September 18 (Day Six)
Leaving early for a job outside Bologna, Elena wakes up at six and calls a cab for us from her cell while on the road. We rush to get ready and then answer the honk at a quarter of eight, load our stuff, head for the stazione: eight and a half euros out of a ten, keep the change—more like thirteen or fourteen dollars. The exchange rate adds up.
At last it is sunny.
We spend the entire day getting across Italy: Ravenna back to Bologna, Bologna to Firenze (Florence), Firenze to Pisa Centrale, Pisa Centrale to Pisa Aeropuerto. We change trains smoothly this time and, when we miss one at Florence, we calmly wait for the next. During the extra hour in the station we lounge outside on the steps, talk to other American tourists, and watch the mid-day traffic.
By Florence the country has become hills and farms, and it is very hot on the train, so we shed layers. Cell phones ring all about us, and conversations, male and female, go on at different ranges of Italian. I stare at vast fields of artichokes in flower, crumbling stone houses, giant daisies so close to the track, hundreds of them golden yellow, that they brush against the train window.
Our first Italian car rental is at the Pisa airport and, after a long Hertz check-in of forms and passports, etc., then a visit to the Pisa information booth, we take a rental-car bus to the lot. Large portions of pavement are flooded from recent rains. Our car is supposedly in 39, but while unsuccessfully trying to get its trunk and doors to open by pressing on rhw raised portion of the key do we realize the tiny silver Renault in 38 is responding.
Every step of the way from there is excruciating and taxes our patience to the max. The lesson: You have to stay in the present; you have to treat everything as an experience. As our friend Kathy Glass warned, once you start traveling, you are no more significant than a bug. That’s true anyway, but traveling clarifies the matter.
Lindy cannot get the gear into reverse, and her failed experiments have brought us gradually bumper to bumper with a facing car. We can go no further. Neither the dashboard nor the manual are any help, as they are both written in Italian. Starting to get freaked out, she leaves to seek help. There are no employees anywhere on this lot, nothing even close to an employee, but a young German heading to his car kindly stops and follows her back. It turns out there is a ring on the lever that has to be pulled for reverse; he demonstrates. He also gets the emergency brake off.
After that rocky start, just for Lindy to get comfortable enough with the car to attempt the autostrada requires some circling in the airport lanes, pausing a couple of times to check the Italian dashboard and the directions (those at least are in English). We are hesitant to get on a highway of signs we can’t read when we don’t even know which way to go. We have both a marked map from Pisa Informazioni and line-by-line Mapquest-like directions from a representative of the villa that we have rented outside Lucca, but neither of these is much use in getting launched in the right direction because both ways look the same in Italian. Finally Lindy stops another car that, fortunately, has tourists also en route to Lucca, and they guess we turn to the right, towards Firenze. Whether that was a good or bad guess, I will never know, as we bailed after a half hour down A12. I think now that it was the right way, but we got cold feet. Here’s why:
Once on the autostrada we encountered more than one conflicting road sign. Should we be going toward Genova or Pisa, Firenze or Milano? What happened to Viareggio and Massa, the first two road-signed towns toward which the villa directions say we are supposed to exit? Are we really on A12? (no signs). How far must we go on it to pick up A11 east toward Lucca? No wonder Giorgio stays home.
While we were worrying about this evolving panorama, Lindy was also clear we needed to avoid the back road to Lucca and stick to the highway. She probably pictured something worse than what was out there, but the consequence was that we couldn’t follow Lucca road signs because we didn’t know which road to Lucca they were indicating. Also our villa, Il Leccino at Il Coppo, was in Capannori, past Lucca, and the more detailed street directions to it began off an A11 exit, not Lucca per se. We were continually flustered and indecisive. After Lindy blew off all the Lucca road signs and then didn’t see any more, she wondered if she maybe shouldn’t have taken one of them. This was the first comeuppance of driving on roads without the native language.
We exited at a gas station and were told solely in gestures by a man who didn’t speak English that we were going in the wrong direction and to turn back. We accepted his gospel but, as we were heading to the next exit to get back on the highway in the other direction, Lindy suddenly worried that, with such negligible English, he didn’t get that we wanted the autostrada to Lucca and thus was sending us on the back road. Hurtling along, we suddenly didn’t know whether to go forward or back or what rules to apply.
We decided to take the next exit and reevaluate our situation there. The ramp put us on a side road from which we could not make a U-turn back toward the highway because of a barrier and Italian no-entry signs (a definitive dash). We were going to give up again and go into a shopping center for directions when we suddenly saw a promising sign marked Genova, A11. We figured that, once we got turned around, we would take that, for it contained two of the major items from our instructions, Genova and A11.
When we did find a spot for a U-turn, it took nearly five minutes to try it because of heavy traffic. Then, returning toward the highway, we were targeting the Genova on-ramp but, despite my shout, Lindy turned left about thirty yards too soon, and we were suddenly on a tiny one-lane road alongside a canal with cars and huge trucks coming the other way.
We were compounding error upon error, indecision on indecision, winding deeper and deeper into a labyrinth from which we would eventually have to curl our way back out. Rick Steves had discouraged driving at all in Italy calling it “a video game for keeps, and you only get one quarter.” We were playing for real.
Lindy had to squeeze onto the shoulder again and again to avoid oncoming traffic, and the drop into the canal was steep. Other than our narrow carpet of concrete, the so-called road, there were only narrower bridges over the canal, perpendicular to it, and our sole option—to back into or out of one of them—was thwarted because, after the first, which we didn’t react to in time, they were all blocked by chains.
Finally we found a turnaround and, dodging some huge trucks with our wheels just off the slide and our hearts pounding, we came back to where we had made the disastrous left, but we couldn’t cross the road and continue in our same direction because of a no-entry sign, so we had to complete the same two-kilometer loop and the same U-turn all over again, finally getting onto the Genova road, which turned out to be the highway we were just on but going in the opposite direction, back toward the aeropuerto, back in the direction suggested by the man at the gas station. Could this be right?
We were now debating the matter vis a vis three competing sets of directions (counting the gas-station guy), when we approached an exit marked Pisa Nord, a key landmark on our villa directions. I know now that, If we had taken it right then, we would have saved ourselves three hours, but we were so befuddled, we didn’t act. Instead we returned to the aeropuerto, got yelled at by a guard for trying to enter an incorrect lane, and then double-parked illegally. From there I ran back inside for a refresher in directions, praying Lindy wouldn’t be forced to move because then we would be truly not only marooned but separated in a foreign land. I didn’t even have my cell in my pocket. An hour and fifteen minutes had passed, and the best we could hope for was to get to start from scratch over again, better informed.
The Informazioni lady had little patience for me this time. She was already being condescended to by an elderly British tourist who would not leave her position, so she interrupted him curtly to tell me that no one could get lost going from the aeropuerto to Lucca: “An idiot could find it.” I couldn’t tell whether that was an intended slur or an inaccurate stab at brusque English.
I jumped back in the car, and we left the airport again. Almost at once we saw a sign to Viareggio and Massa, which had not been evident the first time. We abandoned what we thought we were going to do and swept into that turn. It was an okay choice in terms of geography and direction but not in terms of traffic and roads. es, we were supposed to go toward Viareggio, but on A12, not SS1. I finally abandoned the sparse schematic map and pulled out the Hertz road map for all of Italy and saw where we were, not only in our little maze but in relation to places like Turin and Ravenna. I understood for the first time that Viareggio and Massa were well past our destination, not immediate locales, just end points of trajectories. As I tracked our progress, I was satisfied at least that I knew for the first time where we were and where we were headed. Having missed the highway by taking that turn at the airport, we were paralleling it.
For an hour or so we had back roads and traffic jams and weren’t even really headed toward Lucca, just north toward A11 to Lucca the slow way, kilometer by kilometer. We crept through towns on SS1, from Miglianno to Terra del Lago Puccini. We were intending to make up for our earlier mistake and pick up A11 at Pisa Nord, but we never saw the Pisa Nord juncture and, overshooting Lucca and A11, ended up at Lago di Massaciocco from where we had to take SS439 to get back in the right direction. We were 23 kilometers from Lucca by then and crept along, east now, knowing that we would get there eventually.
Suddenly the road divided without a sign. Baffled, we pulled into an alley and just sat in the car in a funk. There was no one to ask and, even if there was, probably someone chosen at random in this small village wouldn’t speak English. Suddenly I saw a sign to Lucca, barely visible on the side of the divide we didn’t take. We were liberated!
Lindy gradually circled across three roads to maneuver us in the right direction. After a few more kilometers of SS439 through small towns, we were rewarded by a diversion onto A11. We were finally following our directions to Il Coppo. In retrospect, it occurs to me that every angel in our universe was trying to dissuade us from this villa. It didn’t remotely cross my mind then, but I hadn’t studied at the Berkeley Psychic Institute yet.
We went one exit past Lucca to Cappannori, as instructed. That brief extension onto a toll road cost 2.50 euros. Then we tried to follow the micro-directions provided by the villa, but they were, for lack of another word, abominable. The landmarks did not match anything on the road because (it turned out) we left the toll booth in the wrong direction, a righthand turn after the toll having simply been omitted from the list. So there was no roundabout, no sign for Pescia, no T intersection with a Madonna statue on a stone pillar. When we had passed the three-kilometer limit given for that statue, Lindy pulled into a supermarket and got directions from a woman with marginal English, and we headed back the other way. There were several divides in the road, and we simply guessed at each of them, by intuition or luck finally passing the toll plaza again and heading in what turned out to be the correct direction.
It was actually a while before we got any confirmation because everything stopped dead for fifteen full minutes. We just sat there in traffic, not moving an iota, not knowing if we were on the right road or going in the right direction. At our moment of deepest despair, vehicles finally started moving and landmarks fell into place, magically one by one. Still there were ten different turns onto tiny roads, some of them very obscure and easy to miss: Via Pesciatina, Segromigno, Via Paggiori Basso. Along the way we took the villa’s printed advice and stopped at the Esselunga supermarket to get food. I had been hoping for a natural-foods store, but we were way beyond that kind of utopian sentiment. It was 6:30 in the afternoon, and I had had an apple for breakfast and a few apricots and almonds for lunch on the steps of the Firenze train station where Lindy had her three prunes and maybe five apricots, but to that point we were too exhausted from the day of travels to feel hunger or care about food.
My initial response among the market aisles was to be disheartened again. Not only was everything of course in Italian, but it was an ordinary supermarket like Safeway, the kind I never patronize in the States. Things improved rapidly, though. Soon I saw there were plenty of biologique labels mixed into every section, and we ran around like newly-weds, getting bread, soup, canned vegetables, Irish smoked salmon, olive oil, eggs, butter, milk, fish, cereal, and bananas.
Then we continued in the car, completing the last six sets of turns: Villa Bruguier, Caprile, S. Andrea, etc. Contrary to our preconceptions and hopes, it was not beautiful or rural; it was one long stretch of heavy traffic and shopping centers, a kind of Italian Napa. Everything was artificially gentrified and spiffed up.
