Tanti Auguri (Ton-T Ah-gu-ree)

 Tanti Auguri  (Ton-T Ah-gu-ree)

It wasn’t long ago, only days in fact, that I became an octogenarian, 

which, for the record, is not to be muddled with being an antiquarian.  Though I do enjoy ancient history and have begun to accumulate the respectable patina of age, somehow I’ve reached eighty, a point well beyond the reach of any mid-life crisis.  Yippy, right? 

While reaching eighty is an achievement denied many, I've never been particularly fond of these annual markers.  One of our granddaughters spent more than a year counting down to sixteen.  For her that magical age was when the world hands you a set of car keys, a burgeoning sense of independence, and the first taste of adulthood.  But the odometer of life spins only one way, and eventually notable milestones like these are no more.

Birthdays are funny rituals.  Their meaning quietly changes while pretending not to.  When we’re young, each birthday feels like rocket fuel.  Each year launches us toward some new privilege: crossing the street alone, staying up later, voting.  Everything points toward an event horizon promising more.  Somewhere before I reached 80, questions began tapping me on the shoulder: What's all the excitement about now?  Why keep counting? 

     Pathetic?  Not really.  Just as I’ve changed with age, the significance of birthdays has evolved right along with me.  Around midlife, their tenor shifted.  The cake, candles and off-key singing remain, but now birthdays come with a side of self-examination.  People have long since stop asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?  Instead, birthdays begin to resemble annual performance reviews.  Questions creep in: “Am I where I hoped I’d be?”  “Why does my back hurt when I haven’t done anything in days?”  And like the

Why Bother with Cake?

chiropractic procedure we may need, birthdays begin to measure the alignment between the life you imagined and the life you’re actually living. 

By seventy or eighty, birthdays molt again.  To this point, age may once have been a secret, but why bother hiding it now, it’s just a number.  The blush left the rose long ago to become, with time, spots on my hands.  Celebrations shift from becoming and achieving to simply continuing.  Lighting candles becomes a soothing declaration that you’re still there.  By this point, a birthday is no longer a milestone.  It’s a victory lap, like the winner of the Indy 500 takes to the cheers of the crowd.  By then, compliments arrive with their own sly subtext: "You look great!" or "You don't look anywhere near eighty!"  At the same time, both statements manage to praise you while reminding you just how old you are. 

But survival is one of life's most underrated triumphs.  It means you’ve outlasted fads, crises, several generations of slang, and more computer apps than you care to admit make absolutely no sense without the assistance of a grandchild.  You’ve lived long enough

to watch the world reinvent itself in ways your younger self couldn’t have imagined.  The truth is rather simplistic: we don’t celebrate birthdays because we have an unlimited supply.  We celebrate them because we don’t.  

America may set trends, but is not known for its relaxed, slow pace.  Our race to achieve often outstrips our sense of community.  Italy, on the other hand, seems to have gotten the memo that family outranks frenzy.  Their birthday customs make this clear. 

The Italian approach is warmer, more communal, more food‑centered, and less self‑celebratory.  For Italians, birthdays matter, but they matter as a family-and-friends occasion, not as ego milestones.  Extravagant parties are uncommon; there are no grand productions, no day-long entitlement.  It is a day less about “me” and more about “us.”

    Best wishes arrive in the form of ubiquitous greetings: “Tanti Auguri!” (sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You” as in the US) or “Buon Compleanno” (completion of a year)!  They’re not only spoken but repeatedly texted and emailed non-stop with the enthusiasm of a national sport. 

In traditional Italian culture, only one other annual celebration outshines a birthday.  While birthdays matter, they don’t carry the same historical or communal weight as the onomastico (name day).  Historically tied to the feast of the saint you’re named after, it once carried far more weight than a birthday, which the Church viewed as a pagan indulgence.  Modern Italians celebrate both, but the onomastico still holds deeper cultural roots.

