Summertime

Note: With the start of the summer, Marks in the Margin will take a break. Postings should resume sometime in the autumn.

Meanwhile, I am continuing to read reading Shirley Hazzard’s “We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays.” Toward the end I notice an essay titled “The Tuscan in Each of Us.” I turn to it at once. She writes,

“The anthem of praise raised by foreign writers…to Italy, to Tuscany, to Florence, has consistently sounded a note of relief. Its theme is that of a heaven-sent rescue, the rescue of the self from incompleteness. …We celebrate an environment that is both a revelation and a repose to us, a consolation and a home.”

Her essay reminds me of my days in Tuscany last summer, where I spent a few weeks in a small hill town—Radda in Chianti—mid-way between Florence and Siena in the heart of the rolling Chianti hills.

I stayed at a villa-like hotel surrounded by gardens, with roomy lounges, a pool, and a comfortable room with a view out to the gardens and fields below.

I looked out at the villas scattered about the hills of Chianti and it all seemed so desirable. But I was there in the summer when it is warm and know nothing of the long winters that are cold and damp. And I wondered how comfortable it is inside those charming villas after all. I don’t see all the labor that goes into maintaining the olive and grape groves, or the many days of keeping them neat and trim. What I see is very superficial, nothing of the reality.

I was at peace in Tuscany, the countryside seemed so familiar, there’s something about it that keeps me returning to Italy. After roughly nine months of winter, rain, clouds, cold, utterly dreary days in Portland, I head to Italy for summer, sun, blue skies, warmth and parks.

The countryside reminds me of my childhood, the land around the town where I lived until I went to college. All that is gone now. But it remains in Tuscany. I think the landscape of my youth keeps me coming back.

It was always difficult, she said, to come home. She adored Italy. Apart from everything else, it was one of the few places where one’s hopes for the future could be restored. Beautiful, unspoiled fields and hills. Great houses that families had lived in for five hundred years. It was deeply consoling. Also the general sweetness of the people.
James Salter All That Is

Three Italian Parks

We change, we age, we stay or move away, and in time we end. The park, however, endures. John Banville

Zadie Smith visits Italy. She writes about the Boboli Gardens in City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts, by Catie Marron.

Smith considers the Boboli too formal, few people, nothing like an English garden. I feel the same, although I never expressed it before. That is what good writing often does. It put words to the unarticulated feelings and thoughts we have.

Then she goes to Rome and writes about her visits to the Borghese Gardens. Unlike the Boboli, the Borghese is alive. There are children, couples, old and young, solitary strollers, and dogs and more dogs. There is a zoo, fountains small ponds, a museum, cafes and ice cream vendors.

Benches along each side of the paths, once in a while you see a reader, and in the spring and summer a great many readers. Everything is old, mossy statues, algae-filled ponds, ancient pines. Nothing formal about the Borghese Gardens, you are never quite sure where you’re headed. All you know is you don’t want to leave, don’t want to head down to the crowded, noisy, city below.

I first heard of the Borghese Gardens in reading Mark Helprin’s The Soldier of the Great War. Before he goes to war, the young man rides his horses under the pines in the Borghese. Each time I’ve been in Rome, sometimes alone, at other times with my wife and then once with our children, I’ve wandered through that very open and very public park. It never changes.

In Mary Gordon’s The Love of Our Youth two former lovers chance upon one another in Rome. They spend most of the time catching up as they stroll along the paths of the Borghese Gardens.

“In a public Italian garden a Briton has all the things she loves about Italy—the sun, the food, the sky, the art, the sound of the language—without any of the inconvenient rules that attend their proper enjoyment.” Zadie Smith

The Parco Delle Cascine is an enormous park on the western edge of Florence that stretches along the Arno for miles. Over the years I have gone there often, first as a runner, then as a walker, and now as a sunbather. I marvel at how few people I usually see in the Cascine. It is surely because the park is so vast and so heavily treed that the people are simply hidden in between the bushes and shrubs and down the long pathways that traverse the park from one end to the other.

A few miles into the park there is a public swimming pool, the Publico Piscina where I used to swim. It is far from luxurious; I was reluctant to shower there. But it is the sun and surrounded by lovely tall trees and open fields. On day I realize that the sun that shines on the sunbathers at the Publico Piscina is the very same one that shines on the beautiful people by the pool at the Splendido in Portofino.

As I prepare to return home, I am once again reminded that we are what our situations hand us. In Florence it is warm; at home it is cold. In Florence it is quiet; at home it is “noisy.” I am a different person in Florence. I am turned upside down mostly by the warmth that seems in some strange way to be remarkably therapeutic. Each time I go there I realize how much difference the temperature and light can make, how much they seem to matter to me, how noticeable they are. I feel more at home here than anywhere else.

Two Italian Tales

The ending of Marco Vichi’s, Death in Florence was such a letdown. I was hoping for a happy one. Fifty-six year old Inspector Bordelli did not capture the culprits of the crime he was investigating.

The young boy who had been missing for days was killed. Two of those involved committed suicide. Two others began their own vendetta. His young lover leaves him after an excruciating experience, for which he had not taken steps to prevent. He turns in his badge and Beretta and retires to the countryside. He has failed, failed his lover, himself and colleagues.

