Italy doesn't carry the weight of nostalgia that France does. I've visited only four times. (I have no pictorial record of the first three trips. All the photos in this post were taken in Milan last year.)



But that first visit, in early 1979, when a friend and I trained down from our home in Germany to do three weeks' youth hostelling, was definitely what I'd call formative. I'll never forget stepping blearily out of the railway station in Venice, and seeing the early morning light on the canal, and the profile of that inimitable skyline.

Italy was a revelation in so many ways. We gorged ourselves on art, visiting gallery after gallery. We were on a tight budget, so we ate very simply, but it was a joy to discover that pizza was sold in big slabs on the street, and that the ice-cream was as good as we thought it would be, and that the wine was cheaper than the bottled water. It wasn't such a joy to encounter a series of Italian men who were way more forward than our northern experience had prepared us for...



I didn't keep a diary back then, but I used to send envelopes full of postcards home to my parents. This was a good way, in those pre-internet days, of sharing my journey, and ditching some of the weight that was building up in my luggage. I eventually jettisoned the postcard collection when we upped sticks from Australia. But before I let them go, I noted their content:

25 February 1979: Venice. Have just eaten our lunch just outside the Doge's Palace facing a big canal. It's really warm in the sun, and there are loads of people about, as there's a sort of carnival on in Venice at the moment, where everyone dresses up and walks round, and everyone else sits around and watches them. That's the right sort of carnival, I think. Relaxing.

[I'm not sure if I was aware of this at the time, but the tradition of the Venetian carnival -- which goes back all the way to 1268, but had fallen by the wayside after the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1798 -- had been revived that very year, 1979, "in the same spirit that provokes American historical societies to organize mock battles on Independence Day or to stage charity balls with Victorian costumes and themes. The modern-day merchants of Venice quickly recognized the economic potential of this event, and a new Venetian Carnival was born." Anyway, to continue with the postcards:]

Venice is superb. We've walked round quite a lot of it, and it's just as you imagine it -- canals, gondolas, little squares with pigeons and fountains. Went to see St Mark's Basilica and the Doge's Palace yesterday, both really interesting. This morning we went to the art gallery. It's also lovely just to sit in the sun and watch the people.

28 February: Got to Florence yesterday. A bit sad to leave Venice, though. We'd got really fond of it. The train journey was quite nice -- through the mountains (a lot of it in tunnels, though). The Youth Hostel is in an old villa, which is very Italian-looking, and set in its own grounds. It's been very cold today, but Florence is really beautiful, with masses of lovely works of art. Yesterday we saw the cathedral and baptistry (the doors of which are on the p/c bottom right). The outside of the cathedral is pink and green and white. We climbed up the dome, to a lovely view. Today we saw the Old Palace and part of one of the art galleries. Amazing. We'll have to go back, there's really so much to see.

3 March: Assisi. Have had a few disasters recently but are surviving. It got very cold in Florence after the first day. I've managed to catch a cold, and my friend is getting one too. The Youth Hostel in Arezzo was grim, we got the wrong train this morning on our way to Assisi, and then found that we wouldn't get to our next place (Pescocostanzo) in less than eight hours, so we've given it up as a bad job, and are heading for Rome. Still, Assisi is so pretty that it's been worth all the trouble -- built on the side of a hill out of lovely pink stone, with little winding streets and fantastic views.

5 March: Rome. The weather is now gorgeous. Since we've been in Rome (two days), it's been incredibly warm and bright. Yesterday we went to Ostia, an excavated Roman city. Had a lovely day there -- very sunny and peaceful. This morning we went to the Colosseum and the Roman remains, and then in the afternoon we just wandered. Too hot to do much. It certainly has been a contrast, this holiday. Freeze in Florence, and roast in Rome. The traffic here is incredible. London rush-hour 10 x worse. We have had plenty of opportunity for observing Italian life. Plan to go to the Vatican tomorrow.

10 March: After Rome, we went to Pisa (the tower really does lean) for an afternoon, on the way to Lucca. Yesterday the weather was lovely -- it has been now ever since Rome -- and we had a day at the seaside, just walking along the beach and not doing anything particular. Our itinerary has shifted somewhat, and today we came to Genoa, a lovely, spacious city on the Italian Riviera. The sea is lovely here, and we had some good views from the train on the way up the coast. The p/c shows our Youth Hostel, the castle-like building amongst the trees. We have a lovely view of the sea. Tomorrow, we are heading for Milan.

