Sulmona

In Sulmona, before the honey-tasting, I detached from the tour group to go lurking through the back alleys of town in search of the house where Ovid was born. (That's him, above, having a good think in a town square.) Our tour guide described Ovid as the Roman poet of love, which is true, he used his erotic poetry politically against the Emperor, trying to be sly, but went and got himself exiled to the Black Sea. Still, I suppose I think of him always as the poet of transformations, all those lovestruck mortals in The Metamorphoses getting turned into flowers and cows and various kinds of trees while the gods above played out their careless soap opera, only sometimes moved enough by a person in crisis as to lift him or her into a constellation. As a child, I adored D'Aulaire's Greek myths, then in college, after seeing Naomi Iizuka's gorgeous play Polaroid Stories, I found Ovid, who took those child stories and grew them up, grabbing and retelling the girls-turned-to-birds, boys-turned-to-flowers, Icarus falling, Deucalion's rocks growing into soldiers, the minotaur, monstrous Medea, occasionally a cameo from the fates (but just barely, only ever a footnote), and plotted all this in impossibly overlapping rings to tell the story of the birth of Rome.

The aqueduct and the market.

Sulmona is not bucolic, as I would imagine if I were to dream up Ovid's home from all that vine-wrapped poetry. It is a stone city of turning alleys, quiet laundry in windows, with a Roman aqueduct for a spine. The sort of place that looks beautiful to me, American as I am, coming from vinyl-sided suburbs, I look at the ancient walls and decrepit but ornate doorways and get all weepy, but then I'd imagine a young Roman poet in the early part of the first millennium would probably sit in those alleys with his one strip of sky and feel provincial, so wish for the Borghese gardens and palazzi of Rome.

We were there on Wednesday, market day, which showed us how real the city still is. The market was full of silverware and pantyhose, ham for dinner, herbs for planting in Spring gardens, and those shapeless matronly housedresses that every woman in Abruzzo over age 60 seems to own. Not a single tourist-oriented item, and our group definitely got some stares here and there. The place was truly local. I wandered the alleys and tried to find Ovid's home. Couldn't find it, but saw very many other impressive lonely ancient doorways, shot the picture below of a bird in flight and called it a day, we had our honey-tasting and a last meal in Abruzzo of roast pork, then it was West to Rome, and the next day even more West to America, and my Grand Tour was over.





And now my work is done: no wrath of Jove
nor fire nor sword nor time, which would erode
all things, has power to blot out this poem.
Now, when it wills, the fatal day (which has
only the body in its grasp) can end
my years, however long or short their span.
But, with the better part of me, I'll gain
a place that's higher than the stars: my name,
indelible, eternal, will remain.
And everywhere that Roman power has sway,
in all domains the Latins gain, my lines
will be on people's lips; and through all time -
if poets' prophecies are ever right -
my name and fame are sure: I shall have life.

Ovid, the last lines of The Metamorphoses