Pictures, You Need Pictures: Part 3: Florence

Enough! you say? Well, Henry and I left Rome on a train after two glorious days and headed to Florence where he's been living and studying at the Gonzaga University campus. After Los Angeles and New York, Florence is my very favorite city. I can't adequately explain the impact on me when I first visited in 1985, but it hit me all over again fifteen years ago and yes, all over again in 2019.

I did my pilgrimage to the monastery where Fra Angelico painted the frescoes, where strangely amongst the din that is Europe and its tourists, the place remains supremely quiet and near-empty.

And then, of course, around the corner and up the stairs...

The Annunciation.

Exhale.

Eat.

I might be smiling in the above photo, but I am also slowly dying as we walked through the city over the river and up the steepest hill I've ever climbed in stupid shoes to the Piazza Michelangelo. It overlooks the entire city, and the view was entirely worth the effort. In fact, if I'd died up there, it would have been just fine.

On our last night we ate at this famous restaurant called 13 Gobbi. We had anchovies first, followed by pasta with mozzarella, and then I had eggplant parmesan and Henry had Milanese. It was easily one of the best meals I've ever had, but to tell you the truth, all the food in Italy is crazily sublime. How is that even possible? (It feels ridiculous posting these poorly lit photos, but I'm going to, anyway):

This is just a crazily lit photo of a gorgeous building near the restaurant. We walked the long way home. Henry dropped me off at my pensione, hugged me good-bye and left for his own. I left the next morning for the west coast of Los Angeles, filled with gratitude for this time spent away.

P.S. For all those who've asked after us, we are safe and far enough away from the fires to only be affected by smoke and bad air quality. We have many friends who were affected, though, who had to flee in the middle of the night. My heart goes out to all those who lost their homes, their possessions, their livelihoods. California is a fiercely beautiful state, and I am grateful to have lived here for over twenty years.

Italian Relatives

Relatives,Mendicino, Italy
July 1985

The Journey

Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down   

A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out

To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling.

But far up the mountain, behind the town,   

We too were swept out, out by the wind,   

Alone with the Tuscan grass.

Wind had been blowing across the hills

For days, and everything now was graying gold   

With dust, everything we saw, even

Some small children scampering along a road,   

Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.   

We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,   

And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face.

I found the spider web there, whose hinges   

Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,

Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging   

And scattering shadows among shells and wings.   

And then she stepped into the center of air   

Slender and fastidious, the golden hair

Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,   

While ruins crumbled on every side of her.   

Free of the dust, as though a moment before   

She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.

I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped   

Away in her own good time.

Many men

Have searched all over Tuscany and never found   

What I found there, the heart of the light   

Itself shelled and leaved, balancing   

On filaments themselves falling. The secret

Of this journey is to let the wind   

Blow its dust all over your body,

To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly

All the way through your ruins, and not to lose

Any sleep over the dead, who surely   

Will bury their own, don't worry.

James Wright

via The Poetry Foundation

Saturday Three Line Movie Review

The Trip to Italy
dir. Michael Winterbottom


Two handsome in the way that I like middle-aged men go on a culinary tour of Italy, retracing the steps of the Romantic poets, namely Lord Byron, keeping up a steady stream of witty banter and driving along the requisite Italian roads with breathtaking views of the Mediterranean . They do brilliant improvisations of famous actors while bemoaning their own advancing age, receive the exquisite offerings of food brought to them in perfect Italian restaurants, converse with their families back home and people they meet on the road, conveying in a charming and poignant, utterly original way what longing means -- even what it means to be human. I floated out of the movie to strains of Italian opera and am now officially completely smitten by Steve Coogan.











