See You in the Piazza

by Frances Mayes

  * * *

  RIGHT IN THE centro, the frescoes in the Gothic Chiesa dello Spirito Santo show judgment day in no uncertain terms. Bodies emerge from graves and are shunted left for paradise, right for hell. Simple as that. The vaulted church feels intimate; I sit for a few moments of quiet and look at a happier fresco, Saint Christopher ferrying the Christ child across waters.

  Thanks to Paul Blanchard’s Trentino–Alto Adige chapter in the Blue Guide: Northern Italy. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known a revealing aspect of Vipiteno: the schools. Liceo Scientifico, the science high school, designed by Höller & Klotzner, and the Scuola Elementare, the elementary school designed by Cez Calderan Zanovello. The science high school’s handsome and elegant juxtaposition of glass and slatted wood and its serene spatial relationships must inspire everyone who treads the halls. Zanovello’s long colonnade supported by raw tree trunks surprises by evoking the nearby forests. Of what matters to the inhabitants of Vipiteno, the schools speak as frankly as the judgment day frescoes. What lucky students.

  * * *

  THE POINT OF the trip is shifting for all of us. We’re still interested in towns, but the stupefying landscapes stun us constantly. On every walk, we remark on the air. Just breathing gives you vigor. Sloping, green upland meadows (Heidi and Grandfather, where are you?), with surging streams and those dreamy Tyrolian houses that look as though fifty could live there. In the fields where hay is being racked, men are wearing lederhosen. Forked hay falls from the pitchfork in a golden tumble. We drive across the Brenner Pass into Austria, just for William to set foot in another country. But we turn right around. Back into Italy, and on into the Dolomiti!

  Like Vipiteno, Campo Tures qualifies as a Bandiera Arancione village, Orange Flag sites selected by the Touring Club Italiano as particularly attractive or culturally noteworthy. This place is blessed by the gods. The Aurino (Ahr in German) River, narrow but swift, roars through. A ring of mighty peaks surrounds the valley. At one end of town looms Tures Castle. The little village—only five thousand residents in the greater Campo Tures area—was the field (campo) of the Tures family. Quiet today on our late June visit but as a winter sports and market center, it certainly sees many lively days. Surprisingly, only a few houses are old. They look strangely Ottoman with their stacked wooden mirador windows and plain façades. Instead of marooned and seemingly abandoned in Campo Tures, they’d look at home along the Bosporus. Mountain gear shops cluster in the centro, then we find orderly neighborhoods to wander in. A sign on the park invites you in to “read and relax.” Good idea.

  A covered wooden pedestrian bridge crosses the Aurino. Downstream, a red church spire, among lush willows and vines bordering the river, points up to zigzag peaks against gray sky roiling with clouds. Alpenglow, at sunrise and sunset—the play of rose and lavender light across the peaks. I’m mesmerized by the tumbling green and white water—how can it remain contained inside such tight banks?

  “Now, why are we here?” William asks as we complete our walk around town in an hour.

  “Look up! Those eighty peaks! We should come back in winter. You can sleep in igloos here.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes, and I read it’s not even that cold. Sledding, cross-country. This is the place.”

  * * *

  AT THE HOTEL Alpinum, our adjoining balconies look into a garden. Rooms are comfortable, albeit modest. There’s an indoor pool but we don’t take the time for a swim. William is catching up with friends on Snapchat. Ed falls into a major nap while I read my old favorite, The Lawrence Durrell Travel Reader. I copy in my notebook: You enter Greece as one might enter a dark crystal; the form of things becomes irregular, refracted. I recognize that strange feeling when the power of a landscape overtakes you. When in the Mani of Greece, I thought I would wear a white linen shift and grow very thin until my bones showed, so elemental did the place feel. Here in the voluptuous valleys and idyllic green hills sloping up to raw and haggard mountains, I close my eyes. The power and spirit of this landscape (Durrell would call it sense of place) must be that you enter it as an explorer. What lies over the next pass? The Dolomiti are in Italy but there’s a bedrock German culture, too; these are mountains but not remotely like any seen before; the air is fresh but I want to gulp it like spring water; we’re slowed by curvy roads but have a feeling of momentum; we hike one foot after another but harbor the desire to soar over the fields of hay, over the isolated wood and stone huts (malghe) of the summer pastures. I write: You enter the Dolomiti as one might enter a dream of flying.

