Vademecum Italica: Travels in Italy

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COUNTRY? AN INTRODUCTION

Many years ago, while walking early one morning on the Capitoline hill in Rome I encountered a Chinese man. The sun had just risen and it seemed we were the only two persons up there. I was meandering there to try to get some photographs in the early morning light. The Chinese man seemed to be just strolling and, what caught my notice was that he had his sport jacket draped over his shoulders Italian style, without his arms in the sleeves, like a priest in his cape saying his morning breviary.

As we came closer he smiled, and said with ease, Buongiorno Signor, Come sta?

Bene, I answered, e voi? At which he rattled off a paragraph in Italian from which I was only to make out that he had arrived in Rome the night before by plane from China. His Italian was smooth and unaccented and he obviously mistook me for a Roman.

Sono Americano, I said quickly, non parlo molto bene Italiano, protecting the embarrassment of my scant command of the language that consisted mostly of bastardized idioms I had picked up from my grandparents. Had it been twenty years later I might have been able to respond with Wo shi Meiguoren, but then I would have to confess that I did not speak much Mandarin Chinese either.

Fortunately he knew a smattering of English and we struggled, as we strolled together along the Via del Campidoglio, to gain some information about one another. I managed to learn that he had studied Italian language and culture at some university in western China and this was his first time, his first hours, outside of China. Tired as he was he was too excited to sleep and wanted to be out in the city he had read about for years, and speak the language he had acquired. (I heard for the first time the word jiaoshou, when I told him that I was a professor.)

At least he got the first part, but in me he did get someone who at least appreciated the thrill of his first encounter with Rome, those magnificent first impressions of a place one has only known in mind for so long—the sweet sensory confirmation that it really exists! Would my Chinese friend write about his feelings—in Italian or Mandarin—such as Robert Hughes wrote of a morning in Rome that might have been much like this.

Nothing exceeds the delight of one’s first immersion in Rome on a fine spring morning, even if it is not provoked by the sight of any particular work of art. The enveloping light can be of an incomparable clarity, throwing into gentle vividness every detail presented to the eye. First, the color which was not like the color of other cities I had been in. Not concrete color, not cold glass color, not the color of overburdened brick or harshly pigmented paint. Rather, the worn organic colors of the ancient earth and stone of which the city is composed the colors of limestone, the ruddy grey tufa, the warm discoloration of once–white marble and the speckled, rich surface of the marble known as pavonazzo, dappled with white spots and inclusions like the fat in a slice of mortadella. For an eye used to the more commonplace, uniform surfaces of the twentieth–century building, all this looks wonderfully, seductively rich without seeming overworked. [Robert Hughes, Rome, Prologue, writing of his first visit to Rome in 1959]

There were hardly any Chinese in Rome back in those days, but when I was last there in 2012, there were legions of them and other Asian tourists taking photos of each other in front of the Pantheon, the Trevi, in the Foro Romano, in Piazza Navona and Piazza di Spagna. They seemed remarkably at ease, obviously not intimidated by the high prices in Euros, fashionably dressed and un-gawkish in their role as emissaries and consumers from what might become the world’s biggest economy. They are the un-barbaros and they seem to sense that it’s their turn at the empire game. They reminded me of my Chinese friend on the Capitoline in his draped jacket and what Rome is like in the morning light.

Having traveled to some seventy countries over thirty-five years I am sometimes asked what is your favorite country? It could be a qualified question: for food? for art? for weather? for natural beauty? for feminine pulchritude? for the people? the culture? The answers might be different for different countries. But when the question is put comprehensively, I do not hesitate—because I know that answer rather easily, and it would seem I am showing ethnic favoritism because I am an Italian-American. Italy!

My mother, it should be noted, as is mentioned in one of the following essays, spoke disparagingly of Italy when she and my father first visited there in the early 1960s. She thought the natives of her motherland rather rude, and the cities did not meet her sanitations standards. I had to wait a few years to form my own opinion, and many more years to be able to make a reasonable, if still very subjective, comparison with the rest of the world.

