Tyres screech between the narrow walls of a bridge and into the tight bend immediately afterwards. A Vespa swerves: the little boy sitting in front of his father has grabbed the handlebars. Wrists precariously interlocked, a fourteen-year-old on his motorino pulls a younger girl on her bicycle up the slope of a dike, finding time to rev and buzz his buzzer as he does so. Somehow, beneath it all, the sleepy, underlying, village serenity persists, is always there, but there to be constantly violated by this indomitable Dionysiac principle on wheels. Here comes a moped reared up for fifty metres on its back wheel, overtaken by a Porsche in second at forty, roaring past the new church straight into the vicious turn by the chemist’s. So that if Via Olivé was not in fact laid in a fog or a drunken stupor, one can only presume that it was conceived as a practice track for apprentice race drivers, stunt artists and other would-be suicides. All of which inevitably takes its toll of those heedless elderly cyclists in trilby and shirtsleeves, headscarf and blouse, who wind and wobble about one-handed as they clutch walking-stick, fishing-rod or shopping-bag. As so often in Italy, the picturesque is combined with a sharp edge of danger.
The first bridge, around which cars will be loosely parked for butcher, barber and cobbler, takes you over a dry flood-overflow ditch. Perhaps five metres deep, seven wide, and straight as a die for miles, this unfortunately necessary piece of engineering slices the village in half with a ribbon of brambly scrub, Coke-cans, bottles and other discarded trophies of summer nights. As we were to discover later, the fact that such a considerable obstacle has still only been bridged to one end of the village, is a matter of smouldering political recrimination in Montecchio. For us, that first morning, it merely meant that the bar was perhaps five minutes further away than it need have been.
Having crossed the ditch, you follow the road past the new church, past a single AGIP petrol pump, perfectly at home beside a handsome stone arch, and arrive at the second bridge. More attractive than the first, this spans a tiny river, the Fibbio, which flows beneath windows and balconies, linking ponds where men stand fishing under NO FISHING signs, taking the mountain rains southwards toward the Adige, the Po, the Adriatic.
Returning from the bar that morning, we doubtless turned left here to follow the stream a little way to its source, since this was also the direction for Via Colombare. And so would have made our second delightful discovery of the morning: at the bottom of a little dead-end, not two hundred yards from our new flat, a great battered water-wheel was thrashing away in magnificent dereliction. The discovery was all the more welcome when we found that, standing on a little bridge a few yards downstream of the wheel, the air was mercifully cooler, sparkling with bright droplets, damp and breezy.
Did we go on to the Laghetto Squarà that morning? I imagine we did. The little path behind the wheel would have been too inviting to ignore with anything more than an hour before lunch. It’s stony underfoot. There are tall, sagging fences to protect an extravaganza of peppers, aubergines, young tomato plants. Water is everywhere: tiny streams gurgling through the vegetable patches, the small river rushing at the millwheel, and to the right, through a Roman arch framing rusty silos, a stagnant pond with stone surrounds which presumably once had some industrial purpose. There are big blue dragonflies and livid green surface weeds. A scooter buzzes urgently at a blind corner, forcing one to step smartly aside, and then the path emerges into the open space of Laghetto Squarà
What happens here is that spring water rising beneath an abandoned seventeenth-century church flows out under its rotting door and bubbles across the path into a small square lake, the laghetto. There are tall plane and poplar trees around it, a stone embankment this side, and grassy banks the other, with three or four sluice gates. Moving to the edge, the glass clearness of the water allows you to look down two or three metres on to abandoned Roman building stones, pollution-fed weeds and that characteristic assortment of junk that people all over the world feel obliged to throw into attractive expanses of water: old tyres, a shoe, electrical appliances.
It’s sad. Despite the obvious attraction of Laghetto Squarà, nothing has been composed or finished, nothing appears to be tended or even cleaned. For this is the public sector, not the private commercial world of the bar. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine the comune, the local government, having spent anything on the place in the last ten years, aside from paying someone to prune the surrounding trees with extraordinary ruthlessness (because paid, we later discovered, in the form of firewood procured).
Yet precisely because of this neglect, the laghetto hangs on to a quality it might lose with transformation into some modern notion of the recreational picturesque; it retains its weathered, rather haphazard air of simply, naturally being there. You sit by the waterside on a big square stone fished out from the bottom some years ago; there are faded Roman inscriptions on its bumpy surface, a date, a few letters suggesting the name of an emperor. Spring water chuckles over the shale path to your left; the hills are behind you; the lake, the busy village and the plain in front. ‘So,’ you think, ‘this is the water table, I am at the foot of the Alps.’ Kids throw themselves into the lake in their underwear. Girls scream, protesting they don’t want to be pushed. And maybe they don’t. It’s a little more comfortable here than back in the dusty streets. A lizard basks just a few inches from your foot, reminding you how long you’ve been sitting still. Montecchio, you feel, may turn out to be OK.
5. Fantasmi
IT TOOK US two long, hot days. We made friends at Brandoli, the local supermarket, where three trips were required to accumulate the necessary boxes, and we moved a whole culture from Flat 3 up into the suffocating solaio below the roof.
Should we have paid more attention to what we were moving? Would I know more about Italy if I had read all the various diaries and letters with attention? Perhaps so. But old bric-à-brac, old clothes, old medicines, old shoes, old files, accounts, newspapers, rags, toiletries, shopping lists, votive items, paperbacks, military hats, jewellery boxes, camp cooking equipment and tins upon tins of assorted nuts, bolts and nails, have a very bad effect on my morale. Where another might find each item numinous with meaning, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of insignificance. I think of mountains and mountains of such relics multiplied by every household in every corner of the world — varying, of course, from country to country, each with its own cultural matrix, its own peculiar make-up, implying this value and that, but in the end just debris, life’s parings waiting to be thrown out — and all I want to do is to see the back of it all as fast as possible. I’d never make it in archaeology or anthropology. Thus, what I did save from our supermarket boxes for a moment’s examination, and what my memory and my wife’s now offer me in the way of details of that marathon clean-up, can only be scraps, clues, hints to the character, life and times of Umberto Patuzzi — or ‘il professore’ as we were later to come to think of him — and of his still vegetating wife, Maria Rosa. Had we known how intriguing these people were to become for us, we might have paid more attention.