Maiden Voyages (52 page)

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ITALIAN DAYS

SAN GIMIGNANO: “City of Fine Towers”

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to: San Gimignano.

An English spinster, almost deaf, attaches herself to me on the bus to San Gimignano. She tells me of her adventures and misadventures in Spain, Portugal, Italy—all having to do with trains nearly missed, roads not taken, the kindness of strangers. I am not feeling particularly generous or kindly, except toward the green hills and the fields of yellow flowers in which I wish to lose my thoughts. “Rape, I think those flowers are,” she says, “horrible name. I think they make oil of it.” I think it is saffron, perhaps crocus …

Butter-yellow flowers bloom from the medieval towers for which San Gimignano is famous. They are variously called wallflowers and violets (and said by townspeople to grow nowhere else on earth). The small and fragrant flowers sprang up on the coffin of St. Fina (among whose gifts was the ability to extinguish house fires) and on the town’s towers on the day of her death. (On that day bells tolled; they were rung by angels.) St. Fina is sometimes called the Saint of the Wallflowers. (
Wallflower
, in addition to its botanical meaning, in colloquial Italian means, as it does in English, a “girl who is not invited to dance”—
ragazza che fa da tappezzeria
.) She died when she was fifteen. She was loved for her goodness and beauty, she had butter-yellow hair, she once accepted an orange from a young man at a well, and she died on an oak plank in penance for what seems to have been an entirely blameless life. In paintings by Ghirlandaio in San Gimignano’s cathedral, she is so slender and delicate, so attenuated, as to cause one pain.

Modest St. Fina, a silent slip of a girl, might seem an odd choice for veneration in a walled city of military architecture—proud ramparts and aggressive towers built by suspicious patrician families to hide treasures and to assert the will for power. (Alberti railed against towers, regarding them as antisocial; in the sixteenth century Cosimo de’ Medici ordered a halt to the expansion of San Gimignano, forbidding the commune of Florence to allocate to it “even the slightest amount for any need, be it sacred or profane.”)

There is a wrinkle in time in San Gimignano. There is no such thing as a mellow or lovable skyscraper, but the towers of San Gimignano, glibly called the skyscrapers of Tuscany, seem to have been born old … or at least to have anticipated the day when gentle St. Fina would, like Rapunzel, who also lived in a tower and whose hair was also gold, seem the perfect anointing presence. One imagines her—one imagines both Rapunzel and St. Fina—at the top of a steep, narrow, spiraling stone stairway, breathing silently in a slender shaft of brief light from a narrow window … everything military has retreated from this fairy-tale place.

There are fourteen tall towers in San Gimignano; there were once seventy-two. They are surrounded, on the narrow city streets, by palazzi and modest houses, all higgledy-piggledy, with projecting Tuscan roofs.
They stretch from earth to sky and are built on shifting soil; and they speak, as Georges Duby says, two languages: “on the one hand the unreal space of courtly myth, the vertical flight of mystic ascension, the linear curve carrying composition in to the scrolls of poetic reverie. And on the other, a rigorous marquetry offering the view of a compact universe, profound and solid.” They have one peculiar property: Their stones remain the same color—a gray-gold with a suggestion, a faint pentimento, of black—whether wet with rain or hot with sun. The little guidebook I bought in San Gimignano is quite lyrical and accurate about the walls and towers of San Gimignano, which embody, as its author says, the contradictions of the medieval mind, a mind “reserved and hospitable, bold and fearful. Fearful of enemies, of strangers, of night-time, of treasons.” The walls kept enemies out; they also kept people in; they imparted, to those within, a “sense of community, of common interests and ideals never denied.” San Gimignano is formidable in its beauty; every description of it I have ever read makes it sound both forbidding and delightful. Forbidding it once was, in the days of fratricidal warfare, when families threw collapsible wooden bridges from the window of one tower-fortress to that of another (the days when it traded with Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia and men vied for great wealth); now it is simply delightful. And sheltering. The walls cup and cradle (as, in Niccolò Gerini’s painting of St. Fina, she cradles the walled city in her slender young arms). The towers exist not to keep enemies—the Other—out, but to house the soul warmly; one has a sense of great bodily integrity in these spaces; one feels safe. When St. Fina drove the Devil out of San Gimignano with a gesture of her long and lovely hand, she did it for us.

Because one yields, in San Gimignano, to the fancy that the world is created anew each day, that time does not, in the way we ordinarily understand it, exist, it is exactly right, and so lovely, to find in a deserted piazza a small thirteenth-century church dedicated to St. Augustine, whose reflections on the nature and measurement of time so profoundly informed his love of God (and anticipated the existentialists):

On the chancel wall of the church are lively fifteenth-century frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli of the life of the great theologian. I am surprised to see St. Monica plump, peasant-sturdy, and careworn; I always imagined that one who prayed unceasingly, as she did, for the salvation of her son, would find one’s flesh melting in the process. (I think of a life of prayer as inimical to fat.) Of all the charming frescoes, the most charming is that of Augustine chatting with the infant Jesus about the Mystery of the Trinity (that which might be remote and austere Gozzoli rendered immediate and intimate); the Child attempts to empty the sea into a puddle—much as any child might at the seashore, with a pail, or a shell—the impossibility of which convinces Augustine that the Trinity cannot be comprehended by reason alone.