I say subjective because clean streets is ordinarily subordinate to other things in my criteria for favorite country. But within my list, what might take the position of primacy probably owes more to mood, time of day or year, or specific location. So, in no particular order, Italy is my favorite country because it might mot always have the very best, but has the following characteristics: a great history (if not always a noble one); great art (although not the best cared for or protected); a great cuisine (hey, I grew up eating the stuff); great language (great for opera and animated conversation, although Portuguese sounds better for modern music); great weather (nothing beats semi-arid Mediterranean climate); and, particular to my passions, Italy has fascinating cities. Oh, and beautiful women (a genetic benefit of those Roman legions bringing home beautiful slaves from their conquests.)

Other countries compete with Italy on these individual criteria. One will always get an argument on food and women—and men as well (although I did not say that Italy has the best looking men). But Italy permutes and demonstrates these criteria best of all places I have visited. Where else can one sit in a piazza in clement, sunny weather, sipping a cappuccino (in the country that invented it), watching gesticulated conversation among the locals, or feasting on great public art ranging from Roman imperial times to the Renaissance, and leisurely reading something from Ruskin, Mary McCarthy, or John Addington Symonds’ Biography of Benevenuto Cellini. For me, no better version of heaven could be portrayed inside the dome of any of the fascinating, art-festooned churches likely to be nearby.

I have probably visited Italy more than a dozen times over the years, and have been from top to bottom, including Sicily, and side to (narrow) side, enough to claim some familiarity with its richness in its variety of food, dialects, customs, and physical appearance. My own people come from near Napoli (my father’s family), and from Abruzzi in the mid-central, but whatever distinctions there were became ethnically-smushed into an Italian-American idiom.

Going back to Italy became a passion for me when I was studying Caesar’s Gallic Wars in my Latin classes in high school. I would have to wait until my thirties, but the day I exited the Stazione Ferrovia in Venice and first set foot in Italy I experienced what later came to be called Stendhal’s syndrome—a dizzy-headedness combined with the closest one can get to time travel.

Of course, like most travelers and tourists, I took photos. But I also began taking notes and writing paragraphs of observations in journals and notebooks, afraid that some detail might be forgotten, trying to compress the emotional surge that comes with discovery, and confirmation—confirmation that this place that I had seen in films and conjured in my mind from novels and histories, actually exists! There is no substitute for being there. You can fool yourself by saving money (maybe) and going to Caesar’s Palace, The Venetian and Bellagio in Las Vegas, an ersatz experience that would be equivalently enhanced by bringing a blow-up sex doll along as a companion.

So the following is a compilation of writings that range from public radio essays to treatments for film documentaries, and some travel writing and academic work over many years of travel to Italy that I initially compiled for friends and family members who were making a trip to Italy. Being an urbanist the focus is mostly on cities, but also on myself and my family, as well as the participants in several of the travel-study programs that I escorted. Alas, they are the observations of a traveler, not someone who has had the experience of being a resident in Italy. I’m still dreaming about that.

A VADEMECUM

You’re packing. The trip is booked, significant friends and relatives have copies of your itinerary, the shuttle to the airport is reserved. All you have to do is get all of this stuff on your bed and scattered around the bedroom into that suitcase.

A good deal of it you could leave home and hardly miss it. Something reminds you that impedimenta was the Roman word for baggage and you appreciate the knack they had for naming things. But the Romans also gave us a terms for those essentials or necessities that we simply must bring along to make our travels comfortable, or to enhance them—vademecum, things that go along with me.

. That’s it; you could go just about anywhere with that stuff and do just fine.

Maybe.

Everybody has some other essentials for a trip. Maybe a picture of your kids or that special someone. Maybe some medical necessities. Maybe your iPad or your smart phone. Everybody has some other essentials. Maybe that stuffed animal you’ve never been able to get to sleep without.

Me, too. For me, and maybe for you as well, an essential, and the one that seems to take the longest to pack, is books. Yes, books are certainly heavy, they don’t fold easily into some corner of your suitcase, and when you finish them you either have to drag them through the rest of your trip or make the difficult decision to jettison them.

I am not referring to the books that you have probably already packed: guide books, menu translators, and phrase books. Or even that history of France, or wherever you are going, or a biography. The guidebooks are usually well worth their weight, but the others I am likely to read, or try to read, before the trip.

The books I’m referring to here are novels. There isn’t anything particularly revolutionary about taking fiction when one travels. Take a look at any airport gift shop and most, if not all, of the selections are the latest 12 weeks on the NY Times bestseller list offerings. Potboilers and page-turners by King, Gresham, Clancey and Steele. Airport booksellers know that you want to be distracted from the rigors and routines of getting to your destination. Hence the mysteries, thrillers, twisty plots, and steamy romances.

