A weekend in Abruzzo

A few weekends ago, my husband and I and two of our friends spent a couple of days in southern Abruzzo, where one of my husband's uncles has a small vacation house. I had already stayed there twice before, but this was my first winter visit. My husband had been promising to take me there since December, because I was longing to see some snow. Our schedule didn't permit an earlier trip, though, and neither did that of our guests, so we didn't make it to Abruzzo until early this month.

Fortunately, there was still some snow on the highest peaks, and as we drove higher and higher, we saw some even by the side of the road. (If we had waited two more weeks, and visited during the recent cold snap, surely we would have found more snow, and perhaps even witnessed it falling.) I insisted that we stop the car so that I could get out and walk in the snow. It was rather stiff; it had become ice really, but stomping in it was still a satisfying experience. While I was out frolicking, alone of course, as jumping about in the snow without boots, a coat, or even a scarf seemed risky to my fellow travellers, all of them Italian, I shot this photo:

I liked the effect of the striations left by the melting snow. I think the others must have been getting impatient with me because one of them actually ventured out into the cold and lobbed a snowball at me.

We arrived at the house in Pescocostanzo at lunch time, and we were hungry, so we decided to cook some pasta ai funghi, with mushrooms, and eat some prosciutto and bresaola we had purchased at a salumeria on the way. The kitchen was tiny and had only a few electric burners, which, it turns out, were faulty. It took an hour to boil the water for the pasta, and that was after the forty-five minutes spent preparing and cooking the mushrooms. Obviously, we should have thought to put the water on to boil even before we began the sauce. After a half hour of waiting for the water to boil, we all agreed to do the unthinkable: we ate the second course first. When the water finally began to boil, we dumped the pasta in, and you can imagine what happened next. It took a good five minutes to reach the boiling point again, but after that we didn't have to wait much longer to eat. We finished lunch shortly after four and decided to go for a ride to Roccaraso, a ski resort. After a passeggiata there, we moved on to Rivisondoli for dinner. Later, we walked around the town, enjoying the fresh mountain air, and after one of us chanced to look upwards, we also spent some time gazing at the lunar eclipse.

The next morning, we decided to go to Scanno and see the nearby lake. On our way there, we drove by a smaller body of water, and, as there was a place to park along the side of the road, we stopped to have a look and take some pictures.

The glistening reflection of the morning sun on the water's surface was breathtaking. I'm not sure what this body of water is called, but it's very near Lago di Scanno.

At Lago di Scanno, there were many families with children on the banks enjoying the mild weather. There were ducks circling the lake, nearing the shore now and then in search of a handout. My husband was captivated by some green-headed ducks that looked much like mallards. He claimed to have never seen ducks with green heads before. I was much more impressed by the few that were black-headed with white bills. Here's a partial view of the lake with some of the ducks visible in the distance:

After Lago di Scanno, we drove south to Villetta Barea, where we had lunch and later went for a walk along the edge of town, where here and there we found hundreds of tiny margherite, or daisies, some in groups, others solitary:

During our walk, the sky clouded up and the temperature began to fall. We left for Pescocostanzo, but stopped briefly on our way there at Barrea, for a view of the lake. By then the sky had darkened.
Here's the town of Barrea caught at a moment when the sun peeked through the forbidding clouds:
After Barrea, we continued to Pescocostanzo, where we packed our bags and put them in the trunk of the car. Before leaving, though, we went for a walk in the center. It was already dark when we climbed up to a terrace overlooking the town.Afterwards, we went to a bar called "The American" and had some hot chocolate, a relaxing way to prepare for our trip back to Campania.

Old dog, new trick

I had no idea that anyone still used hot water bottles. In my mind, they were linked to old cartoons and movies, and little old ladies of years long past who slept weighted down by layers of wool blankets that stank of mothballs. I had never even seen a real one until a few weeks ago.

We live in a large, old stone house that has no insulation. Energy is costly here, so we don't heat the house every day in the winter, and when we do turn the heat on, it's only for a few hours. I prefer heating the house in the afternoon, because some of the heat persists into the late evening when it's time to go to bed. Despite the lingering warmth, the bed is always chilly, and it takes some determination to get under the covers. For a while I let my husband get into to bed before me and warm it up while I pretended to busy myself in the kitchen, but he soon recognized this as a ruse and began to lament that it wasn't fair that he be expected to warm the bed every night. So it was back to getting into a cold bed for me.

My husband has an elderly aunt whose house is a stockpile of all imaginable housewares. She uses nothing and saves everything, and is always on the lookout for someone who needs something, so that she can unload her older items and make room for new acquisitions. To say older items, though, is misleading, because nearly everything she owns is in perfect condition, and usually still in its original packaging. Throughout the winter she offered us blankets, comforters and hot water bottles. We refused them all, proudly telling her about our very warm down comforter, but this approach had the unfortunate consequence of proving only that we didn't need blankets or comforters. We resisted the hot water bottle for a while, not wanting to associate ourselves with an item which, we thought, was probably used only by people twice our age. But we relented as she grew more persistent, which is what must always happen when dealing with this aunt. Shortly thereafter, she proudly proffered not one, but two, and in different colors, lest we do something unfortunate, like mix up "his" and "hers."

