Under the Lombard Smog

Work is slow, so slow in fact that I had time to read the Real Estate section of the New York Times the other day. The title “Collecting Houses in Northern Italy” popped out at me so I clicked on the link and found myself reading the story of an American woman who manages to acquire four quaint old farmhouses in Piedmont at bargain basement prices with the ease as if she was acquiring a second or third household cat. Reading the article one gets the impression that if you just looked hard enough you too could find that charming cascina to convert into a four bedroom vacation getaway for eager American tourists.
I thought about my apartment (or should I say condo because we own it), built in 1962, loved by us but certainly not New York Times Real Estate section worthy, and wondered why I hadn’t instead struck out to the Amalfi Coast when I first came to Italy. There I could have found a renaissance villa in almost complete disrepair, marry the son of the family it belonged to—whose name would be Gennaro and who would own and run a vineyard or something and look like he belonged in an underwear ad-- and then I could make millions selling my story as a novel about the trials and tribulations of fixing up the villa (I can’t tell you what a hard time we had with the mosaic fresco of the family crest on the floor of the main hallway!) before appearing a in a full page spread for the NY Times Great Escapes section, grinning toothily at the camera as I hoisted my glass of homemade limoncello in my spacious, beautifully tiled kitchen with muslin curtains billowing in the breeze behind me and with a eat-your-heart-out-bitches look in my eye. The local townspeople would welcome me into the fold as one of their own and offer up wise sayings about the tides and love, and parables about how growing grapes relates to life in general. I would have an endearing old widow named Maria to help me around the house who would offer up an “O Signore!” and cross herself anytime someone said something a bit racy and she would be so devoted to me and my family she would scrub the walls of my tiled kitchen every day, make our pasta from scratch, and wash all my children’s clothes by hand. Yes! And in the NY Times article there could be a charming photo of my two children dressed in white climbing up an olive tree with the pony running around in the paddock in the background, I did mention that we would have a pony, right?

Perhaps the thing I find most irksome about these kinds of articles is that they make me feel like I have to apologize to friends and family when they come to visit me. They must be thinking that I’ve missed out somehow and that the woman in the article could have been me if I had only played my cards right. They’ve seen “A Room with a View”, they’ve read “Under the Tuscan Sun”, they know all about what life is supposed to be like in Italy. I remember years ago writing my friend in the States to tell her that I had bought a bicycle and she wrote back saying she imagined me wearing a long, full skirt and riding it through a piazza where the pigeons would all scatter as I came blowing past, fresh flowers tucked into the basket on the front of bicycle. I had to break it to her that full skirts weren’t in that season, and that my new mountain bike didn’t have a basket mounted on the front.
I can also see the confusion on their faces when we pull up in front of our building, which is on a standard residential street in a residential neighbourhood. Where is the charming cobblestoned courtyard? The personable fruit seller who knows your name? (Actually you can find him down the street in front of the old elementary school two mornings a week.) Where is the café with the handsome men lounging around outside waiting for a woman to walk past so they can whistle? Why isn’t opera music playing in the background? Why don’t I own a Vespa? And above all, why is it raining?
Once we head into the center of town I can see them relax, and once I get them a aperativo at my favorite bar they become downright giddy. Here are the cobblestoned streets, the courtyards, the good food, the open air markets, the church bells ringing, the well dressed people taking their evening passaggiata that they were promised when they booked those airline tickets. I even show them the 16th century building where Lorenzo and I (and eventually Giulio) lived for the first 3 years after we moved up North from Rome. “Oh, how nice!” they sigh when I show them the building where we lived our two room apartment overlooking the courtyard below. And then I point out how we couldn’t wait to move from there once we realized they were putting in a restaurant in the tiny courtyard below us with al fresco seating where two people speaking in normal tones over plates of spaghetti carbonara could keep the whole building awake. And how there was no parking and nowhere even to legally unload your car so one person had to unload as fast as the could while ignoring the cars lining up behind them on the narrow street while the other sat at the wheel ready to tear off the second the last bag was removed from the trunk. Or how it was so damp in there in the winter that patches of mould would appear on the walls in the bedroom. Or how I choose Giulio’s stroller when he was a newborn based on if I could fold it and carry it one-handed while carrying Giulio in the other as there was nowhere to leave things at the base of the steps without worrying that someone might make off with them. (Like they did with the aforementioned mountain bike just a month after I bought it.)
We didn’t have to stay up North, in fact initially we dreamed of when we could return to Rome until one day we realized that we didn’t want to. We will never have a restored Renaissance villa where we are now, but there was even less of a chance of us even being able to buy a three room apartment on the outskirts of Rome. Somehow breathtaking scenery and lemon trees took backseat to bike paths for getting around town, good schools and day care programs for my kids, and the possibility of finding a decent job for me. That as nice as it to live in some old quaint building in the center of town, there is a lot to be said for a home where you have a huge fenced in yard where the kids can play and where you can unload your groceries without fearing a ticket from the municipal police. And while the idea of a rich husband is always nice, Lorenzo won me over because he was the first man I ever met who showed up at my door with two shopping bags full of food and announced he was going to make me dinner, the very thing I needed the most without even realizing it. And finally, let’s just say it, without Lorenzo I would never have Giulio and Livia who are worth more to me than 20 falling down renaissance villas.
But somehow this need to apologize to visitors is something stronger than me. I’m sorry, I want to say, sorry to have brought you here to an Italy you didn’t know about, where people shop in supermarkets, live in apartments built in the last 40 years, work long hours and worry about their jobs. Where people pay their taxes, follow rules, and do worry about getting to work on time, realize that smoking isn’t good for you and that running and cycling is, so I’m just waiting for the New York Times to do a piece on it. They can use my apartment for the shoot if they want to.