Dear Terri,
Just a fast double check . . . come definitely on Tuesday! I just hope I can get a few things done to this flat before you come! Oh and could I please ask you to bring me a few things from England that I can't seem to get here? (Baking powder, cheddar cheese, and maybe vanilla? Oh yes, do they have brown sugar in England? and oatmeal? It's amazing what we miss . . . mostly baking stuff. What I would pay for a bag of Nestles chocolate chips!)
The Crow has arrived here (Il Corvo) and we are thinking of seeing it in Italian . . . if nothing else, it will improve our slang.
Ciao raggazina!
Midori
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Dear Terri,
We’ll definitely go up to Florence, on the train. I will see if I can arrange a tour with a fellow teacher who is living there and teaching art history, no less!
I have my first Italian cold . . . bleech, what a headache. Carl and Stephen are getting over it, and I am watching Taiko. We should be in the pink by Halloween. I need to work on our masks, I think . . . though right now my red nose makes a good one.
We are all talking about getting on a train and going somewhere this weekend . . . hmmm. Maybe the ocean and do some tide pool wandering.
Ciao Bella!
Midori
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Terri,
Come back! We miss you! Though I am glad you are in the sun . . . and that The Wood Wife is finally to be finished in the desert where it was begun. You made quite an impression here at the school. Cathy Ottaviano was so happy with your presentations and the effect it had on the kids (teenagers especially). She just got the box of books for the kids yesterday and was really pleased. We go at the first week of December to the farm in Tuscany and Cathy is trying to arrange some time there for you. If early spring doesn’t work out for some reason, what about coming next September and October? It is still gorgeous then, and Stephen and I hope we’ll still be here.
My writing group is a blast. The kids are great . . . various talents, but we are doing different things and having fun . . . more on it later. (I have one girl in there who is breathtakingly beautiful -- she is lovely, funny, kind, intelligent, and has a face that Botticelli would have sold his soul for. I wish you could meet her . . . she's my actress. I have her coming in and doing readings and recitation as well as the improv stuff . . . it's great!)
Ciao bella!
Midori
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My dear,
I'm just making sure you are still hanging in there after camping out in the desert somewhere, which was when I last heard from you. Hope you managed to finish all your work -- the magazine articles, and The Wood Wife.
We went to Tuscany for three days, to the farm I was telling you about. It was fabulous. It’s December, and we were out in our sweaters, walking the country roads and marveling that any place on earth could be so beautiful and spiritual. It is very much like the downs of England, except higher -- more vigorous hills and vineyards and tall cream-colored brick farmhouses. There are the most beautiful colors in Tuscany . . . all straight out of your palette. The Zitos, who run the farmhouse, are lovely people . . . gentle, restful, involved with a lot of local artists. If this is where you live when you come in the spring, you will be very happy indeed. . . . We’re already planning to go back.
We saw St. Catherine's head in a church in Siena -- and her right thumb, pointing heavenward. The tape description, done by a woman who sounded like a Monty Python character, told us "She died in Rome. Her head was returned to Siena with great solemnity and reverence." Of course Stephen couldn't stop laughing and started saying things like, "Her right toe was brought home amid much drunken revelry and the shedding of garments . . . whereupon the toe was lost. They then received the left elbow which was brought back with great contrition."
Life here is mad . . . every city a maze . . . and I have met yet another brilliant mask-maker in Florence, with whom I hope to take a class after Christmas. Now I’m off!
ciao,
Midori
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Terri,
Okay . . . I am at the University using their machines now and it is much easier. So I thought I'd come here today and write a little more relaxed without worrying about the system shutting down on me. Oh, these Italian phone lines!
We have just returned from the sea and I am still hearing the ocean in my ears . . . sigh. Very beautiful. Milan is home, but chilly now, and my sinuses do not like it here. Both Taiko and I were happy as clams to breathe in huge amounts of salt water.
Life here is such a peculiar mixture of wonderful and nerve wracking. The worries about money, about getting things done with a modicum of practicality and security, sometimes are overwhelming. I've just started praying instead of worrying . . . trusting the road will open for us if it is meant to. I keep coming back to my novel of the maze. How like my life it is.
Christmas here was lovely! We went to Carlos and Lorenzo's farm . . . my two crazy Irish-fiddle-playing Italian friends that you met at the pub in Milano. It was a huge family affair, a five-hour sit-down dinner with more food, more courses, more wines, and champagnes than I have ever seen outside of a restaurant. (And I grew up with a French father, remember!) The kids were stuffed after the tortellinis, but Stephen and I braced ourselves for the four different kinds of grilled meats . . . rabbit, roast beef, capons, and boiled beef with mostarda, an Italian chutney of mustard fruits. We saved room for Panettone, a kind of high-top Italian Christmas cake that is not too sweet . . . a bit like a coffee cake with attitude (and altitude), which is eaten with lots of very fine champagne. Then Lorenzo, Carl, Stephen, and Taiko went out to the fields and shot off their bows. (Thank god they missed the holiday mushroom pickers.) Lorenzo gave Carl a nice charcoal drawing of a longbow archer. Carlos and I played a little music together and did some singing. It was lovely to be invited to a family gathering at this time.
