My Italian Adventures

by Lucy de Burgh

  Luisa told me a few days later in confidence that the ‘Signore’ himself had thrown the clock out of the kitchen window, but I always felt that she was the guilty party, because at the time she had a grievance; she desperately wanted to get home to visit her sister in Sardinia and was totally unable to afford the fare from her very small wages. Whether or not she ever got back to Sardinia I never heard, but in 1947 she was still in Naples and I sent her some part-worn civilian clothes, for which she wrote and thanked me most gratefully. While we were living in the house we occasionally gave her odds and ends, but as my wardrobe consisted almost entirely of uniform there was little enough to give. Luisa had, however, apparently summed up what was available, for shortly before the end of July, when the section was about to close down and Pat and I were due for a new posting, she asked me if she might have my scarlet zipper writing-case. ‘To go with my red dress, when I go out on my day off,’ she explained. ‘But Luisa,’ I expostulated, most unwilling to part with the case, which held all my correspondence, ‘it doesn’t match your dress, they clash.’ ‘Oh no, Signorina, they go very well together, I should so love that bag, I have nothing, and you know I can’t afford one myself.’ ‘Very well, Luisa, I will think it over,’ I said a trifle coldly, secretly cursing the day that made it possible for her to possess what must be a pretty detailed mental inventory of all my goods and chattels. In the end, I let her have it. After all, it was true that she could not afford a bag herself, and if she liked the look of my writing-case, well, she had taken good care of us and it would be a little parting gift. So I gave it to her and she was ecstatically grateful and delighted. She was such an excitable little person, one of the household in every way, not just a mere servant, but friend, confidante and housekeeper; and in the manner of domestics to the eighteenth-century English gentry or the men and maids who appear in the plays of Molière and others, she shared the joys and sorrows, ups and downs, of those she worked for in a completely personal and natural manner. She really was one of the family, and when the day came for Pat and me to depart, she helped us with our luggage, and wept when we eventually went off, embracing us as we thanked her for all she had done for us. We bade the Signora a friendly enough farewell also and kissed the three small children, who had become ‘pals’ by this time.

  I was by now so used to this beautiful villa, to the sound of the sea, and to the homely atmosphere I had breathed in for three months, that it was with a real wrench that I left Posillipo and its orange and lemon trees. But the work had tailed off, much of the clearing up had been done, and Colonel Petrie was going home very shortly. Most of the Other Ranks had been posted and some released, and the other sections in Villa Paulina were also shortly due to close. Pat was going back to the UK, and from there would be posted to Paris. I was returning to Rome as PA to my ex-CO’s successor, in the same job as before. But meanwhile, neither Pat nor I had had any leave, or even days off, for many months. Since leaving England more than a year previously, I had had no more than a day’s leave here and there, and had worked on Sundays, and so we had been granted about twelve days and were travelling up north together. We were like schoolgirls in our excited anticipation, and hoped to see Florence and Venice and even go on to our unit in Austria, if transport was going that way.