The novel takes place in 1966, the year of the massive floods that ruined parts of the city of Florence and its historic treasures. The streets were filled with mud and the litter of the rampaging Arno. The rain never stopped. Food was scare, so was water, there was no electricity, heat or telephone communication.

The city seemed ruined. Bodcelli was ruined. And the pleasure I had in reading the novel left me somewhat ruined too. It will pass for me. But not for Inspector Bordelli. “He didn’t feel like asking himself any more pointless questions. It made no sense. He should let whatever happened happen.” He was alone again.

“…the nobility and greatness that are at times hidden within mental illness.”

Giuseppe Pardo was an Italian Pardo, a leader of Jewish individuals in the community of Pisa. He lived there at the time of Nazi Germany’s occupation of the country during World War II.

Silvano Arieti, now an American psychiatrist, also lived in Pisa then and was a member of the Pardo’s synagogue and a close friend. Arieti describes Pardo’s life in The Parnas, A Scene from the Holocaust.

It’s a short book, primarily focused on Pardo’s great fear of animals, especially dogs whenever he went outside. The origin of his serious phobia is unknown and, while Arieti attempts to give a psychoanalytic interpretation, it isn’t very persuasive.

“I am constantly in a state of expectation that animals will come after me, jump on me, bite me, torture me, or even kill me.”

Arieti makes clear that Pardo was at his best, quite normal, with the group of individuals who gathered in his home. “No trace of his illness remained in him when he was with them. He was no longer the afflicted man, but a much respected person…” This was particularly true of the young people who were part of his group and with whom he engaged in debates both as leader and peer.

What’s important in Arieti’s account is that Pardo refused to leave his home for a safer place as the Nazis retreated from the advancing American troops and began to wreck havoc on the towns in Italy they left. Eventually they discovered Pardo and remaining friends, all of whom were killed during a Nazi raid.

“Am I more afraid of my illness than of the Nazis? Is that all there is in this matter and no more? Had I not been ill, probably I would had left.”

A Florentine Tradition

In contrast to the Dickensian grime, smoke, and smog, to all the noise and confusion that characterized the modern city, there was the peaceful sunlit Florence of the Renaissance—a simpler, purer, more harmonious “magic city” of art and music, learning and piety, strength and beauty. Walter Kaiser

I went out for a long afternoon walk on my first day in Florence. In no time at all the sound of trumpets and rolling drums greeted me. The rhythmic beat came from a group of Florentines dressed in the traditional Renaissance costume of their neighborhood. In turn, they were followed by groups of men from other neighborhoods dressed in their distinctive costumes.



The parade went on for a good half hour as the marchers moved slowly down the crowded street from one end of town to the other. The ancient tradition lives on. This is the way it has always been in Florence.



The main event takes place in piazza in front of Santa Croce Cathedral, where the large, rectangular area has been heavily sanded and ringed with bleachers. It is there that the legendary Calcio Strorico takes place, as it has in various piazzas of Florence for over five centuries.




It is a brutal event involving soccer, rugby, and fierce fighting between the teams from each of the neighborhoods. A commentator put it this way: “Equal parts show and sport, the festivities surrounding this ruthless competition incorporate Renaissance folk traditions and garb.”

Tradition aside, it became so brutal recently that it was banned last year. They will try again this year.

Car-Free Florence

Three days ago on the streets outside the apartment I am renting in Florence there were no longer any cars whizzing by. Indeed, barriers manned by the Carabinieri were set in place that prohibited cars, taxis, trucks, buses, scooters, and motorcycles from entering the area. It was strangely weird and so very quiet and it remains so. Something seems missing, as if everyone has fled the city.

At first I thought it was temporary to block off the traffic during Festiva, Florence’s celebration of its patron saint. Eventually it became clear that was part of Florence’s rapidly expanding plan to increase the number of pedestrian friendly or car-free zones.

People were milling about, amiably chatting with one another on what otherwise would have been an area packed with noisy vehicles moving slowly, bumper to bumper between the many cars parked along each side of the street as those of us who were walking sought a safe place on the narrow sidewalks that are common throughout this city.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker Nicholas Leman writes about several new books that discuss the shifting trends in living in cities or suburbs. Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, interested me most. According to Glaeser the key factor that makes a city successful is proximity, the way it brings people into contact, “enabling them to interact in rich, unexpected, productive ways.”

“In a big city, people can choose peers who share their interests, just as Monet and Cezanne found each other in nineteenth century Paris, or Belushi and Aykroyd found each other in twentieth-century Chicago.”

Florence is also one of the cities that epitomize Glaeser’s view of proximity. Its effects are precisely what I see happening on the streets outside my apartment now. When I’m here I often think of the extraordinarily creative period of the Renaissance in Florence. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Gaileo, Brunneleschi, Machiavelli, the Medicis--all working together, sometimes across the street from one another or down the block at bit.

Elsewhere I have written about Hillel Schocken and Malcolm Gladwell’s views of the experience of living in large metropolitan areas. Gladwell cites the work of Jane Jacobs:

“The miracle of Hudson Street, according to Jacobs, was created by the particular configuration of the streets and buildings of the neighborhood. Jacobs argued that when a neighborhood is oriented toward the street, when sidewalks are used for socializing and play and commerce, the users of that street are transformed by the resulting stimulation: they form relationships and casual contacts they would never have otherwise. Sparely populated suburbs may look appealing, she said, but without an active sidewalk life, without the frequent serendipitous interactions of many different people, "there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with the necessary people."

