Aurora borealis on January 4

A shot of the aurora borealis I took on January 4, 2024, at a few minutes past 9 in the evening.

The aurora was barely visible to the naked eye -- just a bit of lightness on the horizon, and certainly not this beautiful aqua green. My camera captured more than I could see, thanks to some recommended settings (a wider camera aperture than I would use for photographing in the daytime, as well as a slower shutter speed of 4 seconds). Actually, I do not know whether the words aperture and shutter still apply when you are using a phone camera. At any rate, here are the Northern Lights, with aurora beams reaching higher up into the dome of the heavens. I sharpened the photo ever so slightly to make the beams clearer.

Other photographers and aurora buffs were out and about in Denmark at this time of night, and the photos they took showed a warmer green and red than my photo. It must have been on account of the cameras or phones they were using. Either way, a great (if modest) experience for us.

 

May you flourish in 2025!

 

With the year just ended, it's time once more to look up at the projects and accomplishments of 2024. 

Let's start with my artistic endeavors. The year was split, in a sense, into three different periods, not equal in length. The first four months, I thought about my art constantly, as I was getting ready for Vandringer, a solo exhibit at Måløv Kulturhus. This involved putting finishing touches on selected artwork, varnishing, framing, adding hooks to the pictures, deciding which of the smaller ones (pastels and watercolors) were going to the exhibit as well, and preparing the material to promote the show. All the tasks that form part of the artist’s life, apart from the fun business of painting pictures. The exhibition went well, and this blog will be updated soon with (more) pictures from there. 

Then followed a fallow period (following the close of the exhibition I wasn't in any hurry to start painting again). It was broken for a few days in the summer, when I made very quick greeting cards from watercolor paper, always the same motif of birches against a two-tone watercolor background, and at the end of August, when we travelled to Italy and I amused myself making quick sketches of passersby as we sat at an outdoor table having lunch; either that, or I made more detailed sketches from my photos. These pleasurable endeavors had to be put aside as the fall term got underway. But as soon as the holiday vacation began, I started painting flowers. The intention was to vary my greeting card repertoire, but when I actually ordered 100 blank cards, eschewing the watercolor paper for the much more professional look of matching cards and envelopes, I knew I was in the grip of a familiar madness. Here are some of those greeting cards I made over the break.

***
This was the year I confirmed that, with a little determination and an established routine, it was possible to lose 10 lbs in six months. I'd grown a bit flabby by the end of 2023, thanks to several weeks in Asia, eating fat-rich food without a single walk or workout. So at the start of 2024, I renewed my gym membership after a four-year absence. 

The constant physical activity boosted my mood and gave me lots of energy to work in the garden and to finish and frame my paintings for the solo exhibit. I even managed to revise a short novel for young adults in the Spring. My teaching at Studieskolen continued (in the classroom and one-on-one with corporate students) -- it is something I enjoy immensely, as I literally earn a salary for talking to people, drawing them out, asking about their lives and work and helping them to formulate their thoughts.

In May, we drove to Tarm in western Jutland and to Fjerritslev to attend birthday parties for friends and family. In July, there was another visit to Jutland, notably to my favorite museum in all of Denmark, Mosegård.

In August, we took a ferry to the small island of Sejero, off the coast of western Sjælland, where we rented a vacation house. From the second-floor window, I was fortunate enough to see the aurora borealis, which were visible to the naked eye on that night. (I finally managed to photograph them in all their glory on the night of October 10, where there was a particularly strong sun storm).

Later that same month, we travelled to Italy, for the IBBY Congress in Trieste, though first staying a night at a posh hotel in Piacenza, where the cast and crew of my favorite childhood movie had stayed, back in the summer of 1969. The following days, we went to a little hamlet in the foothills of the Apennines and then to the banks of the Stirone stream, where some important scenes in the movie were filmed. We stayed several days in Mantova, where we visited the Ducal Palace and took a boat ride on the lagoon (key settings in Verdi’s Rigoletto) and Verona where we climbed to the highest row in the Arena and saw the city from the top of the Lamberti Bell Tower. From there, we were off to Trieste, where Vagn participated in the three-day IBBY Congress and I rested and painted watercolors.

In the Fall, more English conversation classes, and I was happy to teach a one-on-one course with a student who was preparing for his A-levels in English. It was great to have someone to talk to about Raymond Carver, Shakepeare, James Joyce, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, et al. 

In the midst of all this, I've been slowly transcribing my journalistic pieces from my 20s, and have begun to put them up on this blog.

Happy New Year! May you flourish in 2025!

125-DREAMER: The Eternal Childhood of Robert Alejandro

Robert Alejandro, beloved Filipino artist, designer, and co-founder of the stationery and craft store Papemelroti, passed away on November 5, 2024, at the age of 60.  

