On the outskirts of Susa, the Dutch camper turns at a sign indicating a road leading to a campsite. I hope, for his sake, that the site is somewhat bucolic. Far too many European campgrounds resemble Walmart parking lots. My destination, the Hotel Stati Uniti, sits opposite the train station—no matter what I do this afternoon, I seem unable to shake trains.
It is often said that the Italians are the French in a good mood. Susa seems to confirm this. There is a definite feeling of theatricality in the air as I stroll its old streets. Young men stop to window-shop as much as the young women do. The whole town seems to be sitting outside. Colorful placemats, on sale at a news kiosk, bear likenesses of Elvis Presley and Pope Francis. Nuns walk by, followed by grave old men in cardigans, their hands clasped behind their backs, as if inspecting their fellow townspeople for signs of excessive frivolity. Death notices are plastered on church doors. And babies are everywhere. One sidewalk café could easily double as a day-care center. People stand around its packed tables, squealing compliments to the bambini being dandled and handed around through the fog of perfume and cologne.
“Dottore, vuole una fantastica giraffa?” The man addressing me is an African fellow holding a stuffed toy animal. I smile at his use of dottore—the jokey Italian form of address—and tell him that, no, I do not want a fantastic giraffe. He salutes me in a mock military manner and then skips off.
The streets turn medieval, then antique. In a park at the edge of the city center, the remains of an old Roman aqueduct and public baths stand in silence amid cypress trees. But the real show-stopper is a triumphal arch decorated with all manner of processional reliefs. It honors the Emperor Augustus and was erected at the very end of the first century BCE by the Celto-Ligurian chieftain of Susa, Marcus Julius Cottius. In exchange for swearing his fealty to Rome, Cottius was made the prefect of the region and, more lastingly, gave his name to the range of the Alps looming on the western horizon, known as the Cottian Alps.
The Cottian Alps, for me, are especially sublime because they trace out what is sometimes referred to as “the lard line.” On the north side of the Alps, animal fat is used for cooking; on the south, olive oil. True, the people of Piedmont loved their porkers as much as northern Europeans do, but the culinary revolution occasioned by the unification of Italy is now more or less complete. Whereas the northerners of Italy came out on top economically and culturally when compared to their countrymen in the Mezzogiorno, or the south, the sunny southerners took over in matters of the palate. Thus pasta replaced polenta as the carb of choice, and olive oil supplanted animal fat.
I have occasion to revel in this culinary colonialism at dinner that night. A pesto pasta dish—a specialty of neighboring seaside Liguria—comes accompanied by a light garden salad perfectly heightened by olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The creamy, goopy salade savoyarde eaten at Albertville the previous week becomes a nightmare consigned harmlessly to the past, when I was fool enough to dally on the wrong side of the lard line.
My companions at the communal table are in agreement with me. Heinz and Irene, from Nuremberg, raise their forks to their mouths sacramentally, savoring each bite as if it were their last. I ask them whether they visit Italy frequently. Heinz interrupts the transubstantiation of his penne to reply, “Yes, as often as we can. They live so much better than us.”
I’m inclined to his point of view. We are seated outside, underneath the old arches of a pedestrian arcade, now filled with tables for diners. There is not a hint of an iota of stress, the ambient conversation is convivial and low-key, the men are loose-limbed, the women lovely, the food delicious, the night warm and dry. When my new friends regretfully finish their meal, I ask them what they plan on doing in Susa. Heinz takes out a pen and draws on the paper tablecloth two inverted V’s. His forefinger and middle finger “walk” up and down the figures.
“We like to walk up the mountain,” he says as he does this. “Then we like to walk down it. That is what we do.”
My admiration at his concision is interrupted when a hitherto-unnoticed flat-screen TV placed at one end of the table-filled expanse flickers into life.
“The World Cup,” Heinz explains.
Tonight is the kickoff—Spain, the reigning world champion, against the Netherlands.
