8: Conversation in Orvieto
S Egidio, Jan. 12—
We spent the weekend in Orivieto, after all my ranting about not leaving Rome for a moment. The idea was to immerse ourselves in City, after all. But the only way to visit Rosella was to run up to her town; she was only there another few days; the train only takes an hour; so off we went Saturday morning, taking the H bus from the piazza Sonnino a few minutes' walk from our house, then killing a short hour at the train station because, well, one's always a bit anxious when catching a train, one wouldn't want to miss it.
The Rome station always reminds me of the main station in Amsterdam: it has an enormous bus plaza out in front of it. Its architecture is very different, though: instead of ornate postBaroque Edwardian brick and terra cotta, it is very 1950s postwar Modernist, low and wide and white, all about the horizontal — which is appropriate to a rail terminal: trains don't like climbs.
And inside the station, on both street and basement levels, there are enormous shops. You can buy anything you want here as long as it's some sort of luxury: chocolate, alcohol, books, jewelry, all kinds of clothes. Well, not work clothes, unless your work is... Oh, never mind. There's a big Nike store: we stepped in, looked at shoes that ranged up to a couple hundred dollars a pair (for athletic shoes!), and stepped back out.
Orvieto, as you probably know, is set on top of a hill, really a single "plug," I think, left over after the surrounding volcano had been long since eroded away, either by the river draining that wide beautiful valley, or by centuries of farming and quarrying, or perhaps by the wind; who knows. You can drive up; I think there are two roads up; and six or seven thousand Orvietians live up there, looking down on the twenty thousand or so who live at the bottom, or in outlying villages and farms.
But we did not drive up: we took the funicular conveniently sited across the street from the train station. You pay your euro, surrender the ticket, and take a seat on a little wooden bench in one of the three or four private compartments on what is essentially a large elevator cabin sitting at a forty-five degree angle on its rails.
There is no operator. A buzzer sounds and the car moves slowly forward and up, passed halfway up by the other cabin coming down. It reminded me exactly of Angel's Flight, the cable funicular in the Los Angeles of fifty years ago; and of course it reminded me of the old Neopolitan song with its refrain "funiculi funicula": but I wisely refrained from singing it.
There at the top came Rosella, lovely exuberant Rosella, in the gray and graygreen corduroy she wears with such distinction, such flair; and off we marched up the main street, the Corso Cavour, and she pointed out the sights, the quarters into which the town is divided, the way of the People and the way of the Church, the clock tower, the city hall, the Duomo.
We stopped in at an artist's studio tucked into a building across from the Duomo to admired a number of abstract expressionist but figurative-based paintings and prints crowding a sort of exhibition space. A doorway led to the artist's studio, fragrant with the familiar scent of gesso: he was preparing a new canvas.
I was attracted by a prose-poem in longhand on a large sheet of paper with drawings, framed under glass and hanging in the doorway. The artist had by then appeared and was talking busily to Rosella, who introduced us. I asked him if he'd written much poetry, and he was happy to talk about his writing, and pointed to a stack of books on a high shelf, all identical, awaiting sale. He tried to pull one out of the stack but could not reach the top, so I stood on tiptoe and took one down.
He gave it to us: "Un Muro l'eccidio degli uccelli," "A wall, slaughter of birds." Like almost all of his work, the book itself, published in 1980, is a testiment of Livio Valentini's lifelong testimony against violence. We asked him why, and he spoke of his adventures in the Second World War, ending with two years' imprisonment at Buchenwald. He spoke passionately against violence, but as I looked around me at the images in his painting I said "but you must admit that there is also a beauty in violence, a beauty that many find compelling and even a justification." He agreed immediately, Yes, there is a beauty, and we must contemplate it to counter it, to achieve a life full of beaty but devoid of violence.
Valentini is not young; he's fifteen years older than I, eighty-three years old. He shames me, though: he works every day, and I can't say that his work is merely a routine; he clearly re-dedicates himself to the joy and the beauty of it every day. The book, a catalogue of his first sixty years, contains his own description of that terrible war in a ten-page letter written, "without any pretense at making literature," to his mother, in 1951. It's compelling writing, but offset too by the panorama of small black-and-white reproductions of the work he did in the next thirty years — painting, mixed-media work, jewelry, prints.
