by Norman Lewis
It was in the first week of October and I had not fully understood until this moment how completely and finally summer is effaced in southern Europe by this time, and what a sensation of abandonment replaces it in all those areas where pleasure has reigned during the long season of clear skies and jubilant sun. Never was this sad transition more in evidence than in Bracciano. The map had shown twenty miles of villages where the visitors in their uniforms of pleasure had thronged throughout the five months when the long sun-saturated days subsided so softly, almost imperceptibly into scented and lucent nights. Where there had been laughter, music, bronzed bodies endlessly in action, now there was silence and a disheartened peace. A beauty of an austere resurrected kind might be said to have returned, but the life of recent times was extinct. The lipstick had faded from the mouths of the village girls stranded by the passing of summer now halfway to slatterns on listless waterfronts. Here in the late afternoon the day was already worn out. Down in Trevignato Romano, backed by the Sabatini mountains, fifty boats were moored under tarpaulin with long-legged lake birds picking round them in the mud and a poster for water-skiing ripped by the wind from a wall. There was a bar open here and I joined the last of the boatmen to sip a cloying marsala which was all they had to offer. He was of no help in the search for accommodation to let.
‘Nothing here,’ he said. ‘They lock these places up and forget about them. Try Anguillara.’
‘I have,’ I said. ‘I looked over the Villa Claudia. It was a sad place. Bad atmosphere.’
‘Understandably,’ he said. ‘The man drowned his wife last year. They’d pay you to take it over.’
‘Am I likely to find anything at Bracciano?’
‘You won’t find what you’re looking for. Maybe a couple of rooms over a shop. Only two buses a day to La Storta. The morning one is 6 a.m. They’re on their winter schedule now.’ He tossed the remains of his cheroot into the sallow water and a seabird scuttled across to snap it up.
I drove back to La Storta and explained my quandary to a master who knew the area well and suggested I should go and talk to Conte di Robilant in the nearby village of Isola Farnese. ‘When he’s hard up he sometimes lets a wing of his castle,’ he said.
‘Somewhat more than I could run to,’ I told him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘No harm in seeing him. He might let you have it for nothing if he takes a liking to you. Go and put your case to him. You’ve nothing to lose.’
I spent the night in a motel full of whimsy of the kind I had previously believed to be exclusive to the United Kingdom, with jokey notices and plaster elves that even invaded the bedroom, and in the morning called on the Count. What was remarkable about Isola Farnese was that it was built on a ridge overlooking the ruins of the great Etruscan city, Veii, destroyed by the Romans in 359 BC, and every house on the north side of its single street had a stupendous view through its back windows of what the Romans had left. The village was confusingly called an island because it was nearly encircled by two rivers, from which soared a massive escarpment with the Count’s Hohenstaufen castle built on its top. The Count was at home when I called, a genial man who would have passed anywhere in manner and dress and speech for an Englishman, but for a Venetian cragginess of feature, including a great, aquiline nose possibly inherited from a Doge ancestor.
We discussed the matter of my possible tenancy, in an environment of dishevelled magnificence. The first impression was that this vast vaulted chamber was the storeroom of an eccentric antiques dealer into which every item that could not be put on display had been remorselessly shoved. Vast ancestral portraits, many of them punctured in various ways, or with strips of canvas flapping from them like scrofulous skin hung on the walls, or had been piled up in odd corners. Mildew or attack by moths had left the motifs of ancient tapestries hardly decipherable. There were marble cupids and Venuses that had lost fingers or toes. An eagle stuffed, with wings spread, viewed us with a single saffron eye in the melancholic illumination of stained glass.
‘You could have this if it’s the kind of place you’re looking for,’ the Count said. ‘Plus a few bedrooms to go with it. The view is rather pleasant.’ Together we admired the prospect through the narrow thirteenth-century windows. Below us vast weeds clung to the ledges of the rock face, brandishing garish yellow flowers over the valley. Wide Etruscan fields curved away into the distance, through which, now out of sight, the Cassia plunged in the direction of Rome. Glittering white spots sparkled everywhere in the grass and were in constant movement as if caught up by the wind. These, I was later to discover, were discarded plastic bags.
