howdoigetbackthereitis

Back in Brooklyn, with a knife wound got from aggressive cooking, I am scouring the internet for pictures of Montreux. God I miss Switzerland.

One last postscript before I close up this blog.

* * *

"Why is not life a continued moment where hours and days are not counted--but as it is a succession of events happen--the moment of enjoyment lives only in memory and when we die where are we?"

-Mary Shelley

* * *

The Shelleys were waiting for me in New York, too. At the fifth avenue branch of the New York Public Library, an exhibit co-curated by NYPL's own research librarian Elizabeth Denlinger has been on display all Spring, borrowed from the Bodelian library at Oxford. It's been up since March, but I deliberately saved this visit for after my trip, because I had a feeling I'd want one more mission on home turf to ease me back into real life. Mission #5: Shelley's Ghost, afterlife of a poet.

It's only one small room on the main floor, an easy stop on your lunch break, and entry is free.  It's mostly Percy, but there's a lot of Mary, Greatest Hits of the two of them and those related - and it's tiny! It's basically a room of curiosities, full of original artifacts, like Mary's Frankenstein manuscript with Shelley's edits in the margins, the London posters from the play Presumption: or The Fate of Frankenstein, locks of hair, a manuscript of an incomplete Kerouac play that involves the two of them, parts of Shelley's heart rescued from the ashes, the original "Journal of Sorrow" that Mary began after he died. It's a slim volume, and she's written inside the cover "Journal of Sorrow," giving her private grief an actual title, like any novel. Of all things, I found the sight of the small book the most touching. I've been reading the published versions of her journal and her letters, but nothing humanizes these people more than their own actual handwriting, which doesn't seem all that old or foreign. There's a mural of the major players - Trelawney, Byron, Jane Williams, stepsister Claire, etc - all looking terrifically windswept and anachronistic, with Mary and Shelley front and center, like the curtain call of a play. Big heroes for bookish people. Young, young people who covered a lot of ground. The exhibit runs till June 24.

Climbing all those mountains and wandering all those cities destroyed my blue sneakers. So I left them in a trash can at Villa Danilo and used the extra suitcase space to bring back chocolate for the office and New Dramatists. Yesterday was Memorial Day, it is proper summer, and New York is already baking. Welcome home! Tonight, I'll put my Abruzzo culinary lessons to work, attempting sauteed dandelion greens and fettuccine with speck ham, porcini mushrooms, and truffles. For desert, an almond semifreddo that may or may not work out. I found the very last bottle of Pecorino wine in the wine shop on Columbus Circle. The store-owner said they used to have one other brand of Pecorino that was superior, but the distributor lost track of it and so they can't stock it anymore. Abruzzo is so far off the beaten track, nothing gets out. Who knew? I am actually glad to know that there are still things you have to cross oceans to taste.

Perspective, that's what they call it. It's why we go away, isn't it? But I suppose you can find a bit of it at home in the theater and at museums, which I should do a lot of this summer. I'm having an Ovidian June with String, the Fates musical I've written with Adam Gwon, then July and August will be entirely devoted to getting down everything I can think about the Shelleys for Katie Hathaway so we can go put that to music.

Thank you Lippman family for the grant, for thinking up such a grant, the kind that says "go live a little." I am a bit crazed over the thought that I'm not in Switzerland anymore, but maybe I'll get back there. Postscript finished. Back to business. Maybe write something.

In Montreux, which I loved the most. The shoe I left behind.

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

Lost in Translation

During pizza-making class we had a scare re: Dustin Hoffman, because the Italian news was showing clips from his films with dreamy music and someone heard the word "morto."

V: Is Dustin Hoffman dead? Dustin Hoffman! He's Dead!
Group: No!
V: Giorgio, is Dustin Hoffman dead?
Giorgio: (while tossing pizza dough): Eh?
V: Is Dustin Hoffman dead??? Look at the television. Dustin Hoffman.
Giorgio: Ah. (glances at TV, smiles brightly) Si, il morto. (shrug, smile, toss pizza, perfectly)
Group: Oh god! Too soon! (etc)

It might have been the only moment of perfect agreement we had on the whole tour. Death of a pop culture icon makes for ex-pat solidarity. Why does it seem worse to learn mildly important pop culture news in Italian? Meanwhile, 112 slices of pizza had to be eaten, and so we tried. It was an uphill climb. Pizza-tossing: fun. Pizza-eating: tricky. With a class of eight, plus a chef-teacher making model pizzas, at eight slices per pie, that's a lot of freaking pizza, and so trivial in the light of Dustin Hoffman's passing. There would be no more Dustin Hoffmans but the pizza was endless. Then, miracle, around slice 59, our tour guide popped out with his blackberry and a funny smile. "Update," he said, in his Canadian-Italian way, and proceeded to clarify that Dustin Hoffman was not in fact dead, but opposite, had rescued a man in London from a heart attack and sat with him till the ambulance came. So thank god. Did this news even make the states at all? It was all over Italian television. But really, why, Giorgio? Giorgio, young pizza-maker from Napoli with the big Hollywood eyes, why?? Translation incidents like these are how big cultural misunderstandings get started. It was just like an EM Forster novel.

* * *

Then, truffles. Which I have been obsessed with, but not tasted, since I read Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses.