We were really touched by this short but intense visit. He inscribed the book: A Charlesy per un incontro d'arte e di amicizia , for a meeting of art and friendship, and I like the double meaning, and hope to stay in touch. But we had other things to do, and walked on through the narrow streets and the surprising small hidden piazzas, admiring the odd light on the rough-textured sand-colored walls made of a curiously sandstone-colored local tufa. The railroad station had been socked in by dense fog, but we'd climbed toward the light on that funicular, and minute by minute the air was clearing, and the distant hills were coming into view, green and inviting through the mists.
Lunch was goulash that Rosella had made, and pecorino and pears, delicious, and we talked for hours, and went out shopping for the next day's midday dinner — she hadn't yet bought a Gorgonzola she'd fancied, because she wasn't sure we liked Gorgonzola. (It didn't take long to set her straight on that.)
We went to Dei Fratelli, a very impressive purveyor of "local and national gastronomical specialities of traditional quality and competence," and here we tasted five or six pecorinos and the aforementioned Gorgonzola, and a few hams and prosciuttos too just in case; and we admired the shelves of black truffles and the oils and I bought a bottle of local red wine and we exacted a promise that yes he'd be open the next day in the morning, up until noon, yes even though it was Sunday, and we went back to Rosella's for more talk and a rest.
And then went out to dinner at the Trattoria del orso, where we admired small drawings hanging on the wall, drawn by a friend of the guys who run the restaurant, not an artist but a microbiologist (or something like that, if there is anything like that that isn't that) who does these only for himself and a few friends; and we had a delicious meal, not ordering from a menu because the cook prepares only what he wants to, from whatever is available that day. We had a delicious vegetable soup, Lindsey and I, subtly flavored with fennel seed; and then she had strozzapreti with mushrooms and black truffles and I passed up guinea fowl, a favorite of mine, for three wonderful lamb chops simply grilled and salt-and-peppered and brought to me with a piece of lemon; and afterward a fine cherry crostata which he'd bought at a nearby pasticceria because, he said, he does not bake, he cooks; and he made no apology for this since he was talking, after all, to an important pastry chef.
His kitchen is tiny and he does everything in it, and his dining rooms are not very big though there are after all two of them, and his friend does all the waiting on tables, or did the night we were there. They close three days a week, and two and a half months of the year, and I don't know how long they'll stay with it; I'm sixty years old, said the cook — Gabriele Di Giandomenico — and this is a lot of work. He speaks perfect American English; he lived for years in New Jersey. But he spoke perfect Italian too, and he and Rosella jabbered happily about the Costa smeralda in Sardegna, and life among the rich and beautiful, while Lindsey and I and the waiter talked happily about food.
A long night's solid sleep, then, since we were over four hours at the restaurant; and the next morning a walk around the town, to find that the delicatessen was closed, of course; it had quality but its competence was sadly lacking that morning I thought; and the Duomo was off limits as well because after all services were going on, so we took a coffee in the second-rate cafe, not the first-rate one we'd gone to earlier with Rosella, where she'd bought her cake for today's lunch, the only cafe people go to to be seen in, since after all we'd already been seen there, and we thought we'd see who was to be seen in the other one. And that turned out to be a young couple with back-packs who were just finishing their breakfast and were examining their banknotes as if they weren't sure what continent had issued them.
I was reading Valentini's book when Rosella came back from Mass with two friends who were joining us for lunch — really midday dinner: Gisella, a writer and food person who makes frequent trips to the U.S. (especially Texas and the San Francisco area) to give demonstrations on Italian regional foods, and Adriana, a member of old Roman society (she has an apartment on the Piazza Veneto and was the widow of a painter in the Futurist movement). An interesting lunch: Gisella brought rotelle she had made, circular tortellini-like filled pastas with an intriguing, complex filling; we had a mountain of porchetta, the cold sliced roast pork the Italians do so well; there was the Gorgonzola and a fine pecorino; and then the millefeuille — excuse me; migliafolie.
This was a many-layered pastry (hence the name, of course), filled with pastry cream and all covered with big shavings of white chocolate: it looked elaborate and special and tasted sublime, though it resisted even Lindsey's efforts — she was delegated, of course — at cutting it into portions without breaking it into shreds. And a bottle of white, and a bottle of red, and a half bottle of limoncello, and so on.