One last problem was the wrong street name on our instructions for the turn at a small brown church but, using it as a landmark, we made the correct choice anyway and then asked guidance from a family working a vineyard of hanging grape plants. An elderly man standing among them next to vines dense with blue fruit generously offered to lead us up the hill, but now that we knew we were on the correct road, we thanked him and said we’d do it ourselves. “El Coppo,” he repeated a number of times, pointing to a big impressive-looking villa high up in the hills, overlooking his valley. It didn’t feel quite right for interlopers to be headed there; this was their land. But that was our destination as per the internet site on which Lindy bought this reservation. (“Grazie,” we now say each time, and then “Thank you” too, so as not to seem pretentious. But the Italian custom comes more and more easily to the tongue.)
We wound through grape and olive orchards, stopping once at a farm where younger children played on the dirt and older ones rode bikes. We were way beyond even broken English, but the mere name “Il Coppo” got us waved on. Where the road had seemed to end at the farm, now we saw it had a fork and went further up the hillside.
We finally pulled into the parking area of the villa. Up close it was just a modest if ornate stone house. The caretaker Sergio was working in the field and came up to greet us. Something was wrong about him almost from the beginning. He was too revved up and peppy. A bearded, long-haired hippie-looking guy who wasn’t hippie at all, he spoke only fragmentary English but had lots of ideas about what should happen at once. “Caffé, caffé,” he kept asking in manic fashion, as though it was party time. After he showed us the entrance to our section of the villa, he kept following us around, as we hauled in our stuff, sort of helping (he took one backpack), mostly talking away in Italian. For $1200 a week, the place was vulgar and in disarray. Downstairs was a cluttered living room with ads on surfaces as well as very dead furniture and a small kitchen; upstairs were two overlit bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. It was like a house of old people who had died; no one had refurbished it; they had simply filled it with pamphlets and signs, ostensibly making it into “accommodations.” I have been to cheap motels that were more regal.
Sergio kept inviting us for coffee until Lindy lost patience and told him sharply, “Not now. We’ve been traveling all day. We need to bring our things in and rest.” The cloud that passed over his face then was disconcerting. I’ve seen too many hyped-up enthusiasts turn ugly the moment they are resisted. He abruptly left.
Meanwhile I put the salmon on some ciabatta, ate two sandwiches of it, and drank almost a whole bottle of peach juice biologique. This was the second time on the trip that salmon from the North Sea came to the rescue after a day of starvation.
Sergio soon returned and insisted we come down to his place. Great summoning waves of his arms said he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
His dwelling was just below a swimming pool on the lower fields, and we followed him down through the orchard. We came into the hut, and his tall, bespectacled smiley wife immediately popped up like an electric doll and began exclaiming in Italian. Her name was something like Laurencia, and in a mixture of English and Italian Sergio proclaimed something like, “Laurencia magnifico, Laurencia, queen of Tuscany,” and so on in an unending trail of honorifics, while she stood there preening in a mini-skirt and sort of bowing. It was not charming; it was terrifying. He was way too giddy and she was completely goofy. They seemed either daft or drunk.
You can tell me “Culture, culture” all you want, “cultural differences,” but I’m an anthropologist too and, if there’s one thing I know about culture and personality, it’s that culture does not obliterate character. You have the same people in every culture; they just act out their personalities in roles assigned by folkways and customs. I was not reacting to culture; I was reacting to borderline behavior.
Now Sergio accompanied us back to the villa. On the way up the hill I asked him about the other guests, and he exclaimed the last thing I wanted to hear, heralding it as though it was what we most desired: everyone had left and no one new was coming all week. “You are all alone!” Us and Alfred Hitchcock1
He then gathered steam, showing us around our place again, as if for the first time,. as if he hadn’t already done it. The gas was off in the kitchen, so he had to go back down the hill to get his wife to help light it. Either the gas was a major operation like artificial respiration, or they were simply into camp theater. It took many tries, as if the stove hadn’t been lit for years, and they celebrated the flame together as if they had launched a Titan rocket.
After Laurencia left, Sergio kept walking around the space, lifting useless objects and doing mindless things. He was presenting stuff to us, one by one—a big binder of information about the area, keys to cabinets which he would open and close as if for effect, sometimes the same ones twice or three times, odd objects he idly raised and lowered, as if we needed to be presented with every statue and book.
When Lindy went back to the car for a few last things, Sergio asked me abruptly for my passport. I fished it out of my backpack and handed it to him but, as soon as Lindy returned and saw him holding it, she demanded it back. This was a bad moment, as he momentarily hung onto it and glared. I told her to back off and let him take it, but she was determined that this was wrong and insisted he write down the number there and return it. Badly feigning continuous good cheer, he finally put it into her outstretched hand, muttering something in Italian and getting a weird look in his eyes I couldn’t read. Neither of us felt good about him, but Lindy and I had had opposite impulses; I wanted simply not to agitate a potential mad dog, and she didn’t know what he was going to do with my passport and didn’t trust him with it. (As it turned out, we always had to give our passports at hotels in Italy.)
We had wanted Sergio to leave for the longest time when he wouldn’t, but no sooner than he vamoosed, all sorts of other problems became evident. I started to prepare dinner, but the pots and pans were filthy, not just a cooking black but wet grime and hard soot. When I went to wash them, there was no dish soap, and the paper-towel dispenser was also empty. When Lindy went to the container of toilet paper for a roll to use instead, it was sopping wet. (Showers in Italian bathrooms are often just fixtures in the wall without a stall or curtain, so one has to be careful about where the water goes and then clean up afterward as we did at Elena’s.)
The sun set, and we were alone on the mountainside, totally depressed. Lindy was embarrassed that she had made the reservation and outraged that this was advertised as a villa in Tuscany. There was dirty silverware, cloudy glasses, a 1940s radio, a tiny television from a few years later (not that we wanted to watch TV). When we tried to clean the silverware and dishes, the kitchen drain backed up. Lindy stood by the bed upstairs and cried. Then she picked up her copy of A House in Tuscany by Frances Mayes and dramatically tossed it down. She followed with a soliloquy: “I’m never going to read this book again. Tuscany is just an idealization by rich Americans and Europeans buying land from poor Italians and furnishing phony villas. This is just a set-up. They think that Americans are so anxious to come to Tuscany they’ll put up with anything. It’s crapola. I was completely misled by the woman and the online pictures and this book.” Then she began sobbing again.
We tried sitting outside and calming ourselves. Yes, the view was beautiful, layers of orchards and farms all the way down the hillside to the dense habitation of the valley, lights sparkling, but we weren’t in Italy any more; we weren’t anywhere. We were in a picture postcard, and it had a very dark shadow.
Eventually I made a meal of beans, tomatoes, and cod (which turned out to be salt cod, so was almost inedible). We ate, washed the dishes without soap, and tried to scrub the olive oil from the pans.
Not long afterwards, feeling totally unrelaxed, we lay in the bed wondering about our disconcerting custodians. They gave us a feeling exactly opposite of the security and trust they were supposed to generate. Was it all theater for tourists? Yes, but it also felt more sinister and out of control than theater. They seemed hollow shells that could contain anything. In any case, they would probably be useless in an emergency and, instead of wanting to seek them out to fix what was wrong in the villa, most of which of course was beyond remediation, we hoped they would stay in their quarters because they were inappropriate and out of control. Plus, they were the ones who were supposed to have the villa ready for guests. If this was their handiwork, if their intention and capacity were reflected by the state of things in the apartment, then they were at best completely useless and indifferent.
It wasn’t one thing that made this lodging horrible; it was the intersection of the two. If the place had been beautiful and impeccable, we might have rationalized its keepers, or if the place had been a mess, but the custodians were wonderful and warm, we would have excused the state of it and called it charming. Both together meant that any semblance of well-being or order or hope was lost.
In the distance around eleven I heard odd noises and squeals of machinery and, since there was no one else around, I assumed it came from Sergio’s place. Every now and then there was a loud screech like a car alarm, anomalies that made no sense. This was feeling much too much like Norman Bates’ motel in Tuscany. I knew we had to get out of here. I wasn’t going to spend a second night if I got through the first. Forget the $1200. Nine out of ten Sergios were, at heart, wonderful guys, just a little wacky and in over their heads, but I had seen the tenth one too many times in my life, and I wasn’t going to wait around to see if this was the time he snapped. There was a bit of my mad brother, who recently committed suicide, in Sergio, a bit of that hyper Goddard student who suddenly turned violent in our house and began pulling books off shelves and throwing lamps and wooden statues.
I managed to sleep from about 11:30 to 4:30, then awoke and went downstairs to write in my journal. A couple of hours later the sun began to dissolve the stars, a stunning vista over the valley. With daylight spreading, I went back to bed and took what was, in effect, a nap till 9, and then we made breakfast and packed up. Neither of us wanted to be on the hill with this couple another hour; we didn’t want to engage with them on the toilet paper, the paper towels, the dirty pots and pans, as we surely would have had to if we stayed. We didn’t want to piss Sergio off. We didn’t even want to have to think about whether we might piss him off and how to pussy-foot around him. After all, we were supposed to be paying for luxury and reassurance. Instead we were both physically and emotionally wiped out. The fallacy was the notion that you could pay good money and get happiness and safety. We were not beneficiaries of $1200 worth of “a house in Tuscany”; we strangers in a strange land or, as Kathy put it, “no more significant than a bug.”
We moved swiftly and quietly so that Sergio wouldn’t see us. We were going to ask the management for a refund, and the caretaker might be canny enough to put two and two together and confront us before we left. After all, he’d be up shit’s creek with his bosses if they came looking for evidence.
As we sped away without incident, I felt as though I were fleeing across some ancient border with angry ghosts in pursuit. Probably the ghosts were my projection, but the fact that the usually rational and normal Lindy was as interested in fleeing as me was a confirmation of something weird if not true peril.
We were now set loose in Italy without rooms. Where would we go?
September 19 (Day Seven)
In bailing from El Coppo, here was my reasoning:
We were not secure or happy there with an entire week on tap. Yes, we had committed almost $1200 but, if we were going to be miserable, it wasn’t worth holding out just because of the money. Furthermore, if we cut loose right away and cleanly, we stood the best and most honorable chance of a refund, as it would be clear that we weren’t trying to get away with freeloading but really didn’t want to be there.
Conversely, if we called the office and complained about particulars, what we faced was an attempt to fix and improve things, and it invariably would lead to a discussion of the inadequacies with Sergio, and then we would be up on the hill with him alone, having ratted on him to his employers.
Things could never really be improved because fundamental problems were built into the situation: Sergio himself and his wife, inadequate and filthy accommodations, and (worst of all) isolation such that we would have to invest a large portion of each day coming and going—and would have to be punctilious not to arrive back after dark and risk getting lost.
We had planned to use the villa as a base to visit Tuscany, but that was obviously unrealistic, the kind of plan one might make at a distance with a map but which did not fit the actual scale.
For instance, Lindy had planned to meet a friend from her recent college reunion, along with her husband and another couple at the central piazza in Siena, the next day for lunch—but we would have to be out the door by eight to make it on time, and then we would have to leave Siena by mid-afternoon to get back early enough to be assured of finding our villa before nightfall.
