Open Doors June 2023

OPENDOORSREVIEW

AnArt&Literary MagazineinItaly

The Open Doors Review N. 4

An Art & Literary Magazine in Italy in English & Italian

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Staff Lauren T. Mouat, Monica Sharp, Nora Studholme, Norah Leibow, Michela Guida

Cover Image Tralici by Valerio Arena

© Open Doors Review, June 2023 Issue.

All authors and artists retain the copyrights to their respective works.

OpEn Doors MAnifEsto

In popular culture, Italy is frequently seen as two things: a soap opera Mafiosi video game or a picture postcard tourist dreamland of the Dolce Vita.

Let’s add more stories to this picture. Let’s look under the surface. Let’s highlight the creativity and skill of the people in Italy. Now. Today. The point is not to produce something Italy-focused. It’s to create a collection of writing and visual art that is Italy-grown.

Who do you love? What do you believe in? What do you know? These days, truth is under attack. Reality means different things to different people. While language is increasingly black and white the issues, like our hearts, never are. Art lives in these spaces between.

We are cracking open, evolving, breaking up with the old world, breaking down the new. That’s where art grows. That’s where conversations happen. There, in that space, we find our humanity when we share and connect with each other.

I challenge you to step into that place and create. Come on in, the doors are open.

Agli occhi di uno straniero, L’Italia viene spesso vista come il paese della pizza, della Mafia e della Dolce Vita.

È l’ora di condividere storie ed immagini per scardinare questa stereotipo e dare un’occhiata più nel profondo. Mettiamo in risalto la creatività e l’abilità delle persone del “Bel Paese.” Adesso. Oggi. L’obiettivo non è di creare qualcosa che sia incentrato solo sull’Italia. Si tratta di diffondere una raccolta di scritture ed arti visive cresciuta in questo posto.

Chi ami? In che cosa credi? Cosa è reale? In questi giorni la verità è in pericolo. La realtà viene percepita in maniera diverse a seconda del punto di vista delle persone. Mentre il linguaggio è sempre più categorico, i problemi (come i nostri cuori) non lo sono. L’arte fiorisce proprio in questo terreno di mezzo.

Ci stiamo aprendo. Ci stiamo evolvendo. Stiamo rompendo con il vecchio mondo e mettendo il nuovo alla prova. È qui che avvengono le conversazioni. È così che cresce l’arte. Qui, in questo spazio, condividendo e connettendoci l’uno con l’altro, ritroviamo la nostra umanità.

Non ti resta che entrare in questo luogo e iniziare a creare. Le porte sono aperte.

ContEnts

3

Open Doors Manifesto

6 Letter From the Editor

8 Interview with Author & Guest Judge Giovanni Vergineo

12

Poem by Gabriele Greco L’Attesa*

14

Fiction by Peter Frederick Matthews Writing is Not Like Living

16, 25, 55

Photography by Michaela Paone

18

Essay by Daniel Barbiero

Giorgio de Chirico’s Roman Villa: The Gods never went away

23, 39

Photography by Simone Mantia 24

Poem by Stephen Kieninger

Two Cold Bare Feet

26

Prose by Luca Misuri

Studio 124 Project*

Letter from the editor

The heat came suddenly to Italy this year. After a spring of rainstorms, grumbling thunder, lightning flashes and lashing hail, at last the tempertures spiked and the air lies heavy over the Duomo in Florence. The sky’s bruised grays and purples alternating with vacant beige now are piercing blue infinities promising heat. Far below, the crowds surge like waves between the Uffizi Gallery and the Accademia. People eddy around the steps of churches, pooling in restaurants and in lines outside gelaterie and wine windows, hoping to capture the perfect taste: a taste of Italy.

The Florentines, on the other hand, are dreaming of relief from the heat and the crowds. “It’s not time to work,” I overheard a shopkeeper gripe today in Italian, “it’s time to go to the sea,” before she deftly switched between three languages as she addressed different customers. It certainly feels like representatives of the entire world have descended on Florence and those silent summer days of a few years ago are behind us.

Poised as we all are for summer vacation - both the real and the longed for - I’m pleased to announce the fourth edition of the Open Doors Review. Memoir meets metaphysics, longing and love meet taste and touch, and the subject of time - in history and memory -pervades. Shifting perspectives allow dual interpretations just as multiple languages cause the reader to pause, perhaps puzzling over a few new words or comparing the difference of encountering a piece you immediately understand, and one that requires more work to comprehend.

The pieces in the latest collection of Open Doors come from writers across the globe, united by each author’s connection to Italy. Sometimes that connection comes through family, through travel, through yearning, through making homes in more than one place, in more than one language. As diverse as each author’s ties to the country are the lines of connection between these stories and poems. One of the pleasures of reading a series of pieces like we have curated here is to see the patterns that emerge, across language and medium in fiction, poetry, art, memoir and essay.

Sometimes a comparison is relatively easy to make when a photograph faces a poem or an essay, visually embodying a line or a feeling. Sometimes the connections form in reading one piece after another and seeing themes emerge, re-emerge, entwine.

This, for me, is the value of gathering writing and art of this moment in time and placing one next to the other so that each does not speak just for itself but one to another. In a world where we all have our own channels and our own mountain top from which to shout our stories, let’s not forget the power of gathering, grouping and meeting to see where new conversations can take us.

In order to foster as much opportunity as possible to read and exchange ideas, we are changing up how we offer Open Doors and are making our digital issues completely free! Donations are welcome to cover some of the expense of running the magazine (links at www.opendoorsreview.com) and of couse the main way to help Open Doors thrive is to share it, talk about it, and send in your work.

This issue we welcome two new readers into the team. Monica Sharp and Nora Studholme - a sincere thank you for your work thus far. Thank you to our guest judge and Rome based author Giovanni Vergineo. And as always, a thank you to all our submitters and to our readers.

I hope you enjoy the read, perhaps by the sea. I hear it’s the time to go.

Interview with Author and Guest Judge

Giovanni Vergineo è archeologo, guida turistica di Roma e imprenditore. E’ nato a Benevento nel 1984 ma vive nella capitale dal 2009. Nel 2010 è stato finalista del premio “Italo Calvino” con la raccolta di racconti “Pippe”. Nel 2015 è stato semifinalista del premio “La Giara” con il romanzo “La scomparsa delle Cotolette” selezione regione Campania. Ha pubblicato alcuni dei suoi racconti in varie riviste e raccolte, tra le quali “OschiLoschi” – Nevermind edizioni, Benevento, curata da F. Ignelzi.

Giovanni Vergineo is an archaeologist, tour guide in Rome and entrepreneur. He was born in Benevento in 1984 but has lived in the capital since 2009. In 2010 he was a finalist for the “Italo Calvino” award with the collection of short stories “Pippe”. In 2015 he was semi-finalist of the “La Giara” award with the novel “La scomparsa delle Cotolette” in the Campania region selection. He has published some of his stories in various magazines and collections, including “OschiLoschi” –Nevermind editions, Benevento, edited by F. Ignelzi.

Lauren: Raccontaci un po’ del tuo ultimo libro, di cosa parla e cosa ti ha ispirato a raccontare questa storia?

Giovanni: Il mio romanzo “L’antico vaso andava salvato” parla della vita di Gennaro, uno studente di archeologia. È largamente autobiografico, ma ci sono comunque molte parti totalmente inventate. Il libro vuole offrire uno spaccato della vita degli studenti di archeologia, raccontando cosa significa studiare archeologia in Italia al di là della retorica alla Indiana Jones, quali sono le sfide da affrontare quotidianamente, le scoperte, le incertezze sul futuro e sulla carriera.

È anche un romanzo che parla di amore e di educazione sentimentale: la crescita professionale di Gennaro è contemporanea a una ancora più eclatante crescita personale. Durante uno scavo archeologico, Gennaro incontra Lara, studentessa americana di cui si innamora perdutamente. Lara si trasferisce in Italia, e i due intrecciano una drammatica storia fatta di sentimenti estremi: amore, odio, gelosia, rancore.

La personalità del protagonista viene plasmata pagina dopo pagina dai suoi studi e dalle sue esperienze “sul campo”, così come dal confronto continuo con Lara e la sua cultura.

In ultima analisi, il libro vuole essere una riflessione sull’archeologia come scelta di vita, sul soffocante mondo accademico, e sulla fine dei sogni di gioventù , siano essi professionali o sentimentali.

L’ispirazione è venuta dalla mia vita reale, ma anche dal desiderio di fare i conti con alcune delle mie ossessioni più forti: l’archeologia, l’amore, il confronto con culture diverse.

Lauren: Quanti libri hai scritto (compreso quelli non pubblicati)? Com’è cambiato il tuo processo creativo dal primo all’ultimo?

Giovanni: Ho scritto due romanzi e vari racconti. Il processo creativo non è cambiato molto: parto sempre da un’idea fissa, un’ossessione, una storia che cova dentro di me e di cui vorrei liberarmi. Poi studio, scrivo di getto, e riscrivo molte volte finché non sono soddisfatto del risultato. Nel mio primo romanzo, “la scomparsa delle cotolette”, ho affrontato il tema della famiglia, dei misteri di famiglia e dell’incomunicabilità tra le generazioni

Lauren: Hai una struttura organizzata fin dall’inizio o inizi a scrivere e poi vedi come l’idea si evolve?

Giovanni: Ho una struttura - base, ma mi piace molto vedere la storia dipanarsi in modo naturale, e scoprirla man mano che la scrivo più che crearla. Dico spesso che la scrittura non è nella testa, ma nelle dita: passa direttamente dal mio inconscio al computer.

Lauren: Quanto della tua esperienza di vita entra nel tuo lavoro?

Giovanni: Moltissimo. Quasi tutti i miei racconti e molto dei miei romanzi hanno una componente autobiografica. Mi piacerebbe però provare a raccontare dei personaggi molto diversi e lontani da me, prendermi una vacanza da me stesso, insomma.

Lauren: Per me ci sono due tipi di autori che apprezzo. Quello che mi da ispirazione di scrivere e creare - leggo e subito dopo devo scrivere. E quello che adoro e mi piace leggere ma non mi da ispirazione allo stesso modo. Qual’è un esempio del primo e del secondo per te?

Giovanni: Di solito, leggere non mi ispira a scrivere. Dagli scrittori imparo le tecniche, lo stile, ne apprezzo la bravura o la genialità, ma la voglia di scrivere nasce da dentro di me. Nasce dal voler tirare fuori ciò che ho dentro.

Mi piace molto la frase di Kafka:

Questo mondo tremendo che ho dentro di me. Come liberare me stesso e questo mondo senza ridurmi in pezzi? E meglio essere ridotto in pezzi che venir seppellito con questo mondo dentro di me.

È un aforisma che spiega perfettamente cosa rappresenta la scrittura per me.

Lauren: Scrivi mai in inglese? Se si, com’è scrivere in una lingua diversa dalla tua? Se no, perché no?

Giovanni: Nel mio ultimo romanzo “l’antico vaso andava salvato” ci sono molte parti in inglese. Lara, la co-protagonista, è americana e usa molte parole inglesi. Anche Gennaro, nei dialoghi con Lara, usa spesso espressioni americane.

Nonostante ciò non ho mai scritto in inglese in modo estensivo, quindi non saprei rispondere a questa domanda di preciso. Credo che scrivere in un altra lingua sia un’esperienza fantastica, straniante e complessa. Ma forse è per questo che non lo faccio. Devo pensarci troppo: per quanto parli inglese abbastanza bene, la scrittura in lingua diventa troppo “meditata”, troppo mediata dalla mia parte razionale.

Credo che la scrittura debba uscire veloce dalle dita, e che più veloce esca, meglio sia il risultato. La materia narrativa grezza - su cui poi si intervene con cura e attenzione - deve essere gettata sulla carta in modo istantaneo, violento, veloce. È un’eiaculazione. Non riesco ad eiaculare in inglese.

Lauren: Quale autore italiano consiglieresti di leggere ad un parlante inglese?

Giovanni: Mi verrebbe da dire Calvino, ma è un po’ troppo facile…sicuramente mi sento di consigliare “La Pelle” di Curzio Malaparte. Per quelli più bravi, Tommaso Landolfi e Raffaele la Capria. “Ferito a morte” è uno dei più importanti romanzi italiani ed è praticamente sconosciuto all’estero, il che è un peccato.

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me. “ - Kafka

L’attesa

E mi chiedi se da qui dalle soglie consunte del mondo si scorgano estese

pianure di neve forse ghiacciai smussati

o altre primavere.

Non è un sogno.

Scalfite le piaghe nei piedi

continueremo a camminare.

Oltre quel punto lontano

c’è un altrove da inanellare.

Non sono una sentinella: non so chie arrivi né chi parta.

Guardo più lontano.

S’abbuia l’orizzonte

e si sgretola il segreto.

And you ask me

If from here

At the deteriorated threshold of the world you can glimpse vast plains of snow dull glaciers, perhaps or other springs.

It’s not a dream.

Though we open the wounds in our feet

We continue to walk.

Beyond that far horizon

We encircle the beyond.

I’m not a sentry

I know not who comes nor who leaves.

I look beyond.

The horizon darkens and the secret crumbles.

Writing is not like Living

Left and right

He stares at his own face in the mirror and thinks he can intuit from the marginally thicker flesh of his left eyelid, from the way his right eye flashes, two distinct personalities within him.

His left side is slow and heavy. It cannot keep up in conversation. It is happiest sleeping in under several blankets. It likes animals, has a large appetite; when a neighbour died and their furniture was set out in the street, it was his left side who carried up to the flat those two blameless worn-out chairs.

His right side is cooler, and more capable. It is thanks to his right side that he is able to get anything done. When he carries his bag, he notices that he bears it most often over his right shoulder. His right side resents that his left, though physically stronger, shirks its duty.

If there were to be a battle between the two sides of him, the right side would easily outwit and destroy the left. But that is because the idea of the division is in the first place an invention of his right side. His left makes no such distinction, preferring to imagine a unity, even at the price of its own elimination.

Those ahead of me

In the 10th century, Ahmad ibn-Fadlan set out from Baghdad on a diplomatic mission to visit the Bulghar people by the Volga river. It was there that he met the Rus, the people Russia is named for. He described them as beautiful, as tall as date trees, and recorded how they buried a fallen king in his boat and his many living wives along with him.

One nomadic tribe he encountered were expert horsemen. If a goose passed over, they were able to bring their horse to a regular gallop beneath the flight of the bird and to down it with bow and arrow.

He describes their funeral rites, too.