***

The photo above is of an interview I did of Robert, published in The Evening Paper in July or so of 1996.  I don't have the full clipping, but I luckily managed to recover the original Word document I sent to the editors.  And here is the article, the first interview I ever conducted, and quite possibly the first piece of journalism I ever wrote, as my publications hitherto had been of a literary nature.

125-DREAMER

The Eternal Childhood of Robert Alejandro

by Lakambini Sitoy

Robert Alejandro is petrified by the camera. His lip quivers, the ends of his mouth stretching in a nervous grin. In vain, the photographer tries to get him to pose: put your elbow here, tilt your head just so. The shutter clicks. Robert regards it like a little boy in a dentist's chair watching the inexorable descent of the drill.

Personal publicity has never appealed all that much to the 32-year old co-owner of the Papemelroti chain of stores: he would much rather direct his full attention to a host of current projects, all of which aim to make the world a brighter place for other people. At present most of his time goes into designing the Eureka Family Amusement Center, on the fifth level of SM Megamall. 

"It's a very exciting job," he says as he weaves through the crowd at the escalators. There is an undercurrent of repressed energy in his words; his eyes sparkle. "Everything's all up to me. I have complete freedom to do whatever I want."

Entering Eureka you understand at once. The owners of the enterprise have given Robert complete license to play. Colors and shapes bombard you from all sides, along with a medley of sounds--the rush of a little roller coaster above the toots and honks of about 20 video game machines playing simultaneously, and piped in somehow, a children's song. Everything is beeping, whirring, flashing. Robert moves happily past an unfinished train track, the roller coaster, a boat ride, a barricade protecting some kind of construction, which has been painted with bright flowers and whimsical shapes. This is kiddie heaven. He is home.

"I'm in charge of conceptualizing the designs, the colors, the overall theme of each display ... even the music," he says. The decor is reminiscent of the cute stylized icons on Papemelroti's trademark brown stationery, which Robert and his four sisters design. But this is Papemelroti in full color and 3-D. The boat ride is hung with fantastic birds in hot pink, yellow and blue. On the walls by the train track are lopsided spirals. On top of the bank of violent videogames are robots, in benign red, yellow and silver hues. 

All of this takes time, inspiration and effort. Not surprisingly, Robert's calender is filled for the next few weeks: there's Eureka, plans for more Papemelroti products (everything from paper to t-shirts to furniture to figurines), a children's book which he will design for Tahanan Publishers, and even an exhibit of his paintings, along with some friends.

"To be honest, I'm still not going to take that exhibit seriously," he grins. 

Robert's refusal to descend into the 9 to 5 morass of adulthood has kept him perennially energized and inspired. He recently completed a six-month project with Glico's World in Cebu, designing a 6000 square meter, 3-floor theme park, his fourth. But he never seems to run out of ideas. In fact, each project seems to provide the impetus for the next one: the more he creates, the more he needs to create.

"Even if nobody paid me, I'd still draw, work: it would drive me nuts not to do anything," he says. 

The leather datebook/planner he carries is a testament to this: he opens it randomly, and there, squeezed into the little spaces for notes, are circles of paint he has turned into smile-faces, tiny figures, memos to himself in the looping irregular scrawl that Papemelroti patrons have grown to love. There's a two-inch Taj Mahal, from a recent family trip to India, and there are his mother, father and sisters, bags and all, in a row. When Robert was in college he had more time, and turned his planners into pop-up books. If some unscrupulous character stole and sold Robert Alejandro's scribblings he'd make a mint.

Entrepreneurs have realized the possibilities inherent in a nice young man who'll work for the heck of it, and twice or thrice a week people call up Robert with offers for a job. Generally he has a hard time saying no, especially when it's a friend on the other end of the line, or if there's something unusual to do, like a perfume bottle for a company based in France.

"Then I just say, where can we meet?" he laughs. 

Sometimes, though, he's found himself guided by unknown forces.

"I've had to refuse projects because I simply don't have time. But in other instances, I don't know why I refuse. Sometimes I feel that God is managing me. Intuition has made me steer away from a bad client in the past."

And what is a bad client for Robert Alejandro? Someone, he explains, who wants to have a finger in every pie, who won't give a designer the freedom to be the artist that he is. Just as unpleasant are clients who maintain a haughty distance between management and workers on a project.

"Those people who are just out to make a fast buck...they get no support from me," he says, adding, "In the long run a theme park is not so much the property of the (people who own it) as of the people who worked on it."   

As the creative director of a project, he is immune to the kind of business interests that often entail hiring talent at the cheapest possible price. Robert will mediate on behalf of a worker, asking a project manager to give a particular artisan the price he deserves if he is good. This way, he earns the respect of the workers, and runs into no problems with management--because he is open to any comments from them, and vice versa.