Il Coppo was a place to stay at all day, not a base for exploring, and we would be rushing and driving all the time if we wanted to see San Gimignano or Cinque Terra or Florence or just about any place else. They were simply too far away, and the roads were too narrow, complex, and labyrinthine. With our targeted areas of Tuscany now two, three, and four hours away by car (or car to the train station and then rail), we would either be sitting on the hillside all day with Sergio and Lawrencia or trying to cram in the local choreography of tourism.
Having reinhabited our car, we carefully followed the directions backward, correcting where necessary, and, once we hit the main drag, Via Pesciatina, road signs to Lucca became ubiquitous and we followed them. We didn’t have to deal with the autostrada, and we didn’t have to mind all the precise turn-offs. All streams flowed toward Lucca. While I was still wondering where we were and how many more kilometers we had to go, Lindy announced that we were there. The great walls of the city were right before our noses, and we had been circling them for a couple of minutes without recognition.
Lucca is really two cities, one inside the walls and one outside. The walls are massive, forty feet high and broad enough that we could see people strolling atop them, riding bikes, pushing baby carriages, jogging, sitting at tables playing chess or cards, all without a care, no sense of precipice up there at all.
According to Rick Steves’ guidebook, the once military walls contain a city park more than 2.6 miles in circumference. The complex structure represents a combination of three separate, overlapping engineering projects stretching over two thousand years. The first, a classic rectangular Roman wall, is embedded among the old stones, still showing through the mediaeval wall, which is pretty much the grid, and then the hybrid wall was incorporated in a sixteenth-century Renaissance upgrade and embellishment, which included the present hundred-foot-wide mound of dirt, reinforced and braced by brick, intended to withstand cannonballs, its top expanding into periodic military bastions and ramparts with wide slots to fire cannonballs from, now decommissioned into mini-meadows and picnic areas strewn with play equipment and crumbling medieval masonry.
After going many blocks around the wall, its membrane separating the two distinct landscapes, we found a parallel parking space and left the car. Using the guidebook before leaving Il Coppo, we had taken a remedial course on lodgings. I had memorized all five entries, ranging from the luxurious Hotel San Marco, to some bed and breakfasts with cooking facilities (we were carrying around our biologique eggs, cheese, butter, milk, and frozen ravioli which we would have to use or discard)—then at the low end, inexpensive rooms with shared toilets and showers, and last, Ostello San Frediano, the youth hostel.
We are quite willing to spring for Hotel San Marco, partly for the comfort factor and also in hopes that it will have wireless access, something we have lacked for days—but a last-minute review of Rick Steves’ listings and map revealed something that it took arriving at the outskirts of the walls to fully grasp. The San Marco is outside the wall. Second choices Albergo la Luna and La Boheme are inside it and definitely preferable because we want to be inside the mediaeval town.
We walk up to an opening in the wall, one of the many gates (portae) leading inside, and stare in. It is marginally dangerous as bikes are shooting out of it like stunt drivers down a ramp. When we do pass inside, it is totally compelling. The place is old, Roman-looking and first millennium too. It feels like assorted landscapes from my high-school history book fused together: the Empire of the Caesars, the baronies of the barbarians from the north, the omneity of the Church, Henri Pirenne’s rise of mercantilism, and the palazzos of the Renaissance. According to Rick Steves, churches were built in Lucca from the fourth century on, culminating in vintage Romanesque architecture around the twelfth century AD. At one time there were around seventy of them; many remain. The inner city—the basic ancient fortified grid, its two main imperial roads still crossing at the central market (forum), now Piazza San Michele—is in some ineffable way a Roman settlement.
During the Middle Ages, Lucca became a wealthy silk center, and in 1500, twenty-five thousand craftsmen worked three thousand looms daily. Lucca was a major banking center then too, especially for pilgrims headed to Jerusalem. At its peak, the town had 160 tall, round towers, many stories high, each containing shops, living quarters, and roof arbors under which vegetables were grown. They remain today, bridged together by subsequent construction, to make a second (or third) city atop the battlements. I have never seen living spaces go up so high relative to their diameter except in maybe something like the Empire State Building, which is at a totally different scale. he Lucca towers are like distended lighthouses or little castles, horizontal space completely transposed into vertical loft, so that the rooms are stacked and evolve upward.
The concept of space here, like that of the stilt-houses of the Mesolithic, is ancient and non-Western and takes the sky seriously in a way that skyscrapers flaunt without aesthetics or design. A city is a creature of turrets connected by walls and arched bridges, the latter forming spans over roads along which two lanes of bikes pass, going in opposite directions. The bridges are also actually apartments, many-layered stone spans constructed to make use of limited space within an already-constructed maze. One can clearly see the borderline between elegant old, stone-and-mortar towers and portals and more recent urban habitats of sheet rock and plastered wall that sit atop and between them. Here the first city meets the futuristic fractal ecocity.
When Napoleon invaded Italy in 1799, he considered Lucca a gem and gave it to his sister. Later it passed to his widow, Mary Louise, who turned the fortified wall into a city park.
We read the name on the outside of the gate near where we are parked and it is Porta San Pietro, about seven o’clock in our map’s orientation. The best lodgings inside the walls are more at one o’clock, so we will have to drive around.
It is quite thrilling to circle something so old and alive, the road occasionally meandering from the perimeter of the clock and then returning. We keep our compass and seamlessly go through Porta Santa Maria. A sign on the gate there marks a tourist office, and the building appears right before our eyes as we drive onto the pavement. We are now inside the wall. There is no organized parking anywhere but, in Italian fashion, we make a space amidst other zigzag vehicles, some with three wheels. The car will sit there unticketed for the next hour and a half, though it will always be at risk, as we see gendarmes on their bikes, leisurely notching prey, just not at the tourist office.
Four women inside are helping visitors in many languages. From our college-age girl, articulate in English, we learn first that almost everything in town is booked, not only for today but through the month. Then, seeing tourists queued up on computers at desks, I ask about wireless and am told there is none in this place. I ask again to make sure, and she double-checks with another woman who shakes her head. So email will have to wait yet a little bit longer. If we want to use their computers, she points to the sign, it is 7.5 euros per hour. But my trip journal and all my email addresses are on my laptop.
Lindy lists our hotel preferences, a location inside the wall and having wireless being priorities, and the girl offers to call to check availability, just in case there is a cancellation.
Our early optimism while summoning our courage to flee Il Coppo is slowly becoming pie in the sky. She goes through Rick Steves’ entire list plus many more not in his book but on an A list of her own; then she rings her entire B list and C list. None of these are anywhere in Rick Steves’ universe. They are all fully booked too. Forget wireless, forget a kitchen; we just need a place to put our stuff and sleep. She then dispatches Lindy to check out the nearby hostel, which cannot be phoned for reservations. Meanwhile she turns to the next page and continues on her D list, the last, where she comes up with L’arancio, about twenty minutes walk outside. We let her tentatively book a double for two nights. It is not very upscale and favored mostly by German tourists (as confirmed later by the big ZIMMER sign outside), but probably clean.
With no other options we head there. Once outside the walls and on ordinary commercial streets, we find the establishment fairly quickly. In fact, the owner or manager is standing outside, waiting for us to arrive. A little bulldog, he is gesturing to the entry of an alley that looks far too small for a car, so Lindy turns into the one just after it. He immediately begins waving and pointing, the upshot of which is that she has to back out. Then it takes a while for us to realize he wants her to go all the way back down the street, turn around, and pick the precisely only angle that could get her into his alley—maybe. We have to take that on faith; i.e., he wouldn’t be standing there if it were physically impossible, and he also wouldn’t be standing there if it was easy to see.
I get out to help direct, the L’arancia guy standing further down the alley and me right in front of the car, walking a step at a time as she moves at the same rate. It is excruciating to watch, especially a rental car. There is literally less than an inch on either side of the painted exterior of our tiny Renault. Virtually no American driver would be asked to navigate down such an alley. She edges her way, a foot or so at a time. Twice the manager throws up his hands for her to stop—he suddenly has to flip in the side-view mirrors, first the right and then the left, just in time to avoid contact with brick.
After she breaks into the clear, there is still not space to achieve a bona fide parking spot, though he expects her to make some sort of professional curve, like trying to wind the car inside a conch shell formed by several other vehicles and a wall. She won’t begin to go there so, after a moment’s urging, he gives up on her, signals okay, and leads us inside. It smells like the inside of a bottle of cleaning fluid, plenty of ammonia.
He does not speak much English, just a few words, but we gather he wants us to check in and pay, the sooner the better. We expect to see the room first. He is not terribly happy at this request, but not overly aggrieved either. He gets up from his desk, signals, and leads us out the front door. We are momentarily confused but soon catch on. The room, as it turns out, is at a different facility down the street. We follow him along a sidewalk so narrow that we have to walk single file, and cars come close enough to us at such high speed that Lindy worries I am not being careful enough and will get hit. She keeps telling me to walk closer to the wall.
After two blocks we cross the street just before the railroad tracks, enter a driveway, and around its rear, looking like a small Mexican village with chickens, cats, and laundry, is a row of minute backyards, each filled with more motley animals, gardens, junk, and landscaping than would be imagined for such small areas. The one at the very end is marked L’arancia. He opens the door with a big skeleton key. It is dark and drab, stone floors, but there is a communal kitchen, and (we learn later) not only the one guest room on the first floor that we are shown, but several upstairs. He continues straight to the first-floor room and opens it. It is somewhat bigger than its double-bed, windowless, and ammonia-rich. We take it, 55 euros.
It is amazing, we keep telling ourselves, how much happier we are in this meager setting and poverty than in our expensive villa, which is sitting empty at three times the price. We feel safe, almost cozy. We are deeper in Italy. We are among real Italians. We might even have experiences. The whole point of Italy is to be in the drama and chaos and honest mess; it is not to be merely in an idealized scenic Italian landscape. Up there on the hill, we were pampered Americans, or supposed to be. We were sitting or caged ducks on a converted estate. We were meant to drink expensive wine, cook fine meals with local sausages, eat pastries, read books, swim in the pool, and lie in the sun all day, appreciative of the chance to be in legendary Tuscany.
Il Coppo is a million miles away, conceptually, from these dank rooms with German tourists and students. Yet here is where we can begin to find our trip.
We return to the main office and pay in our last euros, only cash accepted. Now Lindy has to get the car out of that alley, and the owner is done with us, so I stand there directing. There are a few moments when I feel like simply closing my eyes and praying. It is at best an eighth of an inch on her right, and there is no maneuvering room to buy space from the sinistra. She succeeds by about an eyelash. Then, as I catch up to her on foot, I see that she is finding it impossible, with motorbikes strewn along the backyards, to make a turn into our assigned parking berth, so she leaves car parallel and abutting the wall. The owner comes by a few minutes later, views the situation, thinks about it for a moment, then wordlessly declares it acceptable.
After hauling our stuff in, we make lunch in the communal kitchen with the ravioli, tomatoes, and some bread and cheese while visiting with two English tourists, a doughty mother and her fashion-plate daughter, about sixty and thirty, respectively. The mother is a substitute teacher in Nottingham; the daughter works for a Wal-Mart branch in Cambridge. They are on vacation and are surprisingly candid about what a treat it is to be able to do this trip together despite the fact they are stressing each other majorly across the generations. They tell us what they have seen and what they are going to see.
