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Overview
In an absorbing journey down the Italian peninsula, essayist, journalist, and fiction writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, offers a fascinating mixture of history, politics, folklore, food, architecture, arts, and literature, studded with local anecdotes and personal reflections. From fashionable Milan to historic Rome and primitive, brooding Calabria, Harrison reveals her country of origin in all its beauty, peculiarity, and glory.
Italian Days is the story of a return home; of friends, family, and faith; and of the search for the good life that propels all of us on our journeys wherever we are.
“Harrison’s wonderful journal will make you update your passport and dream of subletting your job, home, etc. . . . With Harrison, you never know with whom you’ll be lunching, or climbing down a ruin. You just know you want to be there.” —Glamour
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802190291 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 512 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
MILAN: "THE ASTONISHED AND DISTURBED CITY" BERGAMO: COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE STRESA: HÔTEL DU LAC
1985. The Alps make you feel all starched and clean as you fly into Milan — they punctuate the long transatlantic sleep of a nighttime flight; groaning bodies stir and strengthen and come to morning life as the mountains exert a rosy magnetic pull that won't allow you not to pay them the compliment of being crisply awake.
But we don't land in Milan; we land in Genoa. Milan is smoky with fog. The pilot announces that those whose final destiny is Genoa may disembark, and several Americans do so — never minding that they will in any case have to return to Milan (ninety minutes by plane) to retrieve their luggage. It is a futile disembarkation — what can have prepared them to believe that they and their luggage will ever be reunited? They have allowed the urge to touch land to overwhelm them. Everything about flying is absurd, anyway; all rules of logic are suspended; to make a decision affecting one's own welfare seems like an act of temerity; passengers who file out seem as much the playthings of inertia as those, grumbling, who remain inside.
The pilot announces that we may, depending on weather conditions, all have to disembark, in which case those of us bound for Milan will be bused into that city.
I like the idea of being bused to my destination; can anyone like airports? There ought to be some way of being gracefully eased into a foreign city; this business of gray ramp connecting to gray tube connecting to gray ramp, the knots and snarls of modern airports at either end, destroys the sense of travel (one doesn't travel, one is dumped), and travel — the means of getting to a place — used to figure just as pleasantly, certainly just as largely, in a traveler's plan as did his final destination. Travel used to be a matter of the means not only justifying the end but being indistinguishable from it; the slow and grand progression that took you places knit those places into the fabric of your being. Places weren't isolated spots on a map, they were part of an unfolding continuum. All travelers were pilgrims, once; jet planes changed that.
To traverse vast distances by ship and train permitted one to see the world as the Psalmist did and to put aside the notion of the world as global village — which notion, on the high seas, appears, paradoxically, to stem from a parochial urban sensibility. To change one's space or place is to change one's nature — "Space, vast space," Bachelard wrote, "is the friend of being" — and air travel, the friend of time, is the enemy of being. When you've been obliged to sail through the Suez Canal you certainly know you've been somewhere; I'm glad I'm old enough to have enjoyed sea travel and train travel in the days when sea and train travel were both affordable and plausible. (I am the only person I know who has taken a train from New York City to Quezaltenango, Guatemala.) Now no place that any but the most intrepid explorer is likely to find his way to is more than a phone call away or a twenty-four-hour flight away from home, as a result of which all of literature and all of human relations have changed, all of life has changed ... and I don't like it. To say that a sea lay between you and your beloved used to mean something, everything; now it means you are a beverage, a snack, a bad movie (and a travel agent) away from him, and absence has lost its poetry. When absence loses its poetry, presence — being there — does, too.
The captain is exercising his prerogative to change his mind. First-class passengers are given a second breakfast while the captain and the weather determine our fate. Flight attendants — stewards — fuss. Americans on board deal with this uncertainty querulously or with quiet resignation, according to their natures. Italians use it as an occasion for an impromptu town hall meeting (grouped, gesticulating, at exit doors) or to demonstrate rugged disdain (eloquent shrugs: Que será, será).
At last the weather clears — in fact we have been on the ground for only a little over an hour, but even caviar doesn't quite make up for a gratuitous landing and takeoff; the plane having been refueled, we take off for Milan, the luggage of the Genoa-bound Americans with us.