Another thing that rapidly gains him the respect of construction artisans is his refusal to just point and order. At Glico's World in Cebu, he painted along with the workers and once swarmed up a tall ladder to demonstrate how a particular figure was to be positioned.

"I gain the respect of the people who execute my designs, because they see that I can do (the dirty work) as well," he says. "People tell me I could make lots more money if I had people working under me, but I hate having to play the boss."

Robert's vision of a perfect world goes beneath the shiny, bright-colored surfaces that he designs so well. If possible he would redo the power plays and other nasty things that lead people to stifle the vulnerable child within them. It's a tough assignment. But he won't give up. After all, his Pocketbell Pager ID identifies him as 125-DREAMER. 

Dreams though, can be attained. Right now, at work on the Eureka Family Amusement Center, he's conceptualizig a science museum for children that he envisioned while at work on Glico's in Cebu. When the idea struck, it seemed like the most fantastic project in the world. But no doubt when the science museum at Eureka is finished, he'll be wanting to work on something else.

"If I've done it before,it's not very very appealing to me," he admits. "But if it's a wonderful project (you're proposing), I know I'll make time."

`Wonderful' to him includes illustrating a book of Oscar Wilde-ish fairy tales, for a friend whose work has been ignored by publishers because it's not `grown-up' enough, not `realistic' enough. Robert's sympathies lie not only with the underdog, but with other people like him who have refused to surrender to the cynicism of the adult world. They are the eternal children--Carl Jung's puer and puella aeternus--people who, if they manage to overcome the jaded criticism of the grown-up world, are gifted with lightness, capable of flight. 

END

*** 
More about Robert:

Born in 1963, Robert was the "ro" in Papemelroti, a family-run enterprise founded in the 1970s, which became a household name in the Philippine and was known for its unique and eco-friendly products. 

Beyond his entrepreneurial endeavors, Robert was a prominent figure in the Philippine arts community. He hosted the children's television show "Art is Kool," inspiring young minds to explore their creativity.  

He was also a founding member of Ang Ilustrador ng Kabataan (Ang INK), the country's first and only organization dedicated to children's illustration.  

Throughout his life, Robert generously shared his talents, conducting free art workshops and contributing his illustrations to various causes.  

Diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016, Robert faced his illness with remarkable courage and resilience, continuing to create and inspire until his peaceful passing.  

In a social media post, his family through Papemelroti described him as "a vibrant, passionate spirit whose creativity, generosity, and warmth endure in the countless lives he has touched." 
(sources: Philippine Daily Inquirer, GMA Network , Papemelroti)

Look what I did with my bamboo sushi rolling mat!

Really getting into the Christmas spirit, though goodness knows if and when I'll be able to finish this lantern. It's just a model, folks. The genuine Pampanga parols (Christmas lanterns from Luzon in the Philippines) are handcrafted of capiz and enormous and incredibly beautiful when lit up at night.

 

Christmas "in the English-speaking world" at Studieskolen

The Christmas event at Studieskolen was a success! I was assigned to a classroom with another member of the English team, Wynn Stewart. We were two perspectives in the sprawling category referred to as "The English-speaking world." In other classrooms, the German, Italian , Spanish , French and Polish teachers had set up their displays. On my end of the classroom, I talked about how Christmas is celebrated in the Philippines, and Wynn talked about Scotland. People wandered in, mostly Studieskolen enrolees and employees, some with their kids in tow. Throughout the two hours of the event, I kept talking, and sang "Kasadya Ning Taknaa" at least four times. Got videoed doing it, too!

I had set up one of the desks with a selection of goodies, including some hand-made pastillas de leche, some of which I rolled up in cut-out wrappers, Bulacan-style. I'm not from Bulacan, but the biko and budbud and tablea-chocolate I associate with Neg. Oriental are simply impossible to find in Denmark , not even among the shops that sell Asian products (I could have ordered them from someone in the Filipino community, but that would have taken time, and would have required a large and costly quantity). To make them I'd have had to have a supply of banana leaves, as well as sticky rice, muscovado sugar, etc. There was no guarantee they'd get eaten, either.  

I made model parols -- the classic five-point star shape with the paper tails, and the Pampanga Capiz parol : a laminated printout that I stuck on the walls. These are impossible to find around here, and cost a fortune, so a model was the best I could come up with ... maybe next year, I can stick the two identical sides and wire them up with LED lights. I definitely want to do this again next year... with more information about why English is widely understood, and spoken, in the Philippines.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

There wasn't anywhere in Denmark I could buy or loan a Filipino parol at short notice for an international Christmas event at Studieskolen this Friday ... so I made my own... and then some!

It's small, and only a half-lantern, so really just a hanging decoration though it looks like an authentic one at first glance.

