2006 Cats & Culture Tour Report

The Friends Of Roman Cats|2006 Cats and Culture Tour

Out of a trip come many stories. Here are a few of the stories from Friends of Roman Cats’ Cats and Culture tour of Italy in 2006.

People participated in this special cat tour for all sorts of reasons; most everyone who came is a cat lover, some work with cats and some write about CnC2006-01 them and study them. Everyone who came loves Italy, Italian food, wines and of course the ice cream. Tour attendees were intrigued to see the country from the perspective of how Italy’s stray and abandoned cats are treated and wanted to know more about Italy’s no-kill law.

Most of the tour participants started out from the US on October 5th to meet in Venice the following day. Several of us met the evening before at a small hotel near the Venice train station. I was looking forward to meeting the group, but anxious about a national transport strike scheduled for the day most people we to arrive. We three early arrivals had to drag our bags through a good portion of Venice, over our own Bridges of Sighs but we did find a boat to the Lido area next to Venice where we left our suitcases at the hotel and headed off to the airport. Most participants were picked up at the airport by a water taxi hired for the group and were not very aware of the dread “sciopero”, or strike, though two people had to get to the Lido on their own.

By evening most of us were assembled at our hotel on the Lido in the Venetian Lagoon and we relaxed with a pizza meal at a local restaurant. Here we discovered that by an amazing coincidence Silvana, the woman accompanying our tour, is a gattara or “cat lady” who had helped neuter some 40 stray cats in the town she where she lives outside of Rome.

After a tour of St Mark’s Square and the Doge’s Palace the next morning where we watched a high tide come in and cover the Square with water, we set off to CnC2006-03

visit cat colonies that live in several sections of Venice’s main hospital. At the entrance to the hospital we met Gabriella Sanna, a representative of DINGO, the organization that has been helping Venice’s stray cats since the late 1960’s. We also met Marco, a large CnC2006-05

tabby cat who sits outside the hospital’s main entrance and acts as official greeter to all who enter the hospital. We found that Marco would only leave his post for a few minutes, even when 11 American cat lovers lured him into the hospital to better pat him.

After visiting the well-fed colony and taking advantage of a lot of photo-ops with cats, we followed Gabriella to the small CnC2006-07

outdoor market where DINGO raises money by selling donated items at an outdoor stall. Then we broke up into smaller groups and went off to visit this magical city to find a favorite store selling cat masks or to indulge in Venetian gelato (ice cream). We reassembled for dinner, then went off to a needed rest at our hotel.

The next morning everyone showed up quite early to take the local bus on the Lido to visit the DINGO cat shelter. We all marveled at Maria Grazia, the gracious woman who runs the shelter, for her stamina in coming every day to make sure the nearly 200 cats at the shelter are well taken care of. Maria Grazia showed us around the various enclosures, where cats of every description were lounging in the warm October sun. She explained that while Venice’s municipal government had donated the land for the shelter, they had to raise most of the money they spend on the cats. We caressed cats to our heart’s content, moving from one cat enclosure to the next. Several of us talked about coming back to volunteer at the shelter, a program FORC is working to make happen.

CnC2006-10 We had the afternoon to ourselves. Several of us went wandering to find an abandoned church with numerous small cathouses built against its battered facade. Some visited the former Jewish ghetto, some went looking for gelato and some went to Venice’s magnificent museums. I stopped to listen to an organ concert in Santa Maria della Salute, the church built to celebrate the end of a terrible plague in the 17th century. Listening to the music, I thought of the role cats may have had in ending the plague, by killing the rats that carried it.

We had a very good dinner that evening, learning more about each other’s cat interests and giving ourselves over to the magic of a warm Venetian evening.

The next morning we got into a water taxi and wound our way through the canals to Piazzale Roma where we met our bus and Andrea, our bus driver. We drove along the Brenta canal, where many Venetians built large villas, CnC2006-12 to Padua, where we stopped for a walk through the historic town, lunch at the historic cafe Pedrocchi and a visit to the Scrovegni Chapel to see the frescos of Giotto, a pre-Renaissance master.

We arrived in Florence in the late afternoon. A number of us spread out to see who could find the best gelato in this new city. The next morning we took the bus to the Church of San Miniato a Monte that overlooks the city on the far bank of the Arno River. We met Signora Adela Petrucci, an elegant woman in her 80’s, who is in charge of helping a number of feral cat colonies throughout Florence. She walked with us through the cemetery behind the church where a cat colony lives among the tombstones.

One of the caretakers told us that a young monk from the attached monastery had formed a special bond with an abandoned mother cat and her kitten. We stood at the monastery door and the monk looked very worried that we might enter, so we moved off to a small-enclosed garden where he had a little house for the cat and her kitten. He spoke to them tenderly and stroked them lovingly. Signora Petrucci assured us that she had made arrangements for the cats to be fixed

After we left San Miniato, the bus drove us to Florence’s famed Boboli Gardens, behind CnC2006-17

the Pitti Palace. Here, we met Signora Tea Vianllo who has fed the Boboli cats for many, many years. Tea (pronounced Te-ah) comes every day with a CnC2006-18

large variety of different food, so every cat can get what he or she likes best. They all have names and run out of the hedges to Tea when they hear her coming. We followed her, climbing ever higher in the garden, but finally we had to reluctantly pull ourselves away and go back across the Ponte Vecchio to lunch at a renaissance palace and a walking tour of Florence. At the end, we went in search of still another cat colony that lived behind the church of Santa Croce.

The next morning we went to the Uffizi, one of the world’s great art galleries. After immersing ourselves in art, several of the group went off on their own, while most of us got on our bus and took a somewhat halting ride to a house in the hills outside Florence for a cooking class extraordinaire with Jeff Thickman, a talented American chef who has lived outside Florence for a number of years. It was certainly one of the trip’s highlights.

