Cher in Florence

This was me about one year ago, September 1. I was fresh from the airport, tired and thrilled. I had just put my bags down in my new apartment. Three months!!, I must have been thinking. Wow. A whole three months in Italy. Just imagine what can happen…

It was great to be back in Florence, to see the old sights and catch that startling light.

I traveled around, taking day trips (this is Villa I Tatti, near Settignano)…

and I caught up with my friend Sheila in Pontassieve…

I also went to see Alberto at the Castello del Trebbio (once owned by the Pazzi family) in Chianti…

I went there to do research for an article I’d been wanting to write about the Pazzi Conspiracy for The Florentine. (This pic shows where Lorenzo de’ Medici escaped his assassins in the Duomo.)

My new street, via Benedetto Marcello.

And this is my bike. My very precious bike given to me by a good friend. It changed my life in Florence and made everything so much easier. Especially getting home after midnight . . .

I learned how to cook risotto.

Everything still seemed a bit strange and exotic. To move from New York to here, I felt a bit of an alien. My eyes were very open. And I liked it. Very much.

But still things were a bit precarious. What was I going to do after these three months of my life? Go back to New York? And do what? It wasn’t long before I wondered to myself…how could I leave?

I mean, I love it here. Look at me.

Enter Elizabeth, a fellow writer. She took the train up from Rome one day in October. She’s been living there for six years. When I asked her, “How do you stay?” she said that she teaches creative writing online at some university in Florida..and she thought they might need a composition instructor…

I had some thinking to do…it would be senseless, just impossible, to stay with nothing but a little online job and no real job security.

But then I’d take these bike rides and every beautiful sight would be accompanied by the thought, “But I’d be leaving this…”

…and this…

and this…So. It didn’t take me long to say yes. I applied for the job and started teaching in late October.

In November I had the best birthday I’d had in years. This is at Trattoria Garga.

We had some fun.

Happy.

Christmastime in Florence was like a dream. I’d never seen a city so beautifully, softly lit up like this.

I went north, to Trento, for Christmas. It was very scenic but I was homesick Christmas Day. No one spoke English.

In January, I finally visited my old friend Simon, who I knew from college in North Carolina, who was staying with his mother in Nice. I hadn’t seen him in years.

It was really great to see him.

For all of my fumblings with Italian during Christmas, it was glorious to spend three days with him and his fantastically sharp-witted, D.H. Lawrence-quoting British mother.

In February, I made my first trip home. I’d been worried because of money that I might have to stay home and give up Italy, but I stuck it through and bought a round-trip ticket. Milford, New Hampshire.

Thanks to Facebook, I was able to reconnect with these lovely people, Joe and Lesley: my friends from Suffolk U. I think it had been 15 years since we’d seen each other.

I also got to see my high school friend/neighbor Tammy, who now works in an interior design office but is a full-time passionate dancer. We used to choreograph dances in our living rooms to Michael Jackson and Duran Duran. I still like Duran Duran, I don’t care what people say.

Me and Mom, Dracut, MA. She took me shopping for new clothes and cooked me delicious food all week. She is my Mom and I’m so glad.

The Return. I returned to Italy in the early Spring with a break from the first part of my stay in Italy. I’d had to leave my apartment on via Benedetto Marcello before my trip to the States, so I needed a new place to live. A friend of mine had told me that a woman at her English school was looking for someone to live with her to teach her English in exchange for low rent. I called this woman from the States to arrange a meeting when I got back but she would still be in Sicily a week after I returned to Florence. So, I stayed with my very gracious friends who live on a hill above Pontassieve, outside of Florence, for a week. They have cats, and I adore them.

I also stayed with my friends Sheila and Max for a few days, in Pontassieve.

While I’d been in New York and New England, Spring had hit Florence, apparently. This is the park across the street from my apartment, where I had just started living. The Sicilian woman’s name is Salvina and I moved in with her and her boyfriend Mattia.

This Spring storm made the light all the brighter. It was a strange time because I felt even more disoriented than before. Living with strangers in Isolotto (just outside the city center), having gone through a difficult breakup. It was all new.

Lucky for me, Salvina and Mattia are amazing people.

I started writing regularly for The Florentine, writing about a different street every month.

One morning I woke up to find this big box in the hallway. A truck driver from Sicily had met up with Mattia the night before at a gas station off the highway at 1 in the morning. He was there to hand off the goods: oranges and artichokes plucked from the trees in Sicily. We enjoyed them for weeks.

So pretty, too.

This is a spontaneous English lesson plan for Salvina. Our kitchen is also dotted with post-it notes (kitchen, cupboard, fridge, stove, etc.)

