So here I am, back to Brazil one year after last trip.  This time I flew TAP and had a short connection in Lisbon, just 75 minutes.  Of course the flight from Italy took off 45 minutes late and things went wrong.  When we landed I had already given up any hope to make it but, surprise, while descending the staircase to get out of the plane I noticed there was a little man waiting with a “Rio de Janeiro transfer” banner in his hands.

He took me and a few more people on a small bus and drove us through the runways straight to a desert, apparently not yet in use terminal.  There, a lone lady official stumbled at my boarding pass: “Sir, you have to go to terminal one, you can’t cross the border here”. Thanks God, the little man convinced the lady that we badly needed a shortcut.  I felt like I was in a sort of “mission impossible” action movie and I was the President or something.  The man eventually took us again on a bus and drove straight to the plane where they where ready to close the doors.  Pheeew!

Despite the adventurous connection I have to say TAP is not bad.  Their planes are modern and well equipped and the onboard service is OK.  And they did the impossible to make me catch the plane to Rio.  Unfortunately my luggage didn’t make it.  I have a very strange stastistic: each and every connection flight in my life, the luggage didn’t arrive at destination, except when flying through Paris.  London, Milan, Bruxelles, Amsterdam, Lisbon: all failed.  Such an high failure rate is remarkable and says it all about the status of the air trasportation system.  Anyhow, now I’m in Rio de Janeiro and therefore - luggage or not - I’m going to relax.

Boa viagem!

After an entire life spent with professional laziness and no sport activity whatsoever, a little more than one year ago I began running.  When my friends discovered what happened they were shocked.  It happened while I was in Brazil.  Weather, mood and nature in Rio De Janeiro invite you to open air lifestyle and when you see… you know… people running on the beach all the time you end up wanting to try yourself.

A few months before that trip, my boss and half of the top management - all entering their 40s - had just run the New York Marathon.  I remember I was impressed by how quickly some of them got fit for the challenge and how excited they were after successfully running all of the 42 kilometers.  My boss had told me that running would make your brain produce endorphin and that would make you happy and become addictive, and this of course also factored in.

I would have never expected the running experience to be so easy and satisfactory.  Yes, at the beginning it’s damn tiring: you run just five minutes and your heart feels like it would explode, to say nothing about the pain you feel coming from your ankles, calfs and spleen.  And the next day your legs hurt like they were beaten but you get that feeling that your brain can win against your body, that you can push yourself beyond your physical limits.

If you try and persist you’ll find in a couple weeks it’s going to be much better, to the point it does not hurt anymore.  Your body will quickly adapt: your lungs will extract more oxygen from the same air flow, your heart will pump more blood every single beat and your muscles will be more efficient at burning some chemicals to create motion.

At the end of the day you’re making your body more efficient.  And healthier.  In 18 months I lost more than 15Kg and now I feel much better.  I also suffered high cholesterol and now that’s gone.  Yay!  Nowadays I usually run 35Km every week and I’m trying to run faster.  I have no plan to run a marathon, but then who knows.

Along the way I learnt a few tricks to make my running experience better and I want to share those with you.

• Running in a group can make you perform much better, just because natural competition is a good motivation factor, but this is only true when you are already trained.  If you’re left behind you’d be totally frustrated.  At the beginning be sure to run alone.
• Music helps: you think to something else and ignore the anxiety and self-suggestion that comes when listening to your heavy breathing.  If you think to something else (ideally to nothing) your body will work much better.  Music also helps to set your running rhythm but be careful with songs too fast.
• Running is one of the least expensive sports so don’t try to save money when you buy shoes.  Believe it or not, if you wear the wrong shoe you can hurt yourself and damage your knees.  There’s a good shoe for everybody so ask to a competent clerk and they’ll help you find the one that’s right for you.  After some bad experience with Nike and Reebok I bought two pairs of Mizuno X10 and now I’m very happy about them.
• Run early in the morning if you can, before going to work.  The running experience is going to boost your day and make you more productive.  If you run late at night you’ll find a hard time getting asleep because running makes your body active and is much better than coffee and keeping you awake.  Running in the morning - before breakfast - is also better in case you want to lose weight because your body has no sources of fresh energy to consume and therefore it is forced to burn fat.
• A running watch with hearth rate monitor and speed meter can prove very useful to optimize your run but probably you only need this when you can regularly run a couple hours a week.  I bought a Polar s625x but nowadays Garmin also has good products.
• You can ignore most of the pain signals that your body sends to the brain.  That’s the way your body tells you that you’re going past the limit of what it’s prepared to do, but that’s not necessarily dangerous.  If you ignore the signal, your brain will quickly produce endorphin stopping the pain and that will allow you to push beyond the limits, basically moving those limits to some farther point.  None the less, be careful!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOVm6ygxe5I