We used the hot water bottles for a few nights to warm the bed before getting into it, and afterward we pushed them to the bottom edge, using them to warm our feet. I suppose that was pleasant enough, but I had a hard time getting over the annoyance of kicking my bottle every time I turned. My husband pronounced them things of the vecchietti, or old people, and I agreed, so we emptied them and hid them away in a closet, planning to remove them again in forty years time, when they would be more suited to our lifestyle.

Yesterday was the second day of a particularly bad headache. It was so severe that I had to pass the day in darkness, and after dinner the pain became really unbearable. When I have headaches like these, I like to apply a hot compress to the area most afflicted by the pain. I tried to imagine something that would not only be big enough to cover the entire left side of my head, but also remain hot for a long while. So I had my husband fill one of the hot water bottles and bring it to me. At first I tried to balance it on my head, but it was cumbersome and much heavier than I thought it would be. Then I had the idea of placing it next to my pillow, and turning onto my side so that I could rest my face on it. Instant relief! So, while I'm still not convinced of its value as a bed warmer, I confidently recommend it as a cure for headaches. I'll be sure to use it the next time I have one. I think I'll buy a plush cover for it first, though.

Brain food

I was alarmed the other morning when, during breakfast, I began to read the cereal box in front of me and learned that I was consuming:


Were it not for the misspelling of sticks, it might even seem like a clever marketing strategy. After all, there is some evidence that eating breakfast cereal is good for the brain. I can only guess at why the text drifts off at "they." Is it because the experience of eating fruit with brain sticks is indescribable? Or perhaps at the last moment the translators realized that the addition chunks of fruit to sticks of brain would be not merely vile, but unspeakably so? I was reassured by reading the list of ingredients, until I got to "PP," that is. Fortunately, later research revealed that there really is a vitamin PP, perhaps better known as niacin. Regardless, I still think brain stiks are unappetizing.

The field of pears

My husband owns some agricultural land just outside the center of our town. The land once belonged to Zio Peppino, a buongustaio who loved to regale the people he knew with tales of his adventures in eating. He firmly believed that there is no greater pleasure than eating the produce of one's own land, and to that end he divided his time in retirement between the garden at his house in Sardegna and Campo di Pere, the name he gave to his terrain here in Campania. Shortly before he died, Zio Peppino took my husband on a tour of Campo di Pere, proudly showing off his many fruit trees. He carefully indicated the confines of the land that he promised would one day belong to my husband, all the while exhorting him to remember always that the only way we can be sure of purity of what we eat is to grow it ourselves. Zio Peppino had hoped to return one day to the town where he was born and build a house on his beloved field, but he died before he had even begun to realize his dream.

Zio Peppino would be happy to know that we intend to care for the land that he has left us. We have some projects already in mind for this year, the most important of which will be the olive harvest. The olives are the most numerous of all the trees planted there, and they would produce a harvest large enough to provide us with all the oil we could possibly need (a considerable quantity, considering the way I cook,) with plenty left over to make a fair profit selling it to our acquaintances. We've already decided which method we'll use to collect the olives: around the trees we'll place nets that will catch the fruit as it falls. This is perhaps the easiest method of harvesting olives, but it will require some extra effort because some of the trees have grown rather tall.



After the olives, the most plentiful are the fig trees. There are a few distinct varieties that fruit at different times during the summer and fall. Many of the trees fruit twice, the first harvest a plentiful one and the second scarcer, and with smaller fruit. Some of the figs grow large enough to fill my hand while others are small enough to be consumed in a single bite. The purple-skinned figs tend to be larger than the green ones. Here they call them black and white instead. Many of the fig trees are well established and quite large, and they produce so much fruit that it's impossible for us to consume it all, even though we each eat an average of a dozen figs a day while they're in season. I had never eaten fresh figs before I came to Campania, but with one taste, they became my favorite, easily pushing aside an adversary no less formidable than the pear.

There are some pear trees at Campo di Pere, as the name of the place suggests, but not nearly as many as there are figs or olives. I've noticed three of them, but only one of them produces any fruit worth eating. These are tiny and delicate pears, fragrant and very sweet. I recently saw a photo of pears that look very similar, and I now have a name to call them: Garofalo. Near the pear trees is an apricot tree that never fruits, or perhaps gluttonous thieves come by night and, under cover of darkness, pick every last apricot from its branches.