When a man dies, writes Ibn-Fadlan, they build a house for him and place him in it. Then they bring his horses. He might have one or two hundred. They kill the horses and eat their flesh, but hang the head, hooves, hide and tail around the house-tomb, and they say: These are the horses he will ride to paradise. If he was a great warrior, they build wooden statues of the men he killed and say: These men will serve him in paradise.

Since horses are very valuable to them, they occasionally stall over the sacrifice. Perhaps we don’t need to send all his animals, they think. That is when dreams come to them. They see their comrade in the afterlife, who tells them: Look, my companions have all ridden ahead and the soles of my feet are split from my efforts to follow them, but I cannot catch up.

After that, they kill the remaining horses and hang up their body parts, too. The man returns to them in their dreams and says: Tell my family and my companions that I have caught up with those ahead of me and I have recovered from my great weariness.

Those few of his father’s friends who attended were respectful, but distant, as if they hoped to endure the ceremony and get away.

The priest had offered to say a few words but knowing nothing of the dead man he simply recited some facts concerning the date of his birth (a FIFA World Cup year) and the notable events he had lived through.

There was only one speaker, other than the priest. A friend of his father’s, a man with whom he believed his father had fallen out, before his death, read from Corinthians. The man’s voice was fragile. Emphasis was possible only by going high-pitched, by squeaking.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, understood as a child, thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

His mother wore a yellow hat.

Sea of diamonds

To supplement his income, he finds work reviewing self-published books. The standard format requires a rating from one to five stars, accompanied by a short, explanatory text. His reviews are then, themselves, reviewed. After he sends off the file, a message comes back: This sounds more like two stars, or, Isn’t four a little generous here, given your take?

You may be right, he replies, feel free to amend.

The genre he finds himself selecting most often is memoir. A total stranger writes about their life, their trauma, their success, how they are not always kind to their children or their wives, and it falls to him to write a didactic little report, encouraging them to express these boasts or worries with more concision.

One book he receives is by a man who grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. The man’s entire community - his neighbours, cousins, the friends he grew up with - was done great damage by crack cocaine. The man writes about this, but he shies away from it, too. Each time a painful memory approaches, the author supplies another, better one, for balance.

Writing is not like living, he writes in his report. It may be beneficial to a human being to ignore certain things in order to survive. A life might involve a degree of wilful blindness but, in writing, you cannot turn away your gaze. Your contract with the reader means that we do not care how bad things get – very often we would like them to be worse.

He sends off the review, satisfied with his writer’s insight. But over the next weeks, passages from the book come back to him that he would not have anticipated, like when the author wrote:

It wouldn’t be fair to talk about those years without mentioning how the waves could appear like a sea of diamonds. I spent hours looking out at it, wondering if I could decipher its cryptic message.

And:

Before commercial overfishing, there was always an abundance of seafood. Our family enjoyed these times because the sea was open to everyone, regardless of race.

giorgio de Chirico’s Roman villa: The Gods Never went away

By the time he painted Roman Villa, sometimes known as Strange Travelers, in 1922, Giorgio de Chirico had broken away from his celebrated metaphysical style of 1909-1919. No longer painting deeply shadowed arcades, towers and piazzas, claustrophobia-inducing rooms cluttered with strange objects, maps and mannequins, or trains half hidden behind brick walls, after 1919 he largely turned his attention to an attempt to recapture the techniques of the old masters. Even so, the enigmatic mood that characterized the metaphysical style still could be found in a number of his post-1919 paintings, even if realized less adroitly and with a different iconography. Roman Villa happens to be one of those paintings. It is a strange painting that in its own way is perplexing, but its strangeness is akin to those Renaissance paintings that sometimes can be found in the more obscure corners of art museums—paintings that depict scenes and figures no one has quite deciphered, and consequently get labeled “unknown allegory,” for lack of a better description. De Chirico’s painting would itself appear to be an allegory of some kind.

What is immediately striking about Roman Villa is its incongruous juxtaposition of two buildings close up against a vertiginous ridge of bare rock crowned with dark, dense foliage. The rectangular lines of the buildings contrast with the irregular surface of the ridge, which appears to have been inspired by one of Arnold Böcklin’s rugged landscapes— perhaps the cliffs rising from the sea in his painting Prometheus. The resulting spatial tension keeps the buildings on the one hand and the ridge on the other balanced against each other in a kind of mutually atopic relationship: to the extent that each is equally out of place relative to the other, neither one can be felt to be uniquely alien within the overall picture.

reddish-brown female figure seated on a cloud in the upper lefthand corner.

De Chirico painted the ridge in a style reminiscent of 17th century landscape, and for this reason Roman Villa is sometimes referred to as a landscape painting. But it clearly is more than that. The architectural element carries as much of the picture’s visual and narrative weight as does the ridge behind it.

ed except for the corners of their roofs, which contain statues depicting figures from Classical antiquity. On the building to the left, two people sit in chairs on an elevated surface—a very wide ledge projecting from the building on the left— while on the roof of the same building another two people, one pointing into the distance, converse and a third stands alone by one of the statues. A fourth figure, a woman who appears to have been modeled on de Chirico’s mother, looks pensively out of a window in the building to the right. De Chirico’s way of isolating the two conversing pairs and the two individuals helps to create an aura of mystery around them; as in a painting whose allegorical meaning is unknown, we don’t really know what these figures are supposed to be doing or how their situations add up to a coherent narrative--although the painting seems to want us to expect that they do. The two conversations could entail the sharing of secrets, while we can only guess at what the woman is thinking.

The buildings, which may or may not have been inspired by the “Roman Villa” near Fiesole owned at one time by the artist Max Klinger, are rather plain rectangles, for the most part unornament-

But for all the strangeness of the scene as a whole, it is the remaining figure that stands out for its sheer incongruity. It is the almost uncannily intrusive, reddish-brown female figure seated on a cloud in the upper left-hand corner. Her features have a certain muddiness to

But for all the strangeness of the scene as a whole, it is the remaining figure that stands out for its sheer incongruity. It is the almost uncannily intrusive,

them and her overall look is imbued with the paradoxical opaque transparency of early Renaissance painting—the result of de Chirico’s use of tempera paint, which he was experimenting with at the time. (And on this question of materials there is another point of contact between this painting and those obscure Renaissance allegories, themselves painted at a time when tempera was in wide use.) The back of her garment billows out like a sail; she’s bent slightly and holds her left hand to her head in a posture suggesting an attitude of grief or melancholy. Who she is supposed to be specifically may ultimately be a matter of speculation, but nevertheless she is the key to an allegorical reading of the painting.

Picatrix, a 10th or 11th century Arabic illustrated work on magic and astrology translated into Spanish and later into Latin; the Aratea, a ninth century astronomical work that included illustrations of the mythological figures associated with the planets and constellations; and the medieval encyclopedic tradition generally. As they passed through these texts their appearances mutated in sometimes bizarre ways, but they never lost their capacity to symbolize natural forces, human virtues and failings, and moral lessons because they were archetypes that, as Seznac puts it, “served as vehicles for ideas so profound and so tenacious that it would have been impossible for them to perish.” And so they didn’t.

The figure on the cloud has all the appearance of a Classical deity overlooking a contemporary scene. She brings to mind Jean Seznac’s classic work of mythography, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. Not for providing a clue as to her specific meaning or function, but for Seznac’s overall idea that the Classical gods had never disappeared from the collective memory and imagination of the West, but through a process of “misunderstandings, confusions, [and] false interpretations” at the hands of grammarians, mythographers, and moralizers, they survived the ascendancy of Christianity in Late Antiquity and continued to exist in one form or another through the Middle Ages and beyond. Seznac shows that their survival depended on the circulation of such texts as Fulgentius’ circa 6th century allegorical Mythologiae; the

They turn up in de Chirico’s paintings in many forms, often indirectly. He frequently depicted their temples, statues, and seers, and in his post-1919 work occasionally depicted them directly. They seem to have been for him what we now would call condensed symbols—symbols that reach beyond their specific meanings to signify the larger, complex sensibility that gave rise to them and in which they were embedded. The specific sensibility these figures symbolize is the Classical Mediterranean sensibility. We know that de Chirico always felt the proximity of the Classical past, in part from having grown up in Volos in Thessaly, where his father worked as a railroad engineer. Volos was once known as Iolkos and was the point of departure for the Argonauts; nearby Mount Pelion was the purported home of the cen-

taurs. Both myths seem to have played a role in de Chirico’s early imaginative life. His pre-metaphysical paintings include scenes of centaur combats influenced by Arnold Böcklin’s mythological paintings, and he identified himself and his brother Andrea (who painted and wrote under the name Alberto Savinio) with the Argonautica’s Dioscuri. In addition to myth, de Chirico was inspired by the early Greek thinkers, and particularly by the gnomic fragments of the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus.

The price of admission to this “museum of strangeness” was a sensitivity to a certain affective coloring on the part of the visitor. The metaphysical world is a world permeated with a feeling, or Stimmung, that de Chirico often described as “fatality” and that could only be sensed in a spirit of solitude and melancholy.

It isn’t surprising, then, that something of the Classical sensibility carried over into the metaphysical aesthetic. In fact one of the keys to the attitude de Chirico named “metaphysical” is a nostalgia for the Classical past and the mentality it was reputed to embody. This particular kind of nostalgia manifested itself in his feeling that the numinous world of the ancient Mediterranean somehow persisted into the present. That despite everything the gods survived, and that one could somehow sense them.

cane meanings, and in relation to which one must adopt a divinatory stance. To the metaphysical attitude the world is a series of enigmatic signs to be read and deciphered, much as the Greeks read and interpreted the world and its furniture through their philosophical speculations, their oracles, dreams, and miscellaneous divinatory practices. De Chirico saw architecture, statuary, even shadows of a certain length and depth as just such enigmatic “symbols of a superior reality,” as he wrote in his statement “On Metaphysical Art.” An earlier statement from the famous Eluard Manuscript asserted that to see the enigma in things, which is to say to see them metaphysically, would be to “live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness.”

The metaphysical attitude, which de Chirico described so often in his written statements and reflections, was above all a particular way of being in the world. It is a way of being in which one finds oneself in a world permeated by portents and ar-

The price of admission to this “museum of strangeness” was a sensitivity to a certain affective coloring on the part of the visitor. The metaphysical world is a world permeated with a feeling, or Stimmung, that de Chirico often described as “fatality” and that could only be sensed in a spirit of solitude and melancholy. Here, too, the Classical Greeks set an example for him. As he wrote in the Eluard Manuscript, he liked to imagine Heraclitus lost in lonely contemplation, “meditating in the faint light of dawn,” and he asserted

that it would be a “major error” to suppose that the Greeks were “imbued with a spirit of optimism about life.” It is that tragic side of the Classical mentality that particularly dominates the metaphysical Stimmung and leaves its traces in the images de Chirico created. It comes across most obviously in the long shadows, nearly empty courtyards, and overhanging mood of lost time in the paintings of 1909-1919—the “metaphysical period” proper—but isn’t entirely absent afterward. It pervades Roman Villa not only through the overall strangeness and atopy of the scene, but through the specific objects de Chirico chose to depict, particularly the statues. Not only do the statues in the painting make direct allusion to the persistence of the Classical past, but as in the earlier metaphysical paintings, they carry an emotional weight arising from de Chirico’s general insistence on associating the figure of the statue with the tragic sense. In a passage from his statement “Statues, Furniture, and Generals,” which is roughly contemporary with Roman Villa, de Chirico observes that “on top of a palace, against the southern sky, [the statue] has something Homeric about it, a kind of severe and distant joy, mixed with melancholy.” Nothing better sums up what Roman Villa seems to be about, or the feeling it seeks to convey.

sensibility of Classical antiquity. And that is what is so perplexing about her. She is the trace through which the pagan gods, as archetypes and condensed symbols of a world full of fatal portents and omens, signal their refusal to go away.

And it is here that the goddess in the cloud discloses her meaning, along with the meaning of the allegory encoded in Roman Villa. She represents the survival of the metaphysical outlook that persists in de Chirico’s work and with it, a corresponding survival of the divinatory

two cold bare feet

cool wind; Cagliari morning. Winter; up on a Pirri rooftop. cold espresso, a damp cigarette; birds cooing, dogs barking, smoke mimicking mine from a chimney across the street wafts upward toward elephant grey skies. fog obscures the view of Sella del Diavolo.

a patch of sunlight on the city in the distance slowly fades away. burning wood and olive branches, simple, subtle, supple noon.

Studio 124 project

Italiano

Uno spazio vero, tangibile non virtuale sembra essere una vera e propria chimera oggigiorno. L’unico atto avanguardista in questa epoca di arte modificata digitalmente dall’intelligenza artificiale e spruzzata nel freddo universo virtuale della rete, è la ricerca dell’atto creativo, generato in quei “laboratori” rinati come bulbi di tulipani nel “compost” fertile depositato nei due anni di Covid. La reazione di menti creative a questo shock imprevisto ha ridato possibilità all’arte di germogliare in tante singole ed uniche forme espressive, dando vita, in molti casi, a spazi co-working.

Con i suoi numerosi artisti, Livorno sembra riassumere quanto appena accennato. Un posto che pullula di creatività fin dalla sua nascita come porto Mediceo agli albori del ‘600. Il porto franco, aperto ad ogni religione e privo di un ghetto (altro elemento di unicità) ha attirato ogni tipo di popolazione e conseguentemente svariate culture all’interno delle sue mura. I risultati di questo incipit alternativo sono personalità forti e contaminate, come quella di Modigliani e Mascagni affermatesi ai piani alti dell’arte di primo ‘900.

Con Spazio 124 sogno di dare visibilità a nuove personalità artistiche, ridestando l’interesse per un fermento creativo che rappresenti il periodo storico in corso di svolgimento. È forse giunta l’ora di svincolarsi dalla rete e tornare a cercare nei luoghi veri, tangibili e non virtuali ?

These days it’s becoming a rarity to find a real, tangible, non-virtual space. It’s an age of art that has been digitally modified by artificial intelligence and sprayed into the cold virtual universe of the web. The only avant-garde act seems to be the search for the creative act itself, generated in “laboratories” reborn like tulip bulbs in the fertile “compost” created in the two years of Covid. The reaction of creative minds to this unexpected shock has given art the possibility to germinate in many single and unique forms of expression, giving life, in many cases, to co-working spaces.