We got an inkling of these striking cultural differences many years ago on the occasion of a friend’s birthday in Calitri.  We wished her happy birthday and invited her across the street to a café for the three ‘C’s’: coffee, conversation, and a cornetto.  Little did we know that in Italy, the birthday person is the host, not the guest.

In the U.S., friends might buy you dinner or at least a drink.  In Italy, birthday role reversal continues, for if you invite people out for your birthday, it goes without saying that you will be paying the bill.  At work, you bring the pastries.  It’s a gesture of gratitude for the relationships in your life.¹

Italians bring gifts to celebrate the birthday person, but don’t waste time hunting for the perfect card.  Cards aren’t needed even if you are lucky enough to find one.  We still laugh about the time Maria Elena fell victim to cultural unfamiliarity when she tried to buy a sympathy card.  The shopkeeper listened politely as Maria Elena explained what she wanted and its purpose, but to no avail.  They had no such thing.  A blank, folded note card was as close as it got.  Instead of sending sympathy cards, Italians prefer to attend the funeral, speak face‑to‑face, and console grieving family members directly, a tradition that feels both ancient and deeply caring.

Another cultural misstep comes to mind.  It happened following the purchase of beautifully potted Chrysanthemums for an Italian friend.  When we presented them she burst into laughter.  Chrysanthemums are for the dead on All Souls’ Day, which was approaching.  We were embarrassed but soon joined in the laughter.  Like our birthday café invitation, here was another gaffe in Italian cultural norms.  No doubt, there will be more.

As for the cake, the person celebrating their birthday will be the person who either makes it or buys one from a Pasticceria.²  The birthday celebrant traditionally enjoys the first slice.  Much like us, the celebrant makes a wish and blows out the candles hoping, in keeping with a universal superstition, that if all are extinguished in one breath, their wish will be granted .¹

But birthdays, in the grand scheme, extend far beyond the people gathered around us. Each  

DNA Double Helix

birthday is also a reminder of the humanity we carry within us: the thousands of ancestors, stolen by time, whose traits, quirks, and stubborn streaks we possess.  When that last birthday inevitably arrives and we pass, we are remembered by those we leave behind.  However, there is a further passing that occurs when those who knew us also pass into the annals of time.  Memories become further diluted and it goes on and on.  It is only fitting in our birthday enthusiasm to recall the long line of extended family that preceded us, those ancestors well before “great” and “great-great” appear in our family declension.  The past is never gone, just hiding inside us.

For centuries, heredity was a mystery.  Today science is cracking this enigma.  I tapped into these advances through a DNA test that provided a glimpse into the chromosomes I inherited from millennia of ancestors.  Far removed from bordering on expertise when it comes to the entwining of our makeup, I rely on a simplistic analogy:

•      The DNA double helix, always the same, is the font and paper of a book.
•      The chromosomes are the chapters (23 chapters from each parent).
•       My 'story’ (traits) depends on the words (DNA sequences) inside those chapters (in the above photo they are the T, C, G, or a four-letter alphabet on the ladder-like rungs which differ from person to person).  Like computer code, millions of these unique arrangements form the message which determine the traits I possess.  

It is staggering to contemplate but think of DNA as a ladder with millions of rungs, packed so tightly that six feet of it fits inside a cell nucleus far smaller than a speck of dust, pass to me some of the traits, even behaviors.  We are indeed remarkable beings of extraordinarily complex design.

Years ago, I was disappointed with the results of a glimpse into

Grandfather Domenico

my long-in-development pedigree.  I wrote at the time how shocked I was to learn I was only 11% Italian.  Recently, however, that number changed dramatically.  Had they felt my irritation?  Not according to the preamble which explained that technology had improved and databases had expanded.  Maps, names of unknown relatives and more emerged.  Their list of my physical characteristics was much more accurate: I was recast as blue eyed, fair skinned, and with little chance of freckles, baldness, or a hairy back.  All true.