I ask him who he is pulling for. A pause.
“As a German,” he says at last, “I cannot possibly be cheering for the Dutch.”
Somehow I instinctively don’t want to go there, but any second thoughts about that are forgotten as the air fills with repeated cries of “Signori!!” It does not take long to see the source of the chorus of exasperation. Four tall, blond men have taken front-row seats. Two of them have their hands clasped behind their heads, the butterflies of their bent arms obscuring half the screen from view.
They take no notice of the indignant shouts for their attention. They do not hear them. Are they deaf?
Wearily, I get to my feet and walk over to the offending spectators. As I appear to be the only American in the place, I feel obliged to use my native New World lack of manners to break through the logjam of European decorum. And I have figured out by now what awaits.
I tap one of the men on the shoulder. His head whirls in my direction.
“Excuse me,” I say, “could you and your friend lower your arms so the rest of us can see the game?”
A look of genuine surprise crosses his features. His companions are similarly thunderstruck. What an unexpected intrusion from a world unimagined!
“I am terribly sorry,” he replies. He and his friend comply. “I had no idea….”
His English is perfect, but it has an accent.
Dutch.
_______
* The Ponte Milvio (Milvian Bridge) is Rome’s oldest, having first been constructed in the late third century BCE. A more dubious recent distinction credits an Italian novel and subsequent movie with making the bridge the first to introduce Europe to the love-lock craze.
† TAV is the Italian acronym for Treno Alta Velocità.
5. GREAT ST. BERNARD PASS AND THE MATTERHORN
THE HORSE! Ecce Homo! They’re the same thing!!”
My interlocutor and I are standing in a Turin side street leading to the Piazza Carlo Alberto.* He is a publisher and the proprietor of the city’s famed Luxemburg Bookshop, once the haunt of such literary luminaries as Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. The shop is thoroughly international; its warm and welcoming street-level section, overflowing with books, is surmounted by a foreign-language literature selection on the second floor. The shelving is made of dark wood, and there are plenty of nooks and crannies in which to read. A display stand of foreign periodicals constitutes a permanent temptation.
The owner of the Luxemburg is annoyed with me.
“They’re not the same thing at all!” I counter, in French. At the outset of our discussion, we determined that my Italian was as challenged as his English, so our absurdist back-and-forth is conducted in a language in which we are both more comfortable.
The dispute concerns Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. He lived on the Via Carlo Alberto, where he wrote Ecce Homo, the philosopher’s examination of his life and work. Shortly after completing it, he went mad, for reasons still debated. The police reported that he had a mental breakdown on 3 January 1889. The story goes that his insanity first surfaced when he was traumatized by witnessing in the square the brutal whipping of a horse.
I want to know where the whipping took place. My erudite Italian acquaintance wants to direct me to a plaque on the square. I have just come from it, where I saw that it commemorates the centenary of Nietzsche’s birth in the rather revolting language of exalted Fascism then in vogue in the Italy of the 1940s. There was no mention of any horse.
“The horse, the plaque, the same thing …,” he repeats gamely, his voice trailing off when faced with the lunacy of the writer before him. I want to mention that my odd insistence stems from knowing the name of Nietzsche to be intimately related to the Alps. He wr
ote that he loved the view of the mountains to the north of Turin and for many years he summered near St. Moritz. Recent editions of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra seem to have required as cover art Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, an 1816 canvas depicting a windswept young man with his back to us, walking stick in hand, standing on a precipice and staring down at what can only be called a sublime perspective of cloud and rocky eminences. Is this Übermensch terrified by the view, or is he considering it with Olympian disdain? The figure embodies the Romanticism that resulted in the cult of the Alps, and such views are often called “Nietzschean.” Then again, that word has been used and mostly abused since the great philosopher’s death in 1900, often as a lazy way to describe something or someone extreme. Certainly, the view of the Alps from Turin, like that from Geneva, can evoke sentiments of extremity, of fear of the inhuman ruggedness so close. Whether Nietzsche would approve of using his name for a perspective is something we’ll never know.