Last Tuesday night I attended a concert where Maggio Musicale Orchestra played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony directed by Zubin Mehta.  The concert was in Piazza della Signoria and was for free, so it was packed.  It was a very hot night but despite the sense of suffocation I was glad to be there cause the concert has been great.

After some initial synchronization problem - in the first movement where the orchestra wasn’t carefully following the director - they quickly knitted their sound and made an awesome ensemble.  I was particularly impressed by the sharpness of pizzicatos in the third movement.  Then in the fourth movement when the solo bass started to sing he took my breath away.  His voice was so powerful and determined that the walls surrounding the square vibrated and my skin was blown away.  The tenor, alto, soprano and the 100-people choir were also remarkably good while singing Ode to Joy, the amazing melody which is also famous for being the basis of the European Anthem.  As soon as the finale was over, every body stood up to clap their hands in a long ovation.

Of course, this wonderful music is even better when you listen to it in this open air space right the middle of Palazzo Vecchio, Loggia dei Lanzi, Michelangelo’s David and Uffizi.  I’m glad to live 10 minutes walk from there and it’s this kind of nights that make me glad the most.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTfVV-S124o

A new tradition has been established in Ferrara lately.  Every year we celebrate the new summer with a city-wide night party thrown on the solstice day.  In yesterday’s edition I attended a wonderful fireworks show where music and light synchronized together built a moving synesthetic show.  Fireworks went on for about 45 minutes, with a sequence of several songs, each one with a different choreography.

Meanwhile, every corner in the city center had some entertaining event to offer: museums exceptionally opened till late, theater and live art performances, open air mega-screens running movies and the football match of the European championship, several concerts of all sorts of music, free salame with ciupeta bread, card games tournaments and more.  The city center was packed till at least 2am.

After the fireworks we’ve attended a theater show by Teatro Comunitario Pontelagoscuro, a grass-root show created by the citizens of Pontelagoscuro and the help of Teatro Nucleo, talking about the dramatic history of that place in the 20th Century.  It impressive how professional is the result achieved by the will of a few dozen normal people getting together to act in their spare time.

Last weekend we celebrated the bachelor party for one of our friends. People usually organize late-at-night bachelor parties in dancing places, but we picked him up at his home Sunday morning at 8:30am, saying we had to drive a long way before getting to the place. He was then blindfolded, confused with earphones and loud music and brought in the countryside a few minutes out of the city center where half a dozen warriors were waiting for us, all dressed up in military camouflage, guns and all sorts of strange equipment.

The guys looked like real professionals while they tied to a tree our unaware friend. One of them was actually a lady and she started to talk equivocally to him, who at this point was severely puzzled and beginning to sweat. She then abruptly took out the blindfold and he instantly found himself right in front of an unfriendly berserker wearing a Friday 13th mask, screaming like crazy and ordering ready-set-fire to a firing-squad. The squad shot for real, a few dozen bullets. Of course they were innocent small plastic bullets, 6mm diameter, a quarter gram, but our friend was shocked none the less. After a few seconds he got what happened and cursed at us, who were laughing it up. Now that’s a surprise!

We were in a softair camp. Softair is a battle simulation with fake guns shooting small plastic balls by way of an electric air pump. Those guns are actual size and weight and look very similar to the real thing. When you get hit but one of those bullets it hurts a little and you instantly scream “stop it!”. Of course you need special glasses and/or mask to protect your eyes, cause bullets would be dangerous if they hit you there. It turns out the guys meet there every Sunday morning to play fake fights and even make tournaments with nearby clubs.

Of course we took the opportunity to play with them. They lent us guns and we split in two squads, fighting a few capture the flag matches. The playing field was a former motocross track, with plenty of dunes, trenches, wooden ramps and enough trees and bushes to hide behind. After a few hours I had mud everywhere but it’s been lots of fun. Finally, we changed our dress and moved to a nearby trattoria where we had meat and wine until everybody was stuffed.  What a day!

