il dolce far niente
sick days, besides the actual being sick part, are so nice, especially on days like this one, where i'm just lazing around at tommy's house (he works from home), playing on one of his six laptops, and stretching out in the sun coming through the window.
feeling sleepy yet stimulated by the lukewarm cappucino i just made, i decided to do one of my favorite internet activites (besides compulsive blog reading): searching around for articles and pictures of italy so i can feel nostalgic. i checked out www.laurafraser.com -- she's a writer living in san francisco who wrote a book i absolutely adore called an italian affair. in it, she comes to spend some time in italy after her husband divorces her. she's been to italy before; she's got friends there, speaks the language and knows the country inside out, so it's more of a comforting refuge than a vacation where she feels like she has to see every museum and piazza. one day, while on the mediterranean island of ischia, she meets a french professor in her pensione, a craggy bob dylan look-alike. though he lives in paris, married, they eventually start an affair that spans years and continents. they meet everywhere from london to morocco to italy to california, knowing that they'll never have anything permanent, but not really wanting anything permanent, either. the book has all the makings of a trashy harlequin novel, but fraser really has a deft touch and a good sense of humor, plus all her descriptions of the various locales are observant and never cross the line into sentimentality or heavy-handedness.
she's got a new article up on her site about the aeolian islands, a small archipelago between the toe of the boot and the island of sicily. she writes about taking a hydrofoil from island to island, which reminded me of a ferry trip i took with friends from ischia to sorrento during our spring break last march. that day, the weather was postcard-perfect, and we couldn't resist going up to the observation deck and spreading our possessions amongst the rows of narrow seats. we all draped our towels out on the boat railings to let them dry in the sun and, having decided it was just too nice to wear long pants, simultaneously dug through our massive backpacks for skirts, pulling them over our jeans, then sliding our jeans off underneath. needless to say, we got some strange looks from the italians up there with us, but we'd realized long ago that we were, and always would be, brutta figura -- ugly figure, literally translated -- and had become completely desensitized to derisive glances from the stylish and perfectly coiffed natives.
but italian men, as gross and obnoxious as we might have been, clearly couldn't resist our crude american charms, and several came over to talk to us on the two-hour ride. the one i remember most clearly was roberto, who, even in the blazing sun, was wearing a full suit, his shirt buttons opened nearly to his stomach and his well-oiled curls shining. he was somewhat charming and funny, though as he talked, we all shot sideways glances at each other, realizing that at the same time, he was actually really creepy, and probably imagining all of us with him in bed in various positions. roberto's downfall came when he noticed all of our bikinis hanging out to dry on the backs of our seats. picking up natania's rather large swimsuit top, chuckling, he said, "you could - how do you say - with this one, you could parachutista, you know, out of the plane?"
and that was the end of roberto.
anyway, i never made it to the aeolian islands, though a few of my friends did, going to stromboli, a tiny island with only 400 full-time residents, to hike the live volcano at dawn and watch the orange lava flow down the silouhette of the mountain. on the island, as fraser notes in her article, there is a plaque on a tiny candy-colored house that commemorates the place where ingrid bergman and roberto rossellini started their affair. this fact, plus descriptions i've read of the islands, convinces me that stromboli must be one of the most bizarrely romantic places in italy -- a place where the contrasting confusion of rocky isolation and rich, overwhelming scents and sights somehow drive you to a primitive desire to just have sex all the time. i'm even more convinced of this fact when i remember the story of e., a roommate of mine in italy, who had her own italian affair on stromboli.
you'd think it be a rite of passage to fall for an italian man while living in italy, but it never happened to me and my friends the year that we lived there. many of us had boyfriends back home, and as for the single girls, they never encountered someone with whom they clicked. especially e., who was still pining over an ex from college. she was also rather prim and picky, growing up the spoiled eldest in a wealthy new england family. e. wouldn't hang up her clothes in her closet until she had vacummed and polished the interior and she ironed her bedsheets; you can imagine that her standards for dating were rather strict, then, and a lot of italian men just didn't measure up. well, let's face it, men all over the world just didn't measure up.
that was, until she met maurizio. he was a strombolian local, born and raised on the island, never having left italy during his 23 years. he worked as a groundskeeper on the national park surrounding the volcano, wore a dangling feather earring in his left ear, and drove a rickety motorino. i have no idea how he and e. met or how they even communicated, each only speaking a little of the opposite's language; all i know is that she came back from her trip, blushing and raving about how she had ridden on the back of his motorino without a helmet through the narrow village streets; how she had met much of his boisterous extended family, which seemed to make up half of the island population; how she had changed her vacation itinerary to stay with him for an extra day, a huge deal for e., inflexible and picky as she was. good for e., i thought; maybe the influence of stromboli had done as much for her as a bottle of wine would have -- loosened her up, flushed her cheeks and made her head spin.
but all good things must come to an end, and that included e.'s italian affair. her incessant mentions of maurizio started fading a week after she returned, as he called her three, four, sometimes five times a day on her cellphone, pleading for her to return to stromboli, just for one day, just for one more kiss. e., not surprisingly, was put off rather than enamoured with maurizio's stalkeresque actions. she eventually stopped answering when she saw it was him calling, and soon took up with both daniel, an albanian waiter, and seyung, a korean photography student. e. dumped the two of them when she left for the states; i really think she left a trail of lovelorn destruction across italy. if stromboli can do that to e., i can't imagine what affect it would have on anyone else who visits its blackened beaches and drinks malvasia, its famous amber-colored dessert wine. but i kind of want to find out.
