Metro Station Art

Nook of Naples: Named after the Neapolitan Baroque painter Salvator Rosa, this metro station is a divine place to roam. Designed by architect Alessandro Mendini, during its construction builders found an ancient Roman bridge:

From the metro station, a long escalator takes people up to a piazza where boys play soccer among robot-like science fiction characters and a copper hand displaying a sundial. The artwork by Mimmo Paladino, Riccardo Dalisi, and other modern Italian artists feature here:

Walking one block down, the Piazza Salvator Rosa has a Pulcinella in the bushes, while golden flames shoot across the face of a building, and a monument in the middle has volcano images on each side:

You can find the Salvator Rosa Metro Station on Line 1. Buon divertimento!

A Tour of Café do Brasil’s Roasting Factory

The Sunday Hop: Coffee aromas saturate the air along the freeway next to Melito, a
town ten miles outside of Naples. A little beyond the off-ramp, a security guard monitors the gate to Café do Brasil’s roasting factory (also known by one of its brands, Caffe Kimbo).

Café do Brasil traces it roots back to the three Rubino brothers – Francesco, Gerardo, and Elio – who in the 1950’s began to roast coffee beans in their father’s pastry shop and sold their blends in paper bags. Their success exploded in the 1960’s with the invention of the tin can. Now coffee could be preserved for longer periods and shipped over wider distances. People no longer needed to roast taw beans at home, buying blends from a store instead. Café do Brasil became one of the forerunners of this trend, establishing their Melito factory in 1963.

While café-bars today can be found at least twice on every block, more than seventy percent of coffee drinking still takes place in the home. Café do Brasil caters to this market need, their blends a new ubiquitous sight in every grocer store.

Signora Rubino takes me from the administrative offices past massive trucks, to the far end of the complex, we enter a warehouse rumbling with wall-to-ceiling machinery. Hidden from the naked eye, coffee beans whisk through long tubes into silos, scales, and roasting machines. In the middle stands the ‘brain’ of the warehouse – a trailer brimming with hi-tech computers.

Several operators in white coats greet me with a Buongiorno and return their focus to the screens. Café do Brasil buys raw beans from Interkom, a company located in downtown Naples. An engineer takes out a pointer and explains the roasting process to me as seen on several computer displays: raw beans are separated into many silos. Operators open and close values, dropping beans into a large vat. They can distinguish anywhere from 101 to 117 different qualities of beans and their skill lies in blending them together.

When a blend is ready, they weigh the beans on a scale. They then wait for one of four roasters to open and tell the computers to drop the beans inside. Café do Brasil roasts 400 kilograms of beans approximately every eight minutes at temperatures ranging from 200-220 degrees Celsius.

The engineer shows me how raw beans chink down through a metal tube and into a can where operators can physically see and touch a sample of raw beans they plan to roast.

After the roasting is complete, a sample of the beans clank down through an adjacent tube, where operators evaluate the final product. The roasted beans then whisk through tubes into silos meant for maturing, a process which takes anywhere from a few days to a maximum of seven days.

Signora Rubino takes me to the packaging side of the warehouse where assembly-line equipment pull and fold Kimbo labels on a turnstile to create coffee bags. One machine drops coffee grinds inside the packages, another clamps down to vacuum-seal them. The coffee bags then roll along a conveyor belt to where a monster mechanical arm lifts them onto a palette. From there, a bright yellow robot drives up, digs a fork into several palettes, and transports the coffee to trucks waiting outside.

When we return to the administrative offices, Signora Rubino explains that Café do Brasil supports two different brands – Caffe Kimbo and Caffe Kose. Each brand has its own blends that range from the fragrant taste qualities of Aroma Espresso to the milder acidic tones of Caffea Arabica. Their best selling Macinato Fresco has a nutty aroma with a bittersweet taste.

According to the company website, the Macinato Fresco is made up of beans from Brazil. But when I ask what kind of beans Café do Brasil specifically uses, Signora Rubino explains that the company buys beans that come from many different parts of the world. What’s more, beans can be roasted for different amounts of time at different temperatures. The roasting process, therefore, is complex.

