Author: dallanz

Every day as I cross Piazza Sant’Andrea I am blessed to observe a flock of small children, beautifully dressed, and so cute it causes me to wonder if they’ve been coached. I always slow my steps to take in the marvel of them. We’re not related, I have no responsibility for their well-being, but they have my admiration. I’m beginning to take that small inflection towards this latest crop of youth rather to heart, and to treasure it. Often, time explodes and memories of the young crop I was once a part of come flooding back.

The first of those memories – when they are not of my parents – are of my aunt, Mary Schmidt, a woman so filled with love of children that even to talk to her on the phone was to receive a warm hug. Her husband, Jack, was a carpenter. He built their house in his spare time during the spring and summer of 1940 on a large lot in what was actually Santa Clara, California, but had a postal address of San Jose. Jack, a native San Josean and proud of it, liked to say that he wouldn’t have considered building there had it not been for that postal address.

Theirs was as lovely a little home as one might expect; a central dining room with an arch to a living room and foyer, a breakfast room off a generous kitchen, a small court, and a wing with two bedrooms. They never had children, so their nieces and nephews were who they tucked under the heavy quilts of Aunt Mary’s manufacture in the front bedroom. There were about a dozen of us, and the rotational overnights were frequent. Jack had made a lamp for the bedside table that was switched on and off by turning a ship’s wheel. Perfect.

Their yard was enormous, especially in the back. A small lawn sat beyond the arbor and the huge Japanese Elm, fenced with white pickets, a potting shed stood at one end. To the right of the shed, was a clothes line. Beyond the lawn, a generous vegetable garden. Along the southern perimeter of their property were fruit trees; peach, apricot, plum. When Mary was in her late forties she decided to try her hand at brick work. On her own, with perhaps a few hints from Jack but not many, she laid a labyrinth of paths, sitting areas, planting circles, and steps. We all watched it grow, visit to visit, seemingly without a plan, so when she finally decided she’d had enough the brick looked as if it had always been there, grown from an exotic seed.

The energy that Mary would have given to her own children, and that was not expended on the children of others, went into creative endeavor. She baked, canned, cooked, sewed, crocheted, knitted, gardened, painted water colors, organized outings for her church group, held family events, and taught English as a second language. She also managed household practicalities. She did all this while leaving the impression that she was a ditzy, jolly, dame who never could find a reason not to laugh. To us kids lucky to fall into her sphere, she was also a master story teller. She spun tales from whole cloth, never missing a beat between the interconnected adventures of children caught in dire circumstances. I don’t recall the specific plots, and they may not have hung together under examination, but the enthusiasm of her delivery made them captivating.

Mary was my mother’s sister – Ann and Mary, and Mary’s confirmation name was Ann. Ann seemed more serious than Mary, but Mary was more structured than Ann. That different approach to time was the only thing I ever saw fall between them that was not happy, and it was due almost entirely to the schedules and temperaments of their husbands. Jack, a union carpenter, was off work exactly at four, usually home before four-thirty, and expected dinner on the table by five. My father, Pete, was a self-employed auto mechanic who finished the repairs his two hires either didn’t or couldn’t, and was often not home until seven-thirty or later. He didn’t have a phone at the garage until I was in high school, so Ann would begin dinner more or less at six-thirty and hope for the best. So, the phrase “time’s flying” that Ann would find so annoying from Mary’s mouth, was only ever relevant to Mary. Otherwise, they were picture-perfect sisters.

When Mary became suddenly ill in the late summer of 1985, she faced it as bravely as she did anything in life. I was in New York – on a visit before I decided to move there – when I was told the news. “She’s filled with cancer” my father said during one of the few phone conversations we ever had of more substance than the weather. I cried for hours. I’m sure my mother did too, but I never saw it; that was probably why it was my father who broke the news. I flew back in time to see Mary for her final three days. As I massaged her feet, she remarked that she had never been so sick. My mother whispered an injunction to rub all the cancer out of her body through the feet. I dearly wished I could.

