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?

LISTEN UP, lovers of extra-virgin olive oil: here’s the scoop on how the really good stuff
gets made.
          Everyone here in Lunigiana, the northernmost tip of Tuscany, knows something
about olives and their oil. The trees abound here, so it’s relatively easy to produce decent
oil—but making an exceptional product is another matter. You have to work hard and
fast during the harvest; your back and upper-body muscles better be in good shape, and
you better know what you’re doing. Plus, you have to be on good terms with a reputable
frantoio, the place where the olives get squished.

ON several recent, gloriously mild November days, a man named Roberto Magnani—
a neighbor of ours in Castiglione del Terziere—put me through a crash-course in the
creation of divine olive oil, which I will summarize for you.
         First, you first need to locate a moderately obsessive-compulsive fellow such as
Roberto (shown above) and hire him to supervise the cultivation and harvesting of your trees. If, like
Antonio and myself, you lack trees of your own but want some experience and are ready
to roll up your sleeves, you offer to lend a hand to Roberto when he’s harvesting his own
orchard. He’ll be amused by your ignorance and touched by your interest, and he’ll tell
you all kinds of stuff you can’t read in how-to books.
        Harvesting by hand is time-consuming and tiring yet peculiarly peaceful and
satisfying as well. Roberto cuts down branches of various sizes with a pair of scissors-on-
a-long-stick. He creates heaps of these branches; you take a box to a heap, pick up a
branch in one hand, and run the fingers and thumb of the other firmly along its length,
stripping off the olives. Thudding lightly, most of them will land in your box; some,
however, will land on the nets that Roberto’s spread all around. (You’ll gather them up
later, also by hand—and you’ll have to crouch, which will do a number on your back.)
You perform these operations over and over, stopping occasionally to admire the view
and drink some water.

        While you’re working, Roberto will discuss the basics. Never let olives sit
around on the earth for days; they must be picked up quickly once they hit the ground,
else they risk contamination. Harvest the olives before they get too mature; the young
fruit’s oil is lower in acidity and richer in taste. (Plump, ripe olives contain a lot of
water.) Once you bring your baskets and boxes of olives home, remove any leaves
and stems. There’ll be a dismayingly large quantity of these. The frantoio charges
by weight, and while all the leaves and some stems will get rinsed off during the oil-
rendering process, the bits of stem stuck to each individual olive will get crushed along
with its skin, pit, and fruit. Unless you want them to impart a bitter taste to the final
product—and you don’t want that, oh no!—you should pluck them off the fruit. It’s an
activity that Roberto does while watching TV. (Like crocheting, I asked him. Yes, he
answered, grinning.)
        Get your harvest to the frantoio no more than five days after you’ve collected it—
the sooner, the better. Make sure you choose a good mill; don’t go where people take a
lot of inferior olives or where production isn’t happening full-time during harvest season,
else your crop will be contaminated by bad olives or poorly maintained machinery.


AND the actual conversion of fruit to oil—how does that happen?
        You dump your olives into a big bin. They’re sent whizzing down a slide into a
machine that then shoots them into a big water-bath.

Once rinsed, the olives (by now sans leaves and twigs) are sucked into a pulping machine that churns them for an hour or so, reducing them to a muddy, unattractive paste. This paste is then further spun and extruded; another machine centrifuges it, separating solids from liquids. Finally, oil is parted from water, and what emerges from a spigot—sunny green in color, slightly viscous, and strongly scented—is your oil.

        No, you may not take it home and use it! You must carry it home in plastic jugs,
then decant it into airtight containers and store it in a cool dark place until April. Then
you take a bit of it to a lab to be analyzed it for acidity and other factors. And then, like
the proudest of parents, you design yourself a nice label for your newborn oil, and you
hand out bottles of this elixir to your pals.

