Story Frame 22 – Head over Heels in Italy

Pietrasanta, Italy

Sunday 31 May 1998

I awoke this morning in a sun-filled room at the Hotel Palagi.

The white interior with its vivid splashes of colorful art and woven rugs cheered me immensely. I got out of bed and threw open the windows and shutters to admire the view. In the distance, down the hillside, I could see the Tyrrhenian Sea, the portion of the Mediterranean that lies between the western coast of Italy and the islands of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily as if surrounded in an earthy embrace.

And if I twisted myself out of the window and looked up to the right, I was able to see the mountains. The hillside was covered in a pattern of aged terracotta roof tiles, little old stone houses, gardens and terraces and painted glass windows.

I unpacked in a state of bliss yesterday, putting everything away in drawers and hiding my suitcase and all other evidence of being a traveler, so I could pretend – if only for a few days – that I actually live here.

In the afternoon, when the marble carvers at Studio Cervietti stopped working for lunch yesterday, I wandered around the town, taking photographs of the streets and homes. This is the quiet time, between 2 and 4 pm when the shops are all ‘chiuso’– and everyone is at home eating and resting. Or perhaps, this being Italy, making love.

There were a few signs of life, however. I walked down the narrow little streets, watching kids kick soccer balls back and forth to one another, and hearing the unmistakable voice of singer Pino Danieli coming from under a house’s window shutters. Piano, classical, poured out from underneath another as someone practiced – unseen hands gracing the narrow street with music for those who had the moments to stop and listen.

I ended my walkabout sitting in the sun sitting in the sun on the steps of the 15^th century, St. Agostino Church in the Piazza del Duomo, writing in my journal for a few precious moments, as I waited for Martin, Richard and Ed to re-appear.

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and there were ‘fiori d’abertuto’ – flowers everywhere. And everywhere, absolutely everywhere, there was art.

Filming had now begun in earnest on American Byzantine and what a perfect location in which to film. Italian for “sainted stone,” Pietrasanta is an interesting little town on the upper west coast of Italy with a centuries-old tradition of marble artisanry. Over the generations, it has become a collective of artisan workshops, including Studio Cervietti, where ‘The Universal Call to Holiness’ was being carved and where we were filming.

With its “magical blend of past and present … many artists come to Pietrasanta to study, to work and to settle down,” states the town’s guidebook.

“Pietrasanta prides itself on not containing art to prestigious museums and galleries but instead has art all around – especially in the open air – for all to enjoy. More than 300 foreign artists live and study here, forming a unique community. The works of Fernando Botero, Igor Mitoraj, Kan Yasuda, Gonzalo Fonseca, Francesco Vessina, Giò Pomodoro and Novello Finotti have cycled through Pietrasanta on display for all.”

The production team's initial thought, in the early stages of the American Byzantine project, had been to fly marble carvers from Italy to the US, and document the progress as they worked on the art in the parking lot of the Basilica.

“Really?!” I said to Martin. “A parking lot?”

That felt completely wrong, and for so many reasons.

“This is film. It needs to be visually interesting. Who will turn on the television to watch a piece of art being made in a parking lot?”

Stealing Beauty, the film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Joseph Fiennes, Jeremy Irons, Rachel Weisz and Liv Tyler, the daughter of rocker Steven Tyler, had come out the year before, in 1996 – the year after Steve and I split up. I saw it with my mom, who would go to see anything with Jeremy Irons in it.

I was entranced by this film, imagining myself living in Italy as an artist. The soundtrack was moody, evocative and very cool with songs by Mazzy Star, Potishead, the Cocteau Twins, Sam Philips, Hoover, Axiom, Liz Phair, Lori Carson, Stevie Wonder, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and John Lee Hooker. Whoever put it together was genius. I purchased the cd, memorized all the songs and played it relentlessly the nights I was on my own, making pasta, drinking red wine, pretending I was living in Italy.

This was the backdrop in my head as I warmed to the argument with Martin.

"Viewers would rather see scenes from Italy than a church parking lot in northeast Washington, DC,” I said. “Instead of flying the marble carvers here, why don't we go to Italy and film them there?"

Logistically, we would not be able to film them as frequently in Italy as we would be able to if they were just across town. But did we need to film them frequently?

Besides, we had to go to Italy anyway to film scenes from the marble quarry where the source material for the carving would be blasted from the mountains, as well as some of the historic pieces, so shoots at the carving studio could easily be done at the same time.

Thankfully, I got my way and now there I was, waking up in Pietrasanta. In Italy. In another world.

The full-scale model had been cast in plaster, then cut into large pieces and shipped to Italy to Cervietti, an old-world studio and workshop in the heart of Pietrasanta specializing in the reproduction of classical and modern marble sculptures with a strong emphasis on sacred art. Their work was breathtaking, even for someone like me, who was not particularly religious.

Martin and I, along with cinematographer Richard Chisolm and sound guy Ed Roy, spent a few days filming at Cervietti, a plein air studio where artisans worked in outdoor sheds, open to the elements, liberating images from massive, millennia-old blocks of marble using techniques and brass & wooden instruments that predated the artisans themselves by many generations.