Everything You have made is beautiful, Augustine said to his God, but You are more beautiful than anything You have made. In the cloister of the Church of St. Augustine, that beauty is palpable; one feels one has entered the light and peace of God. The cloister is divided by box hedges into four quadrangular plots of land in which grow irises and tulips and palm trees and white and yellow dandelions and pink and blue wandering flowers.… How sweet, these enclosures within an enclosed opening: open/close, close/open; a cypress punctuates each of four corners. A loggia—pots of yellow flowers and geraniums—looks out over a central cistern; the scent of lilacs is pervasive, the lilacs swarm with bees. The fragrance of lilacs mingles with the fragrance of wood-smoke. I walk beneath a tree the leaves of which are the color of China tea; a cobweb brushes across my forehead. A jet plane streaks across the fragrance of lilacs; an orange-and-black cat mews piteously in the garden.

(Were mazes an outgrowth and elaboration of these enclosures within
enclosures? Why would anyone wish to complicate and convolute so simple, satisfying, and sweet a design?)

The sacristan plucks tenacious thorns from my coat. He is listening to a popular love song on his transistor radio in the sacristy. I light a candle and the sacristan extinguishes the flame. Even God has a
riposo
in Italy at lunch hour.

My hotel, once a palazzo, is in the Piazza della Cisterna, in the middle of which is a thirteenth-century cistern. From this piazza, through the battlemented archway, I can reach the square of the cathedral with its seven towers. I like the feel of the herringbone-patterned bricks under my thin sandals. I wander up and down steep hills, arched alleys, passing old men and women with canes. I never want to leave. My terraced hilltop room looks out over roofs and towers and blessed hills to the Val d’Elsa. I am beginning to believe the Annunciation did take place here. Art plagiarizes nature. I want to fly, as Cellini wanted to fly, “on a pair of wings made of waxed linen.” And I want to stay here, rooted, forever.

At dinner a baby boy crawls through the tunneled legs of diners, to the cooing delight of waiters. A woman lights a cigarette, over which a British man and woman make a great disapproving fuss. “There is no remedy for death,” the smoker says, coolly addressing the room at large. She says this in English and then in Italian.

After dinner, in a dim lounge, I watch
Two Women
, a movie with Sophia Loren. I am joined by the Italian woman who smokes. Out of an abundance of feeling I cry, not so much because this is the story of a rape, not because of the girl’s loss of innocence and the mother’s rage and grief, but because the injured girl is singing, her voice frail, a song my grandmother used to sing: “
Vieni, c’è una strada nel bosco
 … I want you to know it, too … 
c’è una strada nel cuore
 … There’s a road in my heart.…” The woman who smokes is crying, too. I am thinking of my daughter. When she leaves, the woman kisses the crown of my head. We have exchanged no words. Men have stood on the threshold and not come in. I never see her again.

I cross the piazza to sit in a brightly lit outdoor café. It is late. I am
the only woman in the café. I fend off three approaches. I won’t be denied the pleasure of seeing the light and shadows of the lovely square, the purple night sky. Inside, male voices are raised in a sentimental love song; they sing to the strings of a mandolin. Their singing is saccharine, their laughter is boisterous, and there are no women here. I wonder, with some little anger, what it would be like to be part of their sentimental, prideful, tough and tender world. I put on dark glasses. A little boy eating a gelato plays hide-and-seek, covering his eyes with sticky fingers (hide), waiting for me to smile (seek). A policeman strolls by apparently without purpose. I am an anomaly. I remove my glasses, thinking that if I can’t see men’s faces, they can’t see mine.

What pleasure does it give men to sing of the beauty of women when there are no women in the café?

I find myself thinking of the handsome guide at the Davanzati who held the elevator for me.

The bed linen smells of lilacs. The air vibrates with the aftersound of bells.

In San Gimignano the birds sing all night long.

In the morning I drink my coffee from a mug bearing the words
OLD TIME TEA
.

In the Piazza della Cisterna there is a
sala di giochi
—video games. Is it possible that the children who grow up here—young men with studied, languid poses—think they are living in a hick town?

On the Via San Martino, away from the cathedral and the Cisterna, there is a café peopled entirely by old men. The café is part billiard parlor; newspapers are bought and read in common. I am accepted here in the morning light of day; I would not have been accepted here last night. I am served my morning coffee with old-fashioned gallantry by a man in a shiny black suit. With great difficulty he recites something he has been taught by an English-speaking cousin: “ ‘We shall sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.’ Is sad?” he asks.

* * *

To leave a walled city is to feel evicted, cast out—cast out of paradise; no matter that the countryside outside the walls is paradisiacal.

The bus, full of high-spirited schoolchildren, that stopped at Porta San Giovanni was the wrong bus, but the driver took me on anyway, avuncularly advised the children to be more calm in the presence of
la bella signora
, and deposited me at the right bus stop. We went by back roads, and I had the sensation, for the first time in Tuscany, not of passing but of being in the countryside, part of (not merely an observer of) a gorgeous (and calm) crazy quilt of silver-green olive trees and flowering peach and cherry trees; the yellow-and-red bus wound its way through the intricate sensual folds of hills dignified by cypress trees: “And you, O God, saw all the things that you had made, and behold, ‘they were very good.’ For we also see them and behold, they are all very good.”
^*

The bus went slowly, like a swimmer who loves the water too much to race and challenge it, and the world unfolded like a child’s picture book: gardeners turning over soil with gnarled, patient hands; bronzed youths of Etruscan beauty casually strolling by the roadside as if here were just anywhere and everywhere was beautiful; showers of wisteria framing old women shelling peas in doorways; lovers picnicking in a vineyard; laughing nuns pushing children on orange swings, their heavy habits flowing on magnolia-scented air: “Your works praise you.”
^†