September 07, 2018
Traveling At A Crossroads, Italy November 2017
About David Charles Barudin
David Charles Barudin holds an MA from Hollins University Writing Program and a BS in Economics from Penn’s Wharton School of Business. After a career in media sales, he is enjoying an active period of submitting stories to magazines and polishing a yet-unpublished novel, Alternate Routes, which expands on the ideal of travel to look in while looking out. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in trade and popular magazines and in Fjords Review, Lyrical Iowa and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and dogs in SW Virginia where he writes full time. He applauds this and other publishers of literary fiction and creative nonfiction, which constitutes the most accessible non-specialized narrative available to diverse, refined readers.
From where I sit at an outdoor café off Piazza Maggiore in the heart of Bologna’s old city, I face the main basilica and the 12th Century towers of the oldest university in Europe. There’s no rush. The ristorantes don’t open till eight for dinner, some at nine, after the staff eats together. Until then, it’s a pleasant time to spend sipping Lambrusco Salamino with antipasti of sliced meats and cheeses as the high tops fill up around me.
I came to Italy for a reason. I’m recently retired and, honestly, floundering a bit at a crossroads in life. The last time I faced this kind of uncertainty was after graduating Penn and an unfulfilling year in business. So, I took off on a trip across the U.S. pursuing the meaning of life—mine. This wasn’t uncommon back then. The Hippies in the Sixties called it dropping out. To the Yuppies who came on the scene later it was copping out. But in between was a brief, more accepted, open window that Early Boomers like me in the early 1970s could climb out and escape for a while called finding yourself. A dubious pursuit, perhaps, and narcistic but it was considered by many of us born just after WWII to be a birthright. The existentialist writers like Hesse, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre and others were popular then and encouraged us. My other reading included R. Buckminster Fuller touting extended travel as a secret for happiness, Horace Greeley creating a generation of pioneers, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient Democracy and America, 135 years before the first Baby Boomers, that observed “among democratic peoples, each generation is a new people.”
The fact is, we are what we read. I left my job, unnoticed and unrecognized. What I immediately liked about traveling was it felt like I was doing something while doing nothing. My thing at my pace. No pressure. It was relaxing and produced unexpected adventures and chance encounters that gave shape to the trip and eventually lead me on the path of being a writer, publisher, and a career in media sales. Revelations on that long-ago trip changed me forever. Now, at the other end of my arc of career and family-raising, I needed to see if travel still held a revelation or two that would resonate and inspire me. Or would Italy be just a pleasant diversion for a man much older now?
Staring out at Piazza Maggiore, waiting for the Bologna ristorantes to open, I’m glad to sit with my glass of wine and time to rehash the first of my two weeks in Italy off-season, my dream trip. And, also, to contemplate the other reason I came. I think back to the Alitalia red-eye from JFK to Rome, looking at the black ocean somewhere below and imagining my great-greats going the other way much slower by ship 115 years earlier. I feel their unmatched anticipation of arriving for the first time on a waiting shore—waiting, it must have seemed, just for them as Italy seemed to be waiting just for me. At Ellis Island my 3-year-old future grandfather would’ve stated his name, Schmuel, to the intake clerk who stamped his papers and said, 'Welcome to America, Samuel.' And that was how we all became Americans, wherever we were from. My red-eye flight suddenly feels like a time-capsule traveling back to origins. Ultimately, when Americans travel overseas that’s what happens. We can't help it; we're Americans. A hint of dawn defines Corsica and finally the sky brightens and there is Italy and the foothills of the great Apennine Mountains as we descend south to Rome. The Rome airport is a bright white shopping mall with gate signs guiding me through the stores to my connecting flight to Genoa. On the long shuttle ride to the plane I ask aloud if this is the bus to Genoa. The laughs reassure me that language isn’t a barrier in Italy. Gestures, a look, a tone of voice and a limited Googled vocabulary do just fine.