I used ... ta-da!... the bamboo sticks from a sushi rolling mat, some hot glue, Christmas silk paper from a craft store, natural fiber for binding tomatoes and beans to stakes (bought from a garden supply), and a paper dinner napkin (the three layers carefully separated: I have an extra layer now) to make the tails. The napkin was wonderful -- it gave the tails the perfect degree of lightness and drape! 

The sight of it, and its white sister, hanging in the dining room makes my heart swell with joy.

The red lantern and the white are joined by a third. 

This color combo is very Filipino and, fortuitously, also the Danish national colors.

 

Watercolor sketches: Verona and Trieste

 Done last summer.  I don't think I've posted this yet. The woman with the dog is from a reference taken in Verona. The reference for the woman with the boy and the pram was taken at the harbor in Trieste.

Northern lights captured -- at last

And now, at long last, I have captured the aurora borealis.

The night of October 10 and the early morning of October 11 it was, well, heavenly. Blue-green to the north and red to the southwest -- it was all around us. Looking southwest, it was like staring into a raspberry frappe. The aurora was clearly visible to the naked eye. 

It was cold as heck, with a wicked wind that whipped the branches around. I was bundled up nicely and didn't feel it all that much. At 11:25 or so on Oct. 10, I went out in search of the aurora (my app told me it was particularly intense that night), walking nearly two kilometers total, but unable to find any spots without light pollution. 

Around 1:45, I got out of bed. It was pitch black and creepy -- nearly all the streetlights go off around 1:00 in my area. I stayed within the familiar confines of the garden, propping my phone up on garbage bins and the mailbox to keep it steady, enough to get a 4-second exposure without blurring. My ISO setting was 1600, my white balance 3200K, whatever those mean (I'd found out how to adjust my phone camera settings online). 

The images of the green aurora were taken before midnight, the red at close to 2 a.m.  There were clouds all over my town, and you can see how fast they move in some of the pictures taken from more or less the same spot, the wind pushing them around within a span of a few minutes. The aurora shone bright through the clouds. How I wish I had pointed my camera directly at the sky ... but it was impossible to steady it for even two seconds, with the wind pummeling me and my frame shaking from the cold.

Aurora dancing. Seen in full, they look like unearthly beings, with strange, green nebulous trails. Or tails.

  

In the footsteps of the Hornets' Nest boys, part 2: Localita La Nera

In the Footsteps of the Hornets' Nest Boys, part 2: La Nera, Monticello

by Lakambini (Bing) Sitoy

The morning of August 24, our taxi arrived a few minutes before 10. Our driver was a man in his 30s called Roberto who spoke to us in Italian, with a few gestures, to confirm that we were to drive over to a place in the commune of Monticello (Gazzola) southwest of Piacenza, stay for a few minutes, and then come back. Roberto apologized for what he said was his bad English, though it was perfectly fine for communication purposes.

In the opening sequence of the movie Hornets' Nest, the early morning peace of a little village amid the Apennines is rudely shattered by a convoy of German trucks, disgorging soldiers who herd the villagers into a row to one side of a dusty lane. Opposite them, beside a pond, the soldiers position themselves, evenly spaced, their weapons at ready. The viewer glimpses a squat stone church, vegetable gardens, weathered stone facades, a house with a second story porch and an image of the Virgin Mary, a pleasant three-story house with manicured shrubbery, an elderly man in a cassock and biretta, middle-aged men in white undershirts, terrified elderly women in black, two young mothers nursing their babies.
High up on a slope, a row of boys peers through stalks of grain at the scene below. They look to be between the ages of 10 and 16. Behind them are distant white cliffs, a suggestion of limitless mountains.

In the village, the German commander demands to know where the partisans are hiding. The partisans are, in fact, not too far away, watching the scene through a screen of trees. The villagers refuse to reveal their position. When they realize what will happen next, they begin to wail. At a shouted command, the soldiers open fire…

Our destination on this morning was where these scenes were filmed -- Localita La Nera in Monticello, Gazzola, the province of Piacenza. (For those who haven't followed my previous posts: I saw Hornets' Nest when I was 11; my sister and I started writing stories about the characters, integrating them into a massive imaginary world we built from movies and books; for my juvenile writing the film was a watershed.)

In just a couple of minutes we had left the old center of Piacenza and were driving past the old city wall, through a series of roundabouts, and then onto the highway. There were none of the tall cypresses and olive trees that were common down south. The trees had a broadleaf/deciduous look. The light was the same sort of light in the movie, which was filmed from July to September, 1969.

There was a line of blue hills in the distance. About 20 minutes out of Piacenza, the change in the terrain began – gentle rolling valleys, now to our left, now to our right, plowed land, farm buildings. Then the grade increased and the road began to wind around the hills, trees flanking the road on either side. It was at this point that I began to feel an incredible heart-pounding excitement – not the apprehension you feel as your plane taxies down the runway for take-off, but a teenage sort of anticipation, as a girl might feel walking into a classroom where she knows her crush is present.

