The night before last my wife Jane and I returned from nearly two weeks in Italy, my first visit there (in 70 years), her second. We landed in Boston shortly before 10 PM, having changed planes twice, once in Barcelona, and again at London’s Heathrow. We were pooped of course, glad to have survived such an active flight, but wishing we had had more time and money to stay longer.
I had taken us there, under the pretext of a literary conference in Venice. The British writer Anthony Powell, about whom I have written and taught for some years, set part of the 11th volume of his 12-novel masterpiece, Dance to the Music of Time (the novel titled Temporary Kings), in Venice. The Anthony Powell Society has been holding biannual conferences since 2001, mostly in England at locations with Powell connections (Eton, Oxford, London, etc.); I have read papers at several. This year, for the 8th Conference, the organizers went for Venice.
Jane and I loved Venice. We bought passes for the vaporetti, the water busses that power inexorably up and down the Grand Canal and out to the islands near the city, and rode from fermata (stop) to fermata. (I loved thinking of fermata in music, the mark that looks like an eyebrow and means “hold that note for a while.”) Hold it so we can get off, I thought.
Venice is like a magical movie set, much better than Disney could ever build. We walked all around, too, getting lost and suddenly hitting the Grand Canal again and discovering where we were. The Grand Canal cuts the city in two like a long sinuous serpent; lots of smaller canals, called fundamenta, run off the Grand one. So we crossed bridges and walked through narrow passages and eventually found lovely sites and excellent food.
Before Venice, we had spent four days in Florence. We saw art all over that city, all the Ninja Turtles – Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo – and others, too. The David in the Galleria dell’Accademia transfixed me, all 17 feet of him. I was struck by his toes; unlike the rest of him, which is highly polished and perfect, they are rough, the feet of a shepherd who has been out chasing sheep over rocky soil. We went to the vast Uffizi, a museum that took 3 hours to enter through the line, and 4 hours to see all the rooms. (Entrance was free, that day!) We had dinner one night, with Caitlin Henningsen, the daughter of friends and former colleagues at Andover. She is researching a doctoral thesis for Harvard in Florence. She told us that our apartment, set atop a five-story building right beside the Arno River, had the best view of the city she had ever seen.
Before Florence we had spent a night in Assisi, to see where St. Francis – a saint of whom I am especially fond – had given up the good life for the monastic one, the order of which bears his name. Assisi is glorious, built on a hill high above a plain that stretches out to the west. Walking involves steepness, and when I walked down from the bus stop to the Basilica, I knew all the way I was going to have puff back up. As the sun was setting, we were standing outside another church, when in the piazza in front was filled with the St. Francis Bagpipe and Drum Corps from Glasgow, Scotland, all in kilts, piping and drumming away. It was October 3rd, which is the eve of the Festa di San Francesco, and they were here to celebrate their saint in his city.
We had started all this traveling in Rome. We walked everywhere in the city, to the Pantheon, the Vatican, the Spanish Steps, the Pyramide, and saw too many pieces of art to count. All along the way, Jane was taking photographs of Annunciations for a project – her church in Lynn has the first church windows Tiffany ever made, and one of them is an Annunciation. There are hundreds of versions of the Annunciation all over Italy. The variety of expressions on Mary’s face as the Angel Gabriel delivers his news is astounding: everything from astonishment – “Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, dude. what are you saying?” – to serenity – “Here I am, Lord, do with me as you will.” We saw the Sistine Chapel and its assorted treasures. I have never been as crowded in my life when we stepped into the chapel and looked up at what Michelangelo had done. There must have been 700 people jammed in there. When I looked down, Jane was lost in the crowd, and she didn’t find me for 45 minutes. I sat down on a bench near the exit until she apparated like Hermione Granger in a Harry Potter book. Fire codes are more relaxed in Italy.
Two magical things happened in Rome. One of my goals was to visit the grave of one of my favorite poets, John Keats. Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome when he was 25 years old. He believed no one would remember him, and so he asked his friend Joseph Severn to put no name on his stone, only a line of iambic pentameter: “Here lies one whose name was writ on water.” That line just cracks my heart, given the wonderful poems he wrote in such a short life.
A docent at the cemetery, a handsome woman about my age, showed me the stone, and pointed out Percy Shelley’s grave as well. At one point she mentioned that she came from Maine. “So do I,” I said. “What town?”
“Freeport,” she replied.
“I grew up in Brunswick, right next door. Do I know you? What is your name?”
She pointed to the badge on her coat. “My maiden name was Powers.”
“I worked one summer in 1963 with a girl from Freeport named Paula Powers.”
“She’s my sister.”
We were astonished, joyful. To find such a close relationship so far away! Anthony Powell, who used coincidence so happily in Dance, would have applauded.
The other event is related to food. We loved the food in Italy. It was just wonderful – fresh, bright, seasoned. In Venice I had rabbit – light colored, almost white – with tomatoes and peas on the plate arranged above it, and realized I was looking a plateful of the Italian flag.
Before we had had a chance to change much money in Rome, we went to a small restaurant. I must identify it: Alfredo e Ada, Via dei Banchi Nuovi 14. We got lost finding the place, taking about an hour of wandering. It was very small. When at last we arrived, there was room for us, and we sat down at a table. The very pretty waitress brought us bread.
“Oh,” I said. “Do you take credit cards?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”
I stood up and dug out a couple of euros for the bread. “We can’t stay. We haven’t changed enough money to pay you.”
She put out her hand, palm down. “No. Wait. Will you come back tomorrow to pay?”
So they fed us on trust, honest to God. Thin pork strips cooked in a lemon sauce, zucchini, bread, house wine, doughnut-like cookies that we had to dunk in the wine. This was in Rome, a city of millions, and we were strangers among them. We came back the next day, ate lunch, and paid for both meals. I was hungry, and you fed me. Italy, a blessed country.
© October, 2014
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