Italian immersion

As mentioned, our friend Valerie came to town for a few days from her aerie in the beautiful hill town of Orvieto. We have no comparable scenery, so instead I tried to wow her with immersive Italian experiences. Valerie is also working hard on learning Italian, so one day we had coffee and Italian conversation with my dear friend Franca, who took this photo of us. You can see that Valerie jumped right in when it came to speaking la bella lingua. 

I look like I am trying to remember a word, which is how I often look when listening to Italian. 

We also played chamber music with cellist Luisa, who taught us several musical terms we ought to know. (Music Italian--the way they say things like "Let's try it again from the repeat" or "Who else has an upbeat?"--is dismayingly different from music English.) For additional immersion, we had an entertaining coffee date with my upstairs neighbor, Pia, discussing politics here and in the U.S., and saw the movie Parasite, which was, like all movies in Italy, dubbed into Italian. We were both pleasantly surprised by how much we understood of the movie, and by how good it was, since we'd ignorantly assumed it was some sort of monster flick. Which I guess it is, but not in the way we expected.

Although she's done a lot of Italian travel, Valerie had never been to Parma, so a trip there was our big outing. It's only a 12-minute train ride from Fidenza.

Our first stop was a traditional restaurant, Trattoria Corrieri, where we had torta fritta (fried bread), giardiniera (lightly pickled vegetables), two big platters of prosciutto, salame, deep-fried pork skin, pancetta (raw bacon), and other pork delicacies, and then--although none of us had room left--a tris of tortelli: potato (the green), cheese and chard (the white), and pumpkin (the red). By the end of the meal we were ready to sing the chorus of the Italian national anthem: "Siam' pronti alla morte!"

I was particularly keen to visit Parma's Galleria Nazionale, which I'd never seen. It's inside the gigantic Palazzo della Pilotta, which isn't actually a palace but a complex of very big, not very attractive buildings originally intended to house armories, stables, barracks, and other accoutrements of the ruling Farnese family's power.

In 1615 Ranuccio Farnese ordered the construction of a spectacular theater inside what had been an armory, in order to celebrate an upcoming visit by Cosimo de' Medici and a planned marriage uniting his son with a daughter of the Medici family. Both Ranuccio and Cosimo died before the marriage and the theater's inauguration both finally took place in 1628.

Built of wood so that it could be constructed quickly, the theater was originally decorated in lavish splendor with paint, plaster, and gilt. During World War II the theater was bombed and went up in flames, but it was immediately rebuilt and is now part of the museum. 

Today it's plain wood, undecorated, which makes it even more beautiful, at least to modern eyes. I'm sorry my little phone camera can't do it more justice. It was literally breathtaking to walk into that vast, gorgeous space. Especially since no one else was there.

I took a photo of this portrait thinking it depicted Ranuccio I, who built the theater. It's actually his grandson, Ranuccio II, the offspring of the above-mentioned Medici-Farnese marriage. Wouldn't you think that someone so rich and powerful could commission a more flattering likeness? And what's with that awful dress? The dog is cute, though, and maybe shows that Ranuccio II was not as evil as he appears.

Ranuccio II, Duke of Parma, by Franz Denys, 1662

We left much of the museum unexplored--there's an archeological section, a museum devoted to typesetting, and rooms full of paintings we didn't get to--but I snapped photos of a couple of canvases by Lionello Spada that spoke to me. 

One is his 1612 Capture of Christ.  The faces of the young men taunting and torturing Jesus are delightful, so full of stupid malice.

The other, from around 1610, is titled The Executioner Gives Salome the Head of the Baptist and was part of a whole room of paintings of people being beheaded, an interesting curatorial approach. 

I love the way the executioner, the servant, and John the Baptist's head all cast such sadly disapproving looks at Salome, who is too lost in lust to notice.  

Of course we also visited Parma's famous baptistery, the number-one sight in the city and, according to Wikipedia, one of the most important medieval monuments in all of Europe. The weather report said for once we'd have a day with no rain, but it started to sprinkle when we got there. Parma still looked great, though. This is the street leading off the piazza in front of the baptistery.