There are also several cherry trees, most of them saplings that produce only a few handfuls of fruit, but one of them is large and bears an embarrassment of perfect cherries, sweet-tart and almost black, and shining in the sunlight. This tree is a coy temptress, situated at the edge of an incline, which makes it impossible to reach its upper branches. No ladder placed beneath is tall enough, no ladder placed near the tree, so close to the edge, can be stable enough. Last June, as my husband and I picked the cherries, we filled our sacks with kilos of them, eating them as we worked. A city girl, I had never before eaten ripe cherries so freshly picked, and intoxicated by their taste, I stretched and contorted my body to reach the uppermost branches, but the treasure dangling there remained always out of reach.

There is a small clearing where some grapevines grow, and they are of two varieties, white grapes and purple ones, and the latter are like concord grapes: dark, thick-skinned and frosty. These are the sweetest grapes that I have ever eaten and I wonder if they are in fact the uva fragolino that I have read about. None of the vines produce enough to make wine. Although the grapes are delicious, I find them unpleasant to eat because of their thick skins, and so I have decided that this year I will try to make of them that great delicacy from America: concord grape juice.


Beyond these various trees and vines, on the highest point of the land, and overlooking a precipice, there is a tomb crowned with an obelisk. An inscription covers the four sides of the base and tells its reader of a woman from Gaeta whose family sheds tears at the loss of her. The story that my husband has repeated to me is that this poor soul died of la peste, or plague, and custom required a burial isolated from every living thing. Her husband, heartbroken that the requirements of her burial would carry her even farther away from him than death already had, settled on the highest point of this parcel of land so that he could daily observe her tomb through the lenses of his telescope. In fact, the plain that stretches out toward the sea is visible from Campo di Pere, with Gaeta to the north and the blue sea beyond.

I shot the photos in this post last week when we went up to the field to check on the progress of the trees. It was a warm early spring day, but hazy, and these images suffer from the lack of blue sky. The trees have only just begun anew their cycle of flower, leaf and fruit, and so they are not yet much to look at. One of my current projects, though, is to photograph Campo di Pere and its trees over the course of the year, and, of course, I will be posting those images here.

To the victor go the spoils

These are two of my favorite examples of spolia. Spolia is Latin, and translates literally as "spoils." In architecture, the word refers to elements that have been removed from their original context and reincorporated into newer structures. The practice was widespread throughout the Middle Ages, especially in Italy, where many ancient structures served as veritable stone quarries. Just to give you an idea of the effect that spoliation had on ancient buildings, the exterior of the Pantheon in Rome looks the way it does because its marble revetment was removed for reuse elsewhere. We mustn't be too angry at the spoliators, though, because their theft exposed brickwork that allows us to appreciate just how much of a structural marvel that building really is.

But back to the photos. I shot both of them nearly ten years ago, while on a day trip to Pisa from Florence, where I was staying for a few weeks while studying Italian. A couple of my classmates and I had decided to take a short trip to see the Campo dei Miracoli. These two examples of spolia appear on the exterior of the cathedral. Both are well known and they are reproduced fairly often in publications on spolia, though the one on the left, with the seascape, is much more celebrated than the other, and I can understand why.

One of my classmates, a young medical doctor, refused to believe that these carvings were spolia. Actually, she refused to believe that there was any such thing as spolia. She confidently pointed out that the carvings were much too fresh, and did not seem older than the cathedral itself, so they were obviously more recent additions. I decided that there was no point in arguing with her, and I just rolled my eyes. Later in the day, at lunch, I was quite pleased to see her horrified reaction as the waiter placed before her a bowl containing some broth and pile of marine creatures crowned by a rather fleshy octopus. I have no idea what she thought zuppa di pesce was when she ordered it. I guess she didn't know everything, after all.

Once upon a time

When my husband was a boy and he used to play make-believe with his friends, he liked to pretend that he was from New York. As a child, I had no idea that Naples existed, even though my family lived in an Italian-American neighborhood. Here we are sometime around 1977. He must have begun his dreams of New York by then, and even if I, a bit younger than he, were still imagining more mundane things, a clue to our future together actually appears on the dress I am wearing. It's obscured by my braids, but it says, "It's a Small World."

Grim Drawsiness

While looking through old photos for Thursday's post, I came across this one. I wasn't sure about posting it, but when I saw sognatrice's recent post on graffiti, albeit of a different nature, I thought, "why not?" I shot it a while ago in Cagliari because I was intrigued by the phrase "grim drawsiness." What did it mean, and what did it have to do with anarchy? I've since discovered that it's just a misspelling of the name of an Italian heavy metal band, Grim Drowsiness. It's a perfectly understandable error, given Italian pronunciation rules. But I have to admit I'm disappointed at the simple explanation, and I regret not just letting the mystery be. (It's a bit like discovering that your giant pet ant is actually a cockroach.) By the way, the band even has its own MySpace page, which I'm not going link here out of concern for everyone's eardrums.

