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Chapter One: Arrival
The traveler arrives late at the station. Train strikes, delays: no one ever gets to Italy on time.
"I'm here."
"Great. Where is here?"
"At the station, actually. In--. Or rather, below--, since at the moment the town is hovering over me like a vision of heaven in a painting of purgatory--"
"Spare me the description, I'll be there in ten minutes."
His friend, the resident, hangs up, the traveler thinks, with surprising ferocity, no doubt fatigued by such tourist poetry. He takes off his raincoat. He's standing on an empty platform in a tiny station in the middle of a plain. Above him, on its hill,-- looms and shimmers. Pale green meadows leap to greet it. The air has a yellowish cast, as if the sun has melted and been absorbed into the fabric of the sky.
In the bar, an indolent red-haired girl arranges coconut slices on a three-tiered revolving tray: listlessly, listlessly trickles of water pour from a spout at its tip, then spill over the staggered tiers. In every bar in every station in Italy there is such a tray, and in every one of them coconut slices are what it displays, though the traveler, in all his journeys to that country, has never seen a single person actually buy one.
Italy, he thinks. Somewhere else. And waits, in jet-lagged somnolence, to be fetched.--D.L.
HANGING LIKE DAYS
A friend of ours grew up in the Isle of Capri trailer park in South Carolina, and though the name had nothing to do with the magnificent island in the Bay of Naples it had everything to do with the desire almost all people have to live in a place that acknowledges the existence of the beautiful. And what a beautiful place is Capri. To read in a guidebook that eight hundred kinds of flowers grow here is no substitute, no preparation, for seeing eight hundred kinds of flowers: gardens composed only of rose and cactus, and fumaroles of bougainvillea. A restaurant near the Arco Naturale serves grilled buffalo-milk mozzarella on a white plate covered with leaves from a lemon tree, the way to the Villa Fersen is lined with poppies and nasturtium, and in the heat of summer days lavender and rosemary perfume the steep walk down to the sea near the three Faraglioni. Finally, there is the Mediterranean; cold and profound and glittering--one shade of which colors the acute eyes of the Capriotes.
Capri seems like many other places--its narrow walks remind me of Venice, the style of architecture of Palm Beach, the sheer cliffs of the Monte Solaro of Yosemite, the older men and their kept boys of Fire Island, the winding Via Krupp of Lombard Street in San Francisco, the small bakeries of Salzburg--but what makes it unique and whole is color. Most things in human life are notable for their physical colors (holidays, uniforms, ceremonies) and for each of these I can think of--the red and green of Christmas and the orange of Halloween, the blue and yellow of Cub Scout uniforms, the white of weddings--Capri has its equivalent: red and green are the colors of hibiscus blossoms and foliage and orange that of Lantana; blue and yellow those of the Grotta Azzurra and clematis; white that of honeysuckle flowers.
All this is to say that Capri reminds the visitor, through color, of all he has ever known and all he will ever know. After coming here, can fuschia ever be anything other than those petals that seem made of brittle Japanese paper and that hang like days on the wall of the little square in the center of the island?--M.M.
PETALS
Each June the village of Spello, just around the hill from Assisi, celebrates its annual infiorate, or dried flower festival. Here is what happens: the night before the infiorate the men and women of the town, having divided into groups, begin tracing chalk outlines (planned months in advance) on the pavement of the piazza and surrounding streets. Meanwhile children and old widows in black sit on the sidelines in wooden chairs, separating by color dried and fresh petals: fiori del melograno (pomegranate flowers), garofolini (sweet william), ginestrella (greenweed), tagete (marigold), cedar of Lebanon, rose, fiordaliso (cornflower). Boxes and boxes of color, deep golds like curry powder, royal blues, hot pepper reds, that as dusk approaches the Spellini begin, very carefully, to scatter inside the traced outlines. (The color scheme, like everything else, has been long foretold.) Until dawn Spello is an enormous coloring book in which nature provides the crayons. (Strict rules prohibit dyeing or in any other way artificially enhancing the petals.) Then, around seven in the morning, the infiorate are finished.
The most elaborate infiorata features actual newspaper headlines about the war in Bosnia, a slaughtered lamb, and, in white and blue, some bars from Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Every detail is flawlessly executed, so much so that from a distance you'd swear the picture was drawn with chalk. Another infiorata recounts the plight of the American Indians. A third brings together the emblems of the principle world religions: Buddha, the Koran, a Torah, and a Bible. None of the petals are glued down; instead, to keep them from blowing away, the tired-looking Spellini must pace all day alongside their infiorate, dampening them with water.
