Five Months in Spoleto, by Rosellen Brown, New York Times Sophisticated Traveler

A funny thing happened to me recently at the blood donation center.  One of the routine questions a donor must answer to be allowed to participate, alongside probings of health and habits is, “Have you spent more than three months out of the US since 1980?” (They were scouting for possible exposure to SARS and mad cow disease.)

“Oh, no,” I replied, since I have never lived abroad, even for a season. My trips tended, when my children were young, to three-week summer visits to too many cities in too many countries, and more recently to a stolen week, during the Christmas break from teaching, in Turkey or Sicily - absurdly brief forays into cultures whose surfaces we barely scratch before we fly home for New Year's.

But at the blood center, I was forced to calculate something that took me by surprise: For the last ten summers, I have taught in a small writers' workshop in Spoleto, Italy, a gorgeous and endlessly intriguing Umbrian hilltown, and at two weeks per summer (not even counting extra days tacked on for travel before and after), that adds up to five months in a single place.
Of course, half a discontinuous year lacks the depth of a long sojourn abroad. But an annual return to the same place over a long span of time has its own unique rewards, and at this tenth anniversary, it is irresistible to review what has changed in a decade and to celebrate - and occasionally deplore - the amazing stability of life in an Italian town.

Spoleto, an hour and a half northeast of Rome by train, claims a population of 37,000, but that's variable depending on how far into the countryside one wants to count.  It is well-known to many Americans because for nearly fifty years it has been the site of Gian-Carlo Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds, featuring music, dance, theatre and, years ago, the literary contributions of Allen Ginsberg and his friends.  There are stunning photos of its 10,000 or so attendees crammed (one presumes happily) into the piazza in front of the Duomo, but this is a spectacle I have only seen on postcards. Our Spoleto workshop (which runs alongside three weeks of master classes for aspiring opera singers and a class in the local obsession, Umbrian cooking) arrives a week after the hordes depart, when the streets are quiet again and the restaurants have caught their breath.

The mercato seems impervious to change.  This teeming agora looks like something a set designer devoted to stereotype might build for summer stock, the pastel walls of the shops peeling picturesquely, the stolid truck still dispensing thick porchetta (pork) sandwiches that send our students to pork lovers' heaven. Zucchini blossoms spread their golden wings in buckets alongside glorious figs and white peaches, and huge, inexpensive bouquets that demand to be taken home, even to the sparely furnished rooms our writers live in. (They stay at a convent where we house them alongside a diminishing covey of full-habited nuns. Some things do change: Years ago there were a hundred at the Istituto Bambin' Gesù; now they're down to five or six, many not Italian, and so they now take in guests.)
My first morning, having bought my newspaper from the same kiosk-lady who sees a narrow slice of Spoleto from her little blind, I ascertain that the barrista dispensing the cappuccino I have dreamed of all year is still turning out a brew our indifferent coffee jerks can't manage. These are permanent jobs, not temp work; they are taken seriously.

Then it's off to my favorite shop to lay in supplies.  The same shop owner in his white coat and little white butcher's hat, looking ready for heavier work than he is called upon to perform, gives me a squeeze of greeting that I wouldn't tolerate nearer to home - some allowances must be made - and I buy exactly the same necessities as always: mozzarella buffala and spicy olives and tall bottles of aqua minerale, which will forever flow like a river through the Italian summer.  Here the only change is that I can finally conduct a moderately creditable conversation (after years of study frustrating to an aging brain) during which I discover that his daughter is an actress in Cincinnati, which she prefers to this boring place.  How do I say, “ Chacun a son gout ” in Italian?

The same wonderfully fixed cast of characters obtains in my two favorite restaurants.  At the Locanda della Signoria, where one eats on an outdoor platform in the shadow of the Duomo, I am greeted with enthusiasm by Andrea, who, in addition to having a good memory, seems to be getting younger and flatters me (though he has no choice) by reciting the evening's offerings in Italian. The next night, I will check out a nearly invisible restaurant, Pecchiarda, which thrives down an unpromising, rock-strewn alley. A few years ago, the proprietors did wreak a change here - they eliminated the bocce court that greeted hungry arrivals - and erected classy umbrellas above the tables.

But the clusters of men who have left their wives at home with the bambini never change; in an inner room they watch their beloved calcio - football, which is to say, soccer - whose pleasures will never fail them. Nor will the menu ever fail us, which represents either calcification or tradition. The spoletini want the familiar; we turisti also want lo stesso, the same, precisely because at home, change seems to be our only tradition. Cecci, chick peas and garlic, fava bean stew - pleasure at its purest.  And since the Comune hasn't yet flattened the hills, I will climb an implausible incline to my apartment to repent dessert, painlessly obliterating the calories without having to resort to the gym.