Creepy-crawlies

Back when I taught, every so often a student would ask me why, if Renaissance artists were so interested in naturalism, did the trees in Italian Renaissance paintings seem so unreal? The first time I heard the question I didn't understand it. "What do you mean?" I asked, "of course they look like trees!" "But they're just tall sticks with a big bunch of green on top," my student responded. I turned around to look at the slide. I think it was a Mantegna fresco. I have to admit that he was right. What he didn't know, of course, is that there are an awful lot of trees here in Italy that look exactly like tall sticks with a big bunch of green on top.

One of the joys of moving to another country is being exposed to a whole new world of flora and fauna. I was reminded of this the other morning when I noticed a thin, dark thing, a few inches long, on the dining room floor. It was over in the corner where we keep one of our computers, and so I imagined that it was a bit of cable that my husband had cut and forgot to pick up. Just to be sure, I nudged it with my (thankfully) slippered foot. As I pulled my foot away, I noticed it squirming, and so I recoiled and screamed. I immediately regretted that, though, because it always frightens my husband, who, being normal and well-adjusted, thinks that whenever someone acts like that, it's because there is a real emergency. So before asking him what we should do about it, I calmly apologized. I was feeling a bit guilty about treading on the thing, and suggested that we set it free. My husband dutifully lifted it from the floor with a napkin, walked into the kitchen, and threw it out the window into the garden below. He told me it was a millipede. Ugh.

The millipede incident prompted me to think about other strange bugs I have seen here in Italy. What follows is an account of my three most memorable encounters, ranging from simply fascinating to mildly terror-inducing. Sadly, while this post would benefit from photos I have none. I had not the presence of mind to photograph these beasties and subsequent internet searching has failed to turn up any information about them.

1. Fluorescent spider

I found this little guy on the portone, or front door, to the palazzo. While leaving to do some errands, I noticed a day-glo yellow spot on the door and guessed that it was a sticker or a piece of confetti that had somehow got stuck to the door. I looked around on the ground but didn't see anything else similar. I went on my way, not giving it a second thought, but when I came back it was still there. It was a windy day, so I figured it had to be a sticker, and as I moved closer to detach it, I noticed that it was a little spider with a circular, fluorescent yellow body and bright orange legs. I don't like to kill spiders, so I left him there, but as I opened the door, he was blown by a gust of wind. He was holding on by a thread, though, and so the wind just blew him around to the edge of the door. At first I was afraid that closing it would crush him, but then I noticed that he had found a little nook in the wood. I went upstairs and immediately began searching for information on the internet. I found nothing. The little spider was still there when my husband came home, and he too marvelled at the appearance of this little fellow. Unfortunately, our fluorescent spider was gone the next day and we haven't seen him since.

2. Giant black ant

Here I need to offer a disclaimer about the classification of this one as an ant, because my husband and I are not in agreement. One day while climbing the stairs of our palazzo, I noticed a rather large, six-legged, non-winged insect crawling very slowly on one of the landings. He looked like an ant: he had a head with antennae, a body with two segments, and six legs. He was about three inches long. I carefully observed him as he crawled under the door of a storage room. I didn't want to kill him because he was rather substantial, and I didn't want to dirty my shoes. When I told my husband about it, he insisted it was a spider. But I had noticed only six legs, so I started referring to him as the formicone, or giant ant. By the next time I saw him, I had developed a strange kind of affection for him, because I came to think of him as a decent little fellow just going about his business. I was glad I hadn't killed him. My husband was with me the third and last time I saw him. He told me that my formicone was a scarafaggio. Disgusting! As a giant ant he fascinated me but I found him revolting as a cockroach. I told my husband to kill him. He refused, saying that I was being unjust. The giant whatever crawled away, never to be seen again. My husband suggested it was because the little fellow overheard our conversation and was terrified of me. I've wavered back and forth on this one, but I am once again of the opinion that he was a giant ant.

3. Ape regina

The previous two anecdotes are completely non-threatening, but this last encounter frightened me. One summer morning, while I was sitting near the open living room window, I noticed, in the space between the persiane, or louvered shutters, and the window sill, the largest flying insect I have ever seen. It was about four inches long and it resembled a wasp. It was a beautiful, elegant thing with a large, oval head that tapered to a point in the front, and a body, which, though large, was delicately-formed. The thorax was a little sphere and was about one-third the size of the abdomen, a somewhat bulbous shape that tapered downward to a point. All over it was striped yellow and black, but finely, not like any bee or or yellowjacket I had ever seen before. Its wings were covered with some dust from the space between the persiane and the window sill, and it was trying to clean itself. I almost had a panic attack. All I could do was shut the windows and watch it through the glass.