The mother is surprisingly articulate about Lucca which she adores, calling it “shabby refinement, a place that’s left as it’s always been, just faded, faded—very peaceful and gentile. You know all they have done is replace the chariots and horse-drawn wagons with cars and bicycles.”
We rest for a half hour and set out by foot toward the fortified inner city, computer in tow. L’arancia is on Via Romana; it’s a right onto Via Tiglio, two blocks on that, a left onto a major thoroughfare, Viale Castruccio Castracani, which lined by an odd combination of banks and miscellaneous variety shops and bars.
Exchanging dollars for euros leads to a strange encounter with a revolving door. You press a button to get it started but, when Lindy got trapped in the middle, I had to press it again to get her out on the other side. We did not know what would have happened if either of us had been alone.
Another street, almost a highway, of heavy whizzing traffic, Via C. Del Prete, must be negotiated a block off-course at a light to get to Pizzale, Don Aldo Mei, and then through Porta Elisa into the inner town. Vast fields stretch out before the embankment of the wall; they are far bigger and wider than a space on which an American football game would be played and just as rectangular and flat. They are useless as a park with so many other parks, including the walls themselves, so they are as barren as that same football field on a Monday morning.
We pass a woman walking a dog at their edge; it is carrying its own plastic poop bag in its mouth. We get a whiff, as the dog looks up at us and seems almost to say, “See what she makes me do.” The walker is oblivious as the dog begins shaking the bag like a bone. The shit comes out and the dog is shaking the weightless remains. She still doesn’t notice, and we turn to focus on where we are going, Lindy pulling out our map of inner Lucca.
The tourist-center lady previously marked the key internet site on it, so we head for that. It gives us a first destination.
We are mainly walking the grid with a sense of wonder—long narrow streets, buildings hanging over them, apartments in another dimension, shops beneath like landscapes from Jacek Yerka. The modern and the medieval mesh seamlessly. It is hard to lose the sense of an enclosed stage-set or theme park here inside the walls, as though this is a transhistorical Disneyland, but it is completely real and buzzing in the Now. There is a thriving small metropolis, and these people are not costumed puppets or actors; they are carrying out social lives and doing serious commerce, ignoring or brushing aside the myriad tourists like mosquitos. For instance, the fast bikers are workers and messengers, as locals, embody the rules, and pedestrians like us elicit the almost immediate retort of a bicycle bell just by listing slightly to the left.
We go from Via Elisa to Via Del Fosso along a deep, narrow slit of canal that stretches into the distance, the still water riding low and making a perfect mirror or treetops. Like a lesson in perspective, the canal goes to its vanishing point trailing a small bridge and buildings a block or two in the distance. Navigating by the map, we leave the canal after the equivalent of many ordinary blocks, but only one Luccan mega-block, at Via Della Zecca, which should veer right to the ink dot of the Internet Point. It does. But we are jinxed; it is closed. We even try to turn the knob, but it is locked; the inside is dark. We cannot read the Italian on the outside, and the phrasebook is no help. He is either gone till 15:30 or leaving at 15:30 (it is now past 16:00); the place is either closed for reparare (repair) or—more likely—he will reappear (repiare).
We proceed around the corner, back to the tourist office, and ask for another wireless site, but they are not able to find us one. A woman calls both the Internet Point and a wireless place on the other side of town but gets no answer at either. Then she wonders why I don’t just plug my laptop into one of their outlets; everyone else does it, she says.
I go with her to the wall, and we make the connection. The ISP for Giorgio’s office in Ravenna is still in the memory, so I don’t see how it will work. I go through all sorts of procedures for fifteen minutes with her help until she throws up her arms. I continue on my own, resigned to failure. “Ethernet” leads back to the Ravenna ISP. “Direct Modem” does nothing. “Airport” shows no available wireless. Finally I try a sequence off “Location” and see a previously unnoticed box for DSL. I click, and suddenly stacked up emails are being sucked out and new ones are tumbling in!
After devouring our mail Lindy and I spend the next hour trying to find other lodgings for our next gambit, either in Siena or around Cinque Terra. We are mainly looking for an advertised organic farm for visitors that Lindy doesn’t quite remember the name of. Nothing elicits it on Yahoo or Alta Vista. Google.com keeps turning into Google.it, so we abandon it. Finally I am left on the computer while Lindy goes outside to use her cell, albeit at a dollar a minute, to try to reserve something in Siena. I send emails to the manager of the villa (refundville) and Elena and Esperide (both, thanks), then catch up on four days’ worth of American ballscores.
When Lindy returns with a seeming success in Siena, we pay for our hour and then head for a walk along the wall.
Once you ascend one of the ramps leading onto it, the sense of a wall goes away. You are in a small, exquisitely landscaped park with lots of bicycles and runners and pedestrians. It is exhilarating to look down over the ramparts; the drop is absolute, like from the fourth floor.
There are little parks and playgrounds and picnic areas within the overall park on the wall. Every now and then a thriving grove is planted in dirt that looks like clay and crushed stone, circular iron fences around some of the trees with probably a hundred thin rungs and less than an inch between them. Invariably there are stone statues of historical figures and events amid the groves and picnic areas.
We go back down the wall at a different spoke than we entered and sit at a café with cake and fizzy water for an hour, then return to the Internet Point which is now open, pay two euros for ten minutes, and check to see if there are any answers to our letters and queries about lodgings—only one from Elena who is trying to line us up with friends of her in Venice for a possible stay there.
We decide to walk back to Porta Elisa along the wall. It is a perfect time for an evening stroll. Obviously a good portion of the town and a few hundred tourists think so too.
This is fun and elating. Damn, we made it to Italy, and here we are, walking on the wall of an ancient city—the kids shout in Italian, playing tag around crumbled balustrades and barriers and kicking European footballs through Roman ruins. Even the old men and women being pushed in wheelchairs are elegant and charming. The world may be a mess, but for a moment Earth is safe and perfect and calm, and nothing like Soviet Communism or America or anyone like W. Bush and his enabler Cheney could exist.
Light falls across time in another dimension. Oddness creates texture, and texture engenders a vision of humanity bridging millennia, a vision that is felt much more keenly than it can be seen at any particular spot or site. It is the collective profundity of all the spots and sites, the charm and attention generated by what has happened for so long everywhere, anywhere at all. Even what is not obviously constructed and cared for by craftspeople is maintained by their descendants with an evident, perhaps even carefree reverence. Even what is in disrepair has fallen apart wabi-sabi without vulgarity or ugliness. These are merely conceptual-art assemblages at a historical scale. And that even includes Lucca’s modern constructions and deconstructions.
Later we set out from our room for dinner at a restaurant recommended by the Tourist Center. We walk through the night, 8:00, but it seems safe—a few dead zones near L’arrancia, but mostly crowded and bustling. We go straight down Via Elisa and find the place at once, Orte Via Elisa. It is minimally luxurious without being overwrought. The food seems thoughtful, the menu with English interlinear (we laugh at one dish described as “packed with holy wine”). The young waiter speaks fluent English and brings a big vase of bread with plates of extra virgin olive oil. We share a simple pizza and then each get spinach dishes, mine with polenta, Lindy’s with roast pork. We are too full for dessert, but the waiter brings us a free platter of cookies. The total cost is 28 euros plus a tip—about 42 American dollars.
Afterwards we walk in the dwindling crowds along Elisa, past the open fields below the walls where “ignorant armies” might have once fought by night—no, certainly fought by night just a short out-breath of the cosmos ago. They are mysterious and threatening in the dark, but it is unclear whether the danger is robbers or ghosts. It is an awfully big flat silence and stillness to lie there uninvestigated in the dark.
Then we hasten down unprotected avenues outside the wall back to L’arancia.
From the time we checked into our room, in fact all through lunch with the English ladies and a brief rest, L’arnacia was quiet, its loudest noises a cat fight and a rooster. At the time we left for our dinner, however, shockingly the sound of evening traffic outside the makeshift eggshell far wall of our room, a kind of haphazardly covered window, was thundering buffalo with the occasional wasp. The wall actually resonated like a drum set, and its integrity seemed to threaten collapse with every car. Remember how narrow that street is!
Now, thank goodness, it is silent. The room is airless and hot, but we turn on the fan and are at peace, our transformation from Il Coppo complete.
In the morning we hear back by email in the morning from the woman in charge of the abandoned villa; she says that she is shocked by our experience. No one, she adds, has ever found a villa of her lacking or dirty before, and everyone has absolutely loved Sergio and his charming wife.
All I can think is that she is fibbing or her prior foreigners were so up for the mystique of “a house in Tuscany” that they were charmed by everything and considered the lapses and flaws rustic or colorful. Perhaps Sergio and Laurencia are like Renaissance Fair performers or waiters at those theater clubs who put on shows for guests. Perhaps they were doing some sort of “peasant primitivo, innocent savage” clown routine that most people expected and applauded: “What lovely natives, so full of artless joy, so unruined, always dancing with the joy of life.”
To my mind, however, the operant routine was more “the emperor’s new clothes,” with the “house in Tuscany” cast as the emperor. You know how it goes—the emperor is marching down the street naked, but everyone hears everyone else exclaiming how beautiful the dude’s outfit is, and no one wants to be shamed or embarrassed, so while everyone sees him naked, everyone still piles on superlatives so as not to play the fool. Then a child suddenly cries, “I don’t get it. The emperor is bareass. There are no clothes.”
If you haven’t heard it before, take it from me. Approach villas in Tuscany with great caution. Il Coppo certainly is one giant scam!
In any case the villa’s manager said that, of course we would be reimbursed, and she asked for our American address. Grazie, indeed! Now let’s see if the check actually comes.
Some additional travel tips from our experience: don’t book anywhere in advance for a whole week or, in fact, for more than a day or two, sight unseen, unless you have reason for absolute confidence (a trusted advance scout, etc.). Pure reputation or spectacular pictures are not enough; they can be rigged. Also don’t book in the countryside unless you know how far you are, in terms of traveling time, from key places you want to go, also how isolated you will be and what access you will have to other people for aid, plus who they are (more or less), and whether you can communicate happily with them. Avoid prepackaged experiences. Make your own. Don’t be Americans on holiday.
September 20 (Day Eight)
Lucca
walls that are no longer walls but parks,
we zip along your ramparts on bikes rented from an Indian named Rai,
an early autumn breeze
blowing leaves across our path,
warm and wistful.
It is Rome, and it is the fall of Rome.
It is the Middle Ages and it is the arrival of Napoleon.
Bricks and stone and dirt have been heaped
and mortared together, stray battlements, leftover cisterns become meadows, barbecue pits where soldiers bivouacked,
a highway runs where the invading armies amassed before the fortifications.
Being on a wall is like no other topos, no familiar
human geography. The shape of reality has changed, grass simply ends, drops ninety degrees
to plains of battle below that
stretch in all directions in a kind of contained vastness, bare now except for a tree or football post, and
birds who would be crows except for white patches on their wings.
