Un Amico Italiano

by Luca Spaghetti

  Many American friends have told me that the first time they drank limoncello was a genuine revelation. It certainly was for Elizabeth—although I think you haven’t tasted limoncello until you’ve tried homemade limoncello, which is not as sweet, but with a higher proof and more of a kick. Especially if it’s served with ice, homemade limoncello can be a lethal weapon, because the fresh, sweet citrus flavor, apparently so innocent, can cut your legs off at the knees after your second tiny glassful.

  I promised Elizabeth I’d arrange for her to try some as soon as possible, but she seemed doubtful: Homemade limoncello? All it takes is a few organic lemons, from which you remove the zest—the yellow, obviously not the white, which is bitter. You place the zest to steep in an infusion of 190 proof pure alcohol in a sealed container. As with coda alla vaccinara, of course, there is an endless array of recipes for homemade limoncello, each recipe corresponding to another school of thought. Some people add a stick of cinnamon, others claim that the infusion isn’t ready for months, while some—and I am one—think that two weeks is quite sufficient. Then you dissolve sugar in a pot of lukewarm water until you obtain simple syrup; let it cool. Mix the simple syrup with the zest infusion, and the nectar is ready.

  After we’d drained off our richly deserved lemon-flavored trophy, we both felt like taking a walk—what better setting than Trastevere for a relaxed after-dinner stroll? Then it was time for our next mission: gelato. This time it was Elizabeth who suggested we go get some near where she was staying, at the Gelateria San Crispino, near the Trevi Fountain.

  To get there, we hopped on my scooter; I gave Elizabeth my jacket and we set off. I decided to take a slight detour and zoom up to the top of the Gianicolo—the Janiculum, one of my favorite places in Rome. It is a stunning, romantic hill overlooking Trastevere, with expansive views of Rome in all its beauty. As a child, I often came up with my parents to hear the noonday cannon being fired. It was a cannon that shot blanks, and it marked noon so that all the church bells of Rome could be synchronized. Another curious thing about the Gianicolo is that just below it is the Roman prison of Regina Coeli, and it is possible to communicate with the inmates by shouting down from the parapet. Until recently, in fact, the Gianicolo was used as a sort of visiting platform by the prisoners’ families.

  Since it was around ten o’clock when we got up there, we were spared the cannon fire, and since we had no inmates to whom we wished to shout hello, we just climbed back onto my scooter and headed for the Gelateria San Crispino. We got there in a few minutes, and in what seemed like seconds we were eating our gelato.

  It was late, and the house red followed by the limoncello were starting to have their effect, so we decided the time had come to say good night. After all, although I didn’t know what writers did in the morning, I would certainly have to resume my everyday battle with the Italian tax authorities and taxpayers at nine a.m. the next day. No one could spare me that.

  When I got home, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I’d been just a little unfair. All things considered, Elizabeth was a pretty nice young woman, and I had to admit that we’d had an unexpectedly enjoyable evening together. So, after all, I’d be glad to see her again.

  I decided that the next day I’d send her an e-mail to thank her for the walk, the beer, the dinner, the ice cream, and the lovely conversation.

  I fell asleep without thinking of the tasks that faced me the next day, which rarely happens to me. In the office the following morning, I checked my e-mail, and I was surprised to find a message from Elizabeth:

  “Ciao Luca, thanks so much for the lovely evening, the beer, the dinner, the ice cream, and the wonderful conversation. See you soon. Liz.”

  Okay, Elizabeth. From now on for me you’ll be Liz.

  16

  Don’t Be Sad ’Cause Your Sun Is Down

  Autumn was coming to Rome. The days were getting shorter, the temperature was dropping, and the leaves of the plane trees lining the banks of the Tiber were turning golden. Crossing the city’s bridges on my scooter was a spectacular experience. Even when I was in a hurry, I could never resist stopping for a few seconds to admire my river, tumbling away toward the Mediterranean Sea, reflecting trees and church steeples as it went.

