In vino veritas: sagra dell’uva

Of the many annual feasts or sagre in Lazio, the ‘Sagra dell’uva’ or grape festival most clearly evokes the ancient earthy bacchanalia, but is actually a modern celebration of past glories that also harkens back to millennial-old agricultural traditions. The region’s most famous sagra in Marino (Friday, 29 September to Monday, 2 October) was created as late as 1925 by local poet and drammatist Leone Ciprelli. The feast has its historical antecedents in the return of Marino’s favorite son Marcantonio Colonna (whose family held feudal sway over much of the Castelli Romani for several centuries) from the Adriatic after defeating the Ottoman Turks in the name of the Pope at the battle of Lepanto in 1571. Beginning in 1573, a religious feast was held in Marino to commemorate the event, but by the 20th century, the Marinese chose a more profane way to commemorate the event, echoing back to pagan rites.

Instead of procession of the rosary, the present incarnation of the sagra celebrates the grape, or more precisely, the boisterous local wine, accompanied by traditional foods that function seemingly to accelerate the consumption of alcohol. Like the pre-Christian Bacchanalia, the sagra provides rare opportunity to spot normally ultra-image conscious Italians letting loose and staggering through the streets; but don’t worry, unlike Italian football games, the revelry is of a good-humored sort. On Sunday night, the exuberance hits a crescendo not to be missed as the town fountain begins to spout wine freely for anyone with a plastic cup and a strong stomach.

While Marino’s festival still retains a local flavour, it has become a bit too-well known among tourists to be truly authentic. Other towns in the Castelli offer grape festivals as well, and for a more heady taste of local flavour, it’s worth heading up to Zagarolo, where you will immediately get the feeling everybody knows everyone else except you. Zagarolo’s sagra (Saturday, 31 September to Sunday 8 October) is truly step back in time. Although 2006 marks only the 63rd annual event, the Zagarolese will readily remind you that the festival really celebrates (and helps to preserve) Zagarolo’s, long-established but quickly vanishing gastronomic traditions and the faded legends of the contadini who worked the fields around this picturesque hill town with their hands, returning with the fruits of their hard labour, which were soon brought to the paese’s tables in the form of divine food and drink.

Now most town residents work in Rome, queuing for hours each day on the antiquated roads or taking the 40 minute train ride on click-clack trains. The pensioners here are now about the only ones who lived the old farming traditions at a time when Rome seemed to be in another world and paesi such as this had to sustain themselves. The young Zagarolese seem to appreciate the old timers’ stories and take an active role in the annual festivities, giving public musical performances and running food stalls that offer cheap local wine and foodstuffs like grilled pancetta and tordo matto: Made of fresh horsemeat rolled with prosciutto fat, local herbs and hot red pepper, and grilled, tordo matto is the quintessential Zagarolese dish.

Other stands run by farm cooperatives and cultural associations offer local farm products and baked goods, and of course one can always find the ubiquitous range of Chinese-made chachkas at the far end of town. Although the entire main drag is decked out in garlands and leaves (and this year even boasts its own wine-fountain to rival Marino’s – a striking cascade of rosé right down the steps of the church), the place to be is piazzetta della Fontana Nuova, where the young and old mingle to the sounds of rock bands and a huge food stand grills up the local delights that just perfectly complement glasses and glasses of the local white..

Although not quite bacchanalia harvest frenzies, these celebrations feel a little bit more pagan than the usual saints’ processions. In any case, the sagre a memorable way to pass a starlit October evening in the Castelli Romani while taking in the diverse sights, sounds and tastes that represent some of Europe’s longest and richest agricultural and food traditions. Although towns like Zagarolo and Marino are looking less and less like the quaint paesi they once were and more like part of Rome’s post-modern suburban sprawl, it’s good to know that it is still possible truly celebrate the diverse bounty of this land, and to support local food traditions so that they are not lost forever.

Afternoon snapshots of Ramallah

There is no point in talking about who did what, or about the killing of the innocent or the guilty; every action takes on a biblical significance here and always has even before the Holy Family passed through here on their way to Galilee. There is no point in telling yet another sensational story about what we have become numb to long ago:
sordid tales of militants or resistance fighters (depending whether you look at CNN or Al Jazeera).

The violence and brutality that we are told permeates the land west of the river Jordan, paints no picture of the very vibrant, intense reality here and the millions of lives lived. Beyond all the rhetoric, which this region seems to inspire in spades, existence continues in these ancient olive groves despite the odds. Did you ever stop to think that in Ramallah, people wake up in the morning, drop the kids off at school, go to work, grab lunch, buy bread, take the kids for ice cream, take walks, make love? There are any number of daily activities that go seemingly unnoticed by the nosy eyes of the TV cameras which construct our realities. Daily life goes on in its startling intensity around the little square in the old part of town in which the church and mosque face one another as if shaking hands. It’s hard to tell the religion of old wrinkled men baking outside; they sit and gossip without affiliation, without time; they have been here for millennia.

You feel the gravity of this place immediately coming off the overnight flight into Tel Aviv and catching a minibus into East Jerusalem, you think of how the three great Western religions sprang up here and you wonder why such similar faiths should inspire such mutual anger and suspicion (or is it the politicians that are doing it?). The hills seem to have been carved into terraces before time, and the olives are shaken loose in the fall as if nothing ever changed.

It can be a bit shocking coming in from distant lands of manufactured knowing into this vortex of truth, but nothing that a good breakfast at the American Colony in East Jerusalem can’t fix – civilized oriental splendor among weathered journalists and career diplomats polishing their rhetoric like crusader swords. From here it’s not far to Al Ram, but who knows how long it will take down the dusty rutted roads to Kalandia checkpoint – have your ID ready and pull your skirt high to show the Brooklyn-born soldiers.

Kalandia is a world unto itself – because this place serves as the only doorway from the West Bank toward Jerusalem through which everyone must pass at one time or another, it has become, for better or worse, a focus of life here. In the shadows of the infamous concrete barrier that separates life in Ramallah, from that in Ram, men and women line up in dark robes and hijabs or blouses and blue jeans in the hope of the being granted permission to climb into another old van and travel one more another kilometer into Al Ram – the end of the line as all locals must stop at the outer limit of the holy city.


Around Kalandia, the entrepreneurial prosper: an impromptu but bustling market has sprung up, selling jewelry, kitchen utensils, clothing, the odd chicken, and just about anything else on the dusty road. Small children wind their way among waiting cars, taxis and pedestrians selling packs of gum for 40 cents. There is an eerie normalcy in all this chaos, not quite, but near joy in the faces of the children who have known no other life, no other possibility outside their infamous refugee camps. Perhaps that is what makes the soldiers so skittish and fearful – when things can’t get much worse, people begin to relax, and there is nothing worse than a calm enemy.
As we weave through the confusion and into the heart of town, our dreams and fears and desires come to us, become more acute. The Coca-cola bottling plant peeks out over the hills and it occurs to us that there might be more to this place than we have been led to believe. We stop off at the corner of Al Tireh road for the best barbecue we have ever tasted.


In the after-lunch waves of heat and ancient, earthbound desire for vindication, we stare out over the endless terraced desert hills and feel strangely at home, strangely at peace in a war zone. Looking back at our artificial constructs lives shaped by media reports of brutality and death, we see the glaring holes in our existence, the flimsy importance we attach to constructs no longer seem to exist, our reliance on, desires of which we know nothing and that ultimately fashion our destruction. In the deep hues of the afternoon, life seems an unfathomable mystery, and everything we had thought we knew about this place crumbles in our hands like dust.


Looking up at the TV blaring the American news from the center of Ramallah – the manara, or ‘star’ – they are reporting a large, barbarous demonstration. Yet when we walk over there, it is quiet; there is nothing but a few cars circling the rotary and a flatbed truck carrying an extremely militant-looking milk cow. Business must be slow today in newsland – it makes you wonder how many other times what you’ve seen go on here was patched together out of scripts and archive footage, and feel a sense of strange pride realizing that you are somehow a part of history, if a manufactured one. You buy a pair of sunglasses and head for one of the many stands that line the streets selling fresh, cool carrot and orange juice. Well, it is a good set to stage the world’s events as any.