For centuries truffles were hunted with sows. Ackerman explains the science of it in detail, but the brief version is: there's a hormone in the truffle that's very similar to a hormone released by a male pig, which is also very similar to the human male hormone. So that's what the sows smell when they're hunting, and probably also why we humans consider the truffle such a delicacy. Everything is biology. Here are Ackerman's further musing on the subject:

"For the truffle farmer and his sow, walking above a subterranean orchard of truffles, it must be hysterically funny and sad. Here this beautiful, healthy sow smells the sexiest boar she's ever encountered in her life, only for some reason he seems to be underground. This drives her wild and she digs frantically, only to turn up a strange, lumpy, splotched mushroom."

She goes on to empathize further with the inconsolable sow. It's a great moment in a great book. I've always thought would make a lovely scene in a play. Not my Shelley musical, but maybe a tourism play. We'll see. Commission?

So people generally hunt with dogs now. Not out of sympathy for those Carrie Bradshaw type sows, but because the sows have a habit of devouring the truffles on the spot, which is not cost-effective, and dogs are more restrained.

Our truffle hunter was a factory man at his dayjob. He does the truffle stuff on the side, but when he scores, the payoff can be pretty good. Like playwriting, that's unreliable, so he has a job in a factory. His family has been hunting this territory for generations. There are codes among truffle hunters here. Though no one owns this land, you don't hunt someone else's spot. And each hunter keeps his prime spots shrouded in secrecy. He brought us through a buttercup field and tall wild grass, then a track of abandoned houses. Easy walking, but on his own he'll pick through much more difficult terrain.

The dogs were called Lady and Ruby. One trains the other. These two were pretty distracted, and I got scolded for petting one. You don't mess with a truffle man's dogs. Lesson learned. It was all very rambo, and not nearly as touristy as I thought it would be. I had pictured each of us on a putt-putt type enclosure with each our own dog on a leash, but this was the real thing, this was "don't touch, be quiet, watch em work." The dogs raced all over the land while the man said "cheh, cheh, Lady, Ruby, cheh, cheh, Lady." Don't know what "cheh" was or how to spell it, but it seemed to work like sonar, and kept the dogs on task, while he stood there with his truffle-digging staff, a combination spade/pick deal, useful for both digging truffles and clubbing predators. He reminded me of the deer hunters back home. No gun, same attitude. A man of few words.

This forty-minute hunt yielded three clods of earth that turned out to be truffles. They had no smell while we were in the field. "Just dirt," someone on the tour said. By the time we got back to the b&b, they were warm with that signature truffle odor, brown, musky, a very old smell that goes right to the bottom of your lungs. Maybe it's the place. We had them in a risotto. From the earth to the plate, two hours.

Transumanza

Here's the transumanza, the word I want to be, the one that means migration for the old transport of sheep. We didn't see this in action - and it doesn't really exist anymore since the sheep take the train - but here's a video of something like what it might have been. Twice a year, from Abruzzo to Puglia, pecore infinite!

Otherwise, Italian cooking lessons are all beef, lamb, sheep, pasta, olive oil, olive oil, olive oil. Wild boar! Aubergine (eggplant), courgettes (zucchini). They don't eat chicken in Abruzzo. Chickens cross the road, they're for eggs and Americans, but not for plates. Our guide had to search very deep to find a chef who would do vegetarian recipes with us, but he found one in an old watermill down an appropriately windy dirt road. She had the largest knife in Abruzzo, a machete as long as your forearm, a weapon for onions, and taught us how to cook with foraged greens. Among these, we cooked with nettles, dandelion, and borage. Nettles hurt like hell, even through the vinyl gloves, which had me thinking of Medea. I think it was Medea (Greek witch/villain/misunderstood-foreigner) who killed her rival princess with a poison dress that melted the woman's flesh from the outside in. That's what nettles feel like. After you boil them good and proper, they're edible and won't hurt, so we had them in a soup, which was quite tasty, in fact. It was the brightest deep appealing shade of green. The secret to the color is to keep the water very salted. My fingers were still tingling from stripping the leaves the day after we cooked them. I suppose that adds to the allure, like the puffer fish they eat in Japan, which actually is lethal if prepared incorrectly. Japanese puffer fish sidebar: Fugu is a rare and valuable delicacy, and the preparation method is meant to leave just enough poison left in it to numb your tongue and prove how lethal it might have been if not for the chef. But that's for someone else's travel grant.

I learned that puffer fish thing in the "taste" chapter in Diane Ackerman's extraordinary book A Natural History of the Senses. Go read it. Other tantalizing food reading: Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder, which my Aunt Susan (epicurean maestro, grows her own peppers in the window, makes a mean deep-fried turkey) gave me years ago, and I still re-read from time to time. That one's fiction. I haven't yet read Like Water for Chocolate, but now think I must. It was recommended at dinner after we had a particularly charming cooking session with a restaurant-owner-chef who taught us a couple actual skills, but mostly insisted, all Italian-like, that we must always cook with love. (Then dinner conversation turned to Fifty Shades of Grey, which I just can't bear to pick up, it looks like a harlequin - which I guess means of all sins, I would always pick gluttony first.) Chef's rules: always use a wooden spoon, never use a Cuisinart.The old device for making pasta by hand on Sunday is called a citara. Families hand them down from one generation to the next. The citara looks and sounds like a guitar. An apt similarity. The chef's a musician, there's harmony in the meal. That pasta on the right? I made that.

Then Abruzzo...

