Sicily, Goethe once wrote, is the key to everything. Italy, then, is the door which that key opens. The country is peppered with towns and cities filled with historic treasures. Amazingly, given her tumultuous history, much of her inheritance, artistic, architectural and civic, lives and breathes.
In Trieste, a two-millennia old theatre sits comfortably next to a Mussolini era municipal building. Turn a Habsburg period corner in Milan and face the mediaeval and holy grandeur of the Duomo di Milano, with the Madonnina, the Virgin Mary, until recently marking the highest point of the city.
Many of Italy’s towns and cities boast a historical range that is difficult to match. Italy’s beauty has been broadly undefiled by the scourge of ideological and revolutionary certitude.
There are, here and there, examples of architectural brutalism, but, standing next to treasures, they act as standing reproaches to a world of experts that has lost faith in love and hope. Italy is Goethe’s everything.
A million PhDs would not be enough to fully understand her. She is whimsical and intuitive, seductive as a result. And, of course, dangerous.
Travelling to Italy as a man married to a northern European lady, one notices something unsettling: spoken Italian has spell-binding qualities inaudible to foreign men but eminently discernible to visiting members of the opposite sex.
“Amazingly, Northern ladies seem to have no defence mechanism against these enchanting sounds and creatures.”
Like Ulysses on a raft, the blonde and blue-eyed (and married) female explorer can only resist the temptation brought up with every spoken word by the local menfolk by tying herself to the proverbial mast. Without it, the perdition of lust awaits. The mellifluous tones coming from local mermen act on pledges like acid on a rock, threatening to loosen all prior sworn and formerly deeply held commitments.
The size of the husband, however big and strong, is of no more concern to the sorcerers than the Maginot line was to the Wehrmacht. The only real option for the man is to run far away, his wife under his arm, from the reach of their words. Sound, though, travels faster than his clumsy feet. Trapped, he is left running like King Kong up the Italian equivalent of the Empire State building, his confused Ann in hand, desperately shooing away swarms of Italian men who gun down the bulky mammal with seductively flirtatious salvoes of “Ciao”, “Ragazza” and “Arrivederci”.
Each shot passes straight through the ineffective defences of the hapless man ape, landing un-hindered into the ears of their intended target. Ann heard them – no longer sure of anything. An exaggeration,
I am repeatedly told! Sitting at a café, a nondescript Italian waiter asked my daughter what she would like to order.
My daughter looked around, blushed and giggled. He spoke to her. What she heardis anyone’s guess. But she didn’t know where to look.
You can enter Italy anytime you like but you might not leave whole. Caveat emptor.
