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There is a Tourist-Italy -- a greatest-hits, if-it's-Tuesday whirl through Rome-via-tour-bus, Florence, Venice, Milan, maybe even the exotica of Siena -- that comprises everyone's first trip to the land of pasta. (Americans are not alone in this; Europeans visiting the States want always to visit New York, that least American of cities.) Whisked through airports, taxis, Autostrada, and air-conditioned tour buses, the neotraveler quickly visits the Chiesa Santa Maria Della and Museo Chiuso per Restauro on the Via Sensa Unico where the scarf-pointered guides identify famous paintings faintly remembered from art appreciation classes. Many of them were painted by that fellow Ignoto Di Scuola, who despite his prolificacy remains a mystery to scholars, painting in many different styles across many centuries. Living in the interstices between these beacons of internationalism is the unknown Italy. If not as touristically big as the Colosseum, as postcard-able as the David, it is thus in some way more authentic. In it one can have the surprises -- delights, disappointments -- that make travel more than just memory's slide show. For this trip, Nancy and I covered central Italy without touching any of the postcard places. Avoiding them was both badge of honor and expression of choice. Florence we experienced as an ugly Autostrada ring road, Siena as an off-ramp to a great restaurant nearby. In Roma, we dodged the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and the Trevi Fountain. For days we heard no English but our own, no American but scraps of hotel-room CNN Europe, as we lived in Italia Ignoto.
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Thoughts of dying had preoccupied me as we boarded Alitalia's evening flight from Boston to Milano, where we would change for the early-morning Milano-Roma hop.
September 11 was only seven weeks' past. The Taliban were firmly in control of Afghanistan. The American media bemoaned our lack of military progress, recalling British and Soviet failures to subdue Afghanistan, questioning the campaign's strategy. "This is a war in trouble," Daniel Schorr had said on NPR's Weekend Edition just a couple of days before. R. W. Apple, Jr. of the New York Times wrote, "Signs of progress are sparse."1
Since 9/11 I had flown eight domestic legs, at first taking comfort in the small regional jets that shipped me to Norfolk or Baltimore, then mentally holding my breath on longer journeys. Now we were climbing onto a huge aircraft loaded with Transatlantic-spanning fuel, leaving the airport whose director had recently resigned after a scathing report slammed Logan's lack of security.
We had booked this trip the preceding spring, after studying Morocco for weeks and finally deciding we were not up for lumpy bedrolls and freezing mountain pit toilets and plumping for the safe havens of Italy. September 11 had shaken our resolve. Yet, without ever exchanging a sentence on the subject, Nancy and I had silently agreed we would go anyway. (I remember how, about fifteen years earlier, we had flown TWA to Europe scarce weeks after the hijacking of TWA 800 inaugurated the modern era of Arab terrorism.)
Yesterday had been Halloween, kids dressed as firemen and policemen. Today, November 1, was All Saints' Day, when all Italy journeys to the graves of their loved ones:
Today is All Saints' Day or, as the Italians more commonly call it, I morti, the dead. The small cemetery car park is full and scores of vehicles have overflowed into the villas and factories of the industrial estate. It's a public holiday. Some cars even have out-of-town plates from as far away as Tuscany, Piedmont. For it is important to visit your dead, however far afield they may be. And it is important to do so today, on this Day of the Dead. For one must have a sense of occasion, of formality, of rhythm. November is the dead time of the year; the leaves are falling, the soil is cold and bare; one visits one's dead. The fact that everybody else is doing the same duty at the same time certainly makes it more attractive. (Pages 166-168)
Tim Parks, Italian Neighbours, which I bought in Bologna and read throughout the trip
How long does it take Americans, driving on our highways, to kill as many people as died in the September 11 attacks?
27 days.2
Yet, after September 11, Americans fled the air and piled into cars -- the upcoming Thanksgiving would prove the busiest ever on American highways, with toll backups extending dozens of miles -- because the car gives us the illusion of control. And it is lack of control, as much as dry statistics, that rules our emotions.
With such gloomy thoughts I passed the first hour after uneventful pushback and takeoff into the dark. But as the video monitors tracked our plane-icon heading north, over Maine and Nova Scotia, beyond the range where a hideous U-turn or baggage-compartment explosion was likely (though not impossible; barely a week after we returned, the shoe bomber tried his in-flight hijinks), the plane's warmth, hum, and a stomach full of decent Alitalia airfood soon drifted me into my usual uncomfortable zombie quasi-doze. In said bleary and blurry state we navigated the chaos of Milano Malpensa -- passing from international to domestic and having to endure yet another flyspeck screening -- and into the emerald-green seats of coach class, back-of-the-bus while the black-attaché-case-toting businessmen in front of us read their Correa Della Sera and Il Messaggero.
Fiumicino is on the coast virtually adjacent to Ostia Antica, the new town constructed by Emperor Claudius after the original Ostia had outgrown its harbor. As Rome flourished, so did Ostia -- at one time its population reached nearly 90,000 -- but as the empire waned, Ostia fell with it. Declining trade, a silting harbor, fires and ever-present mosquito-borne malaria led to its depopulation. A 1557 flood covered it in mud. By 1756 only 155 people lived there; a hundred years later, only a single house remained.
Today, a hundred years after that, most of what was Ostia has been excavated from the ten feet or so or muddy earth that covered it for fifteen hundred years. Though almost as large as seaside resort Pompeii, Ostia is more the residential bones of a town. Instead of wide avenues, vast fora, and clusters of magnificent marble temples, Ostia has dozens of firemen's barracks -- one street, the Caserma dei Vigili, seems to be nothing but -- and the world's first planned affordable housing.
Among Ostia's back streets we found the Terme dei Sette Sapiente (Baths of the Seven Wise Guys), a heptagonal space with individual black-and-white floor mosaics captioned with mock homilies about clean living. Another street honored firemen. Though Augustus boasted he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, Rome was mostly a city of wood -- and it burned all the time. Ostia's designers placed water cisterns and vigili barracks everywhere and indeed, Ostia burned much less frequently than -- ouch! Shit!
A word of advice to the discerning traveler: If you have flown overnight and not slept properly, and if you are touring Ostia, and if you are reading aloud from the Blue Guide as you tour, and if you are taking a shortcut through the ruins, then for goodness' sake look where you put your feet!
I slipped on a mossy granite rock, scraping the palms of both hands, bruising my left hip, and bashing the bejesus out of my shin. Slowly collecting the pieces of myself -- the Blue Guide had gone flying -- I felt carefully around the swelling. A faint wet trickle bled into my sock and probably leaving my own permanent organic contribution to this archeological site. (It always hurts less if you don't look at the wound.) Fortunately, the resourceful Boss had packed both antibiotics and many band-aids, whose supply lasted just about as long as I needed them to.
Awoke at 9:20 am, refreshed after more than ten hours' sleep despite a howling wind that had made our window squeak, the previous evening's three-fork dinner a pleasant memory over our usual Italian breakfast.
On the death in 117 of his uncle Trajan, Hadrian (in Italian, Adriano) became emperor (with the active support of Trajan's widow Plotina, who persuaded Trajan on his deathbed to adopt his nephew as his heir -- possibly after Trajan's death). By all accounts a shrewd if misanthropic fellow -- immediately after his accession he executed for ex-consuls, friends of Trajan, on charges of treason and promptly built the enormous Roman monument Trajan's Column -- Hadrian reigned until 138. As he aged, he gradually withdrew from the world, constructing on the hills outside Tivoli a Hearstian palace of retreat -- Hadrian's Villa -- into which he imported all that the Roman Empire had to offer. Within this palace that was also a mini-city, he built replicas or homages of most of the great architecture he had seen throughout the empire: nymphaia (long swimming pools), a lengthy poikile pond (for visual effect, not swimming), temples, gardens, baths, and two huge libraries, one for Greek texts and one for Latin.
Here he managed the empire, studied, and made a fool of himself over spoiled handsome boytoy Antinoös, whom he took as a lover in 124. Like many a pretty favorite before and after him, Antinoös dreamed of one day becoming emperor, but in 130 he drowned in Egypt (deep in denial). Grief-stricken, Hadrian built a city at the site and named in Antinoöpolis, then had him deified. In the same year he issued an edict against circumcision.
Hadrian's Villa is a fun site to explore, a ruined amusement park with the odd statue or replica re-erected for local color and walk-through climb-through buildings, most of them misnamed by the original Victorian-era archeologists because their floor plans looked like the floor plans of other buildings at other sites (the same confusion exists at Ostia). Our two favorites were:
Afterwards, we strolled down to what the Blue Guide alleged was the riverside forest walk to Villa Gregoriana, but discovered it was gated and locked, as a handwritten sign explained in both Italian and English, CLOSED BECAUSE THE TOWN COULDN'T CARE LESS.
Arriving in a new city presents a travel challenge. In November, the Italian sun sets around five, effectively ending sightseeing and inviting you to make good use of the next hour by traveling to your night's destination. But the Zen of WNBHB encourages arriving early enough to handle the inevitable problems. For this trip, I balanced the two by having made email reservations for our first six or seven nights.
After an hour's dark drive and fifteen minutes' climb to the hilltop town, its walls still partially intact, I maneuvered us through the maze of one-way streets right precisely in Orvieto to our Hotel Corso. Pleased with myself, I hopped out, Nancy waiting, ran into the lobby to confirm our reservation, and was apologetically told, in the nicest possible English, "Your reservation was for last night. Tonight we are full."
So, while our hero stands in the lobby, his life dissolving into a puddle of tired bile, all Zen of WNBHB blown to smithereens, let us recapitulate both how this happened and how thoroughly wrecked we might be:
We draw a curtain over the next ten or so minutes of my disgraceful life.