So after all my Shelleying, I deposit myself in the capable hands of Frui Tours for a wander off into the Italian wilderness East of Rome, with cooking classes and climbable mountains, shepherded by an Italian-Canadian redhead who knows every chef in the region no matter how deep he or she is hidden in this hinterland. He drives us up and down what look like vertical escarpments, through acres of rock wall and climbing grasslands, with switchback roads that must have been made by shepherds and not engineers. There's not a human in sight, no billboards, no streetlights, only the odd hawk, some sheep, a wayward hare. Then he'll pull off the road and we'll discover some kitchen carved into a hill with a chef ready to teach us how to use zafferano [saffron] or the like. The olio, the vino, agnelli, tartuffi, we are eating like Medicis. At every restaurant, they serve us their Sunday food, festival food. It's gorgeous. I will have to walk from Wall Street to Inwood when I get back to make up this trip. Daily. For the next three years.

Meanwhile, Abruzzo is just what I wanted. This is Ladyhawke country: seriously medieval. Picture your most iconic crumbling ancient castle, put it on a mountain nobody could climb, nearly falling off the top, surround it with wheeling birds and a sunset that turns the landscape into a transition shot from Star Wars, that's Rocca Calascio, the fortress we found on our first day. The Gran Sasso is a national park, so it's supposed to be fairly unpopulated, but I didn't expect such purely perfect wilderness as we found in our first B&B up in this corner of the Appenines.

Hollywood found this place (Ladyhawke, The Name of the Rose, Clooney's The American) but it seems like nobody else has. It's like the moon. The hills are all rock, with pale dry grass and prickly vegetation that sticks if you walk too close. There are sharp white mountains in the distance, and we're nearly as high, but our mountains are rounder and you can go right up in a brisk 30 minute climb if you don't stop every ten steps to take a picture, scream like Titanic, "I'm the king of the world!" Really, it feels like that. Closest feeling there is to being a bird. The only things to harvest here are lentils and rocks. Lavender grows wild in the hills and cukoos live in the meadow below. Everywhere you look, there are fragmented stone walls studding the mountains in unfinished lines, low walls that come and go with no apparent reason for dividing anything from anything else. They seem to hold up the mountain, but of course they don't. The rumpled terraces they make in the slopes are the only evidence of what used to be an agricultural landscape. You go driving, you see a village carved into a mountain, or perched on the edge of one, every five miles or so - some inhabited, some abandoned. This part of the world is more Western than the West. And when I say Western, I mean cowboys. Sergio Leone filmed his Spaghetti Westerns in these hills. Germans go backpacking on the ridges, but apparently Italians never do, and Americans or any Inglese seem to be a rare sight, as I've heard hardly any English outside of our bunch, except for one English couple in a restaurant.

Tarragon is called dragoncello in Italian. Best word I've learned is transumanza, which is what they call the annual migration of the sheep from these mountains down to Puglia. The word on its own is beautiful - I want to be transumanza. It used to happen on foot every year, but there there used to be millions of sheep, now there are a few thousand, so the sheep take the train these days. They tell us that's why you'll see churches in the middle of nowhere between here and Puglia, for all the shepherds and all the sheep. The word for sheep is pecora. Pecorino is a grape, a wine, and a hundred kinds of cheese. In a stone cottage that refrigerates itself, an ex-professor of Greek and Latin named Magdalena still makes pecorino ricotta by hand, alone with one cauldron, in the shadow of Castel del Monte. There are some holdouts.

During one of our (rare) breaks from cooking (/eating), I went trekking off on a dirt road through the wonderful nowhere of our nearest hills, to see the more and better nowhere of the next set of hills, and I found a new mountain rearing up ahead of me, all green until its very top, which was perfectly set with a crown of rocks, and for a moment without thinking it on purpose, I was picturing Dr. F on the deserted dirt road ahead of me, in that last mad pursuit at the end of Frankenstein, when he's in the great nowhere of the world and the only sign of civilization he finds are the notes his creature leaves in the tree bark to taunt him, complete with packets of food "keep up your strength so you can keep hunting me" (horrible misquote, I didn't bring the book with me). I had a moment that was ten parts appreciation for the day/trip/grant/myfeet, one part good creepy thrill about being alone which I never am, and one part super regret I didn't bring a copy of the book along on my trip to sit down and read in a desolate/excellent place like this.

Mission #4: the Non-Catholic Cemetery

A marker pointing the way to Shelley's tomb.

Best cemetery I ever saw was the brush and tumbleweed number on the top of a Colorado ridge where Doc Holliday is buried. You can't get there by car, you have to scale the mountain, and the top of the mountain is studded with knobs of stone and graves arranged haphazardly in the roots of hardweather pines and difficult mountain scrub. That grave was littered with playing cards and half-empty bottles of Jameson - hollywood tributes for a man we only remember because of celluloid. And all around you, 360 degrees of sky, sky, sky

Much more stately, but equally unassuming, was Percy Shelley's single stone, laid flat in a bed of lavender, in the Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners in Rome, which was my primary reason for coming South to Italy. In this most Catholic of cities beloved by artists and international travelers of all creeds, there is one spot in a neighborhood called the Testaccio where Rome's cultural descendents can be buried. You find writers inside, sculptors, Goethe's son, a German poet, unknown Americans; all manner of ex-pats, collected in a crumbling brick wall beside a 12th century pyramid which comes complete with digging archeologists and colony of cats. These are the graves of people who were never home at home, and so found this city; people who didn't mind the term foreigner, even welcomed it. In short: romantics. “She loved this place,” it said on one of the American graves. Another had an American poet I haven't heard of who died at 25 in the 1970's and was put here by his parents. Another was a complete statue of a life-sized boy of about 9 sitting on top of a pedestal, thoughtfully, as though waiting for his homework assignment, but stone.