At her funeral, the priest extolled Mary’s commitment to life by quoting her from only ten days prior, before the symptoms had exploded. She had been organizing a trip for a woman’s group to botanical gardens in San Francisco. “Why are you going to all this trouble? Collecting money, renting a bus, reserving tickets, plans for lunch?” he asked her. “Because I think the ladies will enjoy it.” As I recall, the trip was made in her memory, and yes, they did enjoy it.

My mother helped Jack refresh the house when he returned to find it suddenly empty of Mary’s presence. She had to teach him how to balance his check book, how to pay bills. He had never done either himself. Jack lived another couple of years, and kept up a steady stream of jokes and quips when around family, but the front drapes of the house he built for his wife were never opened again. My mother tried once, and he jumped like a frightened cat. It was as if by leaving them drawn he could keep Mary’s spirit home and within easy reach.

By the way, Mary and Jack’s place recently sold, this time for over a million. I doubt that it cost Jack more than ten thousand to build, land included. The back and side yards have gone to weed. No one has time to maintain such a property anymore, they’re too busy trying to pay it off. I hope my young friends in Piazza Sant’Andrea, and as many of their generational cohort as possible, will grow up to have more balanced choices.

I also hope they all have a zia Maria. I suspect most of them do.

 

 

(I wish I could post photos, of Mary at least, but I have none with me. There will be by June.)

I’ve not been very clear about this, but I’m in Orvieto during these months for more than Italian language and culture. It is also a kind of self-styled writer’s retreat. This fact remained hidden even to me until I described my days to a friend and he clarified by giving them a name.

I spend three to seven hours a day writing, how much depending on I know not what. Initially it was all on plays. I resisted beginning this blog because I didn’t want to steal writing time from theatrical projects, but have found instead that these essays support the plays. I’ve learned much about narrative structure writing this blog, and all learning slops around like beer in a barrel on a bouncing ship; the pressure builds up and eventually it foams over everything.

At first, I cleaned up older projects that I’d never had time, perspective, or inspiration to finish. There were a number of them. I had had a play read by actors in Washington DC just before I left for Italy, and was feeling empowered as a writer. So, I began with revisions on that project, and kept right on going through the list. In late November, I picked up the single, very vague, opening scene for a play I thought I might begin work on last spring but never did, and in a single week a remarkably taut first draft flowed from it. I was so excited I went out for dinner. Of course, first drafts are tricky animals because while writing them I see connections in the story that barely exist on the page. I have to quickly return so as not to forget all the brilliance that is not actually there, and even then much of it escapes into the ether.

But this play (called Risotto) was different. It’s based on real people and events, even though the setting and circumstances of the play are invented, and I have a strong personal connection to the material. So, subsequent drafts rolled out as easily as the first throughout the month of December. On the last day of 2015, I felt good enough about the play to submit to a festival in upstate New York.

But there are spiders in the attic that don’t hatch for weeks. Here’s an example.

I wrote a short play three years ago for a festival in New York City. It was a rush job, I never really got it to submittable fit, and it predictably went nowhere. But I liked the story and characters and the overall shape. I last took it out in November, just before I began Risotto, and spend a few days on it — cut five or six pages and clarified the storyline. I was so pleased with myself, I submitted that one, too, in early December.

Then I continued to write everyday for a half-dozen hours for two and a half months.

Last Friday was the deadline for a short play festival. The script I had worked on (The Loyalist) was the only short play I had that seemed to qualify, so I planned to submit it, confident that November’s revisions had brought it up to snuff. On Tuesday night I decided to glory in my own fine work and read it through before submitting the play a few days early.

Good god. I was horrified! Horrified, I tell you! It was in no shape whatsoever to submit as anything other than an example of a meandering, formless, over-written early draft.

