An Italian Easter egg and did Homer get lost in the Baltic Sea?

Nic was kind enough to send me a package just before Easter (and she will be happy to know it has finally arrived!) and I got it just the other day.

It contained a lot of goodies, lovely Italian cookies and crackers, honey, candied violets, samples of different bath products etc. But the best was the Italian Easter egg. Last year, no I think it was two years ago, I sent her a Swedish kind of Easter egg, you know, the egg shaped papier-mâché form, full of egg shaped candy (lösgodis!). In our family, at least when I and my brother and sister where smaller, our parents hid these eggs in the house and we went on an egg-hunt. I told Nic all this, and this year I got a glimpse of the Italian Easter traditions! And even though it was great fun chasing round the house for an egg full of candy, I must say I prefer the Italian way!

The egg was lovely from the outside, with satin ribbons and a rose.

Inside was a complete chocolate egg, made of finest Italian chocolate, unfortunately it had been crushed in the mail.

Look carefully, can you see the content in the egg?

But, to my big surprise, the chocolate egg contained a little present! Nic must have left the present with the chocolateria when she ordered the egg! So very thoughtful and personal! The egg had been formed to contain the present, but I am afraid it also helped crushing the egg in the mail. Well, you can’t get everything!

The little present contained four stamps (stämplar, inte frimärken) with pictures by the Florentine artist Felice Botta. Nic loves his art, and I like it too, he does lots of funny looking and cute animals. Just look at this little frog!

Thank you! It was really lovely and sweet!!! And someone else also enjoyed playing with a part of the egg…

Lejon playing with the satin rose.

Nic also told me about a new book by Felice Vinci, an Italian engineer obsessed of Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey. In his book (The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales: The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Migration of Myth) he proposes that the Iliad and the Odyssey takes place in the Baltic Sea. Troy should be a place in Finland, outside Helsinki named Toija. And Ulysses should be on his 10 year long journey home in the Odyssey in and out of places around the Swedish and Norwegian coast before finally getting home at Lyø, not Ithaca.

The author proposes that the Scandinavian trolls would be the Cyclops, for example. Vinci also proposes that these stories where brought to Greece by immigrants from the north, which brought with them the original stories. These where then transformed into Homers Epics.

Placing the epics in the Baltic Sea explains a lot of Homer’s geography that goes unexplained if the stories were placed in the Mediterranean. For example, the Norwegian fjords could go for narrow sea routes that Ulysses sails through, with the sea flowing inland instead of out, which is the case at the Greek coasts.

This really is a thrilling idea, but as a Scandinavian I have some doubts. The main doubt is that if these originally where stories from the Nordic countries, we should have some remains of them in the folk stories that are left here. But I might just have a bad memory. Please enlighten me and PLEASE comment on this!

I am also planning a package to go from here to Nic in a near future. If you have ideas of what I should send her, please give a comment in Swedish, so she doesn’t understand!

Ifall någon har en kopia av en musikskiva av en svensk artist från götet är jag mycket intresserad av att bränna den (oj, nu fick jag antipiratbyrån på mig. Men släpp skivan i Italien så slipper jag bränna den, jädra bakåtsträvare!!!) Skivan ska heta natten faller över kortedala, fast på engelska. Artistens namn törs jag inte skriva, för det känner hon till.

Remember that we also have a mission concerning Nic, and that is to get her to come to Sweden in a near future. Gifts that make her eager and curious to get here are always wanted! She studies architecture, so if you have a pamphlet about a funny building or a special architect, I am all joy! Thanks!