The overnight train took us direct to Florence, where we checked into the Nuova Italia, a nice little hotel on Via Faenza. Heather says the shower was cold but breakfast included.
Florence was beautiful, no other word will do, and — surely not — seems serene in retrospect. I don’t know why my feelings towards the city are so warm compared with France — perhaps because it’s older and the people more distant from the power that built it. More accepting too of its loss.
And it was intimate. We could have walked round the Ponte Vecchio to the Uffizi, the Duomo and the Accademia, and been back to our hotel in less than an hour. Over a couple of days we visited them all. In retrospect they didn’t seem crowded, perhaps because the piazza was so expansive and the cathedral doors so massive. We had the David almost to ourselves until an American guide with a pennant arrived to tell her followers what to think about it. It wasn’t until ten years later that a maniac attacked its toes with a hammer, so we were able to get close, not held back by the glass barriers that surround it now.
Heather bought a beautiful white crocheted table cloth in the market — shades of something she’d made herself — and we walked up to the hills, sat in the quiet and enjoyed the view.
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Our next stop was Cassino, between Rome and Naples, to visit the battlefield and the rebuilt Monte Cassino abbey, and also to visit Agostino and Olymphia Roscilli.
During the battle Dad’s unit had occupied a house owned by the Russo family, and he and Olymphia, one of Signor Russo’s daughters, had made eyes at each other. Olymphia married Agostino Roscilli after the war, and Mum and Dad visited them in 1969. They’d had a warm welcome once the young friends had introduced their respective spouses.
Agostino met us at the railway station, which many Maori New Zealanders had died attacking in 1944.
If we’d warmed to Italy in Florence, in Cassino we fell for the Italians — their way of life, their food, their generosity. Olymphia cooked, baked and preserved. She had a big garden, the tomatoes nearly finished. There were rabbits and chickens. She’d baked a big loaf of bread. She held it in the crook of her arm and cut slices off it, cutting towards herself so she could take in our conversation. To eat with the bread she laid out peppers and other vegetables that she’d bottled in olive oil. I was amazed at how much oil she used and how little meat — halfway to a condiment. It was an education. She cooked us eggplant parmigiana and we drank red wine that they’d pressed themselves. The conversation was awkward but friendly as we had no shared language.
We slept well and woke up next day to the pleasure, new to us, of ripening grapes hanging from vines on the pergola outside our room.
Agostino drove us in his Fiat to the Russo’s old house, where Dad had been billeted. He didn’t just drive a Fiat, he worked at the big new factory outside the town. Signor Russo had died, and Agostino took us to his niche in the outdoor mausoleum.
We drove up Monte Cassino to the Abbey, which looked startlingly new after the cathedrals we’d visited from Canterbury on. We walked over to the Polish cemetery, where the dead were buried who’d attacked the abbey from higher ground north of the town.
Agostino also took us to a book shop downtown. While we were browsing the shelves for books and maps he spoke to the proprietor, who came to us and said in English, “He says to choose anything you want and he will pay.” We settled for a little Italian to English dictionary, which we still have somewhere, and asked him to pass on our gratitude for the Roscilli’s hospitality.
Agostino and Olymphia took us to a little neighbourhood shop where the proprietors spoke English and could translate our conversation for us in Scottish accents. It reminded me of my country upbringing — everyone knowing each other. As we sat out by the roadside Heather tasted orange-flavoured Sanpellegrino Aranciata for the first time. Sanpellegrino, and Campari and Soda mixers in little cone-shaped glass bottles — they matched our mood and the weather perfectly.
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Those Scottish accents spoke to the remarkable transformation of Italy since the war. Cassino had been the scene of brutal battles as the Allies fought the Germans northwards, and many of the locals had fled to Naples. The Russos had stayed to protect, as best they could, their women and their homes. After the war many Italians left the country, lots to Britain and Australia, a few to New Zealand. Now they were coming home to Italy’s new prosperity. Heather and I went for a long walk through the countryside and managed to get lost.
We called in at another roadside shop and asked for help. The woman behind the counter couldn’t understand us and called out to someone in the rear. A grandmotherly lady came out, asked how she could help, called us “love” and gave us directions. She too had come home after living in Scotland since the war. Everywhere old houses were being renovated or modernised and new ones built, often very grand.
We stayed three nights with the Roscillis and caught the train to Rome. Our car became crowded, and en route another little incident made me think how well the Italians do things. Two couples, obvious friends, chatting easily, boarded near us. There were only two seats, so the men stood while the women sat, and the conversation continued. Then, with no discernible break in the chat, the women stood and the men sat down, and so it went.
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We spent three days in Rome, and as elsewhere visited the main attractions. The Forum, the Coliseum and the Pantheon. The Vatican, the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain…
The Forum was a ruin, an island of peace, but I don’t think that I ever truly came to grips with the Coliseum — a magnificent arena built to watch animals and people get butchered for fun — or worse, that there was an audience for that sort of entertainment. Thank God we have SGI and special effects so we can generally avoid the real thing. And then there were the Christians who accepted their fate rather than renounce their faith.
Tanya Gold wrote about visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, calling it “the most arresting building in the world”. Comparing it with other sites around the world, she described the Pantheon as empty, “waiting for something that won’t come back.” Empty, awesome in the old sense, looking for purpose.
Saint Peter’s, she wrote, is “one-dimensional, less a church than a painting that shouts, and I am afraid of it.” That’s a strange way to express it, but I do know that I didn’t feel the sense of antiquity, and personal humility, that I experienced at Canterbury.
St Peter’s Square, the Basilica — they were magnificent, but felt more like a monument to earthly pomp and artistic splendour. We’d seen Michelangelo’s David in Florence before the maniac got to it, but the attack on his Pietà was eight years earlier, and it was back on display, restored but behind a bullet proof barrier.
We gawped our way through the Museum Galleries — what else can you do in an hour or two? — and along to the Sistine Chapel. Like so much else in Rome, Michelangelo’s frescoes looked so old and timeless that it was hard to imagine their actual creation. Restoration had not begun at that point, but I went back with Dad in 1994 and saw their astonishing colour when it was almost complete.
More recent history was reflected in the Victor Emmanuel monument, which celebrates the unification of Italy, and the Palazzo Venezia, with its balcony, where Mussolini gave his speeches. It was stripped of fascist regalia in 1980, but when you see photos of him looking over the crowds — pleased as punch, like he can’t believe his luck — you wonder how he managed to talk these people, living the good life among their monuments, ruins and churches, into having another crack at Empire.
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The weather was fine in Rome and the food fun. We bought slices of pizza — thick bread base with a sliced potato topping — from a roadside cart.
Next day we had lunch with a friend in Foreign Affairs who’d been transferred from Honiara to Rome by way of South America, where he’d married a Brazilian girl. Lunch was a simple but delicious affair in a little hole-in-the-wall place, after which we sat out in the sun sipping coffees.
We had dinner on the Via Veneto, newly famous as the setting for La Dolce Vita, and all the beautiful people in Fellini’s film — Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée and the rest. Chic and elegant beyond our means. Someone walked past as we ate with a small tiger on a lead, after which we walked down to the Trevi Fountains and made a wish.
We didn’t get to see Anita and Marcello wading in the pools, wet, bosomy and glamorous, but we do have the tiger to remember.
We caught the train again, spent a night in Milan and headed back to Frankfurt and Pan Am. Next stop Bangkok.