  I was riding across one of those bridges when I remembered how Liz had climbed onto the saddle of my scooter without a hint of fear. I also remembered the natural sense of balance she displayed as she perched prettily on the back of my scooter, even if it was her first time. She leaned into the curves as if weightless; she never threatened my sense of balance with sudden jerky motions. She seemed to have been born on a scooter driven by a native Roman! And to think of all the others who have ridden behind me, often leaving me souvenirs such as scratch marks on my hips or bruises on my shoulders from the terrors they’ve experienced as I whiz past lines of cars at a stoplight, just inches from their rearview mirrors . . .

  For us Romans, getting around town on a scooter is a necessary survival skill and an existential condition. The Eternal City’s eternally chaotic traffic, along with its narrow lanes and trolley tracks, has forced us to become accustomed to risking our lives every hundred feet or so, and to drive lawlessly in spite of ourselves.

  Just a few days after we first met, I had a chance to put Liz to the test with daytime traffic, much crazier than the nighttime traffic she’d already experienced.

  I got an e-mail from her asking me to lunch, and I accepted gladly. In contrast with my university days, when every lunch could be a Christmas banquet, both in terms of length and lavishness, I had learned to master my appetites, at least during the week. You can’t eat and drink as much as you’d like and then go back to the office to work your way through intricate tax matters as if you’d eaten a pack of crackers and a glass of water. Trusting that Americans like a light lunch, too, I suggested we grab a quick bite to eat—maybe a pasta and a salad—in the Rione Borgo.

  I felt certain she would like this part of town, just next to St. Peter’s. I could show her the Passetto di Borgo, the elevated passageway that links the Vatican to Castel Sant’Angelo. It was built in the fifteenth century so the pope could flee the Vatican and head straight for his fortress in case of attack. We could also find an osteria that we liked, out of the many that dot the neighborhood. We’d choose a place on one of three streets there called borghi: Borgo Pio, Borgo Angelico, or Borgo Vittorio.

  Liz had rented a little apartment near the Via del Corso for the duration of her time in Rome. Having our second meal together in the Rione Borgo meant it would be a matter of minutes to pick her up and drop her back off. Then I could hurry back to the office.

  She was waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of her building. Once again, we were both early. The sun illuminated her blond hair and fair skin, and her smile—despite a hint of melancholy—made it clear she was happy to see me again.

  It wouldn’t take much more than a few minutes on the scooter in lunchtime traffic to evaluate her courage. I started by zipping nerve-rackingly close to other Vespas and mopeds. Then I tried a fake skid on the slick sampietrino cobblestones. And I ran a couple of reds after some spectacular weaving through traffic. She didn’t turn a hair; she just kept talking and laughing, admiring the beauty of Rome whizzing past on all sides. I couldn’t believe it! The times I’d given Giuliana or my mother that treatment—and they were much more accustomed than Liz to Roman traffic and my personal style of driving—you could hear the screams all the way to the beach at Ostia, and I’d gotten more than one hard punch to the back. But Liz . . . didn’t seem to notice.

  Once again, she had astonished me. At first I thought she was refusing to give me the satisfaction of scaring her. Then I thought she might be reckless enough to think it was fun. In the end, I just hoped she trusted me.

  We found an osteria in Borgo Vittorio, and I sadly informed Liz that today, because I had a business meeting in the afternoon, I wouldn’t be able to indulge as I might have liked, in culinary and enological terms. W
e sat down at a corner table for two, determined to enjoy a brief, light meal.

  Once I had perused the menu, I fell under the spell of the waitress’s musical voice as she recited the unlisted dishes of the day—piatti del giorno. My hunger pushed me over the edge, and I began to fear I wasn’t going to be able to comply with my dietetic resolutions. The more the waitress sang out the names of the various dishes, the more I found her voice strangely sensual and alluring; I was starting to salivate, fantasizing all those delicacies the young woman was describing so lovingly spread out before me on my plate.

  I looked over at Liz, hoping deep down that she was unaware of the trove of culinary delights available to us. Unfortunately, the side-by-side English translation on the menu and the close attention she was paying to the waitress’s recitation undermined my hopes. So long, light Roman lunch!

