This is the second part of the New York Times article that Rosellen Brown wrote about her experiences teaching creative writing in Italy. Those lucky people who are in her class this summer may get a chance to check out Spoleto for themselves! - Chris Spencer
Friends ask me every year as I begin to plan my summer if I’m ”doing it again” — they sound oddly surprised, as if I ought to have outgrown or gotten tired of my two paradisiacal Spoleto weeks. But for the same last two weeks of July, I can expect to be overwhelmed a dozen times by the vista across the hills at sunset, where Assisi’s lights wink on against a dark pink sky; when I wander a few miles above Spoleto on a hilltop called Monteluco, through what the pagans called the ‘’sacred grove” of black-trunked oaks where St. Francis also walked, and crawl into the unbelievably tiny grottoes carved out of rock, in which monks somehow survived minimal diets and loneliness far above the winding road down the mountain. In the last few years, rural tourism (agriturismo) has stimulated the conversion of an old farm near Monteluco into an attractive spot from which to look down the long expanse of rich green into the valley where we live.
The pleasures can be petty, but they add up: I don’t get lost anymore; I know the shortcuts. I know which pizza will disappoint and where you can get a good salad after midnight, and how bad the music is at the annual Communist Festival in the park and how laughable Italian television is, with its scantily dressed morning-show hosts and the weather report delivered by a man in a uniform decorated like a major general’s.
I instruct our students that the riposo after lunch does demand silence and an end to shopping, even if repose itself can’t be legislated. Or perhaps it can: one year, an assiduous music student practiced singing her scales with the windows open during ”quiet time” and found the carabinieri on her doorstep! Italians may seem easygoing, but many of their habits are actually stone-rigid rituals, not to be casually flaunted. Order your coffee before dessert and you can throw your waiter into serious confusion. As for cappuccino after 10 in the morning! I order as if I don’t know any better and bear their tolerant contempt.
But in the end, beyond the trivia whose mastery makes me feel welcome, a town like Spoleto is unchangeable in far more profound ways. It is visibly layered, its history an unyielding pile of conquests, each succeeding the one that preceded it like innings in a many-millennium game. The Etruscans, the Romans, the Guelphs and Ghibellines — each has left its tangible ruins, its ineradicable beauty. They have left a Roman amphitheater, a fourth-century house, a simple sixth-century Roman church, a Fra Lippo Lippi fresco in the Duomo. There is a multi-ton stone portal through which Hannibal is said to have fled when boiling oil was dumped on the heads of his men. The bones in the graveyard crypts may be removed every so many years, but the facades of the old city — cobblestone Spoleto alto, not the basso down below, with its chic stores and uninflected new buildings — may crumble with age, but they will not disappear. If there are malls to be built (and there are), they will be erected on the flat, somewhere else.
The third summer I taught in Spoleto, my mother died in Florida, and my accidental presence in that static repository of eras, of centuries, of entire civilizations, worked my sorrow toward a strange reconciliation with time: before I hurried myself to the plane to come home for her funeral, I felt her less as a unique loss (which, of course, she would always be) than as if she were also but another stone in a huge wall built across the ages. Somehow, being there, I could see her in her place under the eye of eternity, which is a hard eye to catch in New York, where she was buried, or Houston, where I lived then. Wordsworth’s lines seemed very present, when he speaks of a beloved, newly departed, ”rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”
So I begin, now, gearing up for another season on that glorious borrowed hilltop. Will there be snow and hail (two years ago, for a strange few midsummer minutes)? Unmoving heat and then a sweet soaking rain (last summer)? One new restaurant? One snail-slow renovation finally finished? Surprise is not likely. For that, all I have to do is walk up the street at home in the United States and find the day’s new taste thrill, which may or may not last a year.
FESTIVALS OF TWO WORLDS
The American half of Spoleto’s Festival of Two Worlds runs from May 28 to June 13, in Charleston, N.C. Among its offerings are two programs by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Forbidden Christmas, or The Doctor and the Patient,” a theater piece with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Directed by the Georgian writer-director Rezo Gabriadze, its score includes tango music, Georgian folk songs and Shostakovich. Telephone: 843- 579-3100; Web site: www.spoletousa.org.
From July 2 to July 18, the 46th International Spoleto Festival in Italy presents a range of events, including film tributes to Jeanne Moreau and Ingrid Bergman; a concert celebrating the 93rd birthday of Maestro Gian Carlo Menotti, the festival’s founder; and a jazz performance by Julliard musicians under Wynton Marsalis. Telephone: 011-39-0743-45028; Web site: www.spoletofestival.it.
As the festival winds down, the 12th annual Spoleto Arts Symposia (July 17 to July 30) commences, with workshops for writing (emphasizing writing exercises and the production of new work), Italian cooking (taught by the Umbrian chef Eros) and jazz and aria singing. Telephone: 340-773-0073; Web site: www.spoletoarts.com.
