Logic Matters

This is fun. We’ve just got a small satellite dish installed and can now watch Italian TV (for free) while at home in Cambridge. The hope is that we pick up a little more of the language in a fairly painless way. “Italian TV? But that’s just girls in bikinis in every programme isn’t it?” Well, actually no. It’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation. In fact, it can be a bit old-fashioned in a rather charming way. For example, there’s a couple of quiz gameshows we’ve watched before in Italy (good for learners, because there are lots of pauses!) which seem much more gentle and warm-hearted occasions than the English equivalents. And the pride in la bella paese, the extolling of local food and wine and so on, that repeatedly comes across in the morning magazine programmes makes a nice change from our world-weary cynicism.

And I just love the sound of the language. Must be all those hours and hours spent once upon a time in Cambridge cinemas, at a very impressionable age, watching the likes of Monica Vitti (pictured!).

Before it all becomes too distant, a few — ignorant and purely subjective! — wine memories from our Tuscany trip, mostly local wines from around Castelnuovo Beradenga. Quite a few of these wines are available from good merchants in the UK and USA, so these notes aren’t just of idle interest. Do go and indulge! The stars — as in (*) — represent the number of bicchiere in the Gambero Rosso wine guide. One star is pretty good, and three is a classic.

• Fèlsina, Beradenga Chianti Classico ‘05 (*). Still a bit closed(?) but opens up nicely after a few hours. I can get this in Cambridge and maybe I’ll put a few bottles under the stairs for a while. (Felsina’s recent top wines are by all accounts amazing, but we didn’t splash out this trip. I was going to say that this is their entry level wine. But actually, you go round the back of their winery, and can get last year’s unbottled at 1.80 euro a litre into your plastic box, and that’s pretty good too!)
• Fèlsina, Beradenga I Sistri ‘05 (*). Their chardonnay: very different from New World chardonnays and indeed from French ones. But I thought the ‘04 we had last year was better. This is just a bit too heavy perhaps with surprisingly little nose. (But I’ve bought another bottle here, just to check, you understand …)
• Poggio Bonelli, Chianti Classico ‘01 (later years get * or **). This was recommended by our local restaurant, and comes from just down the road. Inexpensive but perhaps the best Chianti we drank all month. The bottle age made it very rounded, almost unusually smooth for sangiovese, without losing character. Excellent!
• San Felice, Chianti Classico ‘05 (*). Rather undistinguished, I thought, though others thought it better of it. Maybe I was just getting picky.
• San Felice, Il Grigio, Chianti Classico Riserva ‘04 (*). Rather better but again I wasn’t particularly impressed.
• San Felice, Pugnitello ['04 I think]. Now this was something else. “Rediscovered” old Tuscan grape-variety. Quite excellent. Purple, complex, very full in the mouth, but not overwhelming. Very drinkable!
• Ricasoli, Castello di Brolio, Chianti Classico ‘04 (***). Very good indeed. A quintessential “modern” Chianti. (I suppose you might say it was a bit “middle of the road”, but it has enough character and texture — and I bet will be terrific in a few years).
• Dievole, La Vendemmia Chianti Classico ‘05 (*). Gambero Rosso says “easy drinking”, and yes, it was. Good for a light meal.
• Dievole, Broccato ['04 I think] (*). This is a sangiovese blend, much fuller bodied. I think the Gambero Rosso underestimated this. Excellent for a heavier Tuscan meal! (An honourable mention too, by the way, to Dievole’s Rosato, which is terrific hot-weather quaffing wine — which we’d have drunk more of if the weather had been better.)
• Villa Arceno, Chianti Classico ‘05 (*). This is the really local wine, which our restaurant gives you as their wine-by-the-glass. Nothing outstanding, but as-it-were essence of good-ordinary-Chianti.
• Lornano, Commendator Enrico ‘04 (**). Sangiovese/merlot which we usually drink at the Bottega di Lornano. Seriously good for accompanying Tuscan-style food.
• Castello del Terriccio, Lupicaia ‘04 (***). No. Philosophers aren’t paid that much. This was by courtesy of a very generous son-in-law! Even so young was sumptuous. Classic. Words fail. And in a few more years must be unbelievable. (Drank this at Bottega del 30, surely one of the best restaurants in the world, just a couple of miles away. Sigh.)

The meteo predicts that really good weather will start on Thursday. Since we are leaving on Wednesday, this is just a bit galling. This morning it was so cold we put the heating on again. And jazz last night in the little village piazza under our window was good, but not the balmy June night under the stars we might have expected, and the well-wrapped-up audience was understandably a bit thin.

Siena itself is like Cambridge at least in this respect: the tourists tend to stick to a small part of the city. So it can be very busy round the Campo and the Duomo. But other sights, even those the guide books warmly praise, can be more or less deserted. We did make one nice discovery a couple of days ago when it was dry in the afternoon. We found ourselves at the botanical gardens which we’d never visited before (and, predictably, they were more or less empty of people). They are very fine, cool under the trees, tumble down a steep slope, and so the views out of the city are beautiful. Recommended.