With its numerous artists, Livorno seems to embody this concept. A place brimming with creativity since its inception as a Medici port at the dawn of the 1600s. The Free Port of Livorno, open to all religions and without a ghetto (another element of uniqueness) has attracted a diverse population and various cultures within its walls. The results of this alternative culture are decisive and distinctive personalities, such as that of Modigliani and Mascagni who established themselves on the upper levels of early 20th century art.

Today I would like to restore visibility to new Livornese characters, reawakening interest in a possible new artistic movement that represents the ongoing historical period. Perhaps the time has come to disengage from the web and go back to searching for each other and for art in real, tangible and non-virtual places.

Meet the artists

Italiano

Simone Mantia è un fotografo e ingegnere livornese.

Scopre la fotografia da adolescente, iniziando a fotografare paesaggi e ritratti. Dopo un periodo di pausa, nel 2017 riscopre la fotografia di strada. Da subito è attratto dalla possibilità di congelare momenti ordinari e di raccontare, mediante le immagini, frammenti di vita. Nel 2019 inizia ad interessarsi maggiormente alla fotografia documentaria, realizzando il progetto “Doppie Visioni” sulle gare remiere livornesi.

E’ stato finalista in diversi concorsi nazionali e internazionali, tra i quali il MSPF (Miami Street Photography Festival), il LSPF (London Street Photography Festival) e l’ISPF (Italian Street Photo Festival). Nel 2018 riceve la menzione d’onore all’Urban Photo Awards e, nel 2020 e 2022, è tra i vincitori dell’Observa Street Photo Festival.

Instagram: manti.simo Flickr: Simone.mantia

Michaela Paone

“Un click al giorno toglie il medico di torno”. Che sia reflex o cellulare è così che sento il mio fare “ click”, mi regala una buona disposizione verso la vita, mi permette di creare mondi affini o paralleli, comunque creare per creare. In genere non progetto i miei scatti, tutto avviene in modo del tutto naturale ed improvviso secondo il mood del momento e l’ambiente circostante. Amo creare un’interazione tra la mia figura e ciò che mi circonda divenendo un unicum. Altre volte prediligo alterate la realtà creando un nuovo punto di vista, una visione distorta.

Simone Mantia is a photographer and engineer from Livorno.

Mantia discovered photography as a teenager, starting to photograph landscapes and portraits. After a break, in 2017 he rediscovered street photography. He was immediately attracted by the possibility of freezing ordinary moments and of telling fragments of life through images. In 2019 he began to explore documentary photography and he made the project “Doppie Visioni” based on the Livorno rowing competitions.

He has been a finalist in several national and international competitions, including the MSPF (Miami Street Photography Festival), the LSPF (London Street Photography Festival) and the ISPF (Italian Street Photo Festival). In 2018 he received an honorable mention at the Urban Photo Awards and, in 2020 and 2022, he was among the winners of the Observa Street Photo Festival.

Instagram: manti.simo Flickr: Simone.mantia

Michaela Paone

“One click a day keeps the doctor away”. Whether it’s a camera or a mobile phone, this is how I get my “click” in. It gives me a good disposition towards life and allows me to create similar or parallel worlds. Generally I don’t plan my shots, everything happens in a completely natural and improvised way according to the mood of the moment and the surrounding environment. I love to create an interaction between my subject and the surroundings, blending the two into one thing. Other times I prefer to alter reality by creating a new point of view, a distorted vision.

Italiano

Simone Di Maggio

Simone Di Maggio (DMBT) ha 45 anni e la sua produzione artistica è quasi integralmente musicale, sebbene la sensibilità verso l’arte e le frequentazioni di amici artisti sia per lui una costante da sempre. Da quasi tre anni sperimenta con il disegno a china e gli acquerelli, riprendendo un percorso interrotto a fine ‘90, stavolta con la volontà di trovare il proprio equilibrio tra forma e colore – immerso nella libertà e la meraviglia del gesto pittorico.

Luca Serasini

Sono nato a Pisa nel 1971.

Ho iniziato a dipingere nel 1996 e dal 2003 ho iniziato ad usare diverse altre tecniche, dalla fotografia ai video e alle videoinstallazioni fino a giungere, nel 2013 alla land art, e grazie ai miei studi di elettronica, a creare light box e dispositivi interattivi.

Uno dei due progetti che porto avanti è il Progetto Costellazioni che parte dalla domanda se abbiamo ancora noi, oggigiorno, realmente bisogno delle stelle. Nato inizialmente come progetto di land art si è via via articolato nelle forme più diverse attraverso il video, la fotografia, installazioni interattive, pittura e grafica.

I lavori in mostra appartengono al ciclo Population I, lavori su carta e acrilico in rilievo che sviluppano, in 21 lavori di piccole dimensioni, il tema della popolazione di stelle. In cosmologia le stelle sono divise in popolazioni, che a seconda della loro composizione chimica ne viene compresa l’età. La prima popolazione (Population I appunto) sono le stelle più giovani dell’Universo.

Simone Di Maggio

Simone Di Maggio (DMBT) is 45 years old and his artistic production is almost entirely musical, although the sensitivity towards art and the acquaintances of artist friends has always been a constant for him. For almost three years he has been experimenting with ink drawing and watercolors, resuming a path interrupted at the end of the 1990s, this time with the desire to find his own balance between form and color - immersed in the freedom and wonder of the pictorial gesture.

Luca Serasini

I was born in Pisa in 1971.

I started painting in 1996 and since 2003 I have started to use various other techniques, from photography to video and video installations up to land art in 2013, and thanks to my studies in electronics, to create light boxes and interactive devices.

One of the two projects I am carrying out is the Costellazioni Project which starts from the question whether we still really need the stars today. Initially born as a land art project, it gradually developed into the most diverse forms through video, photography, interactive installations, painting and graphics.

The works on display belong to the Population I cycle, works on paper and acrylic in relief that develop, in 21 small-sized works, the theme of the population of stars. In cosmology, stars are divided into populations, which, depending on their chemical composition, include their age. The first population (Population I) are the youngest stars in the Universe.

ed and me

Fiction

The Gun I.

Ed Prignano was my father’s best friend. A short, rotund Italian man with thinning hair and soft brown eyes, Ed was always around when I was a kid, standing at the bottom of the porch stairs bullshitting with my dad while they both sipped Pepsis out of curvy, returnable glass bottles. I never paid much attention to what Ed and my dad were talking about, but I was fascinated because Ed Prignano wore a gun in a shoulder holster everywhere he went. Summertime was the best, he would wear those stereotypical Italian-guy A-shirts, white ribbed tanks stretched tight across his abdomen, gold chain glinting in the sunset, and black sunglasses. The holster was leather and formed to his body, the gun a snub-nosed .38 revolver. He wasn’t worried that anyone would see it, and he certainly didn’t try to hide it. He would rest a hand on it as he stood down on the sidewalk along 24th Avenue, laughing so raucously that Carlotta Caliendo, the old lady next door slammed her window shut, glaring at both of them.

My neighborhood was full of Italian folks; my father knew them all. They’d wave hello as they walked past on their ways home from Naples Fruit Market, and my father would raise a hand in response. He liked everyone fine, but he loved Ed Prignano. We’d sit on the porch steps, my dad and I, eating a plate of dry salami and pecorino Romano that my father would cut with his pocketknife against his thumb. He’d always offer Ed some, and he’d always take a slice of each, folding the salami around the cheese into the shape of a taco, stuffing it into his cheek and chewing slowly, savoring the salty, oily meat. Nobody else from the block stopped as long as Ed did, and nobody shared our feast.

The sun would slip behind the houses as my father and Ed talked, first reflecting off the windows across the street like fire, then welcoming in the strange flat light of dusk in the neighborhood. The halogen lights surrounding the car lot at Al Piemonte Ford and the neon around the

top of the Harlow Grill would snap on in succession buzzing to life. Ed Prignano would slap his hairy arm against the bite of a mosquito, and my father would tell me to head in. Sometimes I would stall, wandering out into the yard to pick up my jump rope or my skateboard, but he would always wait for the serious conversations with Ed until I was inside, and the big door was shut. Even in the summertime, I was expected to shut the door to the front porch behind the screen, so my father could speak with Ed in privacy. Sometimes the neighborhood cop, Skipper Fanara would stop along the road and roll down the window and talk to Ed and my dad, but they were never in trouble, at least not the kind the cops were interested in in Melrose Park.

I didn’t know what they talked about, but I wondered. I would open my bedroom window as far as it would go and catch bits of their conversation here and there, but never enough to fully understand. All three of them would laugh occasionally, but it was more murmured seriousness than jovial friendship. I’d overhear words like “bag” and “asshole” and “Saturday” and wonder what any of that could possibly mean, as I drifted off to sleep, my childhood bed facing south and the breeze from the city wafting through the stuffy room in our bungalow.

Ed Prignano owned the funeral home on North Avenue, a building that was low brick and resembled an animal hospital. It didn’t have any windows, except in the door. He did all the neighborhood funerals, including my grandmother’s when I was twelve. It was strange to be in a build-

ing like that in our neighborhood, even then, as my dead grandmother lay in a casket on display, because Ed was there, and he was the funeral director. I recall my father shaking his hand, slapping him on the shoulder as they stood outside the viewing room that stunk of lilies and my father’s dead mother. I wanted to ask if Ed had his shoulder holster on, if the .38 was loaded in case of unruly funeral-goers, but I knew better than to be what my father deemed a “smartass.” At twelve, it seemed to be a fair question, but I kept quiet in order to maintain the somber atmosphere. I instead sat in one of the brown stacking chairs with cracked vinyl sticking to my bare legs quietly next to my brother, wishing the air conditioner was a little cooler.

By that time, when I was twelve, I knew Ed Prignano was a low-level crook, and by association, my father probably was, too. I wondered if Skipper Fanara was too, but logic told me that cops were “good guys” and the idea of a dirty cop, even a slightly dirty one, wasn’t even anything I could entertain.

I had been rummaging through the back seat of the old Chevy that was in our garage and found a bank bag with some cash in it stuffed under the seat. Too scared to lift even a $20, I stuffed the money back into the bag and shoved it back under the front seat, my hands sweating and shaking, as if mere contact with dirty money somehow made me a crook. I crawled out of that backseat and slammed the door on that dusty Chevy and ran into the house, not realizing my walkman was still laying on the back-

seat, Madonna blaring through the foam headphones until I got inside. I tried to reason to myself that the money was just a deposit from the garage that my dad worked at that he had forgotten in the Chevy the last time he drove it, but there was an underlying voice that told me that was a dumb, childish idea.

My father got home shortly thereafter, and his route of entry was through the garage, where he undoubtedly heard “Papa Don’t Preach” coming from the back of the old car. He came into the kitchen looking inflamed, his face sweaty and beefy. “Were you in the car?” he asked me, as I laid out the plates for supper.

“No,” I lied, blush rising from my neck up into my cheeks. I wouldn’t look at him, because if he saw my eyes, he would know I was lying. I’m fairly certain he knew anyway.

“Someone left your music on in the backseat,” he said, handing me the walkman and the balled-up wires to the flimsy headphones. “I hope whoever it was wasn’t snooping around in something that wasn’t their business.” I have never been happier that I didn’t take any of that money! And boy was I glad that my father was as uninterested in talking about what else was in the backseat of the car as I was. I ate my dinner as fast as I could without choking, my father’s eyes honed on me the entire time. I don’t think anyone was more relieved than when I shoveled the last bite of my mother’s brarciole into my gullet and asked in the same breath “Can I be excused?”

The next day, Ed Prignano and my fa-

ther were in the garage, talking about the keys for the Chevrolet, and how they were going to have to keep it locked from then on. I never asked why, and I only offered them each a bottle of cold pop. The best I could do to make my 12-year-old-self seem innocent. They each screwed the top off the bottle with their tough, dirty palms, and tossed the tops on the garage floor with a clang before taking swigs of Pepsi.

Ed Prignano raised his eyebrows at me that day, so far above the frames of his black sunglasses that I knew it couldn’t not be intentional. I knew he knew what had happened, but neither of us said a word about it, nor did my father. I just handed them their sweaty, cold bottles and went back into the house. From then on, I avoided Ed Prignano like the plague, and I can’t imagine that my father didn’t notice.

The Death II.

Terror. The only emotion I felt was terror. In the sweaty, salmon-colored high school bathroom, terror washed over me in waves of frigid air, as though the air conditioner was blowing directly on me, which it wasn’t since it was January. I glanced up from the sink, the white porcelain steadying my wavering stance and stared at my reflection in the dirty bathroom mirror. Long hair, brown, tied back from my face with an ugly barrette. Short forehead. Blue eyes that were never as striking as I thought they were. Olive skin gone drab. Dark circles under my eyes. A nose that would always be a little

too big for my face. Thin lips, dry, parted. The pallor that hung over my face made me look sick, and in that moment, I felt it. My stomach twisted into my spine, creating a dropping feeling like when a roller coaster sank. My gaze swayed from the mirror back to the sink, where my hands still gripped the sides for stability. I was damp with sweat, the hair along my face stuck to my skin slickly, and my neck was wet under my hair.

The door burst open, and Janelle Esposito and Cari Woods walked in, talking about something mindless. They glanced at me only briefly and let themselves into the stalls, slamming the doors behind them. I remembered in that moment to breathe and inhaled the heavy air with a shudder. “Hey, are you ok?” one of them asked me, when clearly, I was anything but.

“Yep, great,” I responded, picking my backpack up off the tile floor. I heaved it onto my shoulder and charged out the door, the world spinning, before any more questions could be asked. The hallway was vacant, and I was relieved to not have to meet the masses of talking and laughing students who were my peers at that moment. The windows into the classrooms revealed desks in rows, each with a student in it. Third period. I should be in Civics with Mr. Beem, listening to him prattle on about local elections, his sandy beard moving in time to his words, and here I am in the hallway, desperately searching for a way out. And I should know, I’ve gone to this school all my life, but everything looks a little foreign, and I’m unsure of everything. Except one

thing: nothing would ever, ever be the same.

There would be no junior prom, no senior prom, no Columbia College in Chicago, no summer job, no staying up all night with my friends, riding around town in the backs of their cars. A giant, tectonic shift had happened, and I was falling into the vast abyss it had created without a parachute or safety net of any sort.

The night before, as I slept in my upstairs bedroom in the bungalow on 24th Avenue West, the furnace-dry air surrounding me like a shroud, oblivious to everything, my mother died.

