January 2016 – alla Rupe

The Mystery of Everything:

This is a guy who is still embarrassed about jokes and quips he missed twenty-five years ago. He remembers them, what they were intended to mean, what he thought they meant, how he answered, how long it took him to get the jokes, and how he tried to make up for having missed them. This is a guy who has to keep a close watch and a tight reign on the paranoid factor.

Now put this same guy into a culture he has admired for decades, a language environment that he kind of gets, but doesn’t really, and a social context that is so responsive, so teasing and witty, so volatile and unpredictable, that his head is always spinning even when he fools himself into believing he’s keeping up with it all. Then crack a joke. Watch him respond seriously. Watch him get the joke really, really late. Watch him try to formulate in his caveman Italian a witty retort that keeps the attempted, and very welcome, rapport rolling along. Watch him fail, not just with an inch or two of clumsy timing, but by miles – or rather, kilometers. Watch him do this everyday at least a dozen times. Watch him write about it on his blog.

However bewildering the experience of adjusting to a new language and culture is, it is also the most exhilarating, remarkable, challenging, threatening, life-altering experience this guy remembers having. And you will recall that he remembers jokes he didn’t get twenty-five years ago. And twenty-five was a random number, he remembers jokes he didn’t get forty years ago. Maybe more. At some point it’s better not to count. So if a parallel to these past few months cannot be remembered by this guy, it never happened.

Okay, one possible parallel for you theatre types. These months have been like getting-off-book week with a really huge role in a really complicated play, over and over and over and over and over again, without ever getting off book. Take a minute for that to sink in, then we’ll continue.

Got it?

Valvola The joke that precipitated this particular blurt of writing was a simple one, which of course, makes the humiliation in missing it even worse. This guy went out with a bunch of people, people he likes very much, and their combined five little boys. They went to a new place on Piazza del Popolo, very stylish, very good, very quirky, very noisy.

Now, if you know this guy well at all, you know that smiling and pretending to hear is a skill he has honed to… well, let us say, he has been practicing for a long, long time. So, the two-plus hours with these wonderful people and their even more wonderful little boys (and really, no ironic subtext there, he adores them all) was also spent trying to hear not only words spoken, but Italian words spoken, and sentences that were broken into pieces, and conversation that was torn into segments by the clamor of little boys.

And if that were not enough, this guy drank a beer.

The whole gang then left the restaurant. It was quiet on the square. The troupe of adorable boys ran into the piazza, glorying in their little boy-ness. One of the fathers turned to this guy, and he’s a guy this guy is very fond of, and says, in Italian; you live in the area don’t you. This guy nodded. The father follows, or are you always in transit? It’s actually pretty funny in Italian, hard to explain why. Beat. Beat. This guy says, oh I live really, really close. The father chuckles and turns away. This guy gets the joke. This guy has no idea how to follow. The vocabulary isn’t there, nothing is there, especially not after one beer.

Good dark beer, the waiter said, very good, even though it’s Italian; it’s good beer anyway. It was, too. But this guy is a lightweight. And he missed a joke. And he happily blames the beer, though he also knows that his Italian improved once he’d drunk half of it. The mistake may have been his drinking all of it.

So the point of this ramble?

If you want to feel that your personality has been put into a microwave oven, on high, for twenty minutes, and been put there four times a day every day you’ve been in a place, do what this guy did and go try to live in a foreign land as an outsider on the inside. If you would ask him, he can’t really say that it’s been all that easy – but it sure has been good.

You begin to see yourself as something other than a collection of words, opinions, charm, projects on the resume, and good timing. And every insecurity you have ever protected from the fierce elements of social living is set up for full and scrupulous review every night as you drift off to sleep and more or less instantly upon waking the next morning. And little by little you become indifferent to those insecurities and collections, and turn instead towards the glory of living, the history of the moment, and the mystery of everything – and the fact that outside of mathematics, there is no such thing as a straight line.

This guy is actually pretty happy. Even the relapses aren’t so bad. But he thinks he’ll stay away from beer for awhile, just to be sure.

The Beauty Elixir:

The market in Piazza del Popolo has had primroses for the past two weeks. I’ve been waiting for warmer weather to buy them. Today was in the upper-fifties (14℃) so I took the plunge: four euro – three yellow, two fuchsia, one burgundy. Before lunch I cleaned up the planters on the terrazzo, and made room for our new occupants. The valley showed dappled – strong light, strong shadows, bright greens, musky tans.

I also bought tomatoes at the market to go with the mozzarella di bufala I purchased yesterday. The tomatoes are of a kind between roma and cherry and are so sweet and flavorful they cause me to shudder. The mozzarella di bufala makes the stuff I get in Pennsylvania seem like tofu by comparison. I’m told the really good mozzarella di bufala comes from Sicilia. I cannot imagine anything being better, but no one here would dream of lying about food.

After lunch and Saturday housecleaning, the sun shone again, just for a moment, and it was clearly time for a walk. I set out for San Giovenale. As I reached the walls, sunlight flooded the valley. It was like the cinematic effect of changing from black and white to color. In that light, I was able to closely watch cars and busses as they traced their ways towards Bolsena. They twist back and forth on dramatic switchbacks that never seem so extravagantly wasteful of distance when actually traveling them. I tried to identify places I know. It’s liberating to see familiar spots from such a distance when the only way of actually reaching them (for me, at this time) is on foot. It imbues the roads, the valleys, the unseen spaces over the mountains, with a mythic reality, one that remains hidden when access is easy.

The garden below San Giovenale where the Presepe Vivente was held has yet to be cleared. There are still stacks of firewood, blackened circles from campfires, the ruins of wood and waddle huts, the straw-filled cradle where the holy infant lay, plastic tarps, huge pumpkins. I suppose it will all be gone in time for the first wave of tourists in March. It has perhaps been too cold, and what’s the hurry anyway?

I went down to walk among the ruins. To the right is a fenced yard that sits behind the hall adjoining ex-Sant’Agostino. This is apparently where the night club that briefly occupied that space abandoned its equipment. Stainless steel fixtures are mixed with slabs of marble, squares of tufa, statues, bricks, planters, and a moldy mattress.

Back up at the perimeter wall I watched the flocks of blackbirds and pigeons. The Etruscans of Orvieto are said to have augured the future by observing the movement of birds. I have no predictions from my spellbound twenty or thirty minutes, but I better understand why the ancients may have believed that avian flight patterns bestow access to the unknown.

The flocks play with the wind, silently for a while, then with random notes, then suddenly a symphony, then silence. They move up and down the valley, always a pair breaking away, ahead or to the side, they turn and parade and swoop. Then the individuals land in trees, on roofs, on steeples, like petals on a pond. The blackbirds glide and turn majestically, almost self-conscious in their handsome strength. Pigeons, clowns of the street with their waddling and doppling, are gymnasts of the air. Athletic and graceful, their patterns are precise, compact, imaginative, willful. They land on the sheer face of a cliff as if it were the branch of a tree.