A young man looks up at my ostentatious mop of red hair and smiles in English: “Welcome to my country. Would you like to get a coffee with me?” The coffee is as thick as the flattery, but these boys are much happier to see me than I’d expected. “Ah, you’re American – my uncle lives in Chicago, and my cousins live in New York. I hope that someday your strong country can help us to finally be free.” You can only grin back in irony.

In the newer quarters, still being constructed of large, immodest homes, high-rise office and apartment buildings, industrial parks, the odd shopping center, it is not unusual to see Bedouin shepherds tending their flocks in a still-vacant lot, or a horseman navigating his cart among the Fords and BMWs down the road towards Birzeit into the mall parking lot; the large supermarket and Benetton beckon like a mythical promised land. From time to time, some sheep or goats might mingle among the parked cars while villagers in traditional dress pick up a six-pack of Coke next to businessmen dressed in Italian fashions – maybe a few containers of hummus as well and some pickled turnips to go with their Barilla pasta.

After an interminable amount of shielding oneself from the searing sun in a thick-walled house or the air-conditioned mall, the sun sets here more beautifully and magically than anywhere else. Those sublime evenings spent in the softening blue light are still precious; standing out on the terrace in the early darkness under an omnipotent crescent moon. The smell of jasmine poisons the air ever so sweetly, tempting your soul to join in the warbling prayer call echoing off the hills and to really believe that this land is magical, unique, infused with a spirituality that goes beyond belief, that is timeless. In is in these moments when we know in an instant why this parched, aching land has seen so much bloodshed on its dusty roads. It is only here where I find my madness ceases and calm takes me over, I feel shame at all my vain indiscretions and at the anger and hatred that permeates me from time to time.

Off to Ziryab café and gallery for a cold Taybeh (brewed right outside Ramallah in the village that bears its name), a bit of tabulleh and perhaps a narghile to bubble away the hours. All the foreigners and intellectuals are there discussing their day at the center of the world’s attention, and suddenly you realize that you have just spent your day in one of the most hippest and most ‘happening’ places on earth. Did you hear that Richard Gere was just here?


Funny that so many people spend their time zealously discussing the pros and cons of this place without ever having been here, and I am filled with the most unbelievable desire to return. Only by standing there does one feel a profound sense of clarity, not only about the ‘mid-east crisis’ of which we know nothing from watching the TV news or reading hastily constructed pages on the internet, but about everything, about life itself. This is truly is the center of it all; it’s a shame that more people don’t visit Ramallah’s beatiful historic center to see for themselves.

Growing up Luo

Is there love and romance in Bondo, Kenya? In the Luo culture of Bondo and all of western Kenya, sex marks every passage in life, even death. It is meant as a means of spiritual cleansing, but in this hot land under mosquito nets, bodies and spirits were sick with fever. In this dry, hungry district, AIDS has wiped out an entire swath of the Luo tribe, leaving orphaned children on every empty doorstep, clutching a fish from the lake or anything they can get their hands on to survive the fetid water and malaria that rages here. This is the poorest district in Kenya, and we are so far from anything soft and romantic it seems romanticism itself is what’s dirty.

Trying to lose myself (unsuccessfully) in much-needed sleep as the cockroaches scuttled around my bed on the concrete floor of the Switel Hotel, I was unable to take comfort in romantic notions and instead found myself envying the chiseled, wise-eyed women of Bondo – the mamas – I had seen them in the scorching sun growing food for themselves and the orphans. There is a kind of harmony in their strength, in their customs, a harmony that is dying as the people one by one abandon their fields and try to live our reality – the harsh killer ratrace cities.


And I, the unofficial ambassador from Rome in my soft silk dress and starched white skin, stood blistering in the sun that bakes their land and kills the corn that they futilely try to grow because we told them to 30 years ago (now we have returned to tell them that corn can never grow here, that the indigenous crops that we had once shamed are much more hardy and nutritious). When I look in to the eyes of the children here, I know there is no God except for all the miraculous green we see before us in this dusty field. With my educated manner and blinding skin of ignorance, these people ask for deliverance in the same way I have asked the God of Rome to deliver me from my own petty woes; like the white-haired Roman, I was impotent to help, tied up in immense red tape and bureaucracy. And instead of receiving deliverance, I am was cursed with the role of savior – to convince my huge organization to bring some help, any help, even pumps to bring Lake Victoria’s water 50 metres to quench the cracked land or mosquito nets to cover the children at night from being ravaged my mosquitoes and succumbing to malaria – and on none of this was I able to deliver.

In Bondo, it was evident that my own petty appeals to a higher power in my ludicrous romantic quandaries were as laughable as the mamas’ appeals to me (the organization that had sent me here to assess the situation had cut off support to this region months ago).


Like a boy whipping his dusty cattle toward a red algae-covered watering hole, my white God of Rome always finds a way to motivate me and terrify me into submission. Safely back with my God, I watch a video of myself in Bondo surveying the meager crops that the mamas and children managed to eek out of the scorched earth and feel nothing but shame and powerlessness – what a scam, I let them down, my whole organization let them down, my whole society destroyed theirs in the first place, and our pebbles of assistance are designed only to prolong their colonial dependency. I went to Bondo with the best intentions, but in the end all I got was a weeklong adventure and some nasty parasites. All they got was let down once again by my people. In the face of such immense devastation, I hope their Gods can to more to inspire them than mine can.



Care for AIDS orphans among the Luo of Kenya (click on title)
www.web.ca/~iccaf/humanrights/kenyainfo/kenyajan01.htm

Kenya: cultural traditions fuel the spread of HIV/AIDSwww.plusnews.org/AIDSreport.asp?ReportID=5502&SelectRegion=East_Afric

Kenya: AIDS awareness thrust of talkwww.therecord.com/links/links_050329121921.html

Human Rights Watch: Women’s property rights violations and HIV/AIDShttp://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/02/13/kenya5339.htm

Policy implications of inadequate support systems for orphans in Western Kenyawww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11518603&dopt=Abstract

Village in Kenya deals with water, social and economic issueswww.rg-j.com/news/stories/html/2004/05/15/70860.php

Mama na Dada – grassroots women’s organization in Kenyahttp://voicesofwomen.org/mamanadada.html

Abruzzo and Puglia

We began as Romans do in the late-afternoon traffic headache that is Rome on the eve of a long weekend; battled our way on the Tangenziale: if all roads lead to Rome, this is the highway from hell. Then as we threaded through the absurd Romans and their arrogant nonsense, the traffic cleared and we were clear to cross the mountains into Abruzzo, watching the sun go down. Arrived late in Pescara and wanted to find a place by the sea. The waterfront was packed. We found a low-budget place on the Lungomare that was attractive not for its ambiance or services as such but because its proprietor, a old, stinking man (in fact he had lived in New Jersey for a number of years) took an instant linking to us.

Abruzzo
He had never wanted to come back to Italy, but had for family reasons. He loved America and hated it here – it was the same story we heard everywhere in the South -- ‘Italia e un sacco di problemi’. Whatever people’s political affiliation, this was the one thing they all agreed on. This man literally attached himself to and felt compulsed to tell us his story, grabbing at me repeatedly while explaining how he was not really Italian at all, but had become a naturalized American citizen. He was certainly a patriotic American on this stormy seafront in Pescara he and his pensione looked worse for wear. Italians are all thieves, he said. Then he had the nerve to charge us 5 euros extra for breakfast.

Purposely against his advice, we grabbed a pizza at the seafront restaurant across the street, and suddenly, I realized where ALL the Italians in Jersey had come from. We were pretty close to the middle of nowhere and yet all these people were dressed in their finest sequined disco wear, eating mozzarella and grooving to YMCA and Gloria Gaynor. In our casual travel wear, we looked out of place and were happy. But still you had to give them credit for effort -– these people had made something out here, some special spot to don their finest when there was really no reason to ever get dressed up. Old ladies and bleached broads were getting down together, throwing a fist up in the air to the strains of ‘I will survive’. Even some children had been dolled up and taken along for a special evening by the sea. This place was good -– I just hope these folks don’t realize the whole thing is and give it up. We finished our pizza and left the spectacle, crossing back to our bare-bulb and hard-bedded room. The old guy was sitting in the dim lobby playing cards with a young. He kissed us goodnight.