Sure, she had been sick. But she had been sick for as long as I remembered. Huntington’s disease made her first tremor, and then shake, and then flail uncontrollably. As a child, I remembered the pages of the books she would read me flapping back and forth as though caught between the spokes of my bicycle. She would ask me to button her shirts when her hands would quake, and she could not force the button into the hole. And I understood that she was sick, and that Huntington’s was progressive, and that things were getting worse, but that was all on another level.

Now she was dead. And that meant a lot of different things for me, my family, and everyone who had anything to do with us.

When I had gotten up, my father was at the kitchen table in his undershirt, drinking coffee. Ed Prignano was there, too, and he looked solemn. Ed never looked

solemn unless there was a good reason. He was my father’s best friend, which was kind of funny. What mechanic is best friends with the local funeral director, after all? Neither of them could look at me, but I knew something was wrong when I walked into the kitchen. Ed held out a cup of coffee to me, which my father would never allow me to drink. He didn’t scold me or Ed when I accepted it and took a long drink, even though it was too hot and burned my tongue. Ed opened his arms to me, which was also very unlike him. Ed was a jolly guy, but not a hugger. He was more of a handshake guy, or if you were a pretty woman (which I was not) you would get a kiss on the cheek and maybe a pinch on the ass. Nobody said anything, and nobody looked up. I let Ed hug me, his big arms smashing me against his robust belly. I could feel the butt of the .38 revolver he had worn in a shoulder holster since I was a kid pressed against me. Ed smelled like lilies and cigar smoke, which I thought were funny things for a man to smell like. I was used to my father, who smelled like motor oil and cinnamon gum and sometimes Hall’s cough drops. Ed let me go finally, and I was able to take a breath. My father raised his eyes to look just past me, and I could see they were red and watery. He did not say a word, just made this pathetic wheezing sound, and I knew.

I pulled my backpack off my chair and hoisted it onto my shoulder. I turned away from Ed and my father, neither who had said a word, and walked through the dining room and the living room to the front door. In the dining room, my

mother’s hospital bed was empty. She had lain there for the last three years, when she could no longer walk. Her arms had worked overtime, even when she was asleep, firing back and forth in terrible thrashing movements, her head ticking to one side. The constant movement in that room had stopped, and with it, everything else.

I opened the door and stepped out into the frigid dawn. Melrose Park is not a welcoming city, especially in January. The newspaper was on the porch, wrapped in its blue plastic sheath. I could see my breath, and I didn’t have a coat on. I didn’t know if my brother had left for school or if he was up or if he knew anything, but I also didn’t care. The storm door slapped the frame behind me, making a metallic crash like something breaking.

“You don’t have to go to school today if you don’t want to,” Ed was standing in the doorway behind me, the storm door between us. “Nobody is going to make you go.”

“I’ll go,” I told him, wanting him to be someone else. Anyone else. I hated that Ed Prignano loved my father so much that they had probably been planning for this moment for years. I wanted him to not be so comfortable in our house that he could sit at the kitchen table in his velour pants and t-shirt. I wanted Ed Prignano never to have touched my mother’s dead body, but I knew that he had, and he would again. And then we would have to look at her, knowing that he had touched her.

“It’s over now,” he said. He meant all my

mother’s suffering, and the not knowing, and the tiptoeing around the fact that she was going to die soon, and I knew what he meant. But a lot of other things were over, too. Him saying that was supposed to bring me some relief, I think, but all it did was make me more furious.

I was sure it was over. And at the same time, it was the beginning of something wholly different and horrifying. “I’m ok, Ed. Mr. Prignano. Just take care of my dad.” I turned away from the house I had spent my entire childhood in with my sick mother and walked down the porch steps to the sidewalk. Everything was spinning, whirling around me in slow motion like a snow squall.

Ed said something else, but I don’t know what it was. He stepped back and closed the big door between the indoors and the storm. I walked down the sidewalk and somehow ended up at Proviso West High School, frozen half to death, and in a tunnel of numbness that somehow was not grief for my mother, but horror at what my life would turn into.

The Mess III.

I wrapped my hands under my belly, which was just starting to pooch out a little bit. What better way to mourn a mother than to become one, right? My tee shirt wasn’t even getting tight yet, and school was finally over. Graduation had washed over me, the flowing orange gown tickling my calves as I waited in the June heat for my name to be called so I could cross the stage, shake the vice principal’s hand, and take my diploma. I had passed all my

classes in the fog of sadness and fury but had no plans for the future.

I had dreamed of college once. I had even taken the train into the city and toured Columbia College down on the lakefront, marveling at its proximity to the Art Institute and the cool young people wandering around with their paint splattered clothes and the canvases they lugged back and forth between their studio and wherever they stayed. I wanted to write. Columbia had a creative writing program, and it was close enough to home so I could take the el into the city for classes. It all seemed well thought out, and almost planned, until my mother died. And then I got pregnant. And then it was not even a topic of conversation anymore. I was just going to have to go to work.

Of course, I could still write. My father made that clear with his graduation gift to me: a Macintosh laptop loaded with a word processing program. He made a production of giving it to me, too. The slick white box was wrapped in orange iridescent wrapping paper. I tore it off and my father beamed. “For your stories,” he said.

He didn’t acknowledge that the application to Columbia College never got sent, it just sat on the sideboard in the dining room until I threw it out one day in a cleaning spree. He didn’t acknowledge my growing midsection. He didn’t acknowledge that my mother was gone. He was off in the cloud of his own sadness, floating through the days and weeks and months. Ed Prignano was an ever-present feature in our lives. He brought coffee

in the mornings for my father, and sometimes lasagna from his wife’s kitchen in the evenings. It was a good thing, too, because without him, we would have all perished on a diet of boiled hot dogs and frozen pizzas.

Graduation brought an onslaught of gifts, mostly in the form of cash, some generated from pure pity. Since I was not going to college, I spent it on a rental for the summer up in Sturgeon Bay. Wisconsin was where I went to forget, and all I wanted to do was forget. My boyfriend was coming along, his presence looming and omnipresent. But he had a car. And he said that he loved me. What did I know at 17 about love? So we planned our trip, and once graduation was over, we left.

My father and Ed stood in the driveway together and watched us go. The air was heavy and the air conditioning in the car was broken. I sweated; my hair stuck to my forehead. Andy, my boyfriend, sweated, but in a red, angry kind of way. I brought the laptop along, hopeful that I could write something worthwhile. Ed and my father both looked a bit bewildered, but they smiled and waved as we backed out of the driveway.

Andy laughed at the idea when I told him. “You think you are going to be a novelist?” he asked in his incredulous way.

I didn’t answer, just looked out the window as Illinois and the city retreated behind us in a sweltering haze. I wondered what my father would do when I was gone. I had hugged him before I left, feeling his frame fold inward like a husk. Ed

had been sturdier when I hugged him, and he had whispered to me to “call if I needed anything.” It was like Ed Prignano was a mind- reader. I had no idea I would need him, or anyone, but I would.

The cabin was small and dark, looking out onto Lake Michigan. There were two rooms with a kitchenette. The bed was too soft, and the chairs were mismatched, but when the windows were open, the lake

breeze blew through the little cabin and kept it cool. I set the laptop up on the table, plugged in and open to the word processor. Andy laughed again. I wrapped my hands around my belly, protective.

I knew how to be a mother before I knew how to be anything else, it turns out. I wanted to be a writer, but I couldn’t make the words come. Andy just scoffed at me. I finally told him “I’m glad I didn’t try to get into Columbia College. It would have been a huge waste of money.” and he agreed. I could feel my child turning inside me, a strange fluttering inside the tightness of my abdomen.

“You should just get a job when we get back to Melrose. The Harlow Grill always wants someone.” His voice hurt my ears, and his sentiment hurt my heart. I nodded and closed my eyes. I could see my mother’s face there, before her cheeks were bony and her eyes sunken. It was like looking at a favorite picture: her in her purple and grey parka at a Halloween party, her hair curled away from her face Farrah-Fawcett style, a drink in her hand, and her lip curled up in an expression that I recognized myself making. Tears welled under my lids but refused to spill onto my cheeks, stinging. “Hey, c’mon. Stop it.” Andy said. “I know you can hear me. Don’t be sad.”

I opened my eyes and stared at Andy through my tears. “I don’t think I can do this, Andy.” He was a blur, his maroon t-shirt melting into the knotty pine woodwork, his face an ugly smear.

“What? The summer? Me? The baby? What are you talking about? Should I just

leave now? What the fuck?” His voice went up an octave when he was agitated, and he was getting there.

I felt terrible. I was just so sad, so deeply and tragically wounded, that I could not imagine spending the whole summer listening to Andy tell me what I should do and try to be receptive to it. I couldn’t hear myself think when he was around, always trying to pull me out of my sadness. “You should just go back to Melrose Park. I just need to be alone.”

“What, so you can write your book? Or do you have some boyfriend here?” Andy was screeching. I put my head down on the table. I slapped the laptop closed.

“Just go, Andy.” I sighed. He had wanted to since I had told him I was pregnant, and this was his chance, maybe his only one. I willed him to take it, but instead he took hold of my hair and yanked my head up off the table. My eyes flew open, the back of my head seared as he twisted his hand into my hair.

“I drove your dumb ass all the way up here and that’s it now? Just go?” He was in front of me, I could feel his breath on my face with each word. I wrenched myself around, trying to get out of his grip.

“Fuck this, Andy. You want to leave, leave.” I twisted again, feeling my scalp scream in protest. “Now let go.”

He did, and my head throbbed in response. I glared at him, and he glared back. How this had turned ugly so fast and for no real reason was beyond me. But I wasn’t about to backpedal on any of it. “Leave. Go back to Melrose. Go any-

where. Just get out of here.”

His lip curled in disgust. He turned on his heel and walked into the bedroom, and flopped on the bed, the springs shrieking. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I walked out the door into the evening air, the coolness a shock from the stuffy cabin. I did what I knew I would all along. I called Ed Prignano.

Ed’s voice was rough on the phone, but he agreed. I sat outside on the porch, a yellow halogen bulb buzzing above me. I could feel the baby churning around inside my belly as I waited. I could feel my future changing. Andy was snoring, I could hear him through the screen door behind me. And I realized I hated the sound of him, and the idea of him. Mosquitoes buzzed hungrily in my ears, and I slapped at the sides of my head.

Ed arrived in his black Lincoln Town Car, crunching up the gravel driveway. When he got out of the car, he was sweating. I got up and walked toward him. I had never been happier to see anyone, especially Ed Prignano. I wrapped my arms around him like I would my own father and sobbed into his shoulder. The leather from the holster pressed into my cheek. Ed held me like that for a while, probably longer than he was comfortable with. But he was an expert on grief, and well-versed in letting people let it out. And when no more tears would come, he asked, “Where is he?”

I pointed at the door, not knowing what was going to happen to Ed or Andy or me or my baby or really anyone. Ed walked to the door, opened it, and walked in-

side. I got into the Town Car, in the back seat, and curled up like a grieving widow on her way to her husband’s funeral. I imagined how many people had wept in the back of Ed Prignano’s Lincoln, and thought their tears had somehow made the leather of the seat softer.

I didn’t see Andy come out of the cabin. I didn’t see Ed behind him, the snubnosed .38 pressed into his back. I didn’t hear Andy get into his car or shut his door or drive away. I barely heard Ed get into the driver’s seat, but when the Lincoln started up, I sat up.

“Thank you, Ed. Mr. Prignano. Ed. I’m not sure what to call you,” I said nervously.

“Ed’s good.” he said, tucking the pistol back into the holster. “You ok, kid?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just got scared. I think I’m gonna go back inside now,” I replied.

“You have writing to do, kid.” Ed tapped a cigarette out of his pack, lit it, and blew a plume of smoke out into the night. “When you decide to come back to Melrose, give me a call. I’ll come get you. And you’ll have a job at the funeral home when you get back. Your dad told me you are in a bind.”

“Thank you, Ed.” was all I could muster.

Ed coughed and took another drag on his smoke, the ember lighting up his face. He was gleaming with sweat even though the night was cool. And his gun was at his side. Just like always.

stinging the frog

The sting in the tail is that you knew.

They didn’t hide their poison. Scorpions hold it aloft so you can’t deny its risk if you tread too close or break the calm.

When all the pain and numbness wears off remember you are the one that can swim.

You trusted, but drowning is also in your nature, pulling the waters over you until they are all you can breathe.

Seal your lungs tight, drifting alone is easy if you give in to the current’s pull.

Basilica

Life was really lived in the kitchen and in the big grassy yard where my grandfather also raised vegetables and suffered three heart attacks. I remember my grandmother sitting out there at the round, white wrought iron garden table crying to my mother after my grandfather died. I remember watching my Uncle Pat, born Pasquale, bound out of the limousine in the cemetery after his funeral, suddenly unable to bear saying goodbye to his father, even if it was hard at that moment to picture my grandfather as a father, especially one like my own dad who seemed to so completely personify fatherhood: suit and tie and briefcase, a close shave and Old Spice, always a neatly folded handkerchief and Lifesavers in his suit jacket pocket. My dad stayed in the limo though, even if he started a bit when he saw Uncle Pat trot towards the grave, before his own son, also Pat, put his arm around him and led him back to the car, frightened for that brief moment by his brother’s grief, and I was frightened too, scared of the feelings I didn’t want to feel but even more scared of the fear these men were showing. Grown men. There was something not right about it. Even Dad couldn’t always keep it all in. Even his stalwart, sometimes impenetrable character had its vulnerabilities, found

its limits somewhere. My dad stayed, his index finger flicking away a single tear, the slightest excrescence that did more to irrevocably alter my sense of the world than my grandfather’s death itself, or the sight of him in the coffin (my first dead body), or the embarrassing wailing of my grandmother and aunts. But if he could limit it all to one tear then I could do even better. I promised myself to not cry at that moment, or any other one if I could help it. In a photo taken many years later in our summer home in the Poconos, my dad and his brother stand next to each other in the kitchen, smiling, glasses of lemonade in their hands, a couple of paisans in nearly identical comb-overs and short sleeve button-ups living their almost identical American Dreams.

Now, in the KLM departure lounge at JFK the summer after my brother Michael’s first hospitalization, some four years before he will die of AIDS, on the eve of a European trip my parents have managed, I wonder if this is what my friend Evan meant when he said “God, you all look so Italian.” We went to college together. I had showed him a picture of my four brothers and me at our cousin JoAnne’s wedding in Massapequa a couple of summers before. All that accumulated brotherhood on display, like chapters in a

story or scenes in a film, everything connected and moving towards something, promising something. Suspense. A love story. Another happy ending flickering in the darkness.

