A Few Days Here and There

 A Few Days Here and There

Those of you who have been following along, reading my narratives, know by now, that I enjoy movies.  Their genres span glimpses of the future to shadows of the past.  They can rile our senses, inspire us, soothe worries with a laugh, impart life lessons far outside the box on just about anything, and imprint formative messages like watermarks that can sculpt us into who we become.  Movies have allowed me to travel to events that have occurred, but I couldn’t experience due to circumstance and the vastness of time.  I have raced in the Circus Maximus with Ben Hur, delivered mail with Il Postino, tried to understand Guido, that aging director in 8 1/2, fantasized with Renato about Malèna, and as a

Aurelio & Tania of Zen

gunslinger, I’ve been in the saddle alongside poncho clad Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).  More recently, I’ve followed the political intrigue of the BBC three-part mini-series, Zen.  It is a series of Italian detective dramas set in Rome’s central police station, the Questura.  It stars a favorite of mine, Rufus Sewell, and so easy to watch Caterina Murino, that Italian beauty who appears on horseback in Casino Royale.  Rufus’ charismatic character, Aurelio Zen, has two strikes against him, he’s honest, and being from Venice is considered an outsider.  You’d be right to suspect corruption in high places but is Zen, Il Buono, il Brutto, or il Cattivo?  Would his career be fated by his birthplace or misplaced integrity?  It's definitely an enjoyable watch to discover whether Zen’s honest character can outmaneuver Italian-style subterfuge.

Though well short of the fast reader I’d want to 

Home Library

be, I also enjoy books.  Unlike movies, books free our minds with the turn of each page to wander in the images we visualize.  And like my collection of favorite actors, I have my favorite writers.  In particular, one author who I feel can sense and best describe Italian everyday life with compassion and sensitivity is American author Marlena de Blasi.  Marlena hails from Schenectady, NY, and last I knew lives in beautiful Orvieto, an Etruscan city on a hill located in Umbria known especially for the Pozzo di San Patrizio (Saint Patrick’s Well).  It is a 16th-century shaft with a double helix staircase.  The 175 foot deep well was dug over a ten year period at the behest of Pope Clement VII.  He had escaped Rome during the barbarian siege of 1527 and feared a water shortage if the city were also attacked.  On a visit to Orvieto in 2011, in addition to visiting the well, we

Orvieto's Saint Patrick's Well

found de Blasi’s home on 34 via del Duomo, and like the uncivilized barbarians who had sacked Rome, we played rogue and rang her doorbell.  Accomplished writers must find it annoying when readers come across their doorbells.  Ah, the price of celebrity.  Whether she was there or not, there was no reply. 

Marlena was once the co-owner and chef of a St. Louis café.  She has also written extensively about restaurants, food, and cooking in numerous publications.  She published her first memoir, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance, in 2002.  It is an engaging true story about how she, then a middle-aged, divorced American woman with two grown children, abandoned everything and boldly took a new chance on life in a mysterious city.  While on vacation in Venice, she attracts the attention of a Venetian banker named Fernando, in of all 

places, Saint Mark’s Square.  Why not, could there have been a better setting?  He is a victim of love at first sight. In her narrative, she goes on to describe this blossoming romance following their second chance meeting a year later that develops into a long-distance relationship.  It doesn’t last long but proves far more than a casual fling.  In a few months, following his visit to the US, his message is clear.  Fernando, who can hardly speak English, asks Marlena to abandon the US for Venice to be with him.  She packs, leaves second thoughts behind, and is off to Venice on an adventure in a strange land with a man she admittedly calls “the stranger.” In double whammy fashion, she experiences the cultural shock of a new place with a new man.  On every page, her tale of adjustment to the new rhythms of everyday Italian life includes a focus on the culture, the people, the charm of Venice, and of course its cuisine.

“They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, “The weather”, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. “Dying and birthing”, of both people and animals. And “What we Eat” - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life, but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.”

There is much truth in this description, supported by some sleuthing of our own.  The townspeople of Calitri are also fixated on food, acquiring it and preparing it.  Meeting people on the

