2003: La Dolce Vita Loca.
by Carl Russo
IV.
The ubiquitous vintage Fiat—here Nonna passes a 1968 850
Speciale—gives lie to the old "Fix It Again, Tony" jab.
From the notebook:
* The anxiety of carrying a fifty-euro bill. "Hey Luigi, can you break a D note?"
* The cheaper the trattoria, the larger the carafe of wine. Italy has outlawed the practice of charging a coperto (cover charge) for the basket of bread they place on your table, yet it always shows up on the bill.
* How dumb the American tourists sound when the say, "Umm."
* Watching Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner dubbed on TV:
"Chi è Numero Uno?"
"Lei è Numero Sei!"
"Io non sono un numero! Sono un uomo libero!"
* The antique drinking fountains that pop up whenever you're about to disintegrate on a hot day. The water is as cold and sweet as it was over two thousand years ago when the aqueducts were laid.
* The cobblestone layer who would certainly be cast as same by Fellini. Big and bulky, with a laurel wreath of white hair and gold chains swaying from his neck, he pounded bricks into the street. (Arrgh! The screen on my camera said I was on shot 38 of a 36-exposure roll!) The topside of the black bricks—about the size of a bread slice—are pointed underneath like inverted pyramids. The mortar appears to be nothing more than sand. The layer scooped out a square with a trowel and whacked it with his silver pick hammer.
* Louder than the chink-chink of the hammer was the old woman's cane on the floor of Santa Cecilia as she hobbled from the front pew to the rear exit. It echoed loud enough to wake the saint entombed below.
* Sant'Agnese also lies beneath her own church, along with 6,000 other skeletons. Or at least the ones that haven't been stolen over the ages. I saw a fourth-century stone marking the gravediggers guild, proving the lasting strength of the trade unions in Italy. You had to pay them if you wanted to be buried in the dark labyrinth of these catacombs. Of course, they saved the best slots for themselves—next to the martyrs. The beheaded Saint Aggie lies in a silver coffin, practically cherry from the seventeenth century. Or so said our gloomy tour guide. While he spoke, a fat yellow spider dropped onto his shoulder, which he brushed off nonchalantly. Suddenly four tourists from Indiana and one from San Francisco were twitching about, searching for spiders on their persons.
* I reached my goal by seeing about twenty Caravaggio paintings, the most stunning being the life-sized renderings of biblical tales. Some pious types of his day considered it heresy to make the saints look so photo-real, draping them in Renaissance clothes, and even modeling the Virgin on a local whore. You can sense the void of his black spaces violently shot with a golden ray from a window (that's chiaroscuro, kids!), illuminating an urgent series of events that reads like a movie.
* And, I humbly submit, Bernini's best sculpture: The Rape of Prosperina in the Galleria Borghese, wherein the big brute digs his fingers into her thigh, cold marble made warm flesh.
* Watermelon gelato with the seeds.
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© 2004 A Rat's Ass Production. All rats reserved.
