One of them was the town of Salsomaggiore Terme, where, by a happy coincidence, Romano was singing in a little concert one evening. Danny was feeling under the weather, having inherited the cold I'd been suffering from before we left California, so he stayed home while our guests and I took a quick train ride to Salso (as it's known locally), which is about six miles from Fidenza.
The town's name means, literally, "major salt baths," because its salty, mineral-rich water has been a tourist attraction since the beginning of the 19th century, when visitors first began coming to marinate themselves in the town's naturally occurring brine. To attract still more visitors, a dramatic new bath facility was constructed starting in 1912. By the time this grand mash-up of Moorish, Art Deco, and Asian influences was completed in 1923, Mussolini had come to power. Although it wasn't designed by fascists, the facade definitely has an authoritarian vibe.
According to online reviews I've read, the inside is extravagantly decorated, too, but rather shabby. Anyway, by the time we got to Salso the palazzo delle terme had closed for the day, while the concert, like many musical events in this part of the world, started late, in this case 9:15 p.m.
The grand spa and the square in front of it seemed deserted as we walked through, and the massive four- and five-star hotels we passed did, too, with no lights visible in their upstairs windows. October is probably the slow season, but Pam and Romano had told us that Salso and other spa towns have fallen on hard times since the Italian government began tightening its belt a couple of decades ago.
Once upon a time Italian workers received not only a generous paid vacation, but several weeks of spa treatment, all expenses paid, if their doctor prescribed it. And doctors did, for everything from heart trouble to respiratory ailments. The Italian health service still pays for a few weeks at the spa, but now your days taking the waters are subtracted from your vacation. Most people apparently decide they'd rather go to the beach with their families or take a trip than spend a big chunk of their time off sitting in hot mineral water. And that has Salso and other spa towns feeling more than a little underwater themselves.
Nevertheless, the place still has a certain grandeur. The venue for Romano's concert, the "Caryatid Room," was formerly a ballroom in a very grand spa hotel.
The mural dates from the 1920s, so I assume the rest of the decor does, too. I loved that the caryatids holding the ceiling up all have little bellies. Back then "spa" didn't mean "starvation diet."
The evening's program was the Italian version of a pops concert. First Romano and one of his students, a young tenor, sang a series of 19th-century salon songs and Verdi arias, accompanied by a cello-clarinet-piano trio. The pianist and the clarinetist, brothers, also contributed a couple of pretty compositions that sounded uncannily like 19th-century salon songs. Here's Romano (on the right) giving us some Verdi. He was, as always, great.
Then, ladies and gentleman, the Salsomaggiore Terme city band! It appeared to be made up equally of high-school kids and retirees, all in matching blue blazers. They collectively took this gig seriously enough to have invested in white shoes, which may not have been a stretch for some of the pensioners but was surely not something most of the kids would wear in any other part of their lives. Although maybe teen style in Italy is more Italian than I realize.
The band was tight and excitingly loud, but their program consisted almost entirely of American tunes, including Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder medleys of songs so old that I remembered hearing them on the radio when I was still in school. The only Italian number in their set came at the end, when the band launched into the national anthem and the audience stood to attention.
As I listened to this rollicking tune--it sounds like one of those village-band numbers in an Italian opera--I was shocked to realize that despite all my fussing and fluttering about learning Italian and taking my new Italian citizenship seriously, I'd not only never learned the Italian national anthem, I'd never even listened to it.
Click here and you can listen to the first verse (like the U.S. national anthem, it has many more) and chorus and see the lyrics. I'm grateful to have had this musical treasure finally brought to my attention, because everything about it tickles me. The slightly preposterous oompah music, the over-ripe classical references, the cheerful death-cult lyrics ("We are ready to die, we are ready to die!") that the tune assures us aren't to be taken too seriously, the happy "Yes!" at the end--it all seems delightfully Italian to me. It's one more reason 'm glad I have some claim to be one of them.
More of our adventures in my next post. This one's already too long.
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