EVEN two years after it’s made, Roberto Magnani’s olive oil is swoon-worthy.
        Here, he said to us after our first day of labor, take this bottle—I gave away all of
last year’s production, and this is the only bottle left from 2010. Use it within the month,
and keep it away from light and heat.
        We took that bottle home, assembled a hasty salad of frisee and tender local
greens (rather like Americans’ Boston lettuce), and splashed some of Roberto’s oil and
a bit of vinegar over it. Delicately spicy, silky yet substantial…the oil turned a simple
salad into a treasure. Closing my eyes as I ate, I visualized those small, pale-green orbs
studding Roberto’s silver-barked olive trees… Those edible gemstones.

     One moves to a new place for a year. Then, having lived in the new home for three and a half months, one returns to one’s actual home and spends a few weeks in all the old familiar places, before heading back to the new residence. And as one undertakes all this to-and-fro’ing, “home” loses and gains meanings, seems a notion at once indisputably real and utterly unreal…

     So I’m back here in Castiglione del Terziere, where cats currently outnumber residents, 3-to-1. What struck me most upon my return, four days ago? The silence. It’s splendidly quiet here, though the donkeys still bray when they please. There’s no subway rumbling under our little house.

     And no noisy election madness underway, either. No one to talk to, here, about how wacky Romney’s running-mate is, or how plastic Mitt himself is—plastic in the sense of endlessly malleable, and plastic in the sense that his body and persona alike seem composed only and purely of the stuff; and plastic, too, in the sense that watching this contender for the presidency, I cannot help but share Dustin Hoffman’s unnerved reaction at that moment in “The Graduate” when the LA businessman says to him “just one word—plastics,” and he realizes that the future lying before him is, well, lying to him.

     Another thing about Castiglione: cars are way smaller here than in New York! Or in Philadelphia, where my parents’ assisted-living community is located. Some of the residents there, my 88-year-old father among them, have hung onto the big honkin’ cars they bought fifteen or twenty years ago—hence the parking lot is quite something to behold…

     My father’s Lincoln Town Car is an old soul, black, with leather seats and the sort of deep cool purr to its engine that no ordinary cat could reproduce. Its dashboard is fake cherry wood, quite snazzy. When the car’s exterior started showing its age a few months ago, my father took a small paintbrush and some wall paint and re-did the whole rear end of the car. It now has a half-glossy, half-matte finish, très recherché.

     My father’s vehicle happens to look just like one of those superannuated car-service sedans that ply Park Slope’s streets and ferry folks to the airports. I once drove the Lincoln from Philly to Brooklyn and, in an effort to park it, tooled around a four-block radius for a solid half-hour, praying for some SUV to liberate a spot. At a stoplight, a young woman with a heavy knapsack tapped on my window and asked me frantically if I could take her to JFK. She was entirely serious, and I realized only after I’d declined that I could’ve earned an easy C-note by saying yes.

     My Italian husband, a true sport, doesn’t mind my father’s mafia jokes or mock-Italian accent. Indeed, Antonio even consented to hopping into the Lincoln’s trunk to prove that yes, a mobster could indeed fit a body in there, easily! It’s a lounge-worthy space. (Explaining the notion of “cement overshoes” to Antonio took a few moments, but he laughed when he got it.) We both marveled at how comfy the car was, how easy to drive, how nostalgia-inducing... How Romney-ish, really: a frightening waste of energy, a comic and vulgar emblem of power, a flashback to a myth of superiority that never had any validity yet has nonetheless managed—is still, alas, managing—to reassure a great many of our fellow-citizens, as well-wrought, well-funded lies can do.

     What’s the Republican Party now? A wholesale manufacturer of fear and prejudice. With those two poisonous products, it’s managed to drug roughly half our nation. May the other rough half (the 47 percent, a.k.a. the 99 percent) prevail…