The wind grew strong and cold, so I climbed to the top of the ramparts, loving the wild movement of my hair, and descended into town. It was just then four, and the shops were beginning to reopen. The evening passeggiata had barely begun. Knots of people dotted Piazza Sant’Andrea, individuals and couples sliced across the square, crossing between the arches. I heard recently that Orvieto, the high town, had a population of fifteen thousand until the barracks were decommissioned in 2000, and it now has a population of five thousand. I tried to imagine the moment in front of me with three times the people, but the present was too absorbing for me to conjure a picture.

As I passed the flower market, the fellow, who in other times may have been called the village idiot, was in conversation with a family group strolling their baby. He is a frequent presence on the streets, cheerful, energetic, and loving. I’m always happy to see him. He occasionally says hello. It falls on me like a blessing.

The dance of the town moved along at varying rhythms and steps, as a fellow in a colorful poncho and long black hair played guitar and harmonica, and sang. He provided the sound track for the splendid, languid, unexpected spectacle that rocked up and down Corso Cavour.

It often seems to me that one of the most destructive tendencies we humans can fall into is our wanting to possess beauty. We attempt to buy it, capture, wed it, control it, define, and subdue it. In all of that effort, we never seem to succeed in understanding it, or in growing any closer to it. We can, however, quite easily become a part of it. The price of admission is to give up ownership, and we are allowed to stay for as long as we can bear the magnificence.

You don’t have to be in Orvieto, or even a place like it, for free beauty suddenly to present itself, but I am grateful to be here for those moments. It sings to me, this city, and weaves from the simple and ordinary an unfathomable magic that, every surprising time the curtain parts, seems to last forever.

The Beauty Issue:

This town I love.

Begun in 1583, construction ended just where it now stands four years later. — *Begun in 1573, construction ended just where it now stands in 1581.*

The city hall reconstruction project was abandoned within eight years and has never been revisited.

Fontana2 (1) — *This is where the water was rerouted. Most people in the high town depended on cisterns for their water.*

The suburban water source was channelled into town, maintained for about 80 years then fell into disuse. Years later, it was repaired but flowed only as far as the fairgrounds.

Everywhere you look, plaster is crumbling, bricks are mismatched, stone is gouged and left as is.

Gas meters, electric cable, antennas, pipes and vents are patched in without regard to sightliness.

Shutters sag, window panes are broken, cornices are gashed, wood is cracked and warped, paint is peeling.

Walls bulge into their adjoining streets.

The streets themselves follow no rational pattern. Their grades are random, they will narrow and widen unpredictably. Some are so tightly packed that turning from one to the other is impossible. Others narrow so precipitously as to render themselves completely useless to automotive traffic.

Architectural styles are patched one on top of the other without regard for consistency or overall design.

Parking is regulated, but only to a degree. Cars are often stowed in what seem like random spaces without order or a commonly agreed upon scheme.

Tiles go broken for lifetimes without being replaced.

Gates are without doors, doors are without knobs, knobs are without functionality.

Dozens of towers have been reduced to awkwardly-terminated two or three story hovels.

Buttressed foundations like this usually mean a tower. Likely the upper stories were removed after a quake. — *Buttressed foundations usually meant a tower.The upper stories were removed by popes who wanted nothing of inter-family warfare..*

The understructure of the city is riddled with cavities.

The surrounding rock is shored up with patched-in masonry. Holes and rusting grates are exposed.

Large buildings have been completely abandoned. Smaller abandoned buildings are, for all practical purposes, shells.

And yet, everyone who walks into the city of Orvieto instantly remarks at how beautiful it is. How does this happen?

I’ll let you puzzle this one out. The photos are clickable. They may help.

(Hint: it may have something to do with demeanor or equilibrium.)

If you come up with something, please share. I’ll be puzzling this one, quite contentedly, for the rest of my life.

Trash Talk:

This is a subject I’ve been wanting to approach since I began this blog, but I resist, telling myself that it isn’t that interesting or that I don’t know enough about it. Okay, outsider eyes find it very interesting, and it’s about what I do know, not everything there is to know. Therefore…

I’m going to talk trash.

Rifiuti4 Last May, the nation-wide transition had already begun. Instead of trundling your recyclables to the ugly, dirty, domed containers that squatted in parking lots, you put a sack of a specific type of trash at your street door and a guy in a small hopper-truck came around the next morning and picked it up. My stay was short and I didn’t generate much trash, so details escaped me, but I knew it was a new sun dawning on the refuse horizon.

When I returned in October, either the system had been expanded and refined, or I had become a more active producer of garbage (many friends would suggest I started down that path years ago) for the system was more nuanced than I remembered. Every night, Sunday through Friday, we put a sack of something specific to the left of the front gate. Organic was three times a week (in bio-degradable and compostable bags,) glass and plastic once, paper once, and undifferentiated (that which cannot yet be recycled) once. You had to keep in mind what went out when, and that took getting used to, but it was a tidy system.

Then shortly after the first of this year, a small, brownish, perforated plastic box appeared next to my front door. At first, I Rifiuti3 speculated a late Christmas present (“late” was an American interpretation; it was before Epiphany and therefore would have been perfectly legal) but as I continued to the ground floor, I noticed that everyone had received these boxes. When I returned home, I took mine inside to investigate.

Included in the box was a year’s supply of compostable plastic bags and three colorful brochures detailing the intricacies of trash separation. A calendar for “Orvieto Nord” specifies what picks up on which days, when holiday service kicks in and what that means, and shows a schedule for domestic trash on one side and commercial on the other. There was a two-fold summarizing what goes into each genre of pick up and how to “prepare” it for the guy with the truck. There was a booklet indexing every conceivable throw-away and exactly what you’re allowed to do with it. The box itself was for personal collection of organics.

Rifiuti1 Because we are a palazzo with six apartments, we were given five, specifically sized and designed, color-coded and clearly labeled bins for the sorting of our refuse. The categories now are organic (in compostable bags,) plastic and metal (which is a clever combo, because we can include things like pharmaceutical blister packs,) glass, undifferentiated, and paper and cardboard. The bins live downstairs in the garage, and we wheel them out on the appropriate night as someone in the building remembers to do so.

For smaller buildings, each household was given a set of little color-coded bins that go out on the same schedule. Walk around in the evening, and the streets are dotted with these spunky creatures. While they don’t fit the medieval/renaissance townscape, they are a lot less unsightly than old collection domes. Some of us find them rather cute. Rifiuti2

Since all this occurred, my curiosity about disposability in general has increased. So, I checked the plastic bags I receive through the week, and 90% of them are compostable. I asked at the market what to do with juice containers. The guy referred me to the label, most of which now have instructions on proper disposal according to category. This is much more specific than “please recycle.” It means “put this in the right bin or risk fines.”

I’m sure there are valid questions about what is done with all this meticulously collected trash. Are the contractors engaged to process it doing the job, or will the stuff be dumped into a swamp somewhere? How is Italy’s tenacious history of kick-back and bribery affecting all this? Is the elaborate and beautifully designed collection process merely the latest example of an Italian genius for elaborate and beautiful design, that once put into place will suffer from neglect and gradually grow ineffective?