Emerging from my disintegration, we fought our way in difficult zigzags toward the hotel our kindly Hotel Corso desk clerk had suggested we stay. But it was to all intents and purposes unreachable by car because not only were the one-ways a challenge, we were in the midst of Saturday-night passeggiato and the streets were teeming with arm-linked Italian families of all ages. When we found ourselves on a street where -- O beacon in the night! -- there was a Michelin-listed three-box hotel, we invoked WNBHB. Nancy pulled over, flashers going, and waited while I rushed in, the nervous-wreck American. Yes, signore, the Hotel Maitani has a room. Everything will be fine. Indeed, it proved to be a heavy-furniture, lace-curtained old-style hotel with narrow sloping corridors, a curiously shaped bathroom, and large steam radiators -- but the shower was hot, the front-desk staff could not have been more helpful, we had enough time to make dinner, and I decided -- based on another time-honored travel principle -- "It's always better in the morning" -- that sufficient unto the morrow would be the necessary travel rescheduling.4
Thus, thirty minutes later found us, miraculously, showered and primped and dressed, joining the throng to stroll the sodium-light-orange-burnished streets, now shining from a passing rain shower, to I sette consoli (The Seven Counselors), the one-star Michelin restaurant that, along with the Orvieto cathedral, had been our reason for detouring to the town in the first place. It was lovely, whitewashed pinlit walls, white tablecloths, with food to match: chewy fibrous Italian bread and zesty olive oil, a cheap ($33 apiece) prix fixe with six courses of small exquisite portions: codfish cakes, lentil soup with shrimp and crunchy bacon, butter-cheese dumplings, rabbit with a potato-olive timbale, a three-cheese course (one sneaker, one blue, one soft), ice cream and nougat. Solving the wine list, we had a bottle of Sinferosa zinfandel (which they call primitivo), very jammy and only $16.
After a sound night's sleep untroubled by lost-driving nightmares, I put our small Berlitz phrasebook to good use: "Por favore mandino caffé solo per due." Not a request for Mandingo's attentions, in fact this produced a tray with a big hot pot over which we had our bowls of bran buds.
Pisan-style cathedrals -- Pisa, Firenze, Siena -- with their alternating levels of white and black travertine and their emphasis on making art of more than just the west doors show the first architectural stirrings of the Renaissance, exterior not just as permanent scaffolding but gracefully artistic in their own right. Inside, a chapel held a Luca Sigorelli with a Christ Pantokrator (benefactor) whose gesture hints at the dismissive Last Judgment Michelangelo would later paint into the Vatican's Sistine Chapel.
Just as we were collecting Hadrian from the paying parking lot, down the main street came a flag-bearing parade -- trombones, drums, banners -- followed by grandfathers in uniform caps. Veterans of World War II? Frail kindly holdovers from a bygone era when the entire world was truly at risk and they were its young, hirsute, fiery combatants, their passage was both gay and sobering. A quarter of a world away, young Americans were digging in to a foreign country to root out a new evil. One day their survivors would be old veterans like this.
Those who fight in and survive a war are bonded by something powerful and permanent -- we seen it in tintypes of Civil War or World War I veterans -- and we saw it in these grandfathers walking past. With time, the sides on which they fought often cease to define them and they simply become one long-lost dwindling tribe of soldiers who can say, This was not history, this was my life.
Driving northeast from Orvieto on the mountain road, we passed several instances of individual women idling in lay-bys, pretty and dolled up. Some were black, some white. Despite the crisp winds, all showed thighs and arms, cleavage and high boots, stockings, and hot pants. "Prostitutes?" Nancy speculated. A little farther one, we saw one emerging from the bushes with a man. "Yu-uck!" said the Boss. "You'd want a body condom to touch one of them!"
Todi, a small town we remembered fondly, was almost as charming as before. Houses, a church, the town hall, and a couple of Renaissance palaces faced on its trapezoidal square. Its streets were cobbled, its buildings made of yellow limestone blocks, smooth and clean. Church was ending, men immediately lighting cigarettes and flipping open telefoninos, women linking arms for the mid-day promenade. The women dressed as if in uniform: brown pantsuits with tasteful matching scarves, brown hair streaked into blonde highlights, beautiful olive skin whose tone would go by forty.
Gubbio, fifty kilometers farther on, was splayed butterfly across the ridge above the conjunction of two rivers that joined just below the town. Its Piazza del Popolo was a lovely open space, its south balcony overlooking the sunlit valley. Here we sat, eating our apple-and-cheese lunch and enjoying the afternoon. It was bounded east and west by palaces, one of which held on its ground floor an intriguing exhibition of local maps, and in its upper floor, the Rosetta Stones of Etruscan -- the seven Eugubine tablets, written partly in Latin, partly in the Etruscan alphabet.
The Palazzo Ducale, reached by a free (!) elevator, had a lovely courtyard filled with minimalists and generally bad modern art by obscure American artists roughly my age. From there, we took a long zigzag walk through a shaded hillside garden, past a truffle exhibition, highlighted for us by a street saxophonist doing a credible if incongruous job on New York, New York -- an odd tune to be playing in these times.
Our hotel adventures continued in Urbino, which we reached after a further hour of post-sundown driving. Navigating by a mixture of Michelin Red and intermittent roundabout signage, we skirted the town's edges and found our hotel, which turned out did not have our reservation...but did have rooms. When presented with my email printout, they admitted its validity and explained that they had two hotels with the same email address...
Along with Ferrara, and Siena, Urbino is one of a few Tuscan towns that, with better luck, better management, or more favorable geography, could have outstripped Florence for Renaissance primacy. Urbino's Palazzo Ducale, though cold and now largely stripped of furniture, aside from a few paintings by the Donatello, Rafaello (Urbino is his home town), and the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there is a wonderfully tender portrait of old duke Federico (1422-1482, famously painted in profile by Piero della Francesa) reading while his young sickly son Guidobaldi plays in the foreground. (Guidobaldo proved tougher than he looked, living into old age and in the interval losing and regaining the dukedom.)
Outside the palace, we hiked through the city -- a university town thronged with students and their accoutrements, coffee shops, bookstores, scooter stands -- for a brief visit to Rafaello's birthplace house, today maintained as a small museum of Renaissance furniture and furnishings.
Late in the afternoon we arrived at the remarkable cliff-side aerie town of San Leo and its huge remote fortress used by the Montefeltro dukes and, in the late eighteenth century, as prison to the eighteenth century's greatest con artist and mountebank, Cagliostro.
Encouraged by the free glossy foldout guide (A day spent discovering San Leo is not a day wasted"), we took a dusk stroll through the tiny picturesque town center and then stopped for coffee in a small bar. At the adjacent table, four old men -- after sixty, you must wear the gray cardigan and cloth cap and your wife must wear black -- were playing tarocco bolognese, a fascinating quirky partnership game that uses a Tarot deck and dates back five hundred years. The cards, warped by many deals, were quickly snapped down on the table with expansive gesticulations, some of them legal signals (unique in my experience), quickly scooped up. Only occasional words were muttered until the hand was over, when one partner launched into an animated you-moron-how-could-you post-mortem of his partner's play. This received the only possible response, an equally animated, palms-up-arms-out how-could-I-know?
Meanwhile Nancy and I played klabberjasz until our coffee was done. As usual throughout Italy, both espresso cups and sugar packets sported logos of particular brands, one a smiling African in round blackface, echoes of Italy's Ethiopian colonial past.
After a nasty night drive where we wound up bolting for the Autostrada, we found our way to Castrocaro Terme, a town with no distinguishing features, from our perspective, except a Michelin two-splotch restaurant.
Italy Joins the War! blared Correa della Sera, zestfully reporting the dispatch of helicopters from Rimini to Afghanistan. Some weeks earlier Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's billionaire center-right probably-crooked Premier, had caused a minor flap by asserting the primacy of Western (Christian) civilization over Muslim ... but by doing so he certainly caught his nation's mood. Here in the bastion of Catholicism, the Italians were four-square behind the War on Terror. Compared to other European waffling -- with the notable exception of Britain's Tony Blair, who provided the intellectual grace to counterbalance George Bush's homespun, man-on-the-street calm resolution -- the Italian gesture (for it was no more than that) was welcome and warming.
A cover story in Newsweek, of which I caught a hasty glimpse, opened, "The White House is casting its lot with the Northern Alliance. But hopes for a quick victory are fading fast." "A faint air of desperation has set in among Washington policymakers," it went on, and ended with, "'What is the military campaign plan?' says a senior Pakistani source. 'Do the Americans even have one?' Bin Laden does -- and nobody is more aware of that than [Pakistani president] Musharraf and his U. S. allies."
Dinner was superb: rabbit terrine with onion marmalade, a plate of prosciutto, tortellini in broth, a rice timbale with spicy sausage and porcini mushrooms, pigeon with fegatini (its "little livers" as the English menu called them), crostini with pecorino and garlic, a tiny but exquisite three-cheese course, a wonderful chocolate soufflé, and then a stack of petits fours so enormous we ate none but instead took them in a doggie box and lived off them as afternoon treats over the next six days. Violating all our rules for solving dinner in Italy, we treated ourselves, over the four hours of well-spaced, well-portioned courses, to two bottles of a wonderful Cabernet Sauvignon, Castellione, only $24 apiece. We liked the wine so much that when, at quarter-to-twelve meal's end, I asked for its label, the waiter said "I try." A few minutes later he returned, seemingly downcast. No luck with the label, he said in Italian, so we will give you a bottle. I thought he meant an empty and was quite pleased -- whereupon, like a conjurer, he produced a full one. We carried it all the way home and it now sits on the kitchen counter, a fond memory in escrow waiting for the right snowy evening of just the two of us.
We awoke to fog and rain, which would prove our morning companions for the next week. While buying the morning's lunch, we spent $5 on a fine durable umbrella.