There are still benches where you need them.  In the late afternoon photographer's light, my first sight of the thirteenth century aqueduct still makes my soul leap.  The little “truffle trees” - under which the government has injected the fungus which will be rooted out by dogs when it's ready - still cling to the incline beside it.  Round and round that scenic road or down below the old town where the modern shops prevail, the early evening passaggiata never changes, that promenade of hundreds, in which the ragazzi - the kids - seem to pass before my eyes from flirty teen-agers into young families proudly showing off their bedecked babies. Their clothes are wickedly tight by American standards of decency.  Only the length of the boys' hair and the proportion of mousse seem to fluctuate from year to year.

What has changed in a decade?  There is still no air conditioning, except in hotels, precious few fans and no screens. (Last summer's heat wave may actually have stalled in its tracks the European derision of American cowards who rely on chilled air.)  But cars have swollen to the point where they routinely scrape their doors on the narrowest streets.

Years ago, American joggers attracted curious stares; now, Italians are “footing” every-where. When I first arrived, we were reachable only via an unreliable FAX machine at the tourist office; now we no longer have to phone home at one in the morning because internet sites spot the streets like milk on a café macchiato. One year, in fact, a young man in the little house where I was staying invited me to see where he had installed a few Macs in an unused kitchen.  “You have heard of NASDAQ?” he asked eagerly.  Since the demise of that blood sport, day-trading, I suspect that change was short-lived!

Friends ask me every year as I begin to sift through the applications to our workshop, if I'm “doing it again” - they sound oddly surprised, as though I ought to have outgrown or gotten tired of my two paradisal weeks.  But for the same last two weeks of July, I can expect to be overwhelmed a dozen times by the vista across the hills at sunset, where Assissi's lights begin to wink on against a dark pink sky; when I wander through what the pagans called the “sacred forest” of black-trunked oaks where St. Francis also walked, and crawl into the unbelievable tiny grottos carved out of rock, in which monks somehow survived minimal diets and loneliness far above the winding road down the mountain.

I don't get lost any more; I know the short cuts. I instruct our students that the riposo after lunch does demand silence and an end to shopping, even if repose itself can't be legislated.  I know which pizza will disappoint and where you can get a good salad after midnight and how bad the music is at the annual Festa dell'Unità, Communist Festival in the park, and how laughable Italian television is, with its scantily-dressed morning show hosts and the weather report delivered by a man in a uniform decorated like a major general's.

But in the end, beyond the trivia whose mastery makes me feel welcome, a town like Spoleto is unchangeable in far more profound ways.  It is visibly layered, its history an unyielding pile of conquests, each succeeding the one that preceded it like innings in a many-millenium game. The Etruscans, the Romans, the Guelphs and Ghibellines - each has left its tangible ruins, its ineradicable beauty.  They have left a Roman amphitheatre, a fourth century house, a simple sixth century Roman church. There is a multi-ton stone portal through which Hannibal is said to have fled when boiling oil was dumped on the heads of his men. The bones in the graveyard crypts may be removed every so many years, but the facades of the old city - cobble-stoned Spoleto alto, not the basso down below with its chic stores and uninflected new buildings - may crumble with age but they will not disappear.  If there are malls to be built (and there are), they will be erected on the flat, somewhere else.

The third summer I taught in Spoleto, my mother died in Florida, and my accidental presence in that static repository of eras, of centuries, of entire civilizations, worked my sorrow toward a strange reconciliation with time: Before I hurried myself to the plane to come home for her funeral, I felt her less as a unique loss (which, of course, she would always be) but as if she were also but another stone in a huge wall built across the ages.  Somehow, being there, I could see her in her place under the eye of eternity, which is a hard eye to catch in New York where she was buried, or Houston where I lived then. Wordsworth's lines seemed very present, when he speaks of a beloved, newly departed, “rolled round in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”

So I begin, now, gearing up for another season on that glorious borrowed hilltop.  Will there be snow and hail (two years ago, for a strange few mid-summer minutes)? Unmoving heat and then a sweet soaking rain (last summer)?  One new restaurant?  One snail-slow renovation finally finished?  Surprise is not likely. For that, all I have to do is walk up the street at home and find the day's new taste thrill, which may or may not last a season.

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