In the spring of 2017 I flew to Rome with my parents to reclaim my heritage. The son of an Italian, I’d never visited and couldn’t speak the language. I had only the vague resonances of my grandparents’ gesticulations and arguments and my father’s urbane example to imagine myself within. My childhood has been fired by Roman legions, castles and barbarians, by the iconography of a dying God, his disciples and the mellifluous art of Michangelo, Leonardo and Raphael. The spirit of the age lived in my bones, I fancied, but I’d yet to claim it as my own. And in that task I would fail too, when I found in Italy a culture fiercer, darker and prouder than my young imagination.
My first encounter with the ancients came in the decapitated heads and yearning martyrs of Carravagio, into whose expedition we wandered in our first 3 hours in the city. In the glorification of mental states that would be diseased in a modern lexicon I found emotions I didn’t recognize. For one thing I hadn’t realized that the desire to die, often brutally, for God was such a foundational myth. It frightened me. Ours was a culture rooted in human sacrifice, and that was made personal. Caravaggio had offered it as exquisitely accessible in his portraits. You could see these people wanted to die, you could feel their fear, resignation, pain and faith.
The look in their eyes spoke of a mysticism deep in my heritage that repelled and challenged me. Everywhere in that exhibition I saw the Christian relationship to death that had inspired the world to great beauty (as I would discover in the Vatican) and great horror (as I would also discover in the Vatican). The ferocity and the fervor – not to mention the fantastic riches they had built – all felt so foreign to me. All this was conjured from an ornate mythology and was born purely, and shockingly, from the imagination.
The old spirituality I found, with its Old Testament flavor, only uplifted me with the sheer mastery of the artist, which was staggering. Caraggio and his contemporaries with their massive paintings of angels, massacres and biblical depravity intimidated me almost as much as the sneering busts of Roman generals made me laugh. It was a disturbing first experience. I loved it.
The modern incarnation of this faith we found most touchingly in a small church just around the corner from our apartment. We had yet to be spoiled by St Peters and the like, cathedrals which render all personal relevance moot, and the intimacy of the ornate Catholic marble and frightening black wood of the confessionals hit us like a ton of bricks. It was quiet and cool in there and people were praying, swallowing the space. The air was so thick and heady with reverence I wanted to feel it. I got on my knees on the hard pews and sure enough felt the power of something tugging at my consciousness. Yes I thought, this stuff works. I emerged wondering what it would have been like to have been a peasant a thousand years ago chanting my days away under the heady burden of that psychic architecture. No wonder Catholicism runs a deep and ancient river through this country.
As hard as it was to see images of people gazing adoringly and with sublime joy at another person in agony, there was undoubted power here. You could never convince a hundred thousand monkeys that their only salvation lay in the bananas beyond this world and that they needed to loot their neighbors’ treasures and give them to the monkey with the tall hat. They just don’t have the imagination for it. Could a secular society stand against the ancient armies of the faithful with their weaponised belief systems?
As Rome attests, yes it can. Their gods had magnificent statues (Neptune at the Trevi Fountains beggars belief) but you always sense they are celebrations rather than submissions. Their monuments were to themselves, to their appetites for glory (the Senator pose, with the upturned palm was a fan favorite) or bloodsport. The sophistication of their designs is shocking, ridiculing the modern sensibility that people of your age are by far the cleverest yet. Take a photo of the Colosseum via the Appian Way with your iPhone 7 Plus and ask yourself where will your technology be in a 1000 years?
Still, I loved it.
When we went north to Udine, it got closer to home. Once again, the ordinary was transformed by imagination. We were welcomed by my long lost Aunt Leonora and Uncle Renzo, a thoughtful antisocial woman and her husband, short and compact with a bushy gray mustache and twinkling brown eyes. On the path up to their small suburban home she’d grown enormous pink, yellow, red and lilac roses and in the back lime, orange, strawberry and cherry trees. There was also chopped wood for the winter. Renzo, who didn’t speak English, and didn’t speak much, liked to stand on the porch and smoke. Occasionally he would mutter a pronouncement such as, “Ah… women.” and say nothing for several minutes. My father would play games with him, attempting profound single word answers of his own and see how long it would be until Renzo spoke again. They managed to carry this on for nearly an hour one morning, staring meditatively into the distance sipping espresso.
Renzo ate spaghetti for breakfast lunch and dinner. At the dinner table over Leonora’s salmon spaghetti, he mentioned he’d jumped out of planes in WWII and I fantasized my uncle was a paratrooper, which explained why he smoked so much and had a bum knee, although I later found out it was just part of his basic training.
Renzo, a professional driver his whole life, drove us on the pastoral roads to Rivarotta, the town where my grandparents were born. They’d left Italy in ruins after WWII when my father was a tiny boy. He bickered amicably with Leonora about his aggressive overtaking, her talking all the time, in particular complaining that she would keep answering questions he hadn’t asked. He was a shy man with a great sense of humor and you could tell that they loved each other very much, even though they had never married.
Serendipity seems all the more plausible when traveling, and it stuck delightfully when we were directed by an old Italian man to the very house my grandparents had grown up in. My father, who had lived there only as a young child, kept having flashbacks and it was a surreal and emotional moment for him. A poor home with wooden walls and a pot plant of lovely pink flowers outside, it was old and broken down, but still beautiful in a kind of forgotten way. Outside was a tractor and a workshop and around the corner, another woodpile for warming the home in the winter. In my impulsive style, I knocked and when no one answered I opened the door of the house. It was so spare it reminded me of the 1920s, just a stove, a table and a bicycle on a linoleum floor.
Again, I loved it.
Heady with emotion and feasting on ancestral memory, I managed to convince the party to visit the graveyard. I wanted to see if I could soak up some more ghosts and was hoping for a headstone with my family name on it. I didn’t just get one, I got an entire shrine dedicated to La Famiglia Candotti. In the small pristinely maintained graveyard decorated with fresh flowers, Leonora sketched her vague memories of our relatives, the most recent of whom died in 1981. I found others too amongst the gray and pink stones, and took some satisfaction in touching their graves and greeting them by name, introducing myself. What’s up Ferruccio? It’s your great grandson Alessandro. How’s it hanging?
After all this, the only logical step was to smash a beer in my ancestral town, and have a chat with the gnarly local barkeep. And who else could we find but my great grandfather, the great gambler, Ferruccio Candotti, this time posing in his fedora in a backroom restaurant on a wall. In black and white with his buddies, hand in pocket with a slightly petulant look, was indisputable evidence of my homecoming. Ferruccio, I discovered via my mother, was suspected of suffering from PTSD after WWI and gambled away the family fortunes, leading my grandparents to emigrate to South Africa in search of fairer fortunes. As it turns out, I was as Italian as could be.
Italy, as I have sketched it, is merely a prism for my enchantment or indulgent fantasy. Richer still are the sunsets of Tuscany, the fury of Rome, the babies suckling the teats of wolves in the Duomo and most of all the people with their strange passions, the priests in their habits and iPhones, the beautiful girls in black leather jackets dancing to street performers in Trastevere as the 24 hour pizzeria and gelateria look on. Do I belong there? The answer is that I do not know.
But that is no offense. The world is a global place in this day and age and no matter how many ghosts, I am no stranger to these callings. My family name paves a street in Florence and a tomb in Udine and no matter who I am now, my blood runs over these lovely, dark, cobblestoned streets.
Mostly important, as I see it, is that I loved it.
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