Decembris
Make the court bouillon to poach the sockeye with most of a bottle of Sonoma chardonnay
Brought in from chilling on the porch in the long poissonière, the rack sprung and clanging against its sides carrying it to the stove
Just as a northern harrier female wings over glimpsed through the high window, pumping against the strong north wind, the bare trees
Peculiar to be looking up at one, usually you watch them at about eye level, coursing marshes, duneland, open fields
Circus cyaneus, more recently Circus hudsonius, then back to C. cyaneus, all with the turn of the century
Avian taxonomists at their conference junkets need something to kick around
North America's northern harrier so much like a Eurasian northern marsh harrier, Circus aeruginosus
One of which, also a big female, mid-morning, bright sun after two days of heavy rain, courses the Arno Delta
The Arno's flats groomed civilly green through long Etruscan-Roman-Christian eras
Springlike alluvial meadows, the plain behind Marina di Pisa
Near the autostrada exit there, a road sign for Camp Darby
Where in sight of the Torre and great Pisa Baptistario the US Army caged Pound in 1945
In a cage like Guantánamo, only open on all four sides
From which he watched a white ox on the via Aurelia, the road to Pisa
And agilely danced around air-guitaring tennis strokes for exercise, leaping forehands, swooping backhands, careful not to brush the 50-odd jagged spikes left when the airstrip matting was welded in place
Just the statement of that eerie image of a white ox on the via Aurelia pulls 1945 Tuscany toward and into this new century
"Like Stravinsky and Picasso and Joyce, he [Pound] had styles rather than a style.... He was a renaissance"
Pound staring out from his welded cage, his beard still reddish then
As jeeps, three-quarter tons and duce-and-a-halfs passed, on the via Aurelia
And he saw "The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent shoulders"
Trudging by on the road out there
After some weeks of that he was inside sitting at the camp company clerk's typewriter beginning The Pisan Cantos
In the first, Canto LXXIV, buried in all the chronically stifling and dreary anti-usury anti-Semitism, "And gun sales lead to more gun sales // They do not clutter the market for gunnery // there is no saturation"
St. Elizabeth's mildewed brick blank
Black light wired window nights
From the bell loft of Lucca's Torre Civic delle Ore, twenty-five kilometers to the northeast of Marina di Pisa, Monte Pisano shields a view of Camp Darby on the Tuscan sea plain
The Lucchesi tower view, due east is the valley leading to Pistoia and then toward Florence, south is the lower Arno toward Pisa, the sea and Viareggio to the west
Vivid and graphic on clear days, suggestive of the view in Cimabue's time
The Casa dei Guinigi tower with the mature trees flourishing on its brick ramparts across the city direction the Citta Vecchia
Lucca, Lucca, ramparted, fully enduring, self-contained, thoroughly integrated Lucca
Puccini's Lucca
Its mountains leading up the coast from the Pisano peak to the Massif di Carrara and Liguria
From his cage, his little Chinese dictionary in his pocket, Pound called a cone peak adjoining Monte Pisano "Mt. Taishan @ Pisa" after the sacred mountain in Shantung
Pleonastic Pound
Shan is Chinese for mountain so "Mt. Taishan" like Rio Grande River or Paris, Francc
The white oxen are gone and were they to reappear would be as exotic as giraffes munching the tree tops in the frutteti
The autostrada flanks the via Aurelia now, a flawless ribbon of new cars and trucks
The two roads cross fiume Serchio on parallel bridges
Pisan lives now have to do with supermarkets, cable TV, cell phones, designer jeans, hair, skin, and leisure time
Uncle Ez never had a social-credit clue that things would go the way they went, the ways they're going
Not in the old fascist, totally ethnocentric Europe, of better than a half a century ago
"Europeans have done something that no one has ever done before: create a zone of peace where war is ruled out, absolutely"
Black and white, as clear as that
Brahms could not exhalt
The chain of small lakes between St. Moritz and Maloja, even when the snow is already deep, strangely did not freeze this December
This valley at the top of the Oberengadin lies at just under two thousand meters
François's home the last years of his life
Just outside St. Moritz upslope at the turn by the Giovanni Sergantini Museum, the Suvretta House simultaneously hosted a formal wedding in its huge main lobby and François's memorial concert in its theater
That vividly cold evening
The brilliant Mendelssohn Trio No. 1, a father and daughter cellist and violinist. Fauré's Elégie for cello and piano, Rachmaninov and Kreisler's Liebesleid, and a Glière duet for violin and cello
