Tales from Naples and Sorrentine Stories

Anne Barriault

Description

Tales from Naples is inspired by the author’s travels to Italy over the years. Best described as contemplative travel writing, the essays observe life on a trip to Naples and Sorrento and offer observations on the arts and humanities in the form of a memoir.
Tales from Naples follows on the heels of Moroccan Musings (Xlibris Press, 2013), a collection of essays based on the author’s time spent in Marrakech and Fes. That book received a travel writing award from the Chanticleer Book Review.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 04 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669870449
• Langue: English

Extrait

Tales from Naples and Sorrentine Stories
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
Anne Barriault
 
Copyright © 2023 by Anne Barriault.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2023904717
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-7046-3

Softcover
978-1-6698-7045-6

eBook
978-1-6698-7044-9
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Rev. date: 03/17/2023
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
850450
Neapolitan Tales and Sorrentine Stories
Prologue
 
Big Moutarde
Fruit of the Sea
Smoking Cats and Sorrentine Dogs
Persephone’s Water Buffalo
Bird on the Head
Lookie, Lookie, USA
Giants of Ischia
Westie on a Vespa
 
Epilogue
ILLUSTRATIONS
By Jeryldene Wood
Vesuvius Landscape
Fish with Teeth
Smoking Cat
PROLOGUE
Y OU MAY OR may not recall that Boccaccio’s Decameron begins in 1348, when seven women and three men meet at the church of Santa Maria Novella in their plagued city of Florence. From there, this brigata, as Boccaccio calls them, travels to the hilltop town of Fiesole to escape the raging pestilence. For ten days in the Tuscan hills, they wait out the epidemic by amusing one another with storytelling. Ten stories a day for ten days.
Since first writing these essays several years ago, I am now reviewing them during yet another modern-day plague. A virus, spreading with alarming rates worldwide and mutating, has taken many loved ones from us and now keeps us, the lucky ones, quarantined at home. Time to ponder projects, new and old, time to fight the fear and lassitude that hold us in their grip, time to count our blessings and be grateful. Time to see another collection of essays into print. Do I love Naples, as much as I have loved Florence or Venice or Rome? No, indeed. But I have loved the friends who have continued to make these journeys with me. We have lost some dear ones along the painful and heartbreaking way. But looking back, the memories created by experiences have crystallized into precious prisms. A bit blurred by hoar frost now, but when scraped ever so gently, the frost melts and the recollections warm again and still hold at the center.
Our modern-day Decameron began in K’s freshwater pool in Goochland, Virginia. My brigata , a very close group of out-of-town friends I consider to be my third family, were visiting over Memorial Day and staying in my tiny Richmond townhouse. K graciously invited us to relieve the city heat with a swim at her home in the country since she and P, her husband, would be out of town. So we found ourselves splashing about that sunny afternoon, contemplating the impending realities of our fiftieth birthdays and the immediate realities of our bodies in swimsuits. Then B hatched the brilliant idea—we should celebrate our benchmark birthdays in an Italian villa. “We’ve got to go. Life is short. We’re all going to die!” proclaimed our idea man.
His would become the battle cry each time the group needed to be rallied—visit after visit, trip after trip, villa after villa. Our pact that day was sealed when my husband R dove naked into the pool. Much to the group’s dismay but never really to its surprise, R always seemed to be doing that, in one way or another, literally or figuratively, during our reunions.
Four villas and multiple birthdays later—and during the unaffected, uninfected pre-covid-19 era of innocent travel—the participants of this little group, in various combinations, celebrated in Tuscany, Umbria, the Campania, the Sorrentine Peninsula, and Sicily. You might say the core of the group consisted of four highly intelligent, incredibly sophisticated, handsome men—two pairs of gay partners, actually—and four unconventionally beautiful, witty, and intelligent women always in various states of marriage and non-marriage. We were usually joined each trip by a few other souls brave enough to venture forth with us. Armed with guidebooks, umbrellas or sunhats, cameras, sensible and not-so-sensible shoes, and an Italian grammar textbook religiously toted by one of us, we immersed ourselves in Italy’s beloved culture. We saw too many towns and too much art in too short a time; had too much fun by driving too fast and intuitively, Italian style; and only after a full day’s touring, consumed too much wine before, during, and after dinner at eight at the villa. Each night we would frighten and amuse by turn our new friends, the villa’s adored and patient cooks, as we squabbled endlessly with one another about who held the crown as the finest Italian painter from centuries past, at least for that day.
Among many memorable highlights were the unpredictably emotional moments. When we first arrived in Tuscany, S and I cried at the sight of what would be our very own olive groves and organic grapevines for the next two blissful weeks of suspended time that stretched before us. The following morning, as the mist lifted from the valley beneath us and revealed the tops of cypress trees, the stone steeple of an eleventh-century church, and the red-tiled roofs of neighboring homes, Mr. P and I misted over the “beautiful view” for which our villa was named: Belvedere. Italian life is full of surprises—the laundromat, the sausage shop, the two days when part of the group took the wrong train one day and the wrong turn the next, though all found enormous compensation in stumbling upon festivals in small towns they had never heard of before but would never forget. One of my most memorable moments—second only to driving through Florence to have a flat tire repaired in what turned out to be a neighborhood where I had lived in a previous life—was a pilgrimage to Santo Spirito in Florence. Santo Spirito is one of the original parish churches designed by Filippo Brunelleschi where many of the altarpieces are still intact in the spaces for which they were painted. While the group was meandering through its chapels and sacristy, Mr. P experienced an unexpectedly moving encounter with the tender wooden sculpture of the young Christ by the young Michelangelo. It was evening, the light was low, the church was closing, the air was cool but humid. A man of lightning articulation, P was speechless, breathless before this slender figure of the crucified Christ—simple, pure, linear, unadorned. Innocent, poignant, sad. After that, I put a coin in the collection box, lit a candle, and said a prayer of gratitude to the universe for this very moment in this perfect quattrocento church, and for my brilliantly mindful colleagues, sharing art that can take an unexpected spiritual turn and transform an evening . . . or a life.
The last day of the first trip, I begged my friends to fill the car so there would be no room for me and pleaded with the villa’s owners, R and F, to let me stay and work for them. From Giotto’s native Mugello, northeast of Florence, R looked as though he had stepped out of this fourteenth-century painter’s frescoes. Spring through fall, R ran his father’s villa and then spent winters in the Dolomites as a skiing instructor, a self-described “maestro del sci.” The lovely F, his wife, tended the villa and worked winters in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.