Getting fingerprinted in Massa, Italy, is easy: you go to the immigration division of the local questura and place your digits, one at a time, on a little glass plate set into a special computer. Assisted by a nice policeman—in my case, a burly one from Naples—you roll each digit back and forth across the glass plate while the policeman presses delicately downward on each of your digits, making sure its whorls are captured by a camera hidden beneath the plate. On the computer’s screen (which the nice policeman pivots toward you, so you can see what’s going on), your identity appears like magic. There you are, reduced to five unique if unpretty blotches: your fingertips. (For good measure, your palms are printed, too.)

I was fingerprinted in Massa recently in order to obtain a “sojourn permit”: a piece of paper entitling me to stay in a given locale as the spouse of an Italian citizen, and to receive health-care benefits while in residence here. On line with my husband and myself were men, women, and children from all over the world, including a cute two-month-old whose Arab mother wore a headscarf, and a five-month-old in a fetching gingham pinafore whose Senegalese mother had quite the mouth on her. She wasted no time telling everyone how shameful it was that people with little kids had to remain standing for such a long time. “Each time you’re here, two hours! And you always have to return with more documents!” She had a point: there were no bathroom facilities, no drinking fountains, very little seating, and a line that began outdoors, snaking up a metal staircase into a tiny, airless anteroom. In winter it’d be no fun at all to have to come here.

Still, the two officials behind the plexiglass were quite courteous in discharging their bureaucratic duties. And most of the supplicants were respectful of one another, though a pair of Eastern European guys who tried to horn their way to the front of the line were rapidly exiled to the back by the Senegalese mother. (She also upbraided an Italian citizen who tried using “I’m an Italian citizen” as a way of expediting the red-tape process. “We’re all human beings here,” she said, “so don’t think you can get away with that!”)

The most intriguing foreigner was an Ecuadoran sculptor who works in marble. The nearby quarries in Carrara are world-famous: Michaelangelo got his materials there, and for over two millennia, beautifully veined and flecked stones have been taken from Carrara deposits. The Ecuadoran had been around Carrara marble for two decades, earning his keep from large firms as well as from individual commissions. He needed to sort out his visa issues before an upcoming work-trip to Turkey; he’d just returned from another trip to Lebanon. He told us about being hired by “the Pope,” which is to say, the Vatican—a commission that did a lot for his career, he asserted proudly.

Standing on the metal staircase in the warm sun, listening to the Ecuadoran’s lilting Italian, noting his chipped nails and rough hands, picturing him sitting in front of a block of marble and a bunch of tools, I tried to imagine what sort of sculpture this man might produce. Marble is cool, hard, and lovely. It’s also surprisingly domesticated. I envision countertops, chopping boards, and mortars, those old-fashioned devices (used with pestles) so useful for mashing garlic. But then the word mortars leads me to mortals, which in turn leads me to morte and muerta and Tod and dood and zgon and smart and all the other words for death in languages around the world. I think too, not cheerlessly, of tombstones. (Sometimes, said the Ecuadoran, people want doves with their angels, and sometimes not. That’s one way he makes his money—taking out the doves.)

On line at the questura in Massa, this sculptor was very far from his birthplace. Perhaps, on certain days when the light in this part of Tuscany is slanted, against all odds, just like that in Quito, Ecuador—a city almost at zero latitude, nearly in la mitad del mundo, the middle of the world—the sculptor begins mentally sketching something in marble, just for himself. Not an angel or dove; nothing to immortalize himself, or sanitize loss. Nor to suggest death’s permanence. This artist is, after all, very much in the middle of the world—a world thronging with impermanence, with people making their way up metal staircases and into crowded waiting-rooms in cities far from their homelands, hoping to sort out their so-called status and to give their infants a shot at something like stability, a safe sojourn. Perhaps the Ecuadoran has dreamed of making himself a marble flag: the flag of himself, one of “all human beings here,” which, thanks to his art, will seem to be wafting idly in the breeze, yet will in fact be grounded and steady. Proof of identity: like fingerprints, but ever so much lovelier.