Circling Lucca on a bike is like flying backwards on the face of a clock
that is counting both forwards and backwards, faster but
mostly more slowly for the old people and babies. Down below are houses, parapets, the pond and fields of the botanical gardens, statues and churches and towers, all the intricate catacombing of viae and piazzas and piazzales and canals,
narrow alleys and open mercados like starbursts, apartments connecting medieval torres, over arches, connecting like a child’s leggo toy, with
every imaginable combination of shape and angle,
to join the original infrastructure in new patterns.
Lucca is the unconscious dream of unbroken habitation in this spot, as new constructions swallow the shapes and deeper morphologies of old ones that once did the same to their predecessors, so that now urbanization is in total florescence, blooming like a lush garden, its flowers made of stone and stucco, varying shades of powder blue, lime green, orange tan, umber, pink,
dinosaur churches rising above it all into the bright blue and cumulus
Italian sky.
Riding bikes inside the city, one encounters
the miniaturization of space itself. Lucca is a perfect fractal environment,
for every angle and cranny has been used, every dead end thwarted by a spiral or slot, every gap filled or left aesthetically between emergent morphologies.
The architectural use of space climbs upward like a spider’s dream of being human, for where catacombs have been left too narrow for modernity, structures and spires still ascend, making a city of artificial caverns, an exquisite one-of-a-kind maze that reads from within like a journey through every possible angle and vista, a repertoire of poetics of stone and light and time.
Even Lucca’s sky is an embroidery of apartments on bridges, linked one by one by one in a daisy chain above the city, winding around its intrinsic invisible architecture.
Oh, Rome, your etheric remains tell us more who you were than the actual ruins, as the semes of Cicero sound within those Italian trills.
From above, from the walls, Lucca looks simple, a compact mediaeval Roman city condensed into the labyrinth of an ancient parchment. The crow flies over Lucca
along every diameter in no time at all, a minute or less,
as though what is below is stuffed into a beehive and synopsized by postcards of Roman ruins.
It is down in the infrastructure, among the irregular megaliths
that Lucca takes shape,
for every human experience is happening as if this were Brooklyn,
a more compact Brooklyn with less open space and exponentially more interstices,
but still hiding its spaces well so that their phenomenology remains.
A wild field with tree-swings behind a façade of apartments,
visible for a fraction through a stone gate.
There are no rectangles, as lines fly down the face of the clock
into hallways opening onto concourses that radiate other lines.
No one has stuffed Lucca with habitats; Lucca has swallowed and regurgitated itself, over and over:
long fashionable, toney strips like Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive
are crammed into the underbelly of medieval towers.
Up to their knees they are shops of jewelry, leathers, designer clothes, silver, Italian name brands of appliance and gadget.
Above the knees mediaeval bridges and parapets house families, generations, women dressing for work.
One wings down long narrow alleys among streams of bikers coming both ways, a wonder that no one crashes or is hurt (certainly no one is wearing a helmet). Rightful populace and day tourists are out on bikes, for that is the only way to make hay through this intricacy,
the cars are intruders, out of scale, tanks bullying through.
Virtually no alley is sealed by a dead end. At the end of every via is a way out, a blind crack of dusk, opening through the eye of the needle back into day, piles of stones ascending as they wind like rivers to assignations of horizons, each dark black cul de sac a notch to the left or right away from silver-blue daylight,
Suddenly an unexpected piazza, Sant’ale Sandro or the Cittadella, a gelato stand, two scoops limon, one each pistachio and hazel nut, or two each strawberry and raspberry, backs to the statue, sucking the flavored ice on little plastic spoonlike sticks, our bikes slightly disturbing the flow,
tourists streaming by, teenagers ragging and necking and generally kibbitzing.
Lucca, city of birds, city of catacombs
city of cobblestone and twelfth-century towers
city wrapped over caves and eternities, satellite dishes and aerials atop sanctified stone,
children protected within moats of grandfathers,
city of flying bridges and stone arches,
of cobblers and masons,
your light is trapped in a million chambers at exquisite vectors. Outdoors
on those curving viae, previously unknown shades of solar wind and shadow blend to reveal eclipses of daylight, exquisite luminosities and opacities, as if pure stone were mirrors, bricks a kind of translucent glass.
Lucca is ochre and salmon, cerulean and blue-green.
Lucca whose entire phenomenology is “inside,” a nation within an egg that, even after cracking its own shell and reaching maturity, senility,
retains a sense of living inside a hollowed-out, intricately chiseled young stone chestnut.
Lucca, bosom of the grandmothers, child of both
the first Christ, the real one, and
all the Christs that follow.
Lucca primitivo, where money and silk trade have just been invented,
are being born every day in the common market of a Roman barony, a fiefdom qua exurban megapolis plantation Europa, “Israele stato terrorista” now scrawled on your walls with graffiti tags and posters of Vivaldi and Puccini.
Lucca, your souvenir shops are flies, your wall is a sleeping lion, a dormant mound that children mime on.
Your towers and their bridges are so high and steep, the curves so absolute, they defy conventional avenues
that each vista arises as if from nowhere and explodes in a crescendo, unexpected, mysterious,
and filled with people, for this is an adiabatic equation in which an unreckonable number of animals have been crammed and are in motion with seemingly infinite space for everyone because tunnels lie within tunnels, parabolas inside parabolas, spirals deprogramming other spirals, and modern structures continue to interrogate new meanings of ancient ones, free energy flowing from molecular disequilibrium.
Take the Piazza Anfitheatro. You’d think it was an ordinary ruins of a Roman stadium,
but masons and carpenters and architects,
like worker ants,
have hollowed it out such that the entire stands is now enclosed as swish housing, and the old playing field is a piazza with shops and statues and fountains. All that remains of the amphitheater are its shape and some of its materials, crumbling on the outside. The footprint has been completely transposed into a modern neighborhood.
We glide from Via Santa Croce to Via Roma to Piazza San Michele throbbing with activity,
adjacent to the tree-lined quiet spaciousness of Piazza Napoleone, its castle and benches,
where gentleman meet as evening falls,
light turning violet and then ink blue, as the bikes slow and
the candles on tables of outdoor restaurants sparkle, and Lucca descends into another night among thousands of years, humans keeping up the appearance, scrubbing the coat, repairing the chinks, replacing the infrastructure, skimming the commerce, (a cat darting), giving way to other generations, while the Roman archetype sits in its core, continuing to flower and shape consciousness, to welcome birds and redirect winds, continuing to buffet the city against cannonballs that are now made not of iron but numbers, rates, and radiations, such that events far, far away, in China or Iraq say, ripple through Lucca, through most cities of Holocene Earth.
But Lucca is rooted so deep in the Roman imperial ground that
those who live here have an invisible protection from the crasser franchised aspects of modernity that
have otherwise enveloped them like an invisible cloud of gnats
and converted every Rome (every Mumbai and Istanbul and Cairo too) to its uses.
From the walls, it is still the Middle Ages, still the city-state of Lucca, held briefly by Pisa; it is still a bridge between Caesar and Charlemagne, between Da Vinci and Napoleon, Pliny and Mussolini, Ovid and Tony Soprano, even at the Internet Point, Mondo Chiocciola, outside which women line up to fill jugs and plastic water bottles from the fountain, in fact are filling them from such fountains all over town.
September 21 (Day Nine)
I am writing these notes in the citron glow of dawn, sitting on the tiny balcony (about 2.5 by 4 feet) of our room on the third floor of the old nunnery at the Church of San Domenica, Siena, a booking that Lindy made on her cell from outside the tourist office in Lucca on the advice of Rick Steves—he called it one of the best bargains in all of Italy. The Church rents inexpensive rooms in an alcove astride the giant cathedral.
I am up early because I have to move our car from our parking place by the Stadio before 8:00, and it is a half-hour hike to there, presuming I don’t get lost. After unloading our suitcases and backpacks yesterday at the back stairs of the nunnery, we set out in the car with advice from the concierge on how to park legally in Siena yet for free. We can’t stay alongside the nunnery despite the plethora of good spaces because car licenses are photographed by a fixed camera and the only ones not ticketed immediately are those allotted a half hour by the Church to check in. If the plates show up in a second photograph, those cars get ticketed too.
After some aimless wandering with no capacity to read complicated street signs or know if we were getting closer or farther from the vague area described as “you can’t miss it” by the concierge, Lindy pulled over suddenly, got out, and hailed a young man on the other side of the street, walking briskly enough that I doubted he wanted to be disturbed. I was likewise dubious that she could communicate the concept “where is free parking?” unless he spoke English. Yet, amazingly, with virtually no Inglese, he got the idea at once and, after trying to direct us with too many gestures to interpret with certainty, he apparently offered to give us his parking spot, to which he was headed anyway, if we would drive him to it. This was not America.
He hopped in the back seat and, as Lindy moved hesitantly into traffic, he immediately urged her to go, go, go, now, pronto, through a crowded intersection. I am not sure what he was saying, but it was probably, from his waves and intonations, something like, ‘You’ve got the right of way, ma’am; floor it.’
It was maybe not the best match of driver and guide, kind of a vicarious view of the mind of the Italian driver: fill space, get there before anyone else does, ignore pedestrians, presume a light is still green for another five seconds after it changes and, the main one: you can always fit. His parking space was in a row of parallel cars facing a park below the stadium. He zipped out quickly, saluted us, and we dashed in to his tight berth under a giant tree. But, as we were walking away, we happened to check out the street sign with the phrase books and realized that “venerdi” was sadly the one day we didn’t want it to be. The car had to be moved early Friday morning.
The amazing thing about my situation is that I am working on a computer on a ledge suspended in a mediaeval city. Immediately beyond my perch are roofs of humped tile (shingled half pipes in channels), brown-red, corroded, covered with pigeon shit, and sloped down toward me. Other such roofs rise and fall in the skyline of the near distance, and then there is a gap, perhaps a road (I can’t see down past the irregular vista of roofs) and, ascending above its interruption, sit some yellowed tan stone buildings shaped like Iroquois lodges. Emerging from their level, the gigantic façade of the entire old city ascends—connected rows of taller than wide rectangular houses, winding almost 240 degrees around me, sloping down in both directions as if the highest point in old Siena were the top of a cone, making it a very compact hierarchical, or heavenly, city.
The houses are intricately set into their grid, lines of laundry strung huge distances between them; little trees, gardens, planters filled with flowers, railings, flags, cupola-like chimneys, and innumerable other artifacts and counter-intuitive structures and angles between structures, saturating and dotting the space to complicate it beyond my capacity to render. This is what travel is—the complexity and embedding beyond explanation or reference.
At the base of the connected rows, filling the area between the yellowish stone cabins and the elevated façade of the city, are eroded and crumbling walls with trees growing in them and among them as well as out of them, and on top of them. The seamless rows of buildings within the upper urbanization—really one long inhabited wall of irregular height and varying relief—are (counting their tiers of windows) six or seven stories high, with tiled roofs like the ones in the foreground. They are discolored tan, stone with a skin disease, their shells wearing through an outer wall in patches to reveal fasciae of brick. Their windows, mostly three, sometimes four of them, across, are each also much taller than wide, hence ideogrammatically depict this as a scene in a fairy tale or an alien aesthetic. Only four among the hundred or so portals I see are lit at this premature hour.