  * * *

  ON OUR WALK, we found the Feldmilla Design Hotel. I should have booked there for its waterside location. It would have been thrilling to hear the torrent in the night. Like the Vigilius Mountain Resort, it is an eco, climate-neutral hotel. We looked at the menu for the hotel’s Ristorante Toccorosso (red glass). All local products, with imaginative recipes and traditional fare as well.

  We’re back at eight. They’ve found us the last table. A wedding dinner is starting. “Oh, no,” Ed says, “bad service coming up.” We’re put at the end table on the terrace, which is quiet and so out of the way that the waiter never will notice us. But, we hear the sweet sound of flowing water, not only from the river but from a sudden torrential rain as well. We’re under cover but a fine mist wafts with every breeze. The waiter appears, prompt after all and smiling. We decide on plates of vegetable croquettes, potato dumplings, and grilled fish. There were lighter choices but we’ve gotten into these dumplings. I am pleased to see one of my favorite sauvignons on the wine list. It would be sobering to know how many bottles of Lafóa I have drunk over the years. A wine that sings, that inspires. Our friend Riccardo identifies one of the tastes as pipi di gatto, cat pee. (Others call that particular taste gooseberry.) To me it’s a quality of some of the best whites, the velvet border on a silk dress.

  The rain has rinsed the already pristine air. We walk back to our hotel along the river, chuting even faster through the night, a long skein in the moonlight, as though a woman has unfurled her silvery gray hair.

  * * *

  LAST DAY IN the Dolomiti coming up. We set out to look for a waterfall that William saw in a brochure. At the beginning of the ascending trail, there’s the inevitable Italian touch: a bar. We stoke ourselves with coffee and head up, intending to see only the first of three waterfalls along the trail. The path leads through a forest where some glacial event once occurred: Enormous rocks covered with vivid moss fill the forest floor. Through tall skinny trees the light filters, a pellucid veil. There must be fairy houses everywhere in the ferny undergrowth. We follow a scent of coniferous green, pungent and sharp. A half hour of gentle climbing and we come to the first surging fall. Is there anything in nature more enchanting? The noise of it astounds—a crashing music.

  William looks back at us. “Let’s go on. This is fantastic.” I say to myself a true line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: There lives the dearest freshness deep down things…The climb intensifies. In half an hour we hear a distant roar and scramble onward. Magnificent. We agree to continue. How could we not? This is one of the best walks ever. We’re quiet, listening to silence, then silence broken by hurtling water.

  Best for last. The long drop of the highest waterfall. The deafening sluice and slide, a violence sending heavenly mist everywhere. We’re happily drenched. (Not happy that the camera is drenched.) Remember this, I think silently to William. This is it.

  Going downhill is faster. We’re back at the car, stunned as though we’ve been abducted by aliens. Not that drastic, but truly exhilarated. Such unexpected beauty keeps us smiling.

  * * *

  WE’RE THREADING THROUGH high passes. A geologist’s paradise. “What does dolomite mean?” Ed throws out.

  “The kind of rock,” William guesses. He starts scrolling his phone. “Calcium magnesium carbonate.”

  “Yes, but why is it called dolomite?” He’s go
t us. “Named for a French geologist.”

  “A geologist named Dolomite? You’re kidding.”

  “Déodat de Dolomieu. Don’t you love Déodat? He explored in the late seventeen hundreds. This range is unbelievably old, two hundred and thirty million years. This was a sea when Europe and Africa were still joined. Sea of Tethys.”

  “I’ve read that hikers still find marine fossils from the ancient lagoons,” I add. “And there are dinosaur prints.”

  “Cool place,” William says. “Good name for a dog, Déodat.”

  Indeed. I’ve seen mountains all over the world. These are unique. Inhospitable, formidable, and also sublimely mysterious, a never-never land to birth myth and legend.

