One of my goals this year was to attend Floriade, a world horticultural expo that is held in The Netherlands once every 10 years. I figured it was now or never.
So, Marina and I took a road trip to Almere. Marina made sure we saw everything from the Eco District and Hortus Avenue to the Urban District and World Village (with 30 international displays) to Green Island and the far reaches of Utopia Island.
There were building walls covered with greenery, a cool stage with a rainbow of canning jars filled with herbs, fruits and vegetables acting as a stained-glass backdrop, a replica of a pigeon tower from Qatar used for village-to-village communication as well as crop fertilization, and amazing lettuce grown hydroponically. We saw Floriade a month before it closed and plans are underway to continue developing the space into a green city district called Hortus. Put it on your list.
But there’s no place like home—Marina’s home in this case—that rang truer to my gardening heart.
A vining houseplant winding its way through two gilt frames…a masterpiece.
Curcuma ‘Healthy Joy’ in the guest bath. This stunning non-edible member of the ginger/turmeric family was all over Floriade but I first saw it at Marina’s.
A “green wall” hanging planter in the master bathroom.
A rooftop garden that provides tomatoes, beans, flowers, herbs, and a spider-web entertainment center.
Then there was an exhibit at the Gent University Museum……Phallus, Norm & Form. A dozen or so artists were included throughout the museum but we only toured the Botanical Gardens and Tropical House.
There, artist Sofie Muller displayed models of mushrooms dating from the first half of the 20thCentury, focusing on those that resemble human sexual organs. She calls her collection fungi/genitalia. Only in Gent.
I’ll wrap this up with one last story about Floriade. My Fitbit counted 16,743 steps; my phone, 53 photos. We saw it all. Or so we thought. Then, we entered a tent of pillows and cushions set up especially for exhausted people like us—a horticulture lover’s napping area. Oh well, photo No. 54. Sleeping Beauty. Laurie Lynch
Some people might find skeletons in the closet at a family reunion. Marina and I found silkworms in the attic.
My month-long visit to Marina and Koen’s home in Belgium included several side trips. This blog entry zeros in on our Italian roots.
As far as I know, my paternal grandparents, Nives (Marcon) and Abele Fedon met in the Lehigh Valley, but their family homes in Italy were less than 8 miles apart.
In 2012, Marina, Richard, and I saw the home in Fregona where Abele was born, in the foothills of the Dolomites. My dad’s cousin, Settimio, whom we visited in Treviso, navigated as I drove the winding roads. Upon leaving, I freaked out with the rental car’s stick shift and steep hills, so Richard had to drive us out.
Nives was born in Danielsville, PA, but It wasn’t until I came home that I realized her family was from San Fior, just south of Fregona, where her parents Stella (Zambon) and Antonio Celeste Marcon were born in the late 1800s. In 1901, two days after their wedding, Stella and Celeste boarded a ship bound for America. They were planning to go to St. Louis, but a fellow onboard talked Celeste into moving to Pennsylvania to work at the slate quarry in Pen Argyl. After several children and a bout of ill health, Stella moved back to her parents’ home in Italy where Nives spent a few years as a youngster, and then the family reunited in Pen Argyl.
When an email invitation to the Riunione della Famiglia Marcon in San Fior, Italy, arrived in March, I couldn’t pass it up. For the last few years, Chris Marcon, a distant cousin in St. Louis, had been carrying on his father’s passion, gathering new information on the Marcon family tree. He got together with an Italian cousin, Carlo Marcon, and made arrangements for Marcons from the U.S., Canada, Belgium, and France to visit the homeland and break bread with the Italian Marcons.
And break bread we did. We each had color-coded nametags, divided into four groups, descendants of four Marcon brothers: Antonio, Francesco, Giobatta, and Luigi. We were among the Francesco offspring. After scrumptious antipasti and prosecco under tents, we went into the dining room and more than 100 Marcons sat down and devoured eight courses plus a Passion Fruit Sgroppino palate cleanser, dessert, and caffè with grappa, for those who could face such an ending at midnight.
The following day, the out-of-towners hopped on a Marcon (no relation) touring company bus. (Marcon is the 6th most common name in the Province of Treviso.) We went to three churches with ties to the Marcon family, graveyards, and a polenta grist mill. We visited a few family homes, noted the attic windows in the tall stone and stucco homes, and saw mulberry and olive trees growing in the back. Let’s hear it for the bus driver who navigated narrow twisting roads on the vineyard draped hills between Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, the epicenter of Prosecco Country.
Francesco Marcon’s Home
And, yes, we did stop at Merotto Azienda Agricola for genealogical, educational and research purposes. (OK, prosecco tasting).
The next day, most of the group toured Venice but Marina and I ventured out alone in Conegliano. We were both captivated by the stories we heard about our Italian relatives, primarily farmers, stuffing their attics with mulberry branches to raise silkworms.
We read about the Museo del Baco da Seta (Silkworm Museum) near Vittorio Veneto, not far from Conegliano where we were staying. Marina figured out the public bus schedule (and bought the tickets) so we could visit. At the museum we struggled to learn about the silkworms that were raised by the women of the family in my great-great-grandfather Francesco’s attic in San Fior to supplement the family income. (The museum displays were explained only in Italian.)
The silkworm larvae, or “knights” as they called them, were gathered in early spring and fed mulberry leaves in home attics. There, the larvae completed their lifecycles, spinning cocoons. The silkworm cocoons were gathered. Some were used to collect disease-free “seed bachi” (eggs) after the moths hatched and other cocoons were dried to obtain silk threads for spinning.