This weekend we climbed the mountains around Riva del Garda.

Riva is a lovely small town at the north-western end of Lake Garda, surrounded by the cliffs of Mount Rocchetta and Mount Baldo. This is a well known place for sailing and MTBing. We got there on Saturday evening, so we had time to enjoy the place, drink a Spritz in the main square and have a nice salmon trout. There were many tourists, mostly Germans.

The next morning we woke up early so that around 8:30 we were already boots-and-backpack at Pregasina, which is the starting point of our walk, 540 meters above the sea level. From there we took CAI paths 422 bis and 429 up to Scala Santa and Cima Nodice (~900m) where we could enjoy a wonderful view over the lake and Pregasina, giving us satisfaction for the altitude we had climbed so far (very steep!).

Moving ahead, we took path 430 towards the ridge and Cima Al Bal. Again it was a very steep path and I sweared at it. At some point there is a fork and the right path is for expert only. We preferred to take the easier one. Soon after that we found a military fortress that was carved in the rock during WWI. Nowadays it what’s left is a maze of tunnels unfolding inside the mountain (~1100m). Before Al Bal you also get a wonderful and unexpected view over the Ledro Lake valley.

At Cima Al Bal (1260m) you are on the ridge and find yourself walking on a blade-like path unfolding over a spectacularly thin line of rock, completely open on both sides and yet quite easy to follow. At Cima Nara (1376m) we were at the top altitude of our trip. We climbed 840 meters in approximately three hours. From there we followed the ridge to Mount Guil and Guil Greens, where a surreal bench stands right in front of the precipice and you can sit there gazing at the breathtaking landscape.

From Guil Greens, the farthest point in the trip, we took our way back through path 422 to Rocchetta Pass and then 422bis to Malga Palaer. Despite having 3 liters when we started, I was running out of water. Luckily enough there was a fountain (the only one we found in the whole trip) and that convinced me we could continue to Punta Larici where we easily walked to a overhanging rock dominating Limone and the most of the Lake. 422bis finally took us to Pregasina trough as an easy white road.

The whole trip lasted 8 hours and has been very nice.

Shilpa, a co-worker from Delhi came to visit our Italian offices and brought me this box of Indian tea. I have to say this tea is excellent: strong and balanced. It blends very well with milk bit it’s also good alone. Along with the box, she also brought me a small bag of green dry seeds. She told me the name but I can’t remember. You put one seed in the tea cup, together with tea, and it adds a good and even stronger flavor. In Italy you can’t buy anything like this, so thanks Shilpa!

This is a huge box, half a kilogram. Despite me being a tea lover (for Italian standards) it’s going to take me one year to drink all of it. I was puzzled then when I found this on wikipedia:

India is also the world’s largest tea-drinking nation. However, the per capita consumption of tea in India remains a modest 750 grams per person every year.

Last weekend I went to PyCon Due, the 2nd Italian conference on the Python programming language.  It was in Firenze, a few minutes walk from where I live, so it’s been very handy.  This year the conference was much bigger than last year’s.

For starters, on Friday Richard Stallman spoke at Palazzo Vecchio.  I couldn’t go (I had to work) but luckily enough I listened to RMS in a speech he gave at Hackmeeting 2002 in Bologna, so I’m blessed already.  I missed the opportunity to visit the outstanding Salone del 500, tough.

The next two days were at Auditorium Duomo, where the guys from python.it organized three parallel tracks running from 9am-7pm, with little breaks for some rest and socialization opportunity.  There were many well-known speakers, including Raymond Hettinger, Brian Fitzpatrick and of course Alex Martelli.  I attended talks about Django, Google App Engine, how to listen to our users, Plone, nginx’s mod_wsgi, Zope3, Twisted, Python 3.0 and Python inner workings.

A long list of companies sponsored the event: some big 900-pound gorillas like Google and Skype, as well as local fast-growing Italian companies.  Of course they took the opportunity to try and hire high profile developers, presenting their business and collecting contacts.  Too bad the company I work for didn’t participate.

All in all, with over 300 attendees I can say the conference was a big success, even if some talks were a little under par in terms of quality or effectiveness.  I didn’t like the “teach me” formula but most talks were  definitely outstanding.  And did I mention the hostesses were beautiful?  Go python.it go!  You totally rock!