We set off early the next morning. Mr New Jersey came running after our car to show us his American passport with the photo taken in 1955. It didn’t look anything like him. But we were free, off to Vasto, a seaside town further south with some respectable beaches, although the weather was cold and nasty. No matter, we were there mainly to eat anyway, at ‘Lo Chef’, the kind of unassuming, no-atmosphere place that you would never step one into into unless you knew because it was going to be the best meal of your life. We knew, and had called the day before from Rome to make a reservation for that day’s lunch –- so they could catch the fish. The local specialty is called brodetto, made with fish and broth that are both made to order. The place looked especially vacant in the pouring rain, but they were expecting us. We were sat in an empty cavernous room and the waiter turned up the television in it to a deafening pitch; all the tables were set up to face the TV, on which the Italian news was blaring. At the front of the room, next to the TV, was a large wooden crucifix. But before I could get too irritated, our zombie waiter arrived with two large terra cotta bowls filled with several fish each in different shapes and sizes. They were surrounded by octopus, cuttlefish and various other sea creatures, and were followed by a basket of fresh-gilled bread.


There are no words to describe the sensuality of this meal. The sweet green peppers used in the broth, accompanied by sumptuous cherry tomatoes, give off an almost Mexican flavour. You taste cilantro, undefined herbs. You taste the south. The fish, whole and varied in texture, are bathed in the lavish brodo. With a carafe of the best local Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and the channel 2 news, it was not long before we were sitting before empty bowls and a pile of bones, lulled in to a kind of post-coital slumber. After a course of the freshest melon with the taste of pure honey, we were ready to die. This is one of the best meals you will have in your life – it is worth a trip from anywhere, especially New Jersey. Somehow, the cold surroundings and sullen waiter had transformed into something comforting –- the last thing we wanted to get back in the car and face the driving rain, but we didn’t feel a thing.

Ristorante ‘Lo Chef’: Via Incoronata 39/C, Vasto (Abruzzo) Tel. 0873 391 604

Puglia
Incredibly beautiful medieval architecture in the hill towns surrounding the city of Foggia on a wide plane in Puglia. This is the breadbasket of Italy, where they grow the wheat for all that pasta. In the hills rising above these immense fields, Fredrick II, half-German, half Norman-Sicilian, built numerous monuments in stone around the year 1200. But although Fredrick brought a perfect combination of classical, gothic and Islamic architecture and cultures here, it is little visited and sadly lacking services for tourists, especially on a rainy Saturday. In the medieval quarters of Lucerna, Troia (the bronze doors of its 12th century cathedral standing guard under a huge rosetta window protected by a womb of scaffolding) and Bovino, two Americans were somewhat an oddity, but we encountered only kindness from the locals, who felt and understood the significance of the backwaters they inhabited, peasant guardians of a unique heritage that has influenced and continues to influence western European culture to this day. From one town to another there were no hotels, pensiones or B&Bs, few bars or restaurants and many old people with nothing to do but watch their world slowly come to an end.


We decided to head for the coast looking for signs of civilization, and from what appeared in the darkening sky and driving rain, the coastal region below Foggia had peaked for the last time around 1960 and then fallen into an abrupt and precipitous decline. When Italians talk of ‘abusivismo’ or abusive building with no regard for planning, environment or safety, this is the picture that usually comes to mind. Somehow we had taken a wrong turn: we had been heading for Barletta, another town of immense importance in the middle ages (one of the departure points for the crusades) but which both our travel book and two gas station attendants warned us about the dangers of walking, parking or sleeping in at night. It was just weren't there, but determination can take you to some even stranger places. Whatever city we were in, there were many signs pointing to Barletta, but following only led in a large dark circle through the congested and flooded streets; nowhere to stop. nowhere to stay.

Then out of nowhere like Hotel California stood a large, modern hotel beckoning in the distance. And although the desk clerk was so large that he broke the elevator while showing us to our room, it was a really comfortable place in an otherwise desolate land, with a respectable restaurant in which we tried the local ‘Castel del Monte’ wine. My antipasto –- some kind of delicately smoked meat that I had never tasted before and wasn’t sure if it was in fact meat or fish, covered in slices of wild mushrooms –- induced a deep and lasting coma before my filetto con pepe di tre colori even came out.

Cristal Palace Hotel Via Firenze, 35 A - 70031 Andria (Puglia) Tel. 0883 556 444
www.cristalpalace.it

It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep can do for you -– and satellite TV. The sun was out the next morning but we’d seen the weather report and knew better. After breakfast, we set off to Trani, an exceptionally beautiful seaside town with a medieval cathedral just metres from the sea -– high and vertical, angular, with a slightly leaning tower, Trani cathedral seems to be perched on the precipice of the orient. Lazy back streets and piazzas give a taste of the Italy you came here for, which no longer seems to exist in the places trod upon by tourists; a lonely boy kicking a ball and a clever old man eyeing you in a sun-drenched piazza. Sun between the clouds and we could bask a bit. Most of the shops were boarded up, but we managed to get a coffee in an old-fashioned place where I also sampled a crisp chocolate roll filled with the most lavish hazelnut cream. In another bar on the seafront, there was a picture of Charles and Diana cruising into the harbour on their yacht; they looked confused, as if they’d taken a wrong turn, expecting to end up in Monte Carlo instead of the mezzogiorno.


The cold wind returned and we hauled back to the car hoping to find more treasures on par with Trani. Barletta, the town we had spent hours searching for unsuccessfully the previous day, seemed to live immediately up to its reputation. It was poor, crowded and harried (in fact, thank God we hadn’t found it at night), but its streets suggested that there was something more if you just looked beneath the surface. Having had enough of Barletta’s traffic snarl, we left the car and penetrated the narrow winding streets of the centro storico. With an air of criminality, Barletta’s centro also has plenty of charm and one of the more important cathedrals of the region. Not far off is the colossus, the largest bronze statue to survive from antiquity, it washed up on the shores of Barletta after being plundered from Constantinople by the Venetians, then shipwrecked (depending on which story you believe -– in the South, there is no objective reality). No one is quite sure which figure is represented, maybe Emperor Valentinian, but they have stuck a large cross into his outstretched hand just to be safe.

There are many small restaurants around the centre of Barletta -– a bit curious since the streets were empty -– but I had a good feeling about one I’d seen when parking the car. We crept up close to peer at the menu, and a white-capped woman popped out to tell us that it meant nothing. The menu had changed. Ever paranoid in these tricky parts, I asked if the prices had changed as well; she assured that whatever we ordered would total 15 Euros a piece. The place looked more down at heel than I had first perceived it, which is always a positive sign: it’s the fancy places you need to watch out for. We started with the antipasto buffet, which offered the usual assortment of vegetables under oil (these however, unusually fresh and flavourful), and included the lightest and most delicious frittata I have ever consumed – fluffy and white, 1½ inches thick, bursting with fresh zucchini and with the thinnest crust of a toasty dark brown.

The mussels that followed deserved a standing ovation, both mine served sumptuously in a zuppa and John’s – shelled and combined with perfect little cavatelli barese; the local wine rolled off the tongue. A dessert of fresh fruit and the white-capped woman, who had cheerfully cooked lunch as her children doted on us between bouts of staring at the omnipresent TV, came out to see if we’d liked the meal. I congratulated her perfect frittata and she was happy to provide me with the recipe. The bill: exactly 15 Euros each, and we were ready to resume our attack on Puglia.

Il Valentino, Piazza del P.zza Plebiscito, 53 Barletta (Puglia) Tel. 0883 348 060

After a failed attempt to visit the much-advertised baths in Margarita di Savoia (what was strange was not so much that they were so run down but that they were closed on weekends), we headed north through the saltpans that hug the coast north of Foggia. This haunts you in the late afternoon light; like much of life in Puglia, rhythms have not changed – they’ve been drying sea salt in the sun here since the 3rd century BCE. Driving the road up the narrow strip that separates the salt pans from the sea, little shacks, gardens and beaches scattered around. Up ahead, the imposing plateau of the Gargano Peninsula -– the spur on the heel of Italy’s boot and one of its the finest national parks –- with ancient forests, winding roads and spectacular views down olive-tree covered hillsides to the clear blue sea.