I started going to the nearby Cascine Park a lot.

It’s nice just to sit and have nothing to do.

A walk in my neighborhood.

I went to San Vincenzo for a weekend with a friend. We could see Elba from the beach. It was early in the season, so it was still a bit chilly, but very relaxing and pleasant.

Around this time, I started taking shots of sunsets. It wasn’t that I planned it; it’s just that almost every night they were beautiful.

Ridiculously beautiful.

In May, my lovely friend Lauren visited from New York and introduced me to her guy, Fede. I felt like a witness in front of them; their love is huge.

Salvina and Mattia being silly.

On June 3, my friend Sheila married her boyfriend Max in a small town outside of Florence.

Later in June, my friend Bobby visited from California with his girlfriend, Corrie, who I was happy to finally meet. They are really generous, kind people. Not the kind that just pretend to be; they are the real deal. Also? Bobby knows more about the history of Florence than most people I know. While here, he bought Corrie a ring on Ponte Vecchio and proposed to her when out in the country. She said yes. This is the first time we’d seen each other since he’d popped the question. All this love!

After a dinner with friends on the night of Festa di San Giovanni, my friend Ale and I ran through the packed streets of Florence to catch the fireworks from atop the Hotel Lucchesi. Finally, when we made it to the rooftop, sweating and relieved not to have missed them, my friend Luciano set us up with some prosecco and we were able to relax. Afterwards, he introduced me to Katie, an American who’d been here for three years and hadn’t any American or English friends. We chatted and agreed to meet for brunch the following Sunday. On our drive out to Pistoia for brunch, we chatted about the work situation in Italy. I mentioned that I was looking for more reliable work. She said she’d check in her office at the University of Florence to see if they needed any editors or writers. Hmmm….

This was my very hot lunch perch at the University of Florence, Polo Scientifico. After that brunch with Katie, I had gone to visit the office to meet her boss and colleagues and started work the next day. I was thrilled and relieved. A full-time job in Florence! With visa! My schedule changed from 20-30 hours a week to 60 hours a week, with my online teaching job, which I couldn’t let go of. But fate interrupted again when an American university here in Florence offered me a job that I couldn’t turn down: a book-editing project for their Renaissance studies center. I’d be working freelance from home again. I had that full-time job for only five weeks, but I met a good group of people.

Just a few weeks ago, in the hills with my friends with the cats. It was my first non-working weekend in weeks.

I don’t know why I’m closing with this one. It’s at the bus stop. I was waiting for my last bus ride home from the full-time job. I like the colors.

I won’t and can’t predict what will happen now. I go home to the States next week for another visit. I have good, interesting, and steady work for the next several months. I am speaking Italian more with the goal of fluency now. Vediamo . . .

I know this may sound strange, but have you ever seen through the seasons?

You know, when it’s October and the sun seems so bright and it’s an unusually warm day, in the 70s, and you get a sense memory of April, when things are just starting to thaw. It had been a long, snowy winter, and there are now puddles on the street that wet the wheels of your bike as you ride a little faster. The wind is mild, the sky is azure, and the dreamy quiet of winter seems over. You even hear birds trilling in the trees!

If you were in Florence last month, you could easily trick yourself into believing, just for a few moments, that it was spring. Especially because of the light.

As I did, when riding my bike along my favorite route to the eastern part of the city last month. I sped through the traffic of via Belfiore, took the detour that edges Parco della Cascine, and then wound my way around to head straight to the riverway. It is this turn that always astonishes me: a vista of light opens up suddenly and you can see all the way down to the pastiche facade of Ponte Vecchio and the dark cypress hills beyond. The buildings to the left are luminous with gold and ivory, the Arno reflects a mirror of blue sky, and down to the right across the river the red dome of the church of San Frediano pops up. It is no wonder that artists flock here with a view like that. The light does a dance over the primary colors and never stops moving. All you have to do is stare. There is such a pleasing variation in sizes and shapes; the way the light works its way into all these corners and facades is endlessly exhilarating to the senses.

At once, that day riding along the Arno, I felt renewed. I happened to be just getting over a bad cold, my whole body in a fog for days. But riding my bike, the fresh air weaving its way into my lungs, I felt a bit more alive, broken up, and hopeful.

I love moments like these, when you can feel two strong sensations at the same time–it’s as if two layers have joined into one rich one. You can see the spring in the fall, the vitality in the sickness, the light within the dark.

