Every Day in Tuscany (34 page)

I come to Rome for color. I love the recently repainted buildings in chalky blue, yellow the shade of winter light, and champagne with a spoonful of peach juice. Someone discovered that lighter colors preceded Rome’s characteristic sienna, ochre, and ingot gold.

We walk past the jarring white building by the American architect Richard Meier, built to house the august monument to peace built by Augustus. What an awesome responsibility. While the classic modern building would be a handsome museum in Pittsburgh or Minneapolis, the hard edges look at odds with the mellow
centro storico
surroundings. Although the materials are elegant and the lines sure and well integrated, essentially this building has an already-dated, generic impression. I’ve seen it before in many places.
¹

Don’t mess with Rome! Many contemporary projects are planned. This makes me nervous. Who
is
up to encasing Augustus’s Ara Pacis? Maybe building a simple glass box could have made a statement and still would have left Rome alone.

The fountain out front could be at an upscale branch bank, but at least it’s providing some relief for the backpack-laden tourists who are wading. Willie would like to join them. Instead, he counts it as number three in his cataloging of fountains spotted. By lunchtime, he’s up to ten, including the three in the Piazza Navona.

Roma, the day after Ferragosto—did the Apocalypse happen and we missed it? I know many restaurants close now, know the Romans go on vacation, but who could think that the streets would be
empty
of traffic, so many shops shuttered, even the bars closed? Suddenly the buildings are prominent, also the trees, river, and sky. There are tourists in big clumps at the major sites but otherwise, turn down any enticing street and it’s yours. Serene blue plumbago blooms on windowsills in front of closed curtains. Gone fishing. Along the Tiber, the drying leaves of the sycamores rustle with a hint of fall and the light falls in golden bars. Inside the Pantheon I get to see Willie look up at the great round opening from the classical world. When we were here in March, Alberto laid down on the floor under that heavenly aperture, arms and legs out like the da Vinci drawing. If one of us did that today, we’d be trampled. “Agrippa,” we tell Willie, “a very important builder a long, long time ago.” When we near the Trevi fountain, Ed puts his hands over Willie’s eyes until he’s right in front. The expression on his face! Elation unadorned, pure and plain. Many coins are tossed. This makes eighteen fountains for the afternoon and after this, no reason to go on. We walk to Campo de Fiori, which enfolds the memory of Field of Flowers, and then are lost for half an hour as we search for Pierluigi, one of the few restaurants remaining open in late August. We should have called—all tables are booked. But in the Italian way, a table is brought out and we are seated in the stately piazza, where we have a fine dinner on a perfect Roman evening. The waiter asks Ashley, “Would the young man like pasta with tomato sauce?”

Willie considers and replies, “I’ll have the grilled sea bass, please.” Oh, yes! Our gustatory training is working.

We each have something pulled out of the sea and drink a summer white from the Alto Adige.

We taxi back, all exhausted, fall into our beds, and in the morning we are off to the airport, and they are gone, gone, gone. On the way to Fiumicino, when I pointed out a stand of ruins, Willie closed his eyes and said, “I can’t see any more. If I see any more, I will miss Rome too much.” A response any passionate traveler recognizes.

W
E’RE JUST TWO
now in Trastevere on a quiet Sunday morning, the cobble streets shining from a light rain, a cat asleep on the hood of a Cinquecento, fragile grandmother-handkerchief scent of oleander, intimate churches in neighborhood piazzas, seven bright T-shirts strung on a line with the same blue, blue sky above that Agrippa saw when he gazed through the open eye of the Pantheon. I feel a bit lost, lonely. Love, I know, spares you nothing. Always the motions within a family involve a giving, a taking away, an abundance, a loss. And the small departures accent the future day when the big green wave sweeps you under and those left pick up and go on.