In Italy, you spend a lot of time acquiring receipts that duplicate credit card slips, then tearing them into small pieces and disposing of them.
Ravenna, after 404 AD capital of what remained of the western Roman empire (until its collapse in 476 AD and Ravenna's brief absorption into the Byzantine Empire in 540 AD), is today a modern gritty Italian city. After defeating the guardian morning-commuter traffic, we parked Adriano at a very expensive in-town pay-and-display that we then used as a base of operations for through-the-downpour sorties to Ravenna's half-dozen ancient churches. Inside them, like pearls within barnacled oysters, are the world's oldest Christian mosaics.
The mosaics' significance derives from their age -- they are fifteen hundred years old -- as much as their artistic beauty. Well preserved, high on walls or in apsidal domes or niches, they are hard to see up close; thus much of their artistic impact is lost. As it happened, we visited them in roughly chronological sequence. We emerged from San Apollinaire in Classe into the dark. Rain was threatening to turn to sleet, the wind was up and we were freezing. A brutal night-drive brought us finally to our hotel, which proved to be a glossy new high-rise chain near the tangenziale, Classhotel, whose in-hotel restaurant was a lonely-business-guy-on-the-road hangout and whose television featured in-room movies that you ordered in packages of four (two real ones, two adult), to be listed on one's bill as 'miscellaneous' (or, in the UK, as 'room service').
Until recently, Italian license plates featured two letters to define the province, then six digits, so one could look for them all (abetted by a page, back in the old versions of the Michelin Red, called da dové questa vettura? listing all the possibilities). Recently the government has standardized on a new national format, so the old ones will slowly vanish ... and the Michelin Red no longer provides its helpful chart. So as we drove from point to point, I compiled what I hoped was a comprehensive list from the back of my Italia Tourismo map. In six days, we had already seen about eighty plates, leaving only nineteen to go, including a couple from Sardinia for which I might be able to obtain a marital waiver.
Drove through morning winter fog -- this was to become a pattern -- north along the flat pine shoreline to the Abbey of Pomposa. Having paid far too much for entry, we dawdled through the modest but well laid-out museum of lapidary bits dug up in the 1975 excavation, before seeing the fourteenth century frescoes in its refectory -- plastered over thirteenth century frescoes underneath, requiring unbelievably careful restoration of two layers of fresco -- and the even more remarkable flamboyant frescoes in the abbey church itself.
The university town of Ferrara, an hour west, immediately delighted us as a city of bicycles -- not buses, not cars, not motorinos, genuine cyclists, all of whom rode with only one hand so the other could be free for bookbags (students), umbrellas (executives), shopping bags (grandmothers), cigars (workers), and cell phones (everyone). It had a lovely postwar, Les parapluies de Cherbourg quality that immediately charmed us. Without the infernal combustion engine, things were quieter and the streets clean.
We were staying at the Locanda dei Duchessina, a three-building Michelin-red-box establishment that announced itself to the street with its name spelled in twinkling white lights. The lobby was filled with heavily-lacquered furniture, chintz pillows, dark landscape paintings in solid mahogany frames, and a darkie jockey umbrella stand. In the office off the foyer, behind an enormous ormolu desk strewn with stacked magazines, bills, receipts, a raven-haired and raven-eyed matriarch with designer half-moon readers and long crimson fingernails greeted us with a manner both imperious and accommodating.
Our room, one of five in a small separate building down an alley across the street from the hotel, was all pink and white, pillows with bows sewn onto them, gingham wallpaper edged with pink garlands, a pink bed headboard with an eighteenth century pastoral scene painted in. Frou-frou and over the top, but memorable for the one night.
Ferraran movie theaters were showing Bridget Jones' Diary, Swordfish, and Come Cani I Gatti (The War Between Dogs and Cats) as well as Passage to Kandahar, a lyric ode about a blue-eyed Canadian returning to the Afghan town of her birth, traveling under Taliban repression. Now it was much more ironic with American B-52's pounding Taliban positions in what was being described as carnage without progress.
Spent the afternoon walking through medieval Ferrara:
After a relaxing hot bath, dined at a new restaurant, Viaragnotrentuno, whose menu we found appealing. Like so many other high-end Italian restaurants this trip, they were playing American vocal jazz with Lena Horne singing Stormy Weather as we arrived, a good sign. Great food, good bread that we allowed ourselves to dip in rosemary-flavored EVOO, and a fruity, balanced Gaggiano cabernet sauvignon completed a fine day.
In Ferrara's pinacoteca, an uninteresting disappointment, we were the only tourists, outnumbered five to one by the guards. Around the corner, we visited the Museo Michelangelo Antonioni. Expecting to find filmography and memorabilia from movies such as L'avventura, Blow-up, The Passenger, and Zabriskie Point, we encountered instead a two-room exhibition of Imaginary Landscapes: washed, ethereal colors in jagged horizons, like distant mountains seen through a haze.
To release the tension he felt when making movies, Antonioni painted watercolor swirls on heavy stock paper, letting his arm flow without conscious thought. Tearing the papers into bits and scattering them, he then searched for intriguing border sections. These he photographed in extreme closeup and printed, many times enlarged. He said he felt a great peace when doing this.
Our left brain controls conscious thought, organization, reason; the right rules visual perception, instinct, esthetic and emotional satisfaction. To create enduring art, visual or written, you must fool the watcher -- placating or distracting the left brain long enough for the right brain to play with its psychological finger paints. Antonioni's little self-hypnosis gave exercise to both his pandemonic creator (watercolor swirls) and his structured editor (choosing what to photograph). By doing these watercolors for himself with no thought of showing them, he also lowered the emotional stakes for himself, unblocking his creator and letting his editor experiment.
This remarkable piece of self-therapy and self-hypnosis also suggests an approach to writing stories -- invent a series of spectacular images,5 scenes, moments in time, little points of experience or hinges of emotion. Write them down without regard to setup or payoff -- creation occurs in the act of creating. Only then think about how to link them up.
Nancy didn't analyze; she just found the photographs extraordinarily moving. Days afterwards she was still talking about it.
Our first meal in Bologna, Italy's food capital, was in a downtown McDonald's overrun with students and businessmen happily chowing down at 2:15. It was raining, dark, and cold, and we needed a warm dry place to sit and eat our apple-and-cheese lunch as around us the telefoninos chirped like an aviary.
The Cambridge of Italy, Bologna is known as the Red:
Bologna is also Italy's body-piercing, dreadlocks combing, dope-wafting capital. In most Italian cities, the kiosks that open during the day like Venus flytraps sell calendars depicting bronzed topless women; in Bologna, it's Che Guevara 2002.
In the Piazza Maggiore, a gilded living pharaoh in a golden body-suit, Tutankhamen headpiece stood stock-still atop a plastic milk-bottle carton, a small dark green coin basket about ten feet in front of him so that passers-by would walk between pharaoh and his basket. If someone dropped a coin in the basket, he bowed from the waist with slow metronomic steadiness, then returned silently upright.
We saw him now and then as we toured the Duomo (a large empty soothing space) and the surrounding twisting narrow side streets. At 4:30 pharaoh began twisting like a butterfly fighting inside his cocoon. In less than a minute there emerged from its collapsing chrysalis a short saturnine student, who quickly folded up his gear, swapped his cobra headpiece for a motorcycle crash helmet, and headed off.
The Egyptian theme was continued in the adjacent Museo Civico Archeologico, which had a nice subterranean collection of relics, plus many of the building blocks that comprised the tomb of Horemheb. A comprehensive computerized reconstruction enabled the viewer to float from the surface palace's double peristyle courtyards down through shafts, platforms, false doors, false rooms, and eventually to the final burial chamber.
We were staying out of town at a two-splotch, red-box resort hotel (that wiould prove pleasant enough but not worthy of two splotches), so we fought through the abysmal rush-hour traffic made worse by rain and gloom. In a major honk-fest jam, I spotted an Aosta (AO) license plate -- which I verified by hastily jumping out, running up three cars, and returning, all before the light changed. We also saw several other rare plates including Enna (EN), a tiny commune in central Sicily that I would have thought unattainable.
Fat gray fog lay again on the flat Piemontese plains as we zipped along the autostrada back from our country house into Bologna. Passing an intersection, we saw SR (Siracusa, a difficult Sicilian plate), a beat-up black little Fiat badly double-parked with his lights flashing.
Bologna is an agate, its exterior crusty, gray and dirty, its small interiors brilliant. We walked and walked, ducking into many courtyards, then into the churches of Santa Stefano and San Domenico. Saint Dominic is buried here in a fine sarcophagus adorned with small marble statues, two of which are said to be early Michelangelos (one of which anticipates the David). The details were shown us by a cheerful talkative sacristan proud of his relic and eager to show it off -- even speaking negligible Italian, given a context and an animated host speaking slowly and with great enunciation, you can understand a great deal.
Living up to its reputation as the worker's friend, the city provided us an impromptu one-day strike of all the civic museums, closing their pinacoteca, so instead we saw all the fifteenth and sixteenth century palazzi.
Shopping women laden with bags travel in flocks like pigeons, coming to a halt with a great flutter, spreading wide and dropping something on the pavement.
Dusk falling rapidly, we climbed Bologna leaning Torre degli Asinelli, all 498 steps. Though as tall as Pisa's, it is square, brick, and held together with ringbolt steel -- brick does not tolerate shifts well -- resembling from a distance not a white baton but the scorched remains of a burned-down factory. Round and round the square-cornered counterclockwise turns we climbed, each flight slightly shorter as the tower narrowed, up and up, until we breathlessly reached the summit's grated balconies. The skies were dark blue-gray, the tile rooftops umber and chocolate. Streets ran as dotted ribbons of red and white lights from rush-hour traffic. On the tower's leeward side, we could look disturbingly straight down to the piazza and the tiny elongated dots of people viewed from above. The wind whipped through us. Hearing our English, a young Bolognese and his girlfriend stopped to chat, asking us where we were from. Not many Americans come to Bologna, he said with rueful good humor, and we praised the city as worthy (visitor courtesy, of course, but also genuine).
