See You in the Piazza

by Frances Mayes

  “Excellent. My wife is pregnant and it’s full of iron. Very good for her.” No wife in sight. He goes on to order roasted duck.

  * * *

  SO OFTEN IN Italy, there’s a way. Something is not possible, then it becomes possible. As Wallace Stevens wrote, “After the final no, there comes a yes.”

  Inaccessible, the sign says. And I so want to see the Bodoni museum. Any book lover would. Giambattista Bodoni, the pioneer typographer, revved up the art of composition and type design so forcefully that he’s credited with being the first modern typographer. After he was tapped to become the official printer for the Duke of Parma in 1766, he jump-started the possibilities of printing. Many Bodoni texts remain on the top floor of the Palazzo della Pilotta. This is the ugliest pile of bricks I’ve seen in all of Europe, but the vast complex houses the Archeological Museum, the National Gallery, the Palatine Library, and the astonishing wooden Teatro Farnese that smells of resins and crosscuts. Stage, seats, walls, floors, ceiling—all strips of wood. What a feat, restoring this fantasy space after it was badly bombed in World War Two.

  We visit everything. But we cannot see the Bodoni collection. No, we’re told. Closed. Impossible. Then, as we’re leaving the vast Palatine Library, the woman at the ticket booth follows us out into the hall and says conspiratorially, “Come tomorrow at nine.” Perhaps she saw how long we lingered over the books.

  * * *

  ED EXITS OUR room at seven each morning for a three-mile walk. I wish I were not lazy. He gets to see the vegetable deliveries, the bread trucks unloading, early birds zipping to work on bicycles, students pausing for coffee. He returns bearing a cappuccino for me and observations. The crowd of immigrant African men, all very tall, who gather on the sunny side of the baptistery, the Fellini woman in a white feather hat who walks three ancient white poodles, the pebbly river you easily could wade across, the quiet of the dignified city without cars or motorcycles in the historic center’s streets, the coppery glint of sunlight on the angel atop the duomo.

  It’s getting late and we hurry to the Pilotta.

  To our surprise, the ticket seller, a different woman, expects us. Top floor, she directs, and we climb. Immensely high ceilings double the usual stairs for each story. Early-morning-walker Ed sprints up but I’m pausing on the fourth (eighth!) floor as if I’m halfway up Everest. Signor Natalino (“Little Christmas”) greets us formally and proceeds with a half-hour lecture on Parma history. His Italian is so clearly enunciated that we understand almost everything, even though he frequently uses the dreaded past remote tense.

  This is Bodoni type:

  FRIENDS, ROMANS, COUNTRYMEN, LEND ME YOUR EARS…

  You can see the sculptural elements in the clipped curves and in the different widths of ink in each letter. You can also see a connection to the earlier, heavier Gutenberg type and to Gothic lettering, but it’s hard to know the revolutionary aspect of this new type and the way forward it opened to subsequent printers, and the ease his type gave to readers’ eyes.

  As a young man, Bodoni left home in Piemonte, where his father and grandfather were also printers, to work in Rome. There, for his agile body, he was known as “the deer.” After six years at the Vatican’s print house for missionary publications, where he learned Coptic, Arabic, and other lettering, he returned to the north to work for Ferdinando, Duke of Parma, heading up his printing shop for official publications. Later, as his artistry brought him fame, he was allowed to open his own shop. He could publish whatever he wanted. His first book was the poems of Horace.

  Loosed from Signor Natalino’s lecture, we gaze at Bodoni’s typographic tools and books. Wood, string, chisels. Creamy thick paper and elegant, simple type, all safely behind glass when I would so like to take out a book and see what’s beyond the displayed page. And I wish for my California friend Robin Heyeck, who published my and Ed’s early poetry on the letterpress printer in her garage. She taught us the aesthetics of type and paper, and also the tedious work that goes into handsetting tiny letters into a block. From her we learned to distinguish among Bembo, Arrighi, Centaur, and Garamond. She put in hours with sloshing buckets for dipping paper, pulling out marbled designs. Trial and error. Patience. How space is as crucial as print, and how, with pressure, the lead fonts bite into handmade paper. Back-straining work results in words given their full due. Her Heyeck Press books are in fine-edition libraries all over the country, and a row of them stands in my bookcase. We’re all in Bodoni’s debt.

