Assisi, and only two days to go. Six bottles of wine to absorb into my luggage have made me think about packing, but then the thought arises that I might never see this again — better wait ’til the sun sets.
I don’t rhapsodise about every view, but if sunrises and sets are God’s way of asking us to pay attention, and I always thought they were — not that I often do — then a lot of people aren’t really listening. Like the nattering herds in the basilica today. Or like the whispering, shuffling priers around the saint’s tomb — or like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, to be fair.
The valley below is flooded with points of electric light. It’s spacious and serene, but that’s just the view from up here — not the valley we drove through today, all buzzing cars, including ours, all the day-to-day coming-and-going. All the chattering households now settling, fed, like birds at sunset with all their televisions still on in all their corners, including ours, where my father is watching a CNN Special on Jackie’s Life of Dignity.
Back home, I thought, a sunset’s a sunset. Here it’s a coda to the tourist’s day, on the terrace in the evening. The valley really is beautiful, darling. They’ve done a wonderful job of the sky. Glad we came.
Anyway. Breathing in, breathing out and smiling, slightly inebriated and enjoying it. Behind me crowds better dressed than St Francis ever was — better shoppers than he could ever be — are relaxing over drinks, dinner and cigarettes, walking and chatting in the streets, strolling to the edge of the piazza to admire the sunset alongside me.
§
We were a varied set of diners in the Trattoria tonight. A very large man breathing as if his last after climbing the steep cobbles, sitting opposite a very thin woman directly in front of us. She seemed as aware of their appearance as you might expect. Dad and I, him struggling with the gastric upsets that have afflicted him the entire trip, complaining about the food and visiting the brightly lit gabinetto helpfully placed to one side of the dining room, in full view of the rest of us. A stupid Australian woman making Christian excuses in a loud voice for selfish men. A Steve Martin look-alike in a blue and white striped business shirt, jeans and sports shoes. A perfectly decent English couple trying hard not to be put off their perfectly decent dinner.
You speak English, I said to the waitress? What was that with the Crostini? Were they little olives? No, she said, pointing to her breast. They are from inside the chicken. Did you like them? It was not an easy meal, really, but I finished it and the wine. It’s the fizzy water makes me do it, said Dad, I’m sure of it.
§
Instead of watching the last light leach from the sky, I bought Amaro and caffe from my favourite Bar and watched the passing parade. A group of middle-aged German women sat next to me, talking intensely. I admired the legs of my remaining drink in the tapered glass. Pleasantly pissed.
Bars had quickly become my favourite Italian institution: quick stop panini, caffe, directions, liquor; lollies and tè caldo for Dad. There’d been the same two staff at this, my favourite, no matter when we called. Both wore fresh white shirts and waistcoats of Italian red and green. He was a beefy man with long hair and a bozo moustache. She was beautiful.
I know the Italians have lived with their ruins for thousands of years but I find it hard not to imagine that something fundamental has changed. The people have moved out and the boutiques have moved in. The cars have moved in and the people have moved over. Rome is almost as awful and as fascinating as Jakarta. I walked alone to the Trevi Fountain one afternoon and looked at the horde of tourists surrounding it. Why were we all there?
“The difficulty, actually,” I heard an English woman say to her daughter, “is not that all these people make it pointless being here, but that it was never any good in the first place.”
If you visit the Via Veneto, my guidebook said, you’ll be forty years too late. After me, Henry Ford should have said, the deluge. And the 747. It must be fifty years too late to go anywhere.
The Parthenon was a favourite when Heather and I visited in 1980. This time it looked lost and insignificant until I went inside. I was shocked to see them cleaning the dome. The gorgeous green-tinged murk was coming off to reveal pale grey stone. I took my photo to avoid the cleaned section and the crowds. There were cats sleeping on the walls behind.
At the Church of the Three Martyrs the nun insisted on sweeping the courtyard before she would sell me postcards. A fine sense of priorities.
I happened to end up with a guide to myself exploring the old churches along St Giovanni di Laterano. It was my best experience in the city.
“We’re not professionals,”he said. “I’m an actor.”
He was getting on a bit and was limping quite badly by the time we parted. He was dressed in corduroys, knitted sweater and tweed jacket, muffler and galoshes on a wet, blustery day in May. The previous day there had been thunderstorms.
He was English, he said.
“I teach English actually — but I’m an actor really. Worked for Fellini. Did six films for the old boy — most unusual for a foreigner.”
And he named them. Been in Rome off and on since the late fifties. Fascinated by the early church. Actor, he said, and Practising Catholic.
“Don’t you think the motor car and the tourist have destroyed Rome?” I asked.
“God yes,” he said, “and the Italians. They’re not like us. Dishonest as hell.”
I bought him a cappuccino.
“Always make them put your change on the counter,” he said. “Then pick it up. Two distinct actions. Otherwise they’ll pocket some of it. Don’t know how they do it but they do. They’re not like us.”
At the lowest level of the Basilica of St Clementine, at the dawn of Christianity, a temple to Mithras. Not only did I have the guide to myself, but everywhere we went was silent and deserted.
Bloody hell,” Dad said, as we drove back into Rome to fly home. “I saw it during the war and the only traffic was a few army trucks.” He’d seen Florence, too, and much of the Abruzzi and Umbria. “Bloody hell it’s changed.”
One day he refused to face the tumult at all. Which is why I’d had the guide to myself and why we’d left for Assisi.
But it wasn’t why we’d come to Italy. That was because it was fifty years since the battle of Cassino, and we’d come for the reunion.
“If I’d known Olympia was dead before you got the tickets I wouldn’t have come,” he told me on the plane.
For myself I had a hidden agenda. I wanted him to have what I thought might be a last hurrah before the tides went out, and I wanted us to dig around in his wartime experiences. I’d tried often before but our bickering had always stood in the way.
I was half glad that he’d missed out on the official government-sponsored trip, so we could go together instead of being driven around on buses, and I think he was too.