Much like a fine blended wine, it appears that my DNA maturation is 99.8% European.  Forty-five percent of me was contributed by my Italian ancestors on my dad’s side, who originated in the Lombardy region from a mix of ancient Ligurian, Etruscan, Celtic, and Roman populations.  I’d love to claim descent from some Roman centurion, why not Caesar himself!  But wars, lost records, the loss of family lineage preserved in family bibles, and the fading of memory has long erased those details.  My grandmother on my father’s side, Adelina, originated from an eastern Lombardy town near

Adelina's Italian Hometown

Lake Garda.  My grandfather, Domenico, hailed from the opposite side of Lombardy, from the Italian lakes’ region, close enough to Lake Lugano that another few kilometers and I might have developed an inexplicable fondness for Swiss cheese.  Given that I now live beside a lake, it seems lakes run in the family as surely as DNA. 

How my grandparents arrived in the U.S. I know, but why they came remains a mystery.  Neither did I ever learn how they originally managed to close the 200 km gap between them.  While they ran out of birthdays many years past and I can’t ask them, I did inherit the breath of a hint from the April 1906 ship’s manifest they arrived on.  With them on their arrival at Ellis Island was my baby uncle, Antonio, born in 1903 and at the time two and a half years old. 

Grandmother Adelina (Lt)

I noticed they had married in February 1906, just before departing Italy.  In a small Italian town in 1906, gossip traveled faster than broadband ever would.  News didn't go viral; it simply walked out the front door and arrived everywhere at once.  I suspect Uncle Pete’s pre-nuptial birthday may have encouraged their departure for a new start in the U.S.  For that I remain forever thankful. 

My French DNA from my mother, tips the scale at 45.3% and descends from a blend of Gauls Roman settlers, and later Frankish populations.  The earliest known chromosome doner on my mother’s side was Marie Labrecque, born in Paris in 1435.  From there, a part of me migrated to Normandy, Brittany and Loire, before sailing to Canada in the 1600s.  One Canadian ancestor, Marie Michel born in Quebec in 1660, married Chief Martin Kaorate Taouabanoun, a historical figure in Quebec.  Admittedly, it has been some time, but I estimate that a drop or two of native Algonquin sangue (blood)

Canadian Grandparents

remains in me.  It may perhaps explain my occasional bouts of righteous indignation (a hereditary trait perhaps?), or as my ancestor might have put it, “going on the warpath.”  

I doubt that my Indian heritage celebrated birthdays especially in small tribal units.  Months were not part of their culture.  Absent a work-a-day, seven-day cycle, phases of the moon, community rites of passage like manhood, and seasonal events were good enough.

To allow everyone else to pile onto this DNA scrum, my remaining 10% is a blurred blend of Norwegian, British, Spanish, Portuguese, to name a few.  Apparently, my DNA development moved about in many directions, with occasional stopovers, resulting in packets of concentration along the way.  Clearly a combination of decisions made, sidestepped, or forced by circumstances outside my ancestor’s control played a hand and likely attributed to their success, eventually seeing them gradually make their way to France and Italy.  Many hundreds contributing to my make-up, many were likely average Joes and Sallys.  But then, there may have been some standouts among them.  Impossible as it may be, I’d love to know every one of their stories, from mundane to spectacular, especially of those French and Italian ancestors who dared cross the Atlantic.  Moving backward from limb, to trunk, to the very roots of my family tree, united in common DNA, we remain connected, and worthy of celebration in each and every birthday.  

    For each birthday we celebrate rests upon thousands we never witnessed: those marked by phases of the moon, church bells, by harvests, candles, chants, cakes, gifts, and calendars now long dissolved to dust.  Behind every one of us stands a long line of ancestors whose names have slipped away, but whose lives still pulse quietly in our own.

I've often told my children and grandchildren, "Remember who you are and what you represent."  The older I get, the more I realize how much is encompassed in those words.  None of us stands alone.  We are the accumulated hopes, risks, journeys, sacrifices, and lucky breaks of countless people who never imagined how their stories would ripple forward.  

