I have been remiss on writing the notes on my current travel to Italy, partly because I arrived too late at Milan five days ago, and by the time I had made it down to Treviglio by train I was completely bushed. I was delighted, however, when I saw my friend Monica waiting for me at the station. We met two years ago in Sardinia, and had then parted with the ritualistic formula “Arrivederci”, which this time was true across time and space. Monica lives in the countryside, in a comfortable and spacious modern house that fits very well her artistic nature.
The following morning I took a look at my surroundings and found out that the house is in the middle of a factory complex! This is the business that Monica’s father and uncle established sometime in the 50’s to build mannequins. Yes, all those mannequins you see in the stores have to be made somewhere, and this is it, in the middle of the plains of the Piemonte Milanese. It is an interesting process of sculpture, mold making, extrusion of plastic, painting, polishing, and for an extra charge adding a wig and makeup.
The following day I went to visit Bergamo, which has both a downtown and an uptown. The latter sits atop a lofty hill and was the medieval core of the town during the times of the Repubblica Serenissima de Venezia, when Bergamo, which is a lot closer to the Principality of Milan than to Venice itself, was one of the outposts of the Venetian Republic (which lasted for more than a thousand years) and thus heavily fortified. Several of these ancient buildings are the seat of the different schools of the University of Bergamo.
Lunch was at the Trattoria de Giulianna, a colorful and very popular restaurant where Giulianna herself directs an army of waiters and waitresses to serve an endless stream of guests. Not unlike a cocina económica in Mexico, the menu includes antipasto (for example, fresh salad), first plate (normally pasta), and a second plate (normally meat), water, wine, dessert, and coffee. The plates are very generously served, so there is no danger that the guest will be hungry.
In the afternoon (early evening) I met with Patrizia (a friend of Monica) to go to an exhibition of the Japanese artist Kuzama, whose distinction is an obsession with creating repetitive patterns of dots, phalluses, triangles, and other simple motifs over canvases that sometime extend to 10 meters. She started this as a child, and so strong was her obsession that her mother took away her pens and forbade her to paint. She persisted, however, and over the following 50 years kept creating infinite tesselations in New York. At age 70 she came back to Tokyo and committed herself into a sanatorium, where she lives and works to date. At age 95 she has a full studio across the street from the sanatorium, where every morning she goes and works from 9 to 5. Unfortunately the exhibition consisted of a lot of details about her life but only one display: A closed room of 4 by 4 by 4 m, completely lined by mirrors (the floor is a thin layer of reflective water). From the roof hang maybe 100 strings of small Christmas lights, that through multiple reflections, turn into millions of reflected points of light. Every visitor gets one minute to go inside the room, with the road closed, to have a personal experience immersed in this repetitive pattern. When I started it looked to me like I had been transported to the middle of the galaxy, with swirls of starts expanding all around me. But then I changed my position, and all of a sudden I was inside the lattice of a crystal, staring down endless rows and planes of atoms repeating themselves on atomic scale. Funny contrast between going from the infinite vastness of a galaxy to the smallness of a crystal lattice.
Patrizia dropped me off at the bus station, to take the bus back to Monica's (the poor thing is sick with the flu and had to stay home to recover), but I was lured away by the lights of the Christmas market in downtown Bergamo, with its many booths, ice skating rink, and surrounding displays of municipal lighting. I did eventually made it back to Bariano, in time to meet Monica at the bus stop and come home to a tasty dinner.
My second full day I took the train to Pavia, on the Ticino River and just 3 km upstream of its junction with the River Po. I wanted to see the latter because of two reasons. First, it is the scenario where in the 50's and 60' Giovanni Guareschi located its Mondo Piccolo, inhabited by the colorful inhabitants of La Bassa, the formidable communist mayor Peppone, and the even more formidable parish priest Don Camillo. Peppone and Don Camillo were big strong men, who exemplified many of the social arguments between the Communists and the so-called Reactionaries in the years following World War II. Besides some clever fights and arguments between the two, the stories have the charming intervention of the Crucified Christ, Who from the main altar guides Don Camillo into reflecting carefully about his beligerant actions. As Guareschi warns us, these stories could only have grown in the flood plain of the River Po, where brains boil in the summer, flood during the rainy season, and freeze during the winter.
My second reason for wanting to visit the flood plain of the River Po, is because this is the rice growing region of Italy. Yes, it comes as a bit of a surprise, but Italy is a rice-producing country (witness the fondness of Italians for risotto). Again in the post-war years, there was not enough man power to harvest the rice, and immediately after plant the next crop. So Italy turned to woman power, by using the clever scheme of having the different parishes put together a dozen young women, chaperoned by one or two older ones, and send them to the fields to do the job for two or three months every year. The payment was in the form of a sac of rice the workers could take back home to feed their families for that year. There is an old movie called Rizo Amaro (Bitter Rice) that gives a nice novellated version of this interesting time in Italian history.
I had great fun walking down from Pavia to the River Po, but the way back was tough. My boots were not that comfortable and my feet were beginning to hurt (and without a good pair of feet I might as well be an invalid). I manage to get back to the city, and even visited some of the important sights, but I was completely spent by the time I got back to Bariano. I need to get a new pair of shoes.
Ah, what a pleasant surprise: Our friend Lino, who Monica and I met in the town of Orgosolo in Sardinia, is in Milan. I am going to go there tomorrow morning and spend the day with him :)
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