Here, everyone has to park outside the walls of the old part of the borgo. But that’s no hardship. There’s stone and gravel put down between the olive trees just under the house, and you park the car among them, leaving it to quietly admire the views for miles over the hills.

The trees have been brutalized since last year, obviously scaring the living daylight out of them, and as a result they are beginning to fruit like mad. I can report that the local olive oils vary, but from merely very good indeed to the amazing. (And judging from the ages on the gravestones in the village cemetery, they must have magically life-extending properties.)

It’s sunnier and warmer (for a while). This year the excellent restaurant just a few steps across the piazza has put a few tables outside, and will bring you a coffee and cornetto from when they open up in the morning, or an aperitivo in the afternoon. A great idea, but so far the weather has been such that we’ve only made use of it a few times. But this morning, sitting in the sun at half-past nine, it was already pretty hot. At last.

We normally never watch breakfast TV, but here we have the excuse of trying to pick up more Italian: and actually it isn’t at all bad. The weekend show we watch has a nice slot visiting different places around Italy and talking at length about their local produce, and demonstrating a characteristic recipe. That — followed by walking through the woods onto the estate of Villa Arceno and alongside their vineyards — worked up appetites for Sunday lunch at a favourite restaurant, La Bottega di Lornano. But by then the weather was getting too threatening again to eat outside (even under their big awning). Still, a terrific meal as always, in Tuscan quantities, and we drank a favourite wine, Dievole’s Broccato. Prices in Italy are going up, and the pound is going down against the euro, so this is not quite the stunning bargain it would have seemed three years ago. But we still ate much better for less than the cost of a second-rate chain restaurant meal in England. Which is why we very rarely bother to eat out at home.

I need to reread Parsons’s next section before posting on that, as I’m not sure I have the measure of it (his book is evidently the distillation of a lot of thought over a long time, so it isn’t going to make for a quick read).

Meanwhile, we went yesterday to the Archivio di Stato in Siena (which does guided visits three times a morning). The interest there — apart from the great ranks of volumes of documents — is an exhibition of the Tavolette di Biccherna. These are painted wooden panels that were produced as covers for bundles of civic account books, starting in 1258 with the practice continuing to the eighteenth century. The earlier ones, in particular, are fascinating (particularly interesting to see secular art of the time). Very definitely worth a visit: we enjoyed it great deal. There were exactly two other people there when we went.

Even in rainy first light, Tuscany is beautiful, and the views from our windows remain wonderful. But yesterday started bright and dry, and we set off over the hills via Asciano by backroads to Montalcino to meet up with a friend. The sign-posting of Italian roads is characteristically awful even on major roads. And they here don’t seem to have an equivalent either of the wonderful Ordnance Survey maps. So using backroads has in the past been a recipe for getting lost, getting cross, and (shall we say) disharmony in the car. But we’ve the use of a sat-nav system for a while. It quite unproblematically got us took us via a very circuitous route which we’d never have attempted before, well off the beaten track, over the hills south-east of Siena. I’m an instant convert: a must buy for Italy.

As always, the last mile or so climbing up to Montalcino itself was stunning, worth the journey in itself. (And if, when you get there, you want somewhere to eat more than a snack but less than a big lunch, try the Enoteca Osteria Osticcio in Via Matteoti. The tables inside at the back have the most wonderful panoramic views over miles and miles of countryside, the people are friendly, and food very good.)

We have decamped back to Siena for the better part of a month. Or rather to a small village about 15km to the east. Siena is already bustling with tourists, but here things are very quiet. From one window, a few domestic sounds of village life; from another I can see half-a-dozen men slowly working in a line between the vines below the village walls.

I suspect that logic postings here might be infrequent for a while, though I’ve brought a laptop and some things to work on when the mood takes me. But I have, at last, belatedly finished a review of the Absolute Generality volume (I’d have finished it a lot sooner if I’d bothered to check the word length and realized that I’d already written too much by a factor of four). The headline is: if you read nothing else, read the paper by Shapiro and Wright. That is terrific. Otherwise, I found the collection rather disappointing and frustrating. The editors should have rapped the knuckles of the unclear and the prolix. (Search back through this blog for more.)

I’m also still trudging through my Intro to Formal Logic, with one last search for typos and small ways of improving things. As things have turned out, I’ve found quite a large number of small changes worth making: but I’ve only made one significant addition, to Sec. 9.3, where I first start talking about valuations of propositional logic wffs. I now say a necessary three paras more about the classical assumption that we are dealing with wffs that are determinately true or false. (By great good fortune, the chapter previously finished near the top of the page, so I’ve been able to add material without changing pagination downstream.) Overall, I think the book is much improved for the changes.

Now a difficult decision. Go for a walk locally? Or into Siena to people watch over a drink in the Campo? Life is tough sometimes …