Distraction from the tedium of travel is one thing; but somehow the idea of reading a courtroom drama set in New York when one is on the way to Rome, or a science fiction set in outer space when one is about to meander the inner spaces of Hong Kong, seems silly.

Choosing the right books, books that can begin one’s cognitive transportation, while also providing the distraction from one’s corporeal transportation, seems to make much more sense. And good fiction, particularly of the sort that uses one’s destination as a ‘character’ or diver of the plot, can provide the atmosphere of a place that heightens our anticipation and appreciation of it. A good author of a novel, and often especially historical novels, has already sought out the dramatic potentials of a place for a period, setting and plot, given it a narrative form that can give one’s travels an underlying sense of, if it is not too much of a stretch, déjà vu.

Perhaps this consideration is not of importance to all travelers, but for my first visits to, say, Ithaca, Alexandria, Saigon, London, and Hong Kong, to select just a few apt books were actually visits to Homer’s Ithaca, Durrel’s Alexandria, Greene’s Saigon, Dickens’ London, and Clavell’s Hong Kong.

Choosing the right books can be far more time consuming than the right clothing; there is one requirement: they must be by or about some place or someone where I am traveling. There is nothing as incongruous, or ludicrous, as someone reading a John Grisham novel at a café in Positano.

So I had thought long and hard about what might be appropriate for a visit I would be making at the Black Sea port Constantsa, Romania. I would be arriving by ship, and it would be nice to have read, or be reading something that would add some heightened level of interest and appreciation for the short time I would be there.

A few weeks prior to departure the Constantsa book was still an unfilled hole in my travel reading plans. It was a different interest that caused me to remove a dusty book from the shelf of my favorite used bookstore in San Diego. It was a novel, God Was Born in Exile: Ovid at Tomi, by Vintila Horia, about Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, popularly known as Ovid¹ and his exile to a garrison town, called Tomi in Roman colonized Dacia.² I instinctively grabbed the book because in four years of studying Latin, my Jesuit teachers had assiduously avoided even an introduction to any of the Roman poets. Of Roman war I knew a great deal, having plodded with Caesar’s legions over most of the Roman world. But of Roman love I knew next to nothing. So it was Ovid’s name that caught my eye, he the author of the manual of seduction for Roman males, Ars Amatoria.

It was not until I had the book home, eager to feed my long-delayed high school prurient interest in Roman erotica that I decided first to see if I could locate Tomi. The geographical dictionary said: Tomi, or Tomis, cf. Constantsa! Unwittingly (was it coincidence, or the machinations of the Roman gods?), I had found my Constantsa book. I resolved to start it somewhere in the Ukraine and time is completion for my arrival at Constantsa, or Tomi.

Ovid himself was a reluctant literary traveler. It was not his literary talents, but his subject matter, that got him exiled from Rome by Augustus in 8 AD. He would have much preferred to remain at the center of the Empire where the inspiration and audience for his work was large and enthusiastic, and where the supply of beautiful women was endless. Playboy of the Roman World is how one reviewer of several new translations and commentaries in the most recent Ovidian revival characterized him.³ For any Roman, exile from the capitol city was a capital sentence. For an urban rake to be banished to such a backwater as a garrison town in Dacia populated with soldiers, camp-followers, and pacified local illiterates, exile must have been a fate worse than death.

Indeed, present-day Tomi still has the gritty, derelict feel of a garrison town, although this may have more to do with the years of Ceausescu’s dictatorship rather than Caesar’s. A pall of destitution hangs over the entire port. Forests of cranes, acres of them, signal its former importance as an entrepôt. But nothing is going on here; the cranes stand idle and rusting, as lifeless as trees in a forest murdered by acid rain. The only activity is some sluggish unloading from a rust-stained Shanghai freighter, its red smears looking like blood from the flanks of a harpooned whale. Constantsa is a graveyard for a failed political system and economy.