I never find out about the horse.† We exchange business cards and he says that he’ll be interested to see this book when I have finished it. I admire his tact. I continue on the broad streets of Turin, moving through marvelously grandiose squares and past splendid residences from the city’s days as host to the self-important House of Savoy. As befits my horse quest, there is no shortage of monumental equestrian statues here.
The place brims with life, not the baby-crazed conviviality of small-town Susa but the carefree cosmopolitanism of big-city Italy. Turin has long been a magnet for travelers, whose opinions of the place vary widely. From the Renaissance onward, the literary have wandered past its imposing façades and passed judgment. Dostoyevsky, reliably cranky, deemed it “very boring” and “odious.” Herman Melville thought it “more regular than Philadelphia. Houses all one cut, one color, one height. City seems built by one contractor and paid for by one capitalist.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, like Nietzsche, was enchanted by the city and its environs. As a very young man, he had walked across the Mont Cenis Pass en route to Turin; he had “followed Hannibal over the Alps,” as he put it in his Confessions. Once in the city, out of money and in need of a place to stay, he was taken in by the clergy and he converted to Catholicism. One of the priests, in a tale told in Rousseau’s Emile, took him “out of the town on to a high hill above the river Po, whose course we beheld as it flowed between its fertile banks; in the distance the landscape was crowned by the vast chain of the Alps; the beams of the rising sun already touched the plains and cast across the fields long shadows of trees, hillocks, and houses, and enriched with a thousand gleams of light the fairest picture which the human eye can see.”
Rousseau did not know it, but he was describing a vista cinematically. That he did it in Turin is a superb coincidence, as the city is one of the birthplaces of the motion picture. At the turn of the twentieth century, film studios sprang up in the city—Ambrosia, Aquila, and Itala Studios—and Turin’s directors began distributing full-length silent features throughout Europe as early as 1914. This prestigious past is memorialized in the city’s excellent national cinema museum, housed in one of the strangest buildings in Europe, the Mole Antonelliana. Standing 167 meters tall, this brick behemoth—it is the tallest unreinforced brick building in the world—the Mole was originally intended, during its construction in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to house a synagogue for the newly enfranchised Jews of Turin. Relations between the Jewish community and architect Alessandro Antonelli (whose name the building bears) eventually soured, and the city took over the financing of the project, which culminated with erection of a soaring dome and pinnacle. When the Winter Olympics returned to the Alps after Albertville—Turin hosted the 2006 Winter Games—the city used a stylized rendering of the building as its official Olympic logo. The Mole Antonelliana is to Turin what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. The tallness of the municipal icon is less fitting in Paris, where there is nary a highland in sight, whereas Turin stands close to the towering Alps.
The expressway northward proves the aptness of Turin’s logo, for the spiky Alps on the horizon are magnificent, looking like a malevolent white grin. I pull into a gas station to fill my tank. Workmen pour out of a van stopped behind me at the service bay to admire my car. They point to its trapezoidal exhaust pipe below the rear license plate, testament to its testosterone.
My chest involuntarily swells in the reflected glory of my car. After all, we are on the outskirts of Turin, once one of the world’s greatest automotive capitals. Fiat is an acronym for Fabricca Italiana Automobili Torino, so the bar for making a splash in Torinese car culture is set pretty high. But my status becomes severely deflated when my companions, on asking the price of the car, learn that my muscle Mégane is, in fact, noleggio—a rental. Faces fall and questions die in the air.
Hoping to redeem myself, I inform them that there are 265 horses under the hood. I wait to see their mood of disappointment return to worshipful awe, but only a low murmur greets this cock-of-the-walk announcement. One of their number, a thoughtful-looking fellow in late middle age, steps forward and addresses me.