Other Three Line Movie Reviews


Get On Up
Begin Again
Chef
The Immigrant
Cesar Chavez
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Gloria
Labor Day 
Philomena

August: Osage County

Her

American Hustle

Bare Arms, Not Bear

The woman in the black cardigan is my Italian grandmother, and she's standing next to her sister outside of their ramshackle house in the small town of Cosenza in the Calabrian region of southern Italy. I imagine it's nearly 100 degrees outside despite the heavy clothing, but they're all protected from drafts, the kind of wind that grabs the neck and kills you if you're not careful. I have lately begun baring my arms after a period of many years. My attitude is a sort of screw it, I'm fifty years old and who the hell cares if they look like my Italian grandmother's? Covered or uncovered, my grandmother was a very strong person physically, if not mentally. Legend has it that she carried bags and bags of groceries for many blocks in New York City and then up many flights of stairs unassisted. I, too, have pretty decent upper arm strength which has come in handy with the disabled child, but my arms are just not cut in that sinewy way that comes from exercise or genetics. They look soft, and they are soft and their strength is buried deep, like the plastic king in the middle of the dough of a King Cake. How's that for metaphor? This summer I was inspired by a friend of mine at Expressing Motherhood who made an amusing video about baring one's arms, and for three days in a row I've worn three different outfits and bared my arms and am now crafting a post about the act.

That leads me to something a bit more substantial -- or should I say as substantial as my bared arms?

Anywho.

Last night, Cheryl Strayed, the mega author of Wild, posted an interesting article by Katie Roiphe on Facebook. Listen, I'm not really friends with Cheryl Strayed, I just "liked" her Facebook page, and every now and then I'll "like" what she posts along with tens of thousands of others. Roiphe's article was about the very hot (both literally and figuratively) Karl Ove Knausgaard's new series of memoirs that are slowly being translated into English. Her article basically proposes the question "what if a woman wrote it?" Knausgaard's memoir evidently outlines in minute detail his every personal struggle, including the minutia of his daily life as father. He talks about diapering his babies, I think (I haven't read it), along with philosophy and whatever else is going on in his life and mind. The books are a huge sensation. I want to read them, frankly. But, yes, what if a woman wrote it? Roiphe makes an amusing case that a Karla Ove Knausgaard would probably receive a far different response than her male counterpart were she to publish the same, and much of that negative response would come from women.

Generally, I'm beyond bored by things like the mommy wars and the work vs. nonwork stuff. I think the extreme parenting I've done has given me a sort of trump card that I admit to periodically over-using, but this article by Roiphe really struck me, particularly in the context of my own recently published ebook. Now, I'm not comparing myself to these fancy pants writers. I have a $2.99 ebook that is about 36 pages and covers roughly one and a half years of my life. I've gotten a great response to the book from people of all persuasions, and I've also gotten some criticism that I believe was considerate and worth absorbing. However, one person made the comment that she (a woman!) didn't see it as a book, really, for a literary community but rather as a "passionate article for a mother's community." I've been thinking about this statement for days, actually -- not in any obsessive, upset way but more in a curious, cud-chewing way. There's a tiny ding in that statement, a criticism not so much of my writing's literary quality (which is always arguable) but rather in the suggestion, however faint, that a mother's community holds nothing literary.

Like I said, I'm chewing on this quite placidly. With bare arms.

Henry home from the mother country

Henry got home this afternoon from his school trip to Italy. He looked tan, handsome and taller, and I was so excited to see him and wrap my arms around him that I failed to take a picture. He chattered non-stop on the way home, telling us about everything that he did and saw, and then he gave me a present and I practically burst into tears. The kids went to a leather factory, and he picked out and bought me the above leather journal and had it stamped with my initials. Can you even believe that a fourteen year old boy would be so thoughtful? I saw it and knew right away I would have to get you one, Mom, he said. When we got home, I showed him my little leather travel diary that I wrote faithfully in the entire summer I traveled in Europe after graduating from college. We realized that I was in Italy, in the same cities, on the exact same dates, 28 years ago. Wow, Henry said, You wrote it all down. I didn't write a thing, but it's all up here. Now, I'm flipping through his iPhone and looking at Italy through his eyes.