I promise that there are even more excellent things to this
little town than the ones I list below.
The nuance of a place, its particular beauties, reveal themselves over
time, and with a month behind me and a month still ahead. The sights—the traditional streets,
pedestrian and cobbled, with the ancient ruins among them, the churches and the
historical record of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the daunting and bedazzling Alps
that wall in the town on every side—all are certainly attractive to someone who
would want to visit. Living here, on the
other hand, you notice other things: the patterns of daily life that are and
are not home. Having awakened in Italy,
I have been learning to follow the life in a quiet, remote part of that
country. And I love the experience, the
schooling it gives you about who you are, what you value and assume.
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps.
It’s beneath that kind of spectacle that the Aostans live, and
from what I can tell, they don’t take it for granted, because who could? But here are elements more everyday, that
upon leaving here, I won’t take for granted myself:
1.
The town is extraordinarily
clean. Each morning the shopkeepers wash
and mop down the cobblestones in front of their stores, a dusty stream
trickling into the central gutter of the street, like it did in medieval times,
then flowing down the sewer grates, leaving the streets not only clear but also
scrubbed. This is by nine in the
morning, and though litter may gather on the streets by the end of the day,
it’s kept in check by the merchants’ watchful eyes: like good chefs, they know
part of the appeal is the presentation, and for someone who comes from the
American mid-South, this kind of upkeep is almost glamorous in contrast to
home.
2.
The children are unfailingly
fascinating to watch. Like at home, they
come in all shades of hair and skin—slimmer, more groomed, though, and even if
the clothes are not expensive brands, they wear what they have attentively,
without the high fashion you would find down the road in Milan, or the
bourgeois conformity you get used to seeing around town at home, but a simple,
elegant mindfulness with a few American-slogan T shirts thrown into the mix. And it’s remarkable to watch the swagger of
the little boys when they’re about ten or eleven: they seem to be waiting for
Scorsese’s accelerated frame-speed to slow down the walk, to give it a comic
version of the menace and drama of the guys just walkin’ along in Goodfellas or Casino.
3.
For a town where little English
is spoken (as opposed to larger cities like Florence or Venice), the world is
surprising easy to negotiate linguistically.
If I say “scusi” or “mi dispiace” enough, people begin to see
that I’m sorry, I can’t help being a virtually monolingual American whose
feeble grasp of Latin will take me only so far down their road before, if they
are kind (and almost all of them are) they have to extend a hand and guide
me. There’s a great passage in Italo
Calvino’s Invisible Cities that it reminds me of, where Marco Polo, newly
arrived from Venice, begins to talk to Kublai Khan, the great Emperor: Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine
languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of
wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from
his knapsacks: ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes--which he arranged in
front of him like chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kuhlai sent
him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to
interpret. I
negotiated my laundry with an able, brilliant woman who had not a shred of
English: with my dozen or so phrases of Italian, pantomime, pointing to
calendars and clocks, we arranged what I wanted done to the clothing (nothing
needed dry-cleaning, grazie), how much it would cost, and when I would
pick it up. After which, we stared at
one another, sighed deeply and laughed, as though we had carried a piano up a
flight of steps together. Throughout the
town, kindness and good humor have met my sparse and damaged Italian, and
thanks to laughter and resourcefulness, every job has been done.
4.
At the University, on the other hand, the level of
fluency has been a great relief and a godsend.
I knew from preliminary correspondence that my colleagues at the
University of Valle d’Aosta spoke English like natives, but it was a great
delight to discover the skills of the students.
The conversations were sophisticated, they got my jokes (except for one
of them, and I’m thinking it was far more likely that the joke was bad than
that their comprehension failed them) and their writing, aside from a few
little quirks in phrasing and idiom, might easily be mistaken for that of my
own students back in Louisville (and this is not a dig at my Louisville
students—the Aosta students were really that good). I spent two pleasant afternoons walking
around town with these young people as I helped them devise and focus the
subjects of travel articles I’d assigned them to write: it was discussion,
question-and-answer, and undergraduate banter without gaps in communication and
interpretation. I think it was that much
more pleasant because I was hungry for English, for good old-fashioned casual
talk, and the students I had were bringers of that joy.
5.
Fifth on my list has been the personal joy of new
colleagues. With a small faculty for the
English classes, the university has managed to cover a wide range of
instruction and do it well. It’s obvious
they work hard, and at a number of universities, and yet it’s all done with
good cheer and enthusiasm. Excellent
conversationalists and dinner companions, they all know how to live the life of
the mind while having a fond acquaintance with just plain living in
general. So my thanks for hospitality
extend to Carlo Bajetta, Anna Anselmo, Rosie Crawford, and my friend the
incomparable Allesandro Stanchi, who has kept me from imploding with all the
practical matters involved with living elsewhere for two months (those of you
who know me well, know that practical matters and I don’t readily mix). It’s an extension of this town’s kindness,
and a pleasure to be taken in immediately and without question as a colleague.
6.
I said five things. But here’s a little something extra. Also, alive and well in the culture of Aosta
is the concept of what’s called lagniappe
in New Orleans. A custom where the
shopkeeper gives you something extra in your purchase. The most famous example of this is, of
course, the 13th item that makes up the “baker’s dozen”, but examples in Aosta
have been an extra pair of oranges from a fruit shop, extra portions of fontina
cheese, some really decent spreads of food with aperitifs at a restaurant
called Ad Forum, and, at a Chinese restaurant off Chanoux Square in the center
of the city, an after-dinner liqueur, home-made, that would send Marco Polo
packing for the East with “cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or
hootings” Of course, a lot of this generosity might come because Alessandro
knows everyone…or knows someone who knows someone who knows someone…and it’s
that connectedness, that spirit of community, that ties so many of these things
together and has become what I love most about Aosta, about the part of Italy I’ve
seen in general. ©2014 Michael Williams
No comments:
Post a Comment