RANDOM ECHOES - ITALY 30/10/05

Festival of the Thrush (La festa della Torno).

Hunters in the hills – shotgun reports echo regularly even before dawn. Pop pop.

At a point of no return effectively as health breaks down in the hills, and all sense of place is lost for a day. As if this daily fog here had passed into me and I had woken with it and thereby it keeps me at bay from the rest of the world, shrouded from family, from my lover, even from the subtly beautiful town of Pienze which we visit for lunch. Bizarre, to be walking and talking but silently keeping in check the nausea and the dizziness, and the overwhelming sump of tiredness. Unable even to take in the views across the Tuscan landscape, though I know I took a couple of photos; or the fact that at one point we stand in the center of a beautiful duomo looking up at the bright portico seventy feet over our heads. In the car, I am unable even to move for fear I will vomit; it takes all my will just to hold it back until we arrive at our small cottage and Pol sets me up a bed in the garden to be warmed by the descending sun. I sleep for over ten hours and wake as if it were a different person it had all happened to. But am left with an ugly residue of the day.

Autumn shows itself directly in the withering vines outside the cottage. Particularly in the late afternoon sunlight, which has a tendency to readily become hazy and dreamlike at this time of year, forming patches of mist yet never obscuring things entirely. So the vines, with their bunches of white grapes once thick and strong and hanging heavy now turning purple brown and gorged on by fruit flies and wasps, loose themselves and reflect sadly there in their rows some sense of forgotten glory. At the end of one row a white plastic bowl has been left, the vestige of human presence probably from a few weeks back when the idea would have been to harvest the grapes and take them either for eating or primarily for making into wine. Not this year. I look on that view and its passing is sad, brings a sense of finality to me, of inevitability that cannot be fought (perhaps it is simply a reflection that our time here in Italy is coming to a close). Yet, in there is beauty too. The colours are still vivid even in their death throes – the light coming through a paler leaf, the almost icing of must on the skins of fruit that haven’t yet turned. Caravaggio knew these things and ran with them every time he painted a still life. He wasn’t interested in the plentiful, bountiful world the church wanted him to represent; he had to show that the deity could equally present a rotting world at times as much as anything else and there came earthly beauty if you dared to look long and hard enough, and challenge the single world view of his time.