When I first read that many years ago I was naturally struck by the lively public socializing that I have always observed in the neighborhoods here Florence. I doubt that the rarity of such encounters in America is because Italians are more outgoing than we are.

Rather I think it has more to do with almost haphazard way their cities have evolved over the centuries and the resulting relationship of the buildings to the street. The frequent socializing of the Italians occurs because their cities naturally invite fortuitous meetings between individuals as they stroll along the sidewalks or visit the piazza in their neighborhood.

“Now in Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day's work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, arts, doctors, technicians, poets, scholars. A thousand minds, a thousand arguments; a lively intermingling of questions, problems, news of the latest happening, jokes; an inexhaustible play of language and thought, a vibrant curiosity;…all these spring into being, and then are spent. And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public.” Richard Goodwin

And Schocken, in his book, Intimate Anonymity, defines a city as: "a fixed place where people can form relations with others at various levels of intimacy, while remaining entirely anonymous." He concludes by noting: "The future of urbanism lies in the understanding that the city is a human event, not a sculpture." I am sure this is one of the secrets in the design of all good cities and the neighborhoods within them. It is surely one of the secrets of Florence.

Note: For a continuing discussion and superb photos of car-free cities throughout the world, including the most famous one in Italy, see the journal Car-Free Cities.

Fragments from Florence

It is the city itself—the city understood as a self; as a whole, a miraculously developed design. It is the city as what Italians call an insieme, an all-of-it-together. R.W.B. Lewis

Every June 24th Florence puts on a colorful celebration for its patron saint San Giovanni Battista. During the day, there are parades, concerts, a rowing competition along the Arno, much good cheer, and in the evening a fireworks show launched from the Piazza Michelangelo, a hillside square with a panoramic view of the city below.

The finals in a sport that is a combination of ruby, wrestling, and soccer also takes place in the afternoon at another square. It is said to be a rather bloody battle that has been cancelled in the past because of the violence among its spectators. While the match is scheduled this year, I have no desire to join the throng in attendance at this gladiator-like event.

The ease of walking everywhere is one of the delights of being in Florence. I walk to the market, to the bookstores, to the magazine stand and the trattorias that I go back to each year. This is what a city should be like, a place where everything is close by, it is not difficult to get by without a car, and as you saunter about the city, you are presented with one surprise after another.

Tomorrow the celebration continues with an event known as White Night in Nottarno in the Oltrarno (the other side of the Arno) when the shops, restaurants, and bars stay open well past midnight. Every piazza in the area will hold concerts and live performances. There will be street art demonstrations, late night dinners, jazz, Latino and rock concerts. Clearly there is far too much to do. What a place this is!

And yet at times I am taken aback when I read about the wartime experience of people who were living in Florence then. Now the streets are crowded, the people are smiling and there is gaiety everywhere. Then the streets were empty with threats of bombing and that knock on the door. The Jews were in hiding if they had not already been rounded up, everyone was hungry and had much to fear, there were worries about what the retreating Germans would do to their city and only hopes that the Allies would arrive soon.

“A grim long winter lies before us, at the end of which none of us can tell whether our homes will still be standing, or our children safe; and we must meet it with what we can muster of patience, courage, and hope” Iris Origo

The Parco Delle Cascine is an enormous park on the western edge of Florence that stretches along the Arno for miles. Over the years I have gone there often, first as a runner, then as a walker, and now as a picnicker. I marvel at how few people are usually there. Perhaps it is because the park is so vast and so heavily treed that the people are simply hidden in between the bushes and shrubs and down the long pathways that traverse the park from one end to the other.

The Number 7 bus takes travels up into the hills above city to the little town of Fiesole that was first a Roman and later Etruscan village and where I have dinner one night. On the bus trip back I sit down next to three young women who immediately try to engage me in conversation. I see at once that they are a little tipsy. So we have a lively conversation although they do not speak English and I do not speak Polish, their native language, or Italian which is what they are speaking or trying to speak to me.

Still we have a jolly time for a while, until another women approaches us and says with a note of exasperation that she can’t stand listening to us any longer. So she begins translating what everyone is saying, although I thought we were doing just fine before she comes to our “rescue.”

The three Polish women are heading for a pizza restaurant a little below Fiesole and they invite me to join them there. I had just eaten enough lasagna for all four of us, so regrettably I decline. Who knows what might have happened on that lovely evening up in the hills above the city of Florence had I accepted their invitation. In retrospect, I am glad that I had eaten a substantial dinner.

Journey to a Tuscan Villa

I’d like to invite you on a tour of an Italian retreat for writers, Santa Maddalena, located in the heart of Tuscany about a half-hour from Florence. It was the home of the writer Gregor Von Rezzori and his wife. When he died, she established the Santa Maddalena Foundation that offers visiting fellowships to four writers each year, as well supporting the Writers Festival described in my last two posts.

You don’t have to fly all night to Italy for this tour that will also include visits with some of well-known writers who have worked there. To see the beauty of this place, hear what it means to these writers, and be introduced to Rezzori’s wife, Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, you need only watch two engaging videos included without additional charge on this no-cost, no-frills journey. How can you resist?