I later described it to my husband who said that it must have been "un' ape regina." But I misheard and thought he said "una peregina." "Is that a kind of wasp?" I asked. My husband looked at me strangely and repeated, "No, è un' ape regina." I didn't hear it correctly that time either, so I looked for "peregina" in the dictionary but found nothing. I spent some time contemplating the existence of this strange beast whose name was not to be found in the dictionary. Several weeks later, my mother-in-law was visiting, and I told her the story of the yellow and black insect. She too said that it must have been un' ape regina. But this time, I heard the pause between ape and regina and finally understood that they were trying to tell me that it was a queen bee. But can it really have been? What was she doing outside of her hive? I've searched for images of queen bees on the internet but never found anything that looked like her. I wish I could find one, though, because although the thought of her still makes me shudder, she was absolutely exquisite.

In praise of March III

The further adventures of KC and the tall, dark, and handsome Italian.

March 2005: Amor vincit omnia

A few days after my husband and I first met in Rome, I had to return to the United States and he to Naples. We parted promising that we would write and hoping that we would be able see one another again soon. We kept in touch through email. Every day he wrote me long, heart-felt missives while I struggled to respond a with couple of paragraphs that were both expressive and made sense. (Despite the fact that his first words to me were "right click," in the early stages of our relationship we communicated exclusively in Italian.) While he was certain from the start that we were meant to be together, I needed some convincing. Sure, Rome's lesson had begun to melt my cool reserve, but the transformation from cynicism to romanticism is a slow and on-going process. His letters were beautiful and persuasive, however, and after about a month, I realized that I needed to spend more time with him in order to clarify my thoughts. I invited him to visit and we decided on several days at the end of March.

After the first awkward moments in the airport, we quickly rediscovered the easy togetherness we had felt those evenings in Rome. We spent Easter weekend in New York City, visiting sites that I hadn't seen in years. Monday evening we returned to my apartment in upstate New York and found that it had been raining while we were away. Part of the bathroom ceiling had collapsed from the weight of water trapped above it, and there were pieces of plaster scattered everywhere. We set about cleaning up the mess and then I called my landlord, who had no advice about what to do while waiting for the roofers to come. The hole was large and sending down drops of water at different points along the ceiling. I had the idea to cover the hole with a large trash bag with a single hole cut into it to collect the water at one point, making it possible to place just one receptacle on the floor. My future husband seemed quite impressed by my ingenuity and helped me with the details. I was a bit embarrassed, though, to expose a guest to such inconvenience, even though it wasn't my fault. Even worse, because of the position of the hole, it wasn't possible to close the bathroom door. But both of us quickly adapted to the open-door bathroom situation and had a few good laughs about it. Really, it's moments like these that reveal whether two people are compatible.

Fate, not satisfied with her work in the bathroom, decided to throw us another curve, and in some ways an even more ridiculous one. I have suffered from throat ailments all my life and every winter I have at least one bout of laryngitis, strep throat, or bronchitis. In fact, I remember finding myself in the middle of that March thinking how amazing it was that I'd managed to escape being sick that year. Well, just a couple of mornings after we returned from New York, I woke up unable to speak. And I began to wonder, how are we supposed to get to know each other better if I can't speak? Oh, and how was I supposed to teach my classes? Actually the answer to the second question is easy, as everyone who has ever taught knows: films! (And that's a way gain points with the students, too.) And in answer to the first question, he just had to listen more closely as I whispered everything. From my illness come two of my sweetest memories of the beginning of our relationship:

1. "Una non parla, l'altro non sente"

One evening we were both tired and didn't want to cook or go to a restaurant. I suggested we have a pizza delivered, and he agreed. As I picked up the receiver to make the call, we both remembered that I couldn't speak louder than a whisper. When he suggested that he call, I reminded him that while, yes, pizza is an Italian food, the people who answer the phones in pizzerie in upstate New York tend not to speak Italian. So, based on my extensive experience ordering pizza, I wrote a script of the conversation he would have with the person who answered the phone. We went over the pronunciation, and above the more confusing English words, I wrote how they would be spelled in Italian. I dialed the number and we both put our ears to the receiver. As the person on the other end spoke, I pointed to what he was saying on the sheet of paper, and future husband then read off the correct response. After that call, he was so proud of having succeeded in ordering a pizza in English that he asked for the sheet of paper so that he could keep it as a reminder. We have it to this day. At left is a scan of the actual script.

2. The power of chocolate

All that whispering, while not technically the talking that had been expressly forbidden by my doctor, was not easy on my throat. So I drank some herbal tea each night before going to bed. One night I was very tired, and decided not to make the tea because I just wanted to lie down. He was worried about me and insisted on making a cup of tea and bringing it to me in bed. But that's not all he did. Completely unbidden, he broke some pieces off our Lindt chocolate Easter bunny and put them on the plate next to the teacup. I haven't yet written of my grand passion for chocolate, so let me assure you that he could not have chosen a better way to charm me that evening.