_*_*_

There seem to be no postcards from Milan, or from Lake Como, which we visited on a day trip. By the time the next one was sent, I was back in Germany.





I didn't return to Italy until 1983. This was with another friend who lived in Germany. We'd talked about a road trip, but her car was playing up, so we opted for a German package holiday that took us by rail to Cesenatico, on the Adriatic coast, and included accommodation with full board in a simple but very pleasant little hotel. The food here was homely, and followed the quintessentially Italian pattern: a pasta course, a meat/fish-plus-vegetable course, and a light dessert. We spent a lot of time just wandering the town, and relaxing by the beach, but I also remember day trips to Ravenna, San Marino, and even back to Venice.



My third visit, a working trip, was in 1994 for the Bologna Book Fair.

Italian -- after that ill-advised subsidiary, and a few highly convivial evening classes run by a friend in the early 1980s -- faded from my agenda for a number of years.

But in early 1993, I'm writing in my diary about plans "to reactivate my languages", including Italian. I appear to have made an effort for a while, despite the demands of work.

In early November, though, the prospect of the book fair constitutes a new motivation:

"Today sees the launch of yet another Italian campaign. Out comes Italian for You, where we'll make another attempt to get to the end, and will no doubt get stuck in the middle again. Il Padrino [The Godfather] has resurfaced, with half the story still to read, left over from about February. Italia dal Vivo and Voci dall'Italia, Beginners' Italian, and Missione in Italia -- all are dusted down, and set ready for action. More recapping. More going through the beginnings with high hopes, never to reach the end...

"But let's be positive. Maybe I'll succeed in bringing my Italian up to reasonable reading and conversational standards by Bologna. That's the incentive and the goal."

There's obviously another lapse, but by the end of the year I'm back in the game:

December 1993: "I am up to Lesson XVII of Italian for You. I am by now utterly sick of Maria, Giulia, their boring life, and their totally tedious friends."

January 1994: "There are 11 weeks till Easter -- 11 weeks to actually get through these Italian courses, and not founder in mid-book as usual."





By the end of that month, I'd finished Il Padrino (it had taken a year -- not because the Italian was particularly difficult, but on account of all the stopping and starting).

At the beginning of February, I note an unexpected life lesson from Italian For You, in the shape of an extract from Dino Buzzati's short story The Bewitched Bourgeois. Climbing in the mountains, the protagonist, Giuseppe Gaspari, turns to observe the landscape:

"Despite the sun, he felt a sense of disappointment. He had hoped that the place would be in a romantic valley with pine and larch woods, surrounded by large walls. Instead, it was a valley of pre-Alps, closed in by squat peaks, panettone-shaped, which seemed desolate and grim. A place for hunters, thought Gaspari, regretting never having been able to live, even for a few days, in one of those valleys, those images of human happiness, dominated by fantastic cliffs, where white castle-shaped inns stand on the threshold of ancient forests, full of legends. And with bitterness he considered how his whole life had been like this: at the end of the day, nothing had been missing, but everything was always inferior to what he desired, a middle way that extinguished need, but had never given him full joy."

I decided to file the description in the "don't be like this" category...

And Italian study does continue. In March I'm enjoying Ignazio Silone's Fontamara, and recording:

"We went to Exeter, ... and did a couple of bookshops... I eventually bought three books: Il Fattore Umano (to continue the Italian theme), and PD James's No Apto Para Mujeres and Frederick Forsyth's Odessa (to begin my Spanish phase). I still cherish ambitions of reading these two as fluently and easily as French and German, and of not getting them muddled up. The problem is that I now have a vast backlog of books, and can't organize enough time to read them."

Yeah, well, that problem has never really been solved, even in retirement...

And finally, it was fair time. My diary is quite work-focused (it was a work trip, after all), but the Bologna experience obviously involved LOTS of food:

5 April 1994: It has rained all day in Bologna. But apart from that, it's been very enjoyable, although it's difficult to relax with the hard work of the fair so imminent. We strolled the main street, in the shelter of the arcades, enjoying the shop windows. We had excellent cappuccini, and later on, a pretty good dinner -- wonderful Pinot Grigio and good gnocchi. I had lots of comparatively successful little Italian conversations, and we managed to get hold of a plan of the town. From my window, I can see red, pan-tiled roofs, little balcony gardens, peeling ochre walls, and green slatted shutters.