Those are questions too great for this outsider, and the answers can only be known in time. What Italy is doing looks like a solid beginning, and one worth emulating in other places; especially by those entities who take pride in organizational skill and procedural elegance, but whose environmental programs are soaked with politics.

Besides, we’re past the point of having other options. Either we stop pretending that “disposable” means we can throw it away without further thought, or we stop producing stuff we call disposable that isn’t. Or a mix of both. (I find it curious, and disturbing, that my spellcheck doesn’t even recognize the word, indisposable. If it’s not a word, I now invent it.)

Think about the environmental crisis for a moment. Eventually, all solutions boil down to careful use of resources and intelligent disposal of waste. A well-considered effort to address issues of disposal, even if it may have its flaws, is leagues ahead of a half-hearted one where the central tenets are to be affordable to business and convenient for the consumer.

We’ve kicked the trash can down the road for a couple of generations now, it’s time to grow up. At the very least, Italy (and the EU) are taking steps.

The Connecting Points:

There were two groceries in Sunnyvale when I was very young; The Red Rooster and The Airbase Market. The latter was named after Moffatt Field Naval Air Station where once, years before I was born, the USS Macon was housed, a dirigible airship of gigantic proportions. The hangar built especially for the airship survived into my childhood. It is still there, pointlessly huge, but an icon.

My father took me to see it when I was about ten. It’s a cathedral of steel, lofty, empty, awesome. He told me that the Macon fit into its hangar with only a few yards on all sides to spare. My imagination soared. He told me that for the airship’s first arrival they asked for volunteers to help dock it as kind of a publicity stunt, so on that day only, he became part of the landing crew. He told me that as the ship came in, it hit an updraft so had to momentarily ascend, and it took a few fellows up with it because they didn’t know to loosen their lines. Then he gave me that look that usually meant he was making stuff up, but I never knew for sure if he was.

The Macon went down in a sudden storm off the coast of California in 1935, but she lived on in the logo of the Airbase Market.

The Red Roster was a chain. They had stores in Santa Clara, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. The scope of this vast enterprise dazzled my young mind. How could anyone organize such a complex operation and continue to maintain friendly and excellent service? I was also a little miffed that the beloved Red Rooster was not exclusively ours. The management gave away juice glasses with the store’s logo – a red rooster, of course. They were kid-sized, and I loved them as much as the store. Most everyone you visited in town had at least one of their glasses. I still own a few.

When my mother shopped at either of these markets, the checkout clerks were people she had known for years. She was able to trade stories, local news, and family information. The checkout was one of the still-vital connecting points for a community that had begun to feel the effects of modernization. Habits such as strolling main street, Murphy Avenue, were waining. The new habit was to drive everywhere, even if your trip were only a block or two. The friendly markets continued as bastions of the connecting point and to hold the key to the town’s heart.

Then in the late fifties the downtown was “redeveloped.” A great to-do was made of this. The hoopla included a ground-breaking ceremony for which a select group of elder citizens was asked to sit on the speakers’ platform, my father’s mother among them. My grandmother, who grew up near Dubrovnik, had lived in Sunnyvale for fifty years by that point and spent the ceremony grousing to her neighbors, without relief. “What a stupid idea, the town is already developed. There’s no need for this.” But as she had been awarded a gift certificate for groceries as a bribe, there she sat in her widow’s black, frowning, complaining, hands curling protectively around her purse.

The newly build “Sunnyvale Plaza” included two supermarkets, strangely located across the street from one another; a Lucky Store, and a Purity. Each was a architectural oddity designed to function as an instantly recognizable brand. One was clad in yellow tile and featured a kind of suspension bridge tower over its front door (Lucky’s) while Purity resembled a gigantic Quonset hut. Neither was particularly inviting, but they had generous parking lots. The supermarkets soon dominated.

The era of the supermarket ushered out the era of the connecting point, or nearly so. I remember my mother as never having had the least bit of trouble making and engaging in conversation at either of the old markets. It was a running dialog, you just picked up wherever you had left off on Tuesday. At Lucky’s (she preferred it to Purity… between the two, the town divided itself more rigorously than it would have in a religious schism) the checkout clerks seldom lasted more than a few months. They thus had no particular interest in forming relationships with customers. Eventually, company policy required them to chitchat, but little useful information was ever exchanged.

Occasionally, a clerk would settle in and remain long enough to become acquainted. I recall my mother surveilling the checkers to see if one of the “old timers” was working, and she would always choose that line if there was, regardless of its length. When there were none, she would steel herself to make conversation. “I just feel we ought to be saying something to each other. So, I talk. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to say anything back.”

This act of courage was thrilling to me until I was about twelve, after which I viewed it increasingly as an embarrassment. When the shopping list was short enough to fulfill and carry by hand, I offered to walk to town by myself so I could practice the more modern skill of silently passing through the checkout line. I became pretty good at it, too. But when I returned home, my mother would quiz me about my checkout experience; who I talked to, what I found out. Then, if I wanted to avoid a lecture on how important it was to connect to people, even to strangers during checkout at the supermarket, I had to make stuff up.

Just now, I strolled to San Giovenale to watch the sun set. It was five o’clock, and the church’s bells rang for several minutes. They have been rung at that time everyday for almost a thousand years, allowing for wars and such. While they were clanging my mind into a restful calm, way in the distance were five airliners approaching and departing the airport at Fiumicino near Rome. They left five evanescent trails of vapor in the deep blue sky.

I recently discovered a panificio (bakery) I like very much. It’s manned by two young Filipino men and an Italian woman of perhaps thirty. Both men are friendly, but one is so kind that being greeted by him is like coming into the company of a saint. The woman is as warm as a loaf of fresh bread. The second time I shopped, they remembered what I had ordered the first time. On my third visit, biographical information was exchanged. Now they remember not only my preferences, but sense when I want something new and help me through the process of choosing it. They also assist me with the language. I am an unremarkable one of a constant flow of customers.

Serving the public here is regarded as a skill acquired over years of observation, participation, and practice. It’s a respected and acknowledged ability. Not everyone has it. Not everyone can develop it. If you can’t, you try to find a job that doesn’t require it. Each who has it exercises the skill in his or her own fashion, and the range of style is as broad as the human personality.

The world has gone on in this way since the first goat was exchanged for a sack of grain, if not before.

The culture in Orvieto acknowledges that retail service can be the basis of a respectable career, and that the connecting points it fosters are as precious a heritage as an ancient church or piazza. What that says to this American outsider is no matter how detailed a company manual or imposing the management style, mandated chitchat and niceness doesn’t replace the real thing. Nor is it as meaningful, or as much fun.

I met three college students from Alabama the other day. Charming folk, they were good at making conversation, especially the young woman. Even she expressed relief, however, in finally meeting an American after an hour or more of mimed interaction with Italians. Foreign travel is also an acquired skill, you see, and although they were ostensibly here for art and culture, learning to travel was their real purpose.

“Our teacher has been doing these trips with students for thirty years. He always comes to Orvieto, and they remember what he likes to drink, his favorite things to eat, and even where he likes to sit! It’s amazing!

