Postcard from Venice… All those reflections..

I didn’t know how it would be, returning to Italy. Would the sky be the same color? Would I remember condizionale? Could I be who I was back then– free and wild and decisive– and be who I am now — married, settling in, compromising.

The last time I went, in 1999, it was the beginning and the end. I had worked long evenings and 14-hour days, smiling and saying, often “Sure! No problem! Be right back!” to save the money for six weeks in Florence and andare in giro nella paese. I did it.
In the top drawer of the old Army-issue solid oak desk I had bought for $20 in Kissimmee, Florida, shipped to Waterloo, Iowa and then moved to Kansas City, I kept a white envelope with “Italy” written on it. After every shift at the restaurant, I took one twenty from my tips and put it in that envelope first. $100 a week, 52 weeks. I never snitched from it. When the envelope got full-ish, every few weeks, I’d take the money to Roosevelt Bank on the Plaza (before it was swallowed up by Bank of America) and deposited it in a savings account. I never snitched from it, either. Made sure I couldn’t transfer from that account to my checking with my ATM card. My mom taught me about saving money; we had had Christmas club accounts, as kids.

The exchange rate, the summer of 1999, was roughly 1860 lire to one dollar. It was one of the last years they used the lire, before they chucked it all for the Euro. The lira wasn’t considered very “good” at the time, but about 2500 lire would buy you una bichierre di vino della casa, rosso o bianco, the same price for a bottle of water, senza gas, or an espresso; It was 3500 lire or more for a 300 ml can of Coke or orange Fanta. I drank a lot of water than summer. I lost 10 pounds, and wore a size 6 by the end of it.

When I think about it, I wasn’t young, really. Lots of people in the UK go on what they call a “gap year:” the year before they start university, they take a year off and travel, work in some foreign land, do volunteer work. They are young: not old enough to drink in the States, though old enough everywhere else. Not old enough, really, to know anything about themselves. The gap year gives them that space. I was 29 when I went to Florence, far past gap-year status. I’d had my gap year already, in 1989, living at home, with my parents, working at Chi-Chi’s. I’d found myself, one summer in Colorado Springs. I made it through university, got a degree and a great job. But then what happened?

I had given up a perfectly good career directing television, as far as any logical outsider might see it. And now I was just waiting tables, freelancing here and there, living in what people said was a crummy apartment, taking some classes, doing– not much.

There was a café in Florence near the language school I went to. It became my “local,” the place I sat everyday, between classes, after classes, in the sun, in the shade. I wrote there, met il mio amore italiano there, listened to another language and let it become another voice for me. Even so, I yearned to hear English, devoured the book I brought with me, and scoured the city for an English-language book shop. The hunger, for understanding, to be rescued from solitude, is so complete.

At Parola, the language school, no one was allowed to speak any language but Italian. It was immersion. There were Spaniards, Turks, Swedes, Germans, Parisians, Austrians, Americans, Australians, and others, all there in the hot rooms, straining in their minds, to translate from Italian to their own language, and back again. Hoping, eventually, their mind would relax and they could just listen and hear it and it would arrive, a thought, without force. Another layer of imagination, peeling back and opening up the world through sound and expression.

I was so lonely, most of the time, in Italy. Hot and tired, the smell of my own strange body odor in a sweat that changes in different environment and food, new stress. The stone everywhere: no grass, le piazze like fields of exclusion, and then up there, on the window sill, an oasis of color in a flowerbox. I was thirsty all the time, walking and sitting, then restless again to move, to see and find and locate, by God, please, whatever it was I came here to find.

An afternoon, cool, lying on a bed with lui and listening to music from a courtyard, the shutters drawn closed to the July heat. A day, with my friend Flavia, bereft with grief over the loss of her beloved Rob. We sat out a torrent of rain and thunder under a vicar’s portico in Fiesole and talked about love. Late night on the bus, returning from the opera in Verona. All around, the women doze in their seats. All but Cathy, the pianist and singer from New York, and I. Flavia snuggled up against us, the Irish girls on gap year giggling nearby. Cathy and I argued into the night, intense whispers. Then, angry and relieved, we recognized ourselves in each other. It is dark, and safe to cry.

My brother, Mike, and I walked the stone roads of Pompeii together and listened to each other sleep. We looked carefully through camera lenses at one another, felt safe to reciprocating love there. Mia cara amica Mallie laughed in a hidden gelataria above the catacombs in Sicily, orders one, then another, then another gelato. I vecchi, the old men, sitting on chairs sulla marciapiede, nearby, watch her eat one after another, her golden hair burnishing in the August sun, then turn back to their daily affairs.

This July, it would be six years. A new Pope is installed. The miles and miles of scaffolding that covered most of the monuments the summer of 1999, summoned in a rush of perfection at the millennium, the Jubilee year, are mostly tucked away. In a crumbling place like Italy, where treasures of the world live, ci sono sempre qualcose restaurazioni.