Portrait of Keats' grrave with the Pyramide.

And here you find first Keats in the ancient section just by the pyramid, then in the newer section, under a crenelated tower in the cemetery wall there's Shelley, who wrote of Keats' grave, "It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." These days, they're surrounded by major thoroughfares in an unremarkable section of the city off the tourist track, but it's only two subway stops away from the center, and it's a simple walk over from Aventine Hill. The trees inside the walls have spread and grown so it's shady on these graves and the Pyramid doesn't dominate the picture the way it would have back then. Keats has an extra plaque in addition to his stone with the lyre on it. Shelley has no monuments, but does sit adjacent to the most stunning stone in the cemetery, an undone angel collapsed over a stone, carved by a sculptor for his wife in the plot where they are both buried. Beat poet Gregory Corso is on the next row down from Shelley. And Edward Trelawney, poet and friend of Shelley's is buried in the plot with Shelley.

You stand there and think "here lies the poet," but he's not really in there. Italian law required Shelley's body to be cremated immediately after discovery on the shores of the Bay of Lerici where he drowned at age 29. His ashes were brought here, to Rome, but they kept his heart from the cremation, and after a bit of a tussle with another poet, the heart was given to Mary, who kept it in a box all her life. In Daisy Hay's excellent group biography of all these people, Young Romantics, she speculates that it's probable the heart was not in fact a heart, but some less symbolic organ. Gory, but these sorts of details make all those old writers seem more real to me. Romanticism was a group dream, made real only in the imaginations of those who chose to dream it together and tried their best to live it, and all that living wore them out. The real truth of the matter is you cannot hold a heart in a box, and wanderlust is hard on the body. He was just a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday when he died, and you wonder what he would have been like if he'd lived into more temperate years.

Shelley's grave.

I was surprised to find him in a such a simple spot. There's hardly even room to stand and look. A simple footpath. You have to move over if anybody else passes through, which a few did. I wondered if they were Italians on strolls or English-speakers on pilgrimages. A few Germans approached and their guide explained to them about the poet in German. They nodded, consulted their pamphlets and moved on. I hadn't thought to bring any playing cards or literary tribute with me - soak his grave in absinthe? - so went to my journal and pulled out the flowers I had pressed in the park at Cologny next to Villa Diodati, and left those on the corner of the stone. A piece of Switzerland - maybe not Shelley's poetic home - but certainly Mary's. I left them on the end of the quote from the Tempest inscribed at the bottom of the stone.

 

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

into something rich and strange.

Picnicker's guide to Rome.

Yeah. Don't picnic in Rome. There's nowhere to sit. I walked for six hours straight, not from curiosity, but from lack of oases. (Gonna have to kill these shoes when I get back to the states.) But then the good thing about Rome is, you turn any corner, there's another extraordinary face in the stone. Extraordinary or terrible or sorrowful. It's a city of adjectives embodied in concrete. My best wandering took me up Aventine Hill, on a windy road through mansions. Look through the odd keyhole at the gates of the Knights of Malta. It's hokey, but you gotta do it, if only to eavesdrop on the other Americans in the queue. The view through the keyhole is adorable. The conversation enchanting. Then, to deschmaltz, go visit Saint Anselmo church, and if you can, peek through the door to the right of the altar, for a real backdoor look at Rome, because there's the church garden (which I think was private) that looks out directly to the Vatican, and there might be a cleric pruning an orange tree. Next door to Saint Anselmo is a narrow park with an unexplained rock formation fountain that I think must have been something ancient and important, because it was just a heap of stone that looked more geological than architectural. Before the heap, see the heartbreaking sculpture of Joan of Arc, who sleeps upright with her sword for a pillow. But my favorite church in all of Rome (though I only saw 20 out of the thousands) is Santa Sabina, which has nearly nothing in it, except a perfect floor, a perfect ceiling, and a very tall candle. It's a church made in the tradition of the Roman forums that preceded all that decorated stuff in the Baroque Quarter. It is tall and solemn and makes you understand the word ancient. There's a crazy bearded pagan face as big as an umbrella doing a waterspout outside Santa Sabina on a wall that borders a public orange grove that looks on all the other hills and the Vatican from a little terrace anybody can bring their picnic to, and so I did, but the oranges were terrible, don't steal them - not worth it - but I found my picnic there after visiting Shelley's grave, which I am going to write about but have to work my way up to it. So tomorrow.

Where is Mary?

The Shelleys only lived one Winter and Spring in Rome, then when summer came, their young son died, the second child lost that year, so they left Rome for the North with the persistent feeling that they had left Rome too late. It was not a happy site for this story, and it's not her city, but Percy loved it. It's where she buried him when he died a few years later. So that's why I came here, too. I wasn't looking for Mary here in Rome. However, I thought this sketch in the entrance to a church looked a bit like her. It's a simple PSA, really - just a nun shushing tourists in the Trinita dei Monte, finger over her lips. But the habit on her head looks like Mary's shroud, and the eyes - wide enough to haunt you - watch the world the same way Mary's would, always best observing from a corner, happily unnoticed. Something about those eyes reminded me of a particular portrait of her that's softer than most. There's no reason to see Mary Shelly in a portrait of a nun saying "shh" in a town that's just trying to teach people how to behave in churches. Still, I think there's an echo, so I'm putting Mary there, in the Trinita dei Monte, at the top of the Spanish Steps, with a sunbeam in her eye, "thou child of love and light" as Percy called her. Where that face looks, she has an ideal view down the Spanish Steps to the Keats-Shelley House.

