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So Little Time |
 A travel poster advertises the charms of Florence |
To experience Italy right,
lose your American notions
of TheColumnists.com
Italia is a land of twists and turns. I find this out
as my husband Bill and I explore this country for the first time.
I love it; he finds it exasperating, perhaps because he chose
to do the driving.
No town seems to be laid out in a grid. Instead, streets twist, dead-end, reverse themselves, and dissolve into alleys. This does not stop drivers from racing to their destinations only to hang the “chiuso” sign for several mid-day hours at their places of business. It seems that anyone in such a hurry to get to work has the mindset to make a maximum amount of money that day. Closing the shop or gas station several hours for lunch and a nap doesn’t seem to fit.
I can’t shake my American sensibilities even though I want to experience Italy on its own terms. This is why we chose to drive on our own rather than take a tour bus. But even if I mastered the language, I would lack the knowledge base of Italian life. Italy would thus remain just short of accessible. When we get lost, it’s another American tourist that I welcome like a guardian angel. We each open our Rick Steves guidebook and pool our own hard-won shreds of information.
Sometimes we all simply need to debrief. While Bill and I were waiting in a long line to see Michelangelo’s David at The Accademia in Florence, the woman in front of us turned around and asked deadpan, “Know any good Mexican restaurants?” She and her family were from Los Angeles. Of course they also knew about lines and traffic but here things seemed different. We compared notes and then went in to meet “David.”
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tell me where I could find a good Mexican restaurant in this town?" |
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But it’s the Italians I want to know. Those who give me directions use their hands along with “destre” and “sinistre”--survival words we have learned. Their whole bodies express the moves it will take to get where we need to go. When we kept going the wrong way on foot to find the Etruscan necropolis in Tarquinia, the man whose torrent of directions was incomprehensible ended up simply driving us to the place.
Our evening walks to find a restaurant that would open as early as 7:30 p.m. show us a wonderful slice of life. Via Prioni in the port city of La Spezia comes to mind. Although everyone has a lovely waterfront mall to stroll, many prefer to walk cheek by jowl along this narrow street that dead-ends there. Groups of people stop to cluck over a baby. Teenage girls walk arm-in-arm past groups of teenage boys who talk loudly to each other but keep an eye on the girls. Elderly people chat in groups on the corners.
Bill noticed how high the noise level got. I wondered about the metamorphosis that will change those young girls with skin-tight jeans and streaked hair into 4’3” old ladies with bowed legs.
Like these evening strollers, other Italians seem to be comfortable with small spaces. We walked the track between the five villages of Cinque Terre which cling to cliffs that plunge into the Liguorian Sea. Our path took us through tiny vineyards and patches of olive trees. One man sidled past us to gather eggs from a chicken coop in a perilous downhill position. Even masterpieces get tucked into small, barely accessible places. After climbing countless stairs to a small monastery chapel above the Cinque Terre village of Monterosso, we saw a Van Dyke painting of the Crucifixion. It had been relegated to a side altar.
Art, castles, walled villages and ancient ruins are everywhere. The past seems part of a continuum of daily life. With that realization, it made me uncomfortable to look each morning at a large painting in the breakfast room at our hotel in La Spezia. Destroyers and cruisers filled the harbor. P-38 fighter planes crossed the top of the scene. The clerk explained with courteous hesitation that the artist depicted the American attack of La Spezia in 1943.
But if I lived in the heart of Florence I could very well attend Mass at Santa Croce. I’d genuflect and during the service my eyes might wander to the frescos by Giotto or to the sepulchers of others who have also crossed themselves and lit a candle there: Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, Rossini. Dante should be inside his tomb but he’s not. He was banished from Firenze for political incorrectness and buried in Ravenna. No matter. They built a tomb for him in Santa Croce anyway.
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guy is buried in Ravenna, why do they have a tomb for him here in Santa Croce?" |
Dante lives again through a clever street mime in front of the Uffizi Gallery. Dressed and made up in white so that he looks like a statue, this Dante replicates the tragic visage of a man who has seen the eternal effects of human evil. Even his smile has woeful edges. After all, Dante had only one decent chat with his Beatrice once she grew up and before she died at a young age.
We, too, learn what it’s like to be banished.
On our second day on the road, we entered the gates of Siena. St. Catherine withdrew her favor. Behind the wheel of our Opel Corsa Bill’s calm, law-abiding soul (he refuses to run yellow lights) changed into that of an Italian driver. In search of a hotel Rick Steves recommended, he charged into the Centro, edged through the narrow streets that skirt Il Campo where a medieval horse race is still held, deftly avoided the toes of an old lady, and turned sharply in the face of a wrong-way sign. A policeman walked over to us.
“Do you have a place to stay?” he asked in English.
“No,” Bill replied.
“The town is full,” he said. “The gate is that way. Go there.”
I write this column as we pack up to leave the country itself. The Tyrrhenian Sea that laps at the long beaches of Ostia where we are spending our last night near the airport has turned a deep aquamarine. It matches the sea at Cinque Terre where we stood on a cliff and watched the rays of the sun cut through the water to converge on the shadows of the two of us standing together looking down.
There is so much of Italy that we haven’t seen: Venice, the Lake Country, Sicily, the inside of someone’s home. I will always be enchanted by Italy’s painterly hill country and awed by the art that is everywhere. I’ll always be able to close my eyes and hear the lively emphases of Italian conversation. And my nose will never forget the smell of a good dinner.
Italy is so much like life itself.
© 2002 by Joyce Kiefer.
The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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