‘It’s okay! He’s singing “O Sole Mio”,’ the young lady said in an American accent. ‘It actually means “my sun”. It’s a happy song. Be happy!’
Life really was all about perception.
Somewhat embarrassed, I thanked her for the clarification—I should have at least bought myself an Italian phrase book by now—and kept walking till I saw the exotic spectacle of the upper reaches of the cathedral of sant’Antonio di Padova rise above the regulation red rooftops and shuttered three-storey flat façades that characterise Padua. The church is Byzantine-inspired perfection with its blue domes and towers and a brilliant gold angel at the top.
Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. ‘Pray to Saint Anthony’ had been a fallback position in my family for as long as I could remember, for anything from lost keys to lost loves, with mixed results. I decided to visit him and put in a prayer for my romantic heart. I thought maybe I’d lost it, or at least the essence of it, along the way somewhere. I was a great lover of Saint Francis of Assisi and so was Saint Anthony. They were both exponents of keeping things simple, unlike Lord Byron. And unlike me. Perhaps it was time for me to start following their example.
It could get crowded inside the church, but it was a Monday when I visited so there was hardly anyone there. Most monuments are closed on Mondays in Italy, so day-trippers stay away, making it a great time to see the ones that aren’t closed. I marched straight up to Saint Anthony’s side. It was odd to be so suddenly and easily next to the bloke whose schtick had been a family punch line my entire life. It turned out that in Padua Saint Anthony was also known as the Saint of Miracles. He’d pulled off innumerable miracles of all kinds across the years. This has turned him into one very popular saint. Either side of his sarcophagus there were boards full of photos and letters, thanking him for various miracles performed. My eyes fell on one picture, a standout for me amidst the snaps of babies, and of young, now thriving men pinned to the photos of the horrifically wrecked cars they survived thanks to the workings of the saint—or so their families evidently believed. The photo that caught my eye was of the wedding of two people in their forties looking very happy indeed. It was a casual, modern wedding; she in a simple dress, he in light pants and open shirt. They were healthy and handsome. Maybe I subconsciously went looking for it. Whatever the machinations, it was that photo which got my attention over all those other assorted miracles.
And then I sat down next to Saint Anthony to say a prayer of my own, so succinct it surprised me. No mucking around, it came out without much thought, clear and concise.
Dear Saint Anthony, I state here and now that I do want a husband or husband equivalent, a partner-type person. A loving partner whom I adore and who adores me and who will love, support and inspire me and I him. And who will be my companion on the journey of life from here on in. Who will respect and nurture me, care for me and I the same for him. May we be passionate about each other but not possessive, jealous or argumentative. May we weather storms, bask in sunlight and be lovingly, happily committed to each other for the rest of our lives. May we have fun and may we make each other laugh. And may we fancy each other like mad.
I did want that person in my life. I absolutely did.
I left the church, turned a corner and was confronted by some graffiti which read, ‘Nice shoes, wanna fuck?’ Now, I am one to look for signs. I did then hope that this was not Saint Anthony’s message back to me, perhaps saying that my prayer was a stretch and the best I could hope for was superficial sex based on choice of footwear and such.
I found it hilarious: a haiku encapsulation of Italy’s shoe fetish, which I had noticed was more than a hypothetical stereotype. It was just ironic that the poignant graffiti should be in Padua, a city of students for whom Converse sneakers were the shoe. They were in the minority in these parts though. As I had noticed elsewhere in the north of Italy, here continued an insistence on fabulous footwear. Of particular head-turning value were ballet flats that combined chic with practicality.
I sat down to an insalata di tonno, or tuna salad, on a fresh white tablecloth beneath a cool awning opposite the blushed bricks and Byzantine grace of La Basilica di sant’Antonio. Children who looked like children chased pigeons in the square in front of the church. The boys hadn’t been Beckhamed to fashionable absurdity. The little girls were in simple bright sun frocks, no tweeniness about them. Italian children still had an innocence to them that was sometimes missing in other places.