Mission #3: Keats-Shelley House

"Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered: which words cannot convey [...] It is a city of palaces and temples more glorious than those which any other city contains, and that of ruins more glorious than they."

-PB Shelley, in a letter to Thomas Peacock

Here's Rome in the rain, a view from the Spanish Steps on May Day when possibly every single Italian ever was in the baroque quarter with me, milling from one piazza to the next, all of us with guidebooks in hand, throwing coins at fountains and dropping gelato on each others' feet. Felt a lot like disneyland. The business of Rome is wandering, it seems. Let the crowd heave you along from one iconic ancient thing to the next. After placid Switzerland, this was a shock to the system. I texted my dad "Rome is ridiculous, everybody is drunk," and later realized it was a national holiday. May day! The workers day! Come to Rome! When the Shelleys were here, they lived on the Corso. Percy would go to the colossal and lonely Baths of Caracalla to write in solitude, and he finished Prometheus Unbound there in the ruin. I went to the baths today, and looked at the great red walls from outside, but the traffic was awful and I'm getting a sunburn, so I figured this was one Shelley-footstep I could leave undiscovered. (And technically, I am supposed to be tracking Mary, not Shelley, but his footsteps are easier to find than hers, since she did all the memorializing.) The Rome I'm in is much more removed from Shelley's Rome than Switzerland was, I think, and I'm not sure there are any places for solitude here today. Temples in excelsia, palazzos, monuments, and humanity, but probably not solitude. Today, Shelley would have to pay six Euros to get into the Baths of Caracalla, and once inside, contend with the comings and goings of people like me with guidebooks in hand.

Shelley

Anyway, Rome seems to belong to John Keats more than Shelley. They're both buried here in the non-Catholic cemetery (that'll be mission #4), but Keats is the one who died in this city, and his name rings louder than Shelley's (and, as usual, Mary's name hardly comes into it at all, if you go by the captions on the paintings and by the monuments). In the rainy picture above, the orangey building on the left is the Keats-Shelley House, a museum devoted to Keats, Shelley, and their circle of Romantics in the house where John Keats spent his last months and died of TB at 25. This was my first destination in Rome. It's a thoughtful exhibit on one floor of the house, made up of five rooms total. All the walls are lined with books. The girl in the giftshop greets you in English without batting an eye. The smallest room is the one Keats died in. It's remarkably simple - spare, elegant, with a blue and white painted ceiling looking just as it did in 1821, a view of the Spanish Steps and a fireplace where Severn cooked little things for Keats, who couldn't leave the bed. That room is sad and sweet. One of the windows looks across the piazza at a Gucci ad, but that's practically another timezone. Something about the wood paneling and the good curtains keeps the Keats room quiet, Gucci or no. The other four rooms are terrifically sincere, a lovestruck collection of ephemera, the common theme to all of the artifacts being a) the poets, and b) Rome. There's an Oscar Wilde letter and sonnet written to his predecessors and a quote about how sacred they made Rome, as well as one of Whitman's annotated copies of Keats' Hyperion with Whitman's own notes scrawled in the margins of the text. It's a museum devoted to footnotes and the things that prove those footnotes. A good place to feel cozy and bookish while all of Rome streams up and down the steps outside.

Au revoir, buongiorno.

Postcard to my writer's group.

How do you say?

After one week in another language in which my every third thought is "comment dit-on ____"  ["what is the word for ____" (wash, site, novelist, bizarre)] eventually the brain turns over into the mode where I begin to realize that sometimes I don't have the English word for the sentiment I want to express, and I have to go mentally rifling through my French files instead of my English, frustrated that I don't have good enough command of either language to name the thing I want.

For example: the feeling one has when looking at a horizon one knows one is never likely to see again. Or a house or a ruin or a tree. What is it called? This feeling, it's a weird tug. A dislocation. Happiness to be looking, concern over how much to memorize, temporary amnesia of your other life, the real one, back home.

I do not know enough words. 

By Buddhist principles I suppose I ought to cultivate this feeling every day, anywhere, regarding just the regular sky, but anyway, it's a more stinging sensation when traveling. I find myself running a steady internal patter of "when I come back to Montreux, I ____" or "Next time in Geneva, I'll know to ____" or "I'm sure after a few of these train rides I'll develop an immunity to the sight of the lake and eventually won't care at all that it _____" (is perfect) (is a different color every ten minutes) (etc). Except that the truth is, the bit of time I've spent by Lake Geneva might the sum total of Lake Geneva days in my life. And that makes life seem very large, by percentages, compared to six days in April. And so what I do then is I just stare, I just stare and stare at the lake. I am eating lunch, and I have to stop and stare at the lake, because, oops, it won't be there next week. I'm reading a book, and I can't get off the page because I keep having to look up and check on the lake. I'm walking down a street, and I'm craning my head every time there's a crack between two houses, and my heart leaps - leaps! - because there's the lake again, oh and the castle! Again! And since I don't have a word for the feeling, I just name the sight itself: Chillon, Chillon, Chillon. Like it's food and I'm hungry, and I can store it up to keep me running for the next few years.