Marlena de Blasi

streets often turns to the topic of food.  Questions like “Are you on your way home to eat?” are often followed by “What are you having?” accompanied by a hand gesture to their mouths just in case we didn’t understand the question.  To satisfy this passion, a street market materializes weekly as vendors come to town and with their vans create a meandering chain of storefronts.  Once their canopies and tables are deployed, each grows to double in size, transforming a quiet street into a shopping mall.  In addition, some local retailers specialize in one particular staple or another to keep daily shoppers sustained throughout the week.  For the most part, the people of Calitri have small frigoriferi (refrigerators).  They are on the order of a college room frig, much smaller than the double door types with large freezers.  They refer to these as “Americano frigoriferi,” which if they had one, from the labels I’ve seen, were produced in China.  Small capacity and limited freezer space promote freshness by ensuring daily visits to the market and since everyone walks, a giant dose of exercise, stops for espresso, and plenty of streetside comradery.  Taken together, there are more than enough negozi (stores) to take up our mornings as we make the rounds while tugging along a wheeled cart that gradually fills with purchases.  Refrigerator sizes aside, Americans have never known real hunger.  However, I can’t say the same about Italians.  The last years of WWII serve as a vivid example.  Transportation, especially in the south, was in shambles.  Vehicles were few and along with bridges, the infrastructure had been destroyed.  American soldiers helped where they could beginning with the simple gesture of giving hungry Italian children Hershey chocolate bars to General Mark Clark helping rebuild Positano beginning with waterpipes no one would miss.  What we perseverate over, like a broken supply chain when a few shelves in the supermarket hold fewer brands of cereal, is nothing in comparison to their historic suffering.  It is partially an explanation why they have developed such a keen concern for the “table,” for meal preparation, quality ingredients, the enjoyment of eating, and mealtimes surrounded by family.  The table symbolizes all this and their delight in eating, enough so that they reserve hours for its enjoyment with a fervor approaching religious zeal.

Our own bouts of hunter-gatherer subsistence have taken on the local social pattern.  Out our

Josephine's Centro Market

door and a few right turns followed by a straightaway soon finds us in the town hall piazza.  From there, free from the medieval borgo’s warren of streets, we easily meld into Corso Matteotti where our daily adventure begins.  If Spaghetti alle Vongole (Spaghetti with Clams) is on the menu, we head for Pescheria del Gargano and a visit with Adriana who scoops up ladles full of miniature clams.  For a Monday, Wednesday or Friday rotisserie chicken, it’s Annamaria’s Polleria but not before 11 am when they are ready.  Just doors away from Josephine & Michale’s Centro Market Alimentari, with its staples like flour to pasta, that I only discovered behind a doorway draped with beads after visiting Calitri a few times, we get in line for carne (meat).  At the Tornillo Macelleria there are no stacks of cellophane wrapped packets, neither are there numbers to take to mark your turn.  Instead, there is a natural order to things as Michele, the friendly butcher, fills your request.  He is used to my visits now and with thumb and forefinger mimes the thickness of the steaks he knows I’ll be wanting.  For cheese, there are many places to choose from, but we usually stop off at the Di Cecca

Cestone Fruit & Vegetables

cheese shop where Luciana, dressed in a white, thigh length lab coat like a doctor and topped in a cap, serves up ricotta and a local cheese like caciocavallo.  As for the name, this cheese, actually two balls connected by a rope, appear like saddlebags on a horse (cavallo).  For fruit and vegetables, Maria Elena works with Rosa Maria at the Ortofrutticola Cestone.  She and Rosa get on splendidly ever since that first day when Maria Elena picked up a tomato on her own.  Little did we know not to touch the produce without a glove.  Besides, now Rosa selects the freshest items for us as education flows both ways as they each try to get their tongues around and pronounce what Mare explains to Rose that what she calls cetriolo, we call cucumber.  As for beverages like ever needed vino, the trek is a little farther.  When we can’t make it to the cantina in neighboring Venosa with jugs to fill, we rely on local Lucodamo beverages.  Two years without a visit to Calitri because of COVID puts me at a loss for the exact name of the five-liter jugs of wine we get there, but I know Cinza will point to it and at the same time tell me, as she always does, that it is the same vino served at the Osteria Tre

Caciocavallo Cheese

Rose.  Perfetto, because I love their bottled sunshine! Finally, to top off any meal there of course has to be something sweet.  There are many shops available to pastry lovers like us to choose from Biscotteria I Nobili, Idee Golose, and Pasticceria Zabatta are just a few along our route, but we especially enjoy Le Dolcerre.  It’s a small place operated by Emilia who makes the best almond biscotti ever, prepared every morning beginning around 4 a.m.  And while these may be the echoes of memories unrenewed for over two years, I imagine little will have changed when we return.  There are steady rhythms here too.  By 2 p.m., sometimes earlier, the streets are deserted, and stores are closed.  I suspect it is the same throughout smalltown southern Italy.  If it were the Wild West, the scene would resemble an abandoned settlement, lacking only a tumbleweed or two.  By this time, everyone has found a table followed by that ever-important bed that Barlozzo mentioned.

Following Venice, Marlena and Fernando’s lives together, continue in the sequel, A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure, which first appeared in 2004. 

Truth be told, their sojourn there was not a thousand days as was the case in Venice but rather about a year.  Better to not mess with success, so A Thousand Days in Tuscany it became.  While I’ve listened to Chiara sing Mille Passi (1000 Steps, click twice to listen), I’ve yet to hear a song entitled 1000 Days anywhere, that is until Marlena performed it twice in her stunning back-to-back memoirs.