“The car is too powerful,” he says, the reproach in his voice palpable. “Too many of our young people are dying on the roads. Because of cars like yours.” He gives the Mégane a dismissive gesture, then he and his colleagues clamber back into the van. In the space of a few seconds, I have gone from highway hero to gearhead goat.
THE PLAINS OF THE PIEDMONT give way to the drama of the Aosta Valley. Fabulously tall mountains, some with strangely shaped saddle summits, rise on both sides of the route. The lesser eminences, craggy outcroppings of rock several hundreds of meters in elevation, are crowned with brooding fortresses and castles at almost every turn in the road. These massive piles of hewn stone—Issogne, Verrès, Ussel, Fénis—carry the freight of history, attesting to a time when the local lords resisted transalpine marauders from what are now France and Switzerland.
The first of the Aostan sentinels to be encountered, Fort Bard, is by far the most solid. Although a castle has sat atop its height for well over a thousand years, Bard is a nineteenth-century construction, its avatar having been razed by an infuriated Napoleon who struggled to get past it on one of his many incursions into Italy. In 1800, the four-hundred-man garrison of the fort held off a forty-thousand-strong French army for two weeks, thereby foiling the emperor’s plan to launch a surprise attack on Turin. Rebuilt by the House of Savoy, the fortress is a gray stone monster. Fifty large casemates—apertures for artillery fire—punctuate its northern façade, the direction from which attacks would come. These openings are located in four distinct superstructures that seem to climb up the tall outcropping on which the fort is built. At the summit is a more conventional fortress, it too designed to rain death on an invader via its hundreds of firing slits. All in all, the combined structures count 283 rooms and 323 windows. It looks like a high-rise condo of malevolence. Local government has recently tried to humanize the place by installing a cheerful Alpine museum in the complex—featuring a dahu exhibit—but nothing can really mask its original vocation.
Fort Bard and other subalpine fortresses, stranded on lonely high points, evoke the tense posture of the defender, always awaiting the catastrophic surprise of attack. It is no coincidence that a child of the Alps, Dino Buzzati, twentieth-century journalist, playwright, and novelist, should have fashioned an existential tour de force centered on the fortress mentality. In Buzzati’s brilliant 1940 work, Il deserto dei Tartari (translated as The Tartar Steppe), his protagonist peers for decades over the battlements, waiting for the barbarians to come storming toward him, as he neglects the joys and rewards of normal life in the lowlands he protects. Fort Bard could be Buzzati’s fictional Bastiani, so powerful is its effect on the imagination. And its baleful presence remains a catalyst for the creative of all stripes. Two months before I pass it, the cast and crew of Avengers: Age of Ultron encamped there, using the fortress as a stand-in for the entirely fanciful countr
y of Sokovia.
I am glad to have the place in my rearview mirror. Yet what rises in front of me is less dystopian than disheartening. The valley stands as a vivid example of infrastructure victimhood. Expressway viaducts, spindly millipedes suspended far in the air, mar the views of the Graian Alps, the chain of mountains first glimpsed at Chamonix and by far the tallest in all of Europe. Foremost among the Aosta Valley’s awesome neighbors: Monte Bianco (Mont Blanc), rising 4,808 meters in altitude. The tallest mountain in the Alps, it is also the eleventh tallest in the world in topographical prominence—that is, the distance from base (or lowest contour) to summit, as opposed to its height above sea level. To go from the foot of Mont Blanc to its summit, one has to climb 4,697 meters. To its west rise Monte Rosa, with an altitude of 4,634 meters, making it the second tallest in the Alps, and Monte Cervino (Matterhorn), 4,478 meters in altitude. On the western side of the Aosta Valley rises Monte Gran Paradiso, 4,061 meters in altitude. This last is also the site of a sprawling, sky-high national park, created in the 1920s as a refuge for the fast-disappearing ibex, an Alpine antelope with fantastically long curved horns that once was a common sight throughout the mountains. The conservation initiative succeeded and the animal is no longer endangered—but the same cannot be said of the areas left open to developers.
The Alps Page 9