I could see on the GPS that we were soon to take the road down into La Nera, and I told Roberto (who I’d given a bit of background as to Monticello as the filming location) to drive on just a bit. Just a bit, just a bit, until we were several hundred feet down the road, by a spot where the white rock of the Apennines showed through the scrub grass – worn down from decades of people parking here or using it as a turn-around spot. This was the place that I’d decided, by consulting Google Street View and Google Earth satellite view and examining the mountain behind the boys, that the filming crew had been located as they filmed the scene where Aldo and his gang crouch in the grain field, looking towards the distant village. Roberto turned the car around, and I raised my head and allowed myself … to look.

I couldn’t breathe at first. It was there, all there … the little village a few hundred meters down the grassy slope, the jade green of the duck pond, the blue mountains in the distance, the expanse of field and sky. It had an aura of unreality as it shimmered in the summer light. And it was all around me, bigger than the movie screens of my childhood. As I got out of the car, my knees went weak and I stumbled a few steps in the direction of the slope. Cicadas were chirping in the grass. It seemed as though I stood before an invisible wall that went as high as the heavens – the Fourth Wall, actually, which my imagination would penetrate time and again when I was a child. The whole scene seemed to vibrate. What I must have been experiencing was the physical effect of the blood rushing in my veins as my heart pounded with excitement and joy.

The area around La Nera has changed somewhat from when the production crew turned it into the village of Reanoto. There are more trees down the slope and along the private road to the hamlet, and a house sits halfway down, before the bend in the road. There are lots of electric wires overhead. Three rows of electrical posts lead down to the hamlet.

In the film, huge pylons can be glimpsed in the background of some scenes -- rows of them helping to power the Trebbia valley, I suppose. I didn’t really notice them when I saw the film as a kid. Nor could I have possibly noticed the telephone or electric poles at two different spots during the opening sequence, blending in nicely among the trees. I wonder whether, in 1944 when the opening sequence was set, Reanoto was supposed to have electricity.

Roberto suggested that we go down and see if there was anyone in the hamlet. He thought it was okay to give it a try --- the worst would be that we would be sent away, told off for trespassing. We could just tell them we wanted to look at some fine old buildings, he said.

As we moved down the road, gravel crunching beneath the wheels, the hybrid engine almost soundless, I noticed the brick structure in the field, which I had used to determine the location of the boys relative to Reanoto. I’d puzzled over it – a small shed? But now I think it was a shrine. Some of those, according to Google, are found in fields and slopes around Italy.

The first four houses seen in Hornet's Nest are now all gone. They were built -- weathered stone and all -- for the film. Instead, there was just grass and some trees. We drew abreast of the pond and stopped at the house before it. There were two men sitting on a bench. In the movie this is the big house shaded by trees that the priest is forced out of, along with several women. There is a little shrine on a plinth next to it – it was there in 1969 and it is there to this day.

One of the men came forward. This was Gianmaria Conti, middle-aged, a little younger than me. Roberto explained our errand, and I got out of the car and told them the name of the film in Italian. At the words “I Lupi Attacano in Branco,” the older man -- his father -- became quite excited, as though a switch had been flicked on.

Suddenly, the three Italians were talking animatedly, Roberto translating from time to time. Then the older Mr. Conti started talking directly to me, drawing me away to, for example, show me something about the walls of a stone storage building/loft. I couldn’t make out a single word that he was saying, unfortunately, but I knew that in the film this building had been bricked up, and explosives mounted at strategic points on the walls.

We learned that about a year before the filming began, construction started on four new houses along the road, to the north of the Conti residence. The duck pond became the center of the village. It’s incredible that these houses were just facades, because they match, in architecture, the actual buildings of La Nera, though weathered and decrepit. By contrast, the Conti house looks much better kept – the part of the village where the fine people lived. In the film, quick edits conceal the fact that the house is on the same row as the constructed set and the church, and that indeed the Reanoto sequences were all filmed on a stretch of lane only 150 meters long.

One of the nursing babies was three months old and came from a place called Nibian, the elder Mr. Conti said, indicating the mountain areas to the west. I heard it as Nevia or Nevio, but discovered through Google that it was Nibbiano, a commune which a few years ago was merged with three others to form Alta Val Tidone. Nibian is the name in the Piacentine dialect. I hadn’t realized at the time that the older man was likely speaking this dialect, which differs from Italian, having some features of French. (More about the baby, and the special effects behind the opening sequence, in the comments to the photos).