“But does Café do Brasil want to maintain the reputation given to southern Italy of making dark semi-sweet coffee?” I ask.

Signora Rubino says no. Their company doesn’t want to be known for creating one strong flavor, but rather they strive for an equalization of many flavors and aromas, balancing astringency, acidity, and sweetness together.

So what is the roast recipe for any one of their blends? Aaah. Now that’s proprietary. Only the nose and palette can truly ascertain. But the delight, for a coffee lover, lies in the guessing.

(See my article in INeedCoffee.com for more.)

Bar Brasiliano

The Espresso Break: Galleria Umberto I, named after the King of Italy at the time of contruction between 1887-1891, the gallery today touts high-end clothing stores, cafes and pastry shops. Located in the heart of downtown across the street from the Teatro San Carlo, architects worldwide study this glass ceiling with its iron arches as an example of quintessential modern design.

All the glitz and glamor of this airy space also means that you can find an excellent tazzino of caffe. At Bar Brasiliano, baristas tout several elegant pitchers of zucchero-crema at the counter.

They also offer an array of coffee twists posted by the cash register. The most higly recommended is Caffe Nocciola (Nut Caffe). The base of the caffe nocciola is made from zucchero-crema, a tablespoon of which the barista daubs at the bottom of the glass cup. He squeezes some nut syrup from a bottle. He then pours a shot of espresso on the top. He sprinkles the top with cacao.

You must stir the ingredients together before sipping, but waiting just a few moments shows how the zucchero-crema begins to rise to the top while the espresso sinks.

The last sip includes a few bits of nuts. The drink is not overly sweet and nicely nutty.

Trotula: The Medieval Physician

The Odious Women Tour: To cure a wandering uterus -- an ailment which usually afflicts virgins, widows, and women otherwise celibate -- insert putrid-smelling herbs in the nostrils overnight (if coaxing the uterus downwards) or insert sweet-smelling herbs into the vagina overnight (if coaxing the uterus upwards).

The celebrated female physician, Trotula, gave this advice in her eleventh or twelfth century work On The Diseases Of Women (De passionibus mulierum).

Although we cannot verify her actual existence, Trotula may have been the first female professor of medicine who taught at the Schola Medica Salernitana, an academy renown from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries as providing the best medical training throughout Europe. The school had accumulated mass amounts of medical knowledge from Arabic sources and held the illustrious manuscripts of Hippocrates and Galen, the doctors often translating the texts into Latin themselves. Physicians and professors then contributed more, writing a large body of literature about their craft.

Particularly fascinating was the large number of female physicians and professors in Salerno. (Their existence, interestingly, coincided with the reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples.) In all, more than five dozen references to Salernitan women can be found in the medical texts of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

We come to know Trotula (a common woman's name in southern Italy at the time) only through her written manuscripts. She seems particularly expert in the fields of gastrointestinal disorders and ophthalmology. Her most well-known On Treatments for Women give some wonderful remedies for common ailments:

For Removing Wrinkles: For wrinkled old women, take stinking iris, that is gladden, and extract its juice, and with this juice anoint the face in the evening. And in the morning the skin will be raised and it will erupt, which rupture we treat with the above-mentioned ointment in which root of lily is employed. And first pulling off the skin, which after the rupture has been washed, it will appear very delicate.

A Good Constrictive: for the vagina so that they may appear as if they were virgins. (Trotula mentions six. Here I give two -- my italics --) ... take powder of natron or blackberry and put it in; it constricts [the vagina] marvelously. What is better is if the following is done one night before she is married: let her place leeches in the vagina (but take care that they do not go in too far) so that blood comes out and is converted into a little clot. And thus the man will be deceived by the effusion of blood.

For Worm of the Ears: Take an apple and hollow it out and place in on the ear, and if there is any worm, it will come out.

