What Do Women Want? (22 page)

If the seven deadly sins seem somewhat less deadly in Italy, the Ten Commandments slightly less rigid and more malleable, it is because of this rule-bending humanity of the Italians. It is a country that not only tolerates contradictions—it positively encourages them. The Italian shrug embodies this philosophy. It says:
Things have been this way forever and always will be this way.
Why buck
la forza del destino
? And even the rigid northerner relaxes and has another glass of wine.

Your trip there will never quite go as planned. This is part of the
avventura.
There may be strikes, mixed-up reservations, maddening
imbrogli
of all sorts. But they will be charming
imbrogli
—you can count on that. They will be charming because the Italian people are charming. A lost reservation in Germany is a Walpurgisnacht; in Italy it is an opera buffa. Being in Italy is rather like being in love—with a whole country. So what if people have been in love before? So what if Italy has been a tourist trap for, at least, a thousand years? So what if everything you say in criticism—or praise—of Italy has already been said? Writers yet unborn will say it all again, blissfully unaware that anyone has said it before. They will fall in love with Italy all over again as if she were a virgin who had never been seduced. Italy is hardly a virgin, but then few seductresses remain virgins for long.

The first place I knew in Italy was Florence—or rather Bellosguardo, a lovely hilltop perch (
suburb
is too banal a word) looking down on the duomo from a yew-studded prominence. As a college junior, I lived in the Torre di Bellosguardo—a thirteenth-century tower adjoining a fifteenth-century villa, studied Italian and Italians, and fell madly in love with Italy.

The moon was brighter in Italy. The geraniums were pinker and more pungent. The wine was more intoxicating. The men were handsomer.
Cipressi
were more poetic than yew trees. Italian had more rhymes than English. It was the language of love, the language of poetry. I thought my impressions were original. I filled notebooks, aerograms, and sheets and sheets of something we then called “onionskin” with my banal musings. If I had known then what I know now—that a thousand years of similar musings by similar young musers preceded me—would I have felt diminished? Thank God I
didn’t
know. I felt special, chosen. Italy has the power to confer this sense of chosenness.

I went back to Bellosguardo a few years ago and stayed in the same villa (now a lovely small hotel owned by the charming and erudite Amerigo Franchetti) with my daughter, Molly, who was at the
least
charming age of teenage daughters: thirteen going on fourteen. Because she knew I adored this part of Italy and had wonderful memories of it, she whined in the car from Arezzo to Florence, whined while passing through beautiful hill towns, whined at gas stations, at phantasmagoric autogrills, whined as we threaded our way past a traffic jam created by a procession in honor of Nostra Signora del Autostrada. She hated Florence, hated our room in Bellosguardo, hated the swimming pool, the restaurant, and of course her mother—until I had the inspiration of emptying a bottle of icy San Pellegrino on her head. Whereupon she threw her arms around me and said: “Mommy, I love you!” Is this part of the fatal charm of Italy?

Trips like that have taught me a lesson. For me the secret of being happy in Italy now is to live life
all’italiana.
That means I no longer even
attempt
to tour, but I stay in one place and live life by the eminently sensible Italian schedule: walk in the mornings and evenings, eat and rest in the middle of the day.

In the last few years I have concentrated on two particular sections of Italy: Tuscany and Lucca, the Veneto and Venice.

I discovered Lucca almost by accident. My friends Ken and Barbara Follett had rented a place called Villa San Michele right outside Lucca in a town called Vorno, and they invited us to come and stay. Since the Follett clan never stir on summer holidays without room for their five grown daughters and sons, various pals and partners, cousins, siblings, and Barbara’s Labour Party colleagues, they have to rent enormous houses. Molly and I joined this happy throng; later my husband sprung himself from New York and met us.

Lucca is west of Florence on the autostrada, past Montecatini, the spa town, and just short of Pisa and Livorno. You first see Lucca from a ring road surrounding a walled, gated Tuscan city with bicyclers cruising the wide parapets and cars parked outside the impressive walls of the Centro Storico. There is a lovely restaurant on the walls (Antico Caffè delle Mura), a Roman coliseum turned into a honeycomb of dwellings during the Middle Ages, medieval streets, a glorious duomo. Lucca is surrounded by a variety of small country towns where you can stay, making the city a destination rather than a stopping place.

