Italy

2 June is Italy’s national day—the anniversary of the day on which it became a republic (Repubblica Italiana) in 1946. Everyone remembers that Italy is “the boot” and also includes Sicily, but—please folk!—lets not forget Sardinia. (When I was on the southern tip of Corsica a few years ago, I saw Sardinia—less than 20 kilometres across the water.) Italy—ancient Rome! The Renaissance! So much art, so much music.

I hardly know how to approach Italy’s history—I mean, I suppose I could give the highlights. (These are subjective, and mostly artistic for someone like me. Ie. Me.) This is based partly on the fact that I was living in Firenze (Florence) for a few months a few years ago. So, perhaps instead of the usual format, a tour.

Roma: now I finally got down to Rome one weekend, but I saw a very odd selection of things, because I needed to get to the Vietnamese embassy to organise a visa, and the Vietnamese embassy is not in a particularly historic part of town. I had very little time, so I stuck to the following: the Colosseum; the Vatican and St Peters; the Trevi fountain. There were other things thrown in, but that was what I really go to. Yes. I know how much I missed. I at least got to drive past a lot of things.

Assisi: St Francis. Also, the best meal I ate while I was in Italy. Spectacular ravioli with a creamy tomato and mushroom sauce.

Napoli: Herculaneum and Mount Vesuvius. I was struck by how brown everything was for miles around Mt Vesuvius.

Lucca, Pisa, Siena, San Gimignano: beautiful, beautiful towns. The head of Saint Catherine of Siena. The whole body of Saint Zita of Lucca.

Venezia: running through the fountain outside the station. Soaking. Absolutely soaking. Oh, and Venezia. The whole place is gorgeous.

Padua and Verona: wandering. St Anthony related things. The fake-out that is the Juliet balcony.

Firenze: oh, Firenze! The art. Reading Henry James in various spots around the city. Escaping into the Duomo when the sun got to be too overpowering. Living in a weird suburb northwest of the Cascine gardens, asking directions to the discount supermarket on the first day of my Italian classes. Watching the French open final and The Simpsons in Italian. So many memories…

Livorno: this crazy, crazy pensione about ten miles out of town on Easter Saturday, that was like something out of Fawlty Towers. Sharing a room with a pre-teen boys tennis squad.

Self-indulgence aside. The ancient Romans gave us more than a wariness about the Ides of March. Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Persius… The Renaissance gave us the great artists. And let’s not forget Boccaccio and Dante. Is The Decameron the greatest thing to emerge from the Black Death pandemic?

And, yes, we’re all glad fascism and Mussolini had a use-by date, though it would have been nice if we didn’t have to have them in the first place. Dictatorships are so passé.

Literature in Italy still has its spectacular proponents. My earliest readings (aside from high school translations of Caesar, Ovid, Tacitus and Virgil) were Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello. I fell in love with Six Characters in Search of an Author as a teenager. More recently, I love Montale, Andrea Zanzotto and Salvatore Quasimodo—I struggled through the latter in the original with an English crib.

I’ve chosen Montale as today’s poet. I’m going to read him in the original one day. In the mean time, I’m grateful to Jonathon Galassi and Charles Wright for their translations. Wright is the translator for today’s poem, which I found here.

The Dead

The sea that breaks on the opposite shore
throws up a cloud that spumes
until the sand flats reabsorb it. There,
one day, we jettisoned, on the iron coast,
our hope, more gasping than
the open sea—and the fertile abyss turns green
as in the days that saw us among the living.

Now that the north wind has flattened out the cloudy tangle
of gravy-colored currents and headed them back
to where they started, all around someone has hung
on the limbs of the tree thicket fish nets that string
along the path that goes down
out of sight;
faded nets that. dry in the late
and cold touch of the light; and over them
the thick blue crystal of the sky winks
and slides toward a wave-lashed arc
of horizon.

                More than seawrack dragged
from the seething that uncovers us, our life
moves against such stasis: and still it seethes
in us, that one thing which one day stopped, resigned
to its limits; among the strands that bind
one branch to another, the heart struggles
like a young marsh hen
caught in the net's meshes;
and motionless and migratory it holds us,
an icy steadfastness.
                               Thus
maybe the dead too have an rest taken away from them
in the ground; a force more pitiless
than life itself pulls them away from there, and all around
(shadows gnawed and swallowed by human memories)
drives them to these shores, breaths
without body or voice
betrayed by the darkness;
and their thwarted flights brush by us even now,
so recently separated from us, so close still,
and back in the sea's sieve go down...

—Eugene Montale
translated from the Italian by Charles Wright