This is from note to family. I realise reading it again how much my writing, when let loose, remains influenced by reading all of JP Donleavy’s books in the 1970s.
Herewith at 4am, lunchtime back there at home.
I am full of impressions and observations on our journey here. The China Airlines aircraft and crew wonderful. Taipei airport full of geographic confusion including for young man assigned to push wheelchair. We did not actually kill anyone; I had enough Chinese to ask him to wait for the far behind Helen.
I had had neck problems on way from Sydney. In the famous (to those who know it) Hello Kitty shop in the Taipei airport I bought world’s best quality neck wrap-around. Excellent results wearing it.
Wheelchair assistance in Rome meant sliding down an alley apart from very large crowd of morning-arriving Americans jammed for immigration. Guided by smiling Peruviana, resident of Italy. This airport employment just June to September for the mob. To the gate for diplomatici, aircrew and autorizzati.
We had time at the Roma Termini station to wander, sit, eat, etc and buy a couple of buckets of salads and water for the train. Advance purchase of train tickets meant EUR60 (AUD100) for two, for first class seats at a two person table on an uncrowded Frecciabianca for five hours along coast and spectacular countryside just after summer harvests.
I asked a person at Roma Termini station ticket gate where we could get some fruit. She said back there in the Mercato Centrale. I said they (in modern market of highly prepared stuff) said no, go downstairs. She said, now in English, ok go out the door into the street and go left etc to the supermarket downstairs. I repeated back in Italian and she grinned and said si. Cleaner beside her offered his observation that going outside I would be robbed by Italians. He probably says such things to or about the passing parade of Americans all the time, for thrills. At TripAdvisor sometimes they ask how not to look like tourists and other Americans say you can’t. I’d now make the observation that dress is less important, what would be good would be a little less self preoccupation, a little more empathy, a little smiling observation and movement among others in crowds. Hopefully tourist numbers will be less in a month.
It’s like diving in the sea or something, to suddenly converse again in Italian. Brain and vocabulary muddled along the journey by Chinese, and by the situation that Taiwan voices and manners are so different from Beijing. Three conversations of note yesterday coming here. The first while waiting (not enough conversation minutes) in short queue for SIM at TIM shop with a gentleman of 80 whose wife was at the counter. His mother was a teacher in Ancona advised by fascist authorities that she would be sent to the Alto Adige, Bolzano, known to Austria as Sud Tirol, to this day solidly German speaking and schnitzeling... Mussolini’s italianisation policy. “But my husband” she had said. He’s going too then, they said. As the teacher father of Wanda wife of Eric Newby, was sent out of Slovenia into Tuscany.
We could have talked for hours but life got in the way. …
I am full of impressions and observations on our journey here. The China Airlines aircraft and crew wonderful. Taipei airport full of geographic confusion including for young man assigned to push wheelchair. We did not actually kill anyone; I had enough Chinese to ask him to wait for the far behind Helen.
I had had neck problems on way from Sydney. In the famous (to those who know it) Hello Kitty shop in the Taipei airport I bought world’s best quality neck wrap-around. Excellent results wearing it.
Wheelchair assistance in Rome meant sliding down an alley apart from very large crowd of morning-arriving Americans jammed for immigration. Guided by smiling Peruviana, resident of Italy. This airport employment just June to September for the mob. To the gate for diplomatici, aircrew and autorizzati.
We had time at the Roma Termini station to wander, sit, eat, etc and buy a couple of buckets of salads and water for the train. Advance purchase of train tickets meant EUR60 (AUD100) for two, for first class seats at a two person table on an uncrowded Frecciabianca for five hours along coast and spectacular countryside just after summer harvests.I asked a person at Roma Termini station ticket gate where we could get some fruit. She said back there in the Mercato Centrale. I said they (in modern market of highly prepared stuff) said no, go downstairs. She said, now in English, ok go out the door into the street and go left etc to the supermarket downstairs. I repeated back in Italian and she grinned and said si. Cleaner beside her offered his observation that going outside I would be robbed by Italians. He probably says such things to or about the passing parade of Americans all the time, for thrills. At TripAdvisor sometimes they ask how not to look like tourists and other Americans say you can’t. I’d now make the observation that dress is less important, what would be good would be a little less self preoccupation, a little more empathy, a little smiling observation and movement among others in crowds. Hopefully tourist numbers will be less in a month.
It’s like diving in the sea or something, to suddenly converse again in Italian. Brain and vocabulary muddled along the journey by Chinese, and by the situation that Taiwan voices and manners are so different from Beijing. Three conversations of note yesterday coming here. The first while waiting (not enough conversation minutes) in short queue for SIM at TIM shop with a gentleman of 80 whose wife was at the counter. His mother was a teacher in Ancona advised by fascist authorities that she would be sent to the Alto Adige, Bolzano, known to Austria as Sud Tirol, to this day solidly German speaking and schnitzeling... Mussolini’s italianisation policy. “But my husband” she had said. He’s going too then, they said. As the teacher father of Wanda wife of Eric Newby, was sent out of Slovenia into Tuscany.
We could have talked for hours but life got in the way. …
He was appalled at the situation now where the right wing Austrian government has offered citizenship to the people of the Alto Adige.