On the Gargano, shepherds and cattlemen have been tending livestock and making cheese for millennia, the Normans were inspired by the locals to take over southern Italy and, most recently recently, Padre Pio was born. We headed strait for the tip -– a winding 60 kilometres on par with the Amalfi drive –- to the charming whitewashed village of Vieste and checked into the Hotel Seggio, perched on a promontory overlooking the sea right in the centro storico. If the weather was nicer, we could have enjoyed the pool or even a swim in the sea down a long spiral staircase from the hotel’s sunporch. But once again, we were in need of rest and an amazing meal, so contentedly checked ourselves into a room with two large windows overlooking the sea (but no bathtub – much to John’s disappointment, they don’t seem to exist in the South) and scoured the slightly touristy old centre for a place that reeked of charm and oozed local flavour.


I spied one place in a nook with wooden tables, candles in chianti bottles – despite what I may tell you about being a food purist, I really am a sucker for cheesy ambiance and this place looked just enough. So we settled into a shadowy corner by candlelight and began a special meal for our fifth wedding anniversary. As we enjoyed our delightful grilled fish and meats, and subdued the moment with the full-bodied local wine, the owner came out to chat with us, as is the custom in these parts. We talked about we were from –- she had been to New York once but didn’t like it because the smell of cooking hamburgers was everywhere, and it made the air heavy and overly pungent so she couldn’t breathe. It was an astute observation; despite their love of cooking that smells up the whole palazzo, Italians are positively sickened by the smell of cooking meat. To our host (and probably to many others) New York was a cesspool of sizzling grease.

To close the meal, I enjoyed a light millefoglie layered with fresh cream –- the only sweetness coming from a fine dusting of powdered sugar. John wanted a cheese plate but the waiter informed him that unfortunately, all they had left was caciocavallo, a typically soft and mild local cheese that would not add much gusto to a rich meal. He thanked the waiter and decided he’d do without, but within five minutes the owner rushed to our table to explain: this was no ordinary caciocavallo. It was from her family’s own farm nine kilometres from here. Her father was too old to work, but her brothers carried on the ancient family tradition by milking the cows by hand and cheese-making according to the old ways in order to create the freshest and most flavourful caciocavallo there is. What’s more, if John tried and liked this cheese, he would be affirming all the time-honoured traditions of her family; she beseeched him and he could not refuse (one likes to fantasize at this moments about what would happen if he did, but one doesn’t take the chance).

The cheese arrived in three thick wedges; it was firm and translucent, the colour of teeth. I too was overflowing with curiosity at this point –- the greatest marketer of cheese in creation; I was in awe. And it was heavenly: sharp but pleasing, firm but yielding to the bite – it WAS the most spectacular caciocavallo indeed on this earth, -– don’t think the Italians haven’t perfected their own brand of hype. It is just follows their priorities: food, politics and soccer in that order. Theirs is a conspiracy of flavours, which, woven together, captures perfectly the complicated richness of life.

Osteria La Ripa, Via Cimaglia 16, Vieste (Puglia) Tel. 0884 708 048 www.laripa.net

Hotel Seggio Via Vesta, 7 71019 Vieste (Puglia) Tel. 0884 708 123 www.hotelseggio.it

Late-night adventures in an Italian bathroom

Italy is striking. It confronts your world view with beauty but it doesn’t love you back. It prefers to be destroyed from the outside as it devours itself from within. It knows its beauty but it has cataracts in its eyes. Italy is above all the place where you must learn not to get the things you want, only what you need. Strange facets of history converging on the present without love, only irony. But reach out your hand and you are grasping at air. Only an overwrought antique image, nothing more.

Many of us love this place, aesthetically, soulfully, but Italy does not love itself. Its soul-capturing beauty betrays an underside that is the essence of brutality. Above all, it leaves us sad, for ourselves and for the fairy tale that we were all taught existed – if not here then no, all we have been told is a lie and it is actually those in which the poison and deceit resides that emanate the beauty like an antidote to all our silly little hopes and dreams. A voice within tells me to keep up the fight – ‘if you, Hope, don’t fight for all the lovers and bearers of positive energy, who will?’ But what are we fighting for?

Italy is the place where struggle consumes you (‘la lotta continua!’) even though you know it will devour all your energy, all your days, and will ultimately be fruitless. Sad, sad dreams where a low voice murmurs (calling for help perhaps?) but the words drift off in the wind and the sound of rushing water, never to be found again.

Faith is a participatory process

There is nothing more spectacularly beautiful than a summer afternoon in Campo de’ Fiori, sipping cheap wine in the shadow of Giordano Bruno, a monk burned for believing what we believe. The walls here are made of fire, the seething sun etches warm colours into our skin, blinds us with tranquility. In Italy, love is a pure essence like the wine and olive oil, something people slather onto their skin to make it soft and bronzed. All those moments we’ve lived through up till now, that have only served to drive us to this one spectacular moment in time, live resolutely in the past – finely bound volumes in a great library that will eventually unravel and pass into the dustbin we call ‘loss’. There is no purpose, no higher good. We are simply dancing a fool’s dance ‘round the fire in which Bruno was burned at the stake. Bring me another glass of rosso.

But every once in a great while – perhaps just once or twice while awaiting our next glass at the Vineria – a force from the outer universe reaches in exactly when we least expect it and punches through the transparent bounds of this world into our very reality. We try to deny these funny little anomalies of existence, but they wrap around our dreams and strangle, daring us to look away like a tick burrowed into the skin. Any attempt to pretend we are still what we were a moment ago will be met with misery and frustration – this is force to be reckoned with; it will not be ignored and it has the power to destroy, but perhaps your life needed a little destruction. Drop your nets and become fishers of men – does this little kick in the chianti amount to the force of God? It takes us to the very edges of ourselves and obliterates everything we knew, pointing down a completely foreign path just as a dog’s master buries its nose in its shit. There is something out there, you can feel it.

In the end, faith doesn’t make you understand the world around you, only gives order to the complication. When the voices in my head call out and someone actually answers, it doesn’t necessarily make sense, just convinces me that I really am insane. The reality of life in Rome seems like some surreal dream and yet my real dreams are filled with a gentle guiding voice that murmurs incomprehensibly (if there really is a God out there, speak up, will you?). At this moment, all I see is a tiny glimmer of the road ahead seemingly leading to escape from this existential k-hole we call conventional life: take up your cross; go for something you can’t quite see through the haze but which resides somewhere between the Campo and Saint Peters, homes respectively of the saints and demons who haunt this place.

The only thing scary out there is the fear…racing up the spine and lapping the skin, a pure consuming burn – in the end, that is all we have to contend with.

The muses have gone on holiday

The muses have all gone on holiday and left Hope in her powder-blue dress to sweep up the pieces of a broken civilization

With summer, a strange peace comes over Rome. One is almost hypnotized in the contemplative heat as the masses drain out towards their proletarian holiday camps by the sea. This is exactly what I came here for; dreams of lounging in a shady corner without movement, only chiaro scuro. When faith has escaped, there it always desire. Now it’s Friday morning 9am in Rome and we are sailing off into the sunset for no good reason other than that it’s the best direction to take in life – maybe someday, someone will look into my eyes and actually believe what they see.

Who can resist this place – languidly drinking in the reds and oranges in Santa Maria della Pace – in the summer heat when a breeze starts to lift the hair from my neck and the mind begins to wander, and who cares what the consequences are. Wouldn’t be so bad just to sink into the stones and forget the good fight entirely, to frequent enoteche and cheese shops, sit in the piazzas smoking and wondering when the next peak of passion will hit. Water rushes on down the Tiber, and what are these kindnesses all about? Did you see what I saw? Viva, viva, viva.

It’s sad to think about, but even if we wanted to go home now, we couldn’t. We’ve been marked by this place and these people. There’s been no important breakthrough, but subtleties have shifted inside us; our hearts have mutated. We can never be what we once were, love what we once loved, have the same dinner conversations. Some part of us has been ripped open to reveal the bloody-red guts festering in the heat. And in the midst of it all there are these hypnotic zen moments when complexity surrenders and the mind comes to peace, when we know deep within our bones the anticipation of what is to come. There is no sense in knowing – one cannot change one’s destiny or shape the future in a meaningful way. You can only prepare yourself for the inevitable.