  As soon as he could branch away from printing the duke’s posters, presentation volumes, and announcements, he turned to his own interests: Homer, Tasso, and Virgil. On to Aesop, Dante, Petrarca. Touching to see Poems by Mr. Gray, the English poet, Thomas Gray. I would like to peer inside the only existing replica of the calligraphy manual that Leonardo da Vinci consulted. It’s a “xylographic syllabary,” which I imagine for a moment to be letters with a glassy musical sound. A quick fact-check and I tell Ed authoritatively that the term means vowel and consonant syllables are printed by carved woodblocks, not type.

  Thanks to Robin’s hard work, we easily see how Bodoni’s museum reveals fierce ambition. Eventually, he created twelve hundred volumes. What fascinates me most is the book he never saw. After his death in 1813, his widow, Margherita dall’Aglio (Margaret of the Garlic!), finished his magnum opus. The typefaces of Manuale typografico must have driven several typesetters completely mad: six hundred large pages of alphabets in all sizes, in script and italics, as well as in roman. He shows many examples of characters in other alphabets (Greek, Russian, Armenian), also with the capital letters. Preserved for us, too, are his musical notations, and all manner of numbers and ornaments. Though Bodoni had thoroughly planned the two volumes, bringing them to the light was a heroic effort by Margherita.

  While staring at his statement, “The more a book is classical, the more the beauty of its typeface should be admired alone,” I text a message: Robin, did you ever visit Parma? The Bodoni Museum with all his books displayed? As a respected printer, she might have dispensation to take them from the glass cases and turn the pages.

  One book of his must have been radical at the time. He printed the Lord’s Prayer in 155 languages. Lastly, Ed spots Pitture di Antonio Allegri: Esistenti in Parma nel Monistero di San Paolo. I’m hit by this—Correggio’s pictures in the San Paolo monastery, which we haven’t yet seen. The book where Bodoni pays tribute to an artist who died 206 years before he was born remains sealed in its cabinet. And 203 years after Bodoni’s death, we’re reveling in the immediacy of the works of both men.

  * * *

  THE FOOD STREET! It jogs off Piazza Garibaldi. Eat your way down the length of Strada Farini, jammed with bars, cafés, restaurants, fruit stands, and places to buy cheeses and salume. In the upper stories of the rose, saffron, and peach buildings I see residents at open windows, drying dishes, knitting, smoking—taking in the life of the street below. One man looks like the portrait of Bodoni except for the white ribbed tank top he’s wearing. A cat sleeps on a sill four floors up. What if it turns over? I have to look away.

  Charming metal and glass box structures like small train cars line the street. I’ve seen these along the Via Veneto in Rome. With their standing heaters, the cafés are open all year. It must be lovely in the snow to sit with a hot chocolate and watch the flakes falling. We choose the most crowded one and I order a tris, trio, of polentas—funghi porcini, fondue of pecorino, and truffle. Oh, my. Best polenta ever? Ed, across the table with his bowl of nutmeg-scented anolini in brodo, broth with pasta knots stuffed with beef, says he’s pleased but I see him cast longing eyes at my polenta bowls and I take pity, passing them to him for a few tastes.

  In the great Feltrinelli bookstore nearby—bottom floor is almost all café—I find three books by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi in the English section. Mother Tongue: An American Life in Italy, a memoir set here in the 1980s, naturally reaches out to me. I am
a visitor here; living in a place is always different. From Mother Tongue, which I dip into as soon as I’m back at the hotel, I see how hard it was to be a free-spirited, intellectually curious woman in Parma then.

  As late as 1990 when I became a part-time resident of Italy, few women went to college and even those few who did seemed to dead-end in jobs that demanded much and gave little. Most young women, even liceo (the highest-level high school) grads, stayed close to home. The admired word for a girl was “semplice,” simple. Someone not bothered by a vision of herself that rocked any boat. I couldn’t fathom the lack of ambition until I finally understood the fierce family ties that keep young Italians close to the home fires.