I’m glad they appreciate that. It is amazing, and I hope that someday they understand how tip-of-the-iceberg their teacher’s welcome here is. It will blow their minds, in a good way. And minds having been blown, perhaps they’ll find and develop connecting points in their own communities, and the torch still carried by Orvieto – and communities like it, everywhere – will continue to be passed.

Of Cats and Dogs and Shaving Cream:

I bought Lucianna and her daughter Sofia a gift for Christmas about a month ago, have seen her a couple of times since, but have either forgotten it when we’ve met, or didn’t have it with me when I’ve run into her. Finally, today between a meeting she had and needing to go down to Scalo for laptop repair (her report accompanied by gesture of gun in mouth) we were able to make plans for coffee and a gift delivery.

I went into town a little early to seek out a few items I needed. On the top of my list was cold medicine (just in case,) and flax oil capsules or “una scatola di perle di olio di seme di lino.” That sentence contains so many “di” that I always feel like I’m saying it wrong. (I might be, but no one has ever corrected me.) Also shaving cream.

And bread and pastry. I was proud of myself on that last. I’ve been stuck on tozzetti (we might call them biscotti) as my dolce of choice for at least a month now, but today I adventurously embraced apoline, lemon cream or chocolate filled, two of each. I can hardly wait for tomorrow’s breakfast. But really, I’ve already stuck my neck out this far, why feel compelled to wait?

On the way between the panificio and Blue Bar, I passed Gianluca’s used-book store. I first stopped on a whim about six weeks ago. I was looking for a grammar that the large bookstore in town, a Mondadori, didn’t have, and neither did they offer to order it. Gianluca said he would try to locate a copy. By the time I returned home, there was an email. He would have it the following afternoon. I’ve since been stopping by whenever possible. When he’s serving a customer, there isn’t really room for another, so I wave – when it doesn’t feel intrusive.

I had been wanting a book in Italian, something I could immerse myself in that would also be a learning tool. Claudia had given me a couple of possibilities, but both are too literary, and I have to stop frequently to check word meanings or puzzle grammar. Some of that is great, but too much and I’m not reading for enjoyment, anymore, or even for sense.

A few days back, I asked Gianluca about such a book, and we scouted around his shop. I read first paragraphs as a test. When I understood one, the book became a candidate. I asked him if he had a copy of Christ Stopped at Eboli, a favorite of mine I’d read a couple of times in English. He didn’t, but had another book by Carlo Levi. I understood the first paragraph pretty well, so I took it. As a gift, he also sent me away with a slim volume by Italo Svevo.

I settled down later that evening with both books. After the first paragraph, the Levi book gets way more difficult. While the Svevo stays at about the same level, it’s always a step or two ahead of me. True, Svevo is more direct in his language than is Levi, but with him two or three words I don’t know can scramble the sense of a whole paragraph. Levi, on the other hand, writes like there are not sufficient words in the language to satisfy his appetite for prose. Consequently, I can be ignorant of half the words in a paragraph by Levi and still get a sense of it. In the end, however, I returned (quite happily) to the weekly magazine, Sette. The language is breezy and similar to what you encounter in daily life, the articles range in topic, and I generally find them interesting.

Anyway, on my way past, I thanked Gianluca for his help and gave him a report. He told me that for Italians, Levi is like reading another language, and since it is another language for me, I may have been operating from a point of advantage.

I walked out of the house this morning in the direction of the cat (for more on that relationship, see the post Epifania.) She was catching some rays on the roof of a car, and we shared a few profoundly joyous moments together. Her son, as always, ran away.

Then I went into town, bought stuff, and met Lucianna. After our brief visit, I continued on to a store recommended for shaving cream (the kind you use with a brush.) The lady there directed me to two options on opposite ends of the shop. I looked at both. One, in green plastic, was utterly normal and just as unexciting. The other was luxurious. Just holding the elegantly designed jar made my hands tingle. My favorite brand is made in Firenze and costs about €25, a hefty price but it lasts a year. I figured this tingly stuff might cost something similar. I took it to the counter with the self-conscious disclaimer that I knew this was a little lux, but what the heck, gotta live life, right?

She described the cream’s superior qualities rather at length, then as casually as she could manage, said “Well, then, that’ll be €45,00.” Ah! Maybe a little too lux – for me – at the moment. How about that one in the boring green jar? “That’s €2,50.”

I finally did make it to Blue Bar. I was served by the lovely woman who has taken Romina’s place since she started teaching French at the public school. I took my dolce to the table, and was watching the world pass by the front window when Antonny swooped in. “Sorry! I was playing my guitar in the back room. It’s a chance to be alone, you know?” He played for me yesterday. He’s really quite good, and like his Italian and English (and commedia dell’arte, see the post The Bar Scene) he taught himself. “It’s harder that way, but you find your own style, and that’s better. I studied with a teacher for awhile. He said I’m good. But studying was like learning someone else’s style, so I quit. Now people come in, we jam, it’s fine.” He announced yesterday that come spring he’s gathering some music makers to play on the street in front of the bar at 7 pm weekdays. Reason enough to stay in town, as far as I’m concerned.

On my way home, I found that my lady cat and her normally frightened son had changed cars. I guess while I was shopping his mom convinced him that I’m okay, because for the first time, ever, the son asked me for attention. Mom was gracious, so long as I gave her a bit more time than I did to him.

As I approached the front gate, my ground floor neighbor was going in. “Shall I leave it open?” she asked? “If you like, thanks, I just have to go across the street and say good morning to the dogs.” She smiled and looked at me as if she had surely mistaken, as ever, what I had meant to say, and closed the gate. There are three dogs, of uncertain heritage, in the fenced yard across the street. At least two of them will always run up to say hello as I approach. They greet, I greet, all is well, and they go on with their day.

IMG_1497 (1) — *While I was photographing the bookstore, this lovely lady threw herself at my feet as if to prove my point.*

Why are dogs and cats so different in this culture? (I have no theories, and don’t believe I’ll be spending much time formulating any, but it’s an interesting question.) Cats here are either like my lady cat or like her son has been until this morning. They throw themselves at my feet or they run away. I have yet to meet an indifferent feline in Orvieto. Dogs, on the other hand, are almost always indifferent. Most are not unfriendly, but they do not ask for attention, even when I offer it. The least indifferent canines I have met are the ones across the street, but we have a relationship that has to be factored in. Even they, however, run up to the gate tails a-wagging, greet, then go away. No hanging about for more, not even for a scratch behind the ears. It’s disorienting at first, these two earth-shattering reversals. But then, what isn’t?

I bought the cheap shaving cream in the green jar. I simply couldn’t justify the other. At some point I will actually leave town and go somewhere, and when I do, it may be to a town with a larger selection. In the meantime, I’m living so luxuriously in so many other ways, who cares about tingly?

How to Say “Gatta” in Mississippi?

Last night, I would have loved to have had a dinner date. Not so much for social balance as for having just witnessed a socio-cultural-theatrical phenomenon, and my brain was full to bursting. I have, in particular, a couple of friends knowledgable of the work of Tennessee Williams who would have been most welcome at table.