Saw La Spezia (SP) on a maroon corrugated-metal Citroen 2CV amidst the cluster of parked bicycles as I hurried back to feed the meter -- in Italy, you can never have enough moneta as you always need to feed a voracious meter. Upon my return, had an espresso McCafe! at McDonald's in a tiny paper cup with an Italian hot-coffee pericoloso symbol.
Dinner at a four-fork two-splotch restaurant, San Domenico (the reason we had driven twenty miles to stay in Imola), graced with a fine primitivo (D'Unico), another good zinfandel at a reasonable price. The black-tie service bustled silently and seamlessly about our black-leather banquette -- good breads (no olive oil, we behaved), artichoke puree soup with round pasta, a quail-and-Caesar salad, mushroom risotto, succulent leg of lamb, and a chocobomb dessert with a hot liquid center and creamy vanilla ice cream. The previous evening's cooking had not been worthy of two stars; this was.
Another gray day, the fifth or sixth in a row. The Northern Alliance was claiming capture of Mazar-i-Sharif, a critical major city as it was the largest in the north, with a viable airport, and could become a staging area for U. S. operations. In true journalistic 'objectivity', CNN quoted Taliban representatives stating they had made a 'strategic withdrawal' to sucker the Northern Alliance into a fixed vulnerable position.
From the fertilizer of Watergate and Vietnam, we have grown a generation of journalists who figure that story is all, demand regular baby food news daily at six, and who want counterpoint to the point just for the controversy. They thus ingenuously swallow and then breathlessly spout enemy crap, defending their credulity with sanctimonious hogwash about balance and the public's need to know. In World War Two and Korea, journalists were allowed alongside troops ... because they could keep military secrets. Now the military knows they will not -- and thus limits journalists' inside information. Frustrated, the scribes take inky revenge by writing long 'analytical' pieces claiming that the bombing is not working -- because no one has bothered to prove it to them. Whatever strategy the U. S. was following, the Army obviously had no intention of sharing it with such a pack of gossips.
For about a year I had been working with the Army on housing matters and come away very impressed with their professionalism, functionality, and overall caliber. I told Nancy that whatever we were up to, I was betting it was very strategic and would prove very effective.
On our way up to Modena, a black VW passat from Bolsano (BN) zoomed past us. As we parked in town we collected Alessandria (AL, between Torino and Genova), a legally parked black station wagon. Two more license plates seen, closing in on our goal.
Facing Modena's main square is its Lombard-style Duomo, with entwined twelfth-century lions and filigree and tracery in white marble. The base of its adjoining campanile held a wall portfolio of photographs, hundreds and hundreds of 1940's head snapshots of young men, each with his name and his dates, all of them killed in 1940-44 as Resistance fighters. Lest we forget. In shop windows we saw small Italian and American flags crossed as at arms. Newspapers heralded Italy's recent sending of 2,700 troops to Afghanistan, some of whom would be playing combat roles.
Arrived in Parma and found our hotel amidst the crazy traffic, a white buglike Fiat from Agrigento (AG, in Sicily, a real rarity) whooshed by us, spooking Nancy and causing me to rubberneck (perhaps not the most martially supportive action for that particular moment). Moments later, dodging a scooter-rider with furry bear ears pasted atop her silver helmet, Nancy was loudly telling the honking Reggio di Calabria (RC, down in the toe of Italy's boot) Lancia that she was not going to move out of his way just because he so wished. Now only four plates to go: AV, BG, CB, and CL.
Parma's lovely compact pedestrian-friendly historic downtown is capped by a huge piazza with its Duomo and a tall cylindrical Pisan-style baptistery. Inside, as we gawked upward with the gaggle of elderly Catholics, the sixteen-sided columns and dome were extravagantly frescoed with scenes from the life of Christ. The Duomo was similarly frescoed including an active, Mannerist Transfiguration (a flowing-robed Christ transformed into rising light) strongly influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Last Judgment.
As we dressed for dinner, Italian television was showing an extraordinary rally for America, ten to twenty thousand people overflowing Rome's Piazza del Popolo. They waved Italian and American flags and carried banners: Per non dimenticare (To never forget). Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gave a speech, fully comprehensible because his enunciation was so clear and steady. There is only one possible outcome, he said, that of peace and justice in strength and liberty.
As we dressed for dinner, Italian television was showing an extraordinary rally for America, ten to twenty thousand people overflowing Rome's Piazza del Popolo. They waved Italian and American flags and carried banners: Per non dimenticare (To never forget). Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gave a speech, fully comprehensible because his enunciation was so clear and steady. There is only one possible outcome, he said, that of peace and justice in strength and liberty.
And then the crowd sang our national anthem.
The British ask God to save their gracious queen, religion and monarchy front and center. The French call their country's children to march on Paris and kill aristocrats because the day of glory has arrived. The Germans put their country over all.
In America, we sing of a night of bombardment by an enemy. We are trapped in a fortress and have to take it. Our endurance is illuminated by the red glare and bursting bombs of our enemies' rockets. And we ask ourselves:
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free/ and the home of the brave?
Nancy and I have been to Fort McHenry in Baltimore and seen the original star-spangled banner flying over it. We were moved then. Watching an ocean of foreigners sing an anthem to our nation moved us both now.
Dinner at Al Tremezzino, a one-room restaurant (Planeta) in a strip-mall heading out of town (found in the Michelin Red), portions small but delectable, with a fine Sicilian chardonnay . Had a lovely calamari fritti with an effective if salty flavor but had trouble enjoying it; endless days of gray wet weather, the constant struggles to navigate and to converse (both of which are primarily my responsibility, as driving and packing are Nancy's), were wearying me.
We call it Veteran's Day but its origin is Armistice Day. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the First World War ended. For us it was the trip's midpoint. A quarter of a world a way, a new war raged.
In the breakfast room, we heard Yank speech for the first time in ten days. He was heavy, hairy bearded, from Wichita (home of Cessna), over in Italy to give three free weeks of avionics training to a buyer from Milano. Making a partial vacation of it, he had invited his wife over, and now they were touring. Starting in Milano, they rented a car and drove like the wind. Yesterday they were in Venice, last night in Parma (evidently a convenient Autostrada exit), today they were thinking of Pisa. Whee!
The day before, Nancy had seen a poster advertising a free concert at eleven, upstairs in the post office buildings. We went through an archway, up the inevitable low-riser broad reversing marble staircase. Elegant gray-haired ladies with shoulder brooches proffered leaflets and gestured us to the high white-curtained double doors, which another bluehair swung silently open.
A high-ceiling ballroom in yellow was filled with thin-bar steel chairs with shaped black plastic seats and backs. A smattering of culturati: gay fops in burgundy sweaters and yellow spotted cravats; ladies in pewter suits peering down long noses over half-glasses; dowdy aunts with hands folded over gloves and beatific expressions. On the slightly raised stage, a grand piano. Before it stood the soprano, black hair pinned back to fall just to her shoulders and complement her black lace bolero. Her two piano players were dressed in simple long-sleeved, long-hemmed black gowns.
To celebrate the centenary of local-boy-made-good Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), they were singing a medley of his most famous arias (Aïda, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata). The captivating performance had a family air -- spread across the second row, a father, mother, brother, and two sisters greeted each finale with loud enthusiastic bravas and bravissimas. The pianist blushed and the soprano gracefully curtseyed. Behind her left shoulder, a ten-year-old attendant girl in pale blue sweater peeped through the stage door, applauding with a professional cross-armed mannequin clap and a look of pure adoration. After one particularly energizing aria, she asked quietly for a glass of water, had it presented by the beaming attendant, said "scusare" to her audience, and collected a round of applause for that. She sang for a full hour and a half, delighting Nancy, and received warm and lengthy applause when she was done.
From culture to washerwoman: it was laundry day. We piled everything into Adriano and drove to the lavanderia, which was right where the hotel concierge had said it would be (never trust the phone book, concierges always know better). Spying the storefront, Nancy was turning left into a side street, oblivious to the onrushing motorino going way too fast. "Watch it, stop!" I said. The motorino jammed on his brakes. In the resulting crashless silence each stared at the other -- Nancy through the windshield, the motorino driver a fifty-year-old clean-shaven man with glasses and a look of relief.
Thump! A sound behind us like a suitcase falling over. Adriano lurched forward. The motorino, startled, fled instantly.
The maroon Lancia van's left headlight had clipped our right bumper. It had pulled over, flashers going, and from it emerged a moon-faced young father with a smudge of underlip beard and stylish narrow clear-frame glasses. Before I could say anything he had whipped out his silver cell phone, made a call, and then closed it with a Kirk-to-Enterprise snap. I've called the vigili, he said anxiously in Italian, spinning his finger aloft. They will write it up -- left hand palm open, right hand miming pen on pad -- and decide. If it's my fault -- two hands splayed flat on his chest -- it's my fault. If it's yours, your fault. His gestures were abashed, his expression supplicating. Ten days ago -- ten fingers upwards -- someone did this to me -- pointing to his left rear bumper and side panel, cruelly scraped. After a morning of arias, how could one be angry with Pagliacci, the sad clown?