Here's a photo of the baptistery that I swiped from Wikipedia. It's a strange building, eight-sided and very tall, unlike anything else in the city, or anywhere else, for that matter. How did someone in the 12th century come up with the idea of a skyscraper for baptisms? 

The fellow who designed it was Benedetto Antelami, who also did many of the sculptures outside and inside the baptistry. He's the same Antelami whose work is all over Fidenza's own cathedral.                                                                          

Here is one of the baptistery's three doors. The receding arches are like an overture, signaling that there's something spectacular inside.

The baptistery ceiling, so far away.

The interior is one vast room covered in frescoes depicting the lives of saints, religious proverbs, apostles and church fathers, and various animals, stretching all the way up to the top of the domed ceiling. You could spend all day looking at all of it, if your eyes and your neck could stand it. Like the Farnese Theater, its scale and its beauty are awe-inspiring, even if you've seen it before.

Here's the baptismal font in the center of the room. Note the frescoes in the background. (Also the tourist.) Perhaps because of the weather, there was no one else visiting for most of the time we were there. 

Next door is Parma's Duomo, a typically huge cathedral full of frescoes and side chapels, with a famous Assumption of the Virgin by Coreggio filling the main dome. It shows Mary from below as she wafts into heaven, so you see mostly just her feet. After the medieval sincerity of the baptistery the cathedral, with all its gilt and Michelangelo-esque muscles, frankly seems a little crass.

There weren't many people in the cathedral, either, so we mostly had it to ourselves as we walked around. Suddenly I heard a woman's voice raised in loud lamentation. In between sobs, she cried out, "Per favore, per favore, ti prego. Ti prego!" ("Please, please, I beg you!" or, literally, "I pray to you").

I walked toward the side chapel whence the voice came, hoping to perhaps witness some genuine religious fervor amid the cathedral's ponderous and not very convincing performance of same. A man who seemed to be the sexton was moving in the same direction, and with much more purpose.

He strode up behind the woman, who was facing the chapel altar, and tapped her on the shoulder. "Keep it down," he told her in Italian. 

I was shocked until she turned toward him and I realized that she had been talking on her cell phone.  

She lowered her voice for a few minutes but soon she was yelling and crying just as loudly. I had no compunctions about taking a photo. But despite all that Italian immersion I couldn't understand much of what she was saying, beyond that she seemed to be having a fight with her mother. 

When dreams come true

On the day I flew back to Italy from New York I stopped off in Brooklyn to have lunch with my son at a wonderful ramen restaurant near his house, ramen being something I'd been hungry for but hadn't had a chance to eat for many months. Then I headed to Kennedy and as usual got there ridiculously early. And I realized that I might as well realize a long-cherished fantasy of travel luxury: getting a manicure at an airport spa.

It was a pleasantly meditative experience and more reasonable, relative to real-world prices, than most airport food. Moreover, the polish is only now starting to look really ratty, two weeks out, and I'm cheered every time I notice my screaming scarlet nails.

Interestingly enough (to me, at least), red fingernails have a particular significance in the long friendship between me and Pam, my Fidenza co-conspirator and guardian angel. Many, many years ago, in another time, place, and psychological state, the two of us were part of an ensemble that performed a Mozart quartet in Carnegie Recital Hall. (Not Carnegie Hall, the little for-rent auditorium next door.) The day of the concert all of us were hideously nervous, and one way I soothed myself was to carefully varnish my nails bright red.

The rest of the group was disapproving when I turned up with my garish manicure. No one in our social circle ever painted her nails, including me. But to me that nail polish felt like a lucky talisman. I was playing viola, an inner voice instrument, while Pam was on violin, with a part that was far more challenging and much more exposed. In that moment of high anxiety my red nails seemed like a small way of transforming myself from the terrified screw-up I feared I was into the confident show-off I yearned to be.

In my memory our performance went smoothly, though not brilliantly. But Pam remembers that at some point during the proceedings she panicked and dropped out for a measure or two. Afterwards our cellist, of the four of us the most severely opposed to frivolity of any kind, opined that my nails were a deliberate effort to sabotage Pam's performance. Pam never believed I'd done something so malevolent, but she claims to still have a bit of a phobia about red nails.