The Santa Maddalena utopia has been described this way: The land, located above a wooded ravine, has been transformed into a series of garden rooms….And an olive grove and pathway that link the house to the tower where many of the writers stay. Flower covered walls and groves of oak and chestnut trees mark the way to this former signal tower from the 15th century. Below, hidden by a screen of bamboo and trees is the pool and terrace.…There also is a vegetable garden with sun-ripen tomatoes in typical Italian style.

Recent fellows have included, Colm Tolbin, Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith (twice). Bruce Chatwin wrote of his visit: “The Tower is the place where I have always worked, clear headedly and well, in winter and in summer, by day or night - And the places you work well are the places you love most.”

Jens Christian Grondahl, a Danish writer, said, “Places reflect the people who have lived in them, and Santa Maddalena resonates and shimmers with the echoes and reflections of lives spent loving beautiful things."

The tour begins here:

And continues here:

Buon Viaggio

Banking in Italy

This is a door to an Italian bank, like the one I went to yesterday. Doors like this must be passed through to enter banks throughout this country. It isn’t the way you enter a US Bank, but here in Italy you just can’t walk into a bank at your pleasure.

Once you master the system in Italy, and it does take a bit of figuring out, you enter one door at a time, one person at a time, no more. First you have to press the enter (Entrata) button and if you don’t look like a threat to society, however they look these days and however that is determined, the door slides open and you walk into a small, narrow double-door chamber. So that’s the first door

You are now in an inner corridor, about the size of a small closet. Somehow you are inspected, although again you never know how, and if you pass muster, another door slides open and there you are, inside the bank. Eureka! You have made it. As you wipe the sweat off your brow, you finally can proceed to the counter.

I should note the procedure is reversed when you leave the bank. So you see it isn’t easy to transact your business at the bank or rob one for that matter.

In spite of these strict entry and exist requirements, much like getting in and out of an Ivy League college these days, banks are still robbed in Italy. According to a 2007 report in the Guardian, over 3000 bank robberies occurred in Italy the previous year, slightly more than half of those in all of Europe. And you know how many countries there are in Europe, don’t you?

You think you have a safe job working at an Italian bank? Wrong. According to the Guardian once again “bank clerks now face a one in 10 chance of being held up every year.”

“One Ferrara bank clerk, Stefano Bellettati, told La Repubblica that after being robbed nine times in 11 years, one heist stood out. "Four robbers with wigs and masks came in speaking English, French and Spanish among themselves to avoid identification and fled on bicycles."

One might wonder how they ever made it through those high-security, double-door entry closets. Perhaps they don’t have such systems outside of the major metropolitan areas. I am in the dark about this, although I suspect there are bank branches in neighborhoods outside the city center and small towns that may not have such tight security systems. I don’t doubt they cost a fair amount to procure and install.

I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising: People will find a way to do what they want regardless of how hard it is or the potential risk to them. Even trying to transact your business at your friendly Italian bank.

Just Being There

Each June, as the winter continues for what seems forever, I make plans to visit Italy. In the beginning, it was the single event that kept me going through the winter. Now I wonder if it will be the last time. It is also a chance to recharge the muse after finishing a project and I begin floundering around for the next one.

I do not speak Italian and have little appreciation of its artistic treasures. I have no business or research to undertake. It is enough to simply be there. It is also a stroke of good fortune that I can fly away to Florence, where I spend most of my days simply wandering from place to place, listening to the people, astonished by their energy and the beauty that surrounds them. Then there is the warmth, the warmth each day, all day and throughout the night.

It is reassuring to walk into a place to find the same individuals you recall from previous years--the strong and beautiful woman at the laundry; the quiet one at the kiosk, who retrieves the morning papers for me; those who serve me coffee or tea at the bars. There is something comforting about the people who are familiar in this far off place.

As part of warming up for this month long retreat, I’ve been reading Alastair Reid’s Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner.

Reid was a poet, staff writer at the New Yorker for several years and translator of many works of South American poets. Among other places, he lived in a remote Spanish village during part of each year. Here he took up residence among the villagers who had kept the modern world at bay.

Communication in the village depended on word of mouth and, as Reid writes in Notes from a Spanish Village “are at the mercy of memory. In the store, Dona Anna tells me that Don Anselmo wishes to see me, though she cannot remember when she got the message.”

There are two, no doubt more, ways to travel—to observe a place and to live among its people. I prefer the later. Upon returning to the unnamed village each year, Reid said he “looked forward keenly to picking up the long, unfinished conversations, the view from the inside.”

From his very first visit to Spain he realized it was going to matter a great deal to him and become a part of his life. “I found it recognizable at once, in the way that something one has been looking for subconsciously is recognizable.”

He bought a small home on a hill above the village, shopped in its few stores, helped the neighbors when needed, and lived a simple life, a life that was possible then in such a village where the climate was warm and where the people took pride in being self-sufficient. He had no car indeed, there were few cars in the village, although the bus did trek up the hill a couple of times a day.

He returned each year, in part, to confirm the village, even though as he says, it doesn’t care. But he wonders if “perhaps we come back to confirm ourselves?”