But under a breezy cloud, all is beautiful and right in my little corner of the fall of civilization this morning. Taxi drivers gesticulate wildly, a girl in a skimpy pink dress gasses up her motorino. At the bus stop, passengers wince at the dusky smell of smoke in the air. Newspapers open, they read about the latest attack of terror. Fear rises that they -- ignorant, innocent Romans -- will be next.

Remember in the depths of winter gray wandering those forgotten streets on the other side of Trastevere, searching blindly for that which we’d heard spoken of so fondly, some lost element just around the next angolo, never really finding it, wishing always for more streets, more narrow alleyways forgotten in the midst of old buildings and old men. Now it looks like summer and the streets are just as quiet, just as mysterious if a bit brighter. The old men still stare wearily up from their politics and the mystery still burns.

Wherever you are right now, there is always another – parallel – existence out there; there are an infinite number of potentials. They come to us in our dreams, fantasies, long drawn-out masochistic melodramas on hot Friday afternoons behind our sterile desks, long road trips back in time after an evening spent fighting traffic, when there are only silhouettes in the darkness out there, whispering another state of being that remains elusive but just won’t fade from sight. The old Italian men survive this way, living long lives over afternoons of coffee and potential energy, tales of possibilities lost and found in the interminable fog. Are these parallel lives any less real than the ones we are living right at this moment? Would we be happier if we were completely blind to them?

But it is the potential of these fantastic worlds, and our surprising intermittent glimpses into them, that eggs us on as we tread the four-lane highway through our dreary days –- sometimes, life is too long. Although we are always alone, these parallel universes interconnect our souls. Sometimes we can reach out through them for imperceptible moments in the meeting of the eyes or sharing of a laugh over the absurdity of it all. If they become our reality for more than an instant, our parallel lives become every bit as banal and overly complex as the one we live every day. Yet in every inspiring glimpse of those infinite other less-travelled paths, one is tempted to believe that life could be richer, happier, more fulfilled –- there is the inspiration to step up and achieve great things, to give up everything and stake it all on the impossible. Desire is faith.

Hotel Arka

It’s funny how the closer you get to everything you want, the more you become a slave to ever-more base desires. Macedonia is one of those places that defies imagination because everyone seems to want a piece of it -- in Italian, the word ‘Macedonia’ means ‘fruit salad’, apparently because it is such a mix -- of people, of cultures, who knows, to them it is just a salad. But looking down from the smooth glass elevator of the Hotel Arka in Skopje, coming down from the seventh floor with the swimming pool in front of a big open window overlooking the old Turkish bazaar with its ruinous hammam, one can’t help but notice that this cool modern glass tower is surrounded by shacks in various states of disarray. As late as 2001, this place was at war. But then you stroll down by the river Vardar and feel unsettled by the vast swaths of outdoor cafes with the coolest of enamoured youth basking in their cappuccinos and feeling the rush of entering Europe for the first time without ever leaving their city. ‘We should have something nice like this in Rome’ I comment dryly. Yet in the crisp evening air, you can sense the fear of success; the nearer it appears on the horizon, the more they become enslaved by those innocent and not illegitimate longings for the nice things in life: the storm of plenty clouds the streets with noise and smog -- it’s a scene you wouldn’t expect to see in Eastern Europe, where stolid 1960s socialist architecture vies with the even-more distasteful budding of Euro-capitalism.


For all they like to pretend, this is not exactly the back corner of the world. Alexander the Great came from here, as well as the family of Cleopatra, and Mother Theresa was born just across the river from the Arka. In the 9th century, monks travelled here from Greece and Rome to teach the newly arrived Slavs about Christianity in their own language – this was long before the schism when the Roman church declared itself independent of that in the Eastern Church established by Constantine. Then the Ottomans came with their Islam and tea-drinking. Macedonia marks the mid-way point between civilizations, between faiths; everything here seems more complicated but simple, just barely touching the east and yet consciously hovering against the West. In the end, I was told by one local inside a medieval church filled with gloriously contemplative icons (I thought it was the Byzantines that didn’t like the icons!): “When the day of judgement comes, we won’t be asked, ‘Are you Christian or are you Muslim?’. We will be asked, ‘Are you a kind person? Have you been good to your neighbour? Have you been loving and generous?’”. Makes one wonder what all the fighting’s about, but there is a deep-seated anger in this place, down on the stubbly streets of the old city, over beer with beans and sausage cooked in terra-cotta pots, encircled by cats in the afternoon sun. The further you drift away from the source of illumination, the brighter it becomes.

These icons peer down at you from timelessness in every corner of the city and you feel the full depth of their belonging a higher spiritual plain, beyond religion, beyond love and hate. The air is extremes of hot and cold, the people are stern but generous. The young men’s eyes peer down at you from square faces like objects of devotion; there are dark symbologies running below the surface here, something you can just barely perceive in their faces but which runs deep, stirring their emotions as they sip their tea and the women browse hungrily through the green market. There are flowers everywhere here – lilacs – growing out of every seam in the city and carried in bunches on Easter Sunday. This Macedonia is the spot right in the middle of the world where you leave a part of yourself, a repository for all the most serious aspects of humanity to stir and fester, and never quite escape history even as you try to forget.

one more round Vesuvius

You squeeze into Napoli more than anything else, between the looming volcanic Mount Vesuvius on one side and the '80s glass cyber-punk towers of Centro Direzionale on the other. You cannot see the bay from here, and therefore are deprived of breath, rumbling past construction sights and urban decay, or 'urban archeology' as Neapolitans like to call it, with a profound sense of history. Stazione Napoli Centrale. Brace yourself.

Sitting over sublime puffy-crust Neapolitan pizza at Trianon in the quartiere Forcella with a plastic cup of Nastro Azzuro beer to wash down those filetti di pomodoro strait from the slopes of Vesuvius. I now understood the longing I felt before, felt all along. Just wanting to abandon it all, reason and rationality, to climb inside the perfect style that makes you stare and enter the eyes that grab you, to the vacuous void that lies within.

Standing outside Porta Nolana a short while later, in broad daylight as the market moved around us spewing squid guts into the stolen handbags and street-kid cigarettes, we saw some young men smashing bottles of champagne against a dirty wall -- must be a sacred spot. Then, a few steps down in front of a stall with DVDs of old Sherlock Holmes stories and horror flicks -- wooooshh!!! Fuochi! Multi-colored tongues of fire shooting strait up in the middle of the market. Right on the battlefront of the Camorra war -- Happy New Year! At the moment, we never wanted to leave...

But it was not meant to be -- no rooms. Unless we wanted to sleep on the streets, which is is really bad idea on New Years eve in Naples since the custom is for everyone to throw everything old out their apartment windows into the street -- sinks, TVs, bathtubs, you name it. One hour later we were on a train back to pretty-boy Rome, like an uptight whore with its vacant soul behind a cheesily suggestive pair of eyes. It is in Napoli, actually, that you are safe.

I melted…again

There are few thunderstorms in Rome, but when they come, they take you by surprise like a nuclear bomb. There I was, alone on the outskirts, in the borgate -- the ugly half-slum suburbs, in a cheap fenced-in garden apartment. Empty, alone. It was about midday when it struck. Boom -- the walls resounded. I just knew that all of Rome had been nuked in one stroke -- couldn’t assume that sound at 11:30 am could mean anything else. The whole earth was shaking and held out for several seconds. Then silence. There was no telephone, no television, only the fast-approaching rain to tell me what was going on.

Every once in awhile, I still hear it. Sometimes it comes in the middle of the night and wakes me, lulling me back to sleep with the hum of the rain. Then, half asleep, I am re-aroused by subsequent sonic booms growing further and further distant. Here and now, in this moment, I long for that earth-shattering-ness, that cacophonous reminder of something real but which cannot be seen, only heard (sentito) and felt (sentito) -- sensed. Hung over, I have the heat, the chills, the need for a hot bath where there is only a small, mouldy stall shower. Some thunder would do me good right now, sucking me into the vortex and out of this coal-blackness.

Nonna always said, learn to love the longing, it is the best thing yet -- and it’s true; after the longing comes something much darker, uglier, more frightening. Like entropy itself, it is always moving, pushing urgently toward something ahead in the shadows, unseen and just out of reach but near enough to make the hairs prick up on the back on your neck. This is the fun part, she says, yet I can’t help feeling that here we are all crashing down together, this ship of fools, in our own personal electric storms of longing without peace, save for maybe a few seconds each day when we re-create the glory of Rome all on our own, before the tugging begins all over again and we know intimately that this place is no longer the center of the universe.