Above it all, crowning the city in such a way as to make the lower roofs a staircase, is an immense cathedral-like city hall, the Duomo, like the queen piece on a chessboard, a tall ornate rectangularized turret soaring above a huge dome peaked with a tinier round colonnaded turret just in front of it. The higher turret is marked by four towers that I can see, a fifth hidden squarely behind the large tricuspid central one from the pointed tip of which a thin Cross rises, capping the entire edifice and the skyline as well: the mast of the city as it sails through morning dross. These turrets and their tower are horizontally striped in alternating dark and light bands and colonnaded at four different levels in opposing straight and round series, which gives a very crisp heraldic appearance. The Duomo is a perfect rotunda and monument rising like the Moon above the charming but eroded archaeology of a working secular city.
The overall immensity includes the greater-than-three dimensionality of this vista. Space is concentrated, packed, cultivated, and detailed at so many levels of depth and height that it is realer than real. I am not only on a ledge within a holographic mediaeval panorama; I am suspended in it as though in a balloon floating through hyperspace. The reality is fashioned in stone and it is final; it is not a picture. It is dense and far more intricate than my description or any description, like being in a virtual replica of the late Middle Ages—concrete, bumpy, rugged, exquisitely and granularly textured, interrogated by waxing pink and pale gold luminosity of a Sun beginning to suffuse a slumbering world. It vibrates with an utterness of space in time.
I am reminded of lines from a poem that my friend Chuck Stein wrote in the sixties when we were both so much younger. It seems not entirely coincidental that he too was on a trip to Italy. I memorized his lines back then from thinking them so often: “From this point of view—/is the widest of that kind of view/I ever saw, down far left/and far right and out also/to where hills you can just see in the haze/cut if off….”
And then the apotheosis, for me at Siena now (as for him at Assissi then):
“The world (or a world)/is complete//by that I mean/there is no other/world/from this vantage but/where the hills cut the scene off/is no end of it there/are no towns/to the west of those mountains/imaginable voids of darkness/black gulfs of myth where anything is….”
When I began sitting here thirty minutes ago, the world was almost dark—black magenta—and the sound both near and far was of pigeons cooing on the rooftops, an occasional metallic clank of something falling, hitting and echoing. Now, as the curtain grows lighter, the birds are taking flight, and the sound is of their wings. With each circuit of acrobatic flying, more pigeons join the flock, the rumble of beating wings getting louder and more drumlike, while the visual wave grows more complex like a billowing moiré.
Now there are hundreds of them, and their sound thumps with muted rhythmic thunder. As layers of birds awake and peel into the flock, the procession rises and falls, swoops and twists, turning left and right, deriving new variations on an overall pattern of what could be no less than a communal dance to the dawn.
These birds are praying, praying while flying, praying by flying.
The undulating stream is like no sunrise I have ever seen. It is immense and rhythmic itself, inalterable and intelligent, chaotic and cohesive. The wave thickens and complicates every few seconds, as more birds join. The air is littered with their falling feathers like the first flakes of a snowstorm, a few delicate crystals tumbling just past me on the balcony.
7:00 on the dot. A sudden clanging of bells grows to a deafening crescendo that matches the fortissimo of the pigeons. Any birds that were still asleep are now jolted by the zealous chiming and join their species parade.
This is the climax of the dance. Thousands of them thunder in one giant ceremonial wave that contains two or three lesser sinusoidal subpatterns meeting and separating in elegant counterpoints. The sound is almost terrifying, like a jet. That so many of them can be aloft in a single, multidirectional pattern at the same time—Lindy remarks as she gets up to see what the fracas is—without bumping into one another is a remarkable feat in itself. This is an Olympic display of synchronized flying.
Rewriting this account some six weeks later, I check out Chuck’s original poem and am astonished to find that its forgotten second half is filled with “birds/in great numbers/flying in complex circles/and great haste…/when you look up/from the black/gulfs above, behind/old buildings/that make streets/narrow and the/bird flocks seem/to fly all the faster.//God, there are/hundreds, thousands/of them all/at different speeds/some in small/groups, in low/sweeping arches, others/cutting fast/and singly, above/against the blue/against the others’/slow motion.//I mean/there really is no other world/than that at hand/or way of approach out/of the present/more than a deepening….”
Amen.
When the bells stop, the birds end their dance abruptly and roost, vanishing almost entirely except for a few enthusiastic stragglers in extracurricular circuits, looking now like ordinary avian flight about Siena. They settle in a matter of seconds. The sound has settled too, comprising merely other species of birds heralding sunrise by chirping in the distance, an occasional nearby coo.
Some observations
Lucca, it turns out, is a variation on a theme. Having now also seen San Gimignano and Siena, I realize that many older Italian cities—unlike Ravenna, Bologna, Firenze, Torino—stand as continuous stone façades of towering individual units, fine apartments set atop shops that are cut deep into the stone like neon gems in gopher holes along long, narrow irregularly curving rows. In the States the margins and sometimes brief gaps between stone buildings seem classificatory. Here they are momentary warrens in the massiveness of time.
Siena is larger, more spacious, and solider, also hillier than Lucca, which is basically flat and compact. Lucca’s wall is now clearly what distinguishes it, the geography within its rind coalescing in a delicately carved phenomenology like a city set in a glass ball by miniature chisels and awls.
By contrast, Siena feels like a grid blown volcanically into a nautilus shell wrapped into a hill. When I strode adventurously into its catacombs alone last night, I found myself in a maze of pedestrian-packed tunnel-like streets that ultimately wound into and out of a huge central plaza, El Campo. Like unpredictable concentric arcs of an intracellular matrix, they were baffling in their warp. It took me twenty minutes to reach the giant round piazza on the map. I was scouting for three things while Lindy rested: a laundromat, a wireless point, and a restaurant. I found walking in the city like being in a giant underground mall or the sloped tiers of a stadium. Outdoors felt like indoors, so high were the walls of apartments and shops and so near to each other across each via, leaving but a narrow and opaque thoroughfare.
After failing to find any of the three venues in a half hour—in fact mostly mesmerized by the scenery while trying to rectify streets names with designations on the map—I got lost coming back out of the labyrinth at an unexpected spot, so I wandered confused among external streets of the contemporary city that surrounds old Siena. As nothing looked familiar and I couldn’t sight the Church where our room was located, I grew a bit frantic and had to ask many non-English speakers the way, not too successfully at first. Finally I developed a short code to let them know my plight: “Church San Dominico,” while looking about and pointing confusedly. That usually got a smile and some advice. I finally made it into a little obscure alley that led down into another tight alley that led around a corner to another, to the gates of the nunnery.
San Gimignano was its own event, a small hill-town we detoured some twelve kilometers to visit, about two-thirds of the way between Firenze and Siena. Lindy had it on her “A” list, and I didn’t read Rick Steves till we were almost there. His opening line was not exactly an endorsement. He called it “a perfectly preserved tourist trap” and “a zoo during the daytime” when tourists far outnumber locals.
From a distance we could see that we were in trouble. The main landmarks were tourist buses and people flowing in clockwise and counterclockwise hordes like ants. At close approach, we found the obvious: no parking in the nearby lots. We had to deal with a lot 500 meters downhill, figure out its location code and payment method, and trek back. Almost at once we were in crowds as if headed to a football match. The closer we got, the thicker the mob became, mostly Italian spoken, occasional English, German, and other tongues. There were as many people talking into cells as to each other.
The old city itself was crammed like, yes, a theme park or old Western set opened to visitors. We fell into a slowly moving crowd down the main street. Souvenir shops and little museums peeked out everywhere, including a Museo del Torture, ambiguously camp or serious machines and monsters gracing its exterior.
It felt as though this poor venerable city had survived centuries only to be hollowed out by termites, at least psychically, and nothing was left except the beautifully architected stone façade.
On side streets, though, one had a sense of actual domicile—men with brooms, women perched on stoops—but they too seemed like shades in a ghost town, a few old-timers outside saloons and shops.
Total dietary surrender: We got some horrid slices of doughy reheated pizza at the only establishment that wasn’t too packed with tourists to wedge in.
The best moment was the scenic view leaving town, as landscapes of tiered farms, dark rows of crops, tall thin trees, and wooded copses rolled across the distance, an incredible living painting of Italian farmland in patterns like abstract flags. From a long-ago-urbanized hill, the cultivated valley rose and sank as it bloomed 360 degrees to distant hills. One could stand at any number of posts and scan the details and then the whole canvas like a Renaissance vista of prosperity and timelessness. A minor scab peeling off puew verdure, a crisp thin road cut itself, between tight-rowed crops on one side, orchards on the other.
Italians cultivate the tallest, thinnest dark green trees I have ever seen. They ascend in little groves or stand alone. Could these bear true fruits? Or are they ornamental? Anywhere but not everywhere, in the vast perspective they stand out like needles, or Christmas trees distorted by replication, and they are far blacker than anything else, so they mark space in a cairnlike way. In fact, like everything else in this oil, they are a variation of green, merely the darkest in a spectrum from the ochre bushes in the foreground to fields, both wild and planted, of every shade from light to dark green, and not in any continuous pallet but scattered about a green color wheel.
And the whole, as randomly as it is viewed from any perspective—hilly, alternately wild and domestic, sectored and rambling, houses tucked behind trees, woods subtending farms, yellow vegetation dipping below shamrock and emerald green—always gives the appearance of artistic brush strokes, as though each detail of landscape was put there by a maestro in a balanced harmony generated by an algebraic formula it would take lifetimes to solve.
Italian distances on road signs are startlingly inconsistent. En route to Siena, we hit a roundabout marked 12 kilometers, 11 while exiting it, then 10 a hundred meters further. Wow, we’d be there in no time! After driving maybe three or four kilometers, I next saw a sign for Siena 12. For the next four kilometers, signs varied from Sienna 12 to Sienna 10, going back and forth but never below 10. Then a few meters past a Siena 12 was a Siena 9, and soon a Siena 6.
The moment you don’t know where you are and don’t see a reassuring sign, stop and ask. It is better than getting forging into a deteriorating kōan. Yes, it will be awkward, and people may shake their heads at your English. A few may walk away as if you were bringing leprosy to Italy (or George W. Bush). But someone, whether possessed of a tad of English or even no English, will eventually commit themselves, heart and soul, to getting you where you’re going. They will jabber away in Italian, pointing, trying out words and syllables, listening to your own attempts at intelligibility, repeating Italian phrases and new pantomime, sincerely pleading, until finally you and they agree on a series of hand symbols, a sequence of turns to the left and right indicated by fingers. (And then you also might just get lucky and hit upon an English speaker, though that crops up less and less as things get more rural.)
Lindy had to ask twice around Firenze and three times between San Gimignano and Siena, as the road either split without signs or offered contradictory opinions. A young man at a bland white-cement establishment marked Maggi Giulio, Aria Compressa, Apparecchiature per Verniciatura, took almost five minutes to arrive at a course for us, but it worked.