Adriana told a funny story: she had seen, in the Piazza Venezia, a man in a big expensive car carefully maneuvering it to get into a small parking space in the crowded lot, when a couple of kids in a Fiat Cinquecento, smaller than a VW beetle, zip into it before his irritated eyes, lock their car, and leave, calling out to him Cosi fanno i giovani, That's how youth does it. He got out of his car, walked over to theirs, and beat dents into it while they looked on astonished. Cosi fann'i ricchi, he said, giving them his calling card, That's how the rich do it.
The conversation: food, mostly, on our side of the table, with Gisella; art and Italianicity, on Adriana and Rosella's side. I had the previous evening asked Rosella what she thought was the chief characteristic of the celebrated Italian quality of daily life, and the first thing that came to her mind was the pace — not necessarily a slower pace, certainly not in such cities as Milan and Rome; but a more capacious pace, a pace that not only allowed but actually encouraged discursiveness. You see this in the long meals, in the evening strolls, in the detailed, loquacious conversations. You see it in the newspaper articles, which one of our guidebooks warned us tended to go into long and detailed investigations of the opinions and history behind events.
I think what it comes down to is that Italy is a land of voce, of voice. When I first began reading Moravia's Gli indifferenti I was struck by his fabulous opening sentences, almost Proustian; I was so struck by them that I read one aloud to Emma, because it sounded, to me, like narrative song. And at the end of the volume containing that first novel (and the next few as well), among the editor's notes, I find the surprising information, well perhaps not so very surprising after all, that he composed this novel over a period of three years or so, while he was shaking a case of bone tuberculosis in various mountain sanitoria; and that he never wrote any of the paragraphs down until he had worked them out speaking them aloud. The entire novel is the written record of a story told aloud.
That I think is the essence of the Italian genius: it is given to expression, to shared expression. An American like Hawthorne goes to Rome and writes an interior novel, really a sort of meditation, on his reaction to this Italian genius for publicity: but it reads like a monologue, however fascinating it is — a monologue or the transcription of notes to himself by a professional witness, a therapist, say, or a judge. Even a Henry James reads like this: you can see the sentences being reworked with a pencil, between the lines. (Though it is true all his later novels were dictated, and this of course has a great deal to do with the rather sudden irruption of his celebrated later style, more convoluted, more discursive.)
Our entire dinner conversation went like this, mostly in Italian though with recourse to English when necessary — entirely too often, of course. And then we had missed our train back, and had to rush to catch the next one. Adriana drove us down to the station; she was driving off to her country house anyway, on a ridge off across the valley. She drove us down the narrow road and its hairpin turns, a proper but scintillating woman in her mid-80s, a woman whose husband had been among the great Modernists of the first decades of the last century; she drove us down to the station in her small practical car a dozen years old or so, and angled into a no-parking spot to let us out.
Cosi fann'i ricchi, she smiled, and we grinned too, and took our train back to Rome and dinner with Richard and Marta who have come down from Verona to spend a few days with us.
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9: City life
S. Egidio, Jan. 15—
Some of you have written enviously of our opportunity to get to know Rome rather well, but assure yourselves: we're not making the most of the opportunity. We are carefully observing the duties of modern city life, spending leisurely days with friends, talking in the kitchen, strolling the streets, taking lunch and dinner in restaurants or at home, lingering over coffee in the cafes. This is perhaps not the most studious approach to The Eternal City, but it is pleasant.
We walked up the Botteghe Oscure yesterday, on our way to another trip up Michelangelo's ramp to the Piazza del Campidoglio, and I remembered a copy of the literary quarterly of that name, found in the middle 1950s at Creed's Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, a thick square book on rough creamy paper in subtle brown covers, containing stories and poems, perhaps an essay or two as well, I don't remember now, in English, French, and Italian. It was the beginning of my fascination with modern languages, unknown languages concealing unimaginable stories of intelligence and sophisitication.
I just read one of them, Moravia's "Delitto" — how to translate that? "in a tennis club," about the murderous joke played by a group of slightly older men, say in their late twenties, rich and spoiled members of a decadent 1920s Roman society. It is, of course, dated; hardly worth reading now except as background to his novels.