Music François relished
His family offered gracious and dignified comment
Next day we all took a long snow walk and spoke a lot of him
Later down from Maloja into the tight Val Bregaglia toward Chiavenna and Lago di Como
Where the snow cover began to thin, boldly just above the windshield, across the tight coil of switchbacks, a big female buzzard soared across
Intense purpose about its level glide and in its eyes
Buteo buteo, the most emphatic wild thing since coming up into the deep snow two days before
First stop south of the Alps and the snow in Bergamo
Full welcome sense of the seriousness of an Italian city
Bergamo there for two thousand years in a profoundly different realm than America's life options of moneycraft, tenurecraft, and either disengaged above-it-alls or silly rascality
European cities have identity with qualities North American locales have little hint of
Quiet, civility in conversation, restraint in clothes, ambiance, attitudes and architecture
Self-contained stability
Spend euros for the first time in a Bergamese coffee bar, the new brown money
The euro has changed Europe instantly
It's now ineluctably one in intent
The UK, Denmark, Switzerland and the rest should soon fall in quietly
Southward from Bergamo through Marango on a provincial road to Crema
Mix Marango up with Marengo—looking around the canalscape flats in vain for markers— but the 1800 Napoloniac battle site is over in Alessandria on the far side of Milano
For thirty or forty kilometers in all directions from the big Duomo it's all Milano
Boxtruck congestion of pole-shed warehouse factory yarding sites along two-lane roads
On down along fiume Serio to the Adda to the Po at Cremona's piazza del Comune
Where in the twenty-first century you stand as if in the eleventh, feeling the stones under you as if through the sandals and gamashes of your Romanesque being
Imagining the world that came to that square
Below the great Torrazzo in the 1400s, the tallest campanile in Italy, eighteen meters taller than the Palazzo Vecchio's
Cremona's Duomo through the Gothic centuries
Through the Renaissance when Claudio Monteverdi would stand there in the 1500s concocting his first operatic dreams
Still now the remarkable space remains the same
Sense of place carrying back, the clouds, the sun angles, the building lines against the sky, the temperatures and city-sense the same
That great empty piazza of Strativarius, Guarneri, Amati
Cremona to the strings as Parma is to food
Leave for Parma, cross the Taro
Another marvelously eductive Italian river name, suggestive of interesting things, taro an international word like honcho, Honda, kilo, euro
It's like France, this Emilia-Romagna, urging understanding of the full geography of it to stitch history to beauty through time
Every painter, sculptor and architect, every writer and composer, every valley, every town within its continuity
Not only the Po and Emilia-Romagna, but Lombardia's populous conglomerated passage out of the Alps, Tuscana over the Appennines, and every other inch of Italy
Bel paese
Parama on the via Emilia, Etruscan first of all, flourishing two thousand more years to cinquecento Correggio and Il Parmigianino, within whom the Baroque already loomed
Cultured, charming Parma whose center now is closed completely to cars
Civil Parma, where at the strada Republica end of via Garibaldi three solid posts rise from the middle of the street to block traffic from entering after an electric bus passes
Parma's Romanesque Duomo, its three-tiered lion porch and Gothic campanile, the splendid rose-marble Battistero
Last thing that evening in Parma, the built-in-wood and painted elegant butter yellow and white Teatro Farnese in the last act of Verdi's La forza del destino
The Farnese was built on the model of Palladio's theater in Vicenza
Parma avanti Natale that chilly, brilliant December night
Next day up the Enza to its headwaters and over the passo del Cerreto and down the Rosario to the coast
Rosario, Taro, names full of round vowels, ebro, addo, arno, serio, like the centrality of the Po itself
The rivers with their beginnings at barely over a thousand meters in the rough Apennines, the rough, December-deserted Apennines
Sleety, lonely leading down the Mediterranean side onto the Carrara marble massif, old Apuania of the Alpi Apuane On a cold morning sitting at a smoky hearth at six hundred meters in the front country of the Alpi Apuane, view of the sea, reading Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968 and friend of Ezra Pound) on ancient winters,
Antico invernoDesiderio delle tue mani chiarenella penombra della fiamma;sapevano di rovere e di rose;di morte. Antico inverno.