The ugly American is alive and well and everywhere, more sophisticated perhaps these days than when his species was first identified, not as blatantly yokel, but just as ugly, maybe even uglier for being so much less innocently bumptious and disingenuous. I do see that there are ugly Italians and ugly Germans too, but at least they are novel specimens, more exotic, crude in a brutish sort of way. Americans smile like nightshade and greet each other like dogs in heat.
The previous evening in Lucca, sitting at our outdoor dinner table, an obscure alleyway, Osteria Neni off Via Beecheria, in candlelit calm not long after dusk, being the only patrons then, I looked up to the abrupt clatter and bustle of two American couples being seated next to us. I knew their origin at once because the intense crewcut guy’s introduction to the waitress was “Howdy, how do you do this evening!” It wasn’t badly intended, just narcissistic, vain, and completely out of cadence and volume for the scene.
After alighting there, they talked so loud that I overheard everything. It was a banal, disgusting, noblesse oblige conversation about portfolios, real-estate prices, and Jews. It became clear that they had met during the day and decided to dine together, a spontaneous bonding rite for which they kept congratulating themselves. The crewcut guy and his Italian or Mexican wife were from suburban Colorado; their companions had traveled from Salt Lake. The putative Mormon guy was older and more pontifical, seizing the last word on everything in a kind of faux restrained professorial voice; his wife tended to second him in a saccharine way.
I shouldn’t have been amazed that they were so avidly, aggressively, and sportingly pro-Bush and pro-War, as they talked knowingly, as if cognoscenti, chuckling understandingly about the plebes who didn’t understand complex geopolitical affairs, or the obvious rule of the jungle out there in the real world—good that we had an unshakable, hardass leader who got it. They also competed n telling anti-Semitic jokes about rabbis and Rosenblatts—Jews and wealth and Hollywood—that (the Salt Lake contingent agreed) clashed with their leader’s neo-con pro-Israel foreign policy but suited their own patina of fascism and nouveau-riche, pseudo-intellectual jive.
What was most dismaying was the smugness of their presence, the fact that they occupied so much space in this soft town while imagining themselves cool, in fact cooler than cool, and, if not vested spies or covert operatives, at least polite, discreet company for the immediate universe.
The next night in Siena at La Campane, on an outdoor terrace raised above a sidestreet, we sat in a much denser orchestra of American speech offering different variations of the same range of topics, particularly the favored one of portfolios and real estate. I came to think of these people as “Bush tax break” tourists, barbarians with too much disposable wealth for even their own good. Their boastful confidence and covert disdain and sarcasm regarding all things foreign were startling. They were exploring Europe to damn it or damn it with guardedly faint praise, judge, collect experiences among natives, colonize, be appreciators of their own finer sensibility and discernment, and triumph over the peripheral and disembodied things they were supposedly honoring by their presence and cash.
As strangers began to greet and share speech across tables, I realized that what was driving this comradely banter was a contest of amassing plazas, monuments, and cities like commodities: “trophy tourism.” Have you done Florence yet? Have you been to Cinque Terra? From there, they wage specific items, museums, and hotels within these regions. They compare notes like Lewis and Clark counting their rivers and indigenous villages. Admittedly it was affably competitive, if superficial, scored by the same sorts of lifeless and automatic comments over and over, as if an elaborate bioelectric puppetry with a scoring device like an invisible pinball machine ringing up “hits.” No individual phenomenologies were painted, only packaged events like stamps on a passport. When a coup was duly counted and circled the table, they moved on.
And then there is the Rick Steve factor: It was Rick Steves who recommended La Compane, and in the restaurant I could see six Rick Steves’ Italy being brandished or sitting on tables, although we are the only bums with a date 2004 edition. Even the din was punctuated with frequent genuflections of his name—RickSteves, saint of travelers.
Since Rick Steves is also the one who recommended the nunnery at San Dominica, his name is heard often within the halls of the dormitory. One couple whispered it to us at the iron gates where guests are buzzed in and out, “Did you find this in Rick Steves’?”
When I affirmed we did, the whisper got even softer, as though the walls were bugged: “I’m going to complain to him. They make the beds jere and little else.”
As it turned out, they didn’t make the beds. But what were they expecting for 60 euros at a monastery with a symphonic dawn pigeon dance for free? Perhaps they should go try our abandoned villa.
What they don’t give, at most Italian establishments, is a bar of soap. I carry a nice one from a biologique shop in Lucca. But Rick Steves, to my knowledge, gives no heads-up about this odd local custom—BYOS.
In every part of Tuscany we have been to, little rubbery lizards, very warty and variegated red and brown, dash from the undergrowth onto pavement, skitter and stop, look about like startled rabbits (“where did all these fucking assholes come from?”), then return. Whether accurate or not, two words are shaken loose in me by them: “skink” and “Escher.”
On ending a conversation or taking leave in Italy: it seems that there are four choices.
Ciao is a friendly particle, a semi-semantic syllable like a check digit to segue one from scene to another with the least resistance. It is not so much a word as a polite mew or brief growl with a variety of possible meanings and nuances, depending on its context and tone and how you feel about its recipient when delivering it.
Arrivederci is a big, formal goodbye that, even when used correctly in context. It always seems slightly comical to me, from all the cutting up we did in grade school around Donald Duck’s use of this ridiculously grand appellation (at least for a duck), or as if what is really being referenced is Tony Bennett singing kitsch Italiano.
Buongiorno is a nice “good day” and often precedes prego, which adds a punctuation mark of sincerity to it.
Prego is full of nuances, as noted earlier, from heartfelt and warm to sarcastic and belittling, and is a useful appellative, far more subtle and rich than the phrasebook does justice to by translating it as “you’re welcome.” Surely the railroad conductor did not mean, “You’re welcome, you’re welcome,” as he shooed us out of first class. He meant something more like, “You’re not welcome, you’re not welcome; pray go.”
Everything takes longer here than you imagine it will, much longer. If we had awakened in Berkeley with the goal of driving to Santa Cruz, we would have gotten there by one in the afternoon at the worst. The journey from Lucca to Siena, while equivalent in length, was three times as long. First of all, it was noon by the time we got out of Lucca after gathering our stuff at our room, easing out of our parking space by backing and forwarding with excruciating care between tightly surveyed yards, visiting the Internet Point for one last hit of email, filling a bottle with water from the mouth of a statue at a fountain (clean and straight from the mountains, I am told), buying soap, snagging a small loaf of ciabatta for nibbling, and finally sitting with some tea and croissants at an outdoor café.
Then, after an elating launch onto the autostrada, some great English/Italian political rap serenading our escapade on the radio, we got terribly lost around Firenze and did not pick up the road south before doubling back twice, asking directions of several people at a gas station, crossing four lines of traffic in fifty feet to make a U-turn (good going, Lindy!), then suffering long periods of doubt and worry as to whether we were on the right road (A1 toward Roma) after all.
The road signs, as noted, are not consistent. Trying to match directions from a marginal speaker of English with both the road map and conflicting verbal directions (say from a different stranger with more or less English, or the tourist office in Lucca), all at dear speed as if time were not just money but platinum and gold, leads to constant worry and second-guessing. In fact, every guess is the mother of second guesses.
It was difficult to begin with to take a route to Siena that required almost going to Florence and then turning south, but it was recommended by the Lucca tourist office. We added a few hours to the journey by visiting San Gimignano along the way. We got lost twice trying to stay on the back road to Siena through farmland and small towns; then got very, very lost wandering around the outskirts and catacombs of new Siena, looking for San Dominica. I was the one driving by then and, after committing a terrifying U-turn through the eye of a needle in traffic that had Lindy demanding an immediate change of driver (but I complained that it was her insistence I go in the wrong direction against my better judgment that necessitated the turn), I finally committed to following a football sign for the Stadio as per Rick Steves (a glyph of a ball with cartoon arc around it).
It is a wonder that marriages survive driving in foreign countries. It is also amazing that people (both of us two, for instance) feel they have a sense of direction and an axe to grind when totally lost in places they have never been: e.g. “this has to be that way.” The thing that got us there in the end was the towering presence of San Domenica itself, allowing us to aim as if piloting a boat. The actual sequence of minor streets was somewhat random. We finally arrived at 6:30.
Then I made my solo foray into the city, the afore-mentioned descent down dark alleys into interstices. It was an arduous trek. I was carrying a full backpack of laundry and the laptop over my shoulder, along networks of streets, some of the narrower ones virtually tunnels, finally to El Campo. I hastened down the ramp into it and found myself on a vast stone plaza formed by a circumference of buildings, so huge that the ground-floor restaurants with their sprawling outdoor dining areas around one sector of the unlit center seemed only a thin layer of light, flickering candles on the plaza’s corona. Yet all those people dining in so many adjacent establishments created a continuous clatter (glass and metal) and a din (multilingual).
The streets of the old city are too small for traffic. They are not even one lane, but cars, vans, trucks, and buses plunge down them continually, meaning that you have to be constantly on the lookout and hug the wall. The allowable margin for not getting hit is not even close to what would be tolerable in the States. You almost get hit every time, but drivers have mastered speed and acuity, and though I am sure accidents occur, they are far fewer than the laws of physics and Murphy’s Law would suggest. Operators have amazing aim for the speeds at which things are developing. In fact, “narrow” is the operative word for everything in Italy, at least having to do with streets and vehicles, either within small towns or on the autostradas and smaller superstradas.
In general—vis a vis the use and meaning of space and the application of artisanry to it in the most primal and fundamental sense—more is packed into less here, much more, so life feels intense and communal and much fuller. Also it is cozy and comforting. There is not as much wasted existential landscape to get alienated in and from as in the States where everyone is pushed apart into guarded or waged individualism. Italy doesn’t have enough transparent and wasted room to waste, peer through, or yearn across subconsciously. Here everything is at hand and happening now, cars especially, so you have to react and be engaged. With high density, haste of motion, sculpted morphology, generally graceful erosion of very solid structures, and unbroken serial intimacies, it’s harder for people to get recreationally sociopathic or intransigently churlish. This is an intrinsically less psychotic and neurotic geography. It has its problems, but they are not ones, for the most part, of individuals occasionally going missing in social space and coming back with a gun.
On our trip back into old Siena together, it was already almost 9:00, a normal dining hour in Italy, especially with days lengthened by siestas. It took back-and-forth wandering in various alleys near El Campo to find La Campane off Villa de Citta. The map in Rick Steves was synopsized and distorted in such a way that it was difficult to apply it to three-dimensional streets and junctures, as if a Baedeker to a tessaract. I was walking around El Campo, using reading glasses to see the addresses in the dark, then on his page, and then long-distance ones to look up at the street signs on the corners of buildings. Only when we gave up on El Campo and the streets entering it and asked proprietors of stores did we gradually get directed toward a fairly obscure spot. In Rich Steves’, the mapquesting was made to seem simpler than it was, as though all we had to do was follow a street out of El Campo into another street, but in fact it took two separated streets, each winding discontinuously out of a curl of the other. That particular hired fieldworker missed a few nuances in his or her charting.