I need to talk about cats. And about power.
      It is tedious to hear people who love their animals—dogs, cats, gerbils, you name it—extol their pets’ virtues. (Who wants to know about dear Chunky’s latest exploits? Anton Chekhov called his pet ferrets Quinine and Bromide, by the way. And Virginia and Leonard Woolf had a marmoset named Mitz. Humans come up with the goofiest names for their animals…)
     So I am not going to talk about a pet of mine (though there is, in Brooklyn, a black cat called Zora who is indeed a pet of mine—an astonishing creature, much beloved and deservedly so, though she is currently committing adultery with our housesitter). I am instead going to talk about cats for whom the notion of “you’re mine” is risible. About cats born and raised without houses or “owners” or a clear sense of where the next meal is coming from—or whether, during rain or snow, there will be dry cover anywhere, or if survival will even be possible. Or for how long.
     If you’re a cat in Castiglione del Terziere—my current village-home in the hilly region of Lunigiana, Italy—you’re used to scaling walls and roofs. This village is medieval, steep-laned, and rocky. If you’re born here, you soon develop good leg muscles, tough claws, and an appetite for whatever comes your way: you don’t fuss over food. You sun yourself by lying on warmed stone. You roam the undergrowth in the fig- tree orchard just above our lane, or you lie languidly beneath one of the half-dozen cars in Il Collo, “The Neck”—the dead end at the base of Castiglione’s main lane. Or you ingratiate yourself with 85-year-old Rina, who might let you hang out by her door, and will feed you scraps. You must descend to one of several nearby creeks for water, then slink all the way back up after quenching your thirst.
     If you’re lucky and were born in the castle atop the village, you’ll get meals up there now and then—provided by Loris Jacopo Bononi and Raffaella Paoletti, who live there and don’t mind cats in their kitchen. (They rescued the castle from utter ruin, when it was just a heap of stones, a cats’ playground.) The castle’s library, which contains first editions of Dante, Petrarch, and other medieval and Renaissance authors, would make any well-educated cat’s head spin. But if you’re a Castiglione cat, although you might embody certain qualities associated with Renaissance folk (e.g., multiple skills, an eye for pleasure, keen awareness of who your friends and enemies are, healthy skepticism about both imperial and divine power), you won’t have much time to deploy those qualities. You’ll be working on nothing other than staying alive and well.

Tristana, as Antonio and I have dubbed her, has adopted us.
     She’s a wily girl. Little, solitary, stubborn. A roof-dancer. Soft-furred, her tail slightly bushy. Green-eyed, her gaze slightly askance, as if all the world strikes her as being a bit off-kilter.
     Tristana first started showing up not at our front door but on our terrace, a place reachable only by (1) coming through the front door—something no cat does, since we close it behind us whenever we come or go; or (2) climbing from a neighbor’s wall to that neighbor’s roof, thence to another and another and finally to ours, then down from our roof to the terrace. Trust me, it’s super-tricky getting to the terrace if you don’t walk in the front door. (If you’re not a cat and you try it, you’ll roll off and die.)
     Tristana was adept at all the maneuvers required. And careful not to let any other kitty follow her. She materialized on our terrace not long after we’d moved in, and watched us from the far end, taking our measure. Gradually crept in to grab scraps we’d leave for her near the terrace door. Then began showing up on the balcony outside our bedroom each evening. Inched closer to the bedroom door-window. Took to sitting there, staring impassively as I sweet-talked her. Grabbed and dragged to one corner a few bits of mozzarella I offered her. Bided her time til she felt sure I wasn’t going to do her harm.
     Long story short: Tristana now has me (and hard-hearted Antonio, too!) wrapped around her paw. We don’t allow her to spend the night inside, but she’s commandeered a chair in our living-room, on which she lounges, princess-like, for several hours of each day. In between naps, she accepts the prosciutto, fish scraps, and other delicacies we give her. For the longest time she rebuffed all my efforts at petting her, evasively corkscrewing her delicate little body each time my hand drew near. Recently, though, she’s decided that a bit of ear-rubbing would be a nice thing. And while I’m at it, a bit of side-rubbing too. And some backrubs. Again, please. Oh, and some more dry food. And a bit of water.
     All right, this account threatens to turn into one of those paeans to a pet that I (and you, reader) find obnoxious. So I shall stop. The point, anyway, wasn’t to focus on Tristana, though (as you’ll see from the photo) she’s a beauty. The thing I wanted to convey was this: it’s equal parts interesting and unnerving to live in a place amidst animals who are numerous (there must be thirty feral cats here!) yet wholly autonomous. Who count on the kindness of strangers—on Rina and Raffaella and myself—for food and affection, yet feel no need to express or even experience loyalty; it’s not an important virtue. Who respond to the pleasures of domesticity but know where to go at night when it’s cold, dark, and wet, and no human will follow them. Who fight and procreate and die in this village just as their fellow creatures have done for centuries.
     We, their human co-inhabitants, are bigger, and we have cars; we can move about without expending our bodies’ energy. We sometimes make things easier for the animals in Castiglione, but to them we’re mainly just part of the scene. We lack their kind of power, for we know nothing of all that goes on at night here—when the owls hoot and the donkeys bray and the wilder animals, those in the woods across the ravine (badgers, deer, perhaps a wild boar or two) make their noises, stirring and proclaiming and jeering and warning…
     We don’t know what they’re saying, can’t grasp their complex transactions. Must content ourselves with listening, if we awaken in the middle of the night, to an untrammeled realm—beautiful, terrifying—from which we’re excluded, and wondering what we’d do if we really had to survive there.

