The Sound of Silence: Some Foreplay

Bagni di Lucca 2011

Many of you have written to say that you enjoyed my last post on The Enchantment of Italy: Part I, the opening “chapter” to how I went from farm girl in Iowa to buying a villa in Italy earlier this year. It means the world that you felt “right there” with me and enjoyed it! Thank you for reading, “hearting it” and sharing it with friends! I have hit over 300 subscribers , over 100 new subscribers since I posted it!

Alas, this is truly not a 2-part fairy tale for any of you who are hoping to get to the villa part right away. In fact, the more I muse on it, the more I find myself in reverie, lingering on all the days and ways Lee and I spent together in Italy since 2006, the big build up to actually taking the unlikely plunge, like long and delicious foreplay. So, turn down the lights, friends, because that’s what I’m offering up today. 

My favorite photo from Rome. 2011. Where are these lovers today?

On the day of Lee’s 60th birthday, 14 March 2011, we flew to Rome for a 3-4 week trip. If you recall the Rome vs. Paris argument on an early date, you now know that Lee continued to be the victor in the destination game. By now, I didn’t care; I was quite smitten with Italy, too. Lee was between work and I turned out to be an early “digital nomad”, able to work from wherever I was, at least for some period of time. 

This was my first trip to Italy that didn’t focus on Florence. We created an amazing home exchange with a couple from Rome who owned two places in Italy; one a very chic apartment near the Pantheon in Rome and the other a country house in Bagni di Lucca, translating to Baths of Lucca, an Etruscan mountain village in Tuscany noted for its natural thermal baths used by Romans and later by many of the English expatriates including Henry James and Lord Byron. For our part, we had a 450 sf apartment in New York City at the time. Lee had been teaching at the Rudolf Steiner school there for a couple of years and I discovered living and working in New York was my graduate degree in all things design. Doing home exchanges with our place on East 81st between Madison and Park was ridiculously easy, even as a 4th floor walk crooked stair walk up. 

I never fully understood the story of our Italian hosts, but know the family owned this extraordinary 18th C palazzo in the center of Rome, a little villa in Bagni di Lucca and, by the way, sailing boats, well, really yachts. His parents were sailing around Cuba when we were there and they were off to Cuba to join them in a week. Alessandro and girlfriend, Jade, were there when we arrived, inviting us to dinner with their rather chic Italian friends, where we learned from Alessandro through the loveliest tutorial about the compensatory eye contact when toasting before dinner. His eyes were a deep pool of brown and practicing with him was an unexpected rush of something. Moving on….

Anyhoo…Rome was Rome. It’s so big, I feel mostly swallowed up by it. I both love its majesty and I want to retreat to a cool-walled palazzo with a book and bottle of wine, kind of like my dog, Miss Bea, goes to her crate by choice. We did our best to find a rhythm to our days, but I couldn't fully get over the quality that I might disappear at any moment and know one would miss me. 

Rome had a lot of Baroque overhaul in the 17th Century and all those plump little putti and clouds and flowers are a bit much for me. Apparently on the 3rd day, after touring the compensatory ruins, I said to Lee. “I think I like art and architecture better than ruins.” I meant I liked Florence better, more pure Renaissance architecture and art. He laughed and I wanted to cry because I thought he was laughing at me. I don’t like being teased; I never have. I was still such a neophyte at travel and experiencing new cultures, always a little afraid the Europeans could see through the persona to an apron and work boots and bobby pinned hair of the farm girl. 

But, not in Bagni di Lucca. That farm girl would fit right in. After almost 3 weeks in Rome, Assisi and Bologna, we made our way up the mountainside to this provincial town. I had been asked to write a piece about an experience in Italy for a local magazine and this is what I wrote while still there. I love that all these years later I can still feel what it felt like to be there. Thank you

Jeannine Ouellette

for your sessions on visceral writing as I pulled this out as I began to play with your evocative exercises.

View from our rooftop. The neighboring village with bell tower.

Like I said, the farm girl in me was right at home.

Camellia. Blessed Camellia.

Date: 9 April 2011, San Cassiano, Bagni di Lucca, Italy

It is 15:00 and even the chickens seem to be napping. Signs of life? The fly in this bedroom, Lee’s voice. He moves toward the door. “You’d better get down there if you want any. There’s only one bottle,” he says. He looks back and smiles with contentment.

“I’ll be down. I want to feel the breeze one more time before I get up.”

On the rooftop terrace, he sits in the white plastic chair at the white plastic table. There is a large brown bottle of Birra Moretti and one glass — we will share it. I sit at the table in the other white plastic chair and snap the bag of potato chips open. We have a new habit: potato chips and birra in the afternoon under the Italian sun.

 The view is ancient and expansive. A medieval village perches on the mountain over my left shoulder with a tower of bells that ring the hours. Another village behind me with another bell tower. The sound is muffled by the moist, spring mountain air, but I know that people live there and I want to thank them for their bells. There is a bell tower in this village, too, at La Chiesa di San Cassiano, where a church has stood on the site since the year 722. Since we arrived two days ago, the doors have been locked so we don’t know its secrets, but we return daily hoping to find the bronze doors unlocked, willing to welcome us. The pale gray and white marble façade is flat except for arched carvings over the door. These are primitive forms, primordial, totem-like; not the intellectual images of the Renaissance.

The bells mark our day. As do the roosters. They begin crowing around seven in the morning. Occasionally a dog barks. The small, hairless one barks with particular ferocity as we approach on the stone path to buy a cappuccino at the bar or our birra at the only little grocery in the village. He stands guard in the middle of the path, growling, snarling. He comes all the way up to my ankles when I am wearing my clogs. We walk past.