The Count seemed almost apologetic for a reference to the question of rent although the amount suggested for what was on offer was low. A small difficulty arose. I had in mind a trial period of six months but family trustees came into this, he said, who stipulated a minimum rental of one year. As an alternative he offered a building once used as a small convent, and now a castle annexe which I could have for six months. This, he pointed out, possessed a spacious garden — something the castle itself lacked. We crossed the road for a quick inspection and I took the ex-convent on the spot. In its concentrated way, this, too, had once been grand, although now a little time-worn. There were a dozen or so rooms and many passages, all with marble floors, a large subterranean kitchen with Latin verse scrawled over the walls, a scorpion either dead or moribund in each of the four baths, and a stunning fourteenth-century fresco across one wall of the main sitting room showing a scene, on the verge of erasure by time, of foot-soldiers in armour going to the assault of an airborne fragment of fortification which might have belonged to our castle itself. This room was dominated by a statue of a Japanese samurai grimacing fiercely at its occupants. Otherwise the furniture repeated the decayed splendours of the castle: the great chairs deeply imprinted with the posteriors of the past, the tattered sheepskin bindings of books on religious themes, a case with a stuffed bittern family, the male and female birds surveying their nest with their young realistically set up in the act of emerging from the eggs.
The garden was undoubtedly the feature of this dwelling for it occupied all of a hillside sloping, in places dangerously, to the river. Paths wound steeply down through thickets and coppices of ancient trees, past a shattered summer house, and at one point over a reeling bridge across a tributary of the Cremera, and thence on to the river itself, where, beyond the further bank, the few stones that were all that was left of the great Etruscan city glinted among the green sward and through the branches of the forest at its back. It was the opinion of Doctor Pecorella, to whom the Count introduced me, and who spent more time on archaeology than on medicine, that the convent occupied the site of an Etruscan nobleman’s villa. I noted that the cavern now used to accommodate the central heating equipment and oil-tank had, in the memory of the oldest villagers, contained a number of sarcophagi.
Three days later the family arrived, to greet the arrangements made for them with huge delight. By the purest of chances their arrival coincided with the celebration of a local festa, for which the Count had procured masked Venetian dancers on stilts, who plunged up and down the single street blowing their horns, and shouting obscenities in an incomprehensible dialect. It was a fortunate coincidence indeed, for the villagers of Isola Farnese were not on the whole given to displays of this kind, and suffered from a tendency to matter-of-factness and taciturnity.
There followed an interlude for exploration in which the children, transported from Essex mundanities, wandered entranced through the excitements and mysteries of the ancient south with its castles, its tombs and its fields dominated by magnificent white cattle with mild eyes and hugely spreading horns. ‘I keep them,’ said the Count, speaking of his own small herd, ‘not for profit but for effect. There is no money in such animals, but just to look at them is enough. We pretend to ourselves that they are descended from the race shown in neolithic cave paintings. You may know better than I do about these things, but please don’t des
troy my illusions.’
From the great isolated crag of Isola Farnese we looked down across a spread of fields, some of them prairies in miniature with pockets of woodland with chestnuts crammed together in the corners and hollows of the landscape as tightly as the trees of the Mato Grosso of Amazonia. From these leafy refuges flocks of crows were continually discharged into the skies. They were the only birds to be seen, all the rest having been shot by Roman sportsmen. There were burial chambers to be investigated everywhere, not only in our garden but in the deep banks forming the barriers of the fields. We made our way from tomb to tomb, and the big white cows, shaking their horns to dislodge the flies, followed us, consumed with curiosity, wherever we went.
Great excitement was generated when poking about with her stick in a cavernous interior my twelve-year-old daughter, Kiki, accidentally unearthed a large fragment of decorated pottery. Back in Isola Farnese this was identified as Etruscan, and led to a great deal of digging activity in which several more coloured fragments were brought to light.
