FIB: Centro Storico
There is the tendency to romanticize old stuff; old stuff like old castles and old medieval streets, old houses. I think this tendency comes from a fizzing-up from the well of memory, nostalgia, which makes things prettier than they are. I think that when Americans (and others, though I’ll pick on my own species) think of Italy it is through rosewine-hued glasses. I’ve noticed that blogs written by American females in Italy cash in on this, and, that they are all having babies. I’ve also noticed that there ensues this skewed fairy-tale way of looking at things, like a dance on the right side of perfection; that there is also a left is too quickly forgotten.
I don’t like living unbalanced. I like Annie Dillard’s book, Pilgrim on Tinker Creek, because she takes Nature’s ugly and good. For a properly weighted view of the centro storico, Bracciano I must include the cat with its bloody, scabby face and the kittens with their crusty eyes. That the indifferent Mary to the side of our door doesn’t look after them is presumed enough, so that when I open the door they come running from down the hill that is our slanted piazza, over the quaint cobbles and through the luscious vines draped over buildings; they come hungry and meowing, they want Friskies—to be exact—and a pet or two.
Another good well-balanced view of the centro storico are the lives of the people who have lived here all their life. Needless to say, being a stranieri, I don’t know too many, but I can watch them, I can see; I can relate it to good ole’ Howard City, small towns round the world are in many ways the same. There’s the man at the alimentari with a weird growth on his head. He interests me the most. He has an ogre for a daughter who stomps past the great towers of the castle with her head down. To be ferociously ugly in Italy has to be a sin. I think she must have been made by incest because her face is sunk into her skin and she stomps with a broken cadence, never looking up.
Now that it’s summer the teenagers fill the old winding streets. They make-out in corners and throw water balloons. The girls all wear push-up bras and cleaner clothes than me; the girls have big sunglasses and wear tight white pants; the girls want to be twenty-five and then when they reach twenty-five they’ll want to be twenty-five for the rest of their lives. There are boys around but it’s the girls I watch. I try to remember and wonder what it’s like to be thirteen with a tumult of transitions; that they try to hide it is obvious enough; I think I buried mine in a forest. They are loud and they walk very close together, as if they are protecting themselves from something, the world.
In the centro storico of Bracciano I can pretend I live in some far off time. I can hold myself there; if it was my breath I was holding I would be dead. This weekend there’s going to be a medieval fest. That should be fun to watch. Allay the illusion!
FIB is Fridays in Bracciano every Friday
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Comments for FIB: Centro Storico
Do you really think you’re taking a more balanced view of Italy just because you’re careful to mention scabby-faced cats?
I don’t have the luxury or naiveté to think that stray cats and disfigured women constitute the real ugly side of Italy, perhaps because even though I’m a straniera I don’t live here as one. My husband is Italian and we live an Italian life together, and that means that it’s a hard one: struggling to make ends meet on a single Italian salary because there’s no work here for me. (Even if there were, it wouldn’t be anything that I’ve been trained for- getting a university teaching position here without conoscenze and with an American degree in my field would be near impossible in Italy.) My husband and I live with the constant spectre of having to pack up and move up North (and there would be just a few weeks notice- how does one do that with an infant?) when the company he works for fails, and it will fail. That means that in just a matter of time we’ll be living on a similar amount of money but we’ll no longer have a paid-for house. Out of the frying pan, I guess. But while we’ll here, we live in a falling-down town filled with abandoned buildings and diseased stray dogs and yes, the occasional scabby cat. We eat food raised in fields tainted by decades of illegal dumping by the Camorra and the horror of that for me now that I’m “having babies” is that I have to feed my daughter that poisoned food. So excuse me for looking for the positive side of life here in Italy because were I unable to find it, I just couldn’t take living here.
By the way, any romanticizing of “old stuff” (roba vecchia as I translated it for my husband, we had a good laugh about that) you might find in my blog is not owing to a “fizzing up from the well of memory,” but rather intellectual interest left over from a decade in grad school and a shorter stint as a tenure-track asst. professor studying and teaching some of the very same “old stuff” I’ve mentioned in my blog.
I guess I managed to stir up the Italian expat pot! And I guess that’s what I wanted to do. I did not want to categorize individuals, but can’t repent. I read too much Henry Miller. I have lofty ideals and when I drift down from them I look around and have a little laugh.
Life can’t tilt to any positivity or fall back to any negativity. It is correcting itself always. There may be good times and there may be bad times, but it is our only Time: Life. To cherish the consistent chaos we swirl in… Well, Italy perpetuates it, Italy fecundates in it’s own—sometimes sloppy—mess. If you’re living in Italy you have already exposed yourself to such inexplicable, unpredictable forces! There is much strength in that, yes, I know.
“Today, sitting here in the sun, it doesn’t matter whether the world is going to the dogs or not; it doesn’t matter whether the world is right or wrong, good or bad. It is—and that suffices. The world is what it is and I am what I am. I say it not like a squatting Buddha with legs crossed, but out of a gay, hard wisdom, out of an inner security. This out there and this in me, all this, everything, the resultant of inexplicable forces. A chaos whose order is beyond comprehension. Beyond human comprehension.”
—Henry Miller
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1 On Friday 15 August 2008 at 15:57 GMT thus spake michelle of bleeding espresso:
You can call it “rosewine-hued glasses,” but I call it “living with a positive attitude.” You can call it “living unbalanced,” but I prefer “focusing on the positive.” Even when I lived in Philadelphia, I focused on the good stuff like the exciting art scene and my cozy neighborhood feel as opposed to the filthy slums and high crime rates—both of which were right on the doorstep of my law school. I prefer it this way because otherwise I’d live a miserable life, and I’m just not willing to do that for anyone. This isn’t to say I ignore the negative aspects of life here or there and/or that I don’t work to change them, but whether I choose to share that part of my life on my blog is just that—my choice, and it’s a conscious one.
In any event, all of us on your short list have ranted about things in Italy that annoy us (Amber, btw, has moved back to the States), but, no, we don’t write post after post about it. I can’t speak for anyone else on your list, but if the negative things in Italy bothered me so badly that I had to vent about them every time I sat down to write a blog post (or even most of the time), I wouldn’t stay here. I prefer to be happy. And besides, there are plenty of other people in the world sending out negativity every day; I simply choose not to add to it.
Oh and also, I have no children, and I’m not pregnant (unless there’s something you know that I don’t).