This weekend I went with Fabio and Michele hiking on the mountains. I love hiking but it was quite some time I didn’t go, so I was a bit excited. Our target was Scaffaiolo lake (1775m), a place on the Appennini mountains between Modena and Pistoia, in the Frignano Natural Park area. The plan was to drive to hut Capanno Tassoni (1317m) and then walk up hill from there.

We weren’t equipped with complex stuff, in particular no crampons and no ice axes, so Michele called the hut’s caretaker to check for weather and snow conditions. Luckily enough, we were told there was some snow around 1500m but nothing difficult. My equipment was: a bottle of water, a couple sandwiches, one apple, some chocolate, a compass, a map, Aku boots, a waterproof wind-stopper jacket, hat, sunglasses.

Once we got to Capanno Tassoni - around 10am - we wore boots, reviewed the map, checked everything and started to walk uphill on trail CAI415, heading to Croce Arcana pass (1680m). Initial landscape was green forest. As expected, after a while we found ourselves walking over snow, but nothing too difficult. Luckily enough, my trousers turned out to be mostly snow-proof and the weather was warm enough so the thin jacket was sufficient.

In 80 minutes we made it to the pass. Up there you find no tree at all, just thin grass, and the pass is at the ridge on the border between Emilia Romagna and Toscana so the wind flows strong and steady moving between the two sides of the Appennini chain. A little cross and a military monument with a pair of howitzers mark the place. From there we switched to trail CAI00, that is walking east-bound on the ridge. The top of the mountains was mostly clean, probably because the south slope is more exposed to the sun and maybe also because of the stronger wind, so the walk was definitely easy with the added bonus of an awesome 360 degrees view on the surrounding valleys. Believe it or not, there were people jogging and cycling over there.

Moving forward we climbed mount Spigolino (1825m), rested a bit on the top and finally reached Lake Scaffaiolo (1775m) at 1pm, just on time to taste a big slice of hand-made blueberry cake at Rifugio Duca Degli Abruzzi. Good! Lake Scaffaiolo is a strange water basin on the top of the mountain. The ridge splits in two parallel lines and rain water (and melting snow) accumulate in the middle, forming a thin lake (just 2.5m deep). At least twenty people were there, resting, sunbathing, playing with their dog, having lunch, wetting their feet in the lake.

We tried to go down though trail CAI401 but bad signals hidden by snow made us get it wrong, so after some off-track we ended up on trail CAI333. No problem, the path was beautiful anyway and through CAI335 we quickly joined CAI401 in Cingio Ermidiano. At that point the weather got really warm. I had to undress to a simple t-shirt. From there we followed CAI401 to Della Riva pass and finally we took CAI445 back to Rifugio Tassoni. We walked 6h30 in total: whoa!

The Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg owns so many pieces of artwork that they cannot handle them all in one place. For this reason they routinely organize exhibitions abroad and opened a few branches around the world. They have one in Las Vegas, one in Amsterdam and recently opened a third one in Ferrara. To celebrate its birth, Italian Hermitage organized an exhibition dedicated to Benvenuto Tisi, also known as Il Garofalo, at the Estense Castle.

Benvenuto Tisi was born in Ferrara in 1481 and is one of the most prominent painters of the School of Ferrara. He began gravitating around Domenico Panetti, Lorenzo Costa, Dosso Dossi and then refining his style under with Boccaccio Boccaccino. He already had a distinctive style, with bright colors and strong use of light as it was common in the Venetian school, when he eventually visited Rome and met Raffaello. That was a breakthrough and his style dramatically improved, so much that out of Italy his paintings sometimes are mistakenly attributed to Raffaello, even if Garofalo kept a distinctive mannerism.

What strikes me the most in Garofalo’s paintings is the use of light/dark and bright colors to highlight the subject and yet the obsessive presence of background stuff, as if he were shy of wasting the corners of the canvas.  Also very interesting the ethereal mood his characters can express.

The exhibition also features a few paintings by Garofalo’s contemporary artists and the ticket includes a visit to the Castle. This alone would be worth the money. Several inner rooms were recently restored and feature astonishing ceiling frescoes and the atmosphere of renaissance lifestyle and parties. Just looking at the kitchen you get an idea of the huge banquets the Este family used to throw in their golden period, to say nothing of the Giardino degli Aranci or the underground Jail.