They took us inside the building with the cross on top. This, they explained, had once been a barn or stables, before becoming a church. It was no longer such. But in 1969, the elderly man in cassock and biretta had been the actual parish priest. There were tools on the wall on the left side, and several long tables covered in coated plastic cloth with benches and condiment trays. This, Gianmaria explained, was where residents of the surrounding area would meet – a community center. On the wall, among various family photos from years back, was an autographed photo of Rock Hudson in the role of Captain Turner. Gianmaria brought it out into the light of the door and showed me the now faded autograph in the lower-right hand corner. The Conti family had hosted Rock Hudson for dinner during the filming, and most likely other members of the production. I asked if Gianmaria and his father could pose with the photo.

The elder Mr. Conti had been part of the movie, too, wearing (he gestured) the uniform of a "Tedesco," a German soldier. I think he was one of those in the firing squad line, because he pointed to the ground where he stood, which was where the row of soldiers had been. In the space between an annex to the Conti home and a building that currently serves as a hayloft/storage space, was where two costume-and-makeup trailers had been parked. I wonder who else in the family, and among the other residents of La Nera, had been in the film, or rather, which ones they were. There are six buildings in the locality, and even today, some 50 people reside there.

When I told them Hornets’ Nest had been my favorite movie as a child, the old man expressed disbelief. That morning, I looked younger than my actual age, and more feminine than I really am inside. But I could not explain to him the experience of seeing this film at age 11 (with my parents, of course) on the big screen, the shock and intriguing discomfort of seeing boys only a little older than myself in such violent situations, the archetypal fantasy of orphanhood (only appealing because it is a fantasy), my attraction-repulsion to those 15 grimy faces that were young but not cute in the commercial Hollywood way. My desire to break the film down into its constituent pieces, trace all its players, understand its special effects, is perhaps rooted in the deep unease that the film’s resolution – Carlo, Silvio – and the violence of its opening sequence created in me, and which I actually still feel even though, on my computer, I have gone over these scenes frame by frame, hundreds of times.
(More to follow)

In the footsteps of the Hornets' Nest boys, part 1: Piacenza

 In the last week of August, we flew to Italy, landing at Milan Malpensa and then taking the train from Milano to Piacenza.  It was here that the cast and crew were based during the three to four months (June to September) that Hornets' Nest was filmed.

There was a very nice young man (Italian, from Piacenza) on the train who helped my husband carry his suitcase down and to the stairs. At the same time there was a nice young man (black African) who helped me carry mine! As soon as we were out of the station, the thing that struck me was the heat. Bright and dry. Heat that seared the skin. It was 33-34 degrees C.

We decided to drag our suitcases from the station to our hotel – it was just 1.1 kilometers according to the map and would take only 16 minutes. We skirted the park that is just beyond the station (sticking to the concrete sidewalk to avoid the gravel paths). We passed a group of people who were speaking one of the Philippine languages – Tagalog or Cebuano, I don’t remember. There was a young woman in very high heels, a very pregnant woman in bicycle shorts, another woman carrying a baby of about one year old, a youngish man about the same height as the women. They looked like they could have come from any town park in that country (my country – I have dual citizenship), in their sun-faded clothing and tank tops.

As we continued dragging the suitcases we were overtaken by a young family, the woman holding a child (perhaps a trio from the group we had earlier seen in the plaza?). Filipino as well. Over the next 24 hours I would note the presence of a good many black Africans, south Asians and a few other Filipinos as well. Residents, not tourists, just going about their business.

We found the Grande Albergo Roma after half an hour. It was on a corner just a narrow street away from the main square, the Piazza del Cavalli. It had a very unprepossessing entrance – glass doors a few steps up, the name on a vertical sign down the side. It could have been the entrance to a little bank. There were modern paintings in primary colors set up in the lobby, and the following morning we took a leisurely breakfast at the seventh floor restaurant, with a well-appointed buffet, everything clean and subdued and very deserving of its four-star ratings.

The man and the woman at the front desk were nice, but neither of them had heard of Hornet’s Nest. They had already arranged for a taxi to pick us up at 10 am on Saturday to take us to Monticello, stay for about an hour, and take us right back. The man was from Piacenza and was a small kid in 1969.  He had never heard of it from anyone. They had to ask when the filming took place, and when I told them that the cast and crew had stayed in this very hotel from July to September 1969, they were surprised but not excited. The film is clearly not part of the legacy or legend of the place (I had been hoping for some evidence, photos of Rock Hudson in the restaurant… but the hotel is too internationally four-stars, too much like a modern airport, for that). When they Googled the name of the film after I had supplied it in Italian (I Lupi attaccano in branco, rather than Il Vespaio, which is no longer used), the cast name that they recognized seemed to be Jacomo Rossi Stewart, who has a small part in the film.