Seems a bit carrot-and-stick, but then so ultimately does life.

Part V: Sunglasses and sympathy

There are two ways to buy sunglasses in Rome. Let’s skip over the expensive brands, because nine out of ten people you see wearing those brands got them on the street for ten bucks – the ones who actually pay full price are absurd. Instead of rude shopkeepers and ridiculous prices you can visit a little table manned by a North African or South Asian guy who works longer hours and speaks better English. You try on a few pairs and then bargain with the guy, half in English, half in Italian, or all in Italian, or in French, or Berber or Tamil if you happen to have the agility. You tell him you are a New Yorker so ‘non mi rompe le scatole’, get them for 10 Euros or so. Or, if you are nearly broke like many of us, you can go where the men at the little tables shop – the wholesale stores near Piazza Vittorio, and buy the glasses from the numerous shady (that is, out of the sun) storefronts lining the streets. If you want to get them for as cheap as the men at the little tables get them – I suddenly realized – you can fork up the money for about a zillion pairs at 1 Euro each and establish your own little table in front of the Colosseum. They say that necessity is the mother of invention – I was going native already.

Since I was far too drunk and jetlagged to take another Roman bus, or even find a bus in Rome on a Sunday, I staggered of a little trattoria into the blinding sun without paying, the proprietor calling after me meekly, “You can pay me after you get a job, va bene”. Although my spirit longed to head for Piazza Vittorio and start my sunglass enterprise right away, my body instead made a sharp right at the Tiber and, nearly plunging into its murky brown shadows, staggered over the Ponte Sisto toward Trastevere. I was not lost, only subconsciously drawn into another reality – maybe it was the few glasses absenthe I’d had with lunch.

Sweating that horrid sweat that only comes from leaving an empty glass and entering the searing heat, I hovered around, dancing between beautiful people walking small obnoxious dogs, supermodels being slobbered over by teenage and middle-aged boys, and fat American families with lobster–burns lining up for neon–colored ice creams (I imagined they would slather this bright green salve onto their burnt hides). There, just on the brink of Santa Maria in Trastevere, stood an extremely petite Bangladeshi man selling sunglasses that were sitting on top of little black felt bags, and the man burnished a knowing grin; was it the absenthe or had he drawn me here and away from my plight, sapping all the energy of my capitalistic charisma?

Oh, they were belllllllli, this one pair – huge and bug-like and hopelessly bulging with thick pink rims – in Italy, this is the height of fashion for both women and women; you have to smoke big cigarettes and ride haphazardly on a motorino with these. Getting away with wearing them in public is the second greatest thing in Italy besides wearing fishnet stockings to work in an office. Here, this is called ‘fitting in’.

“Dodici. Twelve Euro” answered the bald man, although I had not asked, only drooled. “You want them”. That was it - it was a statement, not a question.
Perhaps he could see the sun gouging out my bloodshot eyes, he had seen it so many times before. One encounters demons in Rome after drinking absenthe on a hot day. Or worse – beer-goggling the locals on this stuff is simply not safe.
“Otto”, I demanded — eight. I had recently visited the Arab world and become empowered in my bargaining capacity.
“Dieci. Ten Euros, no less”. I whimpered and took my beautiful absurdities.
“And!”, the man cheered me in perfect English now, “they come with this great little drawstring carrying case!”

Voguing in a shop window, I looking completely deranged, like some sort of exotic bee. They were wonderful and now I had the whole afternoon free - no job, no money. I suddenly felt exactly like a local. Still drunk, I stumbled on toward the Vatican, that very quarter where I had met some demons on a previous expedition.

It was still the same cast of characters, except more desperate than before on the graffiti-covered streets. And me, living out of a suitcase, without a man. Baby is gone gone gone. He will come back, follow me back – if he forgives me for dragging him through all this – in another couple of weeks. I am supposed to find work and find us a place, then he will come back. Not easy, maybe he’ll be here soon. Till then, I am out to achieve the impossible, living like a bourgeois bum in this whorish city. Walking through the Borgo as the afternoon turned the walls rusty red, there some old guys were playing chess – one looks up, rolls the eyes vaguely at me, murmuring “sei bellissima”, and back down to contemplate his pawns.

SPECIAL REPORT: Election Day – Italy

Once again I find myself stumbled into a completely surreal moment in space and time outside the bright yellow ‘Romano Prodi Presidente’ truck and they’re playing ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ – I’m back in college on an acid trip, but this crowd surely looks more upbeat than one block back at Berlusconi Headquarters.

Could this be the final changing of old guard or more of the same old bullshit? Whoever we end up with will be a broken man – beautiful but useless the same as all these other loafers with their dark hair and naïve brown eyes and perpetual five o’clock shadows.

One man, everyman – goes double for the women. Fini’s the hottest candidate though. The wind blows by the cameramen, always in navy blue with their power (impotence?) to reveal all on their shoulders while satellite men sit passively behind the scenes quietly turning little dials.

It is always the same, so why do we keep finding ourselves at these places? The Pope died, etc. No excuses now: you love watching the fray and standing behind news shots staring off blankly into space behind the imbecile correspondent, smiling at camera and sounds wryly edging out the corner of the mouth.

Arafat’s death – remember that one? – eating ‘bizer’ with the Al–Jazeera TV crew outside the ‘muqata’ and laughing behind the CNN chief international correspondent on live news – reminded me of the Ulster County Fair, cow shows and pig races and the house of mirrors especially…Prodi’s supporters definitely sexier than Berl’s.

Author’s note: while writing this in Rome’s Piazza S.S. Apostoli in front of the Olive Coalition headquarters on the day of the Italian Parliamentary election, they stole my wallet.

Board Meeting: 3:42 p.m. Friday. early September.

What was she doing in there with all those corpses? Just needed to climb out a window in consciousness and into another time. Wanted to climb into a moment that has passed, yet suspended forever three levels down in the base of her brain. Always spinning, never still. It was a time of immense sadness; but sadness is a heavy kind of joy. All the feelings of a lifetime compounded into this one moment: crossing the highlands in the night sky. Immobilized. Frozen back there. Wide awake while the other passengers dozed, haunted by the sad sweet music of their driver’s choice. The driver – he knew that she was awake but intimated that he was driving alone, self conscious as to appear unaware, he seemed to keep one eye on the narrow road – dash, dash, dash – and the other slightly outside his field of vision, out of perspective, somewhere in the midst of these strange Philistine love songs. All the way back they rode through the silence, she never taking her eyes off the driver’s finite silhouette and he never once letting them wander.

But he knew. Or seemed to know. She thought that somewhere along the road some awareness had passed between. Whatever had brought them out into this lonely night had marked them – kept their minds wandering – in this tiny old rattlebox in a very unusual time and place. None tried to put his finger on it; too engulfed in the intensity of their individual experiences to try and make any sense out of a shared vision. But she saw it trapped in the torpid outlines of the others’ sleeping faces flopped to each side – were they only pretending as to avoid confusion? But some movement of the divine stirred her to sit up ramrod strait and take up her cross, to follow what moved her to its logical end.

Sitting there now in a business meeting, it all seemed to have all been a dream – whatever was indicated in the calculated movements of the eyes, remaining half focused on something greater than the tiny sliver of reality within the lines of the road. Why didn’t he dare? In the end, this feeling drives us all crazy – it’s the incredible loneliness of our ultimate separation from all other forms of life. Che paura! Most of the time we can ignore it by distracting ourselves from the clarity of our existence; in time the pungency fades – call it forgetting. But there come these moments of such supreme knowing and grace when we seem to merge with the beautiful beings around us completely and seamlessly, and there is a common perception of something we can’t put our finger on. The other shoe drops. We were waiting for it, but we didn’t know.

And it is following these moments – in the minutes and days and years that stretch out the life ahead of us, that we acutely feel the absence of this wholeness: the loss, the desolation and finally the despair of our numbing singularity. We live side by side on parallel paths with millions of souls – sometimes even sharing the same bed – and never really meeting but for a few spine–tingling moments of absurd misunderstanding, brushing past each other like two marooned ships on a foggy night. Folly feels divine. It’s chilly. This acknowledgement of our limitedness and the boundaries of our physical being is never shared, though we sit side by side with the same heavy hearts, confined within our skins of deceit. Pretending to be amused.