And now, a month later, it *is* dark. The bright yellow leaves lie crumpled in puddles, the sky seems perpetually grey, and it has rained for days and days in a row. The Arno is high. It’s harder to find the light. You have to dig deeper to get at it. But it’s there, if only in the Christmas lights now dangling like delicate curtains over the city streets.

I am always at attention when someone is telling me a story that I half-believe–or rather, that I want to believe but if I did I’d have to revolutionize my worldview, and so I’m afraid to believe because that would require so much work. I stay in a kind of limbo of belief. I fully admit that I am lazy. For instance, I was raised Catholic, and rather than fully believing, I keep my suspicions up, and yet, I’m not above feeling awe.

The same is true with ghost stories. The other day I was interviewing my friend Alberto, who manages the 12th-century Castello del Trebbio outside of Florence. I wanted to find out more about the Pazzi family, who lived there in the 15th century. I just happened to ask him if there were any legends about the castle. (I like legends.)

He perked up and told me about a former owner of the castle, Antonio Baldini, who had lived there in the early 20th century. He lived with a ghost in the castle, Alberto said. The doors would slam, the furniture moved, you know. Sure, I thought, everybody knows what ghosts do. Their behavior is more or less consistent, even if they are not believed in.

I wondered if the ghost were still here.

As if answering my question, Alberto told me that the ghost disappeared when Baldini sold the house. I didn’t understand. Didn’t ghosts haunt buildings?

“You have to know that it’s not strange because there are two kinds of ghosts–what you call ghosts and what you call spirits. The difference is that the spirit is connected with the family; it is one of the family and it has nothing to do with the building . . . But a ghost is in a building forever. When you say a house is haunted, that’s because new people come and go; [the owners] don’t tell you that there is a ghost in there. But in this case it was a spirit. When the [Baldini] family sold the castle, this spirit disappeared. So today there are no spirits in the castle.”

So simple.

As Alberto told me this story, we were sitting in his office, a modern loftspace above the wine shop (the property includes vineyards and olive groves). Keyboards clicked away, the lights shone bright. I wasn’t too spooked. But then he asked me if I wanted to go see the dungeon where the prisoners were kept? Oh yes!

He took me first to see the private chapel in the castle. Memorial plaques of previous owners line the walls. Stones for the Baldini family were there, including several infants’, some who died only days old. It’s strange, how distance in time can cast a macabre shadow over a story, when really the mother of these poor children surely felt something akin to what my own mother must have felt when she lost her baby, after he was born, before me, in the late 1960s. Just a human being, suffering.

We walked through many beautiful but chilly rooms. In the dining room, family photos decked the side table and on the ceiling someone had painted coats of arm of all the former residents. We then stood for awhile in the “Conspiracy Room,” where, legend has it, the Pazzi family members conspired to kill two Medicis. Alberto stood over a spot in the middle of the room, under a thick rug, and started jumping a little. “Ah, I think this might be one of those trapdoors,” he said. He’d told me earlier that the Renaissance owners of the castle used to invite their enemies to dinner, and then, at just the right moment, press a button and “pop,” deposit them swiftly into the dungeon. He also showed me where the family spends most of their time, in a cozy room about the size of a spacious studio in Brooklyn, complete with a kitchen and warmed from the recent use of the large stone fireplace. Finally, we walked through the bright courtyard, and descended the stone steps that lead to the wine cellars and the dungeon.

Immediately what grips you is the cold, the dankness, and the dark. It is a cellar, after all. It feels like a cave. It must have to do with the switch from the high ceilings above to the low ones down here. We walk by rows of huge wine barrels, each bordered by a cherry red line, and the wine’s specific varieties are written in big, black handwriting on the front. This adds some normality.

But it’s the other rooms that get me. To get to the dungeon, we have to walk through darker, smaller rooms, filled with stacked layers of unlabeled, dust-covered wine bottles. You might bump into a one if you’re not careful. Poe and his Cask of Amontillado instantly come to mind. There is a room off to the side of one of these rooms, with a door half-open. I can’t explain why but I want to see what’s in there. I have a feeling that it isn’t just more wine bottles. I sense it’s an even smaller room. I ask Alberto if it’s okay if I check it out, and he says, yes, sure. He doesn’t tell me what’s inside. I approach slowly, as if I were the wife in Bluebeard, dangerously curious about the most secret room in the house.* When I get to the entryway, all I can see are dark shapes, maybe storage for materials or equipment? It could be anything. I feel for a light but don’t find one, so I walk back to Alberto, my curiosity unquenched.

