Tuesday, June 29, 2010

How Far In Advance Can You Ice A Fruit Cake?

I Uccellina and marshes of Alberese pages Eugenio Niccolini

Maremma, immortalized among others, Carducci, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Renato Fucini, Guido Piovene, Carlo Cassola, Luciano and Bianciardi Eugenio Cecconi, Giovanni Fattori and Paris Pascucci, the Uccellina are still one of the sites without no doubt the most fascinating and suggestive, with the impressive Roman ruins of the Benedictine Abbey of Santa Maria Alborense (now St. Rabano), including, according to legend, would still be substantial hidden treasures protected by ghosts and strange spells. As noted by someone, Grosseto, still, you look out your window and watch at noon, see you there, close by, "those blue mountains, surrounded by the aura of prestige and 'poetic charm. And even today, despite an ever-expanding development and pervasive but not always synonymous with progress, Alberese remains, however, one of the entrance gate to this real world more, to a large extent still intact and undamaged, and protected as a priceless landscape, environmental and historical from the Regional Park of Maremma. This part of the Maremma was already singer and at the same time, nostalgic fan Eugenio Niccolini, fascinated visitor, towards the end of the 800 to these shores then still more savage: the land of wandering hunters and poachers, bandits and stray companions desperate for business. A world of forests and swamps, and thickets of ditches, plains and mountains to the sea. Good places for hunting. For all hunts: wild boar and coots, and snipe the Germans, foxes and deer. And in all climates with hail and frost, with the north-east wind and showers, sun and humidity Spaccapietra marsh. Who was Eugenio Niccolini? Born in Florence in 1853 and died in 1939 and Marquess of Camugliano Ponsacco and at the end of the nineteenth century, he held various senior positions: the Provincial Council and was mayor of Prato in 1913 and was appointed senator of the Kingdom of Italy. In 1879 Eugenio Niccolini had married the last descendant of the family Naldini, which brought him, along with many goods, including the building of the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. He is also remembered for his passionate hunter and spent most of his life in the estates of the Fort Rocchette near Castiglione della Pescaia, where he met people such as dark Tiburzi and Fioravanti, but also great artists such as Carducci and D'Annunzio, and Fabbroni Paolieri, Fucini, Ugolini and Eugenio Cecconi. The latter had the opportunity to embellish, with reproductions of his works, the first edition of volume day of hunting, first published in 1915 and reprinted several times until 1990, without a doubt one of the most beautiful books in the subject of hunting ever published in our country and where, even today, we relive the Niccolini hunting actions full of emotions, locations (from the Circeo Capalbio Uccellina all'Alberese), characters and haunting suggestion of the landscapes described.
was Carducci, as the author tells us, who suggested the first idea and to encourage him to first put in writing his memoirs hunting and D'Annunzio and praised his writing and offered to write the preface, urged him to tell these wonderful stories that otherwise we would never have known: Stories of men and animals, always written with a dry style, but meager and mundane. And 1993, however, his unpublished collection entitled Other days of hunting. All'Alberese, in Poggio's Vacchereccia, Niccolini rented a small house, the starting point of his hunting forays. Recently, the fine volume edited by Felicita Scapini and Mariella Nardi, published in 2007 by the publisher under the title The Park Pacini Of Maremma and its territory, Eugenio Niccolini and his book, he returned to look after Nicola Baccetti, in his short essay, entitled The mountains and marshes of dell'Uccellina Alberese pages Eugenio Niccolini: more than a sketch of the late nineteenth century. Through the literary prose of Niccolini, the lives of Maremma Alberese lost forever: In early February 81 ... we were chasing all'Alberese ... In those days the Via Aurelia to the Farm Swimming Statue, which is now the railway station , through a magnificent forest of oaks which on one side joined to dell'Uccellina thickets, of the other surrounding the marsh, and woods thick with elm trees and thorn, stretched to the thickets of Montiano. It was said that a man could go to the Farm Swimming Statue like a squirrel going from branch to branch without ever touching the ground. As the record Baccetti, the marsh dell'Alberese, it leaves none of which has never been so well described in their environmental characteristics and wildlife, with its Paglieta swampy valleys and narrow under the oaks and cork trees of Dark Pool , woodcock and ducks in long lines, tufted ducks and coots, the holm oaks and cork trees. Maremma, then tame the hunter Niccolini makes you feel all the charm: The deep valley of Castelmarino, the Pinewood to the sea, the caves in the cliff black illuminated by the moon, in that silence, in solitude was so beautiful and solemn spectacle that gave me pleasure that I can not say I felt at that moment as the proximity of a companion would upset the charm. At the same time, the nostalgia of these places sacred to him becomes a lament for their incipient outrage. In our old Maremma, a little more remains than they painted the Cecconi or how much as a legend of ancient times, they tell us that we survived. To attend his end had come from everywhere, but it sottrattasi the eyes of the profane exhaled soul without even noticing the present. The old elms left bend their arms wrapped in clematis and sloping to touch the marshy meadows in the valleys, the oaks, the cork oak covered the shadow of their majestic hills, the highest mountains were still covered by thickets blacks, when life Maremma was already gone. The soul was gone when the body while still sloping vegetated. I remember, as if I had before my eyes, the arrival of the first herds in the Maremma, in October still deserted, and wild boar that startled shepherds abandoned their plans, where they had been quietly throughout the summer, to take refuge in the thickets .
Yet, despite everything, and even more so by the city for the visitor who is found to visit these places cleaned up and now increasingly valued by the agricultural point of view and tourism, it still remains entranced by the beauty of the landscape and you can still run the risk of being infected with the pleasantly strange disease that is known as the Maremma Mal ...!

Edited by Aldo Maiorano

1. Eugenio Niccolini, hunting days, Florence, Vallecchi, 1990
2. Nicola Baccetti, mountains and marshes of dell'Uccellina Alberese pages Eugenio Niccolini: more than a sketch of the late nineteenth century, in the Maremma Regional Park and its surrounding area, volume by Felicita Scapini and Mariella Nardi, Pisa, Pacini, 2007

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