The following morning we left Florence and headed to the nearby town of Bagno a Ripoli to visit a cat shelter that has been built on the corner of a Countess’ estate. Luciano Bacchio, its spokesman, guided our bus to the sanctuary and told us its history. It is a new shelter, built and funded by a small group of CnC2006-22

dedicated cat lovers. Luciano explained that it contains CnC2006-23

many former house cats whose owners had become too old to care for them, as well as cats from surrounding colonies at risk of being harmed by hunters. We met Bianca Russo, the woman in charge of the sanctuary, who surprised us with a delicious lunch before we left.

Our bus took us through the rolling Tuscan countryside, filled with olive groves and vineyards, to the historic town of Arezzo. After checking into our hotel, we CnC2006-24

met Dr Malcolm Holliday, an Anglo-Italian veterinarian whose dream for a state-of-the-art cat refuge has CnC2006-25

finally come to fruition after some 16 years of dealing with Italian bureaucracy. The shelter is extremely well thought out: from the building where cats are taken in and where surgeries are performed to the building where cats are kept in quarantine for several weeks before joining the general population, as well as the enclosures for cats that are ready for adoption and one for kittens and still another for cats with FIV and FeLV who are still in good health.

CnC2006-26 CnC2006-27

The refuge, known as the Cini Rifugio per Gatti, is a model that other cat groups can learn from. Dr Holliday is lucky in that he receives support from AISPA (the Anglo-Italian Society for the Protection of Animals), an English animal welfare group that supports a number of groups helping animals in Italy. He is also lucky to have his vivacious sister Bunny who helps run the rifugio. Dr Holliday confided that trapping, neutering and returning the areas feral cats is the most important service anyone can do to control the population.

That afternoon the group toured the medieval city of Arezzo, visiting two churches with magnificent paintings by the renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca. In the evening we walked out CnC2006-30 for a delightful meal near the hotel. Then we re-boarded our bus and went on to the picturesque city of Orvieto, perched high on a steep hill looking out on the surrounding countryside. We visited the cathedral and fanned out to explore the city and buy some of the many interesting crafts made there. A number of us met for dinner at a restaurant called Asino d’Oro, for a wonderful meal of local specialties.

The next morning saw us get up early, take an elevator down the side of the steep hill to our waiting bus, and head off to Rome. After several hours free for lunch we

again boarded our bus and drove to across the city to visit the stray cats that divide their time between the area around the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius and the non-Catholic cemetery next to it. As we drove into the entrance to the cemetery a German film crew greeted us. They had contacted Friends of Roman Cats when they heard about our tour. They said they would like to hear some of the group’s perceptions of the way Italians lived with and treated the street cats living in their midst. After the interviews we visited with Matilda Talli, who has cared for the Pyramid cats for many years. As a special treat she arranged for a visit to the interior of the Pyramid.

We said goodbye to that group of cats and their caretakers and went off to the historic center of Rome to visit the Cat Sanctuary of Torre Argentina. Friends of CnC2006-33

Roman Cats has a long history with Torre Argentina and everyone was excited to see this shelter CnC2006-34

that has done so much for Rome’s street cats. The cats in the ancient ruins impressed everyone. Some people took a tour around the ruins while others started petting the cats that wandered nonchalantly around. Several people sat down next to the blind cats in the area where they are kept, talking to them and stroking them.

CnC2006-35 Susan, Mary and Maria introduced the rest of the group to Silvia Viviani and Lia Dequel, the two women who started Torre Argentina in 1994. They explained that they are putting ever more emphasis on Trap-Neuter-Return. They believe spending resources on sterilizations makes the most sense until the population is stabilized. It was good to hear Lia say there were fewer cats in the center of Rome thanks to their 12 years of spaying and neutering. We finally went off to our hotel, after accepting a gracious invitation by Lia to have cocktails at her apartment the following evening.

We spent the next day touring the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Campidoglio (also known as Capitoline Hill), Piazza Navona, the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain with Walter, our good-looking guide who believed repeating something 5 or 6 times was better than just once. Not having walked enough, some of us went on to the Spanish Steps and down to Piazza del Popolo while other went shopping and a few returned to our hotel near the train station

In the early evening, we went by bus to near where Lia lives in Trastevere, across the Tiber from the historic center. Lia charmed us with her stories of two of the cats she had taken in from the shelter. “They tricked me”. She said. “I already have too many cats. I only took them because our vet said they were very sick and could not last long and I did not want them to die in the sanctuary. That was over a year ago. Look at them, they are very lively. “ We also admired the many paintings, drawings and sculptures covering Lia’s walls, done by her husband, Oreste, a well-known artist.

We spent our final morning doing whatever we liked, then met later in the day for an afternoon of visiting the Vatican museums, including the Sistine Chapel and the Egyptian collection with it’s cat mummies and statues o f the cat goddess Bastet. We ended by going to St Peter’s and caught a special glimpse of the Pope who was part of a procession honoring a Cardinal who had recently died.

Silvana, our ever-helpful tour accompanist, led us for one last dinner, a good, but lengthy meal near Piazza Navona. In the early morning, most participants took a last bus ride to the airport, after exchanging e-mail addresses and planning a reunion in California where we would try to recreate the dishes we had been taught at our cooking class. We all left feeling we had come closer to understanding Italy and some of the Italians who give so much of themselves to help their street cats. We were happy to see a country that had committed itself to a no-kill policy, and most of us thought that America could do well to emulate the Italian no-kill laws.

We are already talking with our travel agent in the US about a tour next year, so stay tuned!

For more information, please contact: Susan Wheeler: rappwheel@aol.com or
Mary Kennedy: marezie@comcast.net