We had odd Italian dishes: goat cheese baked in sesame crusts and lamb fried in breaded cubes in carrot sauce. Then we hiked back amid lively crowds, people thinning out as we approached the church until the city was empty before the last burst of hoopla at restaurants just outside the gate. We were asleep by 10:30.
That night Lindy dreamed of sticking her head into the hall and seeing a nun. The old lady said, “You can have my job. You can be in charge of the overtakers.” For much of the ensuing day she thought it had actually happened.
As she gradually recognized its dreamed nature, she noted that the nun meant not the people who are dead (for that would be an “undertaker”) but the people who are “taking over” the world.
To me the dream had to do with her periodic insomnia that made days hard and nights symbolically dangerous. The dream was telling her that she was sleeping when she didn’t think she was. In this holy place, ancient nuns had sent a special nun of dreams to guard her rest and tell her in code that she could sleep well here whenever she wanted.
September 22 (Day Ten)
Vignettes from Siena
Wireless
While walking along Rue de la Citta last night, we passed a cluster of four or five college-age kids, all sitting on marble steps with laptops. I asked one girl whether there was wireless somewhere, and she pointed across the narrow concourse to an apartment window. “He has open wireless,” she said. “We come here like birds to feed on his crumbs.”
In the morning, after an episode with the car (see below), I headed straight to those same steps with less optimal results. For one, there were no laptop kids there, but lots of trucks delivering to stores, blocking the steps and making for an uncomfortable gridlock. Police were trying to get them to move on, but there was always another ready to occupy the spot.
From five or six different positions, dodging vehicles and pigeon shit, I tried and failed to get on-line. Lindy had gone down the ramp and across El Campo to the laundromat so, with little else to do while waiting, I worked on my trip journal.
Further indignity arrived when the janitor decided to sweep out the alcove behind me through the gates I was leaning against, and suddenly I was covered with dust and pigeon feathers.
A few minutes later a stream of email came and another went out, so I left Word, switched to Entourage, and began to attack our upcoming itinerary. The signal was obviously weak or sporadic, as almost immediately I began hearing clicks and none of the outbox would send.
When Lindy came back, she reported that she had visited the tourist information site during her travels, and a woman there had told her that the entire Campo had free wireless. I initially thought she meant it was some sort of service; I didn’t realize that there were so many networks in apartments around I was bound to pick up something from just about any spot in the plaza. I packed up, followed Lindy, and plopped down on random bricks, as people were sitting everywhere in the piazza, strewn willy-nilly on the stones.
Almost at once my email sent, and new email came in. I was trying to correspond with Auto Europe back in Maine. Between the marble steps and El Campo I had exchanged two emails with them, working with people back in the middle of the night in Portland. Meanwhile Lindy was using her cell from another spot on El Campo, trying to get a reservation in either Venice or Trieste. But, for all the numbers from either our new Italian friend Elena or Rick Steves, she only got no answer, unrelieved Italian, or something that sounded like prego and might have been pieno, full up.
Meanwhile my wireless signal ran out, and Lindy wanted to go back to the laundry so that she could move the clothes to the drier. She was worried about our getting separated from each other.
I accompanied her to the laundromat down a side alley and, while sitting on the front step, decided to try the Internet from there. To my astonishment, six sites in adjacent apartments came up, and they were all free. It was a reminder that, despite the mediaeval appearances, I was in a university town in a sophisticated modern city. I worked for half an hour, catching up on the world and my own world, and then Lindy took over and did her email.
Where Do We Go after Siena?
Our goal with Auto Europe was getting our reservation changed so that we could (1) keep our little Renault till October 4th, the day we were to fly from Venice to the Frankfurt Book Fair, rather than having to go backwards and return it in Pisa, per schedule, on the 25th; (2) to leave it at the Venice airport rather than the Trieste train station (as previously planned for a different rented car); and (3) to change the Trieste reservation to correspond to our currentlyu reality. As it stood, it would take us at least two hours to return the car to Pisa, and then we would be on a train headed toward Trieste without a reservation there—whereas if we started from Siena and headed toward Bologna, we would be four hours ahead of ourselves (the time for returning the car and the time on the train just to get back to here). From a car rather than a train, we could stop somewhere along the way and make to Trieste or into Slovenia at our own speed, as long as we got to Ljubljana by the 25th.
The need to reconsider our prior plans was based on three changed logistical impositions: (1) Having given up the fancy villa, we were no longer in Lucca, so not very close to Pisa to return the car, but instead already partway to Venice. (2) We could never, as naïvely planned, return a rented car in Pisa, then make it by train to Trieste, get another car there, and arrive in Ljubljana by the evening. That was a twelve-hour undertaking, minimum. (3) Without the rejected villa we had no place to stay on either the Saturday or Sunday night upcoming.
All of these factors added up to wanting to keep the rented car and set out toward Slovenia from Siena. Auto Europe was happly quick in revising our reservation. Yet, though Lindy tried through the evening, she could not find anything at all available in Venice. As for Trieste, Rick Steves didn’t even have it in his Italy book as if it were in another country, so we had only Elena’s recommendation of one hotel, the James Joyce, there, and by phone it seemed to be full.
The Parking
That morning Lindy and I both raced down to the space beside the stadium, only to find the whole area packed with cars parallel-parked, new ones pulling into existing spaces and drivers getting out of them. It was 5 of 8, supposedly five minutes before towing time, but everyone was parking. Lindy asked a guy and then a woman departing their illegally parked cars what was up, pointing to the sign, and they both more or less communicated the same thing with gestures and scraps of inglese: the sweeper had been there already; they never ticket or tow after the sweeper comes through. But it wasn’t even 8, Lindy reasoned. No matter, the goal is to get the street swept, not to ticket. One woman kept trying to assure me that it was okay. I sure looked dubious, remembering opportunistic ticketers New York City. “I promise,” she smiled. “Go. No ticketo.”
So we chanced it.
I came back that afternoon at 16:15 when Lindy and I went for separate walks, and the car was fine, still there, windshield clear, in its tiny corner of grace under the tree.
The Walk
I get tremendous pleasure simply realizing I am in Italy. That fills the gaps and vigilances in my mind and quiets it to be joyfully present in the world and observe the texture and substance and human presence and history about me. I am happy walking in the streets, watching everything like in a dream, a waking dream. In fact, I tell myself something like that: everything is hypnagogic.
Traveling in a foreign country is in fact like being in lucid dream in which the dreamer is privileged to be awake and aware. I am usually on anxious autopilot in the U.S.; I am not even aware of that trance. Here the very fact of existence is gleeful and new. All things are strange and interesting. I have no patterns. I simply take in the reality—the sounds and panoramas, the flits of odd aromas and unexpected sounds, the sensation of warm breezes and water blown off a fountain. Italy. Italy. Italy. Not the States. Rome, the Middle Ages, World War II. Not America, not Ohio or Kansas or the Central Valley or Hartford, not dollars, not miles. Not the covert American game that never stops and in which I can’t escape being a player. America is about winning, one way or another; it is bottom line. Italy seems pure process.
So Europe balances my hyper energy, my tendency to anxiety, providing an equal energy and intensity of its own. Maybe I am really an old Mediterraneanite, like the Coptic figures that resemble me on Egyptian and Greek icons. Maybe my ancestral signaling is more comfortable here.
I enjoy entering the same piazza and getting lost again and then figuring out my way, the correct exit, each time more quickly. That is an accomplishment so primeval, learning a trail, that it is proto-cultural, and yet just as personal because that is how I started out in life once, gradually expanding my knowledge of my environs from the middle of Manhattan outward until I understood where I was, in space and time. I more or less know Lucca. Now I am getting to locate Siena and feeling some ease.
Dinner
We use Rick Steves again and decide to try to an old family place on Via Giovanni Dupre, a narrow alley out of El Campo right by the Duomo, one over from the laundromat. Here the use of a 2004 edition does get us in trouble, as the place is boarded up. We continue to another recommendation at number 132, a hefty hike uphill, and try what he calls “a classic Tuscan grotto,” Taverna San Giuseppe, where we are seated at once only because we are so early. The manger is firm: we must finish by 20:45, and hour and a half. No problem. We are not recreational diners like so many Italians.
We are seated just alongside another American couple, a pleasant one this time: a retired mathematician from William and Mary. We chat with them on and off.
The things from the meal that stand out are the toasted pumpkin-seed instead of olive oil for dipping the bread, the Tuscan bean and bread soup, and the chocolate crème brulee. The Virginians head us off of a hefty tip by explaining that the gratuity is in the bill.
In front of the laundromat I look at the scenery. Yes, we are outdoors. If I gaze just at the houses across the way, this could be parts of Brooklyn, but if I look up, the tops of apartments almost converge above the street, creating a kind of grotto. If I gaze down a street, it curves uphill into a vanishing point and disappears through an arch and a tunnel.
Passing the marble steps on the way back to the nunnery, I notice how eight young girls and four young guys are now all busy on their laptops at the first apartment where I saw them. Maybe it somehow only works after dark. Or maybe the trucks blocked my signal.
I stare at shops and see how fragile and ephemeral they look imbedded in the stone, little lit-up glass boxes in something far more ancient than all their measure and merchandise.
From our window the Duomo is lit by floods and sits ecclesiastically, ontologically, a kingdom in which an entire history is encoded larvally, a hologram about to unfold: perhaps all the plays of Ibsen as they were held in chrysalis before they were plays, before their meanings meant anything, for the duration of the entire Middle Ages; perhaps the revolutions and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in dormancy for the Renaissance, while other, even more ludicrous wars were being fought. Its parapets are motionless, vestigial, superior to time…center stage (rear) at the summit of the hill.
The Second Dawn in Siena
The first birds aloft are utterly drunk with the light and the pleasure of their flight. They rise against the glow and then plummet rapidly like momentarily falling stones, breaking their plunges with sharp, cleverly spiraled swoops that sound like a stiff wind through sails or the feathers on an arrow after it is shot, one after another in a row. What ecstatic abandon!
The chimneys are so varied that they make up their own taxonomy. As a class, they are like little stone caps or urns, bricolage of coarse pottery, individual in their arrangements and designs—five, six, seven, eight, even nine and even ten to a roof, spackled with volunteer moss as the roofs are. Some are tall and thin, others a foot square, still others more like three feet high and two feet across. Some have openings the size of whole sides, others have holes the size of one missing brick; some have flat tops and a single half-pipe tile atop; others are sloped like miniature roofs, a pipe section also atop. The largest ones are not even chimneys but chimney-like hatches with crude wooden doors, casually attached to them so that they don’t cover the whole opening. These doors are made mostly of three vertical boards, more grain and cracks than craft, of the worst, most splintery wood at hand—or perhaps that is how the wood has weathered over centuries.
For some reason, on this morning, most birds sleep, cooing, even through the clanging, almost alarm-clock insistent in sonorous notes. So the moiré never forms; it is just separate squads, accelerating and tumbling in graceful dips and ascents through the sky. Maybe the previous morning was the show of shows of all time in the millennial saga of these birds.
Not a single window is lit. Perhaps this is because, deep into the night, there was a loud community celebration for the winner of an annual horse race through the city, and everyone, likewise cooing and snoring, is now lost in the nun’s dreams.