Inside the primary old building, there were dusty rooms filled with hundreds of sculptures and sculpture models of all sizes on the ground and on the rough wooden shelves; a hushed, still museum-like gathering of busts and bodies, winged angels, saints and Virgin Mary’s. More than a thousand sightless eyes were upon us as we passed through the impressive body of works in an atmosphere that was both magical and also slightly creepy.

Outside, we walked around this enclave of dust and light and statuary to a soundtrack of chisels clinking against stone and the gentle buzzing of saws against clanging church bells in the background – our mouths and apertures wide open to the sights, scents and scenes around us.

I watched Richard wander through the tall open-air carving areas of the studio, his heavy camera perched carefully on his right shoulder. Ed followed him closely, hoisting a boom mike high into the air as they worked to capture on film the carvers at work. With his brightly patterned green shirt, Richard was easy to spot moving amongst the pale white slabs of marble. His black pants had two cheeky chalky white handprints on their back pockets, as if one of the statues had playfully patted him on the ass.

All of the marble carvers wore a folded paper hat on their heads made from the morning’s newspaper, hardly conforming to OSHA standards. But then, we were in Italy, and the priorities are different here.

“How will that keep them safe if a chunk of marble falls on their heads?” I asked Massimo, the handsome Italian man who was our interpreter, negotiator and handler.

He laughed. “They are not at all concerned about that,” he said. “They wear those paper hats to keep the marble dust out of their hair!”

The marble dust, which hung in the air at times like tiny snowstorms, also concerned me.

“Won’t working here, with all this dust, give the carvers problems with their lungs?” I asked Massimo. “Like the way coal miners get black lung disease, only white lung disease from the marble?”

He laughed again. “Not at all!” he said.

“Come over here,” he gestured for me to follow him through the open yards of sculptures, both finished and in progress, over to a large pile of discarded marble shards and fragments.

“Do you know where these will go?” he asked me. I shook my head.

“They will be sold to the TUMS factory, to be made into those little candies that will help your stomach,” he said. I looked at him in disbelief.

“No, it is absolutely true,” he said. “TUMS are made from a mineral called calcium carbonate, found in things like chalk, limestone, and marble.”

“Eating marble is good for you?” I asked him, a little suspicious he might be teasing a gullible americana.

“But of course!” he said, as if everyone knew that. “Follow me!” He made a waving gesture with his hand. So Italian.

We walked back to one of the enclosed sheds where a gray-haired man wearing glasses, perhaps in his sixties, was carving a larger-than-life, muscular statue of a bearded, god-like figure. Massimo called out to him in Italian, saying something I didn’t understand.

The carver smiled, then took off his newspaper hat and glasses and carefully set down his tools. He walked a few feet away from the statue he was carving and, to my astonishment, put his arms down on the floor, and swung his torso up in the air into a perfect handstand. Watching the expression on my face, Massimo laughed.

“There, you see?” he said. “This man ‘as been carving marble for decades. He ‘as been breathing marble dust his whole life and look ‘ow strong his bones are! He is still doing handstands at his age!”

Impressed, I was almost ready to lick the floors.

One afternoon, we were invited to pick up a hammer and chisel and try marble carving ourselves. Martin went first, under the supervision of a smiling middle-aged man wearing a simple blue t-shirt, blue jeans and a newspaper hat. After a few swacks of the chisel, he grinned good-naturedly, then handed the hammer and chisel to me and stepped back to take a photograph while I tried my own hand at it.

Looking at that photograph now, seeing my forehead furrowed in concentration, my fingers grasping the chisel in a death grip, I remember how difficult it was to make even the slightest guided impression in the marble. The chisel bounced or deflected off the stone seemingly with a mind of its own, as if mocking me. Lacking the strength, vision and expertise to guide it, I made a mess of it. Which made me even more appreciative of the skills and artisanry of those in newspaper hats to render such exquisite works of art. And perhaps that was why we’d been invited to try carving marble ourselves.

We spent several days soaking up this old and otherworldly atmosphere, watching the carvers in the process of rendering the model pieces into marble. Eventually, it would take a team of 23 marble carvers of all ages more than a year to complete the work.

In addition to Studio Cervietti, we spent a day filming in a marble quarry in Carrara, up in the mountains above Sernavezza in the northernmost tip of Tuscany, where the riches created from compressed sediment of ancient lakes, rivers and seas have been quarried since Roman times.

The marble extracted here has been used all over the world, from Finlandia Hall in Helsinki to the Saadian Tombs in Marrakesh, to London’s Marble Arch and the Rotunda at the University of Virginia designed by Thomas Jefferson and modeled after the Pantheon in Rome. From Michelangelo’s Pietá carved in the 15^th century to the Miraishin no Oka, the 1980’s Hill of Hope monument by environmental sculptor Itto Keutani in Hiroshima, Carrara marble has been used for hundreds of years in some of the world’s most meaningful sculptures.

The art would be carved from one massive block of marble weighing 77 tons. We filmed similar blocks being transported on the backs of what looked like rickety little flatbed trucks, down the mountain roads filled with hairpin switchbacks. The Italians drove with the doors of the cab open, ready to spring out of their trucks if their heavy loads of marble lost control on the way down.

