Midway: Postcard from Italy

Robert Heylmun is traveling, and sends us this expanded postcard

Maybe I should have said ‘half way’. This note has nothing to do with the aircraft carrier now serving as a naval museum in San Diego harbor, but it does have to do with having spent fifteen or so of my thirty allotted days here in Florence.

            When I tell friends that I am spending a month in Italy, they are often in awe of what sounds like a long time on a trip. I learned years ago that a month goes by very quickly, seemingly more quickly when you’re busy having lots of dinners with old friends. It is for that reason that my current flat mate Alice usually spends three months here (she can’t this year.) Anyway, we have been cramming a lot of things into our limited time. It’s the quality, not the quantity of time here that makes the difference.

            Nine years ago I met Maurizio who was then finishing his laurea (university degree) at the University of Florence at the ripe old age of thirty-three. And that is ‘ripe old’ for a laurea. Postponing the degree puts you into a job market that seeks people who have finished their university studies in their twenties. Sure enough, Maurizio had some trouble finding a job here and finally went to Stockholm to work for the Italian consulate.

            Maurizio has always been extremely generous with his car. Back in 2001 he took me and another friend up the mountain outside of Vinci (Leonardo’s hometown) to the area around Abitone, a ski resort in the winter, but a luxuriously wooded area in the summer. We hiked into the nearby hillsides where we ate wild berries and looked over the valleys beneath that stretched toward the province of Modena and beyond.
            Maurizio took me on a number of small trips in those days, and this past Friday he wanted Alice and me to meet him in Empoli from where he would drive us to the seaside, namely to a town called Castiglioncello. His aunt, now deceased, had years ago wisely bought property there. So off we went.

            The regional train left the station in Florence at precisely 9:27AM when its schedule said it would (no one seems to thank Mussolini any longer), and after a couple of brief stops, got us to Empoli right on time. Maurizio was waiting for us at the station, and we walked with him to his aunt’s house, there to meet his uncle (aunt’s brother) and a collection of turtles that live in the garden. Before long we were driving toward the beach.

            Italy constantly surprises visitors, even us old hands who sometimes think we’ve seen it all. At the top of a high hill overlooking the port of Livorno, now the second busiest in the country, sits the Santuario della Madonna di Montenero. Maurizio managed to drive us up to see it. The church itself is splendidly baroque and probably only a few centuries old, but the astonishing feature of the place has to do with what are called voti. The walls are lined with drawings, paintings, crocheted illustrations, photographs, and even newspaper articles which thank the Madonna for intervening in accidents, thus rescuing hundreds, perhaps thousands of people from death.

The voti seem to be loosely organized around the nature of the accident they portray: one group shows people falling out windows; another features people who were nearly burned to death; there are motor accidents; still more thank la Madonna for keeping them safe through earthquakes. And on it goes. Almost any calamity you can think of that might befall humans is represented there. The best of the voti are painted or drawn in a primitive style (we were reminded of Grandma Moses), and that very style makes their grateful messages much more poignant.

Who knew this place existed? Even the ex-pats with whom we had lunch the next day back in Florence hadn’t heard of Montenero. Some are thinking of organizing a trip to see it. We assured them that it’s well worth the effort.

            We went on toward Castiglioncello .The ever hospitable Maurizio proposed stopping for groceries so that he could give us lunch at one of his apartments. We finally talked him out of that, and offered instead to treat him to lunch at a seafood restaurant I remembered from years ago called La Cicala che Ride (The Laughing Cricket), some ten kilometers away in the neighboring town of Cecina.

And what a lunch it was. Alice ordered a spaghetti con arselle (small clams), and we each had a plate of assorted fish and seafood.  Maurizio dug into a fabulous seafood stew. We shared assaggi (samples) of everything, washing our lovely meal down with an excellent, but by local standards, ordinary red wine. Maurizio had only one small glass of it so that he felt OK about driving us back to Castiglioncello.

            A stroll through the town followed, very welcome as we walked off lunch. This sleepy beach town whose topography strongly resembles Laguna Beach, California, in its less populated days; it has a cove, rocks and cliffs that border parts of it, rising up from the shore and providing shelves on top where streets are lined with great trees that shade its houses and its modest business district.

The train goes there as well, and after coffee at a chic and modern café’, we bought tickets for Florence. Maurizio was staying in town to do some repairs in the apartments, but of course, always the gracious host, saw us onto the train.

            It had been a rich day, one whose hours sailed by. Such days as this one, imprisoned in memory’s amber, are imperishable and a permanent treasure. The trick is to have as many days like this as possible so that when that month, which many people think of as a long time, comes to an end, you’ve got a string of gems to wear home and show off to friends. 

Are you inspired by travel? let us know where you have been!