Pizzas and Onions

Here are a few tidbits from Bordighera in Italy. I saw a few pizza vendors along the streets with little carts which had stoves inside. I took a good look at these pizza vendors and I decided I did not like the smell of grease and onions. I also did not like the looks of the pizzas and the pizza vendors and came to the conclusion, that I did not like pizzas. Your mother convinced me lately that pizzas can be good and I did eat some again. They also taste better if you do not see how they are being made. This part to Italy is very poor. We watched the women washing their laundry in a creek with hardly any water. They were beating the laundry pieces with stones and sticks, but I don't remember having seen any soap. It probably was done this way since ancient times.

One day John and I went into the adjoining hills where they were growing a lot of red grapes. We came to a winery, a large barrel was standing on a cart and standing in the barrel was a girl with her skirt pulled up high and her legs were deep red, like red wine. She had some boards fastened to her feet and was smashing the grapes. When she saw us, she screamed, jumped out of the barrel and ran with her red legs to the next house.

There is another little story I'd like to mention. One of my favorite actresses was Ava Gardner, she passed away recently. In the movie "The Barefoot Contessa" is a scene which was taken at the French and Italian border crossings, where we passed our Mercedes to our parents and where the Italians helped us to cross the French border. About a mile past the French border is an open field which was also used in this movie to show a Gypsy camp and Ava Gardner preformed a stunning gypsy dance. Mother and I visited Nice a few years ago and I wanted to show mother this particular border. Unfortunately we were very limited with our time, because we wasted several hours in Monte Carlo finding a parking space and by the time we had seen the town, it got to late. I might try to rent this movie, it might be more practical than to go back "on location".


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A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology,
College of Education, University of South Florida.
©1991 Kurt Lenkway.


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