italia

service

Italian service takes a bit of getting used to, especially after the meticulous attention you get in France. You can try in vain to attract their attention while they continue a conversation, argument or joke with a co-worker, and when they finally do address you, they make you feel like an inconvenience. But within a minute or two they're calling you cara and disappearing out the back to find you a cheaper brand of pasta than the one you got from the shelf. It has a charm of its own, but Cinque Terre is a tourist area, and it drives the tourists crazy. In the black corner, masses and masses of hungry, internet-craving, toilet-needing Americans and Germans. In the red corner, the harrassed locals who serve them. The tourists always forget to say buongiorno before they ask for something, and the locals can take fifteen minutes to produce the bill at the end of a meal. You can see the two sides shaping up to each other, making faces and snarling inaudible asides. But as in some inter-tribal battle ritual designed to diffuse aggression, just when you think someone's going to draw blood there is an exchange of balls of gelato and wedges of pizza for fluttering euro bills, and each side retreats, pacified.

Really, it's all Americans and Germans here. Even the signs are in Italian, English and German. Do you think all the pretty places of the world get together and divvy up the tourists by nationality? 'You can have the French. They're so whiny.' 'OK, but you take the Americans. They want everything yesterday.' 'Fine, we could do with the tips.' 'Right. Who wants the Australians?' 'Ooh, exotic.' 'Yeah, they're slobs, though, and they don't buy souvenirs.' 'That's ok, we've got the Japanese for that.'

ageing
The number of grey hairs on my head has tripled or quadrupled in the past two months. I think I'm going to get those dramatic white streaks that sweep back from behind each ear, like an opera singer or the undead vamp from an Ed Wood movie. In a gelato shop in Florence, the waiter called me bella ragazza. Then he changed his mind: bella donna. I had to object. Non sonno donna! Sono ragazza. Ragazza! The gelato man shook his head, with the serenity of those who've formed their conclusions and are sticking to them. Maledetta to that.

pace
The word is written on colourful flags that hang from balconies all over Italy. They were put up at the start of the second Iraq war. Now they are faded and tatty.

A guy from Serbia describes the divisions and sub-divisions of territory in the Balkans since WW2. I try to be attentive, as I know it's not often I'll hear the story from this point of view, but somewhere around the mid-1980s I excuse myself, cross-eyed with trying to assimilate so many horrible and ridiculous things.

Ido from Israel tells me he cannot travel around the Mediterranean unless he manages to get an EU passport, because so many places would turn him away or just make too much trouble.

A kid from Maryland who has 'studied' in Milan for six months without picking up any Italian speculates that the Arab guys who hang around his local kebab stand could well be terrorists.

In the streets of Italy the bells burble around you until they pick you up and carry you along. Little shrines built into cliffs and walls and bridges bear fresh flowers. At a bar overlooking the Ligurian sea, kestrels draw arcs and a distant yellow umbrella flutters around the edges like a sea cucumber. All of this existing in the same world. I take back what I said about the unsatisfactory nature of pleasure-seeking. It's a privilege and it's an art--the art of savouring the beautiful, in the face of ugly facts.

the old masters

I wasn't prepared for the depth of the colours, the expressiveness of the faces. A thousand Marys, prim, joyous, sad. The infant Jesuses, watchful, benificent, imbecilic. The shadowy Josephs, the Magdalenes hot and defiant even in their piety, and the young John Baptists, with their crucifixes of reeds, who always seem to know what's coming. The Holy Family themselves seem to have jumped outside of time. They're not the naive young family with all their troubles still to come, but already the celebrities that history will make of them. In some paintings their smiles are almost smug, like the Beckhams receiving the media. They are unamazed that royalty has travelled across the world to see them. The child Christ hardly ever has a child's face.

It makes me worry to think of them trapped in that eternal return, their pain always behind them, always ahead of them. A ruthless circularity like the logic that needs Judas and Pilate to play their parts, but condemns them for it all the same. I keep coming back to Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola, which is an exception to my rule. From a distance the mother and child look as imperturbable as all their other selves, but up close you can see them flinch a little, and hold each other tighter. Jesus looks out of the frame to the right, the direction of the future. Well, there's nothing to be done.

this is how I travel
Missions: I give myself a mission in every town, like finding a second-hand English bookshop. I am lifted on the wings of purpose out of the gelato-slurping fanny-packing throngs into backstreets where half the shutters are closed for a long lunch, and forty-year-olds in Adidas try to interest me in weed, and I have many diverting conversationoids like,
'No, this is a women's bookshop. Women. (hands describe an hourglass in the air.) JD Salinger is a man.'
'JD Salinger, yes?'
'No, women.' (again with the hands)

I get lost: hobgoblin, trickster Florence, blocking my views and scuttling my bearings with high walls on winding back roads. I met a man, old, German, who was also lost. He sweated and leaned on a cane, looking for his tour bus.
'Are you alright?'
'Ehrr.. no.'
He wouldn't turn back with me, or look at my map. He was mock-turtle sad. I hope he found his bus.

I make mistakes: like missing my hostel curfew and accepting an offer to take the spare bed in a friendly American guy's hotel room. He's as gentlemanly as he seems, and I pass a quiet enough night, after handing over fifty euros to the sneaky concierge who intercepts us at reception. Funny--I'm sure he said 'forty' until he realised I had nowhere else to go.

I have a lot of luck, mostly good. Can't ask more than that.

I have a lot of luck, mostly good
It deserves a stronger word than that. I'll write it in Italian, so it doesn't sound so Louise Hay.

I miei miracoli:
Just when I am getting lonely, Matt Douglas blows into Barcelona from hot climates, bringing news of cities full of dust and orange trees and ancient Moorish buildings so delicate you mustn't even brush against the walls. Teaching me, through example, how to be a good traveller. Being patient and optimistic and curious. Laughing at my jokes.

Just when I am sick of the road, I meet the Zamboni family. They ensconce me in their beachhouse on the Adriatic and feed me risotto and tiramisu. And son Flavio, the yachtie, shows me and Matt D around his luscious, improbable Invisible City, which I can't write about because I loved it too too much for eloquence. A concert of Vivaldi in a church by a canal, the hard sun striking sparks off the crenelations of San Marco. That's the best I can do. He helps us find the best local bars, and defends us fiercely against the rip-off merchants of Venice. Blessings on your next voyage, Fla.

Just when my eyes are hollowed out with looking, I find a painting in the Palazzo Pitti by Giovanni da San Giovanni, of Saint Catherine wedding the infant Jesus. Mary dandles him on her knee and looks on encouragingly. It has the richness and strange calm of amazing events that come to you in dreams. It's like all the best dreams I ever had, and everything is new again.

All this luck, this reaching out! I light candles at the little shrines, try to remember to curtsy and cross properly, linger over books of ex voto paintings. I stand by the word I've chosen, but some people might prefer a more secular one. Flavio sees the word serendipity on a sign and asks what it means. Well, I say, to give you some examples...