As we enter the dark dungeon a few rooms away, actually a small room, Alberto reaches for the light but it’s not working. “Huh, that’s strange.” He fidgets with the bulb. This is a classic moment. For all of you writers out there, or horror/suspense aficionados, you’ll recognize this as the moment in the story just before everything goes horribly wrong. It’s formula, but it works every time. His lighthearted “Huh, that’s strange,” is the perfect setup for the quick disaster/death to follow.

“I’ll have to get Mario** to fix that,” he says with a smile. “Anyway, see, here are the rings where they used to fasten the prisoners to.” Iron rings punctuate the walls, and are placed at a height where the prisoners’ arms would be reaching up, slightly. I remember the rings being rusty, but I think that’s more my rusty, shadowy memory.

And of course, nothing unusual happens. We stay there only a moment or two, and then move on to happier rooms, and soon upstairs out into the bright sunshine again.

The imagination is an exciting place. Even if no spirit roamed that castle, the fact is that babies drew their last breath there, conspirators plotted murder, and men’s bodies languished on iron rings, their wrists bloody from the chains (I imagine). All beyond horrible. Time may conjure spirits out of the stories, but isn’t that just a safe way to look the dark in the face? Is there a difference between my imaginings and a spirit?

Both my imagination and the idea of a spirit are definitely more fun to believe in than believing we live in a cold, meaningless universe whose creatures have a penchant for cruelty. I really don’t know. Either way, I’m uncomfortable, and spooky stories keep me on the edge of my seat.

*She discovers in this room the corpses of all of her new husband’s ex-wives, positioned on various horrific torture contraptions.
**Mario is the gamekeeper, who has worked for the castle since 1953. He is also the keeper of the legends, Alberto tells me. He is worth another story altogether. He did tell us about a previous resident who was so cherished by his family that his body was preserved (from the torso up to his head) in a glass case and kept on the chapel’s altar for 40 years. These are moments I wish I were fluent in Italian so I could listen to all of his stories and write them down.

(Warning: This post has absolutely nothing to do with Florence.)

The other afternoon I came home from the supermarket and discovered this in my egg carton:

I was disturbed and in awe at the same time. A strange sensation. An egg’s not supposed to have hair. Sweet, white, beautiful hair, presumably from a baby chick. Immediately I thought:

1. A chick is trying to get out of the egg.
2. A chick lost hair trying to escape. It must have hurt.
3. Of that surreallist fur-covered cup. But the naturalist version.
4. What does it mean to eat an egg?
5. I don’t want to eat babies, or any form of pre-baby.
6. How can pro-lifers justify eating eggs?
7. I shouldn’t eat eggs. Ever.
8. When does life begin?
9. What was a chick doing near a hen laying this egg?
10. What if it’s not a chick but this is a hen’s hair?
11. What if I opened it?
    (Continued)

I.

On Saturday night I went to a dinner party, hosted by a cuoca (chef) so well-known that she’s cooked for the Queen of Denmark. (Yes, I’m very lucky.) It was a fabulous meal of round juicy slices of bistecca, served on a wooden platter that we’d have to tilt up to spoon out the savory gravy, and thin green beans with a pesto sauce amid large slices of white potatoes. Four or five bottles of red wine lined the long dining room table. The guests were a mix of Americans, some of whom had transplanted themselves in this country decades ago, and Italians. The jazz music was loud, the conversation easy and constant, the room filled with smoke, and the laughter as hearty as it was sincere. Most had been friends for years, and it was a joy to see them revel in each other’s company.

Next the hostess served dessert: schiacciata con l’uva (foccacia with grapes). Oh, my. It’s an old “peasant” recipe: when gathering the harvest, farmers used to put aside some grapes for making this bread. Then someone pulled out the rum. We sang along to Don McLean’s “American Pie” with smiles on our faces.

I looked around the room and wondered if I could see myself here, twenty years later, a woman living in Italy speaking in another country’s tongue, hosting a beautiful dinner party with loving friends. I’m not entirely sure I want it enough yet, because when the 16-year-old son of one of the guests told me that he wants to go to college for graphic design in the States, I beamed with pride. I told him about RISD, the great art school in Rhode Island. And throughout the night, I also found myself talking about New York a lot. I don’t painfully miss it, which would tell me that I am intimidated by my new experiences here, I just feel rich about it. As in, I have this here, and I have that there. One is certainly not “better” than the other. But this is useful for me to notice, because it’s possible I won’t ever live in Italy permanently, but I might visit a few months at a time, every year or two.

“Starry, Starry Night” has always been a song that slows the moment. The hostess said in almost a whisper that this song is a rare and beautiful example of the music matching the words. And aptly, soon afterwards, we all put on our scarves and light jackets (it’s cooling down, finally), and kissed each other good night. A little drunk, I roamed home, my body dreaming of sleep.

