It’s unusual for me, but I’ve been thinking about travel. After four days of watching a few radicals tear apart the U.S. House last week, I’ve decided to get away, at least for the weekend.
For instance, to Italy!
As a child, I loved the living room slide shows that the grownups would put on and narrate when company came. My blog post today is not the same thing, but I invite you to turn out the lights, get a cup of coffee and dessert, and find a nice armchair.
A (not armchair) traveler has shared photos with me from her trip to Italy in 2005. And a few authors are here, too, to comment.
“In northern cities,” wrote Henry James in 1909, “there are beautiful houses, picturesque and curious houses; sculpted gables that hang over the street, charming bay-windows, hooded doorways, elegant proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament.”
What rooms, what gardens, what passions would be revealed if you knocked on one of these doors?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived in the Casa Guidi in Florence from 1847 to 1861.
“Here,” she wrote, “we can step out of the window on a sort of balcony terrace which is quite private, and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as we live upon watermelons, iced water, and figs, and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with angelic patience and felicity.”
And 21st century writer Claire Messud, might add her celebrated “bars of expensive, almost crumbly, Italian chocolate, very dark, in gilded foil.”
From Anne Hollingsworth Wharton’s travel notes in 1906,
“The clotheslines stretched across the streets from window to window, on which are hung garments of every size, degree, color, and ingenuity of patch, with the predominant red and white lending a certain picturesqueness to the motley array".”
In Italian Hours, Henry James wrote,
“When I hear the magical name Venice, it is not the great Square of which I think, nor the Grand Canal, the low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, not the dark chambers of St. Marks. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city — a patch of green water and a pink wall.
The gondolier’s cry makes a splash in the stillness. A girl crosses a little bridge. Behind the pink wall is a garden out of which a white June rose has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament.”
In her 1905 book, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, Edith Wharton urges travelers “not to be content with a vague enjoyment of old Italian gardens, but extract from them principles which may be applied to home."
“Traveling is the ruin of all happiness!” wrote the English novelist and playwright Fanny Burney several hundred years ago. “There’s no looking at a building after seeing Italy.”
“And there is absolutely no rushing,” added Henry James.
“What is the fatal charm of Italy?” asks Erica Jong. “What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.”
Virginia Woolf said after a visit to Italy, “. . . our poor English want educating into gladness. They want refining not in the fire but in the sunshine.”
Yes! And even though I wasn’t there to take these pictures myself, they tell me why Anna Akhmatova would say,
“Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life”
Now the slide projector has been switched off, with the fan still running to cool the bulb. The lights are turned up and together we arrive back in the living room, as on a dock or a tarmac.
Among the impressions I bring back with me are the ones I was looking for —a fresh perspective and my natural optimism in human nature.
If you’ve visited or lived in Italy, what impressed you the most?
Lovely, thanks for the breather!
Thank you for a lovely morning respite, Deda! I would love to take this enchanted journey.