  The antipasto was a tomato and mozzarella di bufala salad, known in Italian as a caprese, followed by orecchiette con asparagi e gamberetti, orata al forno con patate, and a small green salad to cleanse our palates. The half liter of ice-cold white wine was soon empty, and replaced with a twin half liter. Two hours later, we were still sitting there, wreathed in smiles, contented and, for the second time, pleasantly overfed. You just can’t argue with it: food is one of life’s greatest pleasures. On both our faces was clearly written: Take anything else away, but leave me my food. Food was art, curiosity, sensual gratification. Food was love. And to my enormous surprise, to put the stopper on our little bacchanal, Liz ordered a glass of the liqueur that had seduced her the first time she tasted it. She could no longer finish a meal without it: limoncello. After pouring us two glasses, the waitress very generously left the entire bottle at the center of our table.

  When we climbed back onto my scooter in midafternoon, I was smiling and satisfied like Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, zipping through the streets of Rome with Audrey Hepburn on the back of his Vespa. One crucial difference: I would never have taken Liz to the Bocca della Verità—the ancient Roman “Mouth of Truth”—even if she’d begged me. Not so much to avoid the cluster of tourists always clamoring to challenge the old stone face by placing their hand in its mouth. Really, I have to confess, it’s that I am truly and deeply scared of the Bocca della Verità.

  I’m no liar, but I’m still not putting my hand in there. Maybe it was the shock I felt as a child when my folks took me to see it the first time and told me that the stone mouth would bite off the hand of any liar foolish enough to challenge it. Maybe it’s the long line of tourists pretending their hands have been bitten off. The fact remains: I’m not going near it.

  I’m happy to walk into Santa Maria in Cosmedin, the Byzantine-style church that houses the Bocca della Verità. Once I’ve admired its architecture and said a brief prayer, I wave a cautious hello from a safe distance to the frightening hole in the wall, check to make sure that my hand is still intact, and take my leave.

  Sometimes, though, I stay and watch from a distance. I always secretly hope that one day the Bocca della Verità will really come to life and chomp off the hand of some joker pretending he’s lost his hand.

  Luckily Liz never asked me about it, and I was certainly never going to bring it up. She asked me to drop her off in the Via Giulia. She wanted to walk off lunch and drop by a bookstore in that area.

  So I took her to the end of the Via Giulia, confident that after taking her walk and reading the first page of her book, she would drop off into a classic and deeply satisfying pennichella—or midday nap—something that for us Romans, lazy and sleep-loving as we are, is not merely a pleasure but a virtual metabolic necessity—especially if you’ve guzzled and scarfed the kind of lunch that we just had. And I couldn’t see why Liz, who seemed to be turning into a Roman before my eyes, should be an exception to that rule. As for me, the daily pennichella was nothing more than a tantalizing mirage, and in fact the afternoon looked grim. Still, I went back to my office happily, contented that, for the second time, Liz and I had spent an extremely agreeable couple of hours together.

  I immediately told Giuliana all about our second meal together, in part to prevent any jealousy on her part, but mostly because I was happy to involve her in this new acquaintance, which I still hesitated to call a friendship, but which was clearly moving in that direction.

  The following week, I arranged for Liz to come with me to Anzio, where Giuliana lived, to have dinner together. I went by to pick up Liz, this time in my car, and in the late afternoon we left Rome and headed for the beach.

  In order to introduce Elizabeth properly to the town we were going to see, I told her that, as an American, she should be familiar with Anzio, because during the Second World War there was a famous Allied landing there. I also told her the sad story of Angelita, the five-year-old who was found in tears on the beach by a platoon of soldiers. She had been orphaned, both her parents killed in the fighting, so the soldiers adopted her and considered her a mascot of the landing forces. A few days later, however, just as the child was beginning to recover from the shock of losing both parents, she was killed by a German grenade. Anzio still remembers Angelita, having erected a statue dedicated to her, depicting a little girl surrounded by seagulls in flight.