I asked a friend who speaks Bulgarian if there's a word there for this particular brand of traveling blues. He didn't know one, but thought that if any language has it, it's German, and it would be about 70 letters long. Or maybe there's something in a nomad language like Romani. He said I should invent one. I'm not in the business of inventing words. However. If English were like German and we combined words like legos, here are some options:

neveragainitude

onceandonlyonceness

howdoIgetbackhereitis
happysadnessforthesightofsomethingsoontogo

totallybereftplacelossprematurelyfeltbeforedeparture

Mon coeur casse. My heart is broken. I must leave Switzerland with its funny, charming manmade things in its sweeping, vertical godmade world. This is a good spirit country. Maybe I will come back. Mary & Shelley came twice, first when they eloped, and then two years later when they found Lord Byron and Mary wrote the book. The country hit her deep enough that she put her whole novel there. It's not at all a monstrous country, but I can see why you might want to imagine monsters here. There's just so much earth, more world than us, the depth and breadth in the land itself puts a different perspective on human industry. You see a clockface branding a village nestled between two mountains, and the painstaking attempt at control in the clock seems a bit silly below the craggy peaks. Mary & Shelley kept orbiting back to this part of the world, even when not Switzerland, they tended toward Northern Italy rather than Southern. No air conditioning back then, maybe it was just temperature, but I like to think it was something more about inner temperature, something inside equalizes when the spirit of the landscape matches your own.

That last picture on the left is the view from my hotel room in Montreux. I couldn't quite capture, but you get the top of a mountain beyond that Belle Epoque building. And this is the cheap room. The expensive rooms on the other side of the building look at the lake. Beats my alleyway in Brooklyn. Montreux! Mon coeur casse!

The word for yellow in French is jaune.

Mission #2: Castle of Chillon

There are seven pillars of Gothic mould, / In Chillon's dungeons deep and old, / There are seven columns, massy and grey, / Dim with a dull imprison'd ray, / A sunbeam which hath lost its way

 The Prisoner of Chillon, Lord Byron 1816

Found Byron's sunbeam.

While Mary was writing Frankenstein, Shelley & Byron took off on a boat tour of Lake Geneva, on their own writer's quest to follow Rousseau's footsteps, which took them to the other end of the crescent-shaped Lac Leman, to the far town of Montreux, where the two poets visited the Chateau de Chillon, where I spent Thursday afternoon; a splendid day in the sun with rocks and lake and tulips tumbling over the lake and the Alps all around and the castle always in sight. On the journey, a storm caught them in the middle of the lake, nearly wrecking the two of them in their little boat, and Shelley wrote horribly prescient things in his journal about his brush with death on the water - but that wouldn't happen till six years later - this trip, he came out of it okay and so they went a'touring the old castle, which is famous now for the pillar where Byron engraved his name, but the truth might be that a castle guard carved the poet's name shortly after his visit, to capitalize on the Byron's fame in order to encourage Swiss tourism. What none of the guidebooks says on this point is how pockmarked every pillar is with graffiti from a thousand visitors before and after Byron, hieroglyphs carved so thick, the stones could very well be tree bark. So Byron was hardly the first to deface the castle - if it was even him. Everyone wants his name in stone. I sat in the seven-pillared room for a good long while (did not deface it) and thought about the days when two poets could pull right up to the castle in their boat and kick around having lord knows what conversations while looking at stones, stones, and more stones, with no souvenir shops and hardly any English around, avoiding the ladies in their lives, thinking about freedom and history how to change the world via poetry. The funny thing about these places and these visits is that you go half-wishing a ghost would step out of the wall, and even though you know this cannot happen, the thought of it, the proximity of the past, of memory, even just the 200-year-old silhouette of a building, takes hold of your whole life for the few moments you're there, and those other eras become more true, all of a sudden, because of the way the light falls in that other place.

 I am stationed down the lakeshore from the castle at a hotel about seventy-five years out of date, with a church next door, a casino across the street, and a 1911 elevator with plush red carpet. Montreux could not be more enchanting. This morning, Dimanche, the lord's day, I woke to the sound of a coughing European in the next room mixed with the floating harmonies of the choir coming out of the church. Mary wrote in her journal about the songs of the vintagers that surrounded Maison Chapuis, how the women had masculine voices that were rough but still pleasant. (MWS was daintier than you picture her, and often catty and overcritical, even when complimenting; sharp-tongued and that's why I like her.) Still, I know what she means, about local music, that raw sound, homegrown. It was lovely, and not terrifically characteristic of Montreux, which is otherwise not at all raw. I'd try to tell you what Montreux is like except that I think it may not be like any other place there is. I suppose in American comparisons, you could cross Miami, Aspen, and, say, Savannah, and you'd have something like Montreux. Freddie Mercury lived here, and now his statue rocks forever on the edge of the lake. The microclimate keeps it warm, so we have palmetto trees and Arizona cypresses and a flower-lined promenade on the lake, while the white-capped alps roar up around us at all angles, keeping the cold out. The light collects blue on the lake all afternoon, then burns out at sunset with a glow I'm going to remember when I'm ninety. Tonight there was exactly one half moon in the sky. The first theme of this trip is literary, that's true, but the second theme, is to look at nothing but beautiful things for two solid weeks. Everywhere I turn is another eye-full of glassy lake, serene hillside, dramatic mountain, crumbling villa, marvelous tulip, cascading willow, you name it, any combination thereof. A visual detox to extend my life span by two years, at least.