The vigili arrived, two men in a panel van that held a do-it-yourself accident adjudicator -- a tiny sitting area with counter table, a mini photocopier, and pads of graph paper. A flurry of Italian with the Lancia driver produced a fractured "Non parla italiano, sono Americano" from Nancy. The senior of the two took up a strategic location and sketched the streetscape with careful pencil lines on graph paper, tic marks denoting broken headlight plastic. The junior, flustered but swelled with importance because he spoke English (and a little Greek, he told us bashfully), took Nancy inside and in his slow delicate English interviewed her in excruciating detail. Where was her license issued? When was it issued? In what city was she born? What did she do?
They settled on, "Own a shop."
The Italian driver and I stood around glumly, cold hands in our pockets, resignedly shrugging our shoulders at one another and listening to the painful crunch as whizzing passersby flattened our broken plastic into shards.
A small blue Fiat tootled by, bearing Caltanissetta (CL; central Sicily). Then it began steadily to rain.
It is a particular genius of the English to materialize whenever you need one. Puffing along like a man on a mission as he trawled his wheeled suitcase stuffed like risen bread, he had glasses askew and slightly unclean, three days of salt-and-pepper beard, wet gray hair combed straight back, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his chapped lips, a rumpled blue knit wool hat, a thick twirled scarf, and a heavy navy blue peacoat missing a button. He's bound for the laundry, I thought. Then he spoke, I caught a whiff of accent, and I pounced into English: would he translate?
His name was Nick Smith. As if he lived for such moments, he sprang into action, instinctively forming Angelo Michele Caforio (as he proved to be) and me into a triangle with him. "He's very sorry," Nick said, relishing his role between Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik. "It's his son's birthday." He indicated the seatbelted eight-year-old watching us from the Lancia. "He was late getting the cake before the bakery closed" -- at 1:00 pm, of course, and the accident happened at five minutes to one -- "and his brother will be picking up the boy and taking him to his party."
Italian services always cost however much change you have left. In the laundromat, I secured two washers amid grinning Moroccans and other Italian pieds noirs. My beard helped; every Italian male over twelve and under sixty proudly maintains some distinctive facial hair: unkempt or dandily sculpted according to choice. Van Dykes trimmed to pencil lines and then died blond. Sideburns that tapered to stiletto points near the jaw line. And mine was unshaven around the edges, proving I was no tight-assed German who would become irate at the unstated queuing system. Coins spilled from my pockets, bouncing and clinking on the floor as I loaded my newly-won washers with clothes and soap. While they waited for their trousers to spin dry, we all went back to watching the plexiglass-protected ceiling-mounted television that showed the MTV music awards: female hip-hop singers who dressed just like the roadside hookers, with black patent leather boots over the knee and lots of torso exposed. Rap artists who dressed like pimps.
"Where are the car keys?" Nancy asked, emerging from the van. The blood drained from my face. "I thought you had them!" (Such are the after-effects of stress.) Panicked, I emptied my pockets on the laundromat's clothes-folding table to Nick's amusement: Italian phrasebook, comb, worn deck of cards, tiny change, Italian dictionary. We are what we tote. After some further frantic scrabbling, I found the keys underneath the suitcase. Sheepishly I handed them to Nancy.
Nick rolled himself another awful cigarette from a flat rectangular tin of vile tobacco. "Only country in the world where it takes four policemen to sort out a traffic accident. One to smoke, two to do nothing but talk football, and one to do the actual work. Mind you" -- he peered over his smudgy glasses -- "you're lucky. These two are among the nicest cops I've seen." You must have an email, I said. "I have three. It takes some explaining." He handed me his business card: Nick Smith, English teacher, interpreter, and nice person. The science fiction conventions are full of his ilk.
He had come to Parma for a girl, "twenty years later I'm still here and don't regret it too much." He spoke with the ornate precisely enunciated sentences of someone with plenty of intelligence and not much chance to display it. He was well on his way to being an eccentric; his two-day beard gone far gray, the lenses of his glasses just a little smeared. While Angelo Michele had his interview with the vigili, Nick and I commiserated for him. "Yep, he's screwed," Nick said sotto voce. The vigili had asked Nancy to write a statement, and in it to note that she was stopped when she was hit. "And that you stopped when you made your turn," said the young cop. "You must always stop when making a left turn."
While the laundry spun, Nick chatted up an Italian mom with hennaed hair and a round-faced black-haired daughter who was reading a WITCH comic book. The laundromat chain had a Web site, "Italy's most sympathetic self-service laundries!"
Forty-five minutes later, as we were folding the dried laundry, Angelo emerged, looking ever more like Pagliacci, wanting to reassure me there were no hard feelings. We shook hands and I clapped him on the shoulder.
Enormous thick cobalt and gray fog settled over us as we headed over the Apennine spine. Amidst a downpour, we were passed by BG (Bergamo) who had to wait in front of us as he cut around a high-body camper van. Lightning jagged the sky, thunder booming nearby, as we descended toward the port of La Spezia and through it to the seaside resort towns. Pelting rain spattered the windshield. The road to Lerici was blocked and the signage was unprepared for this possibility. By going deliberately the wrong way amidst much swearing, we found the back road up the corniche, down into Tellaro ... and to the windswept Locanda Miranda, its sign banging in the wind and blowing falling leaves.
We were the only new guests and were warmly greeted by the paterfamilias and chef -- round face, bald gray-haired head, gray stubble, full white apron stained with food over a singlet-style undershirt, various caricature portraits of him on the walls. As he led me upstairs, he told me the price, so much for the room by itself, so much if you ate, but why come here if not to eat? Could we have an iron? Nancy asked. Not in the room, Madame told us -- fire hazard -- but in the cucina. With the sounds of chopping behind us and Italian television news before us, the anchor showing an appropriate amount of lush cleavage, Nancy ironed a couple of shirts and trousers on the granite cutting board covered with a gingham kitchen towel.
An Italian light switch rests between the two plugs of a switchplate, a kind of efficiency in that you will either find light or make yourself your own light...
We had come for the food -- Michelin splotch cooking, all seafood, with intriguing complex tastes. While we ate, I described to Nancy how I thought my next book would be Travels with the Boss, about the parallel journeys of tourism and marriage: unknown territory, just the two of you to rely on. "I'm like the main character, right?" she asked. I assured her she was. "Let's be clear: I have editing rights." I shook my head. "No, you don't have editing rights. You have censorship rights." She nodded. "That's okay. Editing's hard."
Dinner was a family affair -- daughter the waitress had a right ear like the Cinque Terre: severely angled and articulated, pierced many times along the coast by unconnected settlements. She and Mama stood guard in the archway between the porch dining room and the lounge, watching us as we ate.
As she finished, Nancy put down her fork and looked sharply at me. "I am the main character, right?"
"Mm, lovely!" said the Boss, looking out over our shuttered loggia.
The rain was gone, sunlight bouncing off the ocean and wet leaves. The harbor beyond sparkled.
The Northern Alliance's capture of Mazar-i-Sharif was now viewed as a big consolidation: they and the Americans could now be supplied from Uzbekistan. Mazar could become a staging area for the rest of the country. Now that it had been reported that the Taliban had 'strategically' left behind several hundred tanks and thousands of weapons, their previous-day claim went mentioned.
While wheeling through grungy downtown La Spezia -- a big industrial port on the Tyrrhenian Sea and our gateway to the Cinque Terre -- saw LC, which I had not known existed.
The Cinque Terre are five small towns perched like toenails on abrupt promontories that dive craggily into the sea. They are connected one with the other by winding phalangeal cliffside paths strewn with vistas. But for us to see those vistas, the rain had to hold off. So we packed up a lunch (apples, cheese, and water) and set off, clutching our newly-acquired umbrella as a ward against evil spirits and chattering gaily to convince the water sprites we had no concern. Over the next four hours we covered about nine miles, through two towns and halfway to a third, glimpsing occasional patches of distant sunshine. When we finally regained Adriano and were corkscrewing up the hillsides back to the highway and its tunnels, the clouds parted to give us blazing rays striking through to glitter off gunmetal waves. We stopped the car so I could snap it, and just after I did, the clouds closed up as if satisfied.
On the autostrada, we zoomed past a sign -- silhouette of a vigili -- with the Italian for Speed Checked Electronically mangled by a hellacious hit (probably from a truck's side mirror). Farther on, we saw a guy backing up in the right lane, after just missing his exit, with a road train (double-length truck) bearing down on him, ourselves in the only other (left) lane, the road train's honk a continuous blare like an outraged elephant, Nancy barely able to slow enough to give the road train space to vacate the right lane and prevent comprehensive Fiat crumple. Some drivers...
While Nancy was showering before dinner, I checked out the television (Nancy has observed how, in a phenomenon worthy of The X-Files, televisions immediately come on when I enter a new hotel room). The bad Italian knockoff of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was suddenly interrupted by a grave broadcaster with stylish glasses and a frenetic speaking style. American Airlines 587, JFK to Santo Domingo, had exploded on takeoff and crashed into Queens.
I watched, transfixed. Collapsed tract houses, baseball-cap-wearing neighbors gesticulating as they pointed to the sky. Plumes of rising smoke. Twisted tail section fragments. Takeoff from New York. American Airlines.
An ocean separated us from home.
During the filming of Saving Private Ryan, the ex-Marine who trained the cast told them that, if your buddy is shot right beside you, your immediate reaction is, Thank God it wasn't me. Now I thought, I hope it was an accident, then felt ashamed of having thought so. I think Nancy did too. By unspoken agreement we said nothing. What was there to say?
Because we were rattled, we were late heading off for our dinner reservation. We set off, following the signs. In a few minutes, we found ourselves hiking at roadside with only grass verges, no sidewalks, and long stretches without street lamps. A car came around the corner, its headlights briefly blinding us.
"Augh!" Nancy's ragged cry mingled pain and terror. "David, come grab my arm! David!"
