A Small Place in Italy - Eric Newby

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Sea, at the mouth of the Gulf of Spezia, where Byron went for a six-mile swim. At that time (in 1967) it was still a fishing village, an almost unbelievably picturesque one, that looked as if it had been designed by Rex Whistler, and it was still inhabited by fishermen sufficiently genuine to roll out of bed every morning at 4 a.m., except Sundays, or even earlier, and put to sea, making a hideous din.

      In summer a cool breeze blew up from the sea through Tellaro’s dark and cavernous streets, filling the gleaming white bed sheets that were drying on the lines stretched high overhead between the opposing houses as if they were spinnakers that were drawing nicely. But not always. When the scirocco, a nasty wind from Africa, blew, bringing torrential rain, thunder and lightning along with it, what had been magical, mysterious caverns became deep, dank ditches full of water, then Tellaro was not so allegro.

      For Tellaro and a number of similar places on the shores of the Mediterranean, that autumn was the beginning of what was soon to be a period of extraordinarily rapid change and transition.

      One moment Tellaro was a fishing village with a few artists hidden away in it; the next it had been ‘discovered’ by senior people in Fiat and Olivetti and suchlike organizations, who saw it as an ideal place in which to immure their wives and families during the long Italian summer, less boring than Forte dei Marmi. A place to which they could drive down from Turin or Ivrea, or wherever it was, on Friday evenings in a couple of hours or so, driving back on Sunday nights to the embraces of those of their mistresses who could stand August in such places as Turin or Ivrea, or wherever it was they were returning to.

      Within a year or two smart little fish restaurants would be springing up around Tellaro’s minute piazza, opened by locals who soon became ‘characters’, the sort who treat their clientele with carefully cultivated insolence, a sort of treatment the rich and powerful, rather surprisingly, seem to enjoy, turning them into suppliants.

      And in a couple of years or so most of them would have either grown rich by selling their houses or plots of land, or else, more modestly contented, would be doing well working in the bars and restaurants, and in the souvenir and picture postcard shops.

      A member of one of these local families, by this time very elderly, whom we happened to meet, was a still sprightly lady who had known D.H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen. They had come to live in Italy in September 1913, returning in July 1914 to England, where they were married. In Italy they rented a house in a small seaside hamlet between Tellaro and Lerici called Fiascherino. Every day this signora, then a young signorina, used to walk along the coast path through the olive groves to Fiascherino, where she used to do the Lawrences’ housework and sometimes the cooking.

      ‘I called him Signor Lawrence,’ she said, the ‘ce’ as a soft ‘che’. ‘He was very thin and he had a beard. He looked as I imagined Gesù would look. And he enjoyed the wine.’

      ‘Signor Lawrence,’ the Signora said, ‘had a wife. She was a German, a nobildonna. She was simpatica. Then, suddenly,’ she said, ‘they went away. We didn’t know where.

      ‘One of the things they left behind them was a big trunk full of papers and a key to it. They never came back for it. There was no money in it, only papers.

      ‘Then, one day, I can’t remember when exactly, a signore, a foreigner, I think he was an American, came to our house, I was married then, and said that he was a friend of Lawrence and that he had been given permission to take some papers from the trunk, so I let him do so.

      ‘Then, one day, many years later, another signore appeared, also a foreigner. He said that Lawrence was dead and he, too, took papers from the trunk, all that remained.

      ‘You may think I was stupid to let them have these papers,’ she said, ‘but they were all written in English or German and there was no one at that time in Tellaro who could understand them. The words were difficult words.’

      The Signora lived in La Canonica, The Presbytery, a fine old house in Tellaro, in an apartment on an upper floor. She wanted us to buy it because, she said, she liked us; but for us it was too high up and too dark. Also it had no garden, not even a balcony or a terrace to sit out on. So we didn’t buy it. But when we told her that we couldn’t buy it she cried a little and then gave us as a parting gift two silver spoons with the arms of the von Richthofen family engraved on them.

      Inspired by all this we began to look for our house as soon as I arrived from Africa. It soon became obvious that it was not going to be easy. What had up to then looked like desirable properties immediately ceased to do so when we began to look at them more closely.

      It took ages to locate most of them. Sometimes we felt like travellers in a desert in which the mirage was operating. What looked like a desirable place at a distance ended up by being perfectly awful when we actually got to it, or else, as with a genuine mirage, unfindable, a figment of the imagination. Some were nice but too near the road, some had no outlook, some had outlooks, but very gruesome ones, some were too ruined, too lonely, too frequented, too noisy or too expensive.

      We soon decided to abandon completely the search for anything near the sea. Neither of us had wanted to be near it, anyway. The only reason for being near it was that it would have been nice to have found a place near Tellaro, where Valeria and her husband lived.

      We got an introduction to a surveyor, a Signor Anselmo. He was tall and slim and nice to talk to and he lived in an apartment block in Lerici. Surveyors seemed to us to have enviable lives. All they did was to tell their customers that the places of their dreams were riddled with dry rot, or were built on the lines of geological faults and were likely to disappear into the bowels of the earth without warning. ‘You may think you need a surveyor,’ an American resident in Lerici told us, ‘but you need one like you need an attack of the hives.’

      No, Signor Anselmo didn’t know of any property that would suit us down here on the coast. He advised us to go inland, even a few kilometres inland. Inland it was different, he said, but it was outside the area in which he operated. He did, however, know someone who might be able to help us, a Signor Vescovo who owned a bar/ristorante. Signor Anselmo kindly offered to telephone him.

      Later that morning we presented ourselves at Signor Vescovo’s bar/ristorante. Signor Vescovo was smallish, slightly rotund, aged between forty and fifty and wore thick, tortoiseshell glasses. Was it his name, Vescovo, which means bishop, that invested him with a faintly priestly air?

      He, himself, as he told us, was in the process of selling his business and was at present engaged in negotiating the purchase of a large farmhouse somewhere near a place called Fosdinovo, across the river Magra in the foothills of the Apuan Alps, which he was proposing to convert into a ristorante specializing in wedding receptions and anniversaries, in which the food on offer would be what is known in Italy as produzione propria (home produced). According to Signor Anselmo, Signor Vescovo knew more about the buying and selling of properties in this particular area than anyone else.

      ‘There is one house that I think you would like very much,’ he said as we drank a coffee with him. ‘It is on the side of the hill just above the place where I am trying to buy the farm. It is rather ruined and it only has about two thousand square metres of land but it is a pretty place and very quiet. It belongs to a Signor Botti, a contadino who lives at a place called Caniparola, a small village at the foot of the hill. I think he might be persuaded to sell it as it doesn’t render anything except a bit of wine and a small amount of olive oil; but like all contadini he needs time to make up his mind.

      ‘If you would like to see it,’ he went on, ‘I can arrange it for this afternoon. I will send a message to the Signora who has the key to it by the local bus, telling her that you will come at whatever time you say. I will also write down the instructions about how to get to the house which is called I Castagni [the ‘I’ pronounced as in ‘E’] – The Chestnuts.

      ‘And if you are wondering why I am not going to charge you anything, even if you buy the place, it is because I owe a favour to Signor Anselmo.’

      

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