Library Heaven

To get inside the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, you first have to request a library card. Which means speaking with a certain Signor d’Onofrio, white-haired and voluble, who’ll make you fill out a form while he peppers you with questions and comments.
          What’re you looking for, he’ll ask.
          A book of poems, Antonio and I answer him.
          Ah!, he replies, I write poetry too. You need a password, what’ll it be?
          Zora, I say. My cat’s name—it’s one of Calvino’s cities in Invisible Cities.
         Ah!, he responds. So you like cats. And Calvino. Wait, I’ll show you around…
First, go put your things away. Just push past those people entering; I’ll signal to the front desk.
         Laminated cards in hand, we proceed to the entrance gate, where, after being scolded by Signor d’Onofrio, a very brusque woman allows us upstairs to stash our belongings in a locker. Signor d’Onofrio awaits us on the other side of the balky card-swipe machine, which won’t give us the green light. Never mind that thing, just come with me, he orders us. Let’s go to the courtyard first. I’m not supposed to take people there but…shhh…

        Forefinger to lips, he sweeps imperiously past the book-order desk, the two of us trotting on tiptoes behind him. He leads us to a corridor, a set of stairs, a closed door, another closed door. He opens it—and there before us is the beautiful interior cloister of the library, Il Chiostro del Rossellino, a place of utter tranquility smack in the middle of Florence.

       Bello, eh? he said. People don’t even know it’s here. Come, now I’ll show you our card-catalogue room. This library was built in the mid-Thirties, though the actual designs were drawn up early in the twentieth century. Amazingly modern—you won’t believe the furniture in that room. There’s more stuff in the basement, too… We don’t have the staff or money to take care of it, so we’ve had to put it in storage. Terribile, what’s happened to our library!

        He’s right about the furnishings in the card-catalogue room. The work-desks and lighting fixtures are Bauhaus incarnate: simple, elegant, seemingly weightless. But as we leave and follow Signor d’Onofrio around, what really stops the two of us in our tracks are the various works of art scattered throughout the library’s main floor. We come across painted ceramic sculptures by della Robbia, a couple of marvelous anonymous portraits of Petrarch, a wonderful terra-cotta David. Wow, we keep exclaiming. Sí, Signor d’Onofrio keeps concurring. You must come back! So much to look at!

       Of course we aren’t able to see the printed-matter gems of the library’s collection—four thousand incunabula, twenty-five thousand rare manuscripts, and who knows how many rare books would take months of visiting time. But we’re amazed by what’s openly visible: great art you simply stroll past en route to the bathrooms. The library seems woefully under-utilized. I find myself entertaining a fantasy in which I invite everyone I can think of to enter, then barricade the doors and serve them all champagne and let them walk through the collection, led by Signor d’Onofrio, who’d reveal countless thrilling bibliographic secrets. We’d all stay for weeks, living on nothing but bubbly and books, too excited and happy to leave…

        Signor d’Onofrio leads us back to his office, where he declaims a poem he wrote (so he says, proudly) on the occasion of his cat’s release from the veterinarian’s office, where she apparently spent several very un-fun days. We thank him profusely for his recitation and for the tour, accept a signed copy of the poem, wait a bit for the reference librarian to produce the volume of poems we’ve come for, get a few pages photocopied at a nearby desk, and are on our way.
        At lunch around the corner (tourist note: a little trattoria called Benvenuto on via dei Tintori, cheap and good), Antonio and I agree that no national library could possibly be more winning than this one. And that Signor d’Onofrio is likely to email us more poems—which he does: they await us when we return home.

Mullets in Porto Venere

What’s a mullet, I wondered after learning that triglia means mullet. I mean, it’s a fish,
but what sort of fish? I’ve never seen one before…

We were in Porto Venere this afternoon, a little town on the extreme southern promontory of the Cinque Terre, facing the Gulf of La Spezia. The little island of Palmaria lies humpbacked in its harbor, with Tino and Tinetto just beyond; Byron must’ve stared at them when he visited. (He swam from here to Lerici, or so the story goes.) In summer the crowds descend, but in February nobody’s hanging around Porto Venere on a Monday afternoon. The little bar where we went to warm up after our walk was empty, its owner startled to be asked for tea.