A friend of ours from Sweden has described Piacenza as a boring town. It does seem like the ordinary industrial town that Dan Keller remembered it as, but there were little pockets of beauty, perhaps the way the sun shone on the red-tiled roofs, or lit up a wall, leaving the sides in blue shadow. There was a view of the back of buildings from our window – just a regular view, but there was some joy in knowing they were the back of the buildings facing the Piazza del Cavalli. I investigated the horse sculptures flanking the piazza that evening, and the following day. It was exciting to see Italian horses on our trip – in actuality and in art. Living in Denmark I have sort of grown accustomed to the presence of horses, but in Italy they are somewhat different -- powerful, contorted, and quite sexy. In Denmark they are utilitarian, heavy and straight – draft horses rather than steeds and mounts. The Danish riders I see don’t gallop, they plod sedately along bridle paths or roadsides. By Monticello there are stables too, less than a kilometer from La Nera. (I didn’t get to look them up, though – there were other things to do). Behind the front desk of the hotel there was a giant rearing image of one of the horses in the Piazza del Cavalli. We tried the horse burgers at a little café the following day, so I got my equine fix, all right.

We stayed in a regular room on the fifth floor, where there were two suites, named after Italian composers. On the floor above was the biggest suite in the hotel. Looking at the pictures I sent via email, Dan confirmed that the Albergo Roma has been renovated since most of the cast and crew of Hornet’s Nest stayed here 1969 – it was smaller and cozier, less (he agreed) like a modern airport. Back in the day it was still called the Albergo Roma.  I learned from him that the film’s two stars, Rock Hudson and Silva Koscina, lived in fancy rented houses the duration of the shoot.  

My husband and I didn’t wander so far from the hotel, having a light dinner of pasta at a café, sitting outdoors, off the Piazza del Cavalli. The piazza was virtually deserted, even if it was a Friday night. Maybe it was too early, though we sat there from around 7:30 to nearly 9 pm. Opposite us was an arcade that seemed ancient, where a younger clientele had gathered, eating Italian chips (I don’t know what they are called but they are served in a basket) and nursing drinks, though it was, by Danish standards, the dinner hour. There were no vespas. I had read somewhere that they were banned in the old centers of Italy fairly recently … I’m not sure if that is correct, though. So although vespas figure heavily in keychains and magnets, they were very nearly absent to the ordinary tourist’s eye. In their place were the equally hazardous delivery riders on all-too swift, heavy-tired bicycles, with their cumbersome boxes. I exaggerate (as happens when you blithely cross a cobble-stoned path and are nearly mown down by one – this happened to me a few days later in Verona). But there were a lot more bicycles than Vespas overall, and I noticed little children mounted on handlebars as their fathers pumped away.

And somehow what we saw seemed to be the cleaner, older, more rarefied model for life in small-town Philippines. Not so weird when you consider how Philippine towns were originally laid out along the lines of Spanish towns, back in the 19^th century or so, and the configuration has not changed all these years, and resembles the layout of Italian "towns" to some extent, with a Catholic church, a municipal building and a school around a central square (piazza or plaza); there may be other, smaller squares or a landscaped green park as well. The difference is, among others, in the building materials and the facades.

I took photos of the square by night, too. I reasoned that the young boys in the cast must have done a lot of exploring on their own, after filming was done for the day. I was thinking of how it must have been all those years ago -- did they ride vespas too? Some of the older boys would have been the right age. Some might have had girlfriends by then, left behind in Rome or Naples. I didn’t see any young people at all around the square – only tourists or Italians about 25-years old and up. Where do the teenagers, the courting couples, hang out today? Or am I so ancient and unsophisticated I still believe “courting couples” are a thing? They must all be on their phones.

There would have been a lot of smoking going on back in 1969 – that is evident in the film. Drinking too? Was there a chaperone, sort of like a camp counsellor, to make sure everyone behaved? (Today, we would say “for the safety of the children.”) Their parents might have come up, pair by pair, to see how they were doing, just as Dan’s parents did, paid for by the production. Translators? How did the boys communicate with each other? I get the notion that towards the end of filming, the boys from Naples began to hang around each other, while the boys from Rome or with an English-speaking background, formed another group. I don’t think the directors told them (in group shots) where to stand, and I see these two groupings in both the behind-the-scenes pictures and in the film itself.  It’s very natural behavior.  (Which Dan confirmed too – that they “self-segregated” according to language and other commonalities).

 The following day we took the taxi we had booked, heading southwest to La Nera in Monticello – and what a breath-taking experience that was. More to follow. (And more images below).

A trip to Piacenza

Castello di Monticello (my own practice painting)

PLANS, plans, plans. Bing is going to northern Italy, to visit some of the locations where the movie Hornets’ Nest (1969) was filmed.

I have booked a stay at the Grande Albergo Roma in Piacenza. It's a four-star hotel where the cast and crew were billeted during the filming, which took place from July to early September 1969. 

