Sometimes you just get lucky. Getting ready to go on a flight down south I found not one, but two Donna Leon books. That I hadn’t read! They are not heavy reading, always set in Venice and perfect for a day at the beach or a day in the air. Guido, the police commissario, is so erudite and engaging, as is his family.
And the author has many nice turns of the phrase. Well, I like the stories. Harmless entertainment.
Particularly, when it happened in my own post-Joycean world. Go ahead, paint me a Philistine. I tried. I wanted to like old James. He and I both love Trieste. So, my first choice on our last flight was “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Written early in the century in Dublin and then started over and finished in Trieste, ten years later. Clearly Mr Joyce was miserable times seven when he initially wrote it. Hopefully, finishing it in Trieste, he was crying on the outside, on the pages of the manuscript but laughing it up on the inside, having survived and escaped Catholic boarding school in Ireland to sunny Trieste!
Beautiful Ruins is a surprise. I bought this book for my wife awhile back. We both like books set in or about Italy and it had a cool Cinqueterra-looking cover so that was enough for me to want it for her. Mid way thru our trip she said “I’m almost done with this, I think you will like it.”
Half way thru it I’m ready to break a Cardinal Red Rule which is “don’t brag on a book until its over.” Which is just what I’m doing. I like it a lot. It has complex, interesting characters, over laid with each other in surprising ways, lots of specific “voices,” just a myriad of things to like. I’m already plotting to try more of Jess Walter’s books.
Speaking of books: What good books have you read lately? Either set in Italy or about Italy or by an Italian? Anything, even marginally Italian-oriented, would be considered. If I get a lot of responses, I might like to share them here. Which will drive me to update my Favorite Italian Books List on the web site.
Thinking about our upcoming September trip to Venice, Umbria and hopefully Trieste already. Which makes me want to keep repeating
See you in Italy! See you in Italy!
Stew Vreeland
ITALIAN CLASS, Portland, Maine – “Well, Stew, did that adventure have a happy ending?” Prof Sandro of Sardina wants to know. I’ve told my story (in Italian) and I’m almost off the hook. One more word from me and it is the next person’s turn in the white hot spot light. All eyes still on me, I think: I can do this. A simple “Yes” would work fine. But I feel expansive and try to geld that lily and say “eventualmente” Felt right at the time, but long suffering Sandro shook his head and muttered “False Friend.” By complete accident, I knew what he meant. 
We were in Italy and all our good intentioned dictionaries were not. We ducked into the book store on the main drag in Castiglion del Lago. They say Italian to English. We say English to Italian. Pot-ate-o / Pot-ah-toe. it all comes out in the same wash, no? No. Almost, but still no. Once I saw the difference I realized this could be a very good thing. 
Unlike any dictionary I’ve ever used this Italian one (who knows, maybe they all do) highlights all these bad boys. And trust me there is a “Nota” or a “False Friend” on almost every one of the 600 pages here. Accident (accidente) really means incident (incidente)? And vice versa, for good measure. In what world would that happen? Ah, but it does and “Quando a Roma” we need to step up to that ancient plate and do it the way the Romans would want us to. Wonderful dictionary. Highly recommend picking one up the next time you are in Italy. Whole new perspective. I’m sure Italians look at these FF’s and throw up their hands and say, those crazy English speaking people. THEY’VE got it all backwards. Just like we do going the other way. Allora, relax and enjoy the ride. False Friends is better than no friends at all. 
The actual day of Festa della Mamma dawned dark and sort of stayed that way. So we took a trip to nearby Poggi to see friends’ reno progress. Their house project shares a painterly and pastoral hilltop at the edge of Poggi with a tiny temple-like brick church. Its always been closed the many times we’ve been there. But this day it was open. They shouldn’t do this when tourists are loose in the area. You know what they say? Permesso? And in they come. 
OUR REQUEST, OUR PRAYER
Playing for Pizza first. It’s light but tasteful. Light, even by recent John Grisham standards. I rather think he’s newly discovered Italy’s fulsome charms, like so many people out there in the world. But unlike the rest of us, he’s figured out how to get his publishers to bend to his request for research time on their dime. In Italy. Sometimes his Italian connection is a stretch. The last book I read of his, The Broker, started in the U.S. President’s office and ended in the middle of Bologna. As if there wasn’t plenty of that in Washington. Fine, fine, whatever it takes. As long as the plot ends up with some trite, fairly obvious Italian words in italics sprinkled here and there, we’re good. In our house we have shelves and shelves of books of, by, or for Italians. And (gasp!) some even in Italian. Ok, those are mostly Dylan Dog comics. We had a whole small room set aside for Italian themed books in our previous house. Maybe that was extreme. Fear not, we haven’t thrown any Italian books in the dumpster, but just have all our Italian books in the same room with books on all subjects in one bigger room with more shelves. Still segregated, of course. 
That would be Alexia’s fault. She was our foreign exchange student and her family owned the Padova Saints. I still have a Saints jacket as you can see. Oh, you wish you had that. And oh, the things I learned from Riccardo, Alexia’s wild card of a dad. The main thing we had in common was that he and I both hated any boy she brought home on either side of the Atlantic. “You let her go out with HIM?” he said just a bit too loudly (but at least it was in Italian) while pointing to the insolent, bad intentioned rogue slinking through the door under the porch where we were standing. “She’s YOUR daughter” I yelled back. “YOU should have raised her to know better.” Ecco il pappa. Times two. Of course Riccardo knew full well what bad American boys were up to. Because he “owned” a bunch of them and hung out with them as much as he could. Bon vivant barely covered this mischievous, wise cracking ad guy. As soon as we got to Padova he introduced us to his friend Prosecco. By the pitcherfull. I think that bottles, what, inhibited, Riccardo? He poured us Prosecco in dives high and low as we followed him around Padovatown. Hanging on his every fast-moving word. And he had lots of them. He could, and did, tell stories ninety miles an hour in all known European languages, blisteringly funny; subtle and not so subtle jokes and story lines spilled out across Prosecco- and pizza-covered tables. Occasionally there would be a gap in the blanket of Marlborough brand smog surrounding Riccardo. That is when you would see more cat-that-ate-the-canary eye twinkle than is surely legally allowed. 
It is the typical, misty-eyed, Isn’t Italy Amazing genre. He’s clearly happy, happy, happy with his new lifestyle there. The food is fresher, the sky bluer, people friendlier, the sun sunnier, you know how it is. The usual. We liked book. My wife bought it in an airport and elbowed me awake to say “We KNOW all these people in the book”. Awake now. And it was a gas to us. We do know, at least by long term email relationship, the people who sold the author his dream house. And we are pretty sure we know the people who drove him to it. They used to own a wild B&B we visited a few times with friends of friends. Their place was so over-the-top Michael bailed out after one night even though he had paid for several nights in advance. Could totally relate. He left Tuscany with his shirt tail flapping after him and headed out across Umbria to find a place to stay. Any place just a little more Italian and a little less kitsch. And in true novel tradition, he immediately stumbled over the traditional diamond in the rough, way off the beaten path that had never been on the market and was available to him that day. And it came with a full set of built-in friends for life.