I attend tonight the longest reunione of Scala Colore ever. Lawren is chained to the computer, finishing work for her clienti Americani, so I make the bus ride out to Borgo Roma by myself. Didn’t think they could top the one from last December, just before we left for the States, which ran an astounding six hours, but tonight they break the record by a solid hour. I am there from eight in the P.M. ’til three in the A.M., stumbling back to the Vicolo wrung out and wooden-mouthed from toxic espresso (they need to clean their little stove-top coffee maker!) and ice-less tap-water, head spinning from following rapid-fire hipster Italian and struggling to express myself.

Three good things are achieved, however. Firstly, I get an “ok” from Fedino to pursue our “Italiano per Stranieri” project, which we have already described to our fellow students at Dante Alleghieri and are prepping to initiate. Another cool thing, I am offered space to do an art performance, think I’ll crank out a bunch of automatic sketches in my Steve Keene-esque mode and sell them for an euro apiece. This will be a great chance to feature myself simply drawing, which is what I do best. So many times, I’ll be sketching in bars or in a coffee shop, during the Scala Colore meetings or in our Italian class, and notice that people are staring at me, mesmerized by the process. The spectacle of someone drawing is always interesting, but I like to think I have a personal flair. I go fast and with a certain autistic focus, it’s probably kind of neat to watch. Could be a good way to spread my name around as well. Lastly, there is a new group project, a kind of “exquisite corpse” piece we’ll be contributing to a group show somewhere outside Verona. There are only ten spots for participants, but by sticking it out ’til the bitter end of this interminable meeting, I got us on the list.

For the Festa della Liberazione, we participated in an immigrants’ rights march.

The march wound through Centro, but the mayor wouldn’t allow protesters to walk through Piazza delle Erbe or Piazza Bra.

They call Tosi “the Sheriff”.

Which side are we on????
Despite the blockades, it was quite easy to walk past the officers into Piazza Bra.

We’re getting pretty political up in here. Today, under roiling skies and intermittent showers of warm Spring rain, we join the Verona march for libertà, protesting the current nativist shift in Italian politics. We are right in the middle of smug, prosperous, right-wing Verona, a city recently taken over by this Lega Nord mayor, Tosi, who came on with a law and order platform and lots of push to kick out the immigrants, excepting, presumably, the thousands who keep the economy running by taking all the crappy jobs Italians don’t want. (Does this sound familiar, Americans?) A hostile reception to the demonstration was generally expected, and Tosi did not disappoint.

Firstly, he forbids the march from passing through Piazza Bra, awkwardly splitting the route and denying the demonstrators a true rallying point. The idea is to keep the rabble moving. Secondly, Tosi deploys an army of blue-helmeted riot police, shutting down all side-streets and periodically blocking the forward progress of the march. The message from il sindaco is clear; I view this group with distrust and will have recourse to whatever means necessary to control it. The crowd numbers around three thousand and is noisy, though totally well-behaved. Sometimes L. and I mourn the preponderance of scruffy, pierced, boozy pot smokers in demonstrations like these; it makes for such a stereotyped portrait. Still, there are some cool Italian cats, old guard lefties waving the red flag of their newly disenfranchised party. Quite a few kids join the march with their parents, and, of course, there is a strong multi-national showing. One of the signs points out that the patron saint of Verona, San Zeno, was a black North African.

Fortunately, despite the belligerent stance of the “Tosi regime”, there are almost no incidents. One kid scuffles with the cops near Porta Nuovo and is lightly injured, but at no time does the scene blow up. The marchers will take credit for this, citing their success at peaceful assembly, and the city will congratulate itself on its’ no-nonsense show of force. Are attitudes changed or even shifted? Who knows, but it feels good to walk and holler.

Big dinner party tonight. We have Rebecca or “Bebe”, ‘Cesco and his fianceè Cecilia, and our new buddies from Lille, France, Geoffroy and his wife Gaelle. As with our Easter party, there is no single fluidly spoken language between us, so we defer to Italian. Lawren has gotten together another of her Indian feasts. I will cook tandoori chicken on the grill, L. did the hearty potato and cauliflower dish with the green beans on the side, there is raita and lime pickle, beer and wine, and that slow sunset blue of our killer terrazzo.

As it turns out, the food is less than perfect somehow. I struggle to keep the grill hot and there is too much chicken to cook, so some of the pieces end up just a tiny tad pink; this is a major embarrassment for an aspiring grill master. Lawren doubled the recipe on the potato dish and somehow the spices aren’t booming like usual. We can’t shake the feeling that the cuisine didn’t go over so well. Nobody got seconds. Oh well, we all drank and talked and laughed a lot, so va bene.