At a recent evening of “medieval reenactments” in the nearby borgo of Ponticello— a very old and lovely village with lots of alleys, staircases, and passageways, off which numerous door-less “rooms” (more like caves) make wonderful showcases— craftspeople of all stripes set up exhibits of their wares. Naturally an element of kitsch was unavoidable, yet the event had its charms, along with one major surprise.
        There were the usual makers of linen and wool things for body and home, cast- iron and ceramic objects, soaps and candles, homemade jams and jellies. The smell of porcini funghi pervaded one corner, deliciously. An old woman offered us chestnuts (one of this region’s mainstays, sentimental as well as alimentary) that would put any Fifth Avenue vendor to shame: they were sweet, fresh, slightly chewy morsels. Insubstantiated ideals, I swear: the Platonic Form of Chestnut, in fact.
       Providing assistance and entertaining themselves, a number of village kids dashed around in vaguely medieval outfits. They performed such tasks as beating mattresses draped over a stone wall (hear ye, parents: there’s no better way to help your brood get out their ya-ya’s!); ironing hand-towels (an extremely heavy, cumbersome iron strained the biceps of one poor lass); and sausage-making (undertaken by a hefty boy who ate loads of ground meat on the sly while helping his nonno crank the handle of an old table- top machine—as serviceable now as the day it was made—which pumped the meat into casings).

 And then there was Francesco Pellegrini.
      Signor Pellegrini works in a medium rare among artists anywhere: nuts. Using tiny scalpels and tweezers, he scrapes out the innards of walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds, creates little figures from those leavings, then sculpts and assembles tiny mises-en-scene within each hollowed-out nutshell. As if all that weren’t complicated enough, he sometimes embeds nut-stages within nut-stages, using hinges—so you can open a nut like a matryoshka, find another, open it, find another…

What figures does he implant in the nuts, what drama is he enacting over and over? He’s made hundreds of little nut-theaters, and in each one the same cast of characters appears: il presepe or the Holy Family—which is to say, Joseph, Mary, Jesus, and a couple of animals: a donkey and a cow.

Francesco Pellegrini is a man obsessed with one particular family. He is anything but faithful to its original locus, however. He’s done a few traditional manger scenes, but they’re not what sustain him. Instead, he likes putting the family in all manner of unexpected settings. There’s the Holy Family on a Carousel, the Holy Family Taking a Trip, the Holy Family in a Bottlecap, the Slow Holy Family (on a turtle’s back), the Holy Family of the Tailor (in a thimble and, astonishingly, the eye of a needle)—and dozens more, comic and often unexpectedly moving. The artist has envisioned the Holy Family in places you and I couldn’t hope to dream up.

When asked questions about his creations, Francesco Pellegrini flashes a large easy smile. They’re just what I do, he says, I’ve been doing them forever, I like it… This artist has found what he can contribute: to his own store of contentment and purpose, and to the rest of us who gaze flap-jawed at these miniatures he chisels every day. His creations speak of habitation, human and other (for what are nuts if not hard-shelled homes for the soft, woody-sweet beings that live within them?), and they depict what’s coldly called the nuclear family (warmly: babbo mamma bambino)—without forgetting animals and their intimate proximity to our daily lives. And this peculiar, unusual, ever- expanding collection of nut-works does something else as well: it celebrates hard-to-see- ness, easily-overlooked-ness. Nuts aren’t supposed to contain multitudes, after all, nor even a couple of humans, their kid, and a pair of beasts; yet in this artist’s mind, they do. (“I could be bounded in a nutshell,” said Hamlet, “and count myself a king of infinite space…”)

Francesco Pellegrini’s work embodies…what to call it? Faith? I wouldn’t use that word. Nor belief. I’d say an ease with ineffability, with all that cannot be put into words yet shapes our daily sense of what’s real. Even if the Holy Family means not a whit to us. It means niente to me; yet as I peer into Francesco’s miniature theaters and see the tiny figures there, I feel they’ve been gathered by him not for safety’s sake but to do something essential—what Cormac McCarthy’s character “the man” in his marvelous novel The Road called “carrying the fire.” “There is no god and we are his prophets,” the man says. But also, of the fire: “It was always there. I can see it.” And, of his child: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