Their departure from Venice is finalized when Fernando resigns his bank position.  As Marlena had done, he forsakes all, sells their seaside home on the Lido, an elongated barrier island that protects the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic Sea.  Together they are off to the mainland and Tuscany.  Like Marlena, he has chosen to begin anew.  This time they start over together in a renovated former stable in the village of San Casciano dei Bagni, soon to be christened Palazzo Barlozzo after their cherished friend.  Absent the crowds of Venice, this hamlet was all of about two hundred souls.  For her it is a déjà vu as she, tears in her eyes, saw, not St. Louis but Venice fade in the rear view mirror of their BMW.  It is what we dismissively call “a reset” following a brief thousand days in Venice, a new beginning but with both of them now on unfamiliar ground.  The “bitter” and “sweet” of the subtitle begins to emerge.  For Fernando, the experience is much like the TV character Zen.  Though Italian, he becomes somewhat the outsider, just as Marlena, an American, was perceived as a straniera (foreigner).  In a “tight” society, quickset in tradition and a still very vivid ancient history, new “arrivees” warrant  study.  Yes, Venice is Italian, but it isn’t Roman.  To the degree that it is important, and it is, it was never a Roman city.  It is similar to the attitudes of many Italian northerners, that everything south of Rome is essentially

Battle of Cannae

“Africa” because of the Arab influence there as my Tuscan friend, Pierre Luigi, once proclaimed when we announced we’d purchased a place in Campania.  Sentiment like this goes way back, possibly as far removed as when a Carthaginian from what is now Tunisia (Northern Africa) by the name of Hannibal killed over 60,000 Romans at the Battle of Cannae (216 BC), one of the costliest battles in all of recorded human history.  

Later in a follow-on sequel, La Signora nel Palazzo (The Lady in the Palazzo), she chronicles their arrival in Orvieto.  It’s a trade.  They substitute the embrace and intimacy of village life for the sprawling complexity and intrigue of a big city.  There she is faced with blue-blood aristocracy or locals with or without 23 

and Me DNA bona fides, thinking themselves a step above.  Italians identify not so much as national flag wavers, but more regionally, down to the local level as for example the contrade (wards) of Siena.  It takes time to thaw the icy barriers to acceptance but gradually Marlena and Fernando succeed and survive the social vetting in this wonderfully written gem.

Excellent cook that she is, she employs the proven recipe of her previous bestsellers to describe their new life in Umbria.  It unfolds around the rehab of a dilapidated former sixteenth-century palazzo (palace) ballroom owned by a stodgy noble family.  In an ingenious agreement, Fernando, ever the clever banker, tactfully crafts a pact with the owners that in exchange for footing the cost of renovations, he and Marlena could live there rent-free for several years.  Here again, food proves to be an ingratiating common denominator.  Being ever the gourmet, food and cooking prove to be Marlena’s skeleton key allowing her to cook her way into the hearts of the multitude of influential townspeople, colorful characters, and store owners that comprise her newest world to open otherwise closed doors, one pantry, one party, one festa at a time.

You meet many people in the course of a lifetime.  Some like Marlena host a nomadic soul, willing to shed their trappings and shift gears, prepared let’s say, to trade a seascape vista for the crumbly cement patina of a quaint Italian village.  Then, when they feel the itch, as in the movie Chocolat, they uproot once again.  Something calls.  In a good way, like a snake habitually does, they re-tailor their lives, shed themselves of possessions, surroundings, even friends.  Now repurposed, they begin again.  For the rover, the mystery may lie in the intrigue of what is ahead, just around the next corner, and then the next.  Close the door on here and now, grab hold in a rush not to miss anything, and move on.  It has a touch of magic and romance to it like some romantic scene in Eat, Pray Love.  It’s magical in its ability to compress two, three, even four lifetimes into one and may rest on the belief that the grass is greener over there, not that the grass needs cutting here.  I imagine it much like the excitement we feel anticipating a vacation than heading off to a new and exciting environment but with the big difference, you don’t come back.  Clearly, it takes a special person to court a migratory lifestyle like this.

Marlena’s writing emotes a keen sensitivity to the feelings of others, as if she were blessed with the understanding befitting an empath.  Observant and respectful of events around her, especially the bitter and sweet episodes in the lives they share with those they befriend, when taken into the hands of this talented writer, are skillfully conveyed.  She is a seeker of new rhythms, accepting of new reference designs to life, of days in new surroundings where the sparkle of a new sun rising over mountains replaces that of a mirrored sea.  Marlena’s trilogy is not to be missed.  Absent of Italy, it filled a void for me.  Interestingly, none of these three works have pictures.  Instead, her vivid words, like megapixels, suffice.  I’d estimate there are few who can accomplish what she has.  In a prose style approaching poetry metered out sometimes a thousand days at a time, she describes the simple pleasures that make for a beautiful existence gleaned from her multiple lives in Italy.  In the thousands of compressed days I’ve spent with Marlena amongst the pages of her memoirs spanning Venice, Tuscany, and then Orvieto, I wish she’d answered her doorbell and came downstairs, if only for a moment.  It was not to be, for celebrity needs its space.  I understand this.  But I didn’t want an autograph and couldn’t imagine an invitation to come inside.  No, all I wanted was to see her and look into her eyes.  Eyes, those windows on the soul, that have packed so much life into the limited time they’ve had. 

 

From That Rogue Tourist,

Paolo