She had fallen into a square of blackness and was hanging by her torso. "There's nothing under me!" Her hands clutched for a purchase. I gripped her by the armpit, lifted her up, and we got her feet under her. We checked her black linen trousers -- nothing torn -- and felt her calves -- no bleeding. Nancy started to dust herself and keep walking, and I said firmly, "We're going back to the hotel and then we're driving to dinner. One bottomless hole per night is your limit."
Driving into the citta alta, the old, high city, we found a parking space no more egregiously illegal than the others already cram-occupied, across from the Hotel Arnolfo, whose front door had a large, hand-lettered aggrieved sign saying in Italian, We are not the restaurant Arnolfo, they are in another street. At our Arnolfo, we were graciously ushered in by a very stylish young man (triangular mustache tuft under his lip, vee-shouldered teal blazer, loose designer tie with a stickpin, black flattop haircut, very good English). He assured us that at this hour, nobody would ticket our car, and showed us into their main, high-ceilinged dining room, thick with cigarette smoke. Nancy, her patience reservoir drained by the evening's events, jawboned the young host into moving us into a smaller dining room that she had seen on the way in. Though bewildered that we would choose to eat by ourselves -- how unsocial! -- he prevailed on the maitre d' to comply. When the wine list came and I asked about choices, the maitre d' nudged me toward the $70 cabernet with flowery descriptions. When I inquired about the $28 zinfandel, he raised an eyebrow. Bad aggressive upselling -- if the wine isn't good, why is it on the menu? I stood my ground. It proved excellent.
From then on, the maitre d' was beamingly pleasant -- compensating? -- and we, for our part, expressed gratitude to one and all for accommodating us in the small room. When the chef came out, two hours later, to ask us, Did we like the food? we said Yes, very much, and we especially like the sala non fumare. He made an enormous Italian arm shrug: Italians just love to smoke. Eat, smoke, eat, smoke, I said. Smoke while eating, Nancy said, miming a cigarette in her left hand, a fork in her right. Just as wine list is an excellent leading indicator of food quality, so is asking about a sala non fumare.
"What was that town in Spain," Nancy asked me during dinner, "with a big square we stayed on, you walk through an archway into the old town, it was the name of a wine and it began with R." Much thinking by me. "Caceres," I said, pronounced cath-err-us. "Yes," she said without batting an eyelash, "I said it had an R in it." She paused. "I am the main character, right?"
To start the day, an excerpt from my breakfast reading.
The ruined abbey of San Galgano, open to the sky, open to the elements, was decimated by the 1348 Black Plague (one of several, but the most virulent) and finally dissolved in 1652. We forget how pervasive death was before the twentieth century. In the 1665 plague, more than one-tenth of London's population died in a single year, equivalent to 600,000 New Yorkers dying now.
The ruins of Roselle, a Roman Etruscan hill town, were a scavi -- still being excavated -- interesting to clamber over, incompletely dug (and protected with translucent plastic breezeway lean-to's). The ruins run through and around a poor rural farmhouse with sheep, tractors, rusting tools, and piles of weathered warped gray wood. Massa Marittima, a bit farther south, was a wonderful hill-town with a postcard cobblestones square fronting a cathedral whose huge west front showed Pisan column arcades and layered multi-colored travertine. AA 587, accident or terror? blared the newspaper signboards in four-inch letters.
Called ahead to Rome to reserve tickets to the Villa Borghese, a museum that rigorously rations them. "When do you want to come?" she asked in English. "Thursday." "Thursday is not possible," she brightly informed me, "because the museum will be on strike."6 "Will be on strike." "For one day." "But Wednesday and Friday are okay?" "Yes, no problem."
Arrived after an hour's dark driving, arrived in Montemerano at our hotel, only to discover they had no reservation for us … but they did have a room, in their new wing, at the archway to which was a very apologetic sign, in three languages, After numerous requests from clients, these rooms are non-smoking. The revolution is coming!
We were headed for a special restaurant, Da Caino, two stars, our sole reason for stopping in this particular small town, but when we mentioned this, the hotelier frowned, made a call, and determined that not only did they not have our reservation, in fact they were effectively closed that evening for a private party.
Too many travel hassles and subconscious flying anxiety had worn me to a frazzle. While I slumped in a grim uncommunicative gloom, the hotelier made several phone calls. Achieving success, he drew us a dysfunctional map (here to his driveway occupied half the paper, the next seven kilometers and turns barely a quarter of the space) and sent us off with a lighted-doorway farewell wave of fragile hope. Ten minutes brought us unexpectedly into a charming town green, our restaurant perched cheerily at its entrance. Though nominally smoking, the upstairs room to which we were shown had only one table so inhabited. By then my composure had recovered. When the sweating earnest waiter tore the cork in half, I took the corkscrew from him and slowly maneuvered out the stump, illustrating how as I did so. With food and wine, all became well.
In the town of San Pietro, after following some Italian highway signs, we came to an Etruscan acropolis that had been turned into a basilica whose west front was a concatenation of pre-Christian lapidary friezes reconstituted into decoration if not Christian imagery: a man in agony strangled by snakes -- Laocoön? -- and other twisted figures. The church interior was dusty and crumbling, giving me a new appreciation for Ravenna, three hundred 300 years older, yet in pristine condition.
Tarquinia, a few kilometers south toward Rome, is today an undistinguished Italian town aboveground -- roundabouts, high-rise blocks of flats, and commuter traffic -- unless you take a small road east out of town and park across from a fenced-off field dotted with kiosks faced with closed doors: the Etruscan necropolis.
One of the twelve great Etruscan cities and possibly its capital, Tarquinia flourished in the sixth century BC, before being conquered by Rome, absorbed, and eventually demolished to make building blocks for the unremarkable town of Corneto a few klicks west. In 1489 the first recorded archeological dig was made here. Over the succeeding four hundred years, diggers have identified 5,735 tombs from the sixth to fourth century BC, 2,500 years ago.
Of these, more than twenty are now open to the public. Each is reached via the aforementioned door-kiosks which lead you into narrow stairs descending into the earth (visualize the roof-access doorways atop urban tenements), at the base of which a large plexiglas shield seals the tomb against modern air.
The lost myth of Atlantis has captured our imagination, overshadowing the real mystery of the Etruscans. No one knows their origins -- speculation includes Lydia (the area of Troy) and their language clearly shows both Phoenician and Hellenic influences (the runic script uses characters that later appear in Norse and Tolkien's dwarvish). Most of our modern knowledge of Etruscan comes from the seven Eugubine tablets, Etruscan on one side, Latin on the other, now in Gubbio.
Judging by their funerary frescoes, the Etruscans were stuck in their Freudian oral period. They favored a drinking game called kuttabos, which involved spitting wine for distance or into a barrel while shouting the name of your beloved. The frescoes showed aristocrats (pale skin) reclining on tricliniums and gazing with sloe-eyed complacency at standing naked servants (darker, sun-browned skin) who are serving them and making significant eye contact. One wall frieze showed a standing man leaning forward, left arm bracing his knee, right arm reaching forward to steady himself as a conical brown spray emits from his hindquarters and a brown sausage is projected outward. The accompanying inscription, aranth heracanasa, has not been translated.
In another, two standing muscular men, both ruddy colored (presumably servants), bracket a woman (lighter skin, curled piled hair, presumably their mistress). She stands, bent forward so her torso forms the horizontal bar of their three-person H. The servant whose midriff she approaches is clearly spanking her (his hand very realistically done), and the one at her rear wields a switch slightly longer than a riding crop. All the details are by now obscured by green mold, probably from the sweat of Victorians touching the naughty images (this tomb was discovered in 1875). And we think we invented sexual fetishes.
Curious behavioral rule about Italy -- when the Autostrada is having its one-day strike, don't go through the Telepass line! Meanwhile, Castello Odescalchi, which we had planned to visit in the afternoon, had decided to close at 1:00 pm for two weeks in November, just because.
Kabul had fallen, the Taliban were in rout, there was a battle going on for the final stronghold Kandahar, and we were hunting for Osama bin Laden in caves. In the paper we saw a diagram of a Taliban bunker, probably modeled on Saddam Hussein's. The world was going to discover just how hideous the Taliban were, how they allowed their populace to fall into ruin, and how the journalists bought their propaganda.
We hit the Roman traffic as a pumpkin hits a brick wall: ninety minutes of insane frustration among traffic jams, unexpected one-way streets, lead fumes, and noise. We arrived at our hotel on leafy Aventine Hill, verified they had our reservation, and dropped our bags. Then back into the madhouse for another ninety minutes to the car rental return -- why do they locate their offices in tiny one-way side streets right in the center of town? But the rental agent was friendly, giving us no hassle at all about Adriano's oculi nero, and in a few minutes we were back on the street, suddenly transportation-less. Five minutes later, we saw CB (Campobasso), leaving us only AV (Avellino) to have seen every license plate. And just after that, we saw a poster advertising the movie Pacte des Loups,8 a French chop-socky werewolf melodrama much of which had been filmed in Jumilhac, our favorite chateau from our Dordogne trip.
Rome is all about churches, ruins, and museums. The museums contain ruins, and the ruins include churches, the churches are built of ruins. Eras and ages are all mixed together. Everything is cheek by jowl, not just in space but in period and individual buildings. Other than the Places to Avoid, each traveler designs his or her own itinerary.
Nancy and I like history, culture, and art. In Rome, that brings you principally to churches, because they were or became repositories of architecture, sculpture, and art -- and because, unique so many places, their art has largely remained in the church. Place and purpose give art meaning -- knowing that a particular altarpiece was painted for a particular chapel in a particular church, seeing it where it was designed to be seen, gives it a meaning, the purpose of its emotional impact, in a way that hanging it on a gallery's walls does not.
Bagpipes heard on one's stereo can sound like so much caterwauling; the same bagpipes played in a Highland castle's great hall can move one to tears.