So here on this my eightieth birthday, in true Italian fashion, the celebration isn't entirely about me.  It's also for the multitudes who handed down a fragment of themselves and then vanished into the long corridors of antiquity.  To all of them, from Lombardy to Paris, from Quebec to places whose names no map remembers: Tanti auguri for carrying the story far enough for me to add my chapter, and for making these eighty birthdays possible.

From the Rogue Tourist,
Paolo

1. Celebrating Birthdays in Italy: Traditions and Customs, 

https://holidaypaths.com/birthday/italian-birthday-traditions

2. Unveiling Italy's Most Fascinating Birthday Traditions You Never Knew, https://holidaypaths.com/birthday/italian-birthday-traditions

 

Adrift in Sea and Sky

 Adrift in Sea and Sky

       

       Mid‑September in southern Italy is a season with commitment issues.  The worst of August’s heat has finally loosened its grip, yet the warmth still doggedly persists like a guest ignoring hints that the evening is over.  With our remaining time in Italy slipping away, now was not the time to barricade ourselves indoors.  We had an entire New England winter ahead for hibernation.  So, our little troop, still comprised of Lenny, JoAnn, Maria Elena, and me, happily surrendered to the quiet tug of the open

The Open Door on Via Gelso
Welcomed Us

road and pointed ‘Bianca’, our faithful Fiat, east toward the Adriatic.

Once again, we were on the prowl for adventure.  The sea, part myth, called us like a Siren, promising cool breezes and a horizon wide enough to retune any soul.  That was all the encouragement
we needed to book a two-night stay in coastal Giovinazzo. 

Our hostess, Natalina of the AquaMarina B&B, proved indispensable by helping us solve the first puzzle every visitor faces: where to stash the car without accidentally committing an offense.  We were headed straight toward a ZTL zone, where medieval urban planning collides with modernity in a “thou shalt not enter” area designed to keep visitors like us from doing anything reckless, like parking.

Benched in the Piazza

We arrived early, found the recommended parking area in Parco delle Rimemoranze, and settled onto benches to await the arrival of our host.  People drifted past in the usual southern Italian choreography, but one gentleman seemed particularly invested in orbiting us.  His movements had the grace of a kabuki performer who’d misplaced his script. 

As it turned out, Natalina sent him to collect us along with our luggage, but his shyness, paired with limited English, only added to his hesitation.  Rather than approach directly, he circled with increasing uncertainty, like an aircraft awaiting clearance to land.  The ice finally broke when I offered a simple “Ciao, sono Paolo.”  He brightened immediately, we shook hands, and off we went to Via Gelso in the heart of the old town.  My appreciation for him only grew when he hoisted our suitcases up twenty-five steps from the street to the apartment and then up yet another staircase to our bedrooms.  At that point, he could
have run for mayor, and I would’ve voted for him.

Don't Count Them. They Turn!

The AquaMarina B&B sits in the historic center and scored immediate points for being charming, spotless, and miracle of miracles, fully functional, as though every switch, appliance, and plumbing fixture had recently signed a nonaggression pact.  This time of year, we passed on using the fireplace but the hum of the air conditioning splits in every room was melodic.  And the space was generous: thankfully gone were bedroom layouts with beds tightly spaced only inches from the sidewalls that you had to strategize your entry and exit like a military operation.  

Among Puglia’s coastal towns, Giovinazzo stands out for its compactness and authenticity: a medieval core directly on the

AquaMarina B&B, Giovinazzo

water in one of those rare places where the past isn’t polished like a Disney attraction; it’s simply inhabited, woven into daily life the way a sea breeze swaths itself into the fabric of a sail.  Still absent a non-disclosure agreement not to broadcast this to the world, I can say Giovinazzo hasn’t been overrun by mass tourism, though I sense the future is tapping politely at the door.  

More than pleased, we soon found ourselves strolling the seafront.  Not to be understated, however, this seafront is not the typical rock-littered sandy affair but an actual 15th century seawall that hosts an impressive, well-maintained promenade along Via Ruggiero Messere. 