I am irritably southern in my affections, but even a lover of northern Italy would not have been cheered by what greeted us as we taxied into Milan: fog; the dirty March remains of three feet of late-winter snow (Milanese officials had to go back into the archives 387 years to find an equivalent snowfall); an impression of ashes.
Except for a flight that landed at the airport that serves Venice — and to arrive in a city by water taxi is, while ever so improbably, to arrive indeed and in state — all my previous trips to Italy have taken me through Rome's Fiumicino Airport. Fiumicino is at best and even in sunny times a disorderly place. I have never but once had occasion to threaten to knock someone's pearls down her throat. That once was in Fiumicino, and the person I threatened was a duchess with whom I was engaged in hand-to-hand combat for a luggage cart; when I asked her whatever happened to noblesse oblige she told me where I could accommodate the concept of noblesse oblige; and while luggage went unweighed and computers blinked unwatched (spectacle takes precedence over order in Rome), the duchess's pearls became everybody's business. The only time I have ever seen Fiumicino's overworked ground attendants positively happy was when they were obliged to tell check-in passengers that England's air-traffic controllers were on strike: While southern Italians themselves take what might be called an inordinate or perverse pleasure in their own unruliness, viewing it as a vital sign of life, they are bound to notice that not all visitors to their shores are charmed by chaos. So for them to be able to say that the English — the English! — were causing chaos in the skies was bliss.
I'd been warned that Milan's newly renovated airport, Malpensa, was often "quite up to Fiumicino's standards" — that is, demonically chaotic. I was also told to be on the lookout for a certain countess who keeps peacocks (except, poor thing, she got confused, and they're drab pea hens) in her conservatory. The peacocks were to have been her answer to a neighboring contessa who keeps flamingos in her garden, which is next to a butcher shop that sells cockscombs, snipes, bullfinches, larks, figpeckers, and doves. As part of her endless and apparently doomed search for color, the peahen countess once arrived at Malpensa dressed as a miniskirted maid (her elderly thighs looking, as someone remarked, very well scrubbed but not beautifully ironed), driving a golf cart equipped with all the makings for tea, which the countess wished to serve to a young man of her acquaintance whom the rigors of travel evidently reduced to a vapor. The young man called himself Hyacinth. The carabinieri arrested the contessa. The flamingo countess gave a party to celebrate her neighbor's arrest.
In the event, perhaps because our flight was an early-morning one, all went unremarkably, except, alas!, for one poor young man whom the German shepherds had sniffed and the customs officials had chosen as a target. Customs officials, up to their wrists in pink and white goo as a result, felt their way through the acned young man's many skin creams and remedies for all the world to see. His acne married itself to a dull red painful blush that looked as if it, too, would leave a permanent mark. His companion, a pretty young woman (skin of peaches and cream), stared off stolidly in the direction of Switzerland. He cast pleading looks in her direction while she occasionally wriggled a shoulder in mute acknowledgment of the flashing appreciation she was receiving from the customs officials. Their first night in Milan would not be a happy one.
The road signs are Italian. Otherwise, no clues, no idiosyncrasy of landscape, to tell you where you are. I have never experienced this phenomenon before. Two minutes out of Heathrow and you know that you are approaching London (although the attached houses are ugly, they are ugly in a singularly English way). And one could never mistake England for (say) India or India for New York. ... But if one were dropped from another planet, one might, on the superstrata to Milan, be anywhere — Austria, for example. The approach to Milan has a Teutonic feel, as does Milan itself, which was in fact occupied not once but twice by Austria. Montaigne thought Milan looked like a French city and found little more to say about it than that in size "it beats them" — Naples, Genoa, and Florence — "all."
A half hour from the center of Milan I see two joggers. They are the last joggers I will see in all of Italy.
From the air, I am told, Milan looks green — though you couldn't prove it in this fog. Built on a lost imperial Roman city, Milan was greatly expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; blocks of flats were built around courtyards. Whatever wealth of green there is in Milan is said to be in those courtyards, which are, however, not inviting. Unlike the courtyards of Florence or Rome, which practically suck you into them, so declamatory is their invitation (which is sometimes embodied in the form of a building caretaker), the courtyards of Milan, gated against view, repel entrance. The doorways of Milan look most inviting when they are draped with the purple that signifies that someone has died. The great snows of 1985 killed off much that was green in Milan, and diesel fumes have blighted much else, so one must take the green of oaks and horse-chestnut trees, cedars of Lebanon and flowering magnolias largely on faith.
