Late Afternoon
I spent the morning exactly as I should on my last full day here: walking and taking up positions at favorites places. These included the Loggia, the Ponte Vecchio and the front steps of Santa Maria dell' Fiore. It is hot today, but not as oppressively so as it has been the last several. I still looked for shade, but now it actually gave some relief.
Around 1:00, Bruce called to figure out lunch. As it turned out, he's staying on the Via di Giglio, a street I have some acquaintance with. I walked over and met him at La Madia, a nice, homey little trattoria. A few minutes later, we were joined by two colleagues, Ann Hemenway from Fiction and Adam Jones from Film &Video, as well as Lauren, an advisor who is here to help set up the Florence program at Scuola Lorenzo di Medici. Lunch was very good, which is to say that there was a minimum amount of shop talk and a maximum amount of wine. By the time it was done we all agreed to meet at the Loggia at 8:30 for drinks and gelato. This, then, will be the final night of this year's sojourn.
On the way back to my room I texted Bridget with the all important question of her T-shirt size. I spotted one yesterday that I know she would like, but didn't want to get it in the wrong size. She said that she wears a medium, but to get a small if I like it tight. Needless to say, I got a small.
Beyond this, it really is the time to start processing this year's journey.
If any one word can sum up this trip it is "incursion." Incursions come in good and bad flavors like sweet and sour sensations on either side of a gelato cone. In truth, I've never had one of these sojourns where my life back home has so often interrupted my life here.
In keeping with the Mayan definition of 2012, there were a number of finalities that reached across the Atlantic to touch this journey. One friend lost his father while another is preparing to put his into palliative care. Having just been through the loss of my own father, and of the importance with which I hold both of these friends in my heart, I have felt what has been going on in their lives in a very personal way.
Of course the greatest loss to me, though, was my beloved cousin Eileen. As we got older, we found a bond in our mutual love of Tuscany. I visited her at her home in Casetta in 2005 and since that time had maintained with her a loving conversation about this country and its importance to us both. It was hard enough to hear the news of her death, but doubly hard to hear it while I was here. It made both the loss and missing her that much more acute and I know that I'm still not quite over it.
These incursions, though, were counterbalanced by one that was even more personal and profound. When Bridget arrived, it was more than a breath of fresh air. Coming as it did two days after I heard about Eileen, it was restorative. But it quickly became more than that. Since practically the day we met, Bridget and I have never denied either to ourselves or to each other the enormous importance that we have in each other's lives. When we finally got together last summer, there was a comforting meshing of gears, as though we both knew that this was the way that it was supposed to be. We have never been shy about expressing our feelings to each other and we have always had the gift of demonstrating them in ways that the other one understood and needed.
But something happened on this trip. Without trying to control it or intellectualize it out of existence, we relaxed into a far deeper level of intimacy than we had found before. This took us both by delighted surprise because before this trip we thought we were already there. Whatever final synchronization needed to take place happened in Mascali, Sicily, in a second-floor walk-up in the shadow of a basilica whose constantly tolling bells heralded the great change we were experiencing. That this happened in the shadow of Mt. Etna, the same place where it occurs for Ray and Nina in the script, created a precious circularity of which we are both aware. There is really no other way to describe our time in Sicily and Capri without resorting to the hoariest of clichés: They were the happiest days of my life.
From this vantage point, it is easy to see this trip as being divided into three parts - Prologue to Bridget, Bridget, and Epilogue to Bridget. At the same time, such an assessment refuses to give credit to the singular and solitary joys of the time that I've had here without her.
Before her arrival, I was able to once again get my feet on the ground in my favorite city in the world: Florence. I always try to begin and end in this city for a very simple reason. There is no place that I have ever been that inflames my imagination the way that this treasure on the Arno does. From the moment I enter Florence to the moment I leave, I am in a constant state of excited discovery. This is never more clearly displayed than in the photographs I take there. After my first visit in 2005, I showed my pictures of Italy, Germany, Greece and Austria to my friends Martin and Eileen. At the end, Eileen made a comment I've never forgotten. She said, "It's obvious you loved the trip, but you were in love with Florence." This trip has been no different. When I look at the photos that I took in Florence I recognize that they are superior to all the others. The people are more vital, the lighting more striking, the commentary more precise. These can be credited to the subjects, of course, but it is my eye and my imagination that finds them and gets them at the right moment. And these are shaped by Florence in a way that no other place can do it.
After Florence, there were two great happenings. The first was spending a day on Isola del Giglio. The sight of the keeled cruise ship Costa Concordia is going to bring out all kinds of responses in anyone who is in its presence. Certainly awe, hopefully respect for the souls lost, and undoubtedly a wave of morbid curiosity. I had these, but more than anything else, what I responded to was the surreal incongruity of it.
Giglio is a beautiful and quaint tourist town. It has the same kiosks and bodegas that are to be found in any other place that bases its economy on outside dollars. Although the accident happened a few short months ago, normalcy appears to have returned. None of the locals seem to give ship the slightest notice, despite the fact that it is almost literally close enough to touch. People sunbathe on the beach and only seem to note the existence of the Costa Concordia when the sun is low enough to cast a shadow. When this happens, they simply move their blankets and go back to the business of catching rays. People drink their coffee, buy their souvenirs and lounge on the boardwalk as though there isn't a ship the size of the Titanic lying on its side a stone's throw away.