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| Coming from a country where for the most part soils are ancient, reduced in nutrients and drought is pervasive, the passing scene from the train is so differient: farms with obviously deep soils, farms not confined to broadacre but farmhouses surrounded by home supplies of olives, fruit and vegetables |
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| Distinctive stone pines [Pinus pinea], majestic ornaments of Rome and here north in the Maremma. Rain on the window. |
On the train long conversations with a 74 year old road and bridge engineer retired, who is totally and charmingly besotted by the countryside in which he lives, Livorno, Lucca, Firenze, and who on reading through our travel book just kept turning back to the text of email from Silvia inviting us to her place in Chianti, taking from his pocket a soft pencil to gently gently place two lines beside reference to most beautiful place in his world.
North of Pisa, near Massa, where there are great lumps of white marble in yards plus major limestone crushing works, suddenly among the hills away from the sea... is that the alps?... no, it’s stunning peaky mountains with sides of shining white Carrara marble.
and a movie... I kept the camera rolling because it went on to display well coastal Tuscan countryside with towns and the sensible pattern of utilisation of free space for food cultivation.
It was curious to hurtle past the five stations of the Cinque Terre, a modern throngy-platformed millions-crowdy pilgrimage not to the cross but to these five celebritised villages of total population <4000, clinging to cliffs.But what of the seasides, and larger and smaller beaches, spectaculars and quick-look-this-other-way hilltop towns and castles and churchy spires past which we swiftly fly? To rabbitly run to the Cinque Terre seems like watching a fine leg go by and fixing attention on a minor wartyness on a knee. Such a species we are.
Early along the way the train conductor was a young, tall, elegantly straight-walking young man of slightly misty air ... Hey look, Helen, here he comes again now, so elegantly, leading down this aisle a woman finely dressed and coiffed, of my age, their hands held high delicately. And later, as I’m coming from the little refreshment bar, they come past again. “La romanza grande di Trenitalia” I quietly smiling say. To which she smiling replies “e mio figlio”. He’s my son. And so I say “Mia moglie dice che lui puo sposarsi ad una delle nostre figlie” (my wife says he can marry one of our daughters). To which he quietly replies with a smile “va bene”.
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| 6 October 1941, during Mussolini's visit to Pontecchio in Romagna, the widow Marchesa Maria Cristina Bezzi Scali Marconi and daughter Elettra, accompanied by a fascist elder, at the memorial to her scientist husband. Marconi was to see Mussolini on 20 July 1938 but had a heart attack and died that day. Wearing... a fascinator. |
She was elegantissima, a figure who reminded me in elegance of the widow Marconi who would come to dinner occasionally at my ancient ambassador’s residence end of 60’s in Rome.
From whom in this archival photo and beyond thus am I so few degrees separated? Perhaps as close to Mussolini as to Graham Greene via Omar Torrijos of Panama and the unintended election outcome in Santo Domingo 1978.
From Pisa north to Genova an interesting looking man of sharp features diagonally across the aisle. With the arrival of the conductor, now a lean older man, extensive consultations over his sheaf of tickets. The man come from Bologna, via Florence where missed connection, to a place on this train from Pisa. A positive outcome. He needed to duck back to Genova for a bag of his documenti, then back to Bologna for a plane to Romania next evening. The conductor provided along the way best connections back to Bologna, via Milano for next morning. The man, 64, Romanian, told me he had in the years of Ceaucescu trained in maritime eletromeccanico and gone to sea. Four times Singapore, five times Bangkok once overwhelmed by flooding rain there, once a breakdown for two weeks in Zamboanga, everywhere else except Australia, but a cousin in Melbourne, once 14000 sheep from Somalia to Saudi, plus 150 cattle, 10% mortality... they would not let him step ashore in Arabia Saudita as he was a communist, some other ship had to come for him. After Ceascescu he set up a timber business in the mountains. Ten years ago to Italy to train in hospital work. Was the timber business profitable I asked. No, he said, he was not a milliardario (like billionaire, historically un milliardo means 100,000,000 but has slipped into meaning billion) but although he had no children, he said, “in here (fist to heart) here I am milliardario.”
Our briefly encountered friend was at sea, not in Romania, in December 1989.
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Our windows double glazed look upon busy street of buses, bus stops, people. The Largo Zecca Righi. Fifty metres over there to the bottom station of the funicolare
Our front door gives onto this not so wide pedestrian street Cairoli, the connecting street between the streets of the roll-registered palaces, the Rolli...where ten hours ago sitting for a small dinner outside a bar I manage in weariness to drop knife (used for tired no-longer-fresh schnitzel, metaphorically just like me) after dropping some penne arrabiate... and Helen knocks over her Heineken. While people wander by, evening-strolling (la passeggiata) with an adequate-for-Helen quantity of tame Labradors close to human knee, all quietly thinking “next we dine” and other notlabradors less restrained running three times further than mistresses yipping silently “hey there’s Luigi!” No rowdy, happy. Tourists rare.
Domani is not tomorrow, is in arrivo, quasi quasi.
Today we walk. With a project, as well as gawkery, of finding certain wool shops and on Friday an open free crochet school in a shop. Always good to have a project. Helen dreams of having an Etsy shop, her evening restorative crochet work focusing lately on freehand slouchy beanies of elegance.
E basta.
Saluti a tutti
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