6 April: I was woken by bells at 7 am... [The rest of the day was spent setting up the exhibition stand.]

We enjoyed an enormous, and excellent, dinner at the restaurant round the corner. Appetizers included fried polenta, and little spinach things, and little onion things, and little aubergine pate things. Pinot grigio. Pasta stuffed with cheese. Asparagus with an egg on top. Cappuccino with little nutty biscuits. All delicious...

7 April: [Again, we were busy all day on the stand, with a full agenda of appointments.]

Ristorante alla Grada is wonderful, with this marvellous head waiter who suggests things for you. It was fish night, and I made the most of that -- fish antipasto (a selection of all sorts of things); fish and rice as the primo piatto; fish alla griglia for the main course, plus a delicious salad, with lovely vinegar.

8 April: [Still full on at the fair. But...] Another wonderful Alla Grada meal -- excellent pasta, then vegetables alla griglia, then an amazing boozy trifle.

9 April: [Last day of appointments. I was so tired by now that I went home after the main course at dinner. Very unlike me.]

10 April: Today was the day we dismantled the stand. I can't believe the fair is over. It seems to have passed so quickly. It's a weird kind of time-warp, living like this. The day excludes the outside world, apart from brief glimpses on the TV over breakfast [some of those glimpses were of the unfolding tragedy in Rwanda], and revolves around getting ready in the morning, keeping going through the appointments all day, then dining socially in the evening. How wonderful it would be to have a week in the hotel with no fair to worry about. I could just concentrate on enjoying pre-dinner spremute, with olives and canapes, and breakfast in my room, watching Italian TV, and the best pasta in the world at Alla Grada.

11 April: A lovely day out in Florence with a colleague and two customers-who-are-also-friends. The train was late, but once on, we had a beautiful ride through the mountains. All it lacked was sun.

We lunched in a little trattoria. There was no menu, and it was full of businesspeople who'd popped out from their offices. Excellent pasta again.

We did bookshops, stationery shops, shoe shops, and clothes shops. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Italians have a wonderful design flair. There are so many really beautiful things to look at.

Touristically, we didn't do much. We strolled round the Duomo, and down to the Ponte Vecchio, now given over to the rather cheaper end of the jewellery market, it seems. But the beauty of Florence is that you can stroll so successfully. Narrow streets, green shutters, golden pink churches, glimpses down the river to the hills beyond, still snow-sprinkled, the lace-work of the cathedral -- I had forgotten it was so beautiful.

We had dinner back in Bologna at La Giostra -- good gnocchi and fish, and a lovely little lady serving us. A nice, homey place, where they give you extra little things to try, and let you have half-portions of dessert, and offer digestivi on the house. A really successful evening. Then a stroll back through the streets of Bologna, past churches and through arcades -- our first glimpses of Bologna proper since last Tuesday.

12 April: The sun shone this morning, so our last walk round Bologna was magnificent. It is so beautiful. The arcades, the two towers, one leaning crazily, the arched windows, the balconies, the narrow streets leading from glimpse to glimpse of beautiful buildings -- it's all wonderful. We discovered so many lovely food shops, displaying cheeses, picturesque piles of vegetables, fresh pasta, cakes...

I would enjoy spending some more time in Italy. I think they know how to live. Despite the chaos of some aspects of Italian life, there is a reassuring emphasis on the fundamentals, like food and home and clothing.

_*_*_





So, by the end of April/beginning of May 1994, my Italian was better than my Spanish, and the end of the northern summer sees me still working on both:

29 August: I've decided I need to get the Spanish and Italian going a bit more in tandem. Otherwise, one displaces the other. My aim is still to develop reading knowledge of both till it equals my French and German.

By the beginning of the following year, though, Italian has fallen a bit by the wayside. For many months, references to "Italian" are just to food and wine.

And then the tide ebbed... I embarked on a career in international relations, and French and Spanish were useful, but not really Italian. I took up Russian again. Then we moved to New Zealand, and my language focus became, both from interest and necessity, Asian and Pacific.

We weren't in Italy long enough last year to enable any major language revival, but Italians certainly appreciate one's efforts, however small, and it was nice to have the pained production of a slightly complex sentence rewarded with a big smile and a "brava".

So, now, in honour of this segment of my "shadow journey", and because -- one day -- I really want to return to Italy, I'm reinstating it as a language to work on, at least every now and again.