The second great pre-Bridget happening for me was the discovery of Orvieto. As frequently happens, I make my best discoveries when I make no plans. I had several days to kill before I had to be in Rome. Orvieto was on the way and, since I'd already been to the other points on the triangle, Montepulciano and Cortona, it seemed like a logical place to go. In all honesty, I didn't even know it was a mountain town until the train approached it. What I found was a beautiful haven, a lovely place to spend a few days. Some of its charms are of the obvious kind - a spectacular duomo, beautiful smaller churches, excellent if quirky museums - but it was the less obvious ones that made me fall in love with the place: the Teatro Mancinelli with its color schemes more theatrical than anything that appears on its stage; the extraordinary mountaintop view so expansive that I could see a valley bathed in sunlight then turn my head to see a storm pummeling a mountainside, and; a tour of the caves that underpin Orvieto and create a whole separate city.
The post-Bridget time brought another great discovery. I hadn't even begun to process where I would go after she went back to the states. It was an act of Herculean denial that kept me from even considering the subject until the night before she left. At that point I had to make some kind of a decision because we would be checking out of the hotel in a few hours. I would have to either commit to staying in Rome, or buy a train ticket to somewhere else. I chose Assisi on the spur of the moment and within less than ten minutes had committed myself by booking a hotel online. The next morning, when she bought her ticket to Fiumicino, I stood at the machine next to her and bought my ticket for Assisi on a train that would leave less than an hour after hers.
Like Orvieto, I did not know what I would discover until it was right in front of me. What I found was a beautiful mesa town with more churches than one can imagine, a fortress so quiet that only the shadowing German family got in the way of my feeling that the castle was solely my own, and a tourist town that was quiet and, for the most part, devoid tourists. Most important, though, I discovered my church. I make it a point to visit dozens of cathedrals, basilicas and chapels when I come to Europe and invariably one of them stands out from the rest. The Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli is my church for this trip. I couldn't have been happier that my charming and off-the-beaten-path hotel, the Vignola, was only two blocks away. It meant that I was able to visit it as many times a day as I wanted.
Most of the times when I come to Europe, I'm in a constant state of movement. This means that most of the people I speak to or at least see are quick hits - relationships that are memorable because they are initiated, consummated and finished within a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds. These are the cab drivers and waiters, tourists and officials who appear briefly, do or say something memorable, then disappear back into their own lives never to intersect with mine again. This trip, though, had a number of meetings and run-ins that while maybe not profound were at least more than fleeting. This was a time when I made new friends like Giovanni the manic networker and Davide with whom I had a thoroughly delightful evening in Rome. There was also time to deepen some newer friendships. I got to spend a lovely afternoon sipping cappuccino with Sara and Caroline in Assisi, spent time in Florence with colleagues Bruce, Ann, Lauren and Adam, had a spectacular five-hour non-stop conversation with Jean O'Sullivan in the Borghese Gardens, and an even more engaged day-and-a-half with Gia and Beppe at their beautiful home in the very familiar town of Montevarchi.
The hit-and-runs were, of course, as much fun as they always are. Among my favorites on this trip:
An officious German guard at the Munich Airport who tried backing me down an escalator simply because I didn't read the signs the way she wanted me to;
A Florentine cab driver who looked suspiciously like Roberto Benigni who couldn't decide what was more important, his fare or the blonde on the Vespa;
Two overweight American women in Orbetello who were probably not even aware that they were singing and dancing to Beatles music while the rest of us were eating breakfast;
A little old Italian man who decided that his (much-appreciated) act of kindness for the day would be to lead a tired American through the streets of Orvieto to his hotel;
The clerk at that same hotel who did everything in her power to convince me not to use the hotel's laundry service;
The tall, gaunt clerk at Complesso di Sant' Agostino who first plied me with maps that he admitted were useless then put on atmospheric music only to turn it off as I was leaving;
Ariston, the over-caffeinated and long haired guide through the caves under Orbetello;
A harried car rental agent in Messina who was far more interested in where he had to be for a party later that night than he was in my needs as a customer;
Mandy, the initially suspicious but ultimately talkative, helpful and thoroughly delightful chubby British woman who is the concierge of the Hotel Vignola;
Her affectionate red-haired spaniel, a bitch named Snoopy only because it was given that name before they discovered that he was a she;
The young Chinese woman demanding that everyone take her picture in front of monuments she was far too crazed to enjoy or even notice;
The Polish woman whose confusion over the lavanderia system nearly drove her into a mortal depression;
The Chinese Second Wave who allowed me the chance to share what I had learned, and who were thankful for the information gleaned;
The very pretty concierge at La Scaletta who always remembers me and greets me in a way that helps me feel as though I have just come home.
Most of all, I remember the German Couple, the lovely twosome I kept running into in both Orbetello and Porto Ercole. We couldn't speak each other's language yet we still delighted in our constant collisions. A day hasn't passed since then that I haven't consciously looked for them in out of the way places, always convinced that I would see them one more time.
These people were all part of the colors of this particular trip. The colors, though, extend past the momentary pleasures of people to the fleeting events that marked each day. Even at this remove, the very best of them have Bridget beside me. Going to mass in Mascali then spending the rest of the day on the beach. Watching her walk down a long shaded street in Caltanisetta that my grandfather must undoubtedly have known. Dinners on the back deck and on a mountaintop in Capri. Lying side by side on the chaise lounges while I read Patti Smith and she read "Fifty Shades of Gray." Looking past the second bedroom and onto the deck where she was doing her morning yoga practice. Watching her sunbathe in her stars and stripes bikini on a Caprese rock. Spending whole days in bed with her talking about our future and where we want to go together. Just being in Italy with her. Finally.
Yes, there were many wonderful moments throughout this journey and even a few harrowing ones (may I never drive in this country again!), but in the long run, this was the trip in which the sweetest incursion of all, Bridget, came to stay. That makes it perfect.
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