Mission #1: Villa Diodati

Wednesday, I got up and marched myself to the exact opposite shore of Lake Geneva from my hotel to visit Byron's 1816 house in Cologny, Villa Diodati, which he named. Public transit goes everywhere, and could have taken me there easily, but I walked the whole way. You get to know a place better on foot. There's room for surprise on foot. You feel lost, then you find your way, and there's that pioneer sense of accomplishment from getting there without help. Anyway, I had the time, and Mary and Percy did not have busses, so it seemed worth it to walk the six kilometers from my red light district to the manicured residential district of Cologny at their speed.

Cologny is a hamlet of tasteful old and new houses hidden behind perfect foliage or shoulder-high stone walls. It sits diagonally on a slope above the lake. Some of the gates to driveways have gilded shields with the flags of foreign countries, like Qatar. You get there by a windy road that's too narrow for today's traffic, and people are driving fast, country club types speeding from one beautiful destination to the next. Eventually, the terrible but lovely road puts you out in a town square with an ancient church, a tea-room, a restaurant, and an old stone fountain marked "potable," as though expecting people on foot to wander in on their literary pilgrimages thirsty & weary & etc. Kids on the playground chatter away in English and French, and there's a boutique "American foods" grocery store next to the epicerie. Even the pedestrian crosswalk sign is charming and anglophilic. The silhouetted man has on a tiny bowler hat, so I pretended he was Eliot's Prufrock. (Bit too modern to be a Byron.)  I poked my head into the American foods store, but purchased picnic items from the epicerie. Filled canteen at sacred ancient but potable water fountain. Studied map. Onward through the windy roads and the hidden homes of the Genevois, with their stone walls and lovely hedges. Villa Diodati comes out of nowhere, at a perfectly ordinary (or Geneva-ordinary, which is terminally picturesque) bend in a road. You're just walking along spying on the roofs of houses, when the house behind the wall in front of you has a plaque at eye level commemorating it in French as the residence of Lord Byron, poete Anglais. I did a little double take, gawked, expected a soundtrack to kick in, and when it did not, I stepped backwards, then forwards, to do the arrival over again with appropriate reverence. I spied on every single observable detail of the not-very-observable lawn and garden of the Villa Diodati, which is now private apartments. They're very good at gardening to put off spies, these Genevois.

There's a lemon tree poking over the wall, and a greenhouse full of delicious looking things, and I had to stop spying when the gardener came out to do things with the lemon tree. You can't visit the house itself, but there's a public park next door, and they've set a stone bench in the exact spot where one can best view the mansion. I almost turned my ankle in the knotty grass, and thought of the stories of Percy turning his ankle that summer, which I have always ascribed to his ridiculous enthusiasm, but listen, the ground is bumpy there! (Or was he jumping out of a window heroically? I left my research back in New York, determined to do this all from memory.) Mary and Percy lived just below, in Montalegre (literally a stone's throw away), in a house that isn't there anymore called Maison Chapuis. But she got the dare to write Frankenstein in Diodati, so I am making my Byron monuments into Mary monuments. At the bottom of the lawn, there's a footpath worn into the ground. It would go down to the lake if there weren't other houses there now, and I pictured Mary & step-sister Claire cutting delicately through the grass in difficult shoes and long skirts. It is a storybook place, every inch. Next to the footpath, an electrical box bore the only jagged imagery I could find all day: a caution sign with a sketch of a skull, and I thought maybe Mary would've approved of the imagery, as well as the day, which was gorgeous and blue, with the clouds changing every ten minutes, the very opposite of her gloomy thunderous 1816 summer. I spent a few hours trawling the neighborhood. Studied the horizon she would have studied, the gleaming mountains. A couple of kids came rocketing down the park with cigarettes and one of them unzipped his fly and took a piss, grinning back at his friend. Some construction men sat on a bench and had their lunch. The clouds changed. Nothing whatsoever happened. I thought a little bit about Act 2, and then packed up my picnic and made my way back to the city, mission #1, check.

Geneva

The way the plane lands in Geneva, you come sweeping in over Lac Leman and the farms and the vineyards just like a camera panning over the countryside at the beginning of a film. I got here on a drizzly day, which made that descent even more gorgeous, with all the colors of the green fields and the red rooftops and yellow squares of flowered meadows showing up solid without the sun to blind you. It is beautiful, like they say, "enchanting." Also: tidy, quiet, on occasion, quirky. Feels like proper time travel, coming into a new country that way, through a curtain of cloud. I'm staying in the "red light district" of Geneva, which is really kind of a diet version of red light, if I ever saw one. On one block, there are some skeevy-looking cabarets, which I didn't visit (but maybe should have, in the spirit of getting writerly experience etc, if I were Hemmingway, I would have, you know what I do instead? I go to chocolate shops), but otherwise it just looks overall about an inch less elegant than the rest of Geneva. Like, the Swiss version of "red light" just means "not exactly beautiful."