I saw an Italian production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (La Gatta sul Tetto Che Scotta) at Teatro Mancinelli. I needed about an hour of table talk after the final curtain and all I was able to get was a few minutes with the nice couple I shared a box with. I wrote a friend who is one of those Williams guys, but he couldn’t find a telesponder at such quick notice. Terribly short-sighted of me. I must improve.

Disclaimer; I only understood what I already know about the play and a few sentences, here and there. That’s better than anything else I’ve seen so far, but my experience of the play was primarily visual.

The set was a jewel-toned Edward Hopper painting; walls and doors of various rich greens and furniture in deep reds. Against the vast expanse of green was a yellow curtain that covered the door to everywhere, but only visible when it blossomed onto stage after someone had entered. Nifty touch. The dresses were taffeta and brightly colored, reminiscent of the fifties without being “of” the fifties. Every now and again (at what had been act breaks, as I recall) the back wall opened to reveal an overgrowth of vegetation. The curtain’s rising was immediately followed by a toy tractor of some kind making a bee line for the bed, under which it disappeared.

The acting seemed good. I especially liked Maggie and Brick. Like everything I’ve seen, the acting style tended to be operatic, and the other characters did their best not to disappoint me in that regard. The speech Big Daddy has that ends with his exclaiming that all is mendacity was delivered as a baritone aria and the audience duly applauded. I have a feeling that if Italian theater weren’t more than a little operatic, it would be so much like life as to be indistinguishable. Be that as it may.

As I mentioned, I was able to talk with my box-mates after the show. First I asked where the story was set. “In the American South, of course.” Really? “Well, actually, it was sort of generic.” Okay. Any accents? “No, pretty much standard Italian.” Even Maggie? “Maggie was just like everyone. Does she usually have an accent?” They all usually have accents. It’s just that Maggie sounded like she may have been doing one. “Really? What does the accent in English sound like?” Oh, slower than northern American English, and more musical, melodious, a little florid. “Like Italian?” Yeah, okay, like Italian. Except for the slow part. They laughed.

The interpretation was very Italian, the characters were very Italian, the relationships were very Italian, the overall concept… okay, you get the idea. To their credit, the story is actually, also very Italian, just as it sits. So maybe all this Italianità was a conscious choice. And maybe it wasn’t. I don’t remember all the character names, and there are never any programs, but the minister? Was a priest. In a cassock. And a yarmulke. Well, you know, the Catholic version. I found it so curious and kind of wonderful that in spite of all this, my box-mates completely accepted the production as having been set in the American South – until I raised my eyebrows.

Italians seem to make everything Italian. With plays, they do this to such an extent that it makes me wonder if copyright laws are enforced here, at all, or if maybe they’re just an ugly rumor. Italians do this switch to an extent I don’t think Americans do in return. I wonder if it’s because Italy has, since Roman times, been an absorbent culture, turning whoever comes here into an Italian within a generation, while in the States we allow immigrants (however reluctantly in some places, and at some times) to shape and change the overall culture. Yeah, new arrivals become American, but they stay hyphenated Americans for a long time, and yet their culinary contribution eventually ends up in the State Dining Room at The White House.

Since we’re there, let’s take dining as an example. There’s one not-Italian restaurant in Orvieto (out of dozens) and it’s Italian-Chinese. I mean, like a lot more Italian than Chinese. The most Chinese thing about it are the stone lions out front, and I suspect they were made in Viterbo. The food is probably no more strange to a native Chinese than Chinese-American is, but the extensive use of red sauce is startling. For the truly exotic, there are restaurants that specialize in cuisine not Umbrian or Classico. The Orvietan equivalent to a Samoan or Nigerian restaurant in the States, is one that features Sicilian.

Let’s now turn that phenomenon towards theatre. When Americans present an Italian (or French, or even a British) play, for example, mostly we try to honor the culture of origin, even if just a little, should it serve the play and our audience to do so. From what I’ve seen so far, Italians make it all about themselves. Not self-consciously so, but I suspect there might be riots otherwise. Okay, not actual riots, but at the very least lots of bewildered disappointment.

Of course Italians are not alone in this. Americans do that switch with movies all the time; the French hit of tens years ago is reworked into an American story with beer and garbage disposals. And Shakespeare’s stock-in-trade were stories set in exotic places, with character names from other exotic places, and all mixed in with English cultural references, and little consistency to any of it. But the thoroughness of Cat’s transition to a “typical” Italian family (however atypically dysfunctional) in a “typical” Italian situation was so utter and complete, and apparently so logical to the audience, that it left me a bit breathless. The audience seemed a bit breathless, too, and in a good way, so obviously the cultural transition worked. I don’t mean any of this as criticism, it’s just giving vent to my curiosity.

The audience was my most profound experience last night in other ways, too. That’s not to slight the actors at all, but I was following my memory of the show more than the actors’ presentation of it, so my experience of the story wasn’t as immediate as it probably was for most people.

The audience were dressed. Not over-dressed, but really well-dressed. They were excited like I remember being excited at ACT in San Francisco and am often still excited on Broadway. They watched and listened with all their hearts, and did so for more than two hours with no intermission. They were various; all ages, all types, all levels of income. They applauded at the end like they owed it to the artists to let them know they were loved, and the artists took it in like they agreed. In this town of about 5,000, there were close to five hundred people there, and it was one of two performances. To be fair, people come into Orvieto from all around the area where there is no theatre at all, but still – the surrounding towns are even smaller. At 8:30 five hundred or so people went from the theatre into a restaurant of their choice: a perfect symbiosis.

Okay about 499 did. I walked around a bit, came home, and had a sandwich. But a very good sandwich. And as American a sandwich as I could muster. And rounded it off with a tozzetto dunked in sambuca.

The Bar Scene:

It was maybe 2006. Could have been 2009. Might have been in between. The memory is strong, but the temporal context is obviously weak. I do vividly recall asking the folks at Lingua Si (where I studied Italian off and on for about ten years) if they knew who I was referring to. One person did, but no one else had noticed him. He worked the evening shift, as I recall, and everyone I knew at LinguaSi at the time lived outside of town.

Whatever year it was, the people who were here for the commedia course, In Bocca al Lupo, heard me talk about him. I suggested they go to the bar on his shift and observe. Commedia can become over-styled, a tradition apart from life, and here was an Arlecchino, in life, behind the counter at Bar Montanucci.

A couple of examples. I order a glass of wine; he spins around, flings open the door to the chiller, spins again, pulls out a bottle, flips it, and displays it for me with his right index finger on the top, two left fingers at the base, and makes the bottle give me a little bow. I order a cup of coffee; he turns his back, grabs a saucer from behind, flips it over his shoulder, catches it in front, flips it again, and puts it together with a spoon he fetched while the saucer was still in the air, onto the counter in front of me, and at the same time.

Everything was like that. I ordered stuff just to see his act.

I imagined two things about this guy. First, that he was actually a real-life commedia character; that this was the way he moved, worked, and presented himself. My observations bore this theory out rather well.

The second was a reaction to the first theory, which although appealing, seemed far too romantic. He was a recently graduated acting student, here on a summer job, soon to export himself to Rome for a start on his theatrical career. After a few weeks of catching his act at Montanucci, he disappeared, so the second theory won out.