Villa San Michele at Vorno is entered through narrow stone gates opposite vineyards above which dramatic hills rise. It is a sprawling fifteenth-century villa, once a ruin, with gorgeous views and an ample swimming pool. Little hills covered with vineyards rise around it.

What did we do there? Mostly
far niente.
The joy of vacationing in Italy is
far niente.
The teenagers slept till at least noon every day. The grown-ups—if you can call us that—wrote, faxed, and telephoned in the morning, then after lunch lazed by the pool. If we went to Lucca to bike around the walls or shop or see works of art, it was never until three-thirty or four. I remember one lunch that ended at six in the afternoon, with Neil Kinnock playing sixties folk songs on his guitar while the whole group sang along. I remember passionate political discussions while we all sat topless around the pool. I finished a chapter of
Fear of Fifty
called “Becoming Venetian” while sitting near that pool with a yellow legal pad balanced on my knee. I remember a cruise we took along the coast to snorkel and swim in the Golfo dei Poeti. When we stopped for lunch at Portovenere, we overlooked the white marble quarries of Carrara (where Michelangelo had his marble quarried). The joy of Italy often consists of doing ordinary things in extraordinary settings.

Since Lucca was originally a Roman encampment (founded in 180 B.C.) that became a medieval and Renaissance city, it has the layers of history characteristic of Rome and Verona. The arches of its coliseum were long ago filled in with houses, and the central stage remains as a vast piazza.

Lucca reached its zenith as a trading town in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, she remained an independent city-state like Venice—until Napoleon conquered them both.

No one leaves Lucca without admiring the white Carrara sepulchre in the duomo of the beautiful Ilaria del Carretto done by Jacopo della Quercia in 1406. Ilaria was the young wife of Paolo Guinigi, one of the fifteenth-century bosses of Lucca. I forget how she died. I’m sure I deliberately blank out her story because I loathe stories about young women who die at tender ages. I would rather see monuments to women who survived their first loves and went on to have several more.

Napoleon Bonaparte was so fond of Lucca that he wanted to keep it in the family. First, he made his sister Elisa Duchess of Lucca; later he promoted her to Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

Lucca still has a taste for luxury. The food remains excellent even in little
pizzerie.
The city is full of posh jewelry shops displaying antique and modern treasures. There are wonderful shoemakers—one of whom (Porselli) makes slippers for the dancers of La Scala. I never leave without ballerina flats in half a dozen colors. How can you ever go wrong in a town with good shoe shops?

We liked that summer sojourn in Lucca so much that the next summer we rented a house about twenty minutes from the Folletts’, on the other side of the city walls, in a town called San Macario al Monte. Molly brought two friends. I invited my best friend, Gerri Karetsky, to share the house with us, and her son Bob joined us on his way home from the Maccabea games in Israel. Our place was a farmhouse rather than a palazzo but it was spacious and had lots of bedrooms, a great pool, and spectacular views.

I’ve found that houses with spectacular views often have spectacularly tricky roads leading to them, and this place was no exception. The road fell away in places like the corniche road along the Dalmatian coast—after the shelling.

Once ensconced upon our promontory, we discovered a comfortable rustic house with lovely views of other hilltops, a swimming pool with a vine-shaded pergola, silvery olive trees, dark
cipressi,
and both sunrise and sunset views. From our house, it was a ten-minute drive to Lucca, fifteen minutes to the Folletts in Vorno at Villa San Michele, and only half an hour to Pisa, with its duomo and fabled leaning tower, and the seashore towns nearby.

Between Lucca and Pisa there are sweet country inns, restaurants in gardens, restaurants on hilltop terraces, both splendid and modest. The jolliest meal we had was at a hilltop trattoria whose kitchen was closed when we arrived but where the most obliging
patrone
put out, with great panache, cheeses and salami and prosciutto for us. This nameless trattoria is nowhere as famous as Vipore, Il Giglio, La Mora, or the other starred places around Lucca. Again, it was the kindness of the people that made it so exceptional.