Coincidentally, before the trip Marina gave me a 1930s copy of “The Story of Gardening,” by Richardson Wright. I’m currently reading it and low and behold, Wright mentions the Silk Road between China and the Roman Empire. He recounts a legend of two monks in the 6thcentury traveling to China to find the source of the lovely silk fabrics.
The monks returned to Rome with mulberry leaves and silkworm caterpillars hidden in a hollow staff. Thus, the story goes, the silk industry was brought to Italy. The hills and weather of the Province of Treviso proved to be a perfect growing situation for the silkworms’ beloved mulberry trees as well as the grapevines used in making prosecco. It was man-made fabrics that destroyed the silk industry of our Italian ancestors.
I could go on and on, but you have your limits. Still, I can’t leave out my grandfather’s side of the Italian tree. When it was time to leave Conegliano we took a train south to Treviso to meet Luca and Adelchi, two of Settimio’s (now deceased) sons. They walked us past the walls, archways, canals, mosaics, gardens, and artwork that make Treviso one of my favorite places. We dined on local seafood specialties and yes, drank prosecco.
Getting together with family, whether Italian, French, Belgian, Canadian, or American, was the highlight of the trip. The stories, of those who came before us and those who are with us still, warm the soul and bring a smile.
One night, over a dish of risotto, I was telling Carlo Marcon that my father once said you need a bottle of white wine to make risotto.
But the recipe only calls for 1 cup of white wine, I said.
That’s for the risotto, my father replied, but the cook who has to keep stirring the pot must always have a glass of white wine by his side.
Carlo laughed and said that there is an old Italian saying that rice is born in water and dies in wine. How true.
“Il riso nasce nell’acgua e moure nel vino.”
Ciao, Laurie Lynch
P.S. Lest you think I’ve let all of this traveling go to my head, here’s one last story. Back at the Hotel Canon d’Oro, I shampooed with the hotel’s Olio d’Oliva (olive oil shampoo) and then I applied the Crema Corpa thinking it was hair conditioner. Turns out I conditioned my hair with olive oil body moisturizer, as Marina revealed after I got out of the shower. Talk about a bad hair day. Or, as Settimio would say, “Madonna!”
P.S. #2 I spent the entire Italy trip as part of the Cane Gang, thanks to an earlier bike accident in Belgium. Cobblestones and canes make frightful partners, but thanks to Marina’s elbow, I survived. More stories to come.
I wake up from a disturbing dream. I might have been in a candlelit restaurant and the menu was written in Flemish, no English translations. Or, standing below a maze of street signs, all in Italian. No, I’m in a car, listening to the chattering of my granddaughter but I can’t understand what she’s saying.
I’m lost in bed. Then I turn and see the moonlight filtering through the muslin café curtains along the corner of my bedroom windows. My tensed body relaxes. I am home.
Thanks to my bum foot and Covid, it’s been four years since I was abroad and four years since I’ve been with my granddaughter. Thanks to retirement and a daughter who lives in Belgium, I was able to make an extended visit.
It was Marina who set up a weekend in Ghent with Laís, Richard’s daughter and Marina’s niece. To break the ice, Marina, her partner Koen, Laís and I played Go Fish with a Belgian deck of cards (Aces are 1s) in French, Flemish and English—with the King a Roi, the Queen a Dame, and the Jack, a Valet. Damn, never could remember that one.
After a Saturday breakfast of French Toast (which the French call pain perdu, lost bread), the big event was a watercolor project. Laís and I created watercolor paintings supplemented with pressed Johnny Jump Up flowers from Marina’s rooftop garden. After our paintings dried, we placed them in thrift store frames and exchanged masterpieces, granddaughter to grandmother, free of our language barrier.
My 8-year-old granddaughter lives with her mother, Sabine, in Charleroi, a city in the French-speaking Wallonia region of Belgium. Laís wants to be a fashion stylist when she grows up. I can tell by the way she gathers the scrunchy and long hair tie that Richard and I found at a booth at Boalsburg’s Memorial Day festivities. The scrunchy goes around her wrist, just so, and the hair tie around her waist through the belt loops of her skinny jeans. And speaking of hair, the two tiny braids that dangle from her forehead to below her chin? She braided those in Religion Class.
Alors, while I record her actions in my memory, her words, in Français, are whispered so rapidly that they swirl around the room, escaping the grasp of my elementary French. It is only when Marina translates that I understand.
Laís’s second-grade teacher, Madame Claire, described Laís as a “moulin à vent des mots” (a windmill of words). I’m not sure what Laís thought about that comment but it doesn’t matter because now she’s in third grade with Madame Isabelle. A whole other story, I’m sure.
As the weekend comes to an end, we drive Laís home, a good two hours on highways from Ghent, around Brussels and finally, Charleroi. In 1666, Charle-roi was named in honor of 5-year-old King Charles II of Spain. It has seen a lot of history, boom and bust times.
After a short visit, it’s time to say au revoir. We leave the building and Laís calls from her balcony, a special message to her tante. Wordlessly, Marina steers me across the street. In moments I realize it is to protect me from an up-close-and-personal view of a fellow urinating against a building. Seconds later, a policier pulls up in his cruiser and scolds the man. Ah, Charleroi. No Roi. Go Fish. Laurie Lynch
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