Today, you can visit the Giardino della Minerva that claims to be the location where part of the medical school once stood. Located in Salerno's old city center, the gardens have four terraces that overlook the sea. On each terrace, placards mark the various herbs and the floor has many water canals. Fountains, hanging vines, and trees make this a tranquil spot. The museum inside consists of one room that displays a manuscript and old medical implements. Nothing about Trotula is mentioned here, the story of her life -- her loves, her parents, her troubles and celebrations -- left entirely to our mind's fictions.

Recommended Reading: The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine by Monica H. Green, editor and translator (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

Communist Tours in Cracow, Poland

The Sunday Jump: Advertising ‘Wild Times in the Eastern Bloc,’ self-styled ‘Crazy Guides’ in Cracow are well-known throughout Poland for their stag parties and Communism Tours.

Perhaps it’s macabre to make light of a system during which millions of people disappeared under Stalinism and tens of thousands went to jail during Martial Law in 1981. Or perhaps – it’s sweet revenge. Whatever the case, ‘Crazy Guide’ Mike, pictured in sunglasses and puffing at a cigar inside the front flap of one English-language brochure, established a booming capitalist company for all things Communist.

Because my own father escaped from Poland during the 1960’s and I remember visiting the country while it was still behind the Iron Curtain, I felt intensely curious about these tours. So I asked the receptionist at my hotel to call and make a reservation for me. Several hours later, Kaska, wearing jeans and a money pack around her waist, arrived in the hotel lobby. She’d just finished a tour before me.

She escorted me down the street to where she’d illegally parked an East German Trabant, one of several cars purchased by owner, Crazy Mike, over the internet for 1,000 zlotys (or $330.00).

While Kaska drove me to the steelworks suburb town of Nowa Huta, I shamelessly asked her age.

She answered, “Twenty-two.”

“So you don’t remember Communist times?”

Kaska snapped back, “Tour guides at the Wawel Castle didn’t live through the medieval era either.”

Touche.

The Trabant stopped in the center of Nowa Huta where Kaska took me to “Café Styl,” an old Communist-style restaurant from the 1970’s. The only vestiges of Communism here appeared to be in the red color of the freshly painted walls. Kaska sat down at a table, ordered us drinks, and brought over a small statue of Lenin along with a ‘Crazy Guide’ picture book.

She explained that Nowa Huta was built in 1949 as Stalin’s answer to squelching the bourgeoisie in the adjacent cultural capital of Cracow. Over a ten-year period, socialist planners created broad boulevards that both heralded the success of the revolution and allowed tanks to easily pass through.

Kaska turned the page and pointed to the ‘Huta im. Lenin’ factory from the 1960’s, once the largest steelworks in Poland. The picture displayed smoke stacks belching coal soot into the sky.

During those days Nowa Huta was infamous for its pollution. It was said that when a person walked down the street in a white shirt, he would return home wearing black.

We walked up the road from the restaurant into the center of the city where Communist party members lived in more exclusive socialist blocs. From here, five broad streets still fanned out from a roundabout, the street names changed from the likes of “Cuban Revolution Street” and “Lenin Street” to “Pope John Paul II” and “Wladyslaw Anders” (the Polish commander of the Home Army during WWII). The square itself was recently been renamed “Ronald Reagan Central Square,” inciting resistence from the residents who still refer to it as “Plac Centralny” from the olden days. A grand Lenin monument once stood here, but residents toppled it down in 1989. An eccentric Swedish businessman bought the statue and took it out of the country.

Sputtering in our Trabant, the clutch often crunching into gear, we drove down former Lenin Street that today inhabitant refer to as the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. A cynical reference to the famous Paris street leading to the Arc de Triomphe, a socialist realist ‘castle’ façade adorns the end of the street. It’s the steelworks factory, still blackened. The two smoke stacks, now dormant, hide behind the gates manned by security guards.

An Indian businessman bought this steelworks factory and paired down the 40,000 strong workforce to a paltry 4,000 people. He also replaced the use of coal with natural gas. The factory no longer allows visitors, except in September when the company holds a large rock concert inside. Three orange and white flags out front read ‘transforming tomorrow’ in English. Kaska has retained a bit of the Communist generation’s cynicism when she says, “Transforming tomorrow… but not today.”