Since Molly is a Leo, born on August 19, she has celebrated almost every birthday in Italy since she was five. Her fifteenth summer was one of our best times—we celebrated with all the Folletts, their guests, and our guests at Villa La Principessa, a beautiful country villa-hotel with a garden restaurant full of huge chestnut trees. We had a horseshoe-shaped table. The teenagers captured the middle and the grown-ups commanded the ends. We had invited Molly’s nanny of ten years, Margaret Kiley, to come out of retirement and spend two weeks of this summer with us in Italy. Between our crowd of Jongs, Burrowses, Karetskys, and friends, and the Follett and friends clan, we rarely stirred without twenty people.

Fortunately, Italians find that normal—since
they
rarely stir without twenty people. Parties of family, friends, big kids, little kids, are not only tolerated in Italy, they are considered simpatico—which makes Italy perhaps the most sympathetic place in the world for a family vacation. There’s no place where children are not encouraged and few places where they are not treated as full-fledged guests.

A villa on a hill about five minutes from ours sold excellent local wine, and the simple meals we made at home were as memorable as the ones in restaurants. Sitting out on our terrazzo under the rising moon, eating
prosciutto e melone
and grilled local fish, drinking inexpensive local wine, playing various games of charades with the kids, was better than any evening out.

What is this fatal charm of Italy? Why does it reflect us back to ourselves like a mirror that obliterates wrinkles, takes off pounds, and gives our eyes a devil-may-care sparkle? Why does Italy remain the country of the Saturnalia—the feast when everything was permitted? Is it because the pagan past is still alive in Italy and Christianity is just a thin veneer that scarcely covers? To wake up on a Sunday morning in Italy and hear the roosters crowing and the bells pealing is one of life’s greatest pleasures. To take a walk or a run in that tintinnabulation is even better. The mornings are cool; the birds careen from hill to hill; the bells seem to have been created not to draw worshipers to church but—like so many things here—for your particular pleasure.

If you stay long enough and transform yourself from tourist to habitué, the headwaiters will also call you
Maestro
or
Contessa
or
Dottore
or perhaps even
Commendatore.
To Italians this gentle flattery is almost meaningless; only Americans take it even semiseriously. Typically, we at first fall madly in love with this flattering overstatement, and somewhat later, when we discover it is only a form of social lubrication, we pronounce all Italians liars and fakes. Actually, both reactions are wrong. Naked truth, the Italians believe, can always do with some enhancement.

I had visited Venice many times as a tourist from my teens on but had never lived in the Veneto for extended periods until, when my daughter was small, I was researching and writing my Venetian time-travel novel (later published as
Shylock’s Daughter
). To spin this tale of an actress who comes to Venice to make a movie of
The Merchant of Venice,
travels back in time, and falls in love with a young Will Shakespeare in the sixteenth-century ghetto of Venice, I not only submerged myself in literature about Venice and the Veneto but resided there as well. My unmethodical method is to live in a place, read everything about it, and let the ideas for the book germinate out of the interaction between the atmosphere and my unconscious.

Venetians have decamped to the foothills of the Dolomites and built summer villas there ever since the days of Palladio. Since I sensed that my dashing young Will Shakespeare and my older actress heroine, Jessica Pruitt, would eventually round out their
avventure
in the Palladian villas of the Veneto, I made it my pleasant obligation to see every Palladian villa, every hill town, every church—major or minor. Since my sixteenth-century Jessica was Jewish, like Shakespeare’s, I also immersed myself in the Jewish history of Venice, the story of the Venetian ghetto, and the traces of Jewish life in Bassano, Ásolo, Montebelluna, Castelfranco.

I discovered that there were some towns, like Castelfranco, that had had thriving Jewish populations throughout the Middle Ages; that there had been pogroms caused by blood-libel accusations even among the tolerant Italians; that Jews were welcomed as bankers when there was need for their leavening financial efforts but often thrown out when they became too successful, as elsewhere. I came to understand why Jewish mothers all wanted their sons to become doctors in medieval and Renaissance Venice. The doctor did not have to wear the yellow hat identifying him as a Jew, and he could leave the ghetto after curfew. Many of the doges of Venice had Jewish doctors. To be a doctor meant unparalleled freedom for a Jewish man.