This particular afternoon, we marched ourselves up and down the various streets to:
While each of these was in its own right impressive -- and their memories are crisp even now -- by this last cathedral I was feeling like Pooh bear behind Christopher Robin, being dragged bump-bump-bump from church to church through noisy dark Rome, rootless, my calves tired, a wreck unsure how to navigate us on foot back to the hotel whose rooms we still had not seen.
It was, therefore, with a relief something akin to saintly ecstasy that after some frustrating wrong turns I finally piloted us to our hotel, the Villa San Pio about which no praise is too great. Back home in Cambridge, we live on Avon Hill, a quiet residential street protected by a convenient maze of one-way streets. Villa San Pio is on Aventine Hill, a quiet leafy residential area protected by a convenient maze of one-way streets. The hotel itself was well-furnished, our room enormous, the bathroom gleaming chrome and white ceramic with a capacious tub, ample hot water, and fluffy white towels.
Finally, finally, the long day of psychological homelessness was over! We both sank into luxurious relaxation. Each day thereafter, we found ourselves becoming mellower as we crossed the last insane thoroughfare and started mounting Aventine Hill toward our oasis.
Travelers, a word of advice about Rome: pay the extra money for a good room. (Villa San Pio was a huge bargain, about $140 a night.) Rome rapidly drains the patience reservoir, and to replenish it you need a comfortable hotel room and a full, quiet, night's sleep.
Now the media were reporting complacent I-told-you-so briefings from Army generals explaining that their campaign against the Taliban had been designed to fix them in position, hollow out their support, and then crush them in place.
By just before 9:00 am we were perched before the Borghese Gallery, with our flow-control ticket -- enter at this time, move to the second floor by that time, exit by a third time, do not back up, severe tire damage. Here I was properly introduced to the remarkable, lascivious talent of Gianlorenzo Bernini, whom up to now I had largely dismissed as merely a Baroque flashman who became the Pope's draftsman.
Walked across north inner-suburban Rome to the Villa Giulia, a Renaissance palace that now houses an enormous collection of Etruscan objects. They were seafarers and pirates, and when Magna Grecia conquered Sicily, seizing the Straits of Messina (Homer's Scylla and Charybdis), the Etruscans were cut off and their economy suffered substantially. (Had the 474 BC battle of Cunae gone the other way, Vulci might have been the eternal city and home to the Catholic Church, and Roma just an empty marshy field with a few derelict scavi.)
If not hedonists, the Etruscans were certainly epicures; their relics and reliquaries show us pleasures and problems of the flesh; they had votives for every body part including the uterus (which they imagined looked like a cross between whale baleen and a brain). A very large funerary statute in terra-cotta depicted a husband and wife lying on a banquet triclinium, she in front, he behind, their curly hair oiled and styled. His right hand rests familiarly on her accepting shoulder. With her right, she pours -- perfume? oil? -- into his flat left palm. Their faces, though stylized in generic kouros smiles, convey contentment. The comfortable non-sexual repose of their bodies bespeaks a genuine marital affection.
Rome is also where you find most of the world's great Caravaggios, so our church tour included virtually all of those containing his work. In Santa Maria del Popolo we admired two Caravaggios painted specifically for this baroque cathedral:
In a Roman McDonald's, we read the chief executive's mission statement: "McDonald's aims to be the world's best quick service restaurant experience." Even in Europe, this means no smoking areas, clean bathrooms, plenty of tables where you can sit and not be hassled. So we gravitate to it. A rural Frenchman may trash a random McDonald's and become a culturati folk hero, but if the place is so awful, why is every one everywhere always packed with local kids?
After walking us all over the city visiting churches -- if there is a flyer on the windshield of your car, it's not a ticket, it's an ad to learn English -- Nancy took pity on me, dropping me at an Internet café where I spent a blissful thirty minutes on personal email.
There were reports that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was ordering his forces to evacuate Kandahar -- so the troops would be easy pickings or American bombing through the night. Mohammed Atef, Al Qaeda's military commander, had been reported killed. Pakistanis who went to help the Taliban, lured by the siren call of defending Islam against the infidels, were robbed of their money and watches by their ostensible allies. Many Taliban were trapped in Kunduz, where likely they would be eliminated. German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder narrowly persuaded his parliament to send 4,000 troops to Afghanistan. Everyone was climbing on the bandwagon of renewed respect for America's military -- in this country and throughout the world.
Everyone else's country is a large extended family whose visitor is a temporary in-law -- forgiven for his bewilderment, tolerated for his curious personal hygiene and diet, granted an extra measure of patience for his ignorance of the obvious. For the visitor, the hosts have their foibles, bless them -- have you seen what they eat? -- but they are welcoming and frequently interested in knowing about you. Being a good guest, you eat all the strange things they urge on you, and go with their strange games and protocols. But every time the conversation achieves any depth, your complete lack of vocabulary interrupts the flow. After a while, you notice that uncle Guido is a little cracked, and Aunt Beatrice has bad teeth and body odor, which no one mentions while studiously sitting only upwind of her ... but the food is good, the environment convivial, you're only a guest, and soon you will be going home.
The Doria Pamphilj (pronounced pam-feel-ee) Museum is a private collection housed in the palace of the Doria Pamphilj family, one of several Renaissance plutocracies that vied for Roman temporal whether temporal or spiritual. (Having one of your number elected Pope, as the Pamphilj did with Innocent X, was like winning the Super Bowl: good for local pride, good for tourism, good for business). Like many other major families -- the Medici, Borgias, Este, Barberini, Borghese -- the Doria Pamphilj made their fortunes in the provinces (Genoa; they were a shipping family) and spent it in Rome, migrating their offspring into appropriate jobs and marriages, building and expanding a suitably impressive in-town palace, and accumulating a substantial art collection, some acquired, some commissioned.
Elevation to the papacy clearly warranted artistic commemoration, as in a Bernini bust of a grim unamused withered Innocent X. Bernini had been court artist to Innocent's predecessor, the Barberini Pope Urban VIII (the first of seven pontiffs for whom he worked). One can almost see the new Pope frowning as he sits for the flamboyant maestro, wondering if his miserly cheeks and aquiline brows and chin will be rendered with as much unsparing precision as his predecessor's facial blubber, and fearing (correctly) that they will be.
Innocent also sat for Diego Velazquez, who as a Hapsburg court painter was able to imbue Innocent's grim glare with a dignity of heavy wisdom suggesting the Counter-reformation could be no laughing matter to Christ's commanding general. Though in name Innocent, in nature he was anything but: the pope entailed his fortune and collection with legal documentation so strong it withstood lawyer-mercenary sieges of succeeding generations of libertine Pamphilj seeking to break it up or sell it off.
Standing at the balcony while the Boss used the ladies' room (learn how we survived Italian bathrooms), I automatically scanned the parking lot below, looking for license plates ... and saw AV (Avellino, outside Rome), completing our set. Of course we photographed it (our last pictures, as it turned out; shortly thereafter, the camera lens malfunctioned).
Passed across a tourist-overrun piazza on our way to somewhere else, we ducked into the Pantheon (because it was free and quick, despite being a Place to Avoid). Nice proportions and exceedingly old, but neither of us went ga-ga over it.
Santa Maria sopra Minvera, a little beyond, held an early Bernini, the Tomb of Maria Raggi. Mounted on a marble pillar along the nave, it was a portrait bust in high relief framed by a flung black cloak in Bernini's usual effortless arrested motion. Nancy accurately likened the overall visual effect to a Halloween witch hitting a telephone pole.
For two hours we toured the must-see Roman Forum, impressive for its scale and for what had once been here, but today mostly undistinguished rubble. Before the Colosseum beyond, a Roman legionnaire with an eyebrow ring chatted with a Roman senator talking on a cell phone, while two guards wearing flesh-colored tights smoked Marlboros.
For brand identification, the great families had logos; the Barberini bees were everywhere woven into the fabric, wallpaper, and plasterwork of the (overpriced) Barberini Palace.
We forget just how solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short was life in those times; a self-portrait by Dutchman Benjamin Moreelse, age 21, showed wonderful talent and maturity. But he traveled to Rome for artistic education, caught sick, and died. The highlight of a thin collection was Caravaggio's Judith with the Head of Holofernes. Though an early work, and thus in a brighter clearer light than his later compositions, it shows Judith concentrating hard as she slices through Holofernes' neck, blood spurting. His composition must have inspired Artemisia Gentileschi, daughter of painter Orazio Gentileschi, raped by her father's pupil Agostino Tossi, who fifty years later rendered the same scene.
The Palazzo Quirinale was not open this Sunday, come back next Sunday. The Scudeire Quirinale had an enormous stationary line, come back Tuesday. The Palazzo Venezia was likewise enlined, come back Tuesday. Evidently Sunday is the Roman's grandma-takes-kids-to-museum day.
Adapting our touring strategy, we had our usual fruit-and-cheese lunch in the Piazza Navona, playing a little cards ... and then it began to rain.
Ducked into the Chiesa Nuova, which if nothing else was dry, then stopped for coffee, gelato, and cards. Outrageously priced in the abstract, but cheap enough for a treat event and a great time. As darkness fell, the rain and wind steadily rose. Finally we made a run for it, only to discover the streets full of Indians or Sri Lankans, springing up in the rain like new mushrooms, their arms laden with cheap umbrellas. Nancy impulsively snared one. "Quanto costa?" Only five bucks. A good purchase -- a great spontaneous purchase -- even if we might have to discard the umbrella at journey's end.
Huddling together under our single umbrella, we zigzagged via doorways and awnings to San Luigi Francesi and headed to its Contarelli Chapel housing three Caravaggios in a single setting: The Calling of Saint Matthew, Saint Matthew and the Angel, and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew.