  * * *

  BY LUNCHTIME, AFTER traversing many kilometers of oh-pull-over scenery, we arrive at Lago di Braies, another translucent emerald lake. The mountains hovering close to shore reflect in the water. On the Hotel Pragser Wildsee’s terrace we have lunch before taking a walk across the golden beach and along a path by the water. The washed colors look like an old postcard. The rambling hotel seems like a venerable place where people come, year after year, for the hikes and good air. William suggests staying another night. Sunrise would be a prime time to set up his tripod for a time lapse. But we are headed back to Cortona today and all we have left to see is the rest of the Great Dolomite Road.

  * * *

  WE WONDERED HOW the mountain roads would be—precipitous and narrow, with infinite drop-offs? We should have remembered the strong tradition of the old Romans, whose roads endure to this day. The Italians have road engineering in their DNA. Traffic is light to nonexistent; the roads are flawless. Easy to sit back, for William and me, and take in one jaw-dropping view after another. Conversation lapses into “majestic,” “look at that,” “spectacular,” “those are over three thousand meters,” and finally, “pull over, I feel sick.”

  I step out and breathe until my equilibrium steadies. I’m doomed to the backseat, since William is approaching six feet and can’t fold enough to slip into the Alfa’s afterthought of a backseat. Sips of water; on we go. Lawrence Durrell in Greece has fallen to the floor. I never found my precise image for what it’s like to enter the Dolomiti. Anyway, even metaphorically, how does one enter a dark crystal?

  Finally, we hit flat land. “What music do you want to hear?” William asks.

  “k. d. lang, ‘Hallelujah,’ ” I say.

  “Never heard of it but okay.”

  Ed speeds toward the gentler terrain of Tuscany. Tonight, soul food—pasta al ragù. I write in my notebook: Entering Tuscany is like climbing onto the lap of an immensely kind nonna.

  Tamarisk trees are blooming along the canals of Torcello. Their dusty-white plumes, hazy in the still June air, blur even more in the water’s reflections. At the Torcello stop, we’re let off the vaporetto and there’s nothing, just a path along a canal. Most people come to see the two ancient churches. They pause for a drink or lunch, then catch the boat again. By late afternoon, the island falls into somnolence. We’ll stay for two nights in this old light and summer torpor, this odd spot where a Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene character might wash up.

  I was here twenty years ago. Little has changed. The path was sandy, now it’s bricked. Wild purple allium spikes the weedy fields. A few souvenir concessions and places to stop for a bite have arrived. Otherwise, the island remains trapped in time—a time before a place such as Venice could even be imagined.

  On the voyage out, I took a photo. I caught a flat expanse of glittering water, a milky sky with high wispy clouds, and between water and sky, the low horizon line of a distant island, so thin it looks like a green brushstroke on a field of blue. This watery realm—so different from Venice, where winding canals are alive with working boats, and everywhere the waters shimmer with lights, colorful palace façades, striped mooring poles, and black silhouettes of gondolas. But way out in the lagoon: silence, a soft palette of tawny grasses, sand, and water turning from pewter to the old green of a celadon cup. Among islands barely emerging from the water, I’m back at the beginning. The city of Venice was once like these, just an idea of land. How bizarre to think of building on ground where the water table rises to about a tablespoon under the surface.

  * * *

  TORCELLO, YOU MIGHT say, is the mother of Venice.

  The bishop of Altino, a town that had endured invasion after invasion not far away on the mainland, moved his followers to the then-desolate Roman island in A.D. 638. Some say the low and marshy settlement called to the bishop in a vision. There, his people would be less vulnerable. In the shallow waters around Torcello, channels had to be cut, and when attacked, the people of Altino pulled up bricole, deep-water markers, leaving enemies to founder in mud. After eight centuries of a thriving civilization, malaria and silt ruined life on the island. People migrated onto equally undependable strands that gradually became Venice. Thereafter, the island’s five towns, and its many churches and palaces, were raided for building materials, reducing the place to the few remaining structures. Today, Torcello claims only ten residents.