I eventually abandoned the viola, which I'd taken up only grudgingly, and went back to what I really wanted to play, the violin. Over the years since then I've continued to play, at an amateur level but with tremendous pleasure. Meanwhile Pam switched in the other direction and took up the viola for a while; it turned out she'd envied me the viola as much as I'd envied her the violin. But then, under the pressure of work, family, and her dozens of other creative hobbies, she stopped playing. Twenty-five years went by.

One of the great joys of my California life is playing chamber music with a network of friends and acquaintances, from casual get-togethers sight-reading Haydn quartets to intensive workshops on the fine points of playing Milhaud and Shostakovich. Once Danny and I had more or less settled into the Fidenza half of our lives,  chamber music began to seem like a missing piece. I needed to build up an Italian musical network, and Pam and her dust-covered viola were an obvious place to start.

Pam adores music but at first she balked at the prospect of starting to play again. Even being away from a string instrument for a few weeks means your hands lose a little strength, the callouses on your fingertips start to soften, and you sound noticeably crappier than you did before you took the time off. She was certain that after 25 years whatever technique she'd had would be gone for good.

Her anxiety proved no match for my determination, however. I badgered her relentlessly to just come over for an hour, play easy duets with me, no practicing required. She succumbed and, even though at first her sound was indeed pretty rusty, as soon as she began to connect with the music her playing improved by leaps and bounds. "Just don't paint your nails," she joked.

Then my mom died and I had to go to New York, and while I was gone Pam retreated back into not playing. After I got my airport manicure I sent her a photo of my nails and the message, "Look out!"

I don't know if it was the manicure, the ripple in the continuum Pam and I had already created by playing together, or random luck, but soon after I returned to Fidenza chamber music suddenly flooded into my life. First, my friend Valerie put me in touch with Birgit, a Viennese violinist who was visiting Bologna (about an hour from here) for a few days and looking for folks to play with while she was in the area. Birgit recruited a Japanese cellist who lives in Milan and they met up with Pam and me at my apartment a week ago. We played Mozart and Haydn all afternoon and then had dinner together, and despite some bumpy musical moments we all had a great time.

Kazuhiko, me, Pam, and Birgit. Photo courtesy of Kazuhiko's wife, Maria.

At around the same time I heard from my friend Ornella, a pianist in Fidenza with whom I've occasionally played violin-piano sonatas. Ornella works a lot, is renovating an old farmhouse, and is caring for her mother, who's quite ill, so she has not been able to play with me since I was in Fidenza last summer. But she put me in touch with Luisa, a local cellist, whom I was not shy about wooing.

So a few days after our international quartet extravaganza I invited Luisa over to play trios with Pam and me. She turned out to be a strong player as well as a delightful new acquaintance--moreover, one who doesn't speak much English, and so provides another opportunity to practice Italian. And I noticed that the more Pam played, the more confident she became and the more beautiful she sounded. I was dizzyingly proud of all three of us.

The next day my friend Valerie arrived from her part-time home in Orvieto for a visit, bringing along her brand-new and very lovely Orvieto-made violin. On Friday she, Pam, Luisa, and I played Mozart, Haydn, and even an early Dvorak, and we sounded mostly terrific.

Danny took this photo while we were playing Dvorak.

The day after that--the day before yesterday--Valerie, Pam, and I got together again to sight-read terzetti by Fuchs and Dvorak for two violins and viola. It's a funny combination of instruments for which not much has been written, but these pieces were delightful.

I don't expect to keep up quite so intensive a pace going forward, especially since Valerie has now returned to Orvieto, so I no longer have an in-house violinist. But we already have a date to play piano quartets with Ornella, and more trios with Luisa are highly likely. Moreover Pam has thought of a few other musicians she knows who might like to join us.