I experience an odd phenomenon of feeling embarrassed by unfinished writing even when no one else has read it. I shift into furious editing mode, slashing away, humiliated by what I previously thought good. Of course, it’s just me humiliating myself, but I often forget that’s the case. With The Loyalist, however, others had read it; or at least, I’d sent it out quite confident that those who did read would find it mighty and irresistible. The more public nature of that humiliation spurred immediate revisions late Tuesday night, as if I could take back the sloppy, meaningless, and pretentious dialog — that I had, in some distant way, forced on others — by wasting no time in changing it.

Wednesday and Thursday flew by in a flash. Seven and eight hours a day. Each morning I opened the file to read, and was horrified all over again at what I had thought was fine work the night before. By Friday, either the play had become stronger, though as yet unready, or I was growing accustomed to being horrified, and horror downgraded to despair. Despair being a more passive mood than horror, I had to work at keeping myself going on Friday, but I did, for another eight hours or so. When I put it and myself to bed that night, I felt like the piece had finally seen the beginnings of being a possible candidate for something someone might actually call a play, someday, maybe.

Blest by time zones, the Friday midnight deadline didn’t happen here until six the next morning, so I was able to rise early and take a final swipe at the script before sending it off. I’ve not read it again since. I’m a bit frightened . There is nothing can be done to improve its chances as a festival entry; and if it’s still bad, I don’t want to know until March.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered that Ristotto has a sequel, and that the sequel is a prequel to what will someday be the third in the series based on a script begun in 2014. The new, middle, play is called Fried Prawns. All three are pretty conventional in form, but seem to have potential for being otherwise pleasantly quirky. I would really rather love to end my self-styled writer’s retreat with a trilogy, or at least the bones for one. Lots of hours between now and then, but divided up by days, it is surely doable.

How does one ever declare a script (or a blogpost) finished? That is, I suppose, the next great lesson, and like all lessons so far in this hall of mirrors, one that will shape itself for me and me alone — just as it does for all of us who plunge into the night hoping to discover candles.

There are good language days, and there are bad language days. Today was one of the latter. I twisted my tongue around Italian words I’ve known for decades – simple stuff – all the way through my lesson this morning. Mariella, as always, was patient and encouraging, virtues I am only just learning to cultivate regards myself.

I slept well last night, a welcome change after a few weeks of fitful rest. I may be able to attribute the change to having eliminated espresso from my morning routine. However much I miss the buzz, the sacrifice is an outsized trade for a full night’s sleep. So, this morning was without jolt, and I severely felt the lack. Unwilling to forego the ceremony of the cup, I have been allowing myself a single decaf cappuccino or macchiato before noon. Thus, a perfect decaf cappuccino appeared in front me at Bar Sant’Andrea, site of today’s lesson. As was expected, it had little to no effect on composition of mouth or brain.

A few things needed purchasing after the lesson. A two-week supply of hypertension and cholesterol medications that together run at least 30% more in the States even with insurance, are available here without prescription. Bread, pastry, pasta, odds and ends.

Getting close to one, now, so my step quickens as I rush towards the bakery. They don’t always reopen in the evening, I’ve not figured why, and no hours are posted. I make it on time and am happy to discover my favorites behind the counter: the young Filipino who is kind and plays with his words until they are music, and the Italian lady with a gracious demeanor. I order and ask how to call a pastry item I’d not noticed before. “Sigaretti.” A good name for a short tube filled with chocolate. For the first time in my life I buy cigarettes. They are delicious.

I arrive at the tortellini shop just after it closes, so cross the street to the “supermarket” for their offerings in the same general category – not as good as the fresh, but tasty enough for lunch.

A note about the “supermarket.” When applied to this particular store the word will always appear in quotes. The “supermarket” is the size of a medium-large bodega in Manhattan, but because it’s open through the day it earns an exalted distinction. A bunch of guys in their twenties operate it. Going in feels like a college reunion where everyone has miraculously regained their youth. I mostly come for the company.