These were submitted for inspection to Dr Pecorella who held surgery in the village once a week. He was busy with a patient, but he immediately got rid of him before raking through the collection we had brought. I apologized for disturbing him, and he said, ‘The man was wasting my time. Every week I have to put up with him. He wants to be injected — they all do — and I ask him what for? “It’s just something that comes over me”, he says, and I tell him to put himself on a diet of chicken soup with weekly enemas. As for the stuff you’ve brought me, it’s interesting but the colours won’t last more than a few days. What’s the matter with your lips?’
‘The local wine,’ I told him.
‘It’s the chemical preservatives they use,’ he said. ‘Dab them with vinegar after you’ve had a drink. The fellow in the bar keeps a bottle on the counter.’
‘I noticed it.’
‘How are things going with the Count? Nice fellow isn’t he? From Venice. Just as much of a foreigner here as you are. Descended from the Longobards. All of them have enormous noses — penises, too, so they tell me. Note the difference in a typical Roman face like mine. They have a bust of Caligula in the National Museum I’m supposed to be the image of. I mean when I was young, before my hair fell out.’
Up to this time I had hardly more than heard of Veii, but Pecorella, as an expert on its history, now took me in hand. Dennis’s Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, published in 1880, was still the classic work on the subject, he told me, and I managed to borrow a copy from one of the teachers at St George’s. From this I learned that what we considered as no more than our extensive garden was part of one of the great necropolises of history. ‘The rock,’ said the book, ‘is hollowed in every direction by sepulchral caves and niches.’ At a time when Rome was no more than a cluster of villages, Veii, Dennis tells us, was the exact size of Athens, being seven and a half miles in circumference. Subsequently as Rome grew in size and power, fourteen wars were fought against the Etruscans of Veii. In the end, after a siege lasting ten years, the forces of the dictator Camillus entered through a mine excavated under the city’s ramparts, and the silence of total defeat settled down. Local patriotism insisted that Isola Farnese had been the citadel of Veii, and Pecorella, in other directions a human monument to disbelief, supported this point of view, and subsequently took us to a local hill where from studying the accounts of Plutarch and Livy he had identified the situation of Camillus’s camp. Both this and the reputed entrance to the tunnel appeared to us as no more than meaningless irregularities in the rocky terrain.
The villagers of Isola Farnese came as a surprise to us all. After the eighteen war months in the exuberant south I was quite prepared to accept the Neapolitans as far from temperamentally characteristic of the Italian race, but was quite unprepared for the discovery that these Romans were a match for the natives of Essex in matters of stolidity and reserve. First contacts with our neighbours, apart from the Count and his wife Alice, were with the couple who ran the small bar across the road, and the owner of the village shop in the square. In the first case I bought very bad local white wine, and in the second all the essential groceries, finding it extraordinary that in Italy of all places these transactions could be accomplished with the complete absence of the usual pleasantries exchanged elsewhere on such occasions.
Kiki and Gawaine, two years her junior, were delivered to St George’s which contributed to their favourable impression of Rome. A three-course lunch prepared by a first-rate Italian chef was yet another Roman adventure and many pupils at this school agreed that they ate as never before, and might well never do again. They were unaware at the time that a few of the senior pupils who behaved in so pleasantly eccentric a fashion, and could expect no more than a gentle chiding from a teacher, were on drugs. This became more apparent later when their antics sometimes assumed dangerous and spectacular forms. There were times when the otherwise easygoing and gratifying existences of children drawn largely from the moneyed classes appeared as far from sheltered. Shortly after the children joined the school Paul Getty III, a pupil in an upper form, was abducted. His grandfather at that time was reputed to be the world’s richest man. The grandson was much in the public eye for his somewhat stereotyped rebellion against a materialistic society, which nevertheless provided for him a life of pleasure and luxury. His family connections, his participation in the drug scene and public extravagances could not fail to land him in trouble. He was kidnapped from a Rome nightclub, probably by the Mafia, and held for five months while an attempt was made to extract a ransom of seven million pounds. When this failed one of the boy’s ears was cut off after he had been stunned by a blow on the head. The ear, accompanied by a note threatening to amputate further bodily parts, was sent to the office of a Rome newspaper. After some haggling a ransom of one and a half million pounds was paid, and the boy released. A few of the richer parents decided at this point that it might be prudent to send their children to school elsewhere.