“Destination, Italia,” my little brother Peter says into the camera. He is recording everything on our new eight-millimeter video camera, a late eighties, high-tech wonder roughly twice the size and weight of a brick. “Our ancestral homeland. Ciao, Francesco Rinaldi!”

“Actually,” my dad says, answering Peter, reaching once more into his jacket pocket for his itinerary, rendered in his impeccable Catholic School fountain pen cursive. “We won’t be going to Naples, where we came from. Although your grandfather really came from a town called Santangelo Dei Lombardi, near Avellino. Your grandmother’s “people” as they called them” –as though we aren’t familiar with the term – “came from Santangelo too but she was born here.”

“Their marriage was practically arranged,” my Aunt Bertha had once confided in us. “Maybe we go to Naples on the next trip,” my dad says.

“Ha! Are you a secret millionaire? This trip is not cheap,” my mom informs us,

“All that accumulated brotherhood on display, like chapters in a story or scenes in a film, everything connected and moving towards something, promising something.”

instinctively zipping up her pocketbook. “I hope you boys know that.”

My dad winks at us. My parents were raised during the Depression, then lived on city salaries and raised a big family. My mom reminds us constantly how they saved and sacrificed luxuries at home so that we would have money for special things like this trip. None of us really share her philosophy, however. We want life and we want it large and, most importantly we want it now, especially since the shit has officially hit the fan.

Things had started to get complicated back on Thanksgiving. Right before the big dinner started, my brother Vincent took me out for a walk and a talk around the quiet Brooklyn neighborhood where we grew up. As a little brother I’d always been thrilled to be taken into his confidences, even as they’d gotten more grown up. He lived in Manhattan with his friend Charlie, who I’d never met. Already, like Eddie, the oldest of us, and Michael, a year younger than Eddie, I knew Vincent was gay. Although it was in its way taken for granted, it was a fact as unformed and indeterminate as everything else in my life. I didn’t know what anything meant, or would.

He was ascendant that Thanksgiving Day, firing on all pistons, so handsome in his trendy haircut, trendy black jeans and hip chunky shoes and happier than I’d seen him in a while. He had moved out of our little house out of Midwood with its modest detached houses and

moved into himself. The East River that separates Brooklyn from Manhattan was a compelling boundary. Once Vincent had crossed over – he didn’t really want people to call him “Vinny” anymore – he knew he was home. A couple of blocks from our house however he stopped and put his arm around my shoulder and told me he’d tested positive for HIV.

“Honestly, it’s a relief to finally know. And I’m fine, and I’m going to be fine,” he said. “Anyway, don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

Honestly, despite the shock, my first thought was that I was surprised that it hadn’t been Michael to bring this news home first. As buff, butch and polished as he looked, as All-American, he had lived a practically nocturnal life the last few years, part of the drug-fueled, nonstop party of Fire Island circuit queens and Peter Pan club kids, something I’d only begun to understand – even if I understood all too well how connected it was to this new epidemic. Or maybe, once again, I didn’t understand anything.

Then in the spring, just as the campus erupted into life, bud and flower and bird and bee, restless college students baring bodies under the sun, Frisbee and hackysacks reappearing, along with my own optimism, giving myself a break from anxiety and all those worst-case scenarios, a knock came on my door during a particularly enthusiastic bong session in my room that changed everything. I was called to the funny, graffiti covered phone booth at the top of the stairs of the Co-

Op house where I lived. My mother was waiting on the line.

“Your brother,” she began. She didn’t have to finish. I knew exactly what she was going to say. Vincent wanted me to keep it a secret, and I had, but some secrets are too big for anyone to hide. Just like some possibilities are too great to ever believe they might not come to pass. I felt like a fool for thinking that we might dodge a bullet, that nothing bad might happen. While getting sick was pretty much an inevitability for someone with HIV I was shocked that it would have happened so quickly. I’d thought I, I mean Vincent, would have more time. But then my mother said, “Michael.”

Michael had been hospitalized suddenly with pneumocystis pneumonia, or PCP, one of the most common opportunistic infections for people with HIV and often the herald for the onset of AIDS itself. He’d been having trouble breathing, chest pain, fatigue, and the low-grade fever typical of PCP. One day he was alright and the next he was sick.

“Your father and I brought him to the hospital, needless to say it was a terrible shock,” she told me on the phone that day. Michael in his crisis had also come out to my parents. “The drugs I can accept but homosexuality is a grave sin.”

My mom had always been devout, but we’d always taken her orthodoxy with a grain of salt. As observant as she was, I’d always believed that the essence of her faith lay in the example of Christ’s infinite

love and not in dogma or doctrine, as educated in both as she was. To put it another way, she seemed to me more invested in the spirit of the word than the letter of the law. She was a pragmatist and a nice person, known as the problem solver in her office where she was a Special Education administrator in the public schools, where most of her friends and co-workers were Jewish. Sometimes our nickname for our mother was “The Saint.” She was a saint but the warrior type, Jeanne D’Arc in Aerosoles and clearance rack Liz Claiborne. But she sounded a little angry, which made me a little angry too, just something to add to the fear and nausea and dread.

“Did you know, Matthew?” she asked, her voice quavering at the other end of the line. It was probably the most serious question she had ever asked me.

“No,” I said, and I think I was telling the truth, but the situation was so complicated I wasn’t sure what specifically she was referring to. There were a million things I knew. There were a million things I suspected. Others I considered were likely. Plus I had a few surprises of my own. But no, I didn’t know that I had two brothers with HIV. I didn’t know that lightning had struck twice until right then.

“And what about you? Are you okay?” she asked next, for the first time, another question too big to be contained by that tiny phonebooth, too big perhaps to be contained by that moment. Once as a little boy, as my mother was turning off the

light on Peter and me at bedtime I called out “I’m afraid!”. I reached out from the top bunk and grabbed her sweater, that dependable cable knit Irish cardigan with the big wooden buttons. I don’t know why I was so suddenly terrified. The door was always left open. The light in the hall always on. “The only thing you have to be afraid of is me,” she told me firmly, taking me by the wrists and putting me back in bed. It was outrageous. I would have laughed in disbelief had I not known that what she said was true. She was too sensible to waste a moment on monsters or ghosts. It was bedtime and she had her correspondence to do and her Barbra Cartland novel to finish.

“I’m okay,” I said as convincingly as was possible in that tiny phone booth as my housemates shrieked and laughed in the hallway outside. Did she want me to tell her that I didn’t have HIV? Or did she want the topic to never come up between us?

“I’m okay,” I said again. I mean, what choice did I have?

I had always figured Michael had been infected by one of his first boyfriends, Stephen, a few years earlier. They had met at the Ice Palace on West Fifty-Seventh Street. Michael was barely legal. Steven at thirty-two was positively ancient. He was a short guy with a deep voice, Polish, average looks, compact build, longish hair, not in line with what I thought was Michael’s ideal at the time – his All-American Ken Dolls like the men

in his Bruce Weber photography books. At Bay One, the gay beach in the Rockaways where Michael and Vincent took m e, Stephen chain-smoked Merits and eschewed Speedos for cutoff jeans. A former Merchant Marine, Stephen taught me how to light a cigarette at the beach, an indispensable skill to have when commissioned on the high seas. Another time, in the basement, he showed me a large Zip- loc freezer bag bursting with cocaine, and a Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee can loaded with little empty brown gram bottles. They were his and Michael’s tools of the trade. Later I’d understand how the drugs were probably the glue that really held them together as long as it did, even if I could see in the way Stephen looked at Michael that he really loved him, or wanted him, or both.

Vincent later confessed that he slept with Stephen too and was more or less certain that he’d contracted the virus from him as well. It was the worst kind of brotherly sharing, to say nothing how heartbreaking it was to know the exact time and place of his infection, to boil it down to one single identifiable, and therefore avoidable, moment. I have imagined it many times – not the sex, but Vincent’s urgent need. He was young and horny and that was that. He wanted to give wing to that part of himself, and why shouldn’t he?

Michael has long refused to take Stephen’s calls from San Diego. Earlier that summer, before we left for Europe, I answered one of them in Midwood.

“I know he won’t talk to me, Matt, but just tell me is he like skinny now, and sick?” Word of Michael’s infection had found its way to him. He was typically blunt and pessimistic, but it also made me feel kind of selfishly grown up to be taken into his confidence, that my perspective mattered.

But I didn’t want him to know anything else about Michael or us. I didn’t blame him for anything, but it was a door that I wasn’t going to let open if I had anything to do with it. Michael wasn’t all skinny. He was defying all that. He’d keep on defying that. He wasn’t going to be one of those skeletal men haunted under their blankets in a hospital room. He wasn’t going to be a case study. An inevitability.

“No,” I told him.

Later I searched for Stephen on the internet. I wasn’t sure what would even be out there. He’d last been seen in the pre-internet and social media era. I quickly found however a San Diego gravesite listing that matched his name. 1957-1994. Those dates would have been right, assuming of course that he died of AIDS as well. I also found an article where a person by the same name was arrested for breaking and entering in San Diego the year before. It looked like a low-level drug crime gone wrong. The perpetrator had smashed a glass patio door with a mallet and the homeowner had shot him in the wrist.

“We’re also carrying an insulated My Little Pony thermal lunch box,” Peter says into the video camera.

“To keep my steroid injections refrigerated,” Michael says, holding up the lunchbox and mugging. Michael is taking the steroids for bronchial trouble, a complication from the pneumonia. The lunchbox is pink and soft and intended for keeping fresh a little girl’s kindergarten snacks, baby carrots and tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off. “It’s ironic and cute, just like us.”

“D’oh!” Peter says.

I can see what Evan meant though. The sun finds our faces and I see us reflected in the glass, five handsome sons arrayed in our seats by the gate like one of the complex renaissance paintings I’d been studying at school, those crowded Raphaels and Massaccios. I wonder if there is a similar mathematics to us, like that which orders those paintings, which determines proportion and rhythm and hierarchy, that gives them their sense, fills them with an array of different personalities – guildsmen, scholars, merchants, each marked by a whimsical hat and colored robes. At Vassar I am learning to paint and draw. I got off to a rocky start with a C first semester, but only because I was lazy. Second semester I really applied myself. I made a drawing of my bong, something I had bought in the Village on a weekend trip home. It was made of two small fishbowls attached one of top another by a thick rubber grommet and fixed with a variety of tubes and stems. It looked like a mad scientist’s coffeemaker, and I found the sinuous rhythm of its lines and circles inspiring. I was surprised

at first that I could draw. All it really took was a little patience, concentration, and a willingness to try. It was kind of like photography, in that at the end there was a picture of something, but it was also like writing, in that I built it one line at a time. As time went on, I found I was pretty good at observing, at measuring and composing, at letting the order of what I was looking at impose itself on the page. What I drew actually looked like what it was. Reality it turned out, in this sense at least, was manageable. My instructor chose my drawing from all those presented that day and tacked it to the wall.

“Now this is beautiful,” he said. Beautiful. I had never even considered it. Never considered wanting it. Certainly, in the undeniably creative if chaotic atmosphere of my sullen teen years I had dismissed beauty altogether. To my grungy friends and I art was meant to be shocking and repulsive. In painting class though I’d imagined myself in ermine and velvet like a prince from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum. It looked like me. It was a declaration of self. A fool’s errand. I struggled with it for weeks. Finally, I began to paint it out, to simplify and reduce everything to the essentials. My shiny tangle of hair became a flat purple arabesque. Space, my princely dominion rolling out behind me in ideal Renaissance composition, was remade as a series of rectangles, a house of cards. I painted out my face and left it blank, stark white the color of absolutely no one. It felt good to erase all those familiar features, but anyone who

visited my studio knew right away that even without eyes to see or a mouth to speak that the painting was me.

In Rome I make my family help me hunt down all the Caravaggios that I have studied in my art history classes. They are hidden all around the city, mostly in small dark churches that aren’t listed in any guidebook. A few lira dropped into the donation box turns on the lights above these magnificent works of art. They are only illuminated for a few moments, but they emerge from the darkness like a revelation, like an affirmation of the swirl of light and dark that I feel inside me lately, by dreams as well as dread, by an inescapable future and past that will not stop reverberating, by the promise of our youth and the specter of death.

“Drama,” Vincent declares.

In the church of San Luigi de Francisci we see one of Caravaggio’s greatest works, The Calling of Saint Matthew. In it, Jesus appears at the customs house where Matthew is a tax collector. With the help of a serendipitous shaft of sunlight through the window over his shoulder, Jesus says to him, “Follow me.” Matthew is a handsome man, very Italian looking, naturally, as all of Caravaggio’s figures were painted, scandalously, from real people he found on the street – his barefoot saints and haggard messiahs, accidental players in his beautiful blasphemies. Jesus himself seems another unwashed face in the crowd. It’s a portrait of a moment of truth, when Matthew must decide

whether to leave behind worldly concerns, like money, and devote himself to the glory of God. Matthew’s head is down however, unaware in his mask-like shadow, busy counting the coins on the table before him, distracted by the demands of the world despite the wonder that is in front of him. It is that looking away, that ignorance that invests the picture with its tension. Everyone is excited by the sudden appearance of Christ except Matthew himself. He has yet to witness that momentous ray of light. None of the others can make him, however. The responsibility to see is Matthew’s alone. I am rapt. When the light abruptly clicks off, however, I can’t help but laugh along with my brothers.

We visit the Vatican. I stand before Bernini’s sculpture, Ecstasy of Teresa. It depicts the seventeenth century nun and saint lasciviously pierced by an arrow-wielding angel, her face in orgasmic rapture as she is penetrated by the iron hot love of Christ. It is one of the most incredible works of art I have ever seen. Hard stone transformed into yielding flesh. It is voluptuous and erotic and theatrical. A masterpiece. A triumph of show biz.

“She’s having fun,” Peter whispers.

“That’s inappropriate,” Eddie, the oldest of us, scolds with well-practiced indignation. “I’m going to hell,” Peter says.

There is nothing to prepare me for the experience of seeing it or the rest of the Vatican

first-hand. It is opulent beyond my wildest expectation. What it has to do with the Jesus I’ve been taught about is hard for me to figure out. By now none of us are practicing Catholics except my parents. Even Peter, who had chosen to attend Catholic high school where he went out for basketball at five eight but wound up running cross country, takes it all with a respectful grain of salt. He’s a good boy, but he’s no saint either. We are laughing. We are having a good time banging around Rome, looking cool in our sunglasses and tight t-shirts. I’ve brought the SLR camera I saved up for in high school by working that summer at a dry cleaner on Neck Road in Gravesend, a low-end Canon that I accessorized with some mail order zoom lenses from the back of a magazine. In one picture, we mug on a street corner, like any other gang of ragazzi in the eternal city, though unmistakably American in sneakers and acid washed jeans, in buzz cuts and Wayfarers. Michael however has been unusually silent since we crossed the threshold of the basilica.