A week later, the full moon sits in the narrow space between the buildings above Via Zamboni where I sit at the outdoor café. I miss my wife terribly and wish she was here with me to enjoy this beautiful scene. But traveling light and off-season with only a shoulder-bag wasn’t a trip she cared to sign onto. Her trips have guided tours and an itinerary. This one wasn’t about leaving one place and arriving somewhere else; what was in between mattered more. I’m content to miss her. I know that missing is essential to finding. My trip is about finding lost things close to my heart. Seeing in by looking out. It’s an emotional journey, like poetry. It’s why I came but it provides only a little comfort right now.
Bicyclists pass by much quieter than the mopeds of hilly Genoa where I started my trip a week ago. I went there to see Christopher Columbus' house above Genoa’s harbor where he watched sails drop below the horizon and was inspired to imagine a new world. It seemed a good place for me to start. The small two-story stone house was a short walk from my hotel off the Piazza De Ferrari through the Medieval gates of the old city on the Street of Goats. His family cured and wove wool downstairs and lived upstairs. I tipped the tall costumed docent 5E as I left and he pointed me toward the historic district.
“Don’t be afraid to get lost,” he called after me.
Which I promptly did in the maze of narrow cobblestone vicos masquerading as vias crammed with women’s boutiques and ristorantes. A smiling dark-haired barista advised me in Englitalian over a café Americano and a panino not to try to find my way out of the confusing old city by looking for the way I came in. It was an important statement, it seemed, and noted it in my reporter’s spiral pad. I hadn’t kept a journal since my freelance years but was suddenly drawn back to scribbling down random thoughts. An off-duty taxi driver and his girlfriend finally rescued me from the old city. On the long ride back to the hotel my saviors told me the ferry I planned to take to Santa Margherita and Portofino didn’t run in November. They said sympathetically, “Datsa ahright. Tayka da treno Regionale at Stazione Principe.” The Regionale are slower than the Frecce express trains and make frequent stops they explained, adding, “Cinque Terra is bellissimo!” as I got out and they hesitantly accepted my 20E tip and effusive thanks.
After a career that prized express trains, the Regionale the next day followed the seacoast, stopping in villages that are a string of pearls set in Mediterranean and Aleppo pines around the throat of the Ligurian Alps. Bellissimo indeed. When I next rode the Regionale a few days later, I got off in Pisa as the Frecciarosa sped by to Florence and Bologna. I made my way to Piazza di Miraculi and its gilded domes, green and white marble basilicas, and the Torre Pendente, which was much bigger than I expected (think Statue of Liberty) and far more grandiose. Among hundreds of other tourists, I gawked at the architectural splendor of it all and felt the unavoidable regrets of not adjusting the trip to accommodate my wife to be here to see it, too. I felt the absence of her and sadness at the obvious paradox of so much church wealth surrounding me. I thought back to a low point on my twenty-something jaunt through the heartland of the U.S., to another church I encountered when I was feeling guilty and regretted leaving New York, just before I met my wife and things began to turn around.
Piazza di Miraculi made me remember when I was feeling all of the lonely lost soul driving through Des Moines in 1970 and found myself in an old-time-religion church with Jesus Saves lighting the interstices of a rooftop neon cross. I felt pretty down and shuffled forth among a half-dozen fellow lost souls beckoned to come down front. A black preacher gripped my shoulders and looked hard at me then said to the congregation, “Glory be to God! We have one of the Chosen People among us tonight.” You could hear a pin drop in the Jesus Saves Church. I looked for a side door to flee but every eye was on me. He went on about the Israelites and black folk in America being long-suffering peoples wandering in deserts of despair and valleys of torment. And Amen, Jesus-es came from all directions. The man could preach, and he wasn’t letting me off the hook just because I wasn’t Christian. He said, “Son, do you believe He will lift your loneliness and carry your burden?” At that point in my trip I was ready to give anyone, anything, credit that could even come close. Things were bad. I had given up on ever finding myself, anywhere. I thought, well, maybe Jesus was more than the son of a poor Jewish contractor. Who was I to say? I could at least agree to never say he wasn’t. The preacher smiled and retreated to the altar in a chorus of Amen, Jesus-es. Shortly after that I met my wife and I learned an important truth from leaving New York. Finding yourself, knowing who we were at our rock-bottom core, was about seeing our best self reflected in someone’s eyes. Eyes are the mirror of the soul; in love, eyes mirror a lover’s soul. It’s where love at first sight came from.