 The sound of a car is rare, but when we spot one, it is usually descending the narrow, cobbled path toward our little villa — in reverse — as there is nowhere to turn around. Occasionally, there is a human voice. As the sun was setting yesterday, we saw a blonde, curly-haired girl about two, held in a woman’s arms. From our terrace, we couldn’t contain the joy of seeing people, let alone a toddler, so we said “Buona sera” when they caught our eyes. The woman, likely a grandmother, took the child’s hand and waved at us, instructing the baby, “Ciao. Dici ‘ciao.’ ” (Ciao, say ‘ciao.’) They turned. She put the little girl on the cobbles, taking her hand, and they climbed the hill together.

Now, a boy, probably ten, darts about. Suddenly sound. Outbursts of enthusiasm bounce between the stone and stucco, a staccato amplification of joy that is pure, boy energy, young, shoes hitting the cobblestones — clicking, clacking, echoing. It lasts only a moment.

A neighbor woman sits on a stone threshold by the front door of the stone house. She is sewing — a dip into the cloth, then the arc of hand into the air as she pulls the thread taut. A silent act. A gray-haired man with his dog comes from out of nowhere, with a bundle of something straw-like under his arms, shuffling past her without a word, the shuffle of his feet up the hill until he disappears behind the house with the chickens. Then, it is silent again.

I am with my beer, my potato chips, my husband and my disbelief. How am I here? It is spring in Italy. The sun is constant from the moment the mountains unpack it, shooting it up to arc over us all the day in the bluest of bluest skies, drawing the Minnesota winter chill from our bones like a clay pack confiscating impurities from the skin. We sit in the sun as we are able to take it in, then retreat to the coolness of the casa, to stucco and tile and shadows to rest, cook, write, think and talk, and love; a rhythm of life that is as virginal as I have known since my childhood on the farm — expansion and release. No one tells me what to do. No phone rings.

In memory, he saved half for me

The houses of this village stair-step up the side of the mountain, all higgledy-piggledy, some in an orderly line, others askew, perhaps for a better view. Sometimes the houses share a wall. More often, each casa is freestanding, but within a whisper of another. Shutters refuse sun, wind and rain, but not the rooster’s crow or the dog’s bark or the neighbor’s love or arguments.

The stone or stucco exteriors are shades of earth — sienna, dirt, salmon, chalk. The terracotta roofs are worn. The wooden windows frame lace and linen curtains. Keeping company with us on the terrace are the lizards, brown-gray like the mortar of the stone houses, the color of the mountain when it is in hibernation. They are agile along the branches growing around the arbor, along the edge of the terrace near the flower boxes of happy tulips or the curling wrought-iron fence that prevents us from tipping into the garden below.

 A cotton cord is tied up high to stakes surrounding the terrace. There is a blue plastic bowl sitting on the wall filled with clothespins. When the dishtowels have soaked up their share, I find myself tucking a corner over the line, reaching for a clothespin and fastening it securely over the linen. I remember it in my body — of my arms reaching up, of looking toward the sky, of securing it properly — a somatic memory from childhood on the farm. There is no sound to clothes drying. Occasionally a swallow swoops closely enough to snatch a meal. Whuuuu. Air moving near us. Swoosh, shh.

“The silence is stark,” I say. It is more than silence. There is no expectation. Nothing I should do. There is the woman in the macelleria to grind the meat and sell us the sugo. She doesn’t care what I am wearing or if I have on makeup. We pass the men working in the woods, trimming the branches of the trees. They don’t care how we look or what we do with our day. The silence is more than silence: It is freedom.

 Two days ago, we traversed this treacherous mountainside after renting a car in Pisa. While Lee drove, I deciphered directions from the homeowner on my laptop like translating hieroglyphics. We missed turns and milestones and were two hours late in our arrival. All I recall is being told to honk at every corner. With exclamation points added for emphasis. A corner to me is where two streets meet at a 90-degree angle, an intersection. There were no intersections. The homeowner meant honk when the road turned sharply around a curve as this is concerning when the road is one car wide on a mountainside. We honked voraciously. We landed here in a 12th-century village that seems to be living in a 1940s time warp. There are poles for electricity and tiny, old Fiats but little else that seems modern.

Infused with the trauma of the mountain driving, I suffered vertigo of consciousness: Where am I? What decade is this? Will I have the courage to drive back down these mountains? Why are roosters the only thing I hear? How many days, really, can I spend here? What if we need a hospital? I needed a straightjacket for my mind.

 I saw Orion and the Big Dipper on our first night as if this were a planetarium. Then I entered a bottomless sleep beneath cotton and wool, tucking into Lee. At seven the next morning, I woke up to the sound of the crowing rooster. We opened the shutters, and I saw the silvery sun illuminating the mountainside, the rosy magnolia alone on the gray branches before its leaves have caught up, the camellia petals dropping to the mossy floor, the chalky blossoms on the apple, and I felt like weeping with release. We made bad coffee, poured it into plastic cups and drank it on the terrace. There was silence and sun and suddenly something possible. Something in potentia. Something that is only pregnant in quiet retreat.

There are no appointments. There is no hairdresser. There is no massage. There is no pedicure, no manicure, no bikini wax. There is no bookkeeper, housekeeper, acupuncturist, business coach, accountant, or osteopath. No banks. No yoga classes, no gyms, no reservations.

There is Lee and me and our imaginations. That’s it. That’s all. And a line that goes back a thousand years. And the bells that tell us the time of day, as if we needed to know.