Social efforts are strange. This year, more than the previous two, we are really in the mix with all kinds of folks here in Verona. Seems like every week we’re juggling people imperatives. We find ourselves fantasizing about escape, missing those first months when we felt totally anonymous. It’s funny, I remember the night we officially met Mariella and she invited us to join her little dog group. It occurred to me at that moment how quickly we would be pulled into the Verona orbit, being the kind of people who make fast and firm connections. There would be no avoiding this process. On the one hand, we seem to need people, as the song goes. Lawren and I take pleasure in the connections we make, learn from and even profit from them. We know it’s what one ought to do, to place oneself in the flow of human life. On the other hand, this effort can be exhausting and vaguely saddening. How can one be truly close to another person? How can we know them, how can we really help them? It’s a big world out there, and the more people you contact, the more you sense the unknown and un-reachable mass of others. Makes me feel tiny and wrung out from time to time.

The votes are in and the bad guys win. Berlusconi and his center-right alliance cruise to victory, winning handily with the help of the loathesome Lega Nord. I read in The New York Times about the Lega capo, this slack-faced brute Umberto Bossi, hollering “the Lega is strong!” as the results arrived. The mood among the electorate is salty, to be sure, the dominant undercurrent a damp and aimless anger. There is no sense that winds of change are blowing, though Berlusconi’s alliance probably has enough votes to resist parliamentary collapse. It’ll be easier to bash immigrants within the legal system and taxes will be cut. But the fact is, this is the same old cast of characters who ran the country for five years before Prodi’s truncated term, most of them with serious Mafia ties and totally invested in the weakened system as it currently exists. How can these guys change anything? And the worst part is, the electorate rejected Veltroni, a guy who actually seemed like a serious politician, centrist and flawed to be sure, but someone you could possibly respect. It’s like the Italians want to punish themselves.

Had an evening at Fede’s, going over the whole disaster. The far-left was entirely marginalized in the voting. There is no longer representation in Parliament for the Italian Communist Party. Many of them actually went over to the Lega, a wild electoral swing which serves to indicate the rebellion and negativism among the Italians. How does it feel when you don’t recognize your country anymore, or at least don’t see the ideal of your country as somewhere on the horizon of possibility? This is where we are, Fede and I and so many like us, watching in disbelief as the worst take the wheel, the best are enervated and marginalized, and those in mid-pack mindlessly vote their spleen, or withhold their vote in sullen indifference. I tell Fede the story of November 2004, when Bush and his boys waited till the polls closed and they’d stolen Ohio to level Fallujah, how it felt that morning of weeping rain to see the story on the cover of the New York Times as I got my gas station cup of coffee. Back then, we had hoped the vileness of Bush would out. We were wrong. Similarly, we had hoped Veltroni would squeeze past the widely discredited and ridiculous Berlusconi, just as we hope a Democrat will beat this fake maverick McCain; hope springs eternal.

Chiesa della Bastia in Isola della Scala.

This church is almost a thousand years old. see more photos.

Santa Maria Maggiore in Gazzo Veronese.

detail of Santa Maria Maggiore in Gazzo Veronese.

While Lawren researches Roman-esque churches in the area, I tear through the last of Josh and Audrey’s invites, scoring all the folds so they can press them into shape and send them off. This wedding will be fun. Their long-time buddy and ex-roomate Vera’s dad owns an agriturismo in the Tuscan countryside near the town of San Gimigniano. Josh and Audrey have the whole joint reserved for the weekend of the wedding, late July. Lawren and I already booked our room. We’ve seen the pictures on the web-site and it looks awesome. Best part is, we can bring Mary.

We have three churches to see, so we swing by Borgo Roma to drop off the invites at Josh and Audrey’s and head out to the flat-lands in the direction of Mantova. This area is interesting. It’s developed to the hilt agriculturally, a totally flat plain of moist, fecund earth which has served as a regional breadbasket for centuries. Everywhere you see these stands of tall, elegant trees (what kind of trees are they?) planted in clusters along a tight grid so that, as you drive by, they form a perfect demonstration of vanishing point perspective. You see fields stretching back for acres and criss-crossed by canals where they grow rice, a specialty of this area. There’s a fair number of vineyards and orchards too, everything nicely tended and clearly yielding well. It’s a land of plenty.

In the little town of Isola Della Scala we ask someone on the street, “dove si mangia bene?” (“where’s a good place to eat?”) and are directed to an unassuming trattoria with the look and layout of a small Shoney’s, but without the salad bar. I think it was called Casa di Riso. Anyway, the specialty is risotto, which is big in this region since the stuff is being cultivated everywhere. It’s late in the lunch cycle but the padrone kindly hooks us up; we are the only two people in the place other than the padrone, the cook, and a couple of kids running around, playing. We order what is called a “tris”, a sampling of three risotti. The first is a tawny radicchio, the second green and actually made with ortica or nettles (“quelli che pungono” the padrone says- we recognize the verb pungere, to sting, when we ask him what’s in it), and the third is sausage with a hint of cinnamon. It’s risotto the way it ought to be eaten, right out of the pot, a little soupy, and sprinkled with finely ground parmigiano.

