Despite umpteen trips to Italy over the years, this time it felt like I was seeing it for the first time. An unusual effect of this was that I produced my crappiest bunch of photos in years. It may have been the hazy light, the bleached landscapes or the piles of litter but I think it more likely I was dazzled. The experience was akin to that moment when you stand whimpering in front of a hundred and one brands of soap powder and you want to howl “But I just want something to wash my clothes!” If there’s one thing wrong with Italy, as with detergents, there’s just too damn much of it. It’s a crumbling kaleidoscope of postcard geography, stunning historical buildings, beautiful people – and that’s just the visual element – add the ever present and often intrusive smells of garbage, animals, flowers, espresso, the sweet smell inside bars, an occasional intrusive underarm, the comfort smell of pasta cooking, pungent, vomity pecorino, basil by the bucketful, the cool must of old buildings, dust caked into bedding untouched for four years, fresh bread, biscotti and pizza, for once not piped for customers in a supermarket but weaving through the beaded curtains onto the street, olive oil heating in a pan… and don’t get me started on the sounds…point is, blinded thus, I somehow ‘lost’ my photographer’s eye; gone was my ability to zoom in, to see things from an unusual perspective and I resorted, in most cases, stunned by the scenery, unable to take that dispassionate breath, I resorted to recording that things were there.
The view from where we took breakfast in our hotel in Vico Equensa, Amalfi
I had certainly forgotten how utterly beautiful Italy is despite the thousand and one quotes from the famous and not so famous about this. The reality sank in on the last evening in Frascati on the outskirts of Rome. We took the shuttle from our grand hotel into town for a pizza where we ate al fresco with Rome twinkling below almost as beautiful as the night sky; then we strolled to the main square and sat on the steps with the many Italians taking the evening air for their own intense moments with an ice cream. Enjoying my wine buzz, it seemed that from every angle there was yet another extraordinary building or church, another tanned, glossy haired beauty, more incredible patterns and textures of marbled floors and cobbled streets and more street theatre notably from the very cool traffic cops who cruised up in their violet monster car, in matching uniforms and guns. They swaggered to the ice cream shop, licked them into submission then lit each others cigarettes in an unselfconscious homo-erotic moment before disappearing into their Alfa Romeo. A neon sign reminding us they were Italian and proud would not have been out of place. Mr Sangue insisted on taking a photo of the car – we waited till the cops weren’t looking or they’d have had us spread-eagled over the bonnet of the car.
And as for the geography, everywhere you look the natural beauty crowds in on you; when we drove the 40 or so kilometres of the Amalfi coast I’d remarked, “ For goodness sake, how many times can you say ‘God that’s so beautiful’ in one day?”
I hadn’t realised how mountainous it was, how gorgeous the trees were, especially the ancient pines in Frascati and opposite our apartment in Accadia, I couldn’t get over the fact that there, right in front of us, within the view from our hotel in Amalfi – that was a volcano!
The view from my balcony in Accadia, my home town; if I’ve ever been asked to recall an image of a place I’ve been happy, this is it. This is what I see.
And Mr Sangue is right, the way to see the country, if you can handle the raised blood pressure, is to drive; we battled through Neapolitans driving home for siesta through the lava plains of Campagna, landmarks of cornfields, primeval tobacco plants hanging in sheds, past the AGIP service stations with their she-wolf of Rome logo, squealing each time we saw a Fiat 500 through the higgledy piggildy land, powering down the autostrada with its central reservation packed with azalea bushes past cities with names I could hear in Papa Sangue’s voice.
As I took it all in, parts of my life floated back that I didn’t even know had gone, many uncomfortable memories that I won’t go into here but I re-focused and saw that it’s also true that Italy can look ugly, in a certain light, at a certain time of day, when you’re stuck in traffic or struggling up a shadowless street with luggage or lost and with few clues as how to get where you want to be. The heat destroys everything and the apartment buildings’ bleached paintjobs, bubble and peel like unprotected skin; and where the paint sticks, graffiti smothers it. There’s not much grass to be seen and the roads are dusty, dry, gritty. In beautiful Frascati, at every hairpin bend, in every lay-by, wherever you could pull up on your Vespa and enjoy the romantic scenery, there was a pile of litter like an exercise in bio-degrading; you just knew no one would ever clean it up. And just as balconies dripped with hanging plants, palm trees laden with dates swayed in the strong breeze, all public toilets stank of piss and every communal bin hummed.
A land of contrasts…corny, but true.
Outside an ordinary ol’ cafe – currently my desktop
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