The plan is to hire a car that will head southwest to Monticello commune, specifically to a group of centuries-old buildings (houses, a pond and a chapel), where the Reanoto scenes were filmed. 

I suppose you might wonder why, having found the place on Google Streetview and getting some good screenshots of it (as well as stumbling upon photos uploaded by various folks on the net, for the sake of the beauty of the place and totally independent of its having been a film location: the movie is largely forgotten today) I still have this insane need to visit the site for myself.

The same reason I’m staying a night at the Grande Albergo Roma and another night at a hotel in Salsomaggiore Terme (so that I can devote the better part of the following day in the vicinity of the Torrente Stirrone). I want to walk in the footsteps of the film crew 55 years ago, to be “where it all began.”

I don’t know whether this is an act of destruction (end of the magic!) or of analysis, of finding or of letting go. Maybe all of these.

I have Daniel Keller to thank for the filming location of that crucial scene in the middle of the movie, where Aldo (Mark Colleano) and his gang bargain with Capt. Turner (Rock Hudson) to exact revenge on the Nazis occupying their village of Reanoto. I know that for many people Hornet’s Nest is just another war flick, and a pretty bad one at that, but I can’t help interpreting it as a coming-of-age film. The boys who played the members of the gang were mostly between the ages of 14 and 15. Those scenes by the side of the creek (irrigation ditch in the novelization; the Torrente Stirone in reality) dramatize the moment when young people realize that, in actuality, they are agents and actors as crucial to the outcome of a mission as any adult. It’s the moment that Aldo and his gang assert their agency. 

The summer I saw the movie, I was 11, and also beginning, in increments, to assert myself and think independently of my over-protective parents. Through those experimental excursions (or incursions, actually) into the world of fantasy, where they could not follow me, I carried my rebellion out. It wasn’t the first time I had written stories about people in books or films, nor the first time I had incorporated myself and others from my reality into these stories. The difference was that I was inventing stuff about a film that amused my father but repulsed my mother. Everything about Hornet’s Nest was wrong in her book – the violence, the molestation of the doctor (and subsequent violation and chastisement by the Rock Hudson character!), the children bearing weapons, the death of two of the young characters. It didn’t matter that the anti-war message was plain to see by the end.  My mother detested that movie.

I say “I” but I mean “we” – because my sister was my co-author, co-artist and co-conspirator.

The film culminated in the demolition of the “Dela Norte dam” – with the Diga di Mignano near Lugagnano Val d’Arda representing that massive concrete structure. Although it would have been possible to visit, or just look at, Diga di Mignano from the surrounding hills, I decided to leave it out of the itinerary. Possibly because I’d always been more interested in the boys (especially the smaller ones, as well as brave, doomed Silvio who at the time was the most romantically handsome young man I had ever seen) than Turner’s mission. For them, the breathtakingly violent raid on Reanoto (oh, the enthusiasm with which they greeted the destruction of their own village!) was the climax – the fulfillment of revenge.  

The hamlet in Monticello  is mentioned by several sources online, as is the Castello di Rivalta. The banks of the Torrente Stirone I only know from the location at the top of a call sheet that Dan Keller, or his parents, preserved. I was very lucky to find this on his website.

There is one other filming location that I wish I could visit, but sadly, I have absolutely no idea where it is. It is a cluster of buildings, with a low wall, a flagpole, a square tower and a belfry, that represents another village, where the benevolent Captain von Hecht (Sergio Fantoni) has set up his headquarters. At first I thought this was the Borgo di Rivalta/ Castello di Rivalta southeast of the city of Piacenza, another location associated with the film, but after studying various scenes from the movie, I concluded it was not. Neither is it the hamlet in Monticello (the back buildings, that is).  It is apparently a small village set in a valley (as one can see houses on a ridge at one point, and the diagonal line of mountains in another scene).  In my desperation, I went to an Italian website that listed all the castelli and churches in the Piacenza region, one page per – and Piacenza has a lot of castles and churches. I did not find it. I went to Google Earth and viewed every cluster of buildings in the area around Piacenza, looking for a footprint that would reflect the configuration of buildings in this sequence. This was, literally, looking for a needle in a haystack. Houses in Italy tend to look similar, with their red tiled roofs, though they may have been built centuries apart. It may not have been in Piacenza at all. The foothills of the Appenines are a big place. No, the only way I’ll be able to find it is to gain possession of a name -- a clue, the key.

Sadly, all the adults who were connected to the production have no doubt passed away. There will be others who might hold the key, though. The boys. All 15 were at this location. Some of them are on Facebook, actually, the Italians as well as the English speakers, but I haven’t had the nerve to approach them all. 

But I am overthinking things again, as usual. The truth is, I am still in Denmark, and will be here for some time. But I will post about my quest and my journey, when, hopefully, all is behind me. Wish me luck.