A woman ‘of a certain age’ (as someone no doubt had noted of me) sat down at the same café in which I lunched. She had a panino and a glass of wine and the way she was dressed suggested to me that she was trying a bit too hard. It was all a bit Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun. Why did she bother me so acutely? Probably the mirror. It reminded me of that unproductive state in which I had spent tracts of my life. If I do this, if I go here, if I wear that, if I cross my legs in this manner, if I create a world in my head and in my physical appearance in which I am not so, so lonely, then I can keep from falling down that black hole of utter, utter despair.
Was I that person still? I didn’t think so. The evidence was not in what I did, where I went, what I wore or what I said. It was in the fact that I was no longer afraid of black holes. When they rose up along the pathway, rather than being afraid to fall down them, I knew to hold God’s hand and go down them. Going down those holes, holding God’s hand and knowing there was light at the other end, that was to go towards clarity itself.
After lunch I took a seat in the Padua botanic gardens, supposedly the oldest in the world. They display the same dichotomy as so many old Italian gardens: order around classical sculptures, meandering gravel paths and mathematically perfect garden beds, all juxtaposed against a created woodland. It was sunny and warm and a nice place to ponder. I heard a thrum from the woodland treetops, like the purring of a cat in small bursts. A short, vital woman of about sixty, dressed in a contemporary no-nonsense style that nonetheless showed personality and flair, followed the noise with binoculars.
‘Parla inglese?’ I asked.
‘Si,’ she said.
‘What is that bird?’
‘It’s a woodpecker,’ she replied in a well-to-do English accent. We chatted about the types of woodpecker in England and the fact that we didn’t have them in Australia.
‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that they have unique skulls which prevent them from getting brain damage? When they first designed bike helmets, they studied woodpeckers’ heads.’
I did not know. No, I did not.
‘They don’t do bird watching in Italy, you know,’ she said, amused at herself. ‘They see the binoculars and they find it very funny. There’s not even a term for bird watching in Italian.’
Yet here she was, in Italy, by herself, embracing her passion.
The palpable difference between the woman in the café and the birdwatcher was immense. I hoped I was moving closer to the birdwatcher’s mien.
Mornings in Padua are idyllic. There is a buzz at Piazza delle Erbe, overlooked by the magnificently colonnaded medieval Palazzo della Ragione with its arcades of providores underneath selling cheeses and meats and crusty breads. Red cherries and strawberries and fresh white asparagus and those wonderful corrugated tomatoes from Sicily were on sale at the stalls in the square. At the cafés surrounding Piazza dei Frutti to the back of the palazzo, rosy-cheeked bambini ate little snacks of gelato from cups while their mammas rested a while with a coffee after the market.
Padua is also home to an ancient university where Galileo taught, hence all the students. Part of it comprises the Conservatorio Statale di Musica ‘Cesare Pollini’, where some outrageously talented person was playing piano when I wandered by later that day. It made it impossible for me to walk any further and, as luck would have it, there was a café right there, so I sat down.
I didn’t know what they were playing. It had that swirling emotional landscape of Shostakovich. Everyone else at the café w
as chatting. The man inside had his radio on. I guessed he heard it every day. But I was in raptures.
An elderly lady, thin, fine boned, her straight, thick, once-black, now steely hair cut into a long fringe at the front and hanging down her back in a pony tail, smiled at me as she approached on foot, the crags of her face drawing into a map of the joy she had obviously collected in her life.
‘You are enjoying,’ she said and nodded her approval.
‘Si,’ I said, ‘bellissima.’ Why I insisted on speaking a snippet of Italian to Italians, I don’t know, because all it did was create an awkward moment. She began showering me with lilting phrases of pure Italian. And I had to apologise for the deception. I did not speak her language, mi dispiace.
‘Ah,’ she said, and laughed melodically, before sitting down at my table. ‘So, what are you doing here in Padova?’