Part IV: Tilting at cupolas

At heart, I am a sadomasochist, which is probably why after all this time, I found myself back in the most sadomasochistic place in the world: Rome. There is no point in fighting whatever strikes you here. Returning to Rome after a long absence is like unplugging from the Matrix. Never mind that coming here is always such a bad idea in the first place. The down side about a place being trapped in 1603 is that you feel you are, well, trapped in 1603. Unless you have been born into the ruling class, or at least have an archbishop for an uncle (neither of which apply to me) it is the stupidest thing someone with no money and no job could ever do.

Yet there we were boarding the train for this place I had experienced so in–depth once before; already confronted by suntanned, relaxed, cheesily dressed Romans, jabbering away in their incomprehensible dialect, trying to rush over my head to disembark before it had even rolled into the station. Don’t blame them for this – they really are compulsed to do it. I felt as if I was already stepping over the threshold to a strange land, watching the bewildered Philippino nuns trying to shout back at them. But Philippino nuns – all nuns for that matter – are invisible to Romans; strange in the city of the Vatican and priests in flowing black robes, broad–brimmed hats and all that. It is always the same on the train, same surly conductors – both baffled and angered by the mad scene before them. We waited our turn, stepped down, took a tranquilizer as we boarded the infamous #64 bus – 2 hours and 35 minutes of hallucinogenic bliss later – disembarked in the heart of it all: Via Giulia.

This might be sensibly considered the most ridiculous of all my attempts to join the Italian dolce vita. As I am neither the daughter of a mafioso or the niece of an archbishop, the carefree days of tanning, vogueing in revealing outfits and making out with gorgeous, dark men have always eluded me since my very short fling with Gianni, the cream of the Roman nobility, at age 19. But ever since my first youthful visit here, I have been poisoned with the unremitting desire to join the ranks of these huge-sunglassed, pointy-shoed, incredibly sensual people. It was an impulse more than a desire, to come back, a voice from deep within that screamed, “Give up everything and go to the Las Vegas of the clergy!” It had come upon me with unexpected force, even for someone as used to forceful impulses as me.

Our two–hour bus ride from the station would be the first of many drains on my voracious will, but it was worth it just to have witnessed a tall, well–dressed man in a dark suit frotteurizng a large and fully–habited nun (look it up – there’s no better way of saying it) from a part of the world where you’d imagine women would want to become nuns just to escape being mutilated or tattooed or getting a plate in the lip. The guy reminded me of a Frenchman I used to know in college – Massimilian was in my sculpture class – we were killing time in there. We were supposed to sandblast our bronze sculptures and he wanted me to do his sandblasting for him – he didn’t want to get his hands dirty or callused. He wanted them to stay soft. “But Max”, I implored, “A girl likes a man with rough hands, hands that have worked. Hands that have seen a day of labor. A girl desires rough hands”.

But Max replied “Ver a husssband, yessss, zee rough hands are goood, but ver a loevvver, a loevver must have zeee smoooothe hands”. Silently, I sandblasted his bronze for him and in repayment, he gave me a Valium “ver any problem zat should arizze”...I woke up hours later somewhere very dark, who knows where. But I must have drifted off somewhere on an old cranky Roman bus...oh yes, frotteurizing the nun. Mmmmmm. Back to my Happy Place: I would spend more and more time there in Rome, until I simply refused to leave.

Part III: Inferno

Some people believe that purgatory lies in the hinterlands of Yonkers and this is not entirely false. But in a more spiritual sense, purgatory is where one goes to face their sins before entering paradise, or maybe not paradise after all. In the weeks before our departure, it dawned on me that for various reasons, we wouldn’t be returning from our upcoming trip to Italy. There were too many questions about the future that remained unanswered, so many disappointments of the past to reckon with. What really was out there? But there was no turning back now – we had just to follow our instincts no matter how mad these voices seemed. We had our tickets.

We could always come home. I could always come home. It was so simple. But I knew we’d stay. All there was to do was just call a cab to the airport and grasp each other’s hand and board the plane: it hadn’t been spoken, but he knew it too – ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’.

There was, actually, a plan. We had never actually discussed this, sure, but it seemed a pretty sound plan nevertheless. The plan was to fly to Naples, take a cab from the airport to an apartment we had rented for one month while we were enrolled in our intensive Italian course. Once the course ended, I would convince Jimmy that the best thing to do instead of going home was to head to Rome, where Jimmy and I would look for jobs with our one month of Italian language skills. So far so good.

Our first moments in Italy jolted us out of fantasyland and into the inferno. After landing in Naples one hour late we realized that one of our suitcases was lost (If you can count on Alitalia for one thing, it is losing your bags). In a hurry to claim our apartment, we greeted Naples in a taxicab whose driver had made an ostentatious show of the fact that because it was Sunday and we were Americans, he would be ripping us off. It was one of those situations, among many to come in Italy, that we didn’t necessarily get ourselves into but that was thrust upon us, victims of our own unbridled hopes and dreams. We had arrived.

It was raining hard and the landlord had been waiting all morning for our arrival at the apartment with his wife and little baby. By now, it was well into the afternoon, soaking wet, and we were trapped in some mammoth Brazilian automobile with an obvious sociopath at the helm. But as our criminal driver sped down a long hill into the city through colorful slums, mopeds and copious amounts of laundry hanging to dry, I could see individual rays of sunlight hitting the buildings across the bay and the colors lighting up against the dreary sky, and I actually became tearful. No matter what happened to us, we were on the right path.

It was right then that I noticed the driver was turned completely around in his seat, giving Jimmy a long hard menacing stare; his sun–baked and cigarette–tightened face was wound like a clock. Even now as a Vespa mounted by a guy both smoking and talking on the phone disappeared under the right front wheel, the driver remained completely rotated in his seat. Upon reaching the bottom of this huge hill we had been descending all the way, we entered a solid, honking traffic snarl – ah, but our ever–savvy driver headed against the flow of traffic just as I had expected him to, back still to the road. When he finally did face front, gave a bit of a jump and corrected himself, he then grabbed the wheel with renewed interest and pressed on strait into the oncoming traffic, expertly rounding the circle against cars and trolleys like a salmon fighting its way upstream to mate with its last dying breath.

Of course, he charged us extra for this service – and for the rain, and the fact that it was Sunday and we were Americans who obviously no scruples if we had willingly climbed into his car – and abandoned us in the cavernous entrance of a crumbling, cave–like structure – our building – whose exterior and interior walls had not seen paint since before our country was even a glimmer in George Washington’s eye. The street was so narrow, it could not accommodate vehicles, and although our cabbie had indeed driving on it, he had charged us extra for this too. We stood in the dark, staring at the gauged–out dripping walls, half expecting to see stalactites emerge out of the haze, until our thoughts had settled enough to locate our proprietor.

We eventually located the landlord. Salvatore: the most gorgeous man around 30 but looking ever youthful with his dark smiling eyes; he was pretty chipper considering that that he had been waiting for us with his young wife and an angelic infant in a little car for the past three hours. He happily informed us (in Neapolitan dialect) that our apartment was up on the fourth floor and that there was no elevator (somehow the ghost of my Nana intervened and allowed me to understand this sad news). Then I realized that in Europe, the first floor in buildings does not start until you have already gone one flight up: ‘Jimmy – why the hell did you bring so much goddamn shit?’ At the moment, he didn’t seem to understand Neapolitan or English, just stared at our crap–packed American suitcases idly looking like they were getting ready to wander off with a passing band of gypsies. I could see the American guilt–inspired paranoia mounting in his eyes: if the local folks saw us with all our ridiculous accoutrements, would they not feel more than justified in liberating our belongings from their state of imperialistic servitude? (this and not much else was the fruit of four years at a top liberal–arts college).

Salvatore, our chipper, godlike Neapolitan landlord informed us, as we lugged our bags up the crumbling, graffiti–covered stairway that we were very fortunate because this was the famous borgo degli orifici – the gold and silversmiths quarter, and for this reason, there were ‘eyes everywhere’ – this, I think, was a gesture meant to comfort our troubled souls.

