Friday 9 March 2012

Italy

I will not be writing this blog next week. I am off to Italy for a week, setting out on Tuesday.

I've been before, of course--as a classicist, how could I not?  After four visits to Rome I still haven't managed to go to all the things on my top-ten A-list.  I doubt I'll manage them this time, either: we're only in Rome for a day, this time, not long enough to hit Hadrian's villa, and as for the Via Appia Antica, one really has to do that on a Sunday, when it's closed to traffic.

The impetus for this visit is my 83-year-old mother, who has lost none of her wanderlust with age.  In a casual chat she lamented the fact that she had never seen Florence or the Bay of Naples, and it didn't seem to me that there was any reason for her to put up with that situation.

I've been to Florence three times.  I remember the first occasion most vividly: I drove there with my fiance--as he was then--on a holiday from Paris, where we were living at the time.  I left the car parked in a row with other cars, and returned awash with the glories of the Renaissance to find that the whole row of motors had been towed away.  (The police were very understanding of our foreign stupidity, and let us off the parking fine, though we still had to pay the tow charge.)

The Renaissance is not really my period, though Florence is hard to resist.  I'll feel more at home, though, in the Bay of Naples.  I've been to Pompeii and Herculaneum before, too--twice--but I can't imagine getting tired of them.  On my first visit I was too excited even to take pictures, and grinned so hard that at the end of the day my whole face ached.  I was calmer second time around, but no less enchanted.


Picnic in Herculaneum

We wandered through the ruins marvelling
at frescoed ceilings, bowls of painted fruit,
medusa-headed fountains and mosaic floors--
then settled in a garden where we ate
salami sandwiches on benches in the shade.
Beyond us stood the bath-house where they found
the huddled bones of the all the city's dead.
Vesuvius rose above us, hazed with blue.
In the garden, pomegranates grew.

The men and women who resided here
like us, and like Demeter's daughter, knew that fruit:
the tree that loves the water, loves the sun;
the biting sweetness of its seed upon the tongue
and taste that binds to death when dark has come.

3 comments:

  1. Wow! Last week I became a member of your blog. For me is a honor! I've been a fan of your novels from more than 15 years when I discovered "El Faro de Alejandría" ( "The Beacon at Alexandria" in my language) thanks my sister who's a great reader. Now my father is a fan of you, too!
    Today I listened the Nick Gallant's song "Wanderlust" and I had no idea what was the meaning but I kept the word on my mind for a future search. Suddenly I visited your blog and I read the same word. The "future search" became in a "search it now"! And..... I love the word! I love travel!
    Also, I love the way that you write all of your novels, with lot of sensibility and good humor. Then, I hope you write here your Italy top-ten-list. I love this country, too.

    Regards from Spain. ;)

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Carla! My top ten list for Rome (I don't have one for the whole of Italy) would be something like: 1) the forum 2) the Capitoline Museum 3)Ostia Antica 4) the Pantheon 5)the domus aurea 6)the Palatine 7)the Colosseum 8)any one of several Constantinian churches: San Clemente, Santa Maria Maggiore, S. Giovanni in Laterano 9)Hadrian's villa and 10)the Via Appia Antica. Obviously, this is very much a classicist's list, and if anybody objected that there's an awful lot of other stuff in Rome I would have to agree.

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    2. Thanks, Carla! My top ten list for Rome (I don't have one for the whole of Italy) would be something like: 1) the forum 2) the Capitoline Museum 3)Ostia Antica 4) the Pantheon 5)the domus aurea 6)the Palatine 7)the Colosseum 8)any one of several Constantinian churches: San Clemente, Santa Maria Maggiore, S. Giovanni in Laterano 9)Hadrian's villa and 10)the Via Appia Antica. Obviously, this is very much a classicist's list, and if anybody objected that there's an awful lot of other stuff in Rome I would have to agree.

      Delete