  Everyone was either departing, or preparing for departure at that time. We had already said goodbye to quite a number of ORs, who had gone their various ways, and there was the slightly nostalgic air of mutual farewells about the place. The Favinis were quite sorry that we were all leaving, at least the young people were. No doubt Signor Favini was already making plans for the reopening and reorganisation of his hotel, and would not be sorry to see the back of the billetees. Captain Trent was very friendly with his dark-haired, rather voluptuous daughters, Margherita and Liliana, and it was rumoured that Margherita had set her cap in his direction, having previously been engaged to an American and then broken it off. Anyway, shortly before Pat and I were due to leave, Liliana stopped me in the lane one day, handed me an autograph book and asked me to put something in it. On looking through it afterwards I saw that it contained poems, sketches and some merely conventional greetings. Obviously my contribution must figure in the last group, and I just wrote a few words of Italian about the beauty of Naples and my regret at leaving it, wishing the family all the best. I hoped my grammar was not too appalling. Liliana had asked me to pass the album on to Pat and then to Hugh Trent. A day or so later, when I went into the latter’s office on business, he said, ‘What do you make of this? Will you translate it for me?’ It was a letter from Margherita, showing evident regret at his imminent departure, and scarcely disguising that she was enamoured of him. I translated it and he asked me to write a reply for him. That was just the chance I had been waiting for, and I drafted forthwith a very flowery reply, in my best Italian, not quite compromising, but very nearly, and calculated to give the recipient at least a nice flutter. It ended affectionately, but not too much so. I took it down to Hugh and asked him to read it. He made it out as far as possible and then asked me if I was ‘letting him in for anything’. ‘Not at all,’ I replied, ‘That is just what she expects of you after the attention you have been paying her on the beach in the afternoons.’ After a lot of discussion, I persuaded him that my reply would do very well and then he asked me to write something in the autograph book for him, which duty I also undertook most willingly, not being able to resist the temptation of trying to give the impression that he was the adoring and devoted swain, while taking care not to involve him too deeply. After all, if he would flirt with the local girls, and then ask an English girl to carry on his romantic correspondence for him, what could he expect? Anyway, I believe my literature was quite a success. What seemed to me ‘pretty hot stuff’ was probably like lukewarm water to Margherita and Liliana, accustomed to the vivid language and hot temperaments of the southerners, and so Hugh escaped any entanglement – at least, when I saw him later in Rome, he appeared to be fancy-free and as ready for any new adventure as ever. But sometimes I wondered what happened to Margherita and Liliana after the departure of the troops. They had dallied with the foreign soldiers, but had not found husbands among them. Could they find husbands among their own men? For to marry was indisputably the essential plank of their existence. They had no career, and marry they must. Perhaps their father went on to arrange matches for them, with handsome dowries, for they were at least comfortably off, or perhaps they did marry an ‘ally’ after all. One day I shall go back and find out, and probably see swarms of little berry-coloured boys and girls on the beach with Margherita and Liliana and their girl-cousins, who by that time will have exchanged their glamorous figures for the more comfortable ones of motherhood and maturity – but I am sure their eyes and smiles will be as bright and friendly as ever, and that they will know all the romantic gossip of Posillipo.

  And so one hot morning, at the very end of July, Pat and I squeezed into a car with most of our baggage, a major called Alfred, who was going up to Florence on a posting, and a pet kitten I had just rescued from the mess, fearing it would starve. Having said final goodbyes all round, we drove for the last time up the winding dusty drive, waving goodbye as we went to various local acquaintances. We were soon on the road for Caserta, leaving behind us ‘La Bella Napoli’, her crowded streets, her oranges and lemons, her nostalgic music, her bay and the Villa Paulina. The famous song ‘Tornerai’ (‘Je t’attendrai’), which was then so much in vogue, came to mind. I vowed to return to Naples – like so many places in Italy, it had cast its spell over me.

  Soon after passing through Caserta, the kitten misbehaved very badly in the car. I had fortunately taken the precaution of putting it on an Army blanket, but we had to stop the car and take it for a walk on the sward bordering the highway, while streams of military traffic poured by in both directions.

  Alfred knew Italy fairly well and insisted that we stop in Formia and have an Italian lunch, with spaghetti, which he promised us we would gr
eatly enjoy. So we drew up at a tiny little restaurant within a stone’s throw of the bluest sea I ever saw, viewed through a mass of devastated pill-boxes, tangled barbed wire and other mangled remains of the coastal defences. Contrasted against the white concrete of the fortifications, the sea looked bluer than ever. We stepped in through a bead curtain, into an almost pitch-dark interior, but brightened by clean white tablecloths, and after the glare outside it took a few moments before our eyes became accustomed to the dim light. We sat down and Alfred took charge, and before long we had before us the largest, steamiest plates of oily tomato spaghetti, with what seemed the longest and slipperiest threads of pasta I’d ever seen. It tasted excellent, but the helping was far too large. Pat always had a dainty appetite and she made no headway at all. Alfred undertook to teach us how to eat it correctly, as he could see at a glance that we had not yet really mastered the technique. I did manage with a gigantic effort to stow away about two-thirds of the massive helping, but Alfred did not seem to have the slightest difficulty in demolishing all of his in record time. A pudding followed, quite pleasant, and to wash all this down we had red wine. Needless to say, I slept for most of the remainder of the journey with the comfortable consciousness that at least with Italian food one felt really satisfied. It was clear that one meal a day would suffice, if that meal was pasta, but I felt that it would be better to wait before embarking on any more Italian lunches in the midday heat until I was more used to the diet and had suitably fasted in advance. Pat stayed at the YW that night; Alfred and I stayed at the unit, where I dumped my luggage. We picked Pat up the following morning at 8.30 a.m. on our way up north.