Then a quick lunch at home, the aforementioned stuffed pasta with pesto from a jar (not the best, but remarkably good) a salad of tender lettuce from the market in Piazza del Popolo topped with artichoke hearts from the fair trade store nearby, and a dessert of dried fruit. And two sigaretti.

A few minutes on the computer and it’s time for my first-ever Shiatsu massage. Last Friday, I awoke to a neck so sore it frightened me. It had been sore on Thursday, but rationally sore. Friday’s sore was unreasonable. A friend, Katrin, has a studio di fisioterapia three minutes walk from here. Her studio partner is a Shiatsu therapist named Michele. I thought Katrin only worked on trauma, so I wrote Michele, first. I took his earliest slot for today, and called Katrin anyway. I was a little desperate. As it happens I was fussy to think she only treated accident victims. Even had that been the case, she treated my neck as a victim of catastrophic sleep. She fixed it instantly. She’s good – another one of those people for whom I’d be willing to throw myself down a flight of stairs just so she could heal me.

I appeared for this afternoon’s appointment with Michele with no pain whatsoever. It was a little embarrassing. Michele arranged me onto his contoured massage cushions and went to work. He probed and poked and rubbed and held. At times his hands became as hot as sun-baked stones. I don’t know how long it lasted. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life, certainly within the realm of massage.

I complimented Michele on his generosity. “It’s just my work.” “Well then, your work is generous,” I countered. Not to be outdone, “It’s a generous system of massage.” I’m making a regular appointment. Every muscle in my neck and shoulders relaxed. Anyone who knows me understands that for the miracle it is.

I’m on my way home when I become distracted by the valley. It’s been raining, and the fields seem to have greened up by a factor of ten since this morning. The channels between paving stones on the streets are filled with the same green. All that freshness lures me down to the Anello.

I meander at the base of the cliff. The rain intensifies the color of the rock, the vegetation, the soil. I stroll past my buddy Arlecchino – still in the same spot patiently musing – climb up through Porta Romana, then left past Blue Bar.

I seldom visit in the afternoon, but today I’m in the mood for a snack. Antonny sits behind the bar with his guitar, playing real good for free – improvised music plus a few songs of the sixties and early seventies, songs from before he was born. He strums, we sing a bit (neither of us know lyrics.) A man comes in, picks a beer from the fridge, leaves money on the counter, nods, and exits.

A young man, a regular, comes in. He’s quite reserved. He orders a coffee and water. Antonny leaves his guitar, flips the cup, tosses the saucer and spoon. He pours the water with a flourish, then flips the glass, while full, and spills nothing. (I wonder at the messes Antonny has wrought while teaching himself to perform these barcrobatics.) The young man watches tolerantly as if it were normal for a barista to behave in this way and represents something to be quietly endured. Of course, it is normal – at Blue Bar.

A few more minutes on the guitar, the ceramicist from down the street arrives for an afternoon something hot in a cup. He smiles and nods; I’m starting to become familiar. The two men admire the luxurious camellias on the counter. Antonny, flips, tosses, fills, then drops the cup he’s delivering. It spills and smashes, and scatters across the floor.

The ceramicist, without a beat, goes to the broom closet (well-hidden in a corner) sweeps up the glass, returns for a dust pan, and once the floor is clear, returns again for a mop. Antonny swabs the counter and refills the order. They talk their way through, teasing and blaming each other. In retrospect, I regret not having anticipated the dustpan. I would have liked to have been a part of the communal clean up.

“Be sure you’re here for summer,” Antonny says to me a little later, “there’ll be music on the street in front. You’ll help me with my words, yes?” I agree to do that. I tell him it is my plan, or at least my hope, to be here this summer. “It’s nice in Orvieto, you know, but the people can be boring. You don’t think so?”

I recharge my phone at the tabaccaio. A woman with a shrieking voice tries to make herself understood by increasing volume. I ask the tabaccaio if he can check my phone’s credit (he can’t,) and two young men shout questions about lottery tickets. He’s a bit harried.