    Each September in the town of Colorno, near Parma, a very cool event takes place: the International Festival of Circuses and Street Theater, organized by Teatro Necessario, a trio of actors/street performers based in Parma. One of three, Jacopo Bianchini, is the father of Antonio’s grandson, Milo. (The latter is quite a charmer, and a lucky little boy: he gets to answer the question “what does your daddy do?” with “he’s a clown!”)

   This year, Antonio and I along with our dear friend Lynn (visiting from Boston, and not expecting—but happy—to be taken to see a bunch of clowns et al.) were given tickets to the event’s highlight: “L’Homme Cirque.” It was an hour’s performance by David Dimitri, a man who, according to numerous people in Jacopo’s line of work, has revolutionized the concept of a circus.

   I dunno about revolutionizing, but Dimitri sure blew us away. For starters, he works alone. This means he must organize all his props while performing—in addition to undertaking various mysteries of movement, as I came to think of them: things that left me scratching my head in wonder as I tried to figure out how he’d managed them.

   He started off by pretending to be a man without balance, teetering on one foot
as he changed from one pair of shoes to another. Then he put himself through a series of short problem-solving skits, never speaking a word but always smiling, his grin calm and unforced. It took me a little while to realize how extremely controlled his performance was, since he gave the impression of total ease. (He’s helped in this by the fact that he’s a handsome man, his body taut and elegant. But he’s also fifty years old, a bit long in the tooth for most circus performers.) Humor underlies everything he does, along with a palpable sense that danger and disturbance are everywhere and unavoidable, even necessary.

   What did he do? Dimitri put himself into, lit the fuse of, and got himself shot out
of a cannon he hauled onto his little stage. He dragged out a wooden horse—Helen of
Troy would’ve loved it!—and did acrobatic feats upon and with it, his love for the horse
as evident as it was perverse. And he walked a tightrope suspended above the stage,
getting onto and off it just as any cat would a fence. His movements were ceaseless, fluid,
sensuous. He’s got feet that work as hands might—equally as articulate, each muscle and
toe doing its job. The stories he told without words, through various balance-challenging
acts, were of a solitude strung delicately over an abyss of loneliness; of the attempt to
make things work right, and work out; of comedy as the only path possible through
thickets of distress.

   And his body shouted Freedom! with every move. I can think of only a few dancers (Bill T. Jones comes to mind) with that sort of command of a language, an entire vernacular of movement, which seems utterly instinctive. Dimitri is called a circus performer, but he’s really a dancer in the circus of his imagination.

   The ending of his show? He somehow slipped out through a hole at the top of his tent (which was small three hundred of us were shoehorned into it, barely able to move) and shimmied up to a tightrope strung outside. Follow me!, he called as he exited. And so we did, like the Pied Piper’s devotees. Craning our necks upward, we gazed at a marvelous sight: a man with a pole in his hands, traveling by foot from one end to the other of a tightrope high above our heads—each swing of leg and-foot, leg-and-foot a miracle of balance.

    I watched the rapt expression of Milo as he stared up at David Dimitri, magician on the wire, and thought, ah, che fortuna: you’ll always remember this.

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.