Along the way, we stopped at Il Canaruto, near the harbor.  Joann had her sights set on finding a refreshing affogato. Affogato, meaning “drowned” in Italian, blends hot espresso with a sacrificial scoop

of cold vanilla gelato.  Wait too long, it becomes a drink.  While she enjoyed her find, the rest of the us indulged in Negronis and Aperol Spritzes while overlooking the picturesque harbor.  

Giovinazzo’s history dates to the BC Bronze Age.  Much later, like many villages along the coast, it became a small, Roman fortified settlement valued for is access to the sea.  The compactness of the harbor adds to its efficiency.  One side of the compact provides anchorage for small boats to tie up.  Docks jut from the harbor’s seawall on the opposite side.  Between the two extends a ramp shaped area allowing small craft to be pulled to the security of dry ground for safety and repair.

For centuries, its people have lived in a surf and turf

existence between two worlds.  The high, stony plateau that forms a backbone running through Puglia, crowded with olive groves, represents one.  And nearer the sea, out of necessity, peasants thankful for the food it provided, became fishermen.  Today, Giovinazzo’s identity, where life flows like the tides, remains inseparable from the sea.  

Residents on the Rocks 
Before the Seawall

Daily life in Giovinazzo moves at a rhythm like the tide.  In early morning, the air smells of coffee, salt, and yellowish limestone beginning to warm in the sun.  In the harbor, fishermen return with crates of octopus and fish as early shoppers gather to scoop up the day’s bounty to the clatter of opening shutters competing with church bells.  Mid-
morning finds shoppers afoot, toting shopping bags to fill with their daily needs.  Elderly residents, displaying a level of efficiency that would humble DoorDash, lower baskets from balconies like fishermen casting nets, then hoist up bread, produce, or bottles of wine from savvy venders.  By late morning, like tidepools draining of water, the town gradually empties as shops close for the combined reposo (rest period) and lunch break so traditional in southern Italy.  During this time the town takes on the aura of a ghost town, vacant and quiet but for the clatter of utensils along with voices escaping open windows.  As the heat gives ground by afternoon, Giovinazzo springs to life again as seafront promenades fill with families pushing prams, beachgoers, children playing soccer, couples hand in hand, along with amazed visitors like us.  How they get there I’m not certain, but some gather on the breakwater rocks to chat in the cooling air.  Families cluster in groups and sit by their doorways, some in patches of shade, others chat balcony to balcony or occupy church steps that double as benches.  Gelaterie, bars, and cafés fill.  As evening stars begin to gather, activity livens, the piazzas overflow, and restaurants seats are prized possessions.  Once claimed, diners are encouraged to linger late into the night their conversations adding to the steady pulse of the sea, the mixture of laughter, and the sound of toasting “Cin cin!” or “Salute!” of clinking glasses. 

In a Warren of Meandering Streets

    I am notorious for meeting and talking with anyone I meet.  It was on the advice of two local women, I met sitting on a bench, that we cancelled a reservation Maria Elena had made.  Instead, we enjoyed dinner at Al Porticciolo Osteria featuring a wide choice of hearty and delicious dishes.  Maybe it was a relative’s place, and they habitually steered visitors there, but I’ll take this seafood sanctuary any day. 

We enjoyed another memorable dinner at Hostaria San Domenico, specializing in authentic Pugliese cuisine.  It took some searching, wandering through narrow medieval lanes to finally locate this inn in the web of passageways between neighboring sea walls.  It was tucked in an intimate courtyard with an atmosphere accented with flowers and homes I only dream of affording, its only drawback an aroma I suspect came with calories. 

A courteous staff member immediately welcomed us, and we were seated in the courtyard to enjoy a peaceful al fresco experience in this beautiful escape.  The warm limestone walls turned the courtyard into an intimate open-air dining room absent the usual pictures,

Hostaria San Domenico - Al Fresco Amid
Plants and Yellow Limestone

paintings, bric-a-brac cluttered shelves, and wine racks choaked with bottles.  We were immersed in warm breezes, the chime of occasional church bells, and overhead, a mosaic of stars, making the charming atmosphere feel less like dining in a restaurant and more like being folded into the slow cadence of nightly southern Italian life. 