One evening he insisted on cooking for me. He wanted to make spaghetti all'amatriciana, which, he joked, was the only thing he knew how to make. He wanted to know if I had ever tried it. I laughed when I told him that it was my favorite pasta dish. Another day, when there was really beautiful weather, we went to Saratoga. He was curious to see what an Italian restaurant would be like in the U.S. so we stopped for lunch at a place called something like, "The Pasta Factory." He was quite surprised to receive a single plate with a large piece of beef resting on top of his pasta, which incidentally was not the type listed in the menu. Like any true Italian would, he lifted the beef with his knife and fork, placed it off to once side, and ate all the pasta first. Fortunately there weren't very many other diners and it was possible for us to have a conversation even with my whispering. We were talking about when I would next come to Italy, and I told him that even before I had met him in January, I had been planning on spending a few weeks in Rome that summer. He asked me if I would consider changing my plans and come and stay with him instead. Of course I whispered "yes" in response.

We parted wondering how we would be able to stand being apart for two months. And deep down, we both knew that this was only the first in a long series of good-byes and that each would become progressively more difficult to bear. Our long distance romance had begun in earnest.

In praise of March II

Warning: this next post is about graduate school, a.k.a hell, so readers who are delicate, or simply in search of something interesting to read, might want to skip this one.

March 2003: It only has to be good enough

By March of 2003, my long-suffering professor was running out of gentle and encouraging ways to tell me to finish my dissertation. For quite some time, he had only asked for "pages." "I want pages," he would say, "just give me some pages." When I think back on it, I am impressed that he knew just what to ask. I worked very slowly and methodically and was always afraid to show anyone anything I had written. He sensed this and knew not to ask for chapters or drafts. Just pages, however unrefined they were.

2003 was my last year in graduate school. Altogether, I had spent ten years of my life in two graduate programs, and it was time to finish. I had been applying for jobs, and by March, I even had a few on-campus interviews lined up. If I were to find myself in the enviable position of actually having an offer, an unfinished dissertation would simply not do. I needed to finish the Ph.D. that spring. The dissertation deadline was March 19, but I was living halfway across the country. I had already asked at the post-office in the small town where I lived; for the secretary of the graduate school to have the dissertation in her hands the morning of the 19th, I would need to mail it out the afternoon of the 17th.

By February, my professor wasn't asking for pages anymore, or even chapters. He wanted a finished draft of the whole thing. At the end of the first week of March, all that remained to write was the conclusion and a further refinement of the main argument of one of the chapters. Ten days to write a conclusion and add a sentence or two to an already completed chapter doesn't seem so bad, does it? Well, I always had problems with conclusions, and the final point I wanted to make in that other chapter wasn't already written because I had been struggling to articulate it for months.

The weekend before the deadline I did nothing but write and revise. The last evening I had a finished draft of the conclusion, so I moved on to the other chapter, reading it over and making some notes. When I was ready to compose the final sentence, I began by typing a few words. I wasn't satisfied, so I deleted them. I tried again, and then again. For four hours I sat there, trying to write a single sentence. I began to wonder whether my idea actually existed. How could it, if I found it impossible to articulate? I felt what I thought must be the terrible, sad heaviness of reaching the very limit of my abilities, and I stopped. I went to bed exhausted and defeated. I woke up early the next morning to look the whole draft over one last time, to make sure that it had at least some internal coherence. It did, but the failure of the night before was still fresh in my mind. I waited a couple of hours and then called my professor to tell him that I couldn't send it. I could sense his displeasure even before he started to respond. He wanted to know if I had a finished draft. All I managed to say in response was "yes, but" before he insisted, "Send it NOW!" There was more forcefulness in those three words than in all the requests he had ever made before, put together.

So I spent the next few hours printing it out. Then I put it in a box and drove to the post office, where the clerk who helped me was impressed that such a large parcel should be sent to a professor. She wanted to know how many pages there were. When I told her she was in awe. I didn't bother to tell her that as dissertations go, it was fairly short. She weighed it, printed and applied the postage label, and then placed it in a basket behind the counter, out of sight. And just like that, it was out of my hands. Three years of my life were in a box in a basket in a post office. Amazing. Then a wonderful thing happened. As I walked back to my car, all the anxiety and self-doubt of the night before melted away. As I listened to the triumphant last movement of Michael Nyman's TGV on the car stereo, I smiled all the way home.

That month was the beginning of my liberation from perfectionism. I am still precisa, as my husband likes to say, but I am no longer afraid to stop fussing and declare a thing done when almost everyone else would be ready to say that it is good enough. The exhilaration I felt that afternoon at the post office was far too great a pleasure to experience only once in a lifetime. And so to my truly fabulous professor, and of course, to March 2003, I am eternally grateful.

In praise of March I

I want to sing the praises of March. I feel that March gets less respect than the other months, except perhaps February. Irish people and fans of whatever sport to which March Madness is connected may feel differently about it, but I've always sensed a tone of resignation in the voices of people who talk about March. Perhaps it's the unpredictability of its often extreme weather. Perhaps it's the impatience that comes with knowing that we are nearly done waiting for spring. I may be imagining this: it may be that I'm the one who has a problem with March. Either way, I feel it necessary to offer an apologia for a month that has always been kind to me. Try as I might, I cannot think of one bad memory associated with March. So in honor of March, I offer my recollections of three very good months.