In the afternoon prizes are awarded; the infiorate are faithfully photographed. Finally at dusk everyone goes home, relinquishing their labors of a year, accepting the inevitable demolition that the wind, the streetcleaners, the tromping feet of tourists will insure.
Sometimes the Spellini, in their zeal to achieve, each year new levels of technical excellence, forget that artistry is needed to bring craftsmanship alive. It is a little bit sad (especially this close to Assisi, where Giotto painted) to see such immense mastery as they have achieved resulting only in sermonizing and sentimentality. Then in a corner I encounter three little girls who have made of their petals the simplest image of all: flowers (why not?) accompanied by a white cross. These little girls in red, yellow, and green jumpsuits kneel next to their work, faces full of--no, not pride; instead a kind of odd embarrassment, stubbornly proprietary without being in the least gloating; what I can only call the true artist's nervous devotion, wincingly conscious of flaw, yet nonetheless unwilling to abandon a work that, for all its inadequacy, is still a child, illuminates the faces of these little girls.--D.L.
D.L.--It is the overabundance, the excess, of Italy that amazes the foreign visitor. D. H. Lawrence recorded the amazement of his wife Frieda, the "queen bee" (or q-b) of Sea and Sardinia, upon visiting a Cagliari vegetable market.
We went down to the little street-but saw more baskets emerging from a broad flight of stone stairs, enclosed. So up we went-and found ourselves in the vegetable market. Here the q-b was happier still. Peasant women, sometimes barefoot, sat in their tight little bodices and voluminous, coloured skirts behind the piles of vegetables, and never have I seen a lovelier show. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and blackpurple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a flower show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. From this green, white, and purple massing struck out the vivid rose-scarlet and blue crimson of radishes, large radishes like little turnips in piles. Thin the long, slim, gray-purple buds of artichokes, and dangling clusters of dates, and piles of sugar-dusty white figs and sombre-looking black figs, and bright burnt figs: basketfuls and basketfuls of figs. A few baskets of almonds, and many huge walnuts. Basket-pans of native raisins. Scarlet peppers like trumpets: magnificent fennels, so white and big and succulent: baskets of new potatoes: scaly kohlrabi: wild asparagus in bunches, yellow-budding sparacelli: big, clean-fleshed carrots: feathery salads with white hearts: long, brown-purple onions and then, of course pyramids of big oranges, pyramids of pale apples, and baskets of brilliant shiny mandarini, the little tangerine oranges with their greenblack leaves. The green and vivid-coloured world of fruit-gleams I have never seen in such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and gorgeous. And all quite cheap, the one remaining cheapness, except potatoes. Potatoes of any sort are 1.40 or 1.50 the kilo.
"Oh!" cried the q-b, "if I don't live at Cagliari and come and do my shopping here, I shall die with one of my wishes unfulfilled "
D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921)
"CENA"
The first time I came to Italy alone, I lacked the knack for meeting strangers. Once in Bologna, out of desperation, I tried to have a chat with the stout padrona of my pension, who happened to own a little Pekingese dog. Although I could speak only two sentences in Italian--"per favore, parla inglese?" and "per favore, parla francese?"--I thought to myself, the word for dog in French is chien; and since Italian words are basically French words with an "a" on the end, I pointed to the animal and said, "cena?" at which point the woman's eyes bulged in horror as she grabbed the beast protectively to her breast.
As I learned later, cena means dinner.
This was by no means the last of the mistakes I made in Italian; in fact, ten years later, when I'd actually studied and begun to learn the language, I started making even more. Once in Sestri Levante, for instance, my friend Giovanna and her very correct Milanese parents and I were talking about the various resort towns near Genova, one of which is called Chiavari. "Ti piace Chiavari?" I asked Giovanna's mother, who went white. Later, Giovanna explained to me that by mispronouncing "Chiavari" as "chiavare," I had asked her mother if she liked to fuck.
Mistakes go in the other direction, too. A charming example of awkward translation is the English menu we were handed at one of those places one goes to once. In this case the imaginative author, knowing that primi piatti means "first courses" and second) piatti "second courses," sensibly rendered antipasti as "course d'oeuvres."
Finally this: Italians (like Spaniards) have great difficulty hearing the difference between certain English words: "chip" and "cheap" sound almost identical to their ears; so, too, "pip" and "peep," or "dip" and "deep." Thus you can imagine the surprise of an Italian friend when he went to an American supermarket and found a toilet paper roll that proclaimed "1000 SHEETS."
"America is a wonderful country," he said.