He handed me a hilariously large haunted-house key, took his money for the month and left us in a dark little room with 20–foot high ceiling containing: a fold–out couch, a small gas burner, a sink and a little table. There was a bathroom – oh yes: toilet with no seat, smallest sink in the world and 35–year old washing machine. Outside, the rain continued unabated and inside the dim stairwell I would not have been surprised to see Jesus pop right out of the huge, neon-lit shrine outside our apartment door that had little effigies of people burning in hell planted under his dangling feet – Jimmy, we are not in Yonkers anymore. The graffiti surrounding his head was like a post–modern halo composed of swastikas and curses upon all Romans. (By the way, Italians invented graffiti – and fascism too! and the Vendetta!) And with these chilling facts in mind, we began our beautiful new life in Nana’s land, the Old Country, Napoli – the city called ‘Neapolis’ because it was the New City – in the 6th Century BC. It looked that way.

Part II: Montefioralle

We had been talking about it forever but I suppose nobody really thought we would actually go. Why? Abroad, all these questions would not reside and neither would we – just needed a month to relax and blow off steam, only wander among the ghosts of an ancient city speaking a foreign tongue; pouring libations to our mythical ancestors in the ‘old country’ was really all we needed to know that we actually exist. When after our time was up and we didn’t come back, it came as a big shock to just about everyone in the New York metropolitan area. It shouldn’t have.

It was not all really clear at the beginning even to me, but it went back years, before Jimmy and I had even met to my 20th birthday – I was in Rome for a semester and had been easily picked up by exactly the type of guy you’d expect to pick you up in Italy: young, lithe, big sunglasses, tight red jeans, if a touch slim he still had the words and the accent to make up for the fact that he walked daintily with his friends and addressed grown men as ‘bello’ – ah, Gianni. It was 1994, and Italy and I were still untouched by those universal forces that would later conspire to destroy us both.

Driving through the Tuscan hills on the Feast of All Saints as the sun dipped below the vineyards and ancient Etruscan villages, Gianni wound me higher and higher into the Elysian fields of wine, his Fiat resisting yet seemingly made to buck and grind those turns to Greve, a quiet town, but all considered lively and in a jovial mood. We parked almost inside a dark little bar and rapidly polished off a bottle or two of the popular local table wine that I still believe has alchemical properties. After the bottles were drained – and Gianni had forgotten my name, referring to me only as ‘Beatrice’ (like this: ‘Bee–a–trēē–che!’) – he led me out of the enoteca and had something to show me. I protested at first when he went for his little car, even though I was feeling quite soporific by then, but Gianni laughed, ‘Don’t worry, Beatrice, this is Italy – there is no such thing as drunk driving here’ and under its own power, the Fiat lifted us ever further into the hills to an ancient crumbling place where you could reach up and imbibe the moon.

It was a tiny medieval walled city, but its walls didn’t enclose – it seemed as though all the houses, had been carved from the very same piece of rock, a giant sculpture whittled away over an eternity into a village. The town was but a single structure where spaces had been hewn for people to experience the glorious time between their birth and death. It was dark and infinitely quiet; he whispered as little squares of light began to appear on the sides of the stone walls. Families are enjoying their dinners, laughing and gossiping, babies crying, cats begging for scraps of meat, grandmothers pontificating; the smell of gorgeous juicy steak wafts through and we duck into a doorway to be silent within the damp stone, listening to the night and watching the particles of each other’s breath mingle in the narrow space between. The walls were alive! They heaved their heavy sighs, had remained unchanged over hundreds of years and the laughter emanating from above was ancient.

Outside the city walls – they were not so much walls as precipices that had erupted out of the hilltop – looking down a steep stone staircase into the orchards below, we had left this earth and there was only an old man voice, strange, singing among the fruit.
‘What kind of fruit grows here, Gianni’?
‘…I cannot tell you…’
‘Why?’
‘There is no word for this fruit in English. It is a fruit that only grows here in this paese … delicious.’ (Gianni was a lightweight when it came to the vino.)
We stayed silent, studying the orchards, letting our eyes wind on down the path in its diminishing light. The singing grew louder and very sad; the old man was winding his way up, right up through it, and I understood that that he was singing to us: two young lovers he had seen on the precipice, who must have looked stunning in the glow of the lights.
‘siete bellissimi’. Indeed.

Part I: Escape from the American dream

Now, I want to sit down and tell my story, about how I completely transformed my life, or rather how my life transformed me – it was more of a passive experience. Does anybody have an idea of how difficult this has been? If it were easy to change, everybody would be doing it, but then again its not so easy to stay the same either.

Of course, it’s all been done before, but let me tell you, it was no small thing, except we had no choice – something deep within me led us there like lambs to the slaughter – it was imposed upon me from someplace deep inside, some troubling dream bubbling to the surface, that hammered the soul day and all night while I slept and fought, until I gave up and broke down and fell right into it, helpless and panting, and then I imposed it on him. I consider myself one of the lucky ones and for his sake I hope he does too.


So, it happened, but not all at once – took years off our lives, this transformation. But I figure it’s worth it because trying to play by the rules and live the American dream and pop Prozacs (or what was the name of my brand?) wasn’t the answer. Instead, one should do something to change the situation – but most of us seem content enough with our cocktails of pills and booze because we are so much more fortunate than those poor people in Africa after all.

Let me tell you something: (!) I recently went to one of the poorest parts of Kenya, where everybody lived in shacks or huts or what-have-you, and they were laughing at our people, laughing with derision: ‘My brother moved to Texas some years back and lives in a big house, but he has the saddest life, he writes me often and he never never sounds happy. So I told him to come on back here to our village, but he said he can’t because once your kids get used to that life over there, become American, you can never bring them back – I feel very sad, very bad for him because he sounds so alone there in his big house’.


I didn’t know it either, about the sadness and the empty life, was just living up there in Yonkers – met a guy lived across the street, his bedroom window faced mine and we used to watch each other at night, skilfully avoiding mutual eye contact, in our isolation-box apartments on opposite sides of the same street, mirror images of each other’s ridiculous lives like zoo animals opening the blinds when we were both safely in our pyjamas (we had a mutual understanding that it was to go no further into tawdriness), both seeing the same shrink and never introduced! we kept dutifully on while the doctors and insurance companies and pharmaceuticals kept sucking it up and performing alchemy with the chemicals in the little gaps between our nerves: make us feel more American, make us little golden androids in the big wet dream.…but there is no point in continuing down a path we didn’t end up taking because you never really know what’s down there and you don’t care…


I don’t even remember how it finally happened…I do, but it’s not that interesting. Maybe we waved at the sidewalk one day rather awkwardly and there was a stilted conversation. Since we’d been watching each other for the better part of two years, the awkwardness now seems a bit strange, but since we were both months (and months) into sexual frustration, we didn’t let the silence between us get too much in the way; we quickly became quite used to it.

He dribbled back and forth with his guy-things out of his place and into mine little by little and scattered them around, marking his territory on my warped wood floors with the symbols of modern male consumerism – always lots of wires spreading across the room and up my walls like gray and white tendrils. My cat took to sleeping in his great-black shoe. Those

Victorian monstrosities up our street used to be the summer palaces of the New York City rich and now they were cracking up into scores of rumbly boxcars for young, mobile, college-graduate hobos like us, jobs too ridiculous to describe (it’s like they keep having to think up stuff for our generation to do and can’t come up with anything good).


Perhaps in the end that’s why we never returned from our month-long language study. That’s it – we never talked about what we did and there was no plan to get lost over there, but somehow we both knew and followed this thing to its logical end – even the idea seemed to be cast in finality, Caesar silently crossing the Rubicon: ‘hey, wouldn’t it be nice to spend a month learning Italian?’…‘yes, honey, it would’.

Friends and loved ones and we believed we just needed a month-long break from the grind of our decent hard-working career paths. There is no point in musing on what really went on in our heads or why; by now we had been living together and continuing to gaze at each other in our pyjamas for the better part of two years and it probably was just time. Would have been more difficult not to do it (that’s what people don’t understand – that it takes more energy to fight against things). We just thought would be better for us to communicate with each other in Italian – that way we could always be misunderstood.