Constantly at the back of my mind is the inescapable comparison of our society at the beginning of the 21st century with that of two thousand years ago. Yesterday our president announced, in all seriousness, that we will set up a permanent base on the moon, and then go on to land on Mars. The American flag will begin a journey throughout the solar system.
There was a headline in an Italian paper the other day, predicting this announcement. "Bush promises voters the moon and Mars," it read, with a fine sense of irony. I don't know that you have to be across the ocean from New York and Washington to sense the arrogance of the promise, but perhaps it helps to see, on every side, evidence that a great civilization (if in fact it was civilized), a great power inevitably collapses of its own weight, of the impossibility of sustaining itself when its power and its delights depend on the exploitation and suppression of others.
There's a small ruin near the Theater of Marcellus — an old floor or more likely sub-floor, a rough wall say twenty feet long rising about chest-high, and three beautiful symmetrical marble basins set against the wall. Floor and wall were probably once veneered with marble, long since pried off to decorate some other installation. Each great period wears old clothes. There are iron rings set into the wall, perhaps to tie horses to if this was a rich horse stable, perhaps simply towel-rings if, as I think more likely, it is the remains of a restroom.
What's interesting is the basins, any one of which would fetch a good price in an antiquities market, would make a stunning birdbath or holy-water font. They are two thousand years old and priceless works of art. But they are also clearly simply the product of some factory: three identical marble basins, three of what must have been thousands, scattered throughout the cities of the Roman Empire, from Constantinople to London.
Who made them? Were they free men or slaves? What did they eat and drink; what were their habitations? How did they make them? Were they somehow turned as if on a lathe? Were they roughed out by prisoners or apprentices, then shipped to a finishing shop where experienced eyes and hands reduced them to this degree of interchangeability?
What kind of global trade agreements underlay the Roman Empire, I wonder, and, if (as I suspect) a great deal of the labor involved was less than completely willing, how was order and subordination maintained? There are lessons to be learned here, if anyone in Washington is interested.
I have the feeling, though not the language skills to confirm it, that much of today's Europe is aware of the historical evidence that the future, any future, is not on the side of the arrogant, and particularly of the arrogantly demanding. London, Paris, and Rome — I have not been to Madrid — are among other things pathetic witnesses of the transience of Empire. Empires cannot live in peaceful competition, it seems; but when one finally rises to overwhelming dominance it cannot sustain itself either. Durability lies not in the imposition of power but in submission to the constraints of sustainability, of wanting and using only what can be produced and replaced at home.
The City is what we've come to observe from within, and the question I keep asking is whether The City doesn't represent the nut of the human problem. We need to live communally, apparently; there are so many delights in community. In the last few weeks we've been to concerts and museums and theaters and restaurants, here and at home, whose existence simply requires a prosperous community. And the subtler delights, requiring leisure and education to appreciate, perhaps require that larger class of workers willing to make them possible — the dishwashers, the taxi drivers, the janitors; but also technicians in generating plants, engineers supervising water distribution networks, government administrators and the like.
You walk down an old street faced with 16th-century buildings and notice someone in a jumpsuit poking a screwdriver into the nest of wires behind a set of doorbells. The telephones work, the ATMs spit out money, the streets are lit (and beautifully!) because of people like him. Does he care if the concert of recent chamber music is well programmed, or well played, or well attended? It's all very well to concede that the discernment of this music is analogous of the wires behind those doorbells, or the intelligence that wiring represents, but does that finally serve Empire, or even the simple sustainability of a civil society?
The concert was night before last, in the University, by an active group founded twenty years ago by our friend Marcello, and much of the music was really quite fascinating (to the point that it suggested I get back to work myself!). The concert hall was in one of Mussolini's university buildings, with travertine walls detailing the precise clarity of the acoustics, and a fine big mural behind the musicians showing workers and scientists and, yes, militarism all contributing to an ideal fascist society. I was introduced to Petrassi's widow, a fine handsome woman in a fine handsome fur; and to the conductor of an affecting piece, for children's voices, setting aspiring passages from Jonah, Pinocchio, and The Divine Comedy.
Afterwards we all five of us bundled into Marcello's little car and he dropped us off at a trendy pizzeria up near the Borghese, the only place still open in this fashionable part of town near the Piazza del Populo. We had pretty good pizza and then grabbed a cab to cross the river to Trastevere. We dropped Richard and Marta off at their hotel, not far from St. Peter's, and then went on down to our quarter, considerably less aspiring in its architecture, its streets, its shops.