While I recall the cool refreshment of the white wine and a starter of calamari, names of the other courses evade me primarily because the waiter offered so many homemade pastas and seafood.  By the end of the evening, somewhere between the calamari, homemade pasta, and additional glasses of chilled white wine, the restaurant had ceased feeling like a place we’d discovered and instead felt like a place that had briefly adopted us.                                                

Piazza Vittorio Emanuele and the
Fountain of the Tritons

Walking back, we stopped for after dinner drinks. My choice, the unique flavor of a Montenegro digestivo.  Even while served in bulbus snifter stemware filled over an inch deep, they were modestly priced at only €4.  As I wobbled back toward Via Gelso and a soft landing for the night, those balloon-shaped glasses lingered in my mind. In Giovinazzo, even cocktails seemed reluctant to keep me earthbound. 

One evening as the sun set before us, we exited the seafront labyrinth of ancient town arches into Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, the main square and center of the old town.  I can’t imagine how many such named piazzas there are among the towns and villages of Italy, but the size of this square must rank high in this lineage of piazzas.  Trapezoidal in shape, it is framed by former grand palaces, a cathedral, and is host to the Fountain of the Tritons.  The mythic Tritons, human above the waist and fish-tailed below symbolically ties Giovinazzo to the power

To See Them Maneuver the 
Madonna [Click Here]

and mystery of the sea. 

The fountain was completed in 1933 with design details that came in triplicate: three Tritons, eels, shells, supporting figures, and a tri-lobed basin.  By repeating groups of three, its local designer, Tommaso Piscitelli, emphasized the idea of three becoming one in clear symbolic reference to the Christian Trinity.  It was this landmark that served as our evening anchor, where we joined the local life as children darted about, families flowed along the promenade like a slow evening current, and we sat, so close to the fountain that misty spritzes occasionally fogged my glasses.

Religious devotion remains woven into everyday life here.  This was apparent when quite by accident, while exploring a different route to the seafront, I stumbled upon, let me call it, a ‘preparatory’ religious event.  On the steps of one of many churches, much like their ancestors, men were gathered to move the statue of the church’s patron.  Poles were inserted either side of a massive statue of a Madonna and Child.  In some earlier miracle I hadn’t witnessed, the statue had already been maneuvered outside.  I watched as they lowered the statue down the stairs, through a maze of oldtown streets, skirted the Tritons in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele and up the stairs into the Church of San Domenico bordering the square.  To complete this trek through old town a troop of men rotated in and out, hoisting the supporting poles on

their shoulders for their portion of this heavyweight relay. 

I don’t always walk about looking skyward, but here, the panorama of a never-ending sky, finds me gazing up.  On more than one occasion, the pilot still in me, seeking the source of the growl of an approaching aircraft, or at times, the slither of an especially stealthy cloud, finds me scanning the “footless halls of air," in that “untrespassed sanctity of space” so poetically expressed by John Gillespie Magee in his 1941 poem High Flight (poem’s text quoted here in italics).  

As a teenager, a framed copy of High Flight hung beside my bed, its language equal parts decoration and the exciting rush of the endless freedom of flight.  It stirred much the same feelings in me the next day, when a red wayward balloon, yearning for its freedom, “joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds” and “wheeled and soared” into my line of sight.  I watched as it climbed higher and higher, trailing not a contrail but a thin string to ever so briefly note its course across the sky.  My imagination took hold: from whose hand had

Our Giovinazzo Balloons in
Calitri Await Their Passenger

it slipped and where was going?  I came closer to an answer only later while browsing in a small
Giovinazzo shop on a street whose name I don’t recall. 