The other day I got the lonelies. It’s a habit. When I’m delighted by a moth who has joined me in the apartment for her remaining days, when I say hello to the primroses on the terrace without thinking it odd, when I talk to the ladybug who somehow survived a childhood in a tin full of clothespins to establish herself on the mint, why am I lonely? It’s a habit.

I learned many years ago while living in Manhattan that the lonlies want to walk. This is why I love foot-centric cities and towns. I find walks among living creatures to be a great slayer of loneliness.

The first stop is across the street. My sleek, black and white doggie friend who I greet through the gate is feeling better. He’s seemed a bit under the weather for the past week, not greeting me at all or more briefly than is his custom. I worried. He sees me approach and runs up wiggling at all joints. He perches up so I can reach his nose and head, I touch both, scratch behind the ears, he licks and nuzzles my hand, then goes about his day. If I’m insistent, I can lure him back for another greeting.  Because I’m fighting the lonelies I call him back twice, and being a compassionate soul, he obliges.

Next, the striped cat.  She’s a frisky animal, various shades of brown and tan with a strength in the way she moves that is evident a meter or two away. After a few pets she hops onto a low stone wall that surrounds her territory and walks me a half dozen meters to a porch where she throws herself rhapsodically onto her back.  I sometimes manage to scratch her belly without triggering the tooth and claw reflex, most times I fail. I’m thinking of pocketing a glove so I can experiment until I get it right.

I decide on a long walk to the wall at San Giovenale then down to the Anello, all the way to Fortezza Albornoz, then back up the hill on via delle Donne. I begin my usual route through Quartiere Mediolvale to San Giovenale, but want more variety, so retrace my steps, take another turn, retrace again, and choose the street that after turning right at its end will lead to the back of the church.

Strolling towards me are a couple — hoods up against the chill — and their boy. It’s Andreas, the younger son of friends Claudia and Enrico. He recognizes me first, and I’m delighted. Andreas is a charming, blond-headed, loud-mouthed, high-energy eight-year old, and to be other to him than the old guy who doesn’t talk that well, is marvelous. “Guarda! Ecco Davide!” Then Enrico notices, then Claudia, and soon I’ve been invited to walk to the top of the Passeggiata Confaloniera.

Andreas has a tiny toy bow.  The purpose of the walk becomes to discover, then fashion, arrows for him to shoot. His dad helps. I want to, but feel shy. I adore this family. Claudia is my friend. I’ve known her longer than Enrico has. She’s a trusty guide through the maze of the Italian language, occasionally through its bureaucracy, and is wonderful company.  Enrico, a graphic designer by trade, is a deadpan comic by destiny; he’s good at both. Their eldest son is Tobia, more reserved than Andreas, but no wallflower.  Tobia is at a birthday party for one of his friends, one that turned improvisationally into a movie party in Attigliano.

We wander.  Arrows are found, and trimmed and shot.  Andreas reveals bottomless pockets filled with inexhaustible treasures of confetti. This is the final weekend before Martedì Grasso, and as on every weekend after mid-January, is part of an extended Carnevale celebration especially for children. Streets are littered with colored, shiny, and colored and shiny circles and squares.  Day-glow spaghetti foam hangs from walls. Andreas, by nature resourceful, had packed away a kilo of confetti for private use against his family, and is taking advantage of his foresight. It’s a one-sided battle. The wind blows the stuff at and beyond us before we can collect it to return the bombardment. This is exactly to Andreas’ liking.

We arrive at the top of the Passeggiata to a playground filled with tubes and chutes and ladders, and a hedge maze perfectly scaled for children. The little piazza has an abundance of trees, so therefore, a abundance of arrows. While Claudia and I stand by the wall and chat, Enrico puts his hood up and roams the maze in a squat, pretending to terrorize Andreas who noisily obliges. It’s first-rate entertainment.

