Sheela Clary

I had the good fortune of living in Italy as a college student and young adult, and have just returned from a two-week trip to the Ligurian coast, Florence and Cortona. On this trip, my first with my family, we had many sublime days, some moderately good ones, and one or two I’d rather forget. But when people have asked me how it was, I find I’m tempted to reference the crowds and heat and Covid, rather than summon up the evening I sliced fresh porcini mushrooms in front of the open door that opened onto a Tuscan paradise, or the gorgeous, once-in-a-lifetime night when twenty of my loved ones danced the night away celebrating my 50th birthday.
No, I’m stingy with my praise. I gave Italy points for air-conditioning, open tables, and clear directions. I took points off for sweltering train cars, pressing crowds, and waits of any length. I deducted extra for Italian-specific stressors, such as the N 95-only-mask rule on major train routes that no one informs you of until you’re on board with five minutes until departure and no way to secure an N-95 mask. Ditto for Air BnB an accommodation that was clearly labeled number 8 on the Air BnB app, but sported no such identifier in real life. Redemption could be thereafter be temporarily achieved through a good dinner delivered by an efficient server. But then, by God, there better not be any loud neighbors to mess with our sleep. My judgments were doled out according to a punishing and uncreative rubric. I boiled down ‘good’ to ‘convenient’ and ‘bad’ to ‘inconvenient.’

Of course, things are stressful when it’s brutally hot, and trains and cities are packed, and you’re navigating a foreign country. Of course, a good spaghetti carbonara can turn your day around. But my defensive crouch was something else, something that I didn’t have back in the 1990’s. It felt like a recent development. Eventually, thankfully, I decided to reject it, with my hosts showing me the way to go about that.

At the times on our trip when I forgot to be worried about getting lost, missing the train, or not finding a bathroom, I watched the Italian people. I took inspiration not from their renaissance-era art, but from their fresh takes on life. I took note of their intact and lively civic institutions, their full churches, the clerks and waitstaff who appeared genuinely good-natured, proud in their work, the opposite of burnt out. Even in the picture-perfect Cinque Terre, one of the top ten most heavily visited areas in the country, early morning deliverymen stop to chat with neighbors on their rounds. They prioritize conversation. They greet the young woman who prepares me a cappuccino, stop for a laugh with the mom riding her daughter to school on the back of an old bike. No one’s in a rush to make as much cash as possible. My life is not work, and my work is not life, but my work is important, they all conveyed.

Late on another Italian day, on the south bank of the Arno river in Florence, we hear a seductive guitar. My kids try to open the gate to the park where the sound’s coming from, assuming it’s a busker who makes his living off of the magnanimity of people like us. We’d like to throw in a euro and be entertained for a few minutes. But a sign informs us that we’re trying to intrude instead on a “Circolo Recreativo,” a private leisure club for residents of the city.
The people in there, sitting at tables and on the grass, lives in this neighborhood, San Frediano, which is our neighborhood, too, for about forty hours. The event appears to be an open stage, free for anyone with a talent to share. After the guitarist, we strain our necks to catch a glimpse of children performing acrobatics.

Camucia is the sweet name of the village that sits at the foot of the steep hill that winds up to Cortona. This region is full of American and European expats, thanks in part to Frances Mayes’ blockbuster book Under the Tuscan Sun. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/480479.Under_the_Tuscan_Sun In anticipation of our trip I joined a private Facebook group for Cortona expats, and found a very fortunate membership in need of lots of stuff. Drivers, replacement hot tub covers, a maintenance guy, a pool, friends for a book club, Italian lessons, someone to accompany dogs on a private jet. Scrolling through these endless requests I imagined, before arriving here, that this valley must be chockful of pampered foreigners and a local populace scrambling to satisfy their needs.

But on my first morning I land at L’Etrusco, an easy-to-miss corner bar just past a roundabout. Case upon case of full of colorful breakfast delicacies delight my eyes. It’s breakfast heaven. The kind of place that should be selling out by 8:30. But there is no line. There are only two ladies at the bar, a stout Italian woman dressed in a frumpy skirt and blouse, and another older Italian woman in a slim, elegant maxi dress. As they wait for the barman to prepare their coffees (ristretto for the older woman, macchiato for the younger) they reminisce about a dinner they recently shared, a community event of some kind, or maybe a big family birthday party. The elegant one treats her friend— neighbor? relative? — to the coffee, plus a crème-filled croissant she takes to go. Marco the bespectacled barista never stops moving, and conveys an air of unhurried seriousness. He removes the croissant delicately, with tongs, and slides it gently into an open bag.  

“Grazie, Mirella, troppo gentile! Grazie Marco!”
I am next, and select an assortment of six pastries to take home to the kids. I suggest he stuff them into a bag, too.
“No, no! Un sacchetto non va.”
(A bag won’t do.) Instead, he takes out a golden platter, and stacks the pastries— brioche a marmellata, brioche semplice, bombolone, cannolo di pistachio, two pain au chocolat — carefully in two rows. He covers them in red paper, which he folds tightly, and tapes securely. He hands this gift to me over the bar, and I am honored to be its recipient. His care speaks to me of respect for one’s work, and the confidence of knowing that this is a shared, not individual, value.

In the small-town Italy I observed, workers are not workhorses. In Marco’s world, as in his father’s and grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s worlds, purveyors and consumers alike placed great value on the quality of their wares and worth of their labor. A long history is a powerful binding mechanism. The tourists there, no matter their numbers, do not set the tone, and the residents of tourist-centric towns are not marginalized, demoralized, or bitter. Townspeople know that the town is their town. The businesses that serve visitors serve them also. No one is priced out. Breakfast for six to go from L’Etrusco, plus two cappuccinos, and a huge bottle of water, cost just under $17.00.

Here at home the past few years have been marked by breakages, cleavages, and privations. Italy had its own challenges, of course, not least of which was a megalomaniacal dictator in charge for quite a few years, and a starring role in the most fearful early days of the Covid pandemic. But Cortona is surrounded by stone walls interrupted with a stone entranceway that the Etruscans put in place three hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It stands there still. I walked through it. There is a common history, common dialect, common cuisine, common traditions. The people honor the same saint, they prepare the same foods, bake the same unsalted bread. Italians know what is a good day because they’ve been practicing how to create one for millenia, and they are generous in sharing the ingredients with newcomers, as far as I could see.

As I walked along the Arno toward the Ponte Vecchio like a good little tourist, I fantasized about living as an expat in Italy again someday. I could gain membership to the circolo recreativo, greet Marco every morning as he made my cappuccino, create the tradition of swimming in the crystal clear Ligurian sea every summer.
But I also held in mind the bittersweet truth that I do not belong there. I belong here, for better or worse, in this beautiful, blessed and broken New England valley, inhabited by people with histories not at all in common. It’s a new decision each morning to decide what will make a good day. I could do worse than remember the old man with the red shopping bag in each hand, stopping traffic to catch up with his neighbor.

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