Maybe it was coincidence, maybe fate, but shortly thereafter I discovered them: red ceramic balloon-shaped decorations, their backs flattened, their fronts bulging from the wall.  They could lie flush, at rest, yet even in their stillness they projected a resistance to being grounded.  I bought three different sizes, all in fire engine red.  When composed they would serve as a whimsical yet poetic touch to what we call our “Stairway to Heaven” staircase which leads to our Calitri rooftop terrace.  I wanted not one but three; one balloon would have been a gesture but three suggested a story, their different sizes indicative of ascent.  Grouped on the wall, they would give the illusion that the ‘strings holder,’ (depicted on a separate canvas below them by our granddaughter, Harper) was being lifted aloft, carried upward by wind and whim, to join Gillespie’s “long delirious burning blue.”  The connection of the balloons to the poem, triggered in Giovinazzo, alluded to something else, however.

That solo runaway

Early Draft of Harper's 3D
Balloons on Canvas

balloon stirred associations that reached far beyond the Adriatic.  In the symbology of Western art, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling offers a biblical version of ascent.  The “almost touch” between the fingers of Adam and God captures the instant before God gives life to Adam.  Man does not touch God and God keeps his distance.  Yet in the very last line of High Flight, Magee metaphorically does exactly that ...  he “Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

It wasn’t until I stood beneath that Vatican ceiling years earlier that the juxtaposition fully settled in.  I wondered now whether flight narrows the distance between awe and arrogance.  Have we come so far, achieved so much, that the distance between man and God feels negligible?  Perhaps altitude alters perspective.  Perhaps flight briefly loosens gravity’s hold not only on the body but on the imagination and something divine slips in through the margins.  I have not been above 45,000 feet, but even at that altitude there is the feeling that what is before you, awe-inspiring and humbling, is far beyond happenstance.  I prefer to think Magee was not claiming equality with the divine but in a fleeting moment of overwhelming awe, describing the sensation that eternity had brushed briefly against him in the sky.  He felt, if only for an instant, like touching the mystery of his Creator.  From

Circled - Tail of a Tornado Aircraft on
Seafront Promenade 

now on, each time I climb or descend our “Stairway to Heaven,” I’ll instead look at those balloons and favor reverence as the explanation.  

These allusions to flight were reinforced when we came upon the Deriva del Tornado (“Tornado Tail”), a memorial featuring the vertical tail of a Tornado interceptor displayed in a corner of the seawall along with the prayerful poem Preghiera dell’Aviatore (Aviator’s Prayer).  Like High Flight, this entreating invocation is the prayer of an Italian aviator, who climbs into the heavens seeking the wings, the gaze, and the talons of eagles.

In a way, I experienced my own trinity beginning with an American aviator’s poem, allied with the sky and its allusion of contact with divinity.  It paired with a wayward balloon’s escape from someone’s grasp, climbing,

Italian Aviator's Prayer

bringing flight to mind by its motion and freedom of direction.  Afterwards found me purchasing ceramic balloons.  My trinity became complete when we came upon the vertical tail of an Italian fighter symbolic of the need for stability and control during flight.  Indeed, a devout trinity as subtle as the Triton fountain.

In the end, Giovinazzo lingered less as a destination than as a sensation, a place suspended somewhere between stone and saltwater, between gravity and ascent.  Its seawalls hold the Adriatic back much the way memory holds time in check, not completely, but enough that life continues here unimpeded to the rhythm it always has, along the same lanes their ancestors walked.  It isn’t cheeky Cannes, no Devil Wears Prada ensembles here.  Closer to earth, its inhabitants, dressed for reality, are better prepared to mend a net or coax a grounded boat back to the sea.  Beneath her balconies, bells, and endless skies, everything seemed, but for an unfettered balloon, quietly tethered to something larger: fishermen to tides, prayers to heaven, residents to routine, travelers to awesome wonder.  Perhaps that is why the town stays with me still.  Not because of any single meal, piazza, or sunset, but because, for a few drifting September days, Giovinazzo allowed me to feel again what flight has always promised: that somewhere between earth and sky, if we are fortunate, we occasionally brush against the sublime.

From That Rogue Tourist,
Paolo