“From my first visit on, simply being in Spain has always occasioned in me a kind of joy, a physical tingle, which comes from a whole crop of elements: its light, its landscape, its language, and most of all its human rhythm, a manner of being that graces the place. It comes, however not from any such abstract awareness but from intense particularities: bare village café’s loud with argument and dominoes, or else sleepy and empty except for flies; sudden memorable conversations with strangers; the way Spaniards have of imposing human time, so that meals and meetings last as long as they need to.”

As I approach my return to Florence, I share many of Reid’s sentiments. It is warm there, the light is sparkling, as are its people, and while I am a foreigner who doesn’t speak the language, I do not feel like one. There are even times when I am recognized on the street or in a café and that, of course, always surprises and delights me both.

As he prepares to leave once again, always a difficult experience, Reid comments, “…the urgencies I have created for myself elsewhere seem trivial by now, and the timelessness I have grown into is something too rich to leave cursorily.”

Yes, always.

Live from Florence

In these years he most often planned to go to Italy. He would look forward to the time when he had finished a book or a group of stories and he would be free. These plans were so much a part of his existence that he forgot them, changed them, remade them without consultation or hesitation. —Colm Toibin, The Master

I am staying now in the Oltrarno (other side of the Arno) area of Florence that according to one commentator is the most florentine and greenest parts of the historical center and where the real old and new florentines live, shop, eat and have fun.

Stretching from the Ponte Vecchio to the equally well-known Palazzo Pitti and adjacent Boboli Gardens, this neighborhood is among the most beautiful in Florence. It is also the hippest and most alive, especially around the Piazza Santo Spirito (a block from my apartment) encircled by cafes, “bars,” restaurants, shops, and where so many of the artisans in this city live.

Most of the following “pictures” are selected from my Italian Fragments published in Issue One, Travel Fragments at FragLit.

The Past
I am engulfed by history in Florence. Something extraordinary happened here during the Renaissance. How did it happen? Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, Brunelleschi, Machiavelli, the Medicis—all working together, sometimes across the street from one another.

Buildings
Many of the buildings date from the Renaissance and before. Some are beautiful palazzos or civic buildings, meticulously preserved and thoroughly modernized within. Others are still quite shabby and in need of repair. At first, I am put off by this. But then I am actually back in time, several hundred years. Wandering about the commune then, not now. In the country, the homes and public buildings are painted the most delightful shades of orange, yellow and pink. There are no gray buildings in Tuscany.

Neighborhoods
On every street there are many small shops, each selling only a few items. The pattern is repeated in the next block, as well as on the next street over. So everything you need—bread, fruit and vegetables, a book, hardware, an espresso—is close to where you live. You go from place to place, as I do with the florentines, gathering the things you need. And along the way, you exchange a few and sometimes many words with the people you know—that is, if they are not already chatting with someone else.

Piazza
In every town there is a central square and many smaller ones. They vibrate with talk and music and the activity of the surrounding banks, restaurants, bookshops, churches, artisans and whoever else is fortunate enough to be there. The piazza is the heart of an Italian town and brings a sense of community to those who live there. It is the place to go and to be seen. For many it is their “Third Place.”

Solitude
Here in Italy I am thrown back upon myself like nowhere else. There is no one to talk to. No one I can understand. No one tries to talk with me. The phone never rings. I think this is what it must be like in paradise. There are people everywhere. But you cannot speak to any of them.

Smoking & Talking
Not everyone smokes, but far more do in Italy than in the USA. And as you walk down the streets, you are struck by the large number of men and women of all ages puffing away. Or babbling on their cell phones which are also more prevalent in public areas than in the USA. People engage in animated conversations on the streets, in restaurants, in hotel elevators--everywhere. Yesterday I saw a man with a cell phone in each hand, talking alternatively with the two callers and moments later a woman came speeding by on her Vespa, trying to steer with one hand, while the other was gripping her cell phone as she was fully engaged in a conversation.

Language
It is not surprising that Italians are so musical. It comes with the language. When Italians speak to one another they virtually sing, with a rhythm and gesture that is slightly operatic. Soon the words echo in your mind, although you haven't the vaguest idea what they mean. I doubt it would be difficult to learn Italian. It was not long before I found myself quite unexpectedly speaking an Italian word or phrase in a perfectly appropriate way. When most Italians talk, their hands are usually waving wildly, as if they were conducting an overture. I suspect that if you tied up their hands, they would simply be unable to utter a word.

Scale
Where did we go wrong? Where did we go wrong in America? I think it is the scale of things. You see that so clearly here in Florence, where everything is so much smaller than in the USA. The buildings are only a few stories high, at most. The stores are often nothing more than living room size. They sell only a few products and are ubiquitous throughout the commune. It is interesting that Florence has always been known as the commune, the community. It is really a community of small neighborhoods. The streets are very narrow, often barely wide enough for a small car. There are no broad highways crisscrossing Florence. I think that has made an enormous difference. Traffic is forbidden now in the central areas. The ancient cities were not designed for anything like the automobile. At times there is simply not enough room on the street for both car and pedestrian. Indeed, there is often a little fight for survival when the two meet. In a word, this city was designed to be lived in by human beings. I don't know who the cities in our country were designed for.

On the Language
Robert Penn Warren once said that he liked to write in a foreign country “where the language is not your own and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” A Paris Review interviewer asked Tobias Wolff: You’re just back from seven months in Rome. Why were you there?

