ITALY JUNE 2024

Italy – June 2024

I was asked by Michael Marriott, rose expert, to give a talk in Italy, by the Italian lakes, Rose Symbolism through the Ages.  At a hotel owned by a rose enthusiast.  Would I?!  I couldn’t believe my luck.  I got to work on the talk, the slides to go with it, I had Geordie holding a red rose for love, and the man in Winchester converting old slides into pictures for my new laptop, I bought a flight to Milan … but, I didn’t tell many people.  I knew it could all vanish like a mirage.  (And, life being what is is, who in my elderly book club would be thrilled on my behalf?).  And so it did.  Vanish.  Not enough punters bought tickets (obs – they had no TV names on board).

MILAN

Still, I had my flight, and Bill was booked to look after Bob, so I went.  On the train to Gatwick an Asian girl fixed my iPhone so I could hang it round my neck.  The chicane of Gatwick scents/spirits/tat, and so to Milan airport where a woman directed me to the metro.  If they can speak English they do, kindly and expertly, while I apologise about my Italian.

Milan Central Station.   Completed 1931.  ‘In the Assyrian/Lombard/Art Deco style’, but it’s pure Fascism.  Monumental.  The eagles, the sturdy peasants and flying figures, SPQR and winged caduceii on the tessellated floor, the flights of marble stairs, the helmeted heads!   (The care taken when later elevators were built, and they had to cut off wings the of a caduceus sideways but made it them continue in a glass panel.  In England, I doubt they’d have bothered, it would

have been chop chop chop = mess.    Water spews from an Asiatic maw.  Perfect for Mussolini to greet Hitler’s arrival on Italian soil.Make my way over the Piazza to Guarda hotel.

Only a day here.  Into metro to emerge into a picture postcard of the Duomo, the cathedral where each little spire is spiked with an angel.  Ruskin found this awesome.  I find it more like a wedding cake – I love Italian art but the religious buildings are so theatrical, so unspiritual, so showy off.   Whether baroque like St Peter’s, Rome or Gothic as here.  The Gothic, which in France and England lifts eyes to the heavens, here looks faintly absurd, like the adjacent statue of a histrionic Victor Emmanuel astride a horse waving his sword.  (Does anyone else think that?  )  On the facade, worshippers have touched parts of the bronze figures, making Christ’s hand, and Mary’s nose forever glow.  In the great piazza, speeches are made, then bands play, and men and women march by in uniforms, looking pantomime fierce and important.   Round the corner is the small and beautiful Santa Maria presso San Satiro, a wonder of ingenuity by Bramante fitting into an awkward corner.

Oh the Galleria Victoria Emmanuel the most glorious shopping mall in the world!  Built for gods.  Why buy, just walk down it, along its tessellated marble floors, past people and Prada and cafes, and feel happily dwarfed as if by mountains.  So high, the curving glass arcades, the crush of tiny people irrelevant.  And the way the entrances are articulated, to give its entrances a semblance of symmetry where there is none!  Oh I long to be Italian, the brio, the tossed off grandeur, the smile, never crushing.  The beauty.  Even when it’s over the top.

And the next day by the metro to the Basilica Sant’ Ambrogio, St Ambrose who converted St Augustine to Christianity.  Ah, this is very much my scene.  It’s Romanesque, akin to medieval art in northern Europe, think of the Lindisfarne Gospels.  Outside it’s nice enough though not immediately stunning like the Duomo, and nor is the interior, BUT!  The snaking patterns, the deer fitting into awkward ledges, the man – see his inturned feet – bearing a lion on his back, the mythical monsters, the lions with tails coming back to bit them!    

To the station, and photograph a handsome Nigerian prince (he says he is) while collecting my case at the hotel.  And eventually, on the train to Orta San Giulio.  I have to change at Novara.  Charming man (oh they all are) lifts my case onto rack.  Paddy fields.  Get to Novara as train to Orta draws out.  Wait two or three hours.   Novara is a dull dusty place, an interchange.  Eventually, another Orta train, and it climbs into the hills, running along the mountain sides, and down below I can see the Orta lake, the smallest of Italian lakes.

Ah, Orta-Miasino, this must be it.      So out, with a lot of black workers.  I ask Orta San Giuilio, and am told this is it.  I follow the workers, and see a sloping path which must be lead to the lake, get to road intersection, ask,  and a woman pulling my case takes me all the way down to the village of Orta San Giulio – she’s had a terrible day, her father has just died, and now her brother is selling the house and taking all the money, and she has nowhere to live and she to work again, and she’s just come out for a breathe of fresh air.  We’e now by the lake, and in the village along a cobbled lane – no cars here, only service vehicles allowed – leading to the centro historico – she takes me to the building I’m booked to stay at, and presses the bell of a massive timbered entrance – no reply, so she rings a telephone number, says the owner waited for two hours and left, but will be coming back.  She settles me with a beer at a nearby bar, won’t have one herself, gives a hug and leaves.

Owner arrives, sweet but her English as poor as my Italian, opens door, shows me up to my flat – steep twisty stone steps, view from windows of lane and greenery, and – as in all the b & bs I’ve ever seen – stuffed with kitsch.  The  red wire to the television makes pleasing curves on the wall.  It’s all central and ok and I just go to sleep.

Breakfast.  To the piazza by the lakefor coffee and toasted steak panini.  Nice man.  Stalls selling clothes and now really sorry I did not buy that white broderie anglaise blouse.