It was well after midnight. The narrow pedestrian streets around our piazza were alive with crowds, young people for the most part, some children even, dogs, students, eating at pizzerias and cafes, walking about talking about things. The vitality is really quite amazing, and, somehow, reassuring. The City I like is a city of continuing present, not aspiring future. It's here in Trastevere, I think, not in the ruins.
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10. We took the bus today, oh boy
S. Egidio, Jan. 16—
I wrote sympathetically last time about the common man and his indispensable place in society. Yesterday we took the bus to Tivoli and back. It made the trip from Barstow to Bakersfield — was it really only a little over two weeks ago? — look like a picnic.
We caught the infamous Bus H at the Piazza Belli. The letter "H" is never sounded in Italian, and the bus H should never be seen. And in fact it rarely is seen, especially when you're waiting for it; and when it did arrive it was unspeakably full.
I did finally get a seat. A young man took one look at my grizzled head and offered it to me, out of courtesy or perhaps contempt, I thought at first, but it quickly became clear he simply didn't want to sit there. In front of me was a family right out of that horrible old Italian movie "Brutto, Sporco, et Cattivo" (Ugly, Dirty, and Bad), a disgustingly crude man standing gripping the stanchion, his fatigued and resentful wife, and three wretched kids, all under six, all disfigured by varying degrees of dirt, neglect, impetigo, and bred-in wary meanness.
The man, in his thirties I suppose, amused himself grabbing his wife's nose with his right hand and threatening to put out her right eye with the index finger of his left. She moaned and complained. The kids squirmed and coughed. The man sneezed, never covering his mouth. It was probably a blessing he had no handkerchief to drag out of a pocket; he would have flourished it about and made matters worse.
Finally we pulled up at the end of the line, at the train station, and I got off as quickly as I could, so quickly I left my hat behind. They of course were quick to seize any opportunity: the man called out to me Hai lascił cappelino, Ya left yer cap. I looked back at the crowded bus. Il piccolo luporta, he added, The kid's bringin' it. I took it from the kid and thanked him. The father held out his hand for a tip. I dug out a twenty-cent piece, the only change I had, and carefully gave it to the kid, who immediately put a strong fist around it, then plunged it into a pocket. The father cuffed the kid, shouting at him to thank me.
Then he turned to me and asked for more. You can't even buy an ice-cream with that, he said. The kid looked at me aggressively. I turned on my heel and left the pack of them behind and we all went to the metro station for the next leg of the trip.
The Rome metro is pretty clean and efficient, disregarding its route which is conceived for Rome commuters, not tourists. We got out to the end of the line reasonably soon, and waited only five or ten minutes for the bus that would complete our trip out to Tivoli. And it too was reasonably clean and efficient, for a local bus; it lumbered along the highway past an appalling stretch of discount stores, auto agencies, apartment-house complexes, warehouses, light industry, and all the other blights great cities tuck away on their margins. Venice has its Mestre; Paris its beyond-the-beltway Zones; why should Rome be any different.
At one point the bus travelled a sort of causeway across a stone quarry, an amazing and depressing sight perhaps a half-mile square and at least sixty feet deep. It was white as, well, as marble; its floor was flat as a pancake; the squared-off walls looked as if they'd been constructed of masonry; and where they bounded the quarry you could see how thick the soil above it was, under the scrappy lawns and gardens of benighted suburban houses perched right next this enormous dig.
I have no idea how old this quarry is, but I'd guess some of it goes back quite a way. There's an unbelievable amount of tufa, limestone, marble, travertine, porphyry, and granite in this city, and it's logical that most of it came from as near as possible: even slave labor must have cost something, and this stuff is heavy. It's true that a considerable amount of stone came from North Africa and Egypt, and some fine marble from Greece. But when you see the amount of stone in Rome, and consider that much of even Ancient Rome was built on landfill, or had sliced the tops off hills, you're aware of the incredible amounts that had to be brought in.