At a bookstall—why would this be open when all else is closed?—I find an old brown book stamped in gold:
Venice
by Augustus J. C. Hare. The little volume distracts me with its woodcuts and quoted poetry, classical references and the Victorian approach to travel—leisurely, erudite, practical. Listed inside are his many books on Italy, France, Spain. I do love a traveling man. Or woman. Vernon Lee, for one. Back at the hotel, I read her book
The Spirit of Rome
, published in 1906, which reads like a journal but with a writer’s passion for language and image. I like her description of coming upon the little corpse of a kingfisher: “sky blue breast, greenish turquoise ruff, and glossy dark back, lying in state, as dead birds do.” Her writing about Rome affects me like quick, vibrant watercolors. She describes the old olives in the hills as “pruned square, but of full dense foliage, not smoke-like but the color of old dark silver.” I love descriptive writing when it
takes you there
. She can be slapdash and elliptical, but often I come upon paragraphs so wise that I copy them in my notebook:

I feel very much the grandeur of Rome; not in the sense of the heroic or tragic; but grandeur in the sense of splendid rhetoric. The great size of most things, the huge pilasters and columns of churches, the huge stretches of palace, the profusion of water, the stature of the people, their great beards and heads of hair, their lazy drawl—all this tends to the grand, the emphatic. It is not a grandeur of effort and farfetchedness like that of Jesuit Spain, still less of achievement and restrained force like that of Tuscany. It is a splendid wide-mouthed rhetoric; with a meaning certainly but with no restriction of things to mere meaning.

I second that. Rome constantly outdoes itself. I like her choice of “rhetoric,” in the sense of effective speaking or writing. As though Rome were a revelatory book to read, which it is.

This is the first time I’ve been back in Rome since I read Vernon Lee. Often as I meander, I wish for the companionship of dead writers who’ve given me an intensely personal view of a place. I envision her as she appeared in John Singer Sargent’s portrait—wire-rim glasses, eyes as dark as black olives, severe and professorial except for the partially open mouth, which gives her a tentative quality. Her book about Rome is all observer; she’s not there except as the eye. But there’s the gift: We see as she saw. And now and then a door swings open and you see what you’ve always known but never put into words:

I find that the pleasure I derive from churches is mainly due to their being the most inhabited things in the world: inhabited by generation after generation, each bringing its something grand or paltry like its feelings, sometimes things stolen from previous generations like the rites themselves with their Pagan and Hebrew color; bringing something, sticking in something, regardless of crowding (as life is ever regardless of other life): tombs, pictures, silver hearts and votive pictures of accidents and illnesses, paper flowers, marbled woodwork, pews, hangings. And each generation also wearing something away, the bricks and marble discs into unevenness, the columns into polish, effacing with their tread the egotism of the effigies, reducing them to that mere film, mere outline of rigid feet, cushioned head and folded hands …
²

I
N
A
LBERTO’S HONOR
, we visit the Caravaggios in the Palazzo Barberini. He loves Caravaggio’s light and shadow, his force driving through his brushes directly onto the canvas. These two are unusual. A powerful, subtle Judith lopping off the head of Holofernes, who looks scary and very real. Then there’s the most mysterious painting of Caravaggio’s I’ve seen, shadowy Narcissus gazing into a dark pool.

A
LMOST AS FINE
, for dinner a plate of tiny veal meatballs with artichokes and caramelized cherry tomatoes, served with two crisp slabs of grilled polenta. And a waiter named Pasquale who brings over morsels to taste and insists on selecting the wine. A warm night in Rome and everyone left in the deserted city dines outside. I feel that I’ve lived here for a thousand years.

Roma non fu fatta in un giorno
, the verbs reinforcing the remote past. Though not built in a day, though not knowable in a lifetime, Rome can be absorbed in a few hours: buildings, ruins, streets, the sound of bells, colors imprinting forever inside the mind of the blissful observer. Of the great cities, Rome has the biggest heart. In this end-of-August silence, I can hear it beating.

P
URéE DI
C
ANNELLINI CON
G
AMBERI E
P
OMODORI
Purée of Cannellini Beans with Prawns and Cherry Tomatoes

Villa La Massa, one of the premier hotels in Italy, is located just outside Florence. Head chef Andrea Quagliarella gave me this one. The unusual pairing reminds me of the southern classic shrimp and grits.

Serves 6

1 pound cannellini beans

20 prawns, shelled, cooked, and seasoned

12 shrimp, shelled, cooked, and seasoned

2 ripe tomatoes, chopped

Extra-virgin olive oil

1 small bunch of fresh thyme, coarsely chopped

Salt and pepper

Soak the beans in water overnight, bring them to a boil in abundant salted water, then simmer for about 2 hours. Purée with enough cooking water to form a light cream and pour into soup plates. Add the prawns and shrimp with some chopped tomatoes already mixed with oil and thyme. Add some more extra-virgin olive oil and fresh ground pepper.