Things to Love: The Unexpected, Part I

Dear Friends,

I wrote this blog post before our worldwide crisis, when The Unexpected had a different significance. Please join me in a smile remembering happier times in Italy. This is the first in a series of blogs about my July 2019 trip.

L.

Us frequent travelers know pretty much where we are going, how we are going to get there and how long we will stay. We arrive at our destination with guides, maps, reservations, tickets, and well-planned itineraries. But what happens when we suddenly find ourselves in a place called Unexpected? It happened to me this past summer, on a beach, beneath a bright orange umbrella and a hot Italian sun.

 I met Pina Carrara in the fall of 2018, when she was teaching a cooking class at Philadelphia’s Osteria, where her son-in-law Jeff Michaud is the Owner/Chef. I wasn’t able to attend all the classes (due to chemo treatments) but we became fast friends, taking daily long walks on the Schuylkill together. When spring came, and time for her to return to Italy, she invited me to come to Venice in July where she had a timeshare. I jumped at the serendipitous invitation to return to La Serenissima, determined yet again to try and reclaim the Italy of my youth. At the end of my trip I will visit Pina in Bergamo, where she lives, after I spend a week on my own in the beautiful city of Vicenza, where I planned to do research on my book about my Turkish father, American mother, and growing up in Italy. 

You see, we lived there from 1962 to 1966, in a villa sitting in the lap of the green Berici hills with a view of orderly vineyards and the Dolomite mountains. The four years there changed our lives and we have never been the same. Italy took over our souls and became our very being, our heartbeat and breath. I have tried many times to go back to the past, in both visits and in words, but it is only a momentary trip to the past, like a switch has been turned on and off and I find myself in the present. No matter what I do to try and find her,  the little girl in knee socks who fed pigeons out of her hand in Piazza San Marco and ate too much spaghetti, she is gone. 

Venice in July is typically unpleasant and humido but the summer of 2019 is “hotter than the devil’s armpit,” as they say. Shutters on windows are firmly shut and air conditioners work overtime. There is little relief except for cold drinks, gelato, and late-night dinners, when the sun goes down.

Pina’s timeshare is near Teatro La Fenice. The flat is small, in a centuries-old building, plus her granddaughter is with her, so I book a room at the affordable Hotel La Fenice et Des Artistes, a small, clean and quiet hotel (highly recommend). We go sightseeing, out to lunch in Murano, to the Rialto fish market, and back to Pina’s flat, where she makes the most amazing dinners with seafood I have never seen or tasted, like the canoce (mantis shrimp).

One day Pina decides we are going to escape the heat and go to the beach for the day. After a visit to the L’Ospedale and Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo. We hop on the vaporetto at San Zaccaria, and zoom off to the famous Lido.

When you look down the two-mile stretch you see blocks of color made by umbrellas at each of the private beaches. They all have open air restaurants, changing rooms and showers. There are larger cabanas, like little huts, that families rent for the summer and a number of them are occupied. Mothers mostly, and tons of kids, congregate around the cabanas and eat lunch at their little tables and lounge in reserved chairs near the water. We rent a couple of chairs from the bagnino or in dialect, the sdraio, and make ourselves comfortable beneath a bright orange umbrella. We get cold sodas, soak up the sun, which now feels good instead of painful, and relax. In this moment, caught off guard, like having tripped on a stone (see Proust), I find myself in Unexpected: without looking, trying, writing, wishing, wanting, I am back in 1962. 

Sitting under an orange umbrella, all I hear is Italian, as adults, children, grandparents, chat away. Soft Italian pop music wafts from the bar and restaurant to a background of clinking glasses and plates. Little girls, wearing bottoms only, dig in the sand while impromptu teams of boys and men play soccer. Mothers in bikinis and dark eyeglasses occasionally look up from their Oggi’s and Amica’s (popular Italian magazines) with instructions and reminders about too much sun and lunchtime. In the shade, darkly tanned men in very small bathing suits, their anatomy fully realized in shape and form, relax on lounge chairs next to old ladies who wear colorful scarfs around their heads and smoke. They all smoke. And talk, and talk. The smell of pasta, tomatoes, basil, anchovies, lunch taking its own shape in the restaurant, greets us as we go to eat. I order Bigoli in salsa and insalata mista and they arrive at the table like gifts from the gods. I am smitten, held aloft, gently riding the waves of a long-ago Italy that I thought lost forever. And it is there at my fingertips, as bright as day, as if it had been waiting for me all along and all I had to do was open my eyes.

I thought the experience of being totally transported in time was one of the most amazing times of my life but there was another gift yet to come. 

Dinner at Pina’s isn’t until 9:00 so I have an hour to myself, to think about the remarkable day. I go to the bar on the small piazza outside the hotel to have a celebratory drink and to imagine my father and mother are here with me. I dress in one of my mother’s favorite outfits: her thick gold bracelet from Vicenza, her black and white Givenchy scarf, white pants and black top. I order an Aperol spritz and make a toast to Mom and Dad, silently hoping they will send a sign that they are with me, though I don’t expect it, really, until it happens. I look up. Strung across the piazza are gold glass and brass lanterns, exactly like the one we bought in Venice and hung in our house. We kept the lamp for years and years. It found a final resting place in Mom’s garage, without its careful wrapping, sitting alone, its relevance in our lives dimmed, but never forgotten.