I always secretly leaned towards the first, though, and when I told students about him, that was the context in which he was presented. Students always heard about him, too, even if they were in Pennsylvania and had not even a mental image of Montanucci or Orvieto. His behind-the-bar antics were so joyful, and seemed so genuine, I wanted to believe he was real.

Whichever he was, he had become a legend in my own mind.

When I arrived here last October, I was invited to dinner by the lovely Irish couple who are renting me their apartment for these months. One of the first things they told me was to go to Blue Bar. “It’s a terrific place,” they said. “Antonny will introduce you to everyone. It’s a kind of hub.” So, one of the first places I checked out was Blue Bar.

I’d been in before, many years ago and under a previous owner, because it was one of the early bars with wi-fi, and possibly the only one in Orvieto that didn’t charge for it. It’s a nice little place, nothing at all fancy. The coffee these days is excellent. They have a modest but high-quality selection of pastries, including my favorite, a cheese-drenched spiraletto. (I just made up the name, I have no idea what it might be called in any language, nor does anyone else I’ve asked.) The bar is owned by Antonny Le Grand and his partner, Romina Cipolla, lovely people both.

Blue Bar is a hub, indeed. There’s a constant flow of customers in and out, mostly from the immediate area (the neighbors, the cobbler, the grocer, the ceramicist, the insurance guys, the bank guys, the baristas from Montanucci.) Antonny and Romina greet them by name, they joke, they introduce. It is, in a lot of ways, what I wanted my Caffe Domenica of 30-some years ago to be.

Antonny befriended me immediately. I think the main reason was so he could practice his English, but in some way we’ve not quite figured out yet, we’re just naturally friends. He does imitations; (English people ordering coffee with a gruff voice and an elegant manner, Americans not saying hello and asking to use the bathroom.) He twists and turns and throws things into the air while serving. He hugs people when they arrive, kisses them when they leave. Wow, I thought, he reminds me of that other guy, years ago, at Montanucci.

Today I go for coffee. Another customer, a natural comedian, is praising the ciambellone (we’d say bundt cake) repeatedly and excessively – sincerely, too. He’s making us laugh, and loves having an audience. Antonny introduces him, he’s a barista at Montanucci. “Yeah, I worked there a few years ago,” Antonny says. Finally, I put the obvious together. Antonny had no beard in those days, was a bit thinner, his hair was different, and I probably wouldn’t have recognized him anyway, because all I really remember are his antics. Antonny’s the legendary Arlecchino-behind-the-bar, tossing and spinning and goofing around, always with supreme class!

I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. It was like meeting a major celebrity, except that I had been the one to create his celebrity, and no one else considers him famous. But it didn’t matter. It was better than running into Johnny Depp.

I told him about my connection, and he was delighted. Now, when I walk in, he introduces me as the guy who knew him at Montanucci, and recounts the whole story in detail. His other customers tolerantly listen, smile bemusedly, and bask in his energetic aura. He’s a unique individual, and so unlike most Orvietani. Okay, most people.

A few days ago I come in around 12:30 just as Antonny is attempting to have lunch. He sits at my favorite table in the next room and invites me to join him. “So,” he says, in his Frenchy English “Americans come in here and they call me ‘quite a character’. Is that good?” I explain that it could be either depending on how it was said. I demonstrate. Antonny considers this, then replies “It was the good way.” and goes on to talk about how he learned Italian.

Today, I mention my dental situation of last Monday. “Oh, there’s a dentist right around the corner, want me to take you over to meet him?” No, I tell him, I found a dentist I really like, and I describe Giuseppe. Antonny’s eyes grow dark. I ask what’s up. “He and his team are very good, sure. But they came in here once and just talked to each other. Nothing at all to me. What’s that about?” And he winks, turns, and goes off to charm the latest arrival.

The best part about Antonny is that he loves doing what he does, exactly the way he does it. Consequently, and without it being his main intention, he’s established a consistent clientele, one more loyal than most soccer fans. May we all, in our own ways, be at least a little bit like Antonny.

Walk Around the Rock:

One of Orvieto’s most wonderful amenities is the Anello della Rupe – loosely translated, The Ring Around the Cliff – a footpath that encircles the city. Enter the Anello at any one of its five entrances, and you undergo an instant transformation from Urban Dweller to Woods Hiker.

Directly across a small piazza (now a parking lot) from where I live is Porta Vivaria. Of the old gate only the vertical posts and few stones of the arch remain. Originally, a steep road went from piazza to gate, and past it there were broad steps down to the valley floor. Small livestock were brought through the gate on their way to market in nearby Piazza del Popolo, thus the name “vivaria”. Popolo still hosts the mercato ai fuori every Thursday and Saturday, as it has for centuries (though probably not on the exact same schedule) but no chickens and goats, in case you’re wondering. Now it’s all clothing and cheese, produce and plants.

The path west from Porta Vivaria overlooks relatively recent excavations of one of the many Etruscan necropoli scattered throughout the area. The necropolis we’re passing now resembles a village of little cubes with roofs of sod, neat alleys, and sturdy stonework. I tried once to visit the site, but the gate was closed, or it seemed closed and I fell for the ruse. This day, there were visitors wandering around. I’d never seen that before, but it sent a clear signal that the park was open, so I went down to see if I could get in. Everything was unlocked, I paid my €3, and stepped back in time.

About half the tombs in this necropolis have been excavated, many of them “restored,” that is, missing pieces filled in with new material to stabilize the structures. You can walk around, go inside, touch, sit, breathe, and feel the centuries. It’s really great. The necropolis was build between 2,500 and 2,300 years ago, more or less. The display in the information center suggests that the tombs here were of middle class and upper middle class families rather than for aristocrats; that Velzna (the Etruscan Orvieto) was a relatively egalitarian society with a powerful middle class.

Then in between 300 and 270 BCE something happened. Here’re a couple of excerpts from a Roman source.

“These people were the most ancient of the Etruscans; they had acquired power and had erected an extremely strong citadel, and they had a well-governed state. Hence, on a certain occasion, when they were involved in war with the Romans, they resisted for a very long time. Upon being subdued, however, they drifted into indolent ease, left the management of the city to their servants, and used those servants also, as a rule, to carry on their campaigns. Finally they encouraged them to such an extent that the servants gained both power and spirit, and felt that they had a right to freedom; and, indeed, in the course of time they actually obtained this through their own efforts.

Hence the old-time citizens, not being able to endure them, and yet possessing no power of their own to punish them, despatched envoys by stealth to Rome.”

Rome, eager to please the estranged upper classes, engaged in “corrective intervention.”

This fascinates me. There is an historical hypothesis floating around that Rome was founded by the Etruscans. Without going into this too deeply, there is sense to it. Before the republic, Rome was governed by Tarquinian (Etruscan) kings or dictators. There are Roman histories to justify this oddness, but why would a bunch of Latin miscreants (for Romulus is said to have invited felons and exiles into his city to populate it) eager for freedom invite Etruscans to exercise absolute rule? Well, maybe they needed a kind of warden, but still.