March 2001: Roma Aeterna

I was in Rome doing my dissertation research. February had been a wash: wet, dreary, and cold, and I spent the month thinking about how much I preferred Florence. I was feeling homesick because I was having a hard time adapting to Rome and having to speak Italian. I found it nearly impossible to concentrate on my work. I needed a break, so on the first day of March, I left the city for a long weekend trip to Munich to visit of couple of my friends. When I returned to Rome four days later, there were signs of spring everywhere. The sun was shining, the wisteria was starting to bloom, and the Romans began to appear without scarves tightly knotted around their necks.

With the change in the weather, I became more interested in exploring the city. Every morning I would choose a monument as a point of reference and after visiting it, I would explore the neighborhood around it. I rarely took buses or the metro, preferring instead to walk everywhere. I was seeking out the medieval city most of all, because I found it the most evocative of the city's many incarnations. During these excursions, I found myself walking down shady lanes lined with walled gardens, silent but for the sounds of rustling leaves or barking dogs. I went to ancient churches that smelled of stone, incense, and dust, whose alabaster windows suffused their interiors with ethereal light. I ran my fingers over the smooth surfaces of spoliate columns and smiled at the idea that with my touch, I became part of the centuries-long process that had formed them into their present state. I was enchanted. Even as I write this, I remember the stale odor of those churches, the cool smoothness of the marble against my warm hands, and the sound of footsteps on stone pavement somewhere out of sight.

Every day during the pausa, I would go to the Pantheon, at first because there was no place else to go, but later because I found that the perfection of the place filled me with a great, still awe. I would sit on one of the stone benches along the wall and stare at the circle of sunlight as it moved across the coffers. I would wait there until three o'clock, when the nearby church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva would open and then I would go there and walk up the right aisle to the Carafa chapel. I would feed as many coins as I had into the light machine, and then contemplate the frescoes of Thomas Aquinas. This last bit was research-- the chapel was the topic of one of the chapters of my dissertation. After that, I might go the forum, whose dust and rubble eventually turned my black shoes permanently grey. Or I would move on to another part of the city and begin my explorations again, continuing to wander until the darkness made me want to return to more familiar surroundings. Some days I was a better student and went to the library in the morning, saving my excursions for the late afternoon. But I never let a day pass by without learning something new about the city.

My original plan had been to stay in Rome until the first of April, but by the end of the second week of March, the thought of leaving so soon made me heavy-hearted. So instead of moving on to Milan, where another of my chapels was waiting, I arranged to stay in Rome for another month. When I finally had to leave for Florence on the first of May, I nearly cried.

That March was the beginning of the first great love affair of my life. And I would not be where I am now had I not first fallen in love with Rome.

More on March next week...

O' paese do' sole

I don't live in Naples, but it is the nearest big city and the birthplace of my husband. We go there often to do errands, to shop, and to visit my husband's family. I think that most Neapolitans, if asked what they love most about their city, would mention either the sun or the sea. I took an Italian course there one summer, and for a couple of weeks there was a spate of atypically cloudy and rainy weather. One of my teachers was worried that tourists wouldn't want to visit the city anymore. I've heard many more Neapolitans name the sea as the reason why their city is so special, though. Often when people hear that I am from New York, they will become apologetic about (what they feel is) my misfortune in finding myself in southern Italy, and will then try to cheer me up by telling me, "ma qui c'è il mare!" which means, "but here we have the sea!" It seems impolite to remind them that New York is a port city too, and anyway there aren't any beaches within driving distance of New York that compare to those about an hour or two north of Naples. (What an understatement, think of Sperlonga!)

Yesterday it was raining in Naples, so there wasn't any sun, and since I was there just to retrieve some test results, I didn't get to see the sea, either. Here when your doctor orders tests, you usually go to a hospital to have them done, but not without an impegnativa, which I suppose is analogous to the referrals that some American insurance companies require from your primary care doctor to see a specialist. At the hospital, you take your impegnativa to the ufficio ticket, where you pay the "ticket," which is like a copay. After they give you a receipt and a number, you go to the part of the hospital where the tests are to be done and you wait your turn. That's what the number is for. When the results are ready, you return to the hospital to retrieve them and then bring them to your doctor, who, after looking them over, will put them in a folder that is too big to put in a knapsack without bending it, and which you must bring with you every time you go for an office visit.