Wolff replies: I had immediate reason for going. It wasn’t to do research. I speak some Italian, but living in a country where I can’t be completely aware of what people are saying around me puts this sort of bubble around the head, in which, for a time, not indefinitely, I find I’m able to work with more than the usual concentration and joy. I like not having a car, living in the center of a city where you can walk everywhere. All the errands that seem to consume one’s life become very few and you find yourself with great stretches of time for reading, wandering, and yes, working…it takes the rust off.

Ciao from Italy

Florence is “earthly” heaven to me because I experience it, and long for it, more fully than I do any other place. David Leavitt

After a lapse of several years I have come to Florence once again. This time I have returned for a break and to recharge the muse if she will still have me. Of course, I have come back for the sun and for the warmth and quite simply just to be here, here in this place that never is without a surprise—an undiscovered piazza, a chanced upon gallery, a trattoria that I never knew was just around the block

It an article in the Times several years ago Susan Jacoby wrote of the same feeling I have each time I return.

But Florence feels like home, or rather, like what might have been home had I chosen a very different life when I was young. I know Florence well enough to know where to buy paper towels and cheap flowers, well enough to face a dental emergency with equanimity, well enough to be greeted with recognition (or feigned recognition, which amounts to the same thing) by certain shopkeepers and restaurant proprietors. I have never spent an uninteresting day in this city, never experienced small vicissitudes or deeper sorrows that could not be ameliorated by contact with the noble civilization of these stony streets.

I went to my favorite market yesterday to gather a few supplies. The lady who normally greeted me wasn’t there. I wondered if it was here day off or if she had moved on. And the newsstand where I went each morning to get the Herald Tribune had vanished. Things change I guess, even in Florence, where change always seems to be running in slow motion.

However, most everything else seemed to be as it always is. In his book The City of Florence, C. Lewis wrote, We became familiar soon enough with the best-known sites and monuments--….To these returned time and time again, as to old friends always there to be looked up and, as it were, chatted with after a period of absence.

In the Prologue to this volume Lewis expresses many of my own feelings about being here:

All we knew was that we helplessly loved the place, and did not pause to ask why….

Florence was where we were most contentedly living, and where I was working—on something entirely unrelated to Tuscany.

The life and look of Florence were composed of strikingly different elements— differing shapes and styles from historical periods over many centuries—that nonetheless fitted together, lived together, spoke to each other.

It is the city itself—the city understood as a self; as a whole, a miraculously developed design. It is the city as what Italians call an insieme, an all-of-it-together.

I’ve been walking everywhere, out and about in the sun. Previously I had written: Where did we go wrong? Where did we go wrong in America? I think it is the scale of things. You see that so clearly here in Florence, where everything is so much smaller than in the US. The buildings are only a few stories high, at most. The stores are often nothing more than living room size. They sell only a few products and are ubiquitous throughout the commune.

It is interesting that Florence has always been known as the commune, the community. It is really a community of small neighborhoods. The streets are very narrow. There are no broad highways crisscrossing Florence. I think that has made an enormous difference. The ancient cities were not designed for anything like the automobile. At times there is simply not enough room on the street for both car and pedestrian. Indeed, there is often a little fight for survival when the two meet. In a word, this city was designed to be lived in by human beings. I don't know who the cities in our country were designed for.

David Leavitt in In Maremma, co-authored with Mark Mitchell, wrote, After living in the Italian countryside, Florence seems more “the city” than any other metropolitan place in the world: more than New York, more than Rome, more than Hong Kong. Paradoxically, it seems this way because it is made to the measure of man—one can walk there.

Month in the Sun

The molten sun beat down mercilessly. The hot, slow afternoon was a furnace. The parks lay green and motionless. Pavements shimmered like burning lakes.

When I arrived in Florence that summer, I was overwhelmed by the incredible warmth in the air and the prospect of days of bright, sunny days in the 90s. I had not experienced such days in months, maybe years. Early in the morning I stepped outside on to the street to find myself engulfed by warm air and bright sunlight.

I had to stop for a moment to take account of what this was. What it was was blissful. I had forgotten it still existed. And then the questioning began. Does it only exist here? Isn’t there a place like this closer to home? I’ve been yearning for this all year and now I was in its midst.

It galvanized me into a frenzy of work that I’ve not known in years. Others wilt or find the heat oppressive; I flourish in it, especially when I’m in Italy. Robert Penn Warren once said that he liked to write in a foreign country “where the language is not your own and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” A Paris Review interviewer asked Tobias Wolff: “You’re just back from seven months in Rome. Why were you there?” Wolff replies in a similar vein:

I had no immediate reason for going. It wasn’t to do research. I speak some Italian, but living in a country where I can’t be completely aware of what people are saying around me puts this sort of bubble around the head, in which, for a time, not indefinitely, I find I’m able to work with more than the usual concentration and joy.

In Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer Nathan, the aspiring writer asks Lonoff, his literary idol: “How would you live now, if you had your way?” Lonoff replies, “I would live in a villa outside Florence.” Nathan then asks: “Yes with whom?” “A woman of course.” Clearly that is the solution—live with a beautiful Italian woman who can translate the Italian essays and articles I cannot read here

The Parco Delle Cascine is an enormous park on the western edge of Florence that stretches along the Arno for miles. Over the years I have gone there often, first as a runner, then as a walker, and now as a sunbather. I marvel at how few people I usually see in the Cascine. It is surely because the park is so vast and so heavily treed that the people are simply hidden in between the bushes and shrubs and down the long pathways that traverse the park from one end to the other.