Time stopped for the fifty minutes we spent there, soaking in the paintings, as lightning flashed and thunder rumbled outside. The chapel was dark and our luce coins limited, so we rationed them. As we saw tour clusters approaching, one of us would feed the machine so that the lights came up just as they arrived to see it -- and, more times than not, one or more of the group would renew the light from his or her own pocket. Cast your coins upon the luce, and lo! They shall be returned to you, and more.
More churches in the black rainy early evening:
Home, blissfully dry, then blissfully warm in the tub, and back out, down the hill to our local, the Taverna Cestia, a neighborhood restaurant with hearty tasty cheap food and a good wine list (Chardonnay Collio La Rajada was an American-style wooded Trentino, very presentable). It was a little past nine, the place was clearing out, and from our table near the wood-fired oven we were treated to a three-act pantomime melodrama:
We had reserved all of a morning and most of a day for Vatican City, which is not so much a tourist destination as a fortress to be penetrated: arrive early, find the right entrance, and establish base camp in the proper line, a four-hundred-yard snake that stretched around the east walls, reached only after I had plumped us in the wrong location.
Once past the ticket counter, we confronted a lobby with signposts to distant goals (Sistine Chapel, Rafaello Rooms) in a flow-control system reminiscent of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville: church headquarters as mall experience. We aimed to arrive at the Sistine Chapel at the visit's end, after the entry doors had closed for the day, because we figured that most people would head straight there, clogging it, and leave the Vatican once it was seen.
In the art museum, there were three huge famous Raphaels and large tapestries woven from Raphael cartoons. As these were not on the known list, the rooms were virtually empty. Conversely, crowded beyond any rational measure were the Raffaelo rooms themselves -- an antechamber for Julius II, frescoed by the young Raphael to show a gathering of Philosophy's Greatest Hits -- Plato and Aristotle discoursing as they walk into a Classical piazza crowded with history's greatest talents.
Raffaelo painted himself in as a bystander, but he gave pride of place to Michelangelo, whom he painted in as a foreground solitary sitter in acknowledgment of Michelangelo's achievement with the first half of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, unveiled in 1510.
Though the paintings themselves might have been well worth extended study, this was impossible: a combination of weak light, interior scaffolding and cheesecloth covering several of the works, and an elbow-to-elbow crowd so thick meant that virtually all one could do was shuffle, blindly, gawking upward. We might have done better simply to avoid the rooms entirely and go right into the Sistine Chapel.
Mine's bigger than yours, is the message conveyed by the Vatican church itself, San Pietro. Everything is on a grand and more than grand scale. This is not so much a place of worship10 as a symbolic monument to Holy Mother Church. An extreme expression of the Baroque, built around a huge open plan and enormous scale, San Pietro is beautifully maintained. Every chapel, every niche contains an immense Papal tomb, many of them by Bernini, the central baldacchino an unmistakable focal point (covering the tomb of St. Peter).
We climbed the 477 steps (171 around the elevator shaft, then 306 more) to the interior dome, inscribed in letters six feet high, and peered down at the midges below. The lines and curves were magnificent Escher-esque perspectives, memorable in a slightly terrifying way. Reaching the rooftop in late afternoon, we looked out over hazy Rome before us, the Tiber identifiable mainly by the thick green ruff of treetops lining its banks.
Dinner that evening was a trattoria, Gino in Trastevere, recommended in Michelin and reached by running a gauntlet of grungy aggressive beggars made worse by the Michelin map's mis-location of the restaurant (they were off by three blocks). Mapmakers have a sacred duty to be accurate, and when they fail it, I become irate. On our return trip, we detoured around the panhandlers and merely had to dodge Fiats along the Lungo Tiberna.
Just atop Aventine Hill, a small villa's entrance is guarded by high dark green double wood doors. Bend down and peer through the keyhole and you see, as if in a small stereopticon, a keyhole view. Between a double line of poplars, as if in a cameo, is the dome of San Pietro. On the walk into town, we passed the Bocca della Verita, a Roman sun god relief with a large capsule-shaped open mouth. Supposedly if you put your hand in it and utter a falsehood, the mouth will bite off your hand. A line of Japanese waited, one by one, to be photographed.
On our way up to Santa Maria in Aracoeli, passed a bookstore where I caught site of Fortune Is A River, a historical speculation by Roger D. Masters, Professor of Government at Dartmouth, that I subsequently read.
After touring a delightfully staged but thin exhibition on the Renaissance (Rinascimento) in the Scuderie da Quirinale -- great layout, lovely program guide, representative pieces from various eras, and one minor or inferior work apiece from a greatest-hits list of painters -- we lunched at the Piazza Venezia -- growling bendy-bus station and pigeon hangout -- before taking in the Gentileschi Exhibition at the Palazzo Venezia.
We finished our long slow pleasant day by replaying by walking up the Corso to view again our favorite Caravaggios in Santa Maria del Popolo and the Saint Matthew triptych in San Luigi Francesi, once again deploying our luce coins as bait to prompt others.
After eating as early as we could -- ignore posted signs to the contrary, no Italian restaurant opens until at least 7:30, and probably a few minutes after that -- for the last time climbed Aventine Hill, took a delicious relaxing bath, finished the packing, and went to bed. Nancy took sleeping pills -- with a 4:45 wakeup call, why toss and turn?
In the dark, while a swift-sleeping Nancy breathed heavily -- women do not snore, therefore she does not, or so she informed me -- unable to find the sleeping pills I had reserved for myself, I imagined that the devil appeared in the room. I will bargain with you, he said. I guarantee a safe flight if you will part with your left pinky finger: brutally chopped off, then swiftly cauterized. Would I do it, I asked myself. In the darkness I held up my left hand, extended the pinky, curled the other fingers protectively into a fist. No, I thought, no thank you. In such ways do we hypnotize ourselves against our fears.
Awoke at 4:45 am to make our 5:30 cab for our 7:20 am plane. In the lobby we found ourselves standing next to an affable young Danish fellow who was also calling a cab. Speculating that he too was bound for the airport -- where else would you be going at that hour? -- we arranged to share a cab between us. This required agreeing a price beforehand with the Italian cab driver, who claimed that calling a cab and not using it would obligate the hotel to pay a 30 kL kill fee, so we negotiated our way to a combined 120 kL fare for the group. Henrik was working for the UN Food Program, based in Tanzania, recently redirected to Pakistan (as part of the effort to help Afghan refugees), now coming home through Rome. Of course, when we arrived at the airport, our driver tried to charge us an additional 10 kL for our baggage, despite only 55 kL on the meter (and the 30 kL kill fee), whereupon Henrik wheeled out an impressively colloquial practical Italian, made all the obvious points, paid over 120 kL (which we had jointly assembled), and flatly ended the conversation.
Arriving in Milano Airport only a few minutes late, we discovered anticipated delays due to the thick fog through which we had just descended -- a common problem at Milano, where the mountains trap moisture and make it foggy most mornings in winter; only Alitalia would relocate its hub to an airport socked in with delays six months of the year! So we had plenty of time to read the billboard ads.
American film stars, recognizable the world over, level their brand identity overseas selling local products. Harrison Ford glumly hawks a Japanese beer. Madonna sells Italians ice cream. Here in Milano, Kevin Costner avers, in Italian, It's nice to walk in Valleverde shoes. Kevin is wearing an Armani suite and a Rolex. His hair is neatly combed and his receding hairline obscured. His eyes have been blued. He is squinting a little, an expression intended to convey superior breeding, but instead giving him the appearance of a man enduring a slightly too-intimate nether exploration. Or perhaps he is just anxious that, even though his contract (like all such) states that the ad may not be shown in America, it will be scanned and then sent over the Internet...
Our 10:50 am departure was first posted as 12:40 pm. At 1:30 pm we boarded. And sat. And sat. And sat. And I went through the silent agonies of personal hell. I wished I could cross myself, or say a rosary, or even rationalize away my fears -- who blows up a plane with priests from New Hampshire, or toddlers racing up and down the aisles? -- but could not.
Most of us see ourselves as risk-averse -- which to most of us means avoiding risks that we cannot control. (My worst nightmares involve having my arms pinned at my sides.) So Nancy and I scuba-dive, and Nancy drives in Italy, and we are pedestrians in Rome -- most dangerous of all -- yet the act of climbing onto a comparatively safe airplane inspires more fear than all of them put together. I thought of Lockerbie, where the bomb exploded over Scotland instead of the Atlantic because the plane was late out of Heathrow.
The hours crawled past, the fog an intolerable impenetrable pea soup outside.
After four hours of waiting, my fear transmogrified itself from that of terrorism to mere delay. If our flight were finally canceled, I would be forced to endure this fearsome passivity. But then the blessed announcement, and we pushed, and we rolled slowly into the soup -- they had lost power to the runway lights, so each plane was guided, remora-like -- and finally, with a low shiver of unleashed power, we lifted.
In sixty seconds we were up a thousand meters. Seconds later we burst through the cloud layer into a rainbow-clear sunset. To our right, the cloud-penning Alps, covered in snow on their shadowed sides, rose above the white haze like a frozen stormy sea. It was beautiful, striking, and I could feel my fear seeping out of me, the emotions awash with release. I kissed Nancy on the cheek, held her hand and she mine. On the headphones came the Eagles:
Take it easy, take it easy
Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy
Lighten up while you still can, don't even try to understand
Just find a place where you can stand and take it easy
We may lose and we may win, but we will never be here again
So open up, I'm climbin' in, and take it easy.
(Finished March 17, 2002, on a plane flying back from a week's scuba vacation in Grand Cayman, my 37th air leg since September 11.)
2. As of December, 2001, the WTC fatalities were 3,000. Annual highway deaths are 41,000 or so.
6. Protesting, we later discovered, Berlusconi's plan to privatize the museum guarding contract.