  After years of living here, yes, it’s changed but not enough. Many still give themselves up to stay close to family. It’s a hard aspect of the culture for me. I admire the commitment to family, even long for that, but rebel against the constraints. If I’d grown up in a close-knit Italian family, I might have been toast. Or a disgrace. But here’s Wallis—a transplant with an extensive teaching career. A poet, essayist, with three books on the shelves at Feltrinelli.

  I look at Wallis’s website and impulsively send a message asking if she’d like to meet for coffee tomorrow morning. But how often does one check a website? I don’t expect a reply.

  * * *

  WHEN SHOPS REOPEN after the afternoon pause, it’s dark. While starting over at five seems fine in summer, I’m always thrown in winter. Many of the 32,000 students of the ancient University of Parma begin to gather along the streets in early evening. Even in December, the temperature lingers in the mid-fifties. Everyone drinks at tables and upturned barrels and in the glass cafés. Small streets off Strada Farini also are jumping, with chic or plain or vintage places to stop for a drink or dinner. The street buzzes with locals shopping for dinner and meeting friends for an aperitivo. I’m shocked at the well-dressed students and young couples with strollers. Great boots and fitted jackets and hair that looks five minutes out of a salon. Parma’s rich but who would think that students would be looking so fine?

  I buy some candied Parma violets and scented soaps (made for tourists, I know), and stop into a few shops just to look. We spend an hour in a wine bar smaller than a good-size closet, then cross back through Piazza Garibaldi to La Greppia, a sedate restaurant where the service is old-world formal—snowy linens, cordial and expert service, the menu for ladies showing no prices. Old-fashioned, yes, and friendly. I love sformati, crustless vegetable quiches, and their artichoke one with a fonduta of pecorino is feather-light. Roasted duck with pistachios follows. We eat slowly to prolong the pleasure. From the long wine list, the waiter recommends L’Ala del Drago, wing of the dragon. Better than hair of the dog. Again, how inexpensive these nice wines are compared to similar quality Tuscan wines.

  * * *

  BACK AT THE hotel, I see that Wallis has replied. We arrange to meet tomorrow morning in the café at our hotel. I read further into her book about living in Parma, realizing at every page that her roots here show how a visitor like me only treads on the surface of a place. I want to ask her if the closed society she describes has opened. And what the immigrants (now 15 percent of the population of two hundred thousand) who pore through the cheap clothes at an outdoor market are bringing to the life of the town. And what winter is like, and if she will always stay.

  * * *

  AS A TALL, slender woman comes in the café, we know her immediately. Using a cane, tossing back a wave of silvery gray hair clearly Italian-styled, she’s indisputably American—although I’m hard pressed to explain why. (What is that national stamp that makes one’s country so clear?) The cane clatters to the floor as she sits down. “I’m recovering from a broken foot. I’m still not used to this thing. Thanks for contacting me.” Ed leans the cane against the wall and it crashes again.

  We order cappuccino and orange juice and I say how much I’m enjoying her book, how we’re loving Parma—totally swept away by the art. She had the chance, during a restoration, to climb scaffolding up into the dome of the duomo. She could almost touch the Correggio.

  We talk for hours. I know we’ll be in touch again. I like thinking of Wallis in Parma, observing so closely and with wit all the machinations of Italian life.

  * * *

  AFTER WALLIS BOARDS her bus for home, we rush toward the San Paolo monastery. Across from the small park where you turn in, I see the local post office and glimpse a painted ceiling in the foyer. Immediately, I call Ed. “It’s all Liberty design—glass-paned ceiling letting light pour in, and seductive paintings ringing the room.” Crowded with people using the Internet and paying bills, and others who appear to be reading as though in a library, this post office should be a jardin d’hiver salon for the populace, with chaise longues and potted trees. I’ve never seen such a post office.