I told her I’d just come from the Scrovegni Chapel, where one of the most important pieces of art in the world, Giotto’s astonishing Biblical cycle—widely recognised as kicking off the three-dimensionality of Renaissance art—adorns the walls and roof. It is a series of intricate frames, each fresco depicting a story from the New Testament.
‘I was so moved by the picture of Jesus washing the Apostles’ feet,’ I said. ‘But not the main part of the image. I liked how Giotto captured this sense of deep humility in the old Apostle undoing his sandal off to the side, getting ready to accept the gesture himself.’
‘I like that too,’ she said, in a congratulatory tone.
‘The look on his face is completely stripped of guile but full of the magnitude of the moment,’ I said.
‘Accepting the gifts from God, this is what this picture is a message of.’
‘Ha, absolutely,’ I said. ‘We have such resistance to accepting gifts from God, don’t we? Believing that they are gifts and not things that we’ve hard-earned through manipulation, anticipation, bullet-dodging, compromising and settling.’
‘Oh, signora.’ She shook her head at me. ‘In Italy, our bambini are taught that they themselves are God’s gifts to us and so, like Christmas, there will be an exchange. Gifts will be given to them. From us, from God.’
‘I had to work hard for affection, for any kind of attention,’ I said, surprising myself. It is amazing what comes out of your mouth to complete strangers when travelling. ‘Or at least, I felt I had. Don’t misunderstand me. My mother was a great woman. But when you are the youngest of a large family with much drama going on around you, and your mother, working her hardest to keep things afloat by herself, relies on your older siblings to help raise the babies, well, you know, all the adult rationale in the world is not going to fix the fact that babies see the world two ways. Either connected to Mum, or not. We are strange creatures, human beings. So susceptible. I guess I did not, never felt, I was a gift.’
‘Are you married?’
God, that question. ‘No.’ There. I said it.
‘Has a man ever treated you as his gift?’
I felt winded. ‘I honestly do not think so.’
‘So you thought they were the gift, and you the receiver of small mercies. My dear, you must think of yourself as this gift. You must think of Jesus washing your feet. Whenever you have thoughts of not being this gift, think of that picture.’
You know those moments when the show reel of an aspect of your life starts to run? The projector suddenly whirrs like someone’s kicked it into action? This was one of those.
My mother probably did not pick me up a lot. Not out of negligence, she didn’t have much time to. That didn’t make her a bad woman. It made her someone who had six people—seven, including herself—to keep sheltered, clothed and fed. Acknowledging that as a probability, I saw the strange conga line of men, all unavailable in one way or another, that I’d attracted; saw them so clearly. And myself so clearly. I had this intensity, this clinginess, this terrible fear of loss, and a burning need for physical closeness with a lot of them. One of these men, a jazz musician who, when all is said and done, was always honest with me, actually once said, ‘You poor affection-starved girl’ during one of these episodes of clinginess. He didn’t say it to put me down; in fact, he said it sympathetically. But it was a succinctness that was way too much for me at the time. It frightened and belittled me. Bless him. He was bang on the money. I wish I’d had the maturity or insight then to consider that. Instead, I retreated from his friendship embarrassed, and moved on to some more unconscious, unattainable object of adoration.
Now, not much less than twenty years later, here was this elegant Italian lady and the painting of Giotto illuminating the lesson for me. Maybe Saint Anthony heard that prayer of mine, after all. Maybe that bella donna in a sidewalk café in Padua was another step in my miracle of the heart.
9
Rome
Oh Rome! My country! City of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee …
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV
Rome made a tourist of even Lord Byron, the man who had his issues with tourists. He hilariously but cruelly described English vacationers as ‘a parcel of staring boobies, who go about gaping and wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent’. And there he was, staying amongst them, in the English tourist enclave of Piazza di Spagna.
Lord Byron rode his horse across Rome’s vast length and breadth, only dismounting for ‘poring over churches and antiquities’. As he explored, he acutely sensed the layers in the city, seen and unseen, tangible and intangible. Those outings inspired much of the lauded fourth canto of Childe Harold. And it caused him to get personal about place. Though only in the Italian capital for three weeks, by the time he left he felt: ‘There must be a sense or two more than we have as mortals, which I suppose the Devil has (or t’other) for where there is much to be grasped we are always at a loss and yet feel we ought to have a higher, more extended comprehension,’ or so he told his publisher, John Murray.
