Adrift in Sea and Sky
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The Open Door on Via Gelso |
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.
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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.
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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
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AquaMarina B&B, Giovinazzo |
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
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
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Residents on the Rocks |
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.
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In a Warren of Meandering Streets |
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,
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Hostaria San Domenico - Al Fresco Amid |
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.
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Piazza Vittorio Emanuele and the |
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
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To See Them Maneuver the |
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
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
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Our Giovinazzo Balloons in |
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
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Early Draft of Harper's 3D |
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
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Circled - Tail of a Tornado Aircraft on |
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,
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Italian Aviator's Prayer |
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