II.

On Sunday, I went back to Pontassieve. I had been invited to lunch at the home of my friend Sheila’s boyfriend’s parents, whom I’d never met before. Sheila must have talked to them about me, so I suppose that was enough to warrant a warm invitation. This, of course, would never happen in the States. I was grateful. I was looking forward to spending the afternoon in an Italian home “in the country,” away from the Florentine crowds.

Sheila asked me to take the early train because lunch is “precisely at 12:15.” I like that precision. It shows that the lunch is an event, like your favorite television show or a concert.

When we arrived, Nella and Romano greeted me with kisses and smiles. Nella very happily accepted the white daisies and the small bottle of vin santo I’d brought. Sheila and I and Romano sat on the couch in front of the set table and chatted while Nella finished cooking the pasta. I was hungry. I’d purposely only eaten two tiny pieces of toast for breakfast so my stomach would be fully treated to this meal.

Nella invited us to sit.

First, she filled our plates with tagliatelle with tomato sauce and basil. The sauce didn’t drench the noodles (I tend to oversauce), but just gave them a light coating. The flavor was tangy and a little sweet. We didn’t talk a lot, and when we did it was mostly about the food, the storm (la tempesta) gathering outside, and how too much of life is spent working. I sat up straighter and was grateful, too, for this quiet meal, interrupted only by a few words here and there and a few light jokes. I told them how I’d once seen in New York on Park Avenue a woman in a business suit walking fast and eating a small salad out of a plastic container. It struck me as sad. To take five minutes was too much for her to sit down. Everyone agreed.

I sipped my wine. Just off the kitchen is their garden; grape vines form a lace on a trellis over a table, now wet with fresh rain.

Thankfully, Nella did nothing to defy the stereotype of the mother figure who forces her guests to eat more. She slid more pasta onto my plate and filled everyone else’s bowl until she was scraping the pot. After we finally finished, she brought out “the platter.” The Italians believe that food should be as beautifully presented as it is delicious. It was a landscape: Nella had laid out a bed of rucola (arugula) sprinkled with thin slices of parmigiana reggiano, and in the center had placed lean juicy strips of tenderloin steak.

Mamma mia!

The course was, of course, fantastic. And yes, I did eat more. But that didn’t mean I didn’t have room for the fruit course, “the break.” Romano brought out a bowl of fresh figs from their friend’s garden, a bowl of grapes from their garden, and a bowl of bananas, peaches, and plums. I partook. It was only fruit, right?

Which just set me up for the dessert: a homemade tiramisu that Nella makes with yogurt and honey. Romano poured us some vin santo (for Nella just a little). Then he proudly showed me the simple cake he made that usually goes with vin santo. He bakes it in his wood-burning stove out in the garden. He made me try a piece, of course. It was very simple, and he told me all the ingredients (flour, sugar, eggs, oil).

Lunch was finished.

Romano flipped on the Formula One race on the TV in the kitchen, so as Nella cleared the table, we all sat on the couch and watched.

Well, I watched Nella. Her movements are very deliberate; she does everything slowly, not because she’s older, but because she pays attention. I had mentioned earlier that maybe she would want to put the flowers in the vase so they would get water right away, but Nella had said, “a dopo” (later). They still sat on the other couch in their plastic. There was no rush about anything at all. She cleaned each dish and poured a little vinegar in the pots (to keep them shiny, she said) before placing them in the dishwasher. She took a clear glass vase with wilting yellow daisies from a shelf and placed it on the table. She pulled out a couple of live daisies and set them down, and threw out the rest. She washed the vase, filled it with fresh water, and slowly opened the plastic on the new daisies. She cut the flowers at the base, as well as the older daisies, and put them all in together. She set the vase at the center of the table, the light from the terrace coming in through the doors, the storm now over. She wiped down each chair before turning it upside down on the table, as in closing time at a restaurant.

We said our goodbyes and I thanked them for the wonderful meal, which was an event, yet an ordinary, everyday wonderful event. Sheila and I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the streets of Pontassieve, all the stores closed because it was Sunday. We walked along the river and watched the sky change behind the surrounding hills–a blue sky here, a stormy sky over there.

To me the meal felt like one long meditation. And when I really think about, it’s moments like these that explain why I’m here in Italy. Everyone experiences Italy in a different way, but this way of life is what I’m looking for. This calm, deliberate living that celebrates the simple and the beautiful.

Postscript: When I returned home, I saw the news that David Foster Wallace, a thoughtful, talented writer, had hanged himself Friday. Rest in peace, wherever you are, David Foster Wallace.