Milan is not a sunny city, nor is it a city that declares itself brazenly. It is withdrawn, though — it is, after all, an industrial city — it is also aggressive. All cities have a gender as well as a personality. London is a male city; Hyderabad, my favorite city in India, is a city of slender minarets in which water can almost always be heard lapping, slipping, and sliding over boulders; it is a quintessentially feminine city. Venice is disturbing, after three days of magic, precisely because its "sexuality" is ambivalent. Male? Female? It is a city of masks, and one doesn't know. This uncertainty leads to uneasiness, which translates into claustrophobia. To overstay a visit to Venice is like staying too long at the ball in the company of someone of whose sexual identity you are not sure. Milan, aggressive and withdrawn, is male.
I was in Milan for one month. For four of those days it did not rain. It did not rain so much as it misted — making an umbrella both too much and too little protection.
One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border. It is strange: What difference is there (for example) between the landscape of Canada and that of the northern United States; or, in North Africa, what difference exists between the stretch of land on the coastal road of Tunisia and that of Libya? None, one would say; and yet one knows — I have always known — when one crosses these or any other borders. Are the trees different? the sky? It is mysterious; but one senses subliminally on these long and lonely stretches of road that one is in another country, and it is only after the subliminal awareness reaches one's consciousness that one looks for tangible proofs (in Canada, a maple leaf on a mailbox; in Tunisia, a road sign in French). This phenomenon stems from a change in character so subtle it is indescribable. Milan's physical character lies, at first acquaintance, in its not having a character.
Though its partisans, envious, perhaps, of the ocher and sienna of Tuscany and Rome, claim there is a Milan giallo, to an unprejudiced eye the pervasive color of Milan is not yellow, but gray.
From the terrace of my apartment hotel, its marble greasy from diesel fumes and dirty March rain, I am able to see the Duomo — Milan's great cathedral — or so I am told. I never go out on the terrace. No one uses his terrace, it seems architecturally to serve the function of a moat; and even if I did use my terrace, I couldn't see the Duomo because it is always raining.
I chose to live in a "residence" rather than a pensione or a hotel because, I told myself, I wanted to "plunge into" Italian life — though what exactly I meant by that I don't think I knew, and why I thought this ill-defined urge could be satisfied among people who were for the most part transients I cannot now remember.
The residence — Residenza Missori — was a ten-minute walk from the Duomo and the Galleria (Milan's conservatory like arcade that encloses shops and cafés), on a broad street lined with airline offices guarded by bored-looking carabinieri, a bar, a stationery shop, a restaurant, a scrap of Roman wall. I never felt precisely "placed." Unlike Rome or London, each of which is a collection of distinct villages, Milan has neither the sense of a hub or heart from which spokes or arteries extend nor that of a patchwork quilt. This is so in spite of the fact that Milan consists of a series of concentric circles, which may conform to the lost imperial city. Concentric circles, like whirling rose windows of cathedrals, reflect the idea that the universe moves and is moved by God, and that the movement is circular and cyclical: "Day turns into night and season into season," Georges Duby writes, "and all types of biological growth followed cyclical patterns, and their periodic repetitions had to be taken as signs of eternity." For the walker in Milan, however, it seems merely perversity that one may get to one's destination by walking either to one's left or to one's right. No set of directions is ever issued the same way twice. No one, except for those who live in a vaguely bohemian quarter, the Brera, which looks quite French, ever says I live in such and such a neighborhood. People live in the vicinity of museums or in the vicinity of publishing houses or near the fashionable shopping streets, but one hears little of neighborhoods. ... What happens to the concept of neighborliness when the concept of neighborhoods is eroded is an interesting question.