“Why does anybody need all this?” he asks me, recoiling from the soaring splendor on display. “Even God?”

Vincent and Michael have told me about the weekly ACTUP meetings each Monday night at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center just around the block from the hospital. Mondays because that’s the traditional “gay day off”. Hairdressers, theaters, museums and art galleries were all closed on Mondays, back then at least.

There is a vital resistance forming against the disease and against government inaction. I’ve seen the clever posters that have begun to pop up around town especially. In New York friends of theirs interrupt Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. They scream about how the church wants to limit access to condoms and information about safe sex. They march and protest in the streets, in the offices of health insurance companies and government agencies and are jeered at, spit on, beaten and arrested - or worse, ignored. The simple compassion that we have been told Jesus practiced without condition has instead to be demanded, and what sense can that possibly make in the midst of all this?

It’s rare that I’ve ever seen Michael confused like this. Usually he is so certain, so confident. Even in the hospital he’s always been decisive and optimistic, candid with his doctors and insistent that they be the same. Besides he has always loved excess and flamboyance, hasn’t he? Worse, it puts Michael on the other side of yet another boundary. Anxiety, doubt, shame, rage, depression, isolation; as long as we are human there will never be a vaccine against those. AIDS is more than a disease of the body. It is more than blood borne. It is transmitted through statues in churches in foreign countries. It is a disease of the spirit. It is a disease of belief. It afflicts the future.

“Matt,” he says, “This is just not right.”

Halfway across the world I realize how totally lost we all are. How little I recog-

nize. I can’t explain why there is so much sadness in love, why there is peril in beauty. I can’t explain why the world is fucked up and cruel, why so many parts don’t fit, why there is so little salvation even in the eyes of God. Michael is alive and relatively well, but he is irrevocably changed. That is clearer now in Saint Peter’s Basilica than it ever was in Saint Vincent’s Hospital. He hasn’t just been infected, he’s been betrayed. Perhaps Saint Peter’s was built to glorify God, but it all comes crashing down right on Michael’s head, an object lesson from one of the most fantastic objects in the world. As I look upon my brother I see that whatever mathematics I imagined in our faces is an illusion. Art is just a distraction from the stony darkness of being nobody at all, and life is just the struggle to earn a coin and believe the bright lie for just a moment.

Transient Light

We were foreigners to each other and foreigners to the place, and we all loved being there as if it were the key to deep and luminous mysteries. Day in, day out by the sea, mystics and poets dreaming, painters drunk with every thing they saw. That jewel of a village, which one had to go over a mountain to get to, cast such an enchantment on visitors that their only wish was to stay. Timeless refuge, awash in Mediterranean light, we touched multiple histories there and yet it seemed a place to start anew. Or at least to step outside of where we had been.

I came to spend the autumn and winter in that village. It was a sort of experiment: I was twenty-three and had never lived abroad, only visited as a tourist the year before. I brought my trusted, lightweight Olivetti Lettera 32, and soon was writing a novel about a man who doesn’t sleep, set in a similar landscape by the sea. An older American couple I knew, retired from the Foreign Service, introduced me to other people and so it went as I met residents from all over western Europe, a smattering of Americans, and an Argentine couple who became my closest friends. My artistic retreat could have easily slipped into a social scene, but mostly I was studious and avoided drama. Though I found my way to a few parties around the holidays, it was enough to remind me that the foreign population in the off season had a fairly limited circuit. At any rate, I was glad to spend some time away, and to meet people I would not otherwise encounter. I had no idea where all that might lead or how to appreciate it, just that I was starting to understand the importance of learning to be a stranger.

For Europeans maybe such lessons were no big deal—a jaunt down the road, a commerce of tongues, all in the normal course of things where countries are smaller and closer together. Even the Spanish speakers were outsiders, there in Catalan lands. For all our various desires to depart from our native territories, I knew precious little of what anyone left behind. Origin stories felt hardly pertinent to our discussions, except as an occasional reflection on current matters. If one person or another had made an actual break and fled from their past, I was not aware. Besides, most of the foreigners were older than me, at least in their thirties and well beyond, with children and not. The few people I knew my own age, also Americans, were like me on an extended stay before whatever came next. In a sense, we were neither here nor there, not much invested in the life of the place, unlike the permanent guests with their small businesses or retirement homes.

That village, then, was more a waystation for me, and (though I could not know it at the time) the site of many subsequent returns. Always catching the same bus over the mountain, I did not ever fail to marvel at the first sight, after yet another switchback in the descending road, of the gleaming facets of whitewashed houses before the wide embrace of the sea. The international community that came and went there—some to make their long last stand or to withdraw into an exquisite distance—found it to be one of those rare places where we might hope to shed, if only in the transient light, the cold defining contours of our origins. While the spell endured, all seemed right with the world, almost right.

The Beginning

This was getting old. Very old. Another gaggle of American students from a third-tier college that Halsey Leighton never heard of on their semester abroad that he had to take to the Forum, Colosseum, the Trevi fountain, and the Greco-Roman marbles at the Palazzo Massimo. The bros in their NFL jerseys who thought the Colosseum cool and The Gladiator the best movie ever, Fast and Furious, a close second. There was without fail the jock who told a harelip joke about Joaquin Phoenix, the coed cheerleader peppy and blond, who stood with her back to the Trevi fountain and threw a coin she borrowed from a friend into the water, and the smirking guy who waved over blushing coeds to circle the sleeping hermaphrodite at the Palazzo Massimo. One or two showed an interest in art and actually carried notebooks and pens to take down what Leighton said. The others shuffled their feet and listlessly looked at the treasures of the world, anxious to check their Instagram feeds as soon as he stopped talking. His words didn’t even make it to deaf ears but died at the tips of their scuffed Nikes. Halsey Leighton was tired of listening to himself mouth the same stale anecdotes about emperors and artists, pausing at the same places for dramatic effect and the tepid laughter of his wearied audience. What could he expect of them? They brought so little to what they looked at that they saw nothing. They were in Rome for a semester to get drunk on cheap wine and get laid.

Leighton figured that even on a tight budget the money he inherited at his father’s death would run out in a year. He was disappoint-

ed though not surprised when he heard two days before that the press at Berkeley, where he did his graduate work, passed on his book proposal. If he counted all the hours of research and writing, whatever money he might make would be less than what an acne-cheeked teenager made per hour at McDonald’s. Back in the States all he could look forward to was being an adjunct professor in art history at a second-rate college or cobbling together several jobs teaching English to barely literate immigrants at community colleges.

Leighton was thirty-seven. He had beaten Jesus by five years. One day on Golgotha and it was over for the son of God. For Leighton, the world kept pounding in the nails. He didn’t need a bottle of wine or even a glass or two to know the truth: he was and had always been a perennial “B.” More than a plodder, but less than a groundbreaker, he compared and contrasted his way through Brown, graduate school at Berkeley, and a job at Emory, culling out a convergence or theme that bordered on but never broke through the barrier to true originality. He published a few articles from his dissertation on the Cosmati, four generations of medieval Italian mosaic craftsmen, but they hadn’t made any waves in the field. He wasn’t successful enough at the academic game to be a “has been” or even a “might have

been.” Perhaps if his wife hadn’t left him after three years in Atlanta for her personal trainer, he would have stayed focused and made tenure.

He left his dingy Trastevere studio with its dim light, lumpy mattress, and toilet that flushed with an explosive roar to meet his young hostages at the Palazzo Massimo on an unusually sweltering mid-September afternoon. Leighton almost lost it. He was one of those guys from Pakistan or Bangladesh who crowded the bridges, blocked your way at the Trevi fountain, thronged the roads in front of the Colosseum, and crowded the Piazza Navona and Piazza Popolo hawking selfie sticks, luminescent blobs they threw down on the cobblestones, and glowing plastic missiles they shot into the night sky. The guy invaded his space. He told him to fuck off and was a hair’s breadth away from slugging him. Leighton knew he shouldn’t have lost his temper. The guy’s family probably paid thousands of dollars to smuggle him into Italy, and he was paying off their debt one selfie stick at a time.

His sullen charges were wilting, ready for a shower and an Aperol Spritz. Leighton planned to shepherd them quickly through the ground floor, figuring the Discobolus upstairs might be as far as their energy and flagging interest would take them. On the way he led his bedrag-

gled flock to the room with the Hellenistic Prince and the Boxer at Rest, two monumental bronzes that usually captured students’ attention for a minute or two. He preferred the larger-than-life Prince with his unscarred body and self-assured pose. Leighton agreed with the scholars who thought him a victorious general in repose modeled on Hercules after his labors. Of course, he admired the artistry of the Boxer, the way the unknown Greek sculptor used colored inlays for blood and bruises, but he didn’t find this battered and defeated figure beautiful. Great art should be a respite from the ugliness of the world. It should draw us upward into the luminous light of heaven away from the shabby reality of the world, away from the hawkers of selfie sticks and cheap, useless crap defiling the ancient stones.

There was only one other visitor in the room when Leighton and the students entered. He was an older gray-haired man sitting on the bench against the wall staring at the Boxer. Leighton sensed that he had been there awhile and was in no hurry to get up. He was waiting patiently for the students to move on and stop blocking his view. Leighton spoke in a practiced hush about the two statues, pointing out the wall text and the picture of the Boxer taken when he was discovered: a Roman Rip Van Winkle who

awoke to find the world that he knew lost forever.

The students circled the two bronzes, snapping photos on their smartphones. One student raised her cell phone to take a selfie in front of the naked Prince. Leighton shook his finger, and visibly peeved she put down her phone. He couldn’t stop selfies at the Colosseum or the Trevi fountain. That would have sparked a revolt and a complaint to the program head. But he had a rule: no selfies in churches or museums. The students understood churches were sacred spaces but a few grumbled that they couldn’t take a selfie leering at the sleeping hermaphrodite in the Palazzo Massimo or standing in front of Constantine astride his horse in the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Take a picture if you want, Leighton said, but really look, let the art speak to you. Don’t let your phones get in the way of what it might say to you. Blank stares and an unspoken chorus, “What an asshole.”

Leighton gave his usual spiel. He suddenly felt very tired. He needed a break from the students and himself. Leighton sent the group off on its own. He would meet them at the Discobolus in fifteen minutes. He sat down on the bench, leaving a respectful space between himself and the man still looking at the Boxer.

“Your favorite too?” the man asked.

“Not really, The Prince is more my taste.”

“He makes you pay attention, don’t you think? The way his head is turned. I think if he was looking straight at us, it might not be so powerful. So moving, at least to me.”

“What’s he looking at, you think?” Leighton asked more to be polite than curious.

“His next opponent. He hasn’t had time to savor his victory. It was a long, hard bout. He’s breathing through his mouth. He’s barely had time to catch his breath and wipe the blood from his face, and here comes a fresh opponent.” The man points to the statue’s right thigh. “He turned quickly to look at him and drops of blood splattered his thigh.”

“Maybe he lost. He’s looking at the victor being crowned with the laurel wreath that he trained so hard for.”

“I guess I’m an optimist. All his pain wasn’t for nothing. One glorious punch at Olympia and his life will be changed forever.”

“It’s nice to think so.” Leighton sat quietly for a few moments. “Sorry to bother you.”

“No bother. He’s not going anywhere.”

The man got up. “Keep up the good fight.” He raised his fist.

“It’s a battle,” a weary tone to Leighton’s voice.

Leighton sat alone on the bench looking at the Boxer. If only he could be saved simply by looking. Everything was a mirror if you looked long enough, and he didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like what he was doing and didn’t like himself for not liking it. He was sure most of the students thought he was an asshole. They were probably right. People who weren’t assholes didn’t think about cold cocking a poor South Asian. He was angry at himself for being so angry. A simmering anger that was turning him into someone stern, judgmental, and quick to curse under his breath the slow walking, loudly talking, aesthetically clueless, flabby tourists who wore shorts and ate at red sauce restaurants in Trastevere and thought they were getting a gourmet meal. He was becoming someone he didn’t want to be around. Maybe he could change. He didn’t have to be saint. He just had to stop being an asshole. That was a beginning. Leighton rose slowly, and nodding toward the Boxer, raised a fist in encouragement for himself and the battered fighter.

Albion College. Where the hell was that? Somewhere in Michigan, Siri told him. Well-scrubbed, fresh-faced in their purple and gold t-shirts. “Let there be light”, the school motto printed beneath

the school crest, pulsed over their callow

Midwestern hearts. Leighton didn’t think he could provide any light that would pierce their provincial darkness. He had enough. It was time to raise his finger in defeat like an ancient boxer, wave the white flag, and slink back to the States. Anything would be better than staring into another dozen blank faces.

It was his first time back to Palazzo Massimo since he met the old man by the Boxer the week before. He almost expected to see the man sitting there communing with the statue. He hoped he was there. He would welcome continuing their conversation. But he wasn’t, only two gray-haired British women speaking in hushed tones before moving on.

Sunday afternoons in middle school when his father was on the golf course, Halsey and his mother, Georgette, drove to the Art Institute from their home in Glencoe. (How glad he was she died before the divorce and his meltdown at Emory.) Their first stop was always Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. “Sunday in the park with George, Georgette, and Halsey,” she would say. They would make up fanciful tales about the figures in the painting. The lady with the monkey wanted to join a traveling circus but her stiff-backed father with his cane and cigar said it was out of the question for a young woman of her breeding. She asked

him to please buy her a lemon ice, and when he was away, she convinced the gruff fellow in his singlet lounging on the grass smoking his long pipe to take her away on his barge. Leighton thought her huge bustle was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He was convinced she was hiding a dwarf under it. His mother would pretend to fan herself, saying how hot it was in the park. Time to wander she said, and off they would go with no fixed plan. She had her favorites but let Halsey lead the way. They passed quickly by the dour couple of Grant Wood’s American Gothic¬ — “weaned on a pickle” his mother said. He felt he was standing on the bridge at Giverny on a cool afternoon watching with Monet the play of light on the water below. He walked up as close to Water Lillies as the guard would allow, then walked backwards fascinated by how daubs of color up close took form and shape at a distance. His family were holiday Christians, but there was something in Zurbarán’s The Crucifixion that drew Halsey back each visit. Christ looked more alive in death than in all the saccharine depictions of miracles and blessings.