The hypothesis goes on. During republican expansion, the powers-that-be began rewriting history to reflect a more patriotic Roman origin of the city, so Romulus and Remus and the She-Wolf were invented, and the Etruscan influence on culture, religion, and political structure was downplayed. After all, Rome was out to conquer Etruria, and you don’t do that kind of thing to your grandparents if you want to sleep at night. The solution? Change your grandparents. Rome’s was also a profoundly hierarchical society. It was only over time that reforms were made in governance that allowed the common citizen some say in policy and taxation, and slavery was a economic mainstay not to be tampered with.

So, what was going on with Velzna’s middle class that the Romans found so threatening? Were they experimenting with an egalitarian society at a time when the Roman Senate was feeling pressure from below? If Rome was primally Etruscan and the influence was still strong (and Velzna was now under Roman dominion), was this movement in Velzna a direct threat to the Roman power structure? I find the possibilities fascinating.

The archeology museum in town displays frescos that were lifted from one of the larger tombs in another necropolis southeast of the city. Those in the left chamber are of a kitchen staff cheerfully preparing a meal, while the frescoed right chamber shows the meal (possibly the funerary feast for the deceased) being served in a commodious dining room. With a few deft strokes, the artists captured personalities, body types, motion, relationship, and intention. There’s no attempt at realistic anatomical detail, but the figures leap across time; are startlingly familiar.

The paintings are familiar because of their sensitivity to the human form. They are also familiar because the Etruscans are still here, in Orvieto. There are a few people around town whose figures and faces could have been copied from surviving Etruscan art, if life really did imitate art (and who knows, maybe it does?) and many more, while less representative of the Etruscan ideal, still have the features.

Next, we come to Porta Maggiore, the Etruscan city’s only gate. The street that descends to the gate is called Via della Cava. It, and the gate, were cut into the rock by the Etruscans, and the gate’s supporting structure, the pavement, and perhaps a couple of temples in the area were then built from the stone quarried during the cut. When you walk the walls, you pass over the gate partly on original rock. The medieval (and no doubt the Etruscan) town grew up around Porta Maggiore. From there, the street climbs steeply to what is alternately called Piazza Sant’Andrea or Piazza della Reppublica (and casually, Piazza del Comune). Excavations have lead archeologists to conclude that the piazza has been in use as a market center since Etruscan times. The piazza’s eponymous church, Sant’Andrea, is placed on the foundations of both a Romanesque church and an Etruscan temple.

We continue on the Anello a short distance from Porta Maggiore, and arrive at ex-Campo della Fiera and Foro Boario. The Campo was further out for the Etruscans, both before and during Roman occupation. That site, about a kilometer away from the cliff, is being excavated and foundations of temples and official buildings have been uncovered. They suggest that Velzna was an important spiritual and administrative center, and that the Campo was used both for large regional markets and religious purposes. During the late medieval period, the market activities were moved closer to town. Foro Boario is the name for the cattle market that was also held here. These days, the area is occupied by a parking structure. Barely visible from the valley, it is an elegant piazza from the cliff.

Just past the Foro are the remains of the medieval aqueduct. A hugely ambitious project for its day, it proved to be difficult to maintain. Its history is one of boom and bust, emperor and pope, and ongoing rivalries between powerful families. It reminds me of how any collective effort requires rock solid political stability in order to sustain funding and organization. It’s easy to forget what remarkable times we live in, and how quickly they can dissolve.

Then for awhile, our walk is simply gorgeous. First we come to a row of houses along a bit of street called via (or strada) del Salto di (or del) Livio. The five buildings that look out over green gardens are, at most, a ten minute walk to your favorite coffee bar; shorter if you take the elevator that serves the garage. I’d love to live there.

The name of the street has a tragic, lovelorn history behind it. During the time of the Medici, Orvieto was riven by interfamilial strife. One of the warring families was the Sarancinelli who dominated the quarter now called Serancia, though the family probably took its name from the quarter rather than the other way around. Serancia sits on the cliffs above the street we’re passing now on the Anello.

One of the Sarancinelli was a young man named Livio who tried to set himself apart from the factionalism. By chance, he met a young woman visiting from Rome named Livia (cute, heh?) and they immediately fell in love. This was all very good and fine, but there had been a prophecy that predicted the extinction of the family should one of its members marry a Roman. So cousins of Livio (only thinking of the good of the family, of course) poisoned Livia, and she died three days later in the arms of her beloved. Livio fled to Rome, raised a militia, and returned for his revenge. When his attempts to kill the murders failed, he threw himself off the nearest cliff, and the area into which his body fell is called Salto di Livio; basically, Livio’s Leap.

I’d still love to live there.

Then for another a kilometer or so we pass fascinating cliffs to the left, and to the right, rolling countryside, groves, and farms. The cliffs are fascinating because as they have fallen away over the centuries, caverns, caves, cisterns, rooms, and dovecotes have been revealed. Some of them have been filled in with masonry to prevent further erosion, others are left open, yet others have doors and window frames installed and apparently continued to be put to good use until quite recently.

The butte that Orvieto rests on is riddled with man-made tunnels, rooms, and cavities. The first were cisterns and storm drains carved out by the Etruscans. The Romans expanded these, the Orvietani who followed turned them into storage rooms, cellars, and trash dumps. The resulting labyrinth is comprised of over 1,200 chambers, passages, and wells. Many of Orvieto’s houses include a system of underground excavations that are still used to store wine, oil, and last year’s fashions. My realtor is always quite excited when a property includes caverne as we turn on our cellphone flashlights and eagerly descend.

I discovered early in my stay that going back into town via the next entrance constitutes a vigorous workout. One lengthy climb takes you up to three switchbacks followed by a hundred-fifty steps to street level. After my first ascent – which was, shall we say, not exactly in the manner of a mountain goat – I resolved (panting and sweating) to make the climb two or three times a week. I’ve been doing at least that, and my climbing abilities have improved, though not yet of goat caliber. At the top you’re rewarded, in spring and summer at any rate, with a rose garden. This entrance is named Palazzo Crispo-Marsciano. I like repeating the name. It’s fun. Palazzo Crispo-Marsciano. Palazzo Crispo-Marsciano.

“Crispo” was Tiberio Crispo, father of Pope Paul III. “Marsciano” was Ludovico dei Conti di Marsciano, a busy fellow who fought Turks for the Venetians and lead the Papal armies in Hungary. Now the palazzo is an office of the Tax Police. Really.

Next stop on the Anello, after a few more steep hills and valleys, is the double gate that abuts Fortezza Albornoz. In Etruscan times it was the site of a temple (what wasn’t?) that has been since named Augurale. Its first incarnation as a fort was a project of Cardinal Albornoz, a general and military advisor to Pope Innocent VI (a misnomer if ever there was one,) with a start date of 1364. It was destroyed in 1390, rebuilt in 1395, reinforced in 1413, and mostly destroyed except for the perimeter walls sometime later. Around 1527, Clement VII, concerned that if there were a siege he and his townsmen might run out of water, and having had a bad time of it when the French sacked Rome, began construction on Pozzo di San Patrizio. A remarkable bit of engineering, the well achieves a depth of 53 meters and is served by a double helix so that mules going down for water can keep right on going up again without meeting any of their descending brethren.