There is not much that Ovid might recognize in the present-day city. It has grown from the Roman castrum into a metropolis of a quarter million. The sweeping curve of beach fronting the Black Sea (called the Euxine Sea in his day) on the road into town might be much the same. It remains one of the Rumanian Black Sea resorts, but the hotels all look down-at-the-heels, and the beach is deserted. He would certainly recognize the large mosaic floor of the former baths, now preserved in an annex to the Archeological Museum. But what he would think of the statue of the poet himself that sits centered in the square in front of the museum can only be guessed. After all, there are blank pedestals where statues of Stalin and Lenin once stood.

Guessing and inventing, of course, are what a novelist such as Horia must do about the poet’s years in exile there.⁴ He has the poet visit a city to the north of Tomi, Aegypsos, that took its name from far off Egypt. That city serves as the source of the origin of the wandering Gypsies, who refer to themselves as Rom and, as a complaining American couple at the local tourist office attest, with their razor-slit pockets and purse, remain locally active in their skillful larceny. Aegypsos, for which Horia has Ovid employ the 2nd Century Greek traveler and geographer, Pausanias, as a ‘Baedecker,’ lies at the top of the Danube delta, and may be the site of present-day Tulcea.

Despite the ancient place-names and personalities there is something remarkably contemporary about the circumstances that dictated Ovid’s fate. In the early years of the 1st Century Rome was enjoying a period of peace after years of war. Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, had vanquished Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, and declared himself Augustus. It was also a period in which the more conservative moral code that had come own from the days of Rome’s Republican and agrarian past had loosened considerably. Roman Patrician couples often divorced, abortion was not considered unacceptable since smaller, urban families were becoming the norm. Ovid could write openly and with approval of his own amorous escapades. He chronicled his long adulterous affair with a married woman who aborted his child, and whose maid was also one of his seductions.

The poet reveled in the sexual license of his times, even to mocking the crudities of our ancestors in maintaining monogamous relationships. Those Sabine women stuck to/One husband apiece. But then they didn’t wash, he wrote.

But as has happened to artists in many ages, Ovid’s proselytizing of his lifestyle through his verses ran afoul of shifts in the political zeitgeist. Augustus himself was anything but a model for what today would be referred to as family values. He was a bit of a playboy himself before he divorced his wife, Scribonia, to marry Livia even as she was carrying her divorced husband’s child. But dictators are often do as I say, not as I do, types, and then as nowadays, controlled the spin on public opinion.

Augustus, out of reformist zeal, and by domination of the Senate, began to promulgate legislation that would have pleased the types of right-wing religious groups roiling the political waters in contemporary America. Among the laws was one that permitted the banishment of adulterers. Although such laws were not always enforced, a high-profile personality like the author of the Arts of Love could make a good scapegoat or example.

Ovid certainly sensed the precariousness of his position. Perhaps to ingratiate himself with the Emperor he dedicated his lengthy poem, the Fasti, a celebration of Roman religious festivals, to Augustus to convince him he had switched his love interest from the secular to the sacred. The ploy failed and Augustus in return blamed Ovid’s poetry for the licentiousness of his daughter Julia, and Ovid was packed off to Tomi.

According to Horia, at first Ovid pined for Rome and its women, orgies, banquets and other pleasures, and for a time plotted ways to regain the good graces of Augustus. Even his amours with a beautiful Dacian woman only reminded him of his Roman mistress.

But gradually he formed friendships with the locals. He kept company with a tavern-keeper, a slave girl, a courtesan, and even a Roman centurion, and soon came to the realization that he would live out his years in this remote outpost. He even seems to have turned his interest to the early Christianity that appealed to the Dacians and may have appealed to him as he himself was subjected to, or observed the rigors, dangers, and violent treatment of these remote Roman subjects.

And so Ovid marked his final years in exile, although there seems to be only the statue in the museum square to commemorate his tenure there. But, of course he comes to life through his poetry again and again, especially when the times are easy-going and circumstances turn from war, to love—and when a traveler is looking for something to make a trip, even to an erstwhile place of exile, more memorable.

Originally published as Ovid in Exile, The Literary Traveler, Special Issue, Europe, Winter 1999, (http://www.literarytraveler.com/europe/ovid.htm)

HI, I’M JIM’S SUITCASE: AN ITALIAN LOVE STORY

Is it possible that luggage can have feelings? At least one suitcase does; one that has accumulated some psychological baggage along with a lot of dents, scrapes, frequent flyer miles, and a vanishing Italian girlfriend. This is his story.