There was no one work of art, no one moment that he could remember that set him on his path. He simply wanted to live among all this beauty. To sustain forever that feeling of youthful awe. Now it was

gone. He had stopped looking. There were no more getting lost in a work. No more standing before a painting or sculpture and losing track of time. The study of art was no longer a passion, it was a job. It was all categories and movements and periods.

He lived for a week under the gaze of that battered and bloodied face. It was the image staring at him when he wiped a clear circle on the steamed mirror in the morning and began to shave his stubbled cheeks. It was the last image he saw before he fell asleep. The face that rasped the words from between scarred lips drawn inward where his teeth had been, “I suffered the blows alone.” A pause, then with anguished emphasis, “Alone.” He stared at Leighton. He exhaled long and slow, “Only you can save yourself.”

Halsey circled the Boxer, the young unscarred Albionites herded around him, smartphones at the ready. He stopped and looked directly at his bloodied face. He opened his mouth to begin his usual spiel. He stopped, pressed his lips together, turned and walked to the bench. He sat silently looking at the statue. The students stood in awkward silence, then one by one moved around the statue. Some bent over to get a closer look, some crouched to examine his legs and look up at his face. They snapped pictures but didn’t speak. A stumpy coed with

frizzy brown hair turned toward Leighton, ready it seemed to ask a question. “Look” he mouthed silently. He didn’t get up from the bench. The students trickled out of the gallery one by one and in pairs. Leighton stared at the Boxer.

Leighton remembered reading once — it must have been an old National Geographic in the dentist’s office — of a caste in India whose occupation was whipping themselves on the back. He was Glencoe born and bred. He wasn’t an Indian, he had never been to India, he wasn’t born to whip himself all his life, to wallow in the blood of self-pity.

One of the students walked back into the room. He stood gazing at the Boxer. A clean cut, thick necked, muscled boy, who Leighton couldn’t remember saying anything over the last three days. “Dr. Leighton, this is the best.”

Doctor, heal thyself. Hell was where you could never change. It was time to try. “Yes, it is. Tell me what you like about it.” He and the young man stood side by side looking at the statue and talking, then they walked out together to join the others.

Francesca A.d. 1554

The Introduction.

Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, newly arrived at his majority, has just now proposed an affair to the la-dy Francesca. In all Ferrara, nothing can match her beauty, he has argued eloquently, except his own wealth, which he has offered to Francesca in profusion. After a pause, and some thought, the renowned lady answers him as follows.

The Conversation.

My dearest Alfonso. Since you are, as you like to remind me, a master of mathematics, and espe-cially geometry, let me speak to you in terms you can understand.

As far as my shadow extends upon the ground, let that be the radius of a circle.

I bid you, do not enter that circle on pain of—death, I would say. Or at least the end of something. Perhaps friendship. Come not further than the rim of propriety, and we can enjoy a “commerce” that will profit both of us and all Italia. Then perhaps— given time—it can grow to a heap of treas-ure known as love.

[Here, insert a paragraph break.]

Say nothing.

From your eye, now, take a tangent to the top of the arc thus provided by Earth.

(It is the line of sight.) Extend this line unto infinity, and it can reach the stars.

Tonight, when darkness is all about you, look forth and you may see them:

diamonds scattered on velvet—handful by handful—for the perusal of a lady. This then is the emblem of love. Lofty. Noble. Beautiful.

“And cold.”

And perhaps cold.

Nevertheless.

In this, Your Grace, I pray, be ruled by me.

Apprezzamento dei capolavori letterari cinesi

Amore

Scrittrici: Zhang Ai Ling

(Questo brano breve e conciso esprime magnificamente quanto fosse implicito l’aore tra uomini e donne nella Cina del primo Novecento.)

Questo è vero.

C’era una ragazza di una famiglia borghese del villaggio che era così bella che molte persone vennero a proporle di sposarsi, ma senza successo. Quell’anno la donna aveva solo quindici o sedici anni, credo, ed era una sera di primavera quando si trovava davanti a casa sua, con la mano su un pesco, vestita di bianco luna. Il giovane che abitava dall’altra parte della strada, che lei aveva visto ma non aveva mai salutato, le si avvicinò, rimase immobile e sussurrò: “Oh, anche tu sei qui?”. Lei non disse nulla, lui non disse altro e dopo essere rimasti in piedi per un po’, ognuno si allontanò.

E questo è quanto.

Più tardi la donna è stata rapita e venduta dai parenti ad altre contee come concubina e rivenduta più volte. Dopo innumerevoli tempeste, questa donna, nonostante l’età avanzata, ricorda ancora spesso quella notte di primavera, sotto il pesco di fronte a casa sua, quel giovane uomo.

Quando incontri la persona che incontri tra migliaia di persone, da migliaia di anni, nell’infinita landa desolata del tempo, né prima né troppo tardi, quando ti capita di incontrare, non puoi dire niente, puoi solo chiedere a bassa : “Ah, ci sei anche tu?

l’asino va nella valle delle fate

LinCan Zhu

l’asino:Metafora cinese, una metafora per i viaggiatori.

Xu Xiake: Il viaggiatore più famoso dell’antica Cina

Fonte di fiori di pesco: Un nome proprioIl, simbolo della fuga dal mondo nell’antica letteratura cinese

La Valle delle Fate dove arrivò l’asino, nascosto nel profondo delle Dolomiti.

La montagna si trova nella parte alta del territorio italiano e fa parte delle Alpi europee. Le montagne sono maestose e le viste sulle montagne sono le più belle d’Europa, senza pari!

L’inverno qui è una stazione sciistica fatta di polvere di giada,La primavera e l’estate sono un paradiso verde per gli escursionisti,L’autunno èun quadro colorato!

Se venite in Val di Funes, nascosta nel profondo di queste montagne, non invidierete nemmeno il paradiso se vedete uno scenario montano così spettacolare e il paesaggio della valle bello come una fata.

Quell’anno, l’autore venne e ebbe la fortuna di vederlo. Ecco, alla fine del cielo, c’è una fila di montagne che si ergono come uno sposo, alto e diritto, bello e maestoso. Coccole accanto allo sposo, ci sono nuvole bianche come la sposa, gentili e postura aggraziata. La valle è verde e aperta, e la strada è come la punta della lingua, che lambisce dritta le nuvole bianche. Nella verde vallata, le alture dei casali sono sparse in alto e in basso, il campanile della chiesa punta direttamente verso il cielo azzurro, i verdi pendii infiniti sono lisci come la seta, ondeggiano come onde, e i fiori gialli nell’erba brillano come stelle . Atmosfera incantevole e tranquilla. Come le illustrazioni in un libro di fiabe.

Le montagne viste in lontananza sono alte e dritte come uno sposo, cioè le Dolomiti, che sono maestose, le sue cime che hanno la forma di una fila di cime seghettate sono così maestose, come un dio della montagna che si erge alto, che è indimenticabile a prima vista,più guardi, più ami.

Che affascinante valle delle fate, tutto è così tranquillo, tutto è così fresco. In esso, le persone vogliono solo sdraiarsi sull’erba verde, rotolarsi a piacimento, guardare le nuvole viola che si alzano al mattino e guardare il cielo pieno di stelle di notte.

Se hai l’opportunità di venire in questa Val di Funes e vedere montagne così belle e valli mitiche, temo che non invidierai mai più il paradiso, sarai solo disposto a vivere qui per molto tempo.

StrawbabiesScott&TrangCrider

In Nemi, even the babies are made of strawberries.

Let us back up. If you flew a drone nineteen miles south from Rome, arching slightly westward, you would see a small volcanic crater lake: Lago Nemi. The town of Nemi itself rests atop the edge of its crater, more isolated than Castel Gandolfo, the most famous of the Castelli Romani.

Like each castello, Nemi has an annual sagra, a day or weekend devoted to a sacred festival in honor of the town’s one most treasured good. Marino’s sagra celebrates wine and the grape it comes from; Castel Gandolfo, the peach. For Americans, think 4-H in Italian.

Nemi celebrates the strawberry during its sagra della fragolla, a weekend-long festival for the small, potent strawberries that grow out of the mineral rich soil within the crater, the berry of strawberry more visible when smaller. An American strawberry is a fat-ass, industrial product of little red and less taste; a Nemi strawberry is a petite, organic creation of deep scarlet and deeper savor. Nemians make everything out of it—the tarts and liquors are favorites—but, during the festival, the streets are lined with box upon box of the un-transformed strawberries themselves: the whole town is perfumed with their scent.

And, during the sagra’s parade, all of the babies are dressed up in red as . . . strawberries, including little green caps with stems. Of course, the babies are made up like strawberries, but they are also made out of strawberries, since they are conceived and borne by their fathers and mothers, who have surely eaten more strawberries than the average earthling. The volcanic ash enriches the soil from which the strawberry is born just as the strawberry nourishes the parents from whom the baby is. The sagre of the Castelli Romani celebrate such circuits of fecundity.

In Nemi, even the babies are made of strawberries.

When in Rome

No pease porridge for me if you please neither hot nor cold especially not if what’s in the pot is nine days old

for when in Parma Palermo or Pisa

(no pottage slop)

I prefer to pour a potent potable

(pink plonk)

and partake of a piece of pepperoni pizza with pancetta pomodoro peperoncini

porcini plus a peck of pecorino on the top even a piccante prosciutto panini or pass me a plate of penne puttanesca or possibly a platter of pinoli pesto pasta with parmesan

and I’m pleased to wine and dine al fresco

Translation:

Translators enjoy jokes about their profession. How does a freelance translator define ‘weekend’? Two working days till Monday. Or this one: I’m a translator and yes, I do like meeting people. I’ve even been to a party. Once.

There’s truth in both of these, and of course also exaggeration, but more than anything I would say that translators are a misunderstood lot. In the eyes of some people, what we do seems a sort of magic, while for others it’s hard to fathom why we take so long to craft a translation.

Let’s start with the magic. Which is not really magic at all.

It’s a matter of taking a text, let’s say a novel, in one language and turning it into the same plot and characters evoking similar emotions and mental images with similar significance but in a different language. This is what we aim for in literature; in technical translation the aim is to convey the information in the most precise and accessible form possible. A translator doesn’t just take the words on the page and convert them into equivalent words in another language. That’s what Google translate does, and it may work for the brief email you need to send to a business owner in Nepal but online translation platforms—for now—aren’t able to perceive how one text is read, understood and reacted to in the original language and then choose combinations of words in another language that will most likely recreate that experience for a reader who approaches the text from a different cultural perspective and context. Culture and context are key for successful translation, and artificial intelligence struggles with such nuanced and highly variable elements.

Now, that doesn’t mean that AI is the devil when it comes to translating a piece of literature or other text. Machine translation can help a human translator by proposing solutions that they might not have considered, both in terms of word choice and syntax. Machine translation is also frequently combined with human post-editing: the computer generates an initial translation which the translator then adjusts and corrects to produce a fluent and effective final version. However, when it comes to

the challenges, frustrations & what I love Lori Hetherington

interpreting the intended message of a text and recreating something that is as close as possible to it in another language and culture, a skilled human translator is what you want. Especially one who intimately understands the culture and context of both the source and target languages.

Something I’ve discovered few people know is that translators generally work toward their mother tongue. So, for example, I was born in the US and lived there until I was in my mid 20s; I translate from Italian into English. I rarely work in the opposite direction, even though I’ve been a resident of Italy for more than thirty-five years. If I do, I always work with a mother-tongue Italian translator and/or editor. The reason for this is that a native speaker has greater command of the nuances and syntax of their first language and can most probably turn out a more refined and well-crafted text. Comprehension is passive; writing is active.

There are examples of authors and translators writing in a language different from their own—consider Jhumpa Lahiri. She has received acclaim for books she’s written in her most recently adopted language (Italian) after having won a Pulitzer Prize for her short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies. She’s even self-translated one of her Italian books into English, although Lahiri’s books written in English and translated into Italian are the work of others. It’s important to point out that this sort of linguistic fluidity is unusual, although there are many translators who work from a variety of languages toward their native tongue. For example, a friend of mine translates into English from Italian, French and Russian: she grew up in Italy and France with a polyglot mother and a Russian grandmother. I asked her once if she works with different languages simultaneously. “Yes, in fact I’m doing that right now: I’m translating one book from Italian in the morning, and another from French in the afternoon.” A translator’s output is what’s important, the source may be more flexible.

There are various paths to becoming a translator but one thing is certain: just because a person knows a language, doesn’t mean they can translate it. I’m a university-educated American but I’m incapable of accurately translating legal contracts or philosophical treatises, and I won’t even try! Some translators approach the profession via formal education with university degrees or certification in translation while others become translators in roundabout ways through other life experiences. In either case, a translator needs to be a keen reader, a creative thinker, and a skilled writer.

Most professional translators have areas of specialization, especially in terms of technical or literary translations. For instance, a translator often deals with topics they’re familiar with and/or literary genres they enjoy reading for pleasure. In my case, my university degree is in physical and environmental geography for which I studied a broad range of scientific subjects: I often translate scientific texts or edit scientific articles written in English by non-native speakers. Meanwhile, some translators learn about a topic through the translations they work on. For example, a colleague once

told me she had translated instruction manuals for household appliances and as a result knew quite a lot about troubleshooting for washing machines. When a repairman came to fix her washer she told him straight away and in technical terms what she believed the problem was. Much to the technician’s surprise, she was spot on.

Thanks to the internet, a translator can find information about almost any item or fragment of history, or go almost anywhere with street view. Before the 1990s, translation was much more laborious and required a collection of bilingual dictionaries that each weighed the equivalent of three bricks and took up an exaggerated amount of space on a bookshelf and, once opened, on a desk. Fortunately, finding accurate information or images is much easier now, although I hate to think what conclusions someone might draw if they investigated the chronology on my pc. It’s not unusual for me to search for information about poisons (while translating a historical novel set during the time of the Borgias), cyber security and handguns (for a contemporary romantic suspense novel), the correct spelling of a contagious disease (for a research article), and fascism (for a historical mystery set in the 1930s).

Which brings me to why a translation of what might appear to be a brief text can occasionally take a very long time. In fact, one of the things a potential client can say if they want to really rub a translator the wrong way is, “Sono poche pagine. Cosa vuoi che sia?” In other words, just a few pages… it’s really nothing much. These words also contain subtext: “I expect to have the completed translation in hand quickly and to pay very little.”