The fact that the gate next to the fort has several names, and is still known by all of them – each with authoritative historical roots – says something about Orvieto’s ability to tolerate contradiction, but I’m not exactly sure what. That I’m at all worried about the multiple names probably says something about me, too, and of that I can probably guess. The gate is variously called Porta Rocca, Porta Soliana, and Porta Postierla. I’ve even heard it casually referred to as Porta Albornoz and La Porta della Fortezza. The Outsider: I mean, really, people, we’ve had like a thousand years to work this through, can we arrive at a consensus, please? Orvieto: We need to? Why?

To the left, the Anello takes us over the funicular track, on through its woodiest section, and, after another couple of kilometers, back to Porta Vivaria.

The funicular was built in 1888 to connect the new railway line with the upper town. It was originally a hydro-balance system. Water was pumped into the upper car as it took on passengers, and out of the lower at the same time. Then a brake was released, and the two cars, connected to the same cable loop, switched places. The line was abandoned in 1970 (bad years for urban life everywhere,) electrified in 1990 and re-opened shortly thereafter. It runs every 10 minutes from 7:10 am to about 8:30 pm, thereby proving to be teasingly useless to morning commuters who have to catch the train to Rome that leaves at 6:57. Some things are universal.

Were we to continue to the right instead, we arrive in Scalo, the lower city, via a paved footpath (paved a long time ago, so don’t picture asphalt.) Orvieto Scalo gets its name from the scales that used to weigh goods coming into and going out of town so they could be taxed. This was during the days of the Papal States. There are lots of interesting surviving oddities from those times in habit, law, custom, and cuisine. I’ll do a post one of these days.

What I find particularly wonderful about the Anello is that you can decide to hike it almost on a whim. Enjoy a hearty lunch, stroll over to a bar, throw down a caffe macchiato, and, wow! I feel like a walk. Let’s do the Anello! Minutes later you’ve left behind the urban crush, noise, and oppressive bustle of Orvieto (winky, smiley face,) and are surrounded by nature.

It was perhaps this sort of thing that inspired New York’s city planners to conclude that a central park would be a good idea. It is an excellent idea.

Confessions of a Gelatophiliac:

During my first stay in Orvieto fifteen years ago, I discovered Gelateria Pasqualetti. The ice cream they served was comparable to anything you would find at Vivoli di Firenze. Everyone agreed. Orvieto was blest.

I’m there years later and ask for the restroom. I’m directed up some stairs that take me through a kind of mezzanine overlooking the kitchen. The view is from a Flemish painting, piled with crates of peaches, lemons, berries, oranges, chocolate, nuts. It’s a rainbow of flavor that justifies the magnificent gelato vended below. The perfect balance of sweet and tart, the luscious textures, the modest portions, it all makes sense looking at that kitchen. Classic Italian quality in a classic Italian product served in the classic Italian manner.

I loved Pasqualetti. I bragged about it to anyone who would at least make an effort to conceal the rolling of their eyes out of respect (or pity) for my obsession.

In March 2014, I lead a group of students from Marywood University on a week’s study tour to Orvieto. I told them all about Pasqualetti. They were stoked to try it. I arrive a few days ahead of time to set up, and make my primal pilgrimage the next afternoon. A sign taped to the door says, “Closed for the winter.” I gripe to anyone I can rely on to conceal their boredom out of pity (or fatigue) for my emotional devastation.

The next day, I pass a satellite store Pasqualetti had opened on Via del Duomo. I’m thrilled and immediately order my customary first combination; nocciola, caffè, cioccolato, in coppetta piccola. As the gelato is being scraped into the larger-that-I-remember cup, I imagine my students’ faces lighting up at their first taste of the real thing.

One of the things I cherish about the traditional gelateria – I don’t know why – is the small cup portion. It’s actually small. You order a small anything in most fast food shops in the States and are given what was called extra-super-large a mere twenty years ago. When I order small, I want to receive small. It’s a matter of principle.

Larger than I remember. Pasqualetti’s “small” is at least 50% bigger than what used to be their “medium” and it costs three euro. The cup is also overfilled. I’m a little disturbed, but what’s a cup, anyhow? It’s what’s in the cup that counts. I taste my first spoonful.

The gelato is sweet. Very sweet. So sweet, I can’t taste anything but sugar. Larger cup, fancy graphics, a branch store with more visibility, twice the sugar. Something’s afoot, it’s not pretty, and I don’t really want to know the truth. I feel betrayed and more than I realize, and am deeply reluctant to face the fact.

My students arrive, they sample the gelato at Pasqualetti and at the “new” place on Corso Cavour, L’Officina del Gelato, and they naturally compare. They ask which of the stores I was going on about back home, and roll their eyes when I tell them. Out of respect for their brutal honesty (and inexperience), I pretend to look away.

A few days later, I mention my suspicions to a friend. He confirms my fears. The Pasqualetti family no longer owns the business. The new owners cater to American tourists and imported American tastes, and that demands large portions and lots of sugar. Then he goes through the list of profit-boosting adjustments made, all of them, in his opinion, at the sacrifice of the product. By the time he’s through with his report, I’m a psychological wreck.

Last May, I still couldn’t come to grips. I’d tasted the product at L’Officina and declared it inferior to what Pasqualetti used to serve. I was spiteful, or lovesick, or both. Attached. Blinded by the past.

Barely a day passed between May and October when I didn’t at some point contemplate my resistance. Pasqualetti had sold out. L’Officina opened shortly after. Maybe there’s a connection. Maybe I ought to give the young rebel a fair trial.

When I arrive back in October my first gelato is at L’Officina. It’s good. In fact, it’s very, very… very good. Rich, deep flavors, not over sweet, it’s served in an actual coppetta piccola, and costs two euro. The gelatophiliac heaves a sigh of relief. I have since returned at least four times a week.

Around four o’clock is usually when, if I’m going to have a pick-me-up, I head for l’Officina. Today at four I walk to Corso Cavour and turn right. A few more paces puts the storefront in sight. Hmmm, the awning is up. The awning is never up during business hours. My heart beats a little faster. Ahead of me, a man stands at the door. He stares at a piece of paper taped to the glass, turns away in confusion, looks back. I reach the door and see it. “Closed through March 4.” We turn to each other and groan.

“It’s very good gelato,” says the man to no one in particular (his son is still across the street.) “There’s no better. I don’t know. This is bad.”

I agree.

“Then let’s go and get some cake, instead,” says the son, joining him.

I roll my eyes, but out of respect for his youthful stupidity, I’m discrete about it. They go off for cake.

I stand facing the door, staring at that sign. Cake? How is cake a substitute for gelato? That’s absurd. And once used to the best, in a small cup, how could I ever go back to… the other place? I can’t. I’ll just have to give it up until March. No other choice. Maybe give up sugar entirely. I’ve done it before. It just seems so anti-Italian. But then, that’s my view from decades ago, Italy has changed, it’s time for me to change with it.

I walk in circles, mumbling to myself. Passersby arch away. I twitch a few times, and sigh again. Then I go and get some cake.