  The morning is growing short. We find the doorway to Correggio’s first (1518–19) major Parma venture—the decoration of a private chamber in the convent apartment of the badessa (abbess), Giovanna da Piacenza. Certain orders of nuns at that time were powerful. The abbess, elected to rule for life, had to be a skilled manager of properties and businesses owned by the rich order. This convent was known to house young women who were placed there, for whatever reasons, by their aristocratic families. I remember being told by an Italian that each large family had a “runt,” the unmarriageable one shunted off to the nunnery or priesthood. A dim view of the holy orders. I remember a note in Sarah Dunant’s novel Sacred Hearts, about a powerful, intricate order of nuns in Ferrara. She says that by 1600, dowry requirements were so outlandish that almost half of Italian women were nuns. But this wealthy badessa Giovanna da Piacenza must instead have been a handful—a badass. I’m suspecting trouble got her there, not lack of money or because she was a “runt.” These nuns weren’t cloistered. They enjoyed social events, festas, visits, involvement with intrigue and church politics.

  The first surprise: not a Madonna and Child in sight. Nary a Jesus. Nor a saint. The fireplace wall is emblazoned with the mighty Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt. The livable scale of the room and the fanciful antics of nude young boys—these erotically charged figures are not cherubs—make me wonder about this nun who wanted no Christian subject matter on her walls. She didn’t even want images of women, except Diana, with whom she must have identified. Her family crest on the painting makes me sure of that. Emblazoned in Latin, the imperative: You will not disturb the flame with the sword.

  Correggio created for her a leafy pergola effect under ribbed vaulting, with hunting motifs between each rib, and a running series of gray lunettes showing classical scenes, probably from ancient coins. The escape hatch of the badessa from the religious life? She liked the nude boys? And what on earth do the two dismembered feet in one scene signify? The meaning of the room’s iconography resists complete analysis. Especially in that era of heavy Christian meaning attached to every painting, isn’t it refreshing to enter this charged and sexy bower? After all the assumptions and Old Testament figures, and Madonnas, the room shows the artist early on as one who drew outside the lines. Even today, I easily imagine a round table set up for lunch here. Grouse, woodcock, and pheasant from the hunt. If the two large windows were not sealed, light would fill the room. I hope Giovanna had lute players, poets, and witty company. She was certainly a pistol herself. And I’m wondering: Did her design demands influence the future thinking of Correggio? Did her inspiration, as much as Raphael’s and Michelangelo’s, give him the impetus to break out of conventions?

  After leaving Giovanna’s marvelous room, we pop into a museum of an entirely different sort—puppets. Museo Giordano Ferrari. He was a puppeteer, as was his father, Italo. He collected more than five hundred of these creatures in the 1930s. I’ve never thought much about puppets. A birthday party, a matinee show for five-year-olds. “These spooky creatures,” Ed says, “why are they so scary?”

  “The
faces. They’re caricatures. Exaggerated. Like dreams.” I remember how my daughter at two or three used to pull off the finger puppets, not liking my hidden hand beneath them. That’s it—the manipulator is invisible; the puppets do the bidding of someone you can’t see. There’s a primitive fear in that godlike power. One lurid harridan with a big red mouth looks ready to pop out of the case and say something shocking.

  Articulated dolls go way back to tombs in Egypt, Greece. Puppetry, a theater art with roots in primitive magic, sorcery, archetypal drama, biblical narratives, isn’t at all a toss-away entertainment for children. The characters, scripts, staging of these shows reaches far into political satire, caper stories, mystery, fairy tale. The corsair, sailor, threadbare princess, soldier, devil with crooked horns—all highly artificial but somehow imbued with a strange life. “Let’s get out of here.” Ed heads for the door. The woman at the ticket window nods at us and she looks like a puppet herself. I think of Fellini. He must have been influenced.

  * * *

  OH, LUNCH. THIS at a passionate pizza place, Borgo 20, where the punched dough then rises to be punched again for five days, and after being baked in the hot wood oven is then topped with fresh ingredients. A new twist on pizza and a good one. There on the pizza menu—horse tartara again, with steamed onions and mustard. Also on today’s menu, snail soup with polenta; rice with prunes and crisp pancetta. I like this use of pancetta croccante that I’m seeing a lot in Parma. Crumbled bacon this is not! Pancetta has a delicacy and, traitor that I am, more flavor than the southern bacons I love.