  19

  A Journey of Discovery

  C rossing the Tiber at the ancient Ponte Milvio, we branched right, up Route 3 for Florence, via Perugia. Our first stop was Assisi, where we left the main road to have a look at the town of St Francis. The Basilica is to me one of the wonders of the world. It consists of three churches, one above the other. The upper one is the largest and contains the magnificent Giotto mural paintings of the life of the Saint. The middle one is really the crypt and is covered in coloured frescoes, with brilliantly painted borders and patterns to each Gothic arch. One might be stepping between the pages of an illuminated manuscript of the fifteenth century.

  Inside the crypt it was rather dark, but bands of sunlight shot shafts through the bright, stained-glass windows and lit up the rich reds, browns and yellows of the frescoed walls and ceiling. Then we descended a narrow, rough-hewn stone stairway and came to the tiny shrine containing the tomb of the Saint. Only the tomb itself was lit by a pinkish lamp. Everyone moved softly, almost on tiptoe, and a reverent hush pervaded the vault.

  As we came up from the tomb and sallied forth into the quadrangle outside, the brilliance of the sun almost blinded us for a moment as it reflected dazzlingly from the blazing white stone of the church and the surrounding cloisters, and from the dry sandy floor of the courtyard. We decided that it was absolutely essential to find somewhere in the cool to eat our sandwiches and to ‘tidy up’, and so we began the search, driving slowly through narrow, deserted, shuttered streets and across an ancient square, an antiquated stone fountain at its centre, and back again. It was about two o’clock and there was not even a dog to be seen. The place seemed almost dead.

  Finally, however, we came out on to a big open piazza, where a large church confronted us, Santa Chiara, we later discovered, and to our right lay a terrace from which a glorious panorama stretched for many miles. Assisi is at the end of a ridge, so that the view, right across the plain of Umbria, is unsurpassed. It must have been almost impregnable in the Middle Ages, when it carried on its feuds with neighbouring towns, Perugia and Arezzo, in particular. Its rock is visible from afar, and I later heard that the British prisoners of war, interned before the Italian armistice at Poppi, about 50 miles away as the crow flies, could see the rock of St Francis gleaming golden in the sunset every evening, almost like the burning bush seen by Moses.

  After we had feasted our eyes on this panorama for a few moments, we turned our thoughts to more material matters and managed to find a ristorante that appeared to have no customers but whose doors were slightly ajar. We went in through a room with cloth-less tables and chairs reversed on top of each other and were ushered up a few steps to emerge round the corner into the kitchen. Here the family were collected and someone was playing a piano accordion. We explained our needs and were made very welcome. They invited us to sit at the big kitchen table and eat our sandwiches there and then, and the accordion player made our meal a very cheerful affair.

  Alfred, with his infectious gaiety and his easy flow of Italian, soon established very cordial relations; we were offered a glass of wine and the health of the Allies was drunk. We must have stayed there about an hour and we thoroughly enjoyed the intermezzo. But time was passing, so very regretfully we left the slumbering little town with its mediaeval archways, winding spiral steps and prevailing peacefulness, and set off once more for Florence, rapidly descending to the plain and leaving the olive groves for flat fields and pastures. Before long, we were rumbling through the almost deserted streets of Perugia, like Assisi a cluster of ancient grey houses and one or two towering churches on an escarpment. The only activity seemed to be that of Allied transport. We stopped for a cup of tea and a bun in a part of the town that seemed fairly busy, as far as the Army was concerned.

  As we left Perugia and started another descent, we saw the gleaming water of Lake Trasimeno sparkling in the sun – it lay like a great silver shield with a small green island at its centre. We stopped for a few moments near a bower of vines and managed to purchase some grapes from a farmer’s wife who was looking out from her front door on the other side of the road. Her children helped to cut the bunches down and were rewarded with the customary gift of caramelle.