What may appear to be a few written pages can require hours of research to find the precise terminology or to verify that you, the translator, understand what you’re writing about. A translation by a clueless translator is just as useless as one done by a person who doesn’t have the necessary linguistic skills. Another stick in the wheel (to translate literally from an Italian expression) can be that the style of the original may clash with stylistic guidelines in the target language. Consider the value placed in many fields on writing concisely and contrast it with the apparent love of wordiness in certain spheres of Italian culture. Sometimes the translator has to work their way through convoluted sentences and paragraphs before even starting the translation. It’s something like clearing a plot of land overgrown with nasty brambles before furrowing the soil and planting a vegetable garden.

And what about that vision of the lonely translator, hunched over their keyboard, piles of books and papers scattered on the desk alongside a plate with a dry, half-eaten sandwich? It’s accurate only some of the time. There are endless translators’ networks and close ties between colleagues: if you’re stuck, there’s virtually always someone else who’s resolved a similar problem and most likely they’re willing to help.

Unfortunately, though, the support of colleagues can’t change a tight deadline: a translator’s nightmare and one that many professionals are haunted by on a daily

basis. Since what’s involved in translation is often misunderstood, people who commission translations sometimes neglect to plan adequately in order to allow enough time for the translator to do their best work. Translators are humans too, and we need weekends to relax with friends and family and sometimes evenings to binge watch a series on Netflix.

There was a meme going around a couple of years ago. It showed six individuals standing on a beach, each in a swimsuit with the caption, ‘tan lines from typical summer activities.’ The tennis player had a tan line on her upper thighs and upper arms. The rollerblader had easily recognizable tan lines from knee and elbow protection. The translator was white all over, without a tan line in sight.

To understand the meme, take a moment to really ponder all the places words translated from another language can be found and reflect on the fact that someone directly (or indirectly in the case of machine translation with human post-editing) shaped them. News bureaus, product packaging, international insurance companies, airline safety guidelines, intelligence services, sports federations, the entertainment industry, car makers, marketing agencies, refugee and migrant support organizations, research entities, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, international courts and legal services, producers of electronics, publishing houses, and any website that is available in more than one language. This list could go on and on. By looking at translators and our work from this perspective, it’s possible to see how critical our role is in the current global context. We are the invisible players who bridge the gaps.

One of the aspects I love about my profession is that there is no right or wrong way to translate a text. One version may be deemed more efficient or more reflective of the style of the original, but what I write in the target language is the result of my interpretation, of my understanding of the intended audience, and of the moment in time in which I sit down to work. I’m on cloud nine when my fingers tingle as they hover over the keyboard and the words begin to sing, but there are also days when my gut tells me that I’m missing the mark. And that can be remedied by thorough revision. What I really love, though, is knowing that what I turn out will touch someone else in some way, perhaps evoking emotions or simplifying some aspect of their life, that through the words I write I’m bringing people closer together.

A translation is elastic and dynamic and can always change and still be right, and that’s why there are often multiple translations of classic works of literature. And also why publishers, authors, and businesses frequently ask a translator to provide a sample before awarding a contract. It’s important to find the right fit, like a pair of gloves. When you put them on, your hands look different on the outside but on the inside nothing’s changed.

Author Bios

Fiction

Peter Frederick Matthews Writing is Not Like Living

Peter Frederick Matthews lives in Berlin. His work has appeared in the TLS, European Review of Books and Berlin Quarterly, among other publications. Twitter: @P_F_Matthews

Moriah Erickson

Ed and Me

Moriah Erickson is a respiratory therapist who has published three volumes of poetry to date: NightBoat (NFSPS, 2010) Three Crows Laughing (Slipstream, 2011) and In The Mouth of the Wolf (Aldrich, 2015). She lives in Central Maine with her spouse, three children, and 4 dogs. She was raised by an Italian family in a suburb of Chicago.

Matthew Aquilone Basilica

Matthew Aquilone studied painting at Vassar College, and writing at the Masters Creative Writing Program at NYU. He has been a resident at the Cummington Community of the Arts, The Woodstock Guild/Byrdcliffe Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the

Norman Mailer Center. He was a founding member of Emergency Arts, named best Art Collective by the Village Voice in 2008. His fiction, drama and poetry have been seen in Christopher Street Magazine, Theater for The New City, The Rumpus, The Nervous breakdown and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York where he was born and raised.

Jeffrey Hantover The Beginning

Jeffrey Hantover is a writer living in New York who has been coming to Italy annually since 2013. His novel, The Three Deaths of Giovanni Fumiani, will be published by Cuidono Press in May 2023. Every time I go to Rome I go to the Palazzo Massimo to see The Boxer which is the inspiration for my story.

Michael Edwards

Francesca A.D. 1554

Michael Edwards teaches English at Santa Fe College, in Florida. His most recent publication is a story titled “The Mountain Pathway,” in The Dillydoun Review. Interestingly, Edwards has been told by various seers that, in a past life, he served as an officer in the Roman legions, and that he was stationed in Britannia. Perhaps that is why, whenever he gets a chance, he reminds his friends

(perhaps too much) what a great land Italy is and always has been, throughout history. The story “Francesca: A. D. 1554” is a glance back at one moment in Italian history.

Poetry

Gabriele Greco

L’Attesa

Gabriele Greco nasce nel 1978 a Fucecchio (Firenze). Dopo il diploma di maturità classica al Liceo Ginnasio Statale

Virgilio di Empoli, pubblica le sue prime due raccolte di poesie: Lieve, stelle in processione (Titivillus, 1998) e Petali notturni (Titivillus, 1999). Frequenta la Facoltà di Lettere presso l’Università degli Studi di Firenze, laureandosi in Teoria e Critica della Letteratura con una tesi sul poeta e pittore francese Henri Michaux. Dal 2015 vive in Svezia, a Örnsköldsvik, dove insegna italiano, francese, spagnolo e arti visive in un liceo. Nel 2020 pubblica quattro sue poesie inedite in Affluenti. Nuova poesia fiorentina. Vol. 2 (Ensemble) e nel 2022 esce la sua ultima raccolta di poesie Bruciaglie (peQuod). Nel giugno 2022 ad Ancona, partecipa a La punta della lingua, Festival Internazionale Poesia (17° edizione). Nel settembre 2022 è finalista con la poesia inedita Cardeto al Concorso “Se vuoi la pace prepara la pace” indetto dall’Università per la Pace, dalla Regione Marche e dal Museo Tattile

Statale Omero di Ancona e a Spoleto riceve il Premio Internazionale Menotti Art Festival per la Letteratura 2022. Nel dicembre 2022 una sua poesia inedita, Labirinti perpetui, è selezionata e pubblicata nell’Agenda poetica 2023 (Ensemble)

Stephen Kieninger Two Cold Bare Feet

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Stephen Kieninger moved to Sardinia in 2015. Before moving to Italy, he was the editor of a single-issue poetry/ arts ‘zine, “Cocktail Napkin Thoughts,” was a staff writer for the Palo Alto Daily Post, and has been slowly compiling work for a book of poetry. He also could have been (and occasionally can still be) found on the airwaves at KFJC in the SF Bay playing blues, noise, and the spoken word. He currently lives and writes in Cagliari with his wife, daughter, and cats.

Gerry Stewart Stinging the Frog

Gerry Stewart is a poet, creative writing tutor and editor based in Finland. Her poetry collection Post-Holiday Blues was published by Flambard Press, UK. Her poetry appeared as part of the iamb poetry project in 2022. Gerry has studied Italian and enjoys visiting the country. Her writing blog can be found at http://thistlewren.blogspot.fi/ and @ grimalkingerry on Twitter.

Zhu LinCan

Amore, L’Asino va nella valle delle fate

Ha vinto primi premi e premi internazionali in diversi concorsi letterari. Attualmente è un editore speciale di China Prose Network.

Martin H. Samuel When in

Rome

Martin H. Samuel, born in Kenya, is an author, poet, lyricist and award-winning songwriter who co-wrote the songs ‘Tightrope To The Moon’ and ‘Man On A Ledge’ with Alex Henning in Milan, Italy. ‘Tightrope To The Moon’ is Winner of the Spring 2021 Best Pop Song World

Songwriting Awards Contest : https:// henning-landsgard-samuel.bandcamp. com/track/tightrope-to-the-moon ‘Man

On A Ledge’ is Winner of the Fall 2021 Best Alternative Song World Songwriting Awards Contest : https://henning-landsgard-samuel.bandcamp.com/ track/man-on-a-ledge

Essay & Memoir

Daniel Barbiero

Giorgio de Chirico’s Roman

Villa: The God’s Never went away

Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, mu-

sic, and literature of the 20th century, with a particular focus on the Italian avant-gardes, as well as on contemporary work. Through his writings on music he has sought to bring contemporary Italian artists to the attention of American audiences; among his core musical projects are long-standing collaborations with Italian composers and performers. He is a regular contributor to the web journals Arteidolia, Avant Music News, and Perfect Sound Forever, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without, which was published by Arteidolia Press in 2021.

Jason Weiss Transient Light

Jason Weiss was born and raised at the (New) Jersey shore and schooled in Berkeley; he spent a decade in Paris, and has lived in Brooklyn for the past 30 years, working as a writer, editor, and translator. His first book was Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers (1991), followed by four other books on literature and music, published mostly by university presses. More recent books include: Cloud Therapy (2015), short texts on swimming, and Silvina Ocampo (2015), his translation of the Argentine writer’s selected poems. Multiple connections to Italy, lifelong, though intermittent; my last visit was decades ago. A couple of my books were translated there, I have a few friends--including a woman in Pug-

lia, originally from Japan, whom my wife and I haven’t seen since 1987 when our friend was the middle link of five in the small chain of people through whom we met. https://www.itinerariesofahummingbird.com/

Scott and Trang Crider Strawbabies

A teacher and a librarian at the University of Dallas, Scott and Trang Crider work off and on in the university’s Rome Program in Marino, Italy, where they explore the Castelli Romani and write about what they see. They are now completing a book about the area.

Lori Hetherington

Translation: The challenges, frustrations and what I love

Lori Hetherington has been weaving words as an Italian-English translator, linguistic consultant, proofreader, ghostwriter, and editor since 1992. As a translator, she’s drawn to diverse genres and enjoys projects that pluck at her heartstrings. Her most recent book is Tuscan Tales a collection of fantastic fables authored by Emma Perodi: a classic work of late 19th-century children’s literature in the vein of The Adventures of Pinocchio. Other books she’s translated or ghostwritten range from literary, historical, and women’s fiction to memoir, cookbooks, and narrative nonfiction.

She’s currently translating a historical mystery set in Italy between the Fascist and post-World War Two years. www.

lhetheringtontranslation.com

Visual Art

Various Artists

Studio 124

See essay and artists bios on page 26.

Staff

Lauren Mouat Editor in Chief

I’m Lauren T. Mouat. I was born in California but since 2010 Italy has been my home, first Rome and more recently on the Tuscan coast in Livorno.

Reading and writing are an essential part of my life. When I write, I think. When I read, I grow. In my time in Italy, I’ve written for numerous publications and I’ve sought to bring writers together in a series of writing groups to share our work and ideas. I’ve also worked for many years as a tour guide and, in discussing Italy’s art and history, I found myself wanting to explore and share more of the contemporary writing and creative endeavours that are growing in and around Italy today.

Open Doors is a way to share enthusiasm and encourage the exchange of ideas that only art can bring to the surface. My aim is to connect writers and artists to reveal another side of Italy, a country that is so much more multifaceted than we are used to seeing in mainstream culture. The world is going through vast changes and I believe that what we create now and the conversations we have today, will decide our future.

Monica Sharp

Poetry & Fiction English Editor

Monica lives and writes in Florence, Italy. Her international spirit travels with an American passport. She moonlights as a legal researcher when not parenting, managing projects, or writing. Her writing has been published in Across the Margin, Mediterranean Poetry, Bosphorus Review of Books, Fevers of the Mind, The Florentine, Rome-ing: Firenze, Adamah, and Synapse. Find out more at sharpmonica.com

Nora Studholme Fiction English Reader

Nora Studholme grew up in the countryside of Virginia and now lives and writes in Florence Italy. Her work has appeared in various literary magazines and can be found at NoraStudholme.com

Norah Leibow Non Fiction English Reader

Norah Leibow grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area—and first met the Med-

iterranean when she was 16 on an exchange trip. She is a running enthusiast, lover of architecture, art and taking long walks around San Francisco where she lives with her husband Adam and two cats. She is the author of the weekly newsletter “Be Soothed.”

Michela Guida Italian Copy Editor

Michela Guida è un’insegnante di lingua italiana a stranieri. Durante la sua esperienza di docente, ha collaborato con diverse istituzioni tra cui università americane, case editrici e piattaforme per l’insegnamento online. Ha lavorato come redattrice per riviste online, e continua questo lavoro come autrice di testi didattici, redattrice di articoli e content editor per siti di apprendimento online.

“Ho la fortuna di insegnare la mia splendida lingua agli studenti stranieri. Questo lavoro mi ha dato tante opportunità di crescere e di fare nuove esperienze professionali, anche perché sono un’appassionata delle parole. Adoro leggere e scrivere su tutto e di tutto quello che mi piace. E quando non trovo le parole, fotografo e cerco di immortalare qualsiasi cosa mi lasci a bocca aperta!”

Submit your work to Open Doors!

Do you have a connection with Italy? Do you live here? Do you travel here? Do you dream of here? Whatever your connection to Italy (even if it’s just enjoying Open Doors), we invite you to submit to the next issue of The Open Doors Review.

We accept literary fiction, poetry and thought provoking essays. Content is up to you. We are NOT looking for things that are specifically Italy focused. If your work happens to be about Italy, that is fine, but Italy is by no means a theme. We accept work in English or Italian.

Make us think. Make us laugh. Make us cry. Make us question. Make us uncomfortable. Make us feel.

For details on how to submit visit our site:

www.opendoorsreview.com

Hai un legame con l’Italia? Viaggi o vivi qua? Leggi semplicemente Open Doors Review? Ti chiederemo di raccontarci del tuo rapporto con l’Italia nell’email di presentazione del tuo lavoro.

Ci interessano la narrativa letteraria, la poesia ed i saggi stimolanti. Il contenuto dipende da te. Non stiamo cercando componimenti basati specificamente su tematiche “Italiane.” Potete mandarci i vostri lavori anche in più di una categoria e anche in combinazione (per esempio racconto + arte visuale). Accettiamo lavori in inglese o in italiano.

Facci riflettere, ridere, piangere … ricerchiamo emozioni.

Per inviare le proposte vai su

www.opendoorsreview.com