The upholstered furniture in my two-room apartment is unyieldingly square, hard, and complacent, the kind of furniture that comes in "suites," made not for comfort but for show. It is "company" or Sunday furniture; only here there is no inner sanctum — that is, no proper kitchen to retreat to. It reminds me of the ugly furniture I saw in the houses of Libya's Italian colonists, furniture that looked always "on parade." (Where are those colonists now? I wonder; in what part of Italy do they live? And do they now dream of Libya; of oases and of the Mediterranean, which, once a year, tasted of the tomatoes dumped into its coastal waters when the lovely supply exceeded the demand? First the Libyans evict the Italians and then Fiat makes brothers of old enemies and Libyans come to live in Italy, and then Italy, because of Qaddafi's terrorism, evicts Libyans; and Libya, making a vast profit, sells its stake in Fiat for three billion dollars — one turn of the wheel and we are all nomads or millionaires.) In my residence only the honey-brown wood of doors and closets and the beautiful streamlined hardware, a pleasure to touch, remind me that I am living in what many consider the style as well as the fashion capital of the world — a reminder that is reinforced when I make a purchase at the office supply shop next door to the Missori. Nothing in it — not a staple machine or a pencil sharpener or a notebook — doesn't please the eye and the hand; everything is inexpensive, though nothing is cheap.
My efficient pullman kitchen, tucked neatly behind doors of honey-brown wood, is minimally equipped; but there are colanders of two sizes, there is a spare bottle opener, there is a cruet for olive oil, and there is a cheese grater. This is proof to me that Milan is part of Italy, and that Italians have a sure instinct for life's necessities.
In Milan the Sunday-morning equivalent of "Agronsky and Company" is a learned oenophile lecturing on what wines to drink with truffles.
Italy's legislature has today — my first full day in Milan — outlawed artificial insemination by an unknown donor. Why it has chosen to cleave to tradition in this regard when it permits abortion and divorce is a mystery. Italian law is mystical, severely poetical.
I am dining with Bethany and Giancarlo, friends of an American friend, at a Tuscan trattoria; Giancarlo is beaming with gastronomic pride. The simplicity and the obscure location of the trattoria do not prepare me for what is to come. It is: crostini, thin slices of bread brushed with olive oil and toasted over charcoal, one slice covered with fresh tomato pulp and basil, one with milled chicken liver (mixed here — every restaurant has its own recipe — with sage and a bit of anchovy, enough to make it piquant); this chicken liver makes New York chopped liver seem gross. Then a pasta with a peppery tomato sauce (puttanesca; puttana = "whore"); this does not call for a cheese, nor in fact do many pasta dishes, though most Americans, determined to gild the lily, insist otherwise. Bethany is meanwhile happily eating slices of Parmesan and raw artichoke dressed in olive oil; the leaves of the artichoke are so thin and entirely digestible one needn't scrape them with one's teeth, an unlovely and unrewarding exercise (artichokes — carciofi — are one of the joys of Italy in the spring). Then we each have a simple veal cutlet Milanese (breaded; lemon slices); purists insist that a tiny bit of the bone, like a button-sized handle, be left on the flattened cut of meat, and it is. And finally a sweet in which a fantastic amount is going on, taste yielding to new taste and texture, all harmoniously: a heart of cream; a shell of chocolate gelato dusted with dark chocolate and ground hazelnuts. Giancarlo has knowledgeably ordered two bottles of wine; and this repast has cost us fifty-four dollars. Our plates go back to the kitchen clean, and a good thing, too, because one doesn't take food home from Italian restaurants; there is always a happy culinary tomorrow (and besides, one's stomach should have been smart enough to know what it could accommodate; in Italy it is common and pragmatic practice to order one course, not a whole meal, at a time). To the rule that you don't take uneaten food home there is an exception — radish stems, which you may want to fry with garlic for your breakfast tomorrow morning.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Italian Days"
by .
Copyright © 1989 Barbara Grizzuti Harrison.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Chapter I MILAN: "THE ASTONISHED AND DISTURBED CITY" BERGAMO: COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE STRESA: HÔTEL DU LAC,
Chapter II VENICE: "MIRROR OF WATER",
Chapter III "LOVELY FLORENCE" SAN GIMIGNANO: "CITY OF FINE TOWERS",
Chapter IV ROME: THE ART OF LIVING,
Chapter V TO THE MEZZOGIORNO: NAPLES, THE SORRENTINE PENINSULA, THE AMALFI COAST ... "BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR",
Chapter VI MOLISE AND ABRUZZO: THE MOTHER COUNTRY ... BLESSING AND BONDAGE,
Chapter VII PUGLIA: FAIRYLAND,
Chapter VIII CALABRIA: BETWEEN TWO SEAS,
Selected Bibliography,