Ploughing through the classical repertoire and struggling with problems of intonation, coordination, and ensemble might not sound like everyone's idea of a good time. But for some of us, amateur chamber music provides a whole buffet of pleasures. First is the stunning beauty of the music itself and the excitement of being part of making it. Also, a surge of communal "We did it!" elation happens whenever the group manages to stay together through a challenging passage or a tempo change. And you feel a personal champion-athlete electricity when you pull off a difficult run or get a high note in tune. I am incredibly lucky that this is something I am now getting to do on two continents.

While we were playing quartets the other night I also realized that my mom is responsible for much of the happiness I was feeling. An amateur cellist, she played music with friends all her life and she and I often played together, especially in recent years. Now I was carrying forward what she'd given me and feeling tremendous gratitude.

Dot (on cello) at a music workshop we attended in Vermont last year, shortly before she became ill.

I have not felt a lot of sorrow since she died, but last night I was sad that I couldn't call her up and tell her how my musical life in Fidenza has taken off. She would be so pleased. And so much more interested in all the fascinating, tedious details of it all than anybody else on the planet will ever be.

Meanwhile, Pam is thrilled to be playing chamber music again and admits that after all she isn't half bad, even after that long hiatus. She is not ready to give my red nails any credit for her success, however.

Post-mortem

I realize that my long silence after announcing the death of my mom a few weeks ago may have created the impression among my faithful readers that I have been paralyzed by either grief or the weight of post-mortem responsibilities.

The truth is that, having managed to get everything done in New York that I needed to, at least for now, I've been back in Fidenza for well over a week. It has been cold and rainy here, but despite the gloomy atmosphere I've been feeling entirely cheerful and pursuing my usual Italian-side activities with great pleasure, even though my duties as a blogger seem to have fallen by the wayside.

I think these lights are for Christmas, but maybe they're permanent.

Not that there wasn't a lot to do back in New York. In addition to the usual legal business and the canceling of subscriptions, phone service, cable TV, and so on, we all faced the challenge of dealing with her stuff. We'd already moved her three times since our father died 15 years ago--once to her new solo apartment, then to the retirement community where she'd been living for the last eight or nine years, and last summer to a new apartment in the same building--and each time we helped her whittle down her heap of possessions.

However, the heap was still piled pretty high. Dot was a prolific artist and a dedicated shopper, and she was loath to throw things out, especially things she'd made. We her progeny already had as many of her paintings, pottery, and sculptures as we had room for, sometimes more than that, but she held on to many of her best works till the end. When she died these coveted items became available, and most of us decided we could find room for at least some of them.

I'm happy to report that who got what was settled amicably. There was some contention at first, but once we stopped trying to discuss things via social media and talked to each other face to face, we were able to resolve issues quickly and with good humor. Both my kids wanted and adopted a lot of things linking them to their grandparents, which pleases me more than I would have expected. And I'll be eternally grateful to my New York sibs and their spouses, who bore the brunt of clearing out Dot's last apartment and handled that difficult job with generosity and aplomb.

My sister took this sad last picture of Dot's place minus Dot.

The obvious takeaway from that experience would be to accept the transience of life and the emptiness of material things and get to work disposing of a lot of our own stuff now, rather than leaving it behind for our kids and other relatives to deal with. This point was driven home to me when I first arrived in New York and my brother and daughter greeted me by exclaiming, "You're the oldest one now!" As if that hadn't been occurring to me all during what my sister referred to as our mother's "endless farewell tour."

Like most Americans, however, my reflexive response to reminders of my own mortality is a desire to shore myself up with things, lots of them. In addition to bringing some more of Dot's paintings back to Italy with us, plus quite a few of her ceramics, some costume jewelry, a raincoat, a set of place mats, a nutcracker, a wine stopper, and even a few pairs of shoes, I've been obsessively thinking about the Italian winter wear I ought to be buying and the Italian tchotchkes we need. We're also embarking on a construction project, a second bathroom, which will require all kinds of additional purchases beyond the obvious fittings.

So instead of pondering the grimly inevitable, I'm deliberately not thinking about what will become of our ever-growing hoard when Danny and I pass over to the other side. (Sorry, kids.) And in the meantime I will be cataloging a good deal of what we're accumulating here. Please stay tuned.