In Piazza di Miraculi some of the puzzlements of the crossroads sorted out for me. For the first time on the trip, I was impatient to move along. That evening, sitting at my high top outside the café in Bolgna, pondering the heuristic quality of travel to show us our world by showing us other ones, my thoughts were interrupted by a street vendor who appeared next to my table. He sold me a sparkly flashlight for my four-year-old grandson and lingered to talk. He said I must visit Brindisi where Greek ferries dock and also Gallipoli where he was from and missed very much. I gave him an empathetic nod and he handed me another sparkly flashlight and smiled, Buona sera. Prego, and moved off to other cafes.
In Sorrento I rode a bus that hugged the edge of the narrow twisting Amalfi Coast Highway where on-coming traffic backed up to let us around hairpin turns carved into cliffs high above the blue Med. The views were spectacular and the bus drivers have the nerves of aerialists. My ticket was to Salerno but I got off after 25 km, about halfway, in Amalfi. After a stiff drink and a slice of pizza that took five minutes to cook in a brick oven, I strolled up into town. An elderly grocer greeted me in a store that was more a cave crammed with shelves and crates of produce. We exchanged views on marinara sauce, and he shook a small jar of Amalfi anchovy juice in the air. Psst—psst—psst, he said indicating three drops with garlic, basil, and olive oil. Oregano was too strong and cilantro, he shook his head, ruins it. He waved a finger for emphasis. When I wrote down all the spices and herbs he eliminated from my recipes, my notebook was nearly full.
I love cooking. It’s a singularly focused part of my day, a time when tangential concerns are put aside. How someone prepares a meal in all its details says a lot about their approach and attitude toward life, as all art including the culinary arts do. Being particularly proud of my pastas and red sauces, the Amalfi grocer’s brief pantomime and caveats are a profound influence in my kitchen. I can only hope my dinner guests smile at my wise grocer’s tale to simplify ingredients and improve results because they get the gist of it in tackling life’s oft-conflicting choices.
A rail strike delayed me in Caserta enroute to the Adriatic coast, but I’ve come to welcome the delays and detours of the trip: It isn't about getting somewhere. I’m heading to the port of Brindisi in Puglia and then on to Gallipoli farther off the grid in southernmost Salento on the spiked heel of the boot. I’m caught in a downpour and ducked into a crowded taverna to eat piles of boiled heads-on jumbo shrimp and drink beer with soccer fans (they’re everywhere in Italy) watching Italy fail to quality for the World Cup for the first time since 1958. A heartbroken crowd file out but I leave feeling like a winner. Two days later, my window seat from Rome to New York is above the wing so I see only a slice of blue Atlantic. Unlike my red-eye flight two weeks before, I have the clearest image imaginable of what and who are waiting for me on the other end of the arc of ocean.
David Charles Barudin holds an MA from Hollins University Writing Program and a BS in Economics from Penn’s Wharton School of Business. After a career in media sales, he is enjoying an active period of submitting stories to magazines and polishing a yet-unpublished novel, Alternate Routes, which expands on the ideal of travel to look in while looking out. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in trade and popular magazines and in Fjords Review, Lyrical Iowa and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and dogs in SW Virginia where he writes full time. He applauds this and other publishers of literary fiction and creative nonfiction, which constitutes the most accessible non-specialized narrative available to diverse, refined readers.