Italy in autumn – hills that roll with the regularity of those back home, but rise a little higher, sink a little lower. Tall cypress trees looming from the mist that sits in the mornings like water in a basin. A cemetery on a lone hilltop at night, flickering in orange candlelight. Deer in the fields, roaming in pairs. Hunters in camo gear, also in pairs, loading rifles onto quad bikes and sipping from flasks. Hares in the forest. Porcupines too – as big as a dog, fans of white quills like monsters.
Sitting in a café in the town of Carpineti, Reggio Emilia province, listening to old men yap and laugh and blow their noses and call out greetings and jokes. Espresso machine whirring, behind the clink of spoons cutting through soft cakes and the tall, slim glasses of early afternoon beer. A couple of familiar children on bicycles zip up and down the street, laughing. The big cities, out of the winding hills, away across the endless jarring flat of the floodplains – Modena, Reggio, Bologna, or Milan for the particularly ambitious – call away many of the town’s young people, sooner or later. Nobody around here in their 20s.
Bright morning sunlight off beige buildings, and an old cobbled square – empty now – around a cross, its base adorned with the names of lives lost in the world wars; separate plaques for the first and second. Some family names appear on both. Soldiers, some of them – some of them rebels. Some of them regular townspeople who wouldn’t stay quiet, punished by the powers that were.
The castle on the hilltop. Home to a powerful woman once, Matilde di Canossa, whose complicated history I could never make head nor tail of. A castle above the clouds, half-tumbled now, with an empty summer restaurant near the top for hikers and motorcyclists with an interest in history. Home to bandits once, too, once the aristocracy had cleared out or died. You can see twenty miles from the top, I’d say. Or you would, I suppose, if the clouds parted, if the hills drifted apart.
Dogs barking. Small dogs – why do Italians like small dogs? Small dogs are not the same species as big dogs. They deserve different names. Big dogs are majestic and calm and beautiful. Small dogs are insane. They bark all day in the hills, echoing, their owners absent or simply deaf to it. Fantasies of water pistols and laxatives wrapped in ham fill my nights – and on the worst days, where the barking begins at dawn and continues late into the evening – catapults.
A praying mantis sits on the road, silent, unmoving, arms raised like boxing gloves, testing its mettle against the zip and swish of compact cars – drivers always on the wrong side of the road, cutting corners to save time and nearly dying on every journey. Horn blasts, curses, fingers pinched aloft, why doesn’t everyone just slow down a little? And then the sudden quiet of no cars at all, and only lukewarm breeze and chirping insects unseen in roadside undergrowth. A cat once, too – a kitten with blue eyes, creeping towards me from a tangle of shrubs. Pulled out, saved, put in a box, sent away safely with a grey-haired wildlife ranger.
Pasta for lunch, pasta for dinner. Ragu. Pesto – it comes in a pack, thick like butter, not a jar. Espresso. Cappuccino. Gelato, parmigiano, arancini, biscotti. Broccoli – one floret is known as a broccolo. Spaghetti – spaghetto. Osteria for cheap eats, with tables and ashtrays outside. A growing belly – and the consequently growing need to walk around hills in the hours between lessons. And in the evenings – wine, or no wine, with books, or no books. Documentaries inside, wrapped up, L-shaped sofa beneath mezzanine bedroom, textured, bucolic and real. No plastic. Cosy cottage – 341 years old. A sign on it, repurposed terracotta, hung on old rope beside the front door and carved with a name, the builder: Hippolito Ganapini. Two Ganapini’s on the war memorial, too. One in each war.
Hay bales in fields and tractors, and shuttered windows to tall crooked homes now vacant, because few young people are born, and those born soon leave. Quiet afternoons, except for the dogs, who are all insane. Grasshoppers sitting for hours, idle on the porch, thinking. Clean air. Gelato.