Claudia shares a photo of Tobia and his friends at their birthday party. Twelve boys with mustaches of various colors and sizes, one with a well-developed pair of schnoz glasses.  It’s the perfect opening frame for a nostalgia movie of thirty years from now. I hope I’m around to see the final cut.

Confetti exhausted, arrows slung, parents and guest thoroughly shot, the sun dimming, we stroll back to Piazza del Popolo where they’ve parked. Andreas flings himself onto the floor of the car below the rear seat. Everyone teases everyone else. They load up, and we wave and shake and kiss cheeks.

I go for a longer walk. The lonelies have been vanquished. The town is full of children and old people, and those creatures between in age who tend to us both. Everyone is family.

This morning I woke up with what my father used to call “a crick in the neck.” Is that expression still in common use? I have no idea. Part of the reason I have no idea is that I rarely get one – that is, a crick – but when I do, I go for broke. It sits exactly at the midpoint of everything. It hurts my neck to yawn, sneeze, swallow, and chew in addition to the usual special effects of neck pain. (You may send your thoughtful cards and gifts to my Italian address.)

Nothing much helps these things, whatever they’re called. In my experience they generally go away after a few days. Of course, in the meantime I do what I can in the usually vain hope that four days might become three. Walking seemed like a good idea, as it always does. So as it was a pleasant day – a bit on the chilly side mostly because of the wind, but skies were clear – walking south on the Anello made sense. Contrary to my usual habit, I took the path that seemed to make sense; I headed south on the Anello towards Porta Maggiore.

A little park sits to one side of the road between Porta Maggiore and Porta Romana. The road was a project of the nineteenth century, with characteristic street lights and railings, and is lined with friendly trees. About halfway up the hill towards Porta Romana is a sweet little park with a sweet bronze statue of Arlecchino. I have never heard of a reason for his being there, but he’s good company and I’m grateful to whoever decided a park should be dedicated to a clown in a patched suit. Scattered around Arlecchino are large circular planters (barren this time of year) and park benches. In winter, the benches are perfect for taking the afternoon sun. As far as I’m concerned, that is their only purpose and it is enough.

The park can be reached by the sidewalks flanking the road, of course, but it also had an access from the escalators that descend from the high town to the parking garage at ex-Campo della Fiera. The escalators only run at certain, specific and – to an outsider’s eyes – rather peculiar hours. When they are moving, they take passengers past an entrance to the little park, which is about half-way down. At some point it was deemed unnecessary; the gate that opens onto the park has been locked, as far as I know, for years.

I want to argue that. So many things here (and everywhere) are unnecessary, but continue to function anyway. Closing the gate to the park’s cliffside door saves no energy or expense that I can tell. The lights behind the gate continue to burn, the escalator continues to move (when it moves at all,) and during warm weather the exhaust fan above the gate continues to turn. My suspicious nature imagines enemies of commedia dell’arte, ironically masked, exercising their political clout – but I have no confirming evidence.

So today, I sensibly took my sore neck down to the Anello and walked towards the south, the sun, and Arlecchino. I sat on a bench unlikely to fall into shadow. Eyes alternately opening, closing, I stretched my neck ever so gently and baked it in the warmth. Somewhere deep inside my mind a thought attempted to stir. It tried to egg me into action, it chastised my inactivity, shamed my sloth, labored to divert my attention towards worry, need, yearning, and frenzy.

Poor thought. It failed. I continued to sit in that gentle light, stretching, baking, watching, breathing, for so long a time that I lost track of time. Nothing moved. Not my mind, my body, nor the pain in my neck. Arlecchino stood, I sat, both of us enjoying the sun, neither of us caring what our mental wanderings or imaginations might make of our inactivity.

Arlecchino has been watching the vast panorama before him day and night for I don’t know how many years. He has become still and quiet, and, as I imagine, has grown more open, alive, and receptive in the process. Arlecchino is my aspiration.

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?

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 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.

This town I love.

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

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.

      

 

 

 

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.