So, Day 1 is spent sleeplessly trudging through gorgeous Geneva to fight off jet lag, I walk one million footsteps up and down the cobblestones of Vielle Ville, grasping at French, saying the couple words I remember from Belgian childhood repeatedly as though I could assemble my three easiest phrases into a whole language "je veux, je veux" "merci" "avez-vous" "avez-vous je veux merci, oui, oui, n'est-ce pas," and did have an entire halting conversation with a museum security guard about "la lune dans une [whatever the word is for painting, peinture?]" the moon in a painting that looks at you no matter what angle you stand at, like the Mona Lisa's eyes. Security Guard asks where I am from, "Brooklyn, New York," and he says "ah!" and lights up and says things in French that I don't remember, something about having been to Miami, New York, Chicago, and, wait for it, Iowa City. "Ah!" I say, and fumble en francais, "J'ai... attende.... universite.... en Iowa City!" He says else something in French I can't recall, so I just say, "Oui, c'est tres belle, Iowa City," like a kindergartner. That's all my French.

Apparently I look French enough, or urban enough, or something, (it's the trench coat) because people in the city keep asking me for directions. "Vous etes de Geneve?" I throw my hands in the air, "um, uh, Americaine! Je suis desolee."

Museum, monuments, chocolat chaud, one full hour spent among a crowd of French tourists in a tiny belfry, where some leader amongst them plays a tiny piano wired up to the massive network of bells in the top of St. Peter's Cathedral. I say nothing, they think I am French and part of their group. He seems to be asking the group if they want to play, and people take turns plunking out scraps of Freres Jacques, etc, on the keyboard that rings the bells, and I wish that Katie Hathaway or Adam Gwon was with me to play one of our musical theater songs all over Geneva from the bells of St. Peter, maybe one of the waltzes? (We have waltzes in both shows. Adam's waltz is about the triumph of love, Katie's waltz is about the lie of it.) But if I have only a fraction of French, I have even less piano, so I content myself to watch the other tourists play the little keyboard that turns the gears that pull the wires that move the bells big enough for God.

Two hours of sleep around sunset, then I'm up all night, and the next day it's off to Rive Gauche for Mission 1 of the Mary Shelley tour: Villa Diodati.

To be continued.

Geek travel.

A little over a year ago, I met Katie Hathaway in a song-writing workshop, and we were going to write a musical together about wrecking a car. About a month after that, I got a travel prize from New Dramatists for a Mary-Shelley-themed adventure in Europe. After the travel prize came through, I said to Katie, "You know what? What if we did a Mary Shelley musical instead of wrecking the car?" She said yes. So we started writing songs. I booked plane tickets and forgot to learn any languages and time kind of got away from me, and now it's a year later and here we have seven songs, three scenes and a sketch of the whole show (thanks to residencies at New Dramatists, Overturn Ensemble, and the MacDowell Colony) and it's time for me to go on that trip. So far, the bulk of our work has been on Act One, which is Mary's childhood & teen years in England - scribbling by mother's grave, courtship with Percy, and imagined Creatures in the Skinner Street attic. I said I wouldn't think about Act Two until I'd been to Europe and back again. My plane takes off in a week, but I have been packed for two days. (Except books, I can't decide which books to take.) My good ten-year-old suitcase has been sitting by the laundry closet all weekend. Old suitcase. This may be its last trip.

Rough plan:
A) See the spot in Geneva where MWS wrote the novel.
B) See the spot in Rome where Percy is buried.
C) Learn to make pasta and hunt truffles during culinary tour of Abruzzo, Italy.
D) Think real hard about Act Two of The Romancers, our musical.


Granted, item C is a bit off-topic. I do think it's in the spirit of the Shelleys to trek off into wilder, older Italy with a bunch of strangers and learn how to harvest saffron and whatnot. It will certainly improve my vocabulary. New Dramatists' Executive Director Joel Ruark says I am allowed to have a good time and learn to cook as long as I get material out of it for future plays and fulfill the "New Frontier" subtitle of the Lippman Family Award that made this trip possible.* So, going truffle-hunting in Abruzzo counts, even if there's no literary footnote.** In fact, it might count better than looking at old places where dead people once were, since a lot of those old places have since been turned into suburbs.

Playwriting is pretty weird a lot of the time, and then every once in a while there's a gorgeous moment when it does feel like the movies and you go "oh, that's why I'm here." This month's one of those months.

*Lippman Family "New Frontier" Award. Created as a memorial to the late John Lippmann, a much-loved and respected New Dramatists board member, the Lippmann Family "New Frontier" Award seeks to assist playwrights in opening up new frontiers of the imagination, through travel and adventure.

**Well except there is one footnote. The last stop on the culinary tour is Sulmona, birthplace of Ovid, for a honey-tasting and lunch. Thusly, Ovid:

My soul would sing of metamorphoses.

But since, o gods, you were the source of these

bodies becoming other bodies, breathe

your breath into my book of changes: may

the song I sing be seamless as its way

weaves from the world's beginning to our day.

Why Geneva?

Historians with the benefit of hindsight call 1816 the Year Without Summer, a little ice age precipitated by the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia the year before. Crops failed, rivers froze, populations died, sunsets went wild (see JMW Turner's paintings), and the storms over Lake Geneva broke with particular violence, inspiring Mary Shelley to dream her dark dreams. Imagine her, sitting in a chilly villa with depressed hypochondriac poets, watching lighting carve up the sky, caught by a preternatural impulse to investigate man's connection to the primal forces of the earth, and she's right. She anticipates, presciently, the longings of her readership and the forward momentum of science in society. Full of awe and dread, there's Mary, soothsayer, knowing nothing of plate tectonics, channeling the frisson of Mount Tambora into her “story” as she called it in her journal. “Write my story,” she wrote to herself, in the shadow of the greatest poets of her day. Then she wrote Frankenstein. She was 19.