L’Italia

‘The other ambassadors warn me of famines, extortions, conspiracies, or else they inform me of newly discovered turquoise mines, or advantageous prices in marten furs, suggestions for applying damascened blades. And you?’ the Great Khan asked Polo. ‘You return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then of all your traveling?’ Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino.

You arrive at a city called Napoli where the trash is piled as high as your shoulder. Organized crime is to blame, they tell you. Dead birds litter the street and vile-looking dogs skimp about between the zips of mopeds carrying women who clutch babies in one arm and their boyfriend’s back with the other. The streets of Napoli are so black that on narrow streets you must look up to be sure of the sun’s existence. No one looks before crossing these streets, where a discordant symphony of cars and people and mopeds and elderly women dragging shopping trolleys behind them plays in endless repetitions. In Napoli, everyone, everywhere is involved in the fiercest argument you have ever seen, acted out in intense pantomimes. The old men sit on benches in front of shops that sell long, tight rolls of pink sausages, waiting for someone to join them, and the young girls run by in high heels outlined in diamantes.

In Napoli, a city spilling its ugliness right out to the sea, you will also eat the best pizza you have ever tasted and you will vow never to leave this city of traffic exhaust, garbage, and shouting men. The crust is more like naan bread, you think, and it is topped with a sauce so sweet and rich that you begin to ponder on climate and soil types and family secrets because you know this taste cannot be reproduced anywhere else in the world. You will dream of abandoning your family, selling your possessions and signing up for a course at the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana – the True Neopolitan Pizza Association – to become a pizziola. This is the effect of Napoli, the birthplace of pizza and chaos: it is a city of repulsion and desire.

When you have traveled for five hours from this city, heading north and northeast, you will come to another sea, one lined with perfect cliffs just like the ones you have seen on postcards from exotic places. Its beaches are made of stones so smooth you will lie down on them and feel as though you are swimming in sand. You will fill your backpack with them and insist on carrying them through two airports and all the way back home. At home you will arrange them carefully on a ceramic plate under your window so that you can see them and touch them and be reminded of what it was like to lie on that beach in the pink light of early evening, when smiles appeared without even a thought to precipitate them.

There along the Adriatic, in a town called Sirolo that was built along the beach before the sea became a thing of pleasure, are family-owned beach huts that look like a long row of garages. Painted in pale blues, pinks, and greens, they mark the spot where generation after generation has come to fish and cook their catches. One of them is open and you dare to peek inside where at first you see nothing but a picnic table and a camping stove and an orange and brown bead portieres. Looking more closely you notice a pasta strainer hanging from the wall, and next to it a framed, black-and-white photo of il nonno. This is a place painted so thick with tradition it threatens to smother you, but you are still envious.

By now you know that the special quality of Italy is to be fabulous even when it isn’t: a carpet of ants blackened the floor of the bathroom in your hostel in Pompeii; bees came to drink at the Tuscan farmhouse where you spent a week, and then hid in the grass from unsuspecting bare feet; in the hills outside of Perugia draught and water shortages offered a choice between flushing the toilet or showering just long enough to get wet.

All sins are forgotten, however, when holding a glass of wine made from grapes that grew just at the edge of the garden where you now sit. In the newly darkened sky you gaze at the golden glow of Montepulciano, rising above the vineyards like a crown on a king’s head. You suspect that it cannot be just good wine and good food and good weather that has enamored you with this country. Other countries offer these joys as well. What exactly is is, though, remains Italy’s secret.

Avrai tu l’universo, resti l’Italia a me. “You may have the universe, if I may have Italy,” wrote Guiseppe Verdi.

In the space of one breath – for that is all it takes – you realize that Italy is the country of all your dreams, both past and future. You know you will travel again, take new vacations to new places, or maybe even return to this very spot next summer. You will always be searching for a way back, not to this place, but to this moment.