A few miles into the park there is a public swimming pool, the Publico Piscina where I have been going of late. It is far from luxurious; I am reluctant to shower there. But it is the sun and surrounded by lovely tall trees and open fields. On day I realize that the sun that shines on the sunbathers at the Publico Piscina is the very same one that shines on the beautiful people by the pool at the Splendido in Portofino.

As I prepare to return home, I am once again reminded that we are what our situations hand us. In Florence it is warm; at home it is cold. In Florence it is quiet; at home it is “noisy.” I am a different person in Florence. I am turned upside down mostly by the warmth that seems in some strange way to be remarkably therapeutic. Each time I go there I realize how much difference the temperature and light can make, how much they seem to matter to me, how noticeable they are. I feel more at home here than anywhere else.

In the final analysis, however, Florence can only be for me much like Andre Aciman said Illiers was for Proust.

Illiers itself was simply a place where the young Proust dreamed of a better life to come. But, because the dream never came true, he had learned to love instead the place where the dream was born.

An Italian Summer

Like so many English writers (Keats, Lawrence, Byron, etc) who longed for warmer climes, Rachel Cusk took flight from England recently for a three-month sojourn in Italy. She writes about her experience in The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy. She left with her two daughters, age five and six, and photographer husband from Bristol where she had grown increasingly dissatisfied with its noise, grime, malls, traffic and general ugliness.

“I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty, why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why our race should have fallen so totally out of sympathy with the earth.”

She says her friends were sorry to see her depart but that they did not believe we would find a place in Italy that we liked better, for it seemed to them “that we were afflicted with restlessness and with a love of the unknown that in their eyes was a kind of curse, like the curses in mythology that are forever sending people from their homes to seek what perhaps can never be found…”

The Last Supper is as dazzling and absorbing as everything else I’ve read by Cusk. The casa colonia in the province of Arezzo, where she settles for the longest period, is captured with all the beauty and sadness of Italian life. She befriends a Scottish emigrant who in turn introduces her to local residents and arranges activities for her family in and around the local villages. She proceeds to learn Italian and study in depth the paintings of its artists, as well as the “art in daily things.” She writes most provocatively about this aspect of Italian culture.

“Reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, one begins to notice a minor consistency of an unexpected sort. The artists of the Renaissance, almost without exception, profited early in life from their fathers’ help in the recognition and exercise of their talents.”

And she reminds those of us who find it difficult to fully appreciate the art of that period that, “There must be an offering of the self before the painting will open.”

For Cusk the art of the Renaissance reminds her how physically ugly the world has become. She looks at a Perugino, “in order to digest the supermarkets and shopping malls, the litter and landfill sites, the pylons and traffic jams and motorway service stations that otherwise fill the eye.”

One wonders how she was able to get her daughters to visit all those Italian museums and churches to say nothing of making any sense of it. Throughout her account, however, we scarcely hear a word about them or, indeed, her husband other than the fact that he joins her in tennis matches in the hot, blazing mid-day sun. How she manages to play tennis at that time of day also puzzles me.

She concludes her observation of art by saying its real glory is the art of survival. "That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favor survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant that the next instant doesn’t erase."

I believe it was its art that she loved most about her three months in Italy. Not the beauty of the countryside or the joyful Italian personality, or their lifestyle, or its literature and surely not its tennis games, but rather the beauty of its art. She realizes that living there would really involve the same things as living anywhere.

“There would be all the ripples of effect that are sent out when people establish themselves among other people….To live in another country requires a fundamental acceptance of things that are true in all countries.”

She remarks that Lawrence lived everywhere until he grew to hate the place whereupon he moved on, never finding peace anywhere. I recall a passage from Horace: “We change our skies but not our souls.”

We Are What Our Situations Hand Us

I know what it is like to walk the streets of a foreign city as Tatianna did in the Book of Clouds, the novel I discussed yesterday. But city was not Berlin and there were no abandoned buildings, nor were the streets empty and my mood was not the least bit somber or melancholy.

I have been traveling to Florence, Italy during many of the past few years where I rent an apartment for a month and spend my days meandering about some of the world’s most beautiful streets. I walk in solitude as Tatianna did and while my silent apartment also lies in wait, I never dread returning to it or being in Florence alone. Here are a few of my impressions of those years. Since I have no novelistic talent, they are in the form of brief fragments of my experiences.

The Past
I am engulfed by history in Florence. Something extraordinary happened here during the Renaissance. How did it happen? Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, Brunelleschi, Machiavelli, the Medicis—all working together, sometimes across the street from one another.

Streets
The streets are narrow and irregular and it is sometimes difficult to find a place to walk. To pass another person you often have to step off into the roadway. It is like Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. A sense of intimacy is created, but it is sometimes dangerous as the cars go whizzing by.