  * * *

  I MUST HAVE been in a thousand churches during my years in Italy. Torcello’s haunting basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, a crude relic with a powerful force, may be the most arresting one I’ve ever seen. Built in 639, rebuilt in 1008, altered again and again, it’s barny and beamed, squared off and interrupted by rood screens. High windows, shafts of gray light, traces of fresco, shutters made of stone slabs. I was not prepared for the stunning mosaics. At the west end, a depiction of the Harrowing of Hell, the seven deadly sins, and the Last Judgment in gory detail. Serpents weave in and out of the skulls of the envious near dismembered parts belonging to the slothful; the gluttons eat their own hands. The messages are complex. Beware! A small child is actually the Antichrist in disguise. This is as alarming now as it was to worshipers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

  The east wall mosaic is startlingly different. In a glittering, tessellated, and very tall apse rises the simple elongated Madonna holding her Baby. If you have binoculars, you see that she is weeping. Her right hand gestures toward the infant, as if to say this way. In her left hand she holds a small white cloth, which early viewers would have recognized as a foreshadowing of the shroud. Jan Morris, in her seminal book Venice, quotes a child of her acquaintance who described the mosaic as “a thin young lady, holding God.”

  The whole complex collapses time. What moves me most is the spolia, all the surviving stone and marble bits from across the centuries incorporated into the still-living building: exposed sections of mosaic from the original 639 floor, seventh-century altar, eleventh-century marble panels, fourth-century Roman sarcophagus, fragments of a thirteenth-century fresco, ninth-century font for holy water—this has been sacred ground as far back as memory goes.

  Santa Fosca, the adjacent brick church, is a compact Greek-cross base topped by a round structure. Stripped inside, except for Byzantine marble columns, the space is still mesmerizing. Nearby, the two small archaeological museums with their cunningly cast bronze probes, tweezers, keys, spoons, and cups open to us intimate glimpses of life on Torcello. From many islands in the lagoon you can see the campanile, the exclamation point of Torcello. It was even taller before 1640, when lightning lopped off the top. Too bad it’s closed today. I would like to have seen the brick-ramped interior, which must make it easier to climb up for the view.

  * * *

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY SECLUDED himself on Torcello to write Across the River and into the Trees. We, too, checked into Locanda Cipriani. You can sit under a pergola, sipping a Negroni and plotting the next year of your life. You can read by the window with the scent of roses and jasmine wafting through the curtains, or meander along paths lined with pomegranates and hydrangeas. The bare floors of our room are waxed and the simple curtain lifts in a slight breeze. Pristine, with austere twin beds, a marb
le fireplace, and reading chair: Emily Dickinson could feel at home here. In the bookcase, I find one of my favorites, Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy by David Mayernik.

  The inn is, by now, a large part of the recent history of the island. Here’s Kim Novak on the wall, chomping down on a big bite of pasta. All the British royals come and go in faded black-and-white photographs. How young and slender Princess Diana was. There’s Elton John! The waiters love to chat, the food is fresh from the sea, and the deep quiet makes my tense shoulders relax.

  My favorite waiter says he has not been to Venice—only a half-hour trip—in five years. When I hear that, my perspective suddenly shifts. To those who live on the less-traveled islands, it’s a world. Leaving Torcello, I’m ready to explore as much as possible of the 210-square-mile lagoon, only 8 percent of which is land. We’ll hop on and off the vaporetti for a few days. They are working crafts—the metro and bus routes of the lagoon. Once off the busy Venice, Burano, and Murano routes, residents of the scattered islands are taking trips to the market, to the cemetery, to visit relatives, to school. Their days are lived on water, and their dreams must be of water.

  * * *

  AT SANT’ERASMO, WE step off for a bucolic walk along fields where the coveted castraure artichokes are grown. Castrated because the prized first buds are cut off, encouraging fuller growth for the plant. Those early two or three violet-tinged little prizes are tender enough to sliver, sprinkle with olive oil, and eat raw. The second wave is almost as delectable, and the third growth is the normal carciofo but still special for the large heart and particular taste that comes from saline dirt.