In and around the one-road towns and agroscapes we find our churches, built in stone and brick. Lawren loves that they rest at ground level. The form is direct and simple, long naved and usually without transept, peaked facade with a central window two thirds of the way up. That was back when Christianity still had some mystery, still had a tough, underdog identity. There’s no fru-fru here, no Bernini-esque finery. A tall ceiling to be sure, one which serves to suggest an area above us for which we yearn and to which we aspire, a space accommodating for those who would seek shelter, a structure solid enough to stand for centuries un-moved by wind and weather, but none of the puffed-up, self-satisfied, showy vibe of Vatican City.

These churches don’t make me believe, or yearn to believe, in God- it’s too late for that as far as I’m concerned. But they do suggest to me a humble and earnest effort, carried out in good faith and with honest sweat. The fact that the craftsmanship on display is not of the highest, or was from a period before certain advanced methods were employed, lends a certain hand-made charm. The great beauty lies in the cloak of ages, in the worn stone, in the air of human yearning and human passing. These churches were built to house and inspire the faithful, not to cause fear or to awe. They welcome the heart, even one such as mine, hardened and skeptical and convinced in my un-belief.

We noticed a castle while driving home from Desenzano.

View of Lago di Garda from Desenzano.

We take a rest on an unexcavated part of the villa.

We got the rental again for the weekend. There was no particular errand this time, just a general desire to bust out of Verona and kick around the region alittle. We are helping Josh and Audrey score and fold the artsy invitations for their wedding in July. Lawren helped Audrey do the lay out. She (Audrey) had the idea of doing their invite in the form of that kid’s game where you fold a piece of paper into a four-faceted, hinged configuration and manipulate it with your fingers, a kind of fortune telling game. Josh and Audrey had come by last Saturday with the printed pages but there was a sizing problem. There are a lot of folds to make and everything must line up pretty exactly. So Lawren tweaked the layout and now we have a second batch of invites to work with. Before taking off on our giro, we score about half of the hundred or so invites, talking confusedly with Giorgio, who has stopped by to see if he can help us fix the second computer. What a sweet guy, but kind of clueless at times. He’s got the hard-drive from the second computer in his hand, with all our music, photos, art pics, and blog writings, swinging it around like a ciabatta. Meanwhile L.’s getting nervous watching him, I’m furiously scoring paper, and De Andre plays on the stereo. Welcome to The Vicolo.

Today we head to Desenzano to view the mosaics of a Roman Villa. It’s right in the center of town, a kind of oasis. You exit the tourist hubbub of the town center with its hundred gelaterias and all that crappy merchandise to find yourself on this quiet acre of Roman air. The site dates to the First Century B.C. when Desenzano was a popular vacation spot, though the mosaics are from much later, Fourth Century A.D., and in that style of The Villa Casale in Sicily. I picture these wealthy Roman cats, skipping out on the stress of Rome and looking to recreate their opulent lifestyle in some new locale. What better spot than this mystical piece of real estate, right on the banks of the glacial lake with it’s vast shores, circling mountains, and, barely visible, that mid-water spit of the Sermione peninsula.

The folks who run the museum are so cool. They let us bring Mary onto the grounds of the scavo so we don’t have to leave her in the car. There’s a rolling, grassy area where a whole section of the site is still underground. Bits of wall are sticking up through the mint-smelling grass. The oldest exposed section of the dig dates from more than three hundred years before they laid in the mosaics. How old is the U.S.A.? Was that like 232 years ago they signed the papers? Could it be we Americans lack a certain perspective, tramping around with our pre-packaged, exportable values, like we discovered the key for how to run a world? Strikes me that we’re pretty much rank upstarts, rookies on the historical stage who would do well to show a tad more deference.

We head back into Verona to meet Rebecca, our buddy from the corniceria on Nino Bixio. It’s her birthday today and we’re having a drink in the San Zeno bar where we first met Charlie. ‘Cesco and his (we hear just tonight) fianceè Cecilia will be joining us. They’re nice cats, this group. We feel good hooking back up with them since it had been awhile and our Italian is so much better these days. We are invited to dine on kebab with ‘Cesco and some friends as Rebecca has other plans for dinner, but we decline. We had planned to drive back into the colline and eat at the argriturismo we went to with Rolfe and Collette last summer, Agricola Biotto di Ugolini. Turns out that place has no Bancomat machine and we have no cash, so we are forced to head back down the road to another place we’d passed on the way. The proprietor at Biotto feels terrible about not being able to accommodate us, assuring us that this other trattoria is buona. We are running late, even by Italian standards, but they hook us up with a nice regional-style meal. Before heading back to Verona, we drive up to the hilltop town of San Giorgio di Valpolicella where the beautiful old Roman-esque chiesa of San Giorgio glows white like bones in its night-time spotlight. Another sacred location with Roman roots, hushed and venerable in the center of this closing down paese. We get the idea that we’d like to see more chiese in the Roman-esque style. There are several in the area around Verona. That’ll be tomorrow.