 It wasn’t particularly cold outside, in fact. We’d just finished sunning ourselves on the terrace outside a Gothic church that sits atop rocks at the harbor’s far end, where Porto Venere juts into the sea. The little chapel is cool, grey, calm. Portions of its floor date from the 6th century. Staring at the remains of what must’ve been a floral-inspired patterning of stone underfoot, I tried imagining (as I so often find myself doing in Italy) what “those people” must’ve been like, the ones for whom beauty was as much an imperative as faith was. Does it look good must’ve been a very compelling consideration for an awful lot of “those people”—else how did the floor of this tiny church (and countless other sacred places dating from this period) get so good-looking, when so much else must’ve been vying for attention and energy?

Up on the rocks, taking in a solacing view of the Mediterranean after weeks of rain and damp (and bronchitis) in Castiglione del Terziere, we watched a small fishing-boat make its way toward the harbor, bucking against the waves. It went at a good clip. We made our own leisurely way back down to the docks, where the boat, by now docked, was doing a bit of business: some townspeople had lined up to buy fresh fish. An impromptu, pop-up mercato was underway.

We joined the queue. Surveyed the gamberoni and coda di rospo and seppie and naselli and polpi and cefali. In a container at the center sat a few dozen small, red-skinned, shiny things called (we were told) triglie. Let’s get those, Antonio said. He gave our order to one of the fisherman who, with little prompting, proceeded on a rant about the state bureaucracy’s disastrous recent decisions re: the size of nets, the right time to promulgate cease-fishing laws, the triumph of tourist traffic over real harbor-users, and several other local and national issues—all crammed into a monologue as bitter as it was uninterrupted, during which the fisherman frothed slightly at the mouth. He ended by calling the current political class of Italy a bunch of ladri (thieves), to which Antonio and I nodded in assent—though we were thinking of Berlusconi and his cadres, who may not’ve been the top ladri on the fisherman’s list. Handing us our catch (well, his, actually!), the man came off as generally miserable—his misery alleviated, I imagine, only by the daily bucking motion of his boat.

 We brought the triglie home, looked up their name—mullet!—and decided on a means of cooking them. Then dispatched Tristana outdoors, where she sat with Big Boy on the terrace, gazing hungrily through the glass doors at Antonio as he gutted and scaled the gift we’d brought back from Porto Venere. We prepared the fish alla Livornese (tomatoes, olives, capers, garlic, oil), served them with rice and chard and a bit of Vermentino to wash it down, and ate the whole shebang with relish. Then sat with hands folded contentedly over bellies.

Beauty, I thought, staring at my empty plate. Do I notice it, do I privilege it on a daily
basis? What place does it have in my consciousness? The sunset en route home had
been floridly pink-purple; the lichen on the steps up from the lane to our house had
glowed grey-green in the fading light. Tristana’s fur was cold and fluffy when I stroked
her after putting her food down; Big Boy’s was cold, too, and sleek as an otter’s. The
mullet tasted delicately sweet, the chard sharp, the rice nutty. The house smelled, after
dinner, of all those things and more: of centuries of dust and damp, sun and rain and ice
and more sun: the natural world’s encroachments and leavings.

Yet beauty’s not just that, I thought—not merely what my own or someone else’s
senses discern and deliver to me. Hard to say what else it is, though, without sounding
sentimental or facile or reductive. Or to know how best to acknowledge it. Scarf
it down or set it on a pedestal? Revere it or revel in it? Talk about it or stay silent
about it? All of the above? None, something else? Some tipping of another sort of hat
altogether? What I find beautiful may or may not exist in some confirmable way. Is
conjured by my imagination, produced by emotion as much or more than by intellect. Is
what stops me short, often so I’m teetering on a line between pleasure and discomfort,
even terror. Is often simple, clear, apparent, yet wholly insusceptible to language.

The fisherman would think such musings ridiculous. So would Tristana and Big Boy.
Eat and be glad, they’d say. And be always curious, surprised—that’s how best to be
grateful for it, for beauty… What sort of fish is a mullet, anyway?