Kaska next took me to an apartment block where we walked up four flights of stairs (no elevator) to what used to be a Communist apartment. Never mind that people still lived there.

The two-bedroom apartment touted Communist things like a record player, a cassette player, and a plastic rotary phone. After Kaska demonstrated how to use the meat grinder in the kitchen, she escorted me to the living room where an old television set played a twelve-minute propaganda film about happy Polish workers building a socialist world. Once over, Kasia brought out a shot of vodka with several pickles. The tour continued in the second bedroom filled with Communist posters on the walls, including a man pointing his finger and asking: “What have you done for the realization of the plan?”

She picked up a Communist bottle of orange juice and pointed to old condom wrappers. A T-shirt on the couch announced the ‘legendary’ Mr. Vieslav who, she laughed, worked at the steelworks factory once.

“But actually it’s not true. The tourists like him because he tells a lot of stories.”

When I asked why they couldn’t find an actual factory worker to take part in the tour, Kaska turned stern: “We would never ask someone to do that.”

After two and a half hours, Kaska dropped me off at my hotel. Along the way, she explained that still today Nowa Hutans consider themselves separate from Cracow. Some even claim that Nowa Hutans have a distinct Polish accent. Certainly, they pride themselves on being residents of this city, but Kaska can’t say why. Unemployment is higher here than in Cracow and alcoholism remains an acute problem.

Parking in an alley across the street from our hotel, I shelled out 129 zlotys, (about $40) and recalled the days when zlotys could buy nothing, while on the black market dollars could get just about anything – except for a tour of Communism. Kaska took the zlotys, pulled out a Marlboro light, and brummed away in the Trabant. I then looked to my right and left, realizing that nowadays I only needed to check for on-coming traffic.

The Cruel Equestrian: Pausylipon

The Underground Tour: When his slave broke a vase, Publio Vedio Pollione condemned him to death by being dropped into a pool of eels. But Pollione's friend, Emperor Augustus, begged the self-made ga-gillionaire to spare the slave's life -- and it was done.

Pollione was described as a very cruel equestrian Roman. He was also so wealthy that he owned a private grotto 770 meters long. People and horses could pass through the tunnel by invitation only. It led to his villa perched on a cliff. Inside, he had his own amphitheater for gladiator fights as well as an odeon for theater spectacles. After Pollione's death, the notorious minister of Tiberius, Sejanus, bought the villa. Hence, today the tunnel is known as the "Grotto di Seiano".

Today, three side passageways provide air ventilation while walking down the grotto. One leads out to a view of Nisida. The hallway to the view has the remains of toilets used during WWII when people used the tunnel as a bomb shelter.

The Grotto leads to a pathway filled with vegetation, where the tips of modern-day houses and apartment complexes peek out from the posh district of Posillipo. The trail bends this way and that, about five minutes walking, and the path plunges into a villa, known as Pausylipon, which means ending pains.

The amphitheater and odeon are still well-preserved. Broad steps also take visitors up to what could have been additional rooms, but today provides a breathtaking outlook point. While perched off a cliff, the villa can't be seen from any angle within the city or by boat -- its construction tucked into the stones.

Behind the villa, another pathway meanders to an outlook point where three small islands dot the water. On one island, an eighteenth century villa sits abandoned. Our guide tells us that the owners left during the twentieth century because it was haunted by ghosts. Other folklore says that a woman lived there in complete solitude for many years until her death and the villa remained uninhabited thereafter.

Getting There: The Grotto di Seiano is only minutes away from the Science Center and two blocks from the island of Nisida. The address is Dicesa Coroglio 36 and parking is available along the sidewalk. When is it open? Answer: Unclear. The men at the front say they are at the desk Monday through Saturday from 9am-1pm and their tours are free. You must only call this number: 081-2301030 (which after three rings goes to a fax machine). Another number available is: 081-5754465 (which goes to someone who gives private tours, with an extensive history for an unknown fee). Someone answers this number only off and on. My advice: be persistent and get someone on the phone to find out when the gates are open. (I tried to call regularly from September to April when I finally got someone over the phone and raced over.)