Buildings
Many of the buildings date from the Renaissance and before. Some are beautiful palazzos or civic buildings, meticulously preserved and thoroughly modernized within. Others are still quite shabby and in need of repair. At first, I am put off by this. But then I am actually back in time, several hundred years. Wandering about the commune then, not now. In the country, the homes and public buildings are painted the most delightful shades of orange, yellow and pink. There are no gray buildings in Tuscany.

Neighborhoods
On every street there are many small shops, each selling only a few items. The pattern is repeated in the next block, as well as on the next street over. So everything you need—bread, fruit and vegetables, a book, hardware, an espresso—is close to where you live. You go from place to place gathering the things you need. And along the way, you exchange a few words with the people you know—that is, if they are not already chatting with someone else.

Piazza
In every town there is a central square and many smaller ones. They vibrate with talk and music and the activity of the surrounding banks, restaurants, bookshops, churches, artisans and whoever else is fortunate enough to be there. The piazza is the heart of an Italian town and brings a sense of community to those who live there. It is the place to go and to be seen. For many it is their “Third Place.”

The War
Standing on the banks of the Arno one night I was staring at the Ponte Vecchio. I wondered how that bridge managed to survive the war when all the others, up and down the river, had been destroyed. What led the German general, a man who perhaps cherished his Goethe, to spare that bridge? How little I know of what the war in Italy was like. How young and far away I was at the time. Yet that vague and remote experience, more than 50 years ago, has a place somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind. It was doing its work that night as I was gazing out over the Arno at the Ponte Vecchio.

Bar Pasticceria Curatone
During lunch one day at the Bar Pasticceria Curatone, I observed a riotous display of friendship and camaraderie. A middle-aged man, sitting by my table on the terrace was engaged in an animated conversation with the Bar's owner. Soon some old friends happened by and when they saw him, each one, in turn, burst forth with joy, followed by spirited conversation. In time, others passed by who also recognized one or more of the assembled group. Jump for joy, long embraces, happy smiles, long tales of where have you been? What have you been up to? How wonderful you look. Oh, let me show you the pictures of my baby. As if that wasn't enough, soon after that, I sat astonished as I observed a similar scene unfold at another table.

The Rain
Early this morning the rain began falling on the terra cotta roof outside my window. I could hear the water splashing against the tiles. But now the rain has stopped and the terra cotta tiles are once again dry. When they are wet, they all look the same—dark and wet. Now their colors are apparent, each one a slightly different orange than the other, partly from the dirt or moss or the natural differences between them.

Scale
Where did we go wrong? Where did we go wrong in America? I think it is the scale of things. You see that so clearly here in Florence, where everything is so much smaller than in the USA. The buildings are only a few stories high, at most. The stores are often nothing more than living room size. They sell only a few products and are ubiquitous throughout the commune. It is interesting that Florence has always been known as the commune, the community. It is really a community of small neighborhoods. The streets are very narrow. There are no broad highways crisscrossing Florence. I think that has made an enormous difference. The ancient cities were not designed for anything like the automobile. At times there is simply not enough room on the street for both car and pedestrian. Indeed, there is often a little fight for survival when the two meet. In a word, this city was designed to be lived in by human beings. I don't know who the cities in our country were designed for.

The Road to Italy

I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love. I have heard so much about this book and when I learned there was a section on Italy, I decided to give it a try. Following a protracted and devastating divorce and then a volatile romance, Gilbert decides to spend a year trying to bring some balance to her life and overcome the depression that has settled upon her. She plans first to travel to Italy for pleasure, then India for meditation and finally Indonesia (Bali) to seek some balance between the two.

Ah, Italy. She says she was drawn to the idea of living for a while in a culture where pleasure and beauty are revered. She describes it perfectly--the beauty of the land, the cities, the people and the language.

She reports: In a world of disorder and disease and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted.

And oh, yes, the food. She eats the same way she lives, with gusto and unbounded restraint. Soon she gains 25 pounds and must look for new clothes. But she also loves just as much the language.

Italian—a language I find more beautiful than roses—

Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me.

…we all want to speak Italian because we love the way it makes us feel.

In all the years I have visited Italy I never felt the need to learn Italian. I liked the mystery of those unknown words and the lyrical music of the speech. I loved the sound of the Italian language. As I listened, I began to understand why Italians are so musical for it is the essence of their language. When Italians speak to one another, they virtually sing with a rhythm and lyric that is slightly operatic.

I don’t think it would be difficult to learn Italian, as it was not long before I found myself quite unexpectedly speaking an Italian word or phrase that from all I could tell must have been appropriate. When most Italians talk, they also gesture vigorously with their hands, as if they were conducing an orchestra. I suspect that if you tied a rope around their hands, they would not be able to utter a single word.

However, Gilbert is more dedicated than I ever was. She enrolls in an Italian language class, finds a fellow student to help learn the ins and outs of its subtleties over countless meals, and does her best to speak it as she explores the Italian peninsula from Venice to Sicily. She spends days walking the streets of Rome. However, she does not visit a single museum during the entire time (four months) she was in Italy.

Gilbert is charming, she is zesty, she is hilarious and occasionally she is wise.

In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.

What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!

That’s the thing about a human life—there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

Still for all that Italy means to her she is often lonely and depressed. She is desperate for love. Pure pleasure, she writes, is not my “cultural paradigm.” So after four months of mostly “pure pleasure,” she heads off to India. Will I travel with her? At this point, I remain uncertain.