Then we went to the seaside with our friends Anna and Gianni, which was sublime. I just feel very lucky, despite everything else that is quirky or scary. Oh, I am so happy with the new book! This place . . . every time I turn around there is inspiration, there is something small and authentic that will make the book unique at home, and familiar and charming here, I hope.
Basta! I must finish. Take care and keep me posted on the news. Will Ellen come with you when you come back in the spring? I want to take you both to Venice.
Ciao bella . . . and happy New Years to you and Ellen,
Midori
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Terri,
Buon Natale e Buone Anno! We've spent the last five days at the sea on the Ligurian coast with some Italian friends . . . utterly fabulous. I don't know what to think . . . I fall in love with every place we go. When you come in the spring, we will go -- you must see some of the small villages with their painted faces and the way they light up at night like the sets of a play. (Needless to say, I wrote an entire chapter in my head there!) We ate like lords, and hiked in the rugged hills -- way up and then down again to the sheltered coast of a beautiful old monastery. Took two hours to get down through some the most rugged and beautiful woods I’ve seen here yet, and another three to come up, as the sea was too rough to go by boat. We had cappuccini sitting on the beach, and warm focaccia. Carl has decided to live in a half-dozen of these small villages, with their crumbling castles, emerald sea, and narrow streets that snake up the sides of steep hillsides. Everything is old, old, old . . . che bella vista.
Ciao bella,
Midori
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Terri,
Was I crazy to come to Italy, thinking I could write here? When is there time to write??? Everyday I shop . . . I cook . . . I clean our clothes in the bathtub (pounding them with my feet like they were grapes) . . . I get the kids and Stephen off to school . . . deal with the endless Italian bureaucracy . . . struggle with language and customs and a half-dozen other odd things . . . and then I finally sit before the computer. Exhausted. My brain is bursting with ideas . . . but my body is so tired. . . . I was crazy, yes, I must have been, to think I could do this. And yet the book is already so much richer . . . I have large chunks of it written in my head . . . and the masks and characters are all clamoring to be heard. They are starting to come to life in my imagination, in a way that they never could if we had never come here and lived with this language, light, food, Italian chaotic delicious life.
Basta. I need some sleep.
ciao,
Midori
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Dear Terri,
The kids have been back at school, and really happy again. I am astonished into silence by how much Italian Carl knows -- he is speaking in full sentences, paragraphs (of obscenities at times, which he insists he learns listening to little old ladies, which is probably true -- you should hear some of them!) and correcting our meager Italian. It makes me so proud and so humiliated at the same time. Talk about diminishment.
I go today to Mangigalli Clinic, which is a labyrinth of a hospital, to try to recover Taiko's x-rays. We fear she may have broken her nose over Christmas, when she bonked her head into Carl’s. It's still tender and a bit swollen and bruised nearly a month later. I am as always a little scared . . . hoping that she's all right . . . hoping they don't need to do anything weird or drastic . . . hoping I can find my way into the clinic and then out again with my Italian . . . oy. Another maze to travel. My life is filled with mazes. . . .
Over the fourth of February we go to the Dolomites for a weekend, in the Italian Alps. It wouldn't be winter without some snow. And then to Venice for Carnevale. The masks are fabulous there.
The Innamorati is so much fun . . . and yet also so much work! I can't tell you how fascinating the research has been. I have been reading a Handbook on Dueling from the 16th century, which is gripping and typically Italian. The opening salvo to a duel is to claim someone "lies" . . . which, in the complex mores of the court, meant that they saw behind the mask of gentility. To maintain one's mask (and one's honor), one replied with the challenge. Although dueling was illegal, there were five acceptable lies for which one could fight a duel in the first edition of the Handbook. Then forty-two lies in the second edition, five years later. Challenges were posted, notarized, studied for correctness. The person accused of the lie was allowed to choose the weapons . . . and then, the whole business of determining the winner! A cut to the face was worth more than a cut to the arm . . . a piercing cut was the best . . . unless the opponent refused to surrender his position as he died, in which case the winner lost!
Ciao,
Midori
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Dear Terri,
A fast hello . . . or ciao bella. We have been thinking of you as we were in Florence yesterday . . . and saw a few more things that you and I didn't see last fall . . . mio dio . . . a whole church filled with Giotto frescoes (breathtaking), the inside of the baptistery of the Duomo (astonishing). You need at least three trips to see half or even a beginning of what is there. The kids adored the Botticellis and Stephen fell in love with the Annunciation and has been collecting postcards of every annunciation he can find. . . .
As to tomorrow, for Carnevale we go to Venice. It is going to be a bit difficult as both Stephen and I are sick . . . yeah, but we can't not go. We’re taking antibiotics like mad and ibuprofen and laying low today, and going tomorrow, damn it!!! I'll let you know how it is.
We are thinking and dreaming so much about the farm in April . . . we are so excited about you guys coming here and talk of nothing else . . . buying sketch paper, pencils, conte . . . cool.
Ciao to you and Ellen. Oh yeah, look at Calvino's Italian Folktales -- he has a good bibliography of fairy tales, and even though most are in Italian, there may be some translations available in the U.S. in libraries. More on that later. I'm crawling back into bed so I can make it tomorrow.
Ciao again,
Midori
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