Last night I heard a public talk by Romano Prodi, who served several times as Italy’s prime minister in the 1990s and during the first decade of this millennium. (He alternated with the execrable Berlusconi, whom Prodi resembles not in the least).
          He’s around seventy now, quite hale, and affably smart. Roughly four hundred people came to sit in the main piazza of Pontremoli (a town near our village of Castiglione del Terziere) to listen to their ex-leader’s take on reality, his what’s- happening-now narrative. Unlike a lot of politicians, Prodi is able and willing to take the long view, and he managed to synthesize various events of the past six decades with admirable clarity. He spoke at length about the serious problem of unemployment for young Italians, and as he did so, I couldn’t help but notice that most of his listeners were over fifty—and at the bar in the piazzetta around the corner, a dozen or so noisy young Italians were drinking themselves into serious reality-forgetfulness.
          Prodi ad-libbed for quite a while. The phrase that most stuck in my head wasn’t something he himself said, but something one of his Chinese students (he’s currently teaching at an international business school in Shanghai, and is also a professor-at-large at Brown University) asked him recently, which he shared with the audience: What’s Europe now—a laboratory or a museum? Is Europe a place of forward-looking experimentation, or a calcifying monument to past greatness?
          This got me wondering what sort of question I might ask Obama or Romney if I were invited to one of their intimate fundraising dinners. What’s the USA now—a functioning democracy or a politicians’ whorehouse, where the “public servant” with the most money gets to fuck whomever?
          Don’t get me wrong: I’m voting for Obama, of course. But without illusions. The mess we’ve made of our body politic can be cleaned up only if there’s real campaign finance reform, and I’m not seeing any politician on the horizon who’s willing to wave that banner.

When I returned home from Prodi’s talk and entered our village, I was greeted silently by several figures—some standing, some sitting—who’ve been here since the start of summer. They’re creations of Andrea Poggipollini, a Bolognese artist who’s installed them in unexpected places: on balconies, towers, walls… They seem to be pondering some large question without answer.

       One figure is in a little cave, behind a screen on which light is projected; the viewer sees him only in silhouette. He’s seated, grasping a glass, perhaps in a toast— to himself, to unanswerable questions? In any event, he seems unconcerned about the problem of not-knowing. Elsewhere, strewn about the village (on placards on the ground, on walls, in windows—sometimes with accompanying photos) are bits of the artist’s poetry, along with other wisps and tendrils of verse written by the owner of our village’s castle, Loris Jacopo Bononi, himself an accomplished poet and author.
       It’s altogether a clever and accomplished collaboration, visual and verbal. And it’s good to come back, after an evening in the arid desert of political discourse, to this little poetry-oasis—where no one pretends to have a clue, but at least there’s some moisture in the air.

 

I AM living in—and writing this from—a liminal place, an in-between region.
      Lunigiana is formally Tuscan but ignores the label; it’s not Ligurian or Emilian, either. It’s been inhabited and cultivated for millennia. Located between the Mediterranean coast to the west, Tuscany to the south, and the Emilian plains to the north, Lunigiana is scored northwest-southeast by the Appennine and Alpi Apuane mountains. An ancient pilgrims’ route known as the via Francigena meanders through the region; all year long, backpackers hike this trail, their plastic water bottles bobbing at their sides. Some are day-trekking couples or groups; others, solo seekers-after-truth. (Whether their thoughts tend toward death is anyone’s guess, though I expect it’d be difficult to tromp for days in silence without thinking of the moment when all tromping will cease.)
      This in-between region, crisscrossed for centuries by people who don’t actually stay or live here but traverse it in all directions, seems to reflect my own inner landscape, now that I’m not in Brooklyn, not at my university, not around English-speaking people, not under the influence of the presidential campaign season, not on vacation but sabbatical, and not about to return Stateside unless something urgent calls me home…
       The house my husband Antonio and I inhabit is, in its own way, also a liminal space. It sits midway along a narrow alley running parallel to Castiglione’s sole street— though that phrase scarcely applies to the cobbled, extremely steep lane that ascends all the way to the castle gate, and is barely wide enough for the passage of the smallest possible Fiat or Honda. The few cars that undertake the brief, vertiginous journey suffer for it; their sides and bumpers invariably get scratched by the houses flanking the lane. Going downhill terrifies me; I picture our old, battered VW’s brakes failing, the car gaining speed, aimed headlong at stone… Mostly we avoid the drive, instead hauling stuff up and down the lane in our arms or by handcart, and leaving our car in the little piazza at the foot of the lane, where the provincial road dead-ends.