My doctor recommended that I have my tests done at the hospital in Naples where she works. I did that last month, and other than having the constant nagging feeling that I had no idea what I was doing for the whole time that I was there, everything went well. So yesterday morning I arrive at the hospital and go immediately to the ufficio ticket to retrieve my results, as instructed on the receipt they gave me last month at the lab. The man behind the window looks for my results in a unnervingly small stack of envelopes but doesn't find them. He then tells me that he wants to know where my pink slip is. Pink slip? I have no pink slip, but I do have four other apparently worthless pieces of paper that I had carefully conserved, believing that each and every one of them was vitally important. After a couple of minutes of what looks like a fairly intense internal debate, he finally decides that I should go to the lab and ask there. At the lab, they have my results but they too want the pink slip. "In fact," I tell them, "so did the gentleman at the ufficio ticket." One of the nurses pauses for a bit, makes a funny face, and opens the envelope with my test results. Ecco, the pink slip. I find this amusing because last month, the nurse who failed to give me the pink slip said, "Oh, America! Everything works well there," when I told her that I was from the United States. True to form, she quickly added, "ma qui c'è il mare!" Indeed. I am certain that this why the nurse who found my pink slip where it should not have been wasn't annoyed at all at her colleague's departure from standard operating procedure.

To arrive at the hospital, I had to take the metro and then walk for about fifteen minutes in driving rain. Naples can be very depressing when it rains. Everything seems greyer, dirtier, and more neglected. Everyone seems less vivacious and the chaos of the city ceases to be fascinating, becoming completely insufferable instead. I noticed that collapsible umbrellas have not made many inroads into Naples, despite the efforts of the street merchants who offer a good selection, all carefully arranged in converted baby strollers. Most people out yesterday morning, myself included, had the large, long, wooden-handled umbrellas that you rarely see in the U.S. anymore. This made for some awkward moments on the crowded streets. Despite the outsized umbrella, I am at home today with a chest cold. Two years ago, I would have laughed at that idea, because, as the teenage version of myself declared on more than one occasion, "EVERYONE knows that viruses cause colds, Daddy, not going out with wet hair!" I must be assimilating because I am convinced that my unpleasant morning in "o' paese do' sole" is the reason I'm sick. I suppose it's a good thing that I've managed to remember how beautiful the sea is when the sun is out, because otherwise I would be in a very bad mood.

And for anyone wondering about the tests results, they were all fine.

"Rome is love spelled backward"

The first time I ever encountered that expression I was in graduate school. I was working part-time in the library and one of my jobs was to prepare newly arrived titles for consideration by the librarians. One shipment included a book titled Rome is love spelled backward. I didn't look it over; I must have been in a hurry, because I usually did read a few pages of any book that looked relevant to what I was studying, in case I wanted to buy the book for myself. But I do remember thinking it odd that the phrase was translated because the sentence doesn't actually work in English-- it's not true: Rome does not spell love backwards. My supervisor, very well read and already aware of the phrase, was more displeased that the author had chosen the cliche as a title, and felt that it made the book silly. After that, I hadn't given much thought to the phrase, until I needed a title for this, my first post, which is really about love, and Rome.

I met my husband in the eternal city. I like calling Rome by that name because it is its character as a palimpsest that has always drawn me to it. I was there for a few weeks, briefly escaping the cold Northeastern American winter and the monotony of a teaching position that was destroying my love for the history of art. I had enrolled in a two-week Italian course and was staying in a hotel I had found the summer before, when I was in the city briefly to do some research at the Vatican. On one of my last nights there, I needed to use the computer in the hotel reading room, and not being conversant with Microsoft Windows, I was having a very hard time. The clerk at the reception desk, who apparently moonlights as a matchmaker, insisted that another guest, a systems specialist who was waiting in the lobby, help me. I had noticed this man in the hotel months before, and, well, the hotel clerk had also noticed me noticing him.

So the tall, dark, and handsome stranger came over to me and told me to "Right click." Of course he had a charming accent. He asked me to dinner and I spent the evening talking about why I loved Rome while he, as he later told me, spent the evening thinking about how wonderful a lifetime of evenings like that one would be. I excused myself at midnight because I had to finish my assignment for class the next day. Anxious to find any way to prolong the evening, he offered to help me and spent the next hour patiently explaining Neapolitian card games. We went out the next evening, and the next, and when I had to leave it was clear that we were only at the beginning of the story.

Until those first evenings that he and I spent together, I thought love was a cliche, a tired shorthand device used to describe a certain having gotten awfully comfortable with another person. I was cool and cynical, and secretly scoffed at people who didn't use reason alone as the basis for determining the course of their lives. I didn't believe in the kind of love that makes a person sacrifice everything to be with another. But just over a year after we met, that is exactly what I did, and I did it because something happened to me in Rome that winter. And it could only have happened in Rome, a city where the detritus of a fallen civilization is a constant reminder that everything must come to an end and where, despite this intimation of the utter futility of life, people continue to live and love and be joyful. I finally realized why I was so drawn to the city, that it was trying to tell me something: life is only futile and small when we let it be.

And so, when it was time for me to make the leap and choose love, I was ready.