There are few places in the world where history and its ghosts can affect an individual as much as Rome. The sheer volume of art and archeology, the layering of ages, at least to the imaginative, are irresistible provocateurs. And if you have ghosts of your own to deal with, they may well come up to meet you in Rome, if you are open to them.
I could see the Vatican from my bed, without even straining. Four fluffy white pillows, in a bed that could fit three people without touching, propped me up. The sheets were ironed and fine and I slid my legs this way and that relishing their silky smooth coolness. Through the double doors a sinistre—that’s to the left, grazie—there was the dome of Saint Peter’s glowing a gloomy blue, a bright amber crown at the higher, narrower circumference. I’d been in some corker hotel rooms, but this suite on the eighth floor of the InterContinental de la Ville took the title. It was costing me more per night than practically my entire budget for several weeks in other places, despite the company who ran the hotel giving me a couple of nights gratis because I was writing travel stories about it. And they’d given me a crazy upgrade. I went dizzy thinking about the full cost of what I was privy to. It would be worth it, though, if you could afford it. One day, I said to myself. One day …
The space that had been assigned to me could inspire some terrific poesy—as Lord Byron called poetry—if you were so inclined. (Which I was not.) It had a view of the whole city from a large private terrace. I was on the top floor, above Piazza di Spagna, and so at one of the highest points in the city. On the other side of the building, because my suite extended that far, I could sit on the loo and look out an open double window across the Villa Borghese.
It wasn’t the InterContinental’s fabulousness alone, though, that was making me feel giddy with delight. Out of the blue, like a burst of sunshine through cloud, I believed in my right to be there. The last three times I had been to Rome, as much as I had loved it, I had felt like a ghost, wafting unseen from one spot to the next, trying to stick to something, make some impression, but never doing so. Timid, and
unworthy, I hoped to not offend, not get in the way, not make a fuss, exactly as I had as a kid when all was chaos around me.
But on my first night in that glorious city on this trip, I was back in my splendiferous room having been out for dinner when suddenly I had the profound realisation of who I was and my own realness. My realness. It was the strangest feeling, like a potent painkiller wearing off. Bang! An invisible barrier dropped away and I saw that I was part of the history of the city. I felt connected. I saw that I had left my footprints on it. They might not name a café after me as they had after Lord Byron, or put up a monument to me, but I was part of this city. I could walk its streets and believe in my right to be there.
This day I began to believe in my right to my life. To my dreams coming true. To my happiness. Amazing what crisp white linen and a great view can do. But of course, there was much more afoot than that.
I had a salami and mozzarella toasted focaccia for breakfast the next morning, my first on this trip to Rome. The bread, closer to Turkish than focaccia, was as oily as the filling. That sandwich was delicious. I was in a bar on busy Via Tritone, it was only three euro and, as I was a creature of habit, I figured a week’s worth of salami panino breakfasts wasn’t going to hurt me, especially at that price.
The cashier knew everyone on the street. She would stand outside and smoke and wave with that Roman ‘I don’t give a shit’ attitude. She talked on the phone constantly. How often could a cashier in a tiny café really need to talk on the phone? Maybe she was an SP bookie.
Later that day I took public transport out to the Appian Way, where Lord Byron went into a fit of poesy about the Tombe de Caecilia Metella. Even today, it was a rapturous sight; for me, quite unexpectedly so. I had not been moved by ancient Rome. The Pantheon totally floated my boat, the way it sat amidst mayhem, a squat bastion of cool endurance with a McDonald’s opposite and a million eyes on it. But the Colosseum, which Byron liked—what boy who had seen it didn’t?—had in the past totally creeped me out. Moreover, the Forum and the Aventine had left me unmoved. Cold.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 9