The history of Man is among other things the history of material being dug out of the ground only to be piled up elsewhere. I've often though a wonderful film could be made following one stone from its formation millennia ago through its various locations and uses throughout human history. This could be depressing, of course: many statues were burnt, even in Imperial Rome, to make slaked lime for concrete; many buildings were knocked down and the fragments turned into landfill. The Colosseum is built on a city dump which itself had filled in a marsh.
We took the bus and metro on an outing to Tivoli, there to see the ruins of a couple of Roman temples and the garden at the Villa d'Este. There's not much point in going out to Tivoli for only half a day; I wouldn't do it again: the town needs a couple of days: one should spend the night. But we had time to wander up the main street to the far end of town, where the temples were, have lunch, and spend a long hour in the garden afterward.
Lunch was at the Sibilla, named for the prophetess whose temple was just outside the dining room. Lunch wasn't bad, though the green beans had been cooked long ahead of time, perhaps for another occasion. The restaurant would after all be forgiven for resting on its fame; there are plaques — in chiseled marble, of course — noting previous illustrious customers going back two centuries or more; writers, poets, composers, but mostly heads of state — princes and princesses, kings and queens from Japan, Africa, the European nations. (Our presidents were notably absent.)
The garden was marvelous. We were very nearly alone in it, and we walked at our leisure down the back-and-forth side aisles admiring the many fountains; then along the paths of the lowest terrace astonished at the ancient trees; then back up the center in the gathering twilight, taking up conversation with two gardeners who were clearly ready to end their workday — the place closes at twilight — but generous with time and talk, explaining various things, how long the chestnut withes of the retaining walls last (ten years), why the garden is no longer illuminated (broke down in 1985, no money to fix it), and confirming our guesses that yes the garden is laid out to make a special effect on the equinoxes and yes that is St. Peter's there on the horizon.
The sunset was memorable. First the sun stood behind a single large cloud, throwing its shadow up into the sky above to make a luminous goblet in the air; then it descended slowly to touch the horizon, then more quickly. It was dead quiet. The cypresses and pines were black. We didn't say much.
We did on the bus back, though; it was trapped for many minutes in a terrible traffic jam. It would move perhaps three or four feet, then stop for five minutes. People were both angry and resolutely resigned. I asked the guy ahead of me if this were normal, Yes, of course it's normal, it happens every day, there are all these people getting off work, going out shopping, it all happens at the same time, it's tied up for five kilometers, it takes hours to get through it.
The bus was a few feet from a bus stop, and two or three people were waiting to get off. Open, open, a woman shouted up to the driver, but he did not open, open the door. Her telephone rang. What do you mean where am I, I'm on the bus, she said, in Italian of course, and she said a lot more too that I didn't get. The bus moved a foot or so, then stopped again. After quite a while her phone rang again. What do you mean where am I, I'm still on the bus, it's at the stop, no he won't open the door.
Finally enough ease for the bus to slide over to the curb, open the doors, let the people off. And then miraculously the way was clearer, and we inched our way past the woman, running up the sidewalk, telephone to her ear.
We were about seven hours on buses and subways for the four hours spent in Tivoli. We realized how insular we'd been these last two weeks, walking, strolling really, in what is oddly a very quiet Rome, quiet at least in the neighborhoods we've chosen for the most part. Of course it's crowded in the shopping streets, but many of them have been pedestrianized. Rome has very few boulevards, and we try to stay away from them.
We walked today around, but not into, the Palatine, ending at San Clemente over near the Colosseum, and taking our lunch up at the Ostaria Nerone on the advice of one of our guidebooks (which got the telephone number wrong, but was otherwise right). It's Friday, so Lindsey and I had salt cod, and with it a buttery-soft but nicely textured artichoke, and the four of us had a fine Ceretto Dolcetto, and I had a delicious ricotta cake. And then a cab up to the Museum of Contemporary Art, closed of course; and then a long wait for a nonexistent bus to the Piazza di Spagna, and a walk down the Condotti, and an experimental Martini (Italian vermouth is not really dry, even when it's white and says it is, and the man put only a tiny splash of gin into it, and garnished it with a slice of lemon), and then a walk across the river to the Piazza Cavour and a bus back to our apartment to eat in tonight: some coppa on levain bread Richard had borrowed from his hotel breakfast for us, a couple of big salads, and that pleasant cheap white wine that comes unlabelled from the plaza greengrocer.
If you stay off the buses it's a pleasant life.