WE are not the only ones setting up a home here in our house. There’s also a spider I’ve dubbed Joseph, whose engineering prowess is such that we have ceded him half the terrace.
      We came downstairs several mornings ago, opened the terrace doors, and saw, backlit, a perfectly made spider-web suspended—without guy-wires, or so it seemed— halfway between one of our four plastic chairs and a beam supporting the terrace’s roof. The web seemed to be afloat, a little craft bobbing gently on the breeze. It took us several moments of peering to locate the fine iridescent threads leading from web to chair and web to beam—a span of nearly four feet.
       How did he construct this marvel? He must’ve jumped from the beam, playing out filaments as he dropped, then skittered over to the chair and attached some filaments there, then somehow connected them… Did he have to pause to think, uh, what’s the angle here? Did he make mistakes, curse, have to re-do his work at some point—like tearing out rows of knitting? Do spiders tolerate such trial-and-error? Do they go mad with despair when they suddenly realize the consequences of being a half-millimeter off course? Confronted with such conundrums of their own making, are they guilty Catholics, knotty Jews, calm Buddhists? Is there any spider-Allah they might pray to?

HOW lucky for Joseph, at any rate, that neither Antonio nor I barged into his web, having failed to see it! Without the sun’s help he’d have been the victim of a spiderly version of a natural disaster. Having no desire to play this role in his life—and so as to remind ourselves of Joseph’s presence when the sun shifts, and he and his web become invisible to us—we’ve moved the table and the other three chairs to one side of the terrace, well apart from him. That way, we figure, we can’t possibly take him down, though a wasp or bat certainly could.
        In fact, something might already have done a slight bit of damage: two small holes mar the otherwise perfect concentricity of the web. Joseph’s windows, I think of them as. Who knows, perhaps he made those holes himself—out of a need to disturb the symmetry, rough up the place a little, or remind himself of the need for constant vigilance.


JOSEPH is small and, in direct sunlight, vividly orange; otherwise, he’s the usual brown of most spiders.
        He doesn’t seem to be catching a whole lot of prey. For the past two days, we’ve seen nothing in his web but one or two tiny specks, which could as easily be dust-motes as miniscule insects. Our spider doesn’t appear to do much, at least during the day. He’s inert.
       Antonio says Joseph’s probably just exhausted by his labors; I’ve sometimes fear he’s died of them. And yet today, after breakfast, I saw his little body jerk slightly, as if he were dreaming of something that distressed him. Then he settled back into sloth. Why that brief shudder? Was he berating himself for having put so much energy into a task that was aesthetically satisfying but wasn’t netting him enough to eat? Was he thinking that although he might have a bit of talent for spinning threads, he lacked any reliable sense of where to position himself, whether to move or stay still, how to trick and lure his prey? I can relate, Joseph, I told him. You’re like lots of writers.


AN ELDERLY villager who’s offered to bring us fresh eggs has told us about life in the village years ago, when her husband was still alive and more people lived in Castiglione year-round: how most homes lacked bathrooms, how she used to have a garden but couldn’t deal with it any longer, too much work… I imagine the eggs: slightly warm, having so recently emerged from some hen’s body. She (the hen, that is) must feel enormous relief, ridding herself of such cargo. Joseph, on the other hand, surely wants to engorge himself, despite his seeming lassitude. We all have our desires, some urgent, some optional; we’re lucky if we can find or make a place from which to launch ourselves into their fulfillment. (I think of Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider”: …to explore the vast, vacant surrounding / It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself...)
        The old woman wishes merely to walk down the path and share with us her modest bounty and a few tales; and I, dwelling for a limited time in a stranger’s stone house, want to receive them—and to give the old woman something in return, though what it might be I cannot yet know.

Too much is vying for our attention. We miss, overlook, fail to see. Or to hear-smell-
taste-feel. Each of us wants to be someone on whom nothing is lost, but we all know we
aren’t. Assailed by What’s Happening each day. we go into a crouch, put our hands over
our heads, and think oh please, don’t tell me!—don’t ask me to be aware of yet more stuff
I don’t know about…I just can’t absorb anything else!

Social media, news websites, and blogs: they’re a swamp, making us feel like we’re
going glug-glug-glug into quicksand… Or they’re a particle collider, making us feel like
atoms being smashed at absurdly high speeds. We’re stuck in/to/with them, in any case!
With all these words saturating the info-cloud and then raining down on our heads…

I wonder if a Slow Blog movement might do something analogous to the slow-food
movement: put writers and readers more deeply in touch with the pleasures of language
and the challenges of narrating—both of which take time and solitude to appreciate. So
here’s what I’ll lob into this “Wanderings” blog: stuff for you to ingest at your leisure.
If you like, cook up something of your own and leave it on the table for the next person
who meanders here. It’s good to make and eat word-meals by yourself, and even better
to share such food with others. And to make the feast moveable—to shift mental and
physical locales, to relish rather than fear now what…?

I look forward to hearing from fellow foragers.