Chapter Twenty-Four
ON THE TWENTIETH OF the month we were all awakened shortly after dawn by the most tremendous racket. It was the rattle of small arms, a battlefield sound of the kind to be heard when a fighting patrol has run into difficulties, its members have become separated, and are letting fly in a sporadic and unconcerted fashion, usually with little result, at anything that moves.
I got up and threw open the shutter of a rear window, with partial views of the fields to the left and the right and most of Veii below showing through the oaks and chestnuts across the river. In the distance I noticed, spread across this panorama, several small groups of two or three men carrying guns. At the bottom of the garden itself two men crouched in a kind of trench which had not been there the day before, while a third, hidden behind a shrub a few yards away, cranked a handle attached to a piece of apparatus like an adjustable lamp standard which flashed the sun’s rays in all directions through mirrors fixed at its top. Guns were popping all over the landscape, some far off and some from concealed positions quite near me in the garden. The targets, I realized, were certainly birds, although minutes passed before I spotted one under concentrated fire, and this was very small. There was no doubt about it that a large number of guns were involved, of which not a few had not hesitated to violate our privacy.
I went up through the house and crossed the road to the bar. The lantern-jawed and introspective owner, Primo, was filling tiny glasses with brandy to be served to customers kitted out in the most extraordinary sporting gear, one of them, with a markedly Italian cast of features, in a kilt. The owner gave me a dank look and said, ‘Eh?’ I held up a finger and he passed over a glass. A daughter had been called in to help, and I managed to catch her eye. ‘What’s going on out there?’ I asked. ‘The season,’ she said, ‘starts today.’
The Count was off on his morning walk down the Via Baronale with his grizzled asthmatic Alsatian called Hannibal which he had imported from England and allowed no one to address except i
n English. ‘It’s purgatory,’ he said. ‘Lasts at least two weeks so you may as well get used to it. Better buy ear-plugs if you enjoy a morning lie-in.’ He felt it necessary to warn me. ‘These people are a law unto themselves. Of course they’ve taken over your garden. Your problem is to keep them from taking pot-shots through the windows of the house. The vineyards have to employ guards to keep them out. They not only shoot all the birds but eat the grapes. Better not complain. In this village they grin and bear it.’
For half the day the guns popped and crackled, shot pattered on the roof and occasionally tapped at a window. Someone brought my binoculars, and I saw a fat man throw down what looked like a modern assault weapon to chase after a tiny fluttering bird with some life still in it, and then lose part of his trousers on a wire fence. It is normal for participants on such Roman occasions to shoot each other, and one of the guns went down as though poleaxed, although I was later to learn that he had only lost the top of a thumb.
Suddenly a silence that had hardly been disturbed in 2,500 years settled about us. It was midday when by immemorial custom shooting stopped until two hours before sundown, when birds would be prospecting among the surrounding trees for somewhere to roost. The second part of the day’s entertainment awaited in the form of ritual spaghetti already cooking in cauldrons over fires stoked with wood confiscated by foraging parties in local gardens. The scarifying wine accompanying this was by tradition an early pressing of the year’s vintage, its fermentation arrested by chemicals, and charged with raw grappa. The exaltation close to fury produced by a mug of this lasted for about half an hour, and was followed by sedation and often sleep. In the lucid interval the hunters dashed about reliving their recent experiences, boasting of triumphs, recalling the extraordinary rarity of birds who had narrowly survived their fusillades, and describing how others, equally rare, had fallen from the sky when outside what was accepted as effective range.