He would sit in foggy Milano musing on his Sicilian boyhood while fingering his Nobel medal
Good reading here and now this modern winter in the damp of an old stone house, home for generations of cavatori di marmo
Easy here in the marble mountains looking out to sea to get lost in Italy
Italia Antica
Italia Moderna
Idioma maravigliosa, cavata means also the touch of a violinist
Ivy growing on marble
The nearby pier in Forte dei Marmi in front of Versilia probes the Ligurian Sea
Italians still call it Mar Tirreno, claiming their Magna Graecia to be ever farther northward
Mare Tyrrhenium, Mare Adriaticum, Mare Ionium
Snow falling in fog
Over the Molo
Dozens of Christmas weekend fishermen with drop nets hanging on little cranes braced on the Molo's rails
Lowering and cranking earnestly to retrieve
Both sides, all the way out into the invisibility of the Molo's tip
Bringing up no fish at all
The Mare Desertum, Mar Vuoto, these days
An elegant couple appear out of the fog walking back off the Molo toward the pines and the esplanade
Absolutely different mien from the drop netters with their plastic buckets and gear
Of an old Europe of privileged, aristocrats
Like two quarter horses among cows
With period clothes they would have looked the same in the Farnese 1500s
They will walk off the Molo and sweep off in their Lancia to tea at home, or to a Christmas drink with friends
Her fur and Eva Peron head, his head tall out of his dark cashmere overcoat like an early cinquecento Caradosso medal
Young and ineluctably powerful, probably at their leisure most of the time
Where Tuscany turns to Liguria, Forte dei Marme the resort where in the twenties Huxley wrote Chrome Yellow and Antic Hay, tooling around with Maria Nys in their Bugatti
A few years before that just up the coast, as a boy Montale walked the path along the cliffs of Cinque Terre with his family who spent each summer in Monterosso over the ridge from La Spezia and Portovenere
He wrote of winter here in a stanza of "Bagni di Lucca"
Precoce inverno che boreaabbrividisce. M'affacciosul ciglio che scioglie l'alboredel giorno nel ghiaccio.
Early winter that the North Wind brings pushing the brightness into frost
Shivering
And Montale wrote of Forte dei Marmi's summer in "Proda di Versilia" (in Charles Wright's translation)
...rubble and flat overlookson low houses along an undulatingdescent of dunes, and umbrellas openedagainst a grey sun; sand that can't nourishthe trees sacred to my childhood, the wild pine,the fig and the eucalyptus.
Weak sun at 44ºN in late December, the same parallel as Middlebury, Vermont and the Algonquin in Ontario And it rained in Florence
Montale moved to Florence from Torino in 1927 to a job as a library curator, a sinecure that kept him going for eleven years
Fired when he refused to join the National Fascist party
Fastidious Florence
Formal Florence
Dante, Giotto, Brunelleschi's Florence
Its Piazza's tilted Renaissance magnificence
Up into Brunelleschi's dome, nearly 500 steps to the, stunning arched brickwork and engineering, counterpart of Michelangelo's St. Peter's Basilica dome
The Piazza della Signoia with the Uffizi's dignified long galleries stretching to the Arno
In a book store near the Strozzi Palace amazed at the florid bulk of Gabriele D'Annunzio's collected, find a poem, "Bocca d'Arno," that doesn't come close to bringing things back to the mouth of the Arno at Marina di Pisa and Ezra Pound
A cogent Florentine truth comes much stronger after dark around the Piazza Santa Maria Novella with the great church's geometry of green and white marble dimmed in the modern halogen glare
Eritreans, Ethiopians, West Africans and some eastern and Balkin Europeans gather there now in the thousands
Immigrant stores and food and music and ways waiting for the buses to take them to their far suburbs from a day at their jobs in the center
Milling on the streets on the Piazza Santa Maria Novella
Right there was the city's Circo Massimo for chariot races when Firenze was still Florentia
Greens and yellows and reds
Santa Maria Novella and via Avelli to the Stazione is the newest Italy, the world-music phonecard charterflight internet-savvy Italy
Except for the December chill, an urban zone like an African bus station at night
Asmara or Addis, or even Abidjan
Nothing to do with Botticelli or Cellini
Or Christian monuments, or Mussolini
Italy has been waxing and waning like this for almost three thousand years
Etruscans—the Greeks called them the Tyrrhenoi—were the first of those who've lived here that we know much about
Black light wonder
Italia: Fellini, Ferrari, the Mille Miglie, la dolce vita, Agnelli, la scuderia, Loren, Mastroianni, Pininfarina, Pavese, Olivetti, Monica Viti
Caslinga, Borolo and Vino nobile di Montepulciano
Parma, Perugia, Ferrara
And Giorgio Bassini's The Garden of the Fitzi-Contini
+++++++++++++++
Sampling credits Guy Davenport, The Pisan Cantos, Karl Kaiser.