In 1999, I arrived in Fiumicino alone, where man-boys paced in army green and carried licorice-black machine guns. I boarded the wrong train from Rome to Florence alone, stewing without water in the heat of train car. I paid my way, first in cash, and then on credit. It wasn’t paid off until I refinanced a house I bought later. It’s hard to see it in the moment, in the concrete days, the cobbled stones, the mosquito bites and the aching longing for home and for good, corn-fed protein: why I wanted this. It was s a long, stringy desire; first, just to go away from home, away from the sameness, the simple American-ness, the single, clangy-yanging sound of one language, the flat, male history. Then, to be in Europe, the origin of family, of the French, of revolution, of soft fabrics, complex architecture and softer, more meaningful languages. And l’ultimo, to be in Italy, the mysterious center of that longing, since I was so young. To be there was like finding real love, then panicking, not sure why I wanted to leave it.

I swayed on trains in Tuscany, the sunset drenching fields of sunflower a light of copper and liquid gold. I climbed barren Mount Etna, feet filthy with volcanic dust, and walked with my brother, my friend, over fields of buried, moving lava. I saw the Dolomites standing, stones on end, turning from grey to red, at sunset from a funivia at Soprabolzano. I walked and danced in the gardens of the home of an Italian man who loved me.

Ci sono sempre le restaurazioni. Life moves slowly; restoration takes time. Clouds come first, and sometimes a wind, before the rain falls. The panic, like the storm, subsides.

In Venice this weekend, my husband and I looked at so many religious paintings. In La Galleria dell’Accademia, there are 24 rooms, filled with both pastoral and religious paintings from the 14th to the 18th centuries. Like L’Uffizi in Florence, it is consumptive, exhausting, a ripened cathedral of visual cacophony. It is pleasure, and heavy responsibility. But it rained on Monday morning, the last day of our weekend. We preferred to walk, but didn’t want to spend the day huddled under an umbrella.

Vittore Carpaccio’s series of nine paintings recounts the story of St. Ursula; it swallowed me whole. Floor to vaulted ceiling, canvases cut to fit around doorways, hundreds of faces, hands, expressions, rendered, captured. Multiple timelines in several works, a dream deciphered, a love affair embraced, 11,000 virgins and 11,000 mitres, imagery and metaphors, ciphered in paint and gilt. The rain, then hail, battered the old church and art school outside, thunder clapping so loud, it boomed over the voice on our audio guide. Ursula, on her knees, hands folded in prayer, facing a bow and arrow, rejects Attila proposal. Her face, in the moment before her death, serene.

We returned the audio guides in the dimness of noon, left the gallery in the dregs of the storm. We strayed in Dorsoduro, looking for someplace to eat, something to inspire our palates. Drops fell from the sky, pulled by gravity, their own weight, smacking the faces of the water. One menu, like most others, drew us in. We ordered, ate. The rafters were low, the tables close, the room dimly lit. The family behind us spoke German, a couple spoke French across the room. Two English entered. I spoke Italian to the Signorina… so did the Germans, and the French. The English couple did not.

Then, through the window of the osteria, a block of sunshine cuts through the close buildings and fixes itself on the wall. I wait for a cloud to blink it away, but it holds fast. We pay, emerge from our cove. The sky rises like a banner, ravenous blue, the canals lapping themselves, aqua-mint fresh after the rain. The day, leaden and heavy at breakfast, full of melancholy portent, has swallowed its regret and released itself into full spring.

We walk more loosely, our fingers slipping in and out of each others’. Over more bridges, through a flea market, in and out of shops that interest us. We make plans, for the day: where to find gelato, which vaporetto to take, what church to visit; and for our lives: where to move to next, which family to visit at Christmas, what name to give our first daughter. We agree on the lute player in the Campo, and buy his CD.

Venice is different from the other Italy, I think, as I am different with Italy. Its occasion is refined and shifting, a careful reasoner of tides and merchant traffic and the daily fish take. Full of love, of pride, of joy, generous of spirit, welcome to all who come. But it retreats and advances and settles too, in and out of moods, like the storms, le acque alte, the bora winds of the winter, the plumey-wet heat of the summer. The city bargains with the water, changes, lifts up and settles back down, makes accommodations. The foundation softens but still stands after all. You can see the age, the places where it crumbles: but you can see the work, the effort, too, how the people move, make way, for themselves, their things. It is a dance of compromise and conciliation with the lagoon, the fingers of the Adriatic.

Venice is humble and gentle, funny, mixed up, rough and soft. She fails here, but rises up to meet you in other places, to lift you and carry you. She demands so much effort. But look down, da questo ponte o il prossimo, and see how the water gives back. Life, seasons, the work, water, cycles of pain and love, falling and getting up. Restoration, like the blue sky after the rain.