  We were soon on our way again, beginning to feel the heat a little, for it was very sticky that day. As the afternoon wore on it seemed to grow hotter, and Pat and I became very tired. The hot dust choked us and made our eyes smart. I bathed my face and hands frequently with some astringent lotion but even the soothing effect thus achieved did not last long. It must have been about six o’clock when we rounded the bend and crossed the Arno at Pontassieve, where a great many buildings were badly damaged and the bridge was a mass of rubbled arches. We crossed over a temporary bridge, leaving behind us the narrow road we had been following along the valley, with its rows and rows of small, gently waving poplars, and now we were driving into the evening sun. The sky was crimson with the sunset glow, and as we went on it turned pink like the icing on a cake, centring on a great golden ball, which gradually sank behind the trees. Then the pink faded to mauve and finally merged into the growing blue behind us – in the gamut of colour the evening star shone brightly overhead, but the valley itself was already in twilight and night soon fell. It was dark when we entered the city, but by that time I was too tired to care.

  In spite of my exhaustion I was glad to see Tiny in Florence, and he took all three of us to our section, on the south bank of the Arno. But Pat and I had ‘had it’, as the slang goes, for that evening and the moment we got to our hotel I began to feel faint. We asked for tea and a kindly head waiter did his best to persuade me that it was far better to drink coffee if feeling faint. He had no tea, but would bring me coffee, he said, ‘Lei verrà, Signorina, se ho ragione. Le farà tanto bene.’ He was as good as his word and his promise worked. Next day I felt as fit as a fiddle and spent it sightseeing with Alfred. We visited the magnificent Duomo and the Battistero, with their gleaming black-and-white marble exteriors, so characteristic of Tuscan churches and monuments. Inside the cathedral it seemed strikingly and agreeably quiet and dignified after the more crowded and ornate Roman churches. We were lucky in our guide, a fervent Florentine, and when he discovered that we both understood Italian, expressed himself loudly and volubly on art, politics and the history of his city. Probably no burghers anywhere are prouder
of their city, the home of many great artists and distinguished men in all walks of life, than are the Florentines. Our guide assured us in eloquent terms that the Fascist era had been dead from the artistic point of view, as the Fascists had crushed all individualism and allowed no artist to learn his craft or develop his talent and fulfil his inspiration as he thought fit. We hoped he was inferring that with the arrival of the Allies a golden age for art had dawned, but at least he did not tell us that the Allied armies were vandals worse than either Nazis or Fascists, as he might have done. Several passers-by lingered to listen in, and I glanced a trifle apprehensively over my shoulder, half expecting a carabiniere to appear and take our man into custody for making a political speech in church, but no one hindered him and from the looks on the faces of those around us, I imagine they heartily endorsed everything he was saying.

  Encouraged by our enthusiastic mentor, we climbed the tower of the Duomo to examine the panorama of the city and surrounding country. This was more than splendid – and revealed Florence to be unique, with her red roofs clustering cosily round the towers of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Bargello (old prison), the Church of Santa Croce and other prominent landmarks, all encircled by a belt of green, sloping up gently on either side of the river, on the north past the silver olive groves up to the foothills of the Apennines. Everywhere there was greenery, from the grey-green of the olives to the dark green of yews and cypresses. One could gaze for hours at the soft refreshing colouring, so different from the more brilliant, but harsher tints of the south. And then the ‘silver Arno’, as it has often so aptly been called, was visible, winding in and out, and part of the landscape as far as the eye could see. The ugly destruction wrought by the retreating Germans was scarcely noticeable when the whole city was viewed in perspective. To all intents and purposes, Florence was unspoilt. There and then, I conceived an affection for this city, which with the passage of time has increased and deepened. There must be something about the quiet streets, verdant gardens and friendly, well-mannered inhabitants that appeals to the British, for Florence had a very large British colony before the war. Even then, many of them were still in the city, some having played a prominent part in anti-Nazi activities, sheltering escaped prisoners and passing on valuable information to Allied intelligence.