The lake.  Lake Orta.  Wordsworth says, A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.  Why?  It changes each moment you lift your eyes.  Riffling, shining, serene, reflecting, dangerous, consoling, this colour, that, morning, evening, never less than beautiful.

Ferry to Isolo San Giulio, the convent island.  Surrounded by the elegant boathouses of 2nd homers.  If you live on an island, you don’t have a garage you have an elegant boathouse.  The nuns’ convent rises  like a fortress, and I think of them imprisoned in their little cells.  A cobbled path goes round the island, with  notices on Meditation one way, on Silence if you go anti-clockwise.  Hordes of children, their cries like screaming swifts, their minders vainly trying to shush them into holiness.

The island church has frescoes, 16th century I suppose, of saints and angels, perfectly nice, beautifully done – St Blaise happily lies back on the spiked gridiron of his tormentors – but what I like, really like, are the earlier Romanesque carvings on the pulpit – a centaur shoots at monsters attacking a unicorn, the laced pillars, a phoenix overcoming a crocodile, green men spouting curves, or is the sound of  their song?  No, they are on the pulpit they must be delaring the Gospel.  The eagle holding a book must be St John, the winged lion St Mark, the angel St Matthew, and I miss the ox of St Luke.  A cloaked man, stoically waiting.  As at St. Ambrose I love the Romanesque carvings because here’s heaven and hell, reality seen and imagined, the surreal and the ordinary, the creatures of dreams and of daily life.  The whole of experience

Back, I walk round the peninsula of Orta San Giulio which is like circulating the Isola but on a larger scale. And everywhere there are hidden gardens I can just glimpse, intriguing because inaccessible.  Holiday homes.  One is a Victorian pastiche of a mosque, and so over the top it makes me laugh.  I am always outside, looking in – and this outsider status is where I stand, always stand in life.  Maybe I prefer it. One garden has urns dripping moss on the entrance pillars, other gardens are seen through bars, and here scented roses hang from the wall.  Then, what is this glamorous shrub?  Lagerstromeria?  Here, through the bars of a flowery iron trellis, the atrium of a house.  Down at my feet lies it seems a piece of jewelled enamel.  Back in the piazza I step on a bronze plaque saying HORTUS INCLUSUS, showing Orta, a tree circled by a wall – enclosed garden reached through a gap.  On a wall is another  emblem, with an encircled fir tree and a locked gate, all upheld by a wreath of one bay branch and one oak, and topped by a castellated crown.

A day up Orta’s Sacro Monte, which has a 16th century pilgrimage following the life of St Francis of Assisi.  Up one goes from the village church, looking down on the island and water,  and then progresses through the woods from one chapel to the next.  Each chapel has bright, lively and realistic tableaus with figures enacting scenes from Francis’ life against a painted backdrop  (I am reminded of the lovely frescoes by Rex Whistler at Plas Newydd in north Wales).  They are protected by grilles from vandalism.   It’s all part of the Franciscan Counter Reformation drive, and is among ten or so other Sacri Monti in Piedmont and Lombardy.  All have holy buildings and were built under the watchful eye of the church.  Now they are World Heritage sites.  At the final chapel, I did sigh at the masculinity of the scene – all these priests, servers, men, boys, worshippers etc, and not a woman in sight.  All beautifully done, but a bit too didactic for me.   This happened, so believe!  A wonderful modern statue at the start of the route, of St Francis lifting his arms to the flying birds, but in the chapels not a hint of the animals he was supposed to call Brother this and Sister that.  Still, it is all very precious, and cared for – maybe in Italy I take beauty and balance for granted.  A hidden quadripartite herb garden, with lavender and aromatics.  Lower, a welcome cafe with a large fresh orange juice. All lovely among the trees.

Now I am concerned about back to Milan in time to catch my train to Switzerland and beyond.  This is the continual worry about solo travel, will I make it, will the connections work?  The link at Novara is dodgy I know and there are only about three trains a day from Orta.   If I miss the Milan to Lugano train then I’ll miss the Lucerne train …  I have rung for a taxi for the 2 km up to the station, but there’s no reply.  How long will it take to walk, will I remember the way?  When I came that nice woman led the way and pulled the suitcase for me.  On the third and last day, I walk to the station, to time it.

Come back for a final visit to the Isola, and do my circuit both ways, and the screams of children are no more, only the slap of water.  I love the painted patterns on houses, the patched wall with cherubs, the irregular slates on roofs, A last supper at the lakeside, and the sun emblazons the tower of a distant church, then sinks behind the mountain leaving a golden sky.  Martins swoop and call over the piazza – their black scimitar wings.

Set alarm, but even so wake up several times, finally get up at 5 am, leave the flat with suitcase, manoeuvre it down to the dark hall, unlock the ancient main door, leave it wedged open with suitcase, climb up the twisty stone stairs with keys, leave them in flat, down again, across the hall, and out.  Phew, that bit ok.  Trundle case through this enchanting empty place, grey lapping water, cobbled lane with flat pavers for walking.   And out and up path through woods to station as the early train comes in.  Novara?  Si.  Made it.  Climb in, goodbye.

I now think of Orta San Giulio.  At midday tourists came – but not that many, no buses here, just coaches and cars with limited parking outside the village – and they left after a drink and their ferry to the Isolo.   I still think of it, on the piazza with a glass of wine, watching the lake change as the sun dips over the mountain.