  I tried to prepare Liz for her meeting with Giuliana. I told her Giuliana was acqua e sapone—soap and water, simple and beautiful. I also explained that lately she was pretty upset, because her parents were going through a divorce.

  For the first time, I saw the smile vanish from Liz’s lips. Perhaps I’d overdone it with the sad stories. But there was something I hadn’t known. Liz took a deep breath and told me that she’d just been through a divorce herself. An ugly divorce—as if there’s any other kind—that had completely shattered her, sapped her in body and soul, and one of the reasons she was in Rome was her desire to forget. To turn the page and go on with her life. I felt an enormous concern for this courageous young woman; I felt very close to her. In her words, I could sense the same grief that Giuliana was experiencing, in a sense, at second hand, which meant I was experiencing it at third hand. And the straightforward, honest, passionate way in which Liz told me about the pain and exhaustion of that period of her life proved to be an enormous help in dealing with the sad events that were affecting Giuliana and me.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t spoken a word to another living soul about what was happening to Giuliana and her parents, out of a sense of privacy and respect for my girlfriend and her mother and father. But somehow, talking to Liz about it seemed natural. She had bared her soul to me; she had spoken with great sincerity about what she’d experienced. By doing that, for the first time, she had cast a light on a situation that had been shrouded in darkness for me. I understood that Giuliana and I weren’t alone. I was grateful to Liz for this moment of closeness, of solidarity, and I finally understood that hint of sadness in her smile.

  I swore to myself that I would do everything within my power to help Liz to recover the happiness and serenity she had lost. I wouldn’t neglect her; I’d do my best to protect her from sadness. Sometimes maybe all she needed was a smile from a friend. No matter what, I’d be there for her. Together the city of Rome and I would send her back home to her family as good as new for Christmas.

  We pulled into Anzio after an hour’s drive. The time required to get to Anzio had flown by, and it was a deeply moving moment for me to see Giuliana and Liz smiling as they met for the first time. An immediate reciprocal friendship took the place of mere curiosity, and my fear that there would be long, embarrassing silences proved to be so completely unfounded that, half an hour later, I was able to get my first word in edgewise only by feigning a medical crisis brought on by lack of food.

  This time, we decided to have a pizza, certain we’d have plenty of other opportunities to sample the excellent seafood available at Anzio. Right now we wanted to have time after dinner to walk around the center of town and the port.

  For a moment, in the pizzeria, I was tempted to order a Roman-style pepperon
i pizza, but it seemed a little harsh to subject my American guest to a fiery onslaught of hot red peppers. Perhaps she really was accustomed to Amtrak pizzas—she certainly found nothing to object to in the honest but pedestrian pizza of Anzio. We informed her otherwise and, intrepid foodie that Liz was, one of the first excursions she planned would be to sample the far superior pizza of Naples.

  The evening went by in a flash. When the time came to say good night to Giuliana and head back to Rome, her expression told me she’d liked everything about Liz, just as I’d hoped she would.

  Liz and I got back in the car and headed back to Rome. While my new friend told me that Giuliana really was “soap and water,” like I’d told her, she asked me what my favorite American word was. Every so often Liz would ask questions like that, out of the blue.

  I had to think for a few minutes before I came up with mine. It was “surrender.” I’ve always found the sound of that word to be something wonderful. The first time I noticed it was as a child, when I listened to “Surrender to Me,” a song by the trio McGuinn, Clark & Hillman. And then I remember stumbling upon it when I watched The Wizard of Oz again. It was movie I’d loved as a child, and I noticed it in the scene in which the Wicked Witch of the West skywrites “Surrender Dorothy” over the Emerald City. I loved that word, and I found there was something musical about it. It was fun, a little tongue twister.

  At that point, I asked Liz what her favorite Italian word might be. I expected her to answer anything from scarpetta to cibo (food), from pasta to pizza, or from amore to musica, or else Luca or even her own name in Italian, Elisabetta. I never would have expected her to say what she did: attraversiamo.