The quarry kept a crushed vehicle at the top of the road – a reminder to everyone of the dangers of letting their load get out of hand and the possibility of brake failure. Unstable as the trucks appeared to be, they were at least an improvement over earlier times when live bulls were used.

The process of extracting the marble is also dangerous. They still talk of a cliff face that collapsed in 1911, crushing ten men on their lunch break.

Despite the dangers, however, Italian men are still Italian men. I took a photograph of one deeply suntanned quarry worker setting dynamite to move the blocks of marble. Perhaps in his thirties, he had shoulder length brown hair, a tattoo on his arm, and was dressed in nothing but an old and dusty pair of tighty-whities. Apart from a pair of heavy gloves, construction boots, he wore nothing else. He’d even tucked his tighties up under the elastic, apparently to maximize his tan potential.

When the lunch whistle blew, the dozen or so quarry workers stopped work and walked over to a big yellow Caterpillar front-end loader and stepped into its large bucket to be transported up the mountainside to a lunchroom canteen. Curious, we followed behind on foot. Inside the canteen, there were table after table of suntanned quarriers, laughing, talking and eating simultaneously.

Charmed by the bottles of wine I saw on each table, and wanting to remember the scene, I raised my camera to grab a shot of the scene. Instantly an arm came out blocking me. I heard the words “No, no!” as a finger waved furiously at my camera. They didn’t want any documentation of the wine at lunch.

The following day, during a break at the studio, I wandered over to the Bozzetti art gallery in town located in an atmospheric sixteenth-century former convent. Everything I saw and experienced in Pietrasanta made me want to live in the world of artists and artisans, and not just for a few days.

For budgeting reasons, we normally worked long hours on location, with no days off. But this time one of our days fell on Sunday and we had no choice. Studio Cervietti was closed. The four of us dispersed, each to explore Pietrasanta in our own ways.

In the morning, Martin and I wandered around, looking at other artisan studios in town, including one that had a long dining room table with intricate inlaid flower motifs crafted in marbles and gemstones of brilliant colors on its surface. I was immediately smitten with it and wanted to bring it home and show it to my sister. As a tile artist, I was certain Karen would also love it and marvel at the craftsmanship. Even if it was the only piece of furniture in my entire house, I would be happy.

Fortunately, Martin’s common sense prevailed. That, and the price tag which was unaffordable to most people working in the uncertain and unsteady field of documentary filmmaking, myself included.

Afterwards, Martin and I decided to walk the Via D’Amore – a small cliffside trail overlooking the sea that unites the five little coastal towns of Cinque Terre – in search of lunch. Along the way, he noticed a large succulent. He stopped, pulled out a knife and (to my horror) etched our initials into one of the plant’s juicy leaves: KF ❤️ MD.

Why weren’t the initials the other way around? I wondered.

In the evening, we reunited with the guys. In their explorations, Richard and Ed had met a pleasant young American already living my dream life with a group of friends on a hilltop just outside Pietrasanta. They told us she had invited all of us to join them that evening at the little stone house they were renting for a candlelit dinner of traditional homemade risotto in their gardens amongst the olive trees.

As I looked around the large table at the collection of new and old friends laughing and talking over food and wine in the evening glow of the setting sun, I realized these days in Italy marked a turning point, shifting the vision of what I wanted in life in quiet yet seismic ways.

Back home, anxious to hang on to the feelings stirred up in my heart during our days on location, I painted my living room in several shades of the colors I’d seen on the exteriors of building in Italy. To give it that aging Italian slightly moldy plaster look, I scrubbed the paint onto the walls by hand using rags I’d torn from one of Leif’s old t-shirts.

I also signed up for immersion Italian lessons in DC. Our teacher, Paula, was from Milan. A bottle blonde chick in tight suits and high heels, her day job was working for Baretta, the gun company. While we were not actually learning Italian at gunpoint, knowing that acted as a triggering and subliminal incentive to do well in class.

I got out an old Italian record by Lucio Battisti I’d purchased ten years earlier at the Rizzoli bookstore in Washington DC – a bookstore founded, ironically, by filmmaker Angelo Rizzoli.

Rizzoli’s was located on the C&O Canal in Georgetown and in my pre-marriage, pre-documentary worshop days, I often hung out there on my lunch break or after work just to be in its atmosphere.

What follows is a slight diversion from my tale. Then again, perhaps it was foreshadowing….

The day I walked into Rizzoli’s and heard the voice of Lucio Battisti, it was love at first listen. I bought the vinyl album, brought it home and played it endlessly, memorizing the lyrics especially to the title track, Una Donna Per Amico (A woman as a friend.) Although I often bought books, it was the only album I ever bought there.

Sometime that same spring, I met an intriguing guy with dark hair and captivating dark eyes, a brainy soccer player. He was in Georgetown just for the summer, for an internship during the months between his master’s degree and PhD at Harvard. Our places of work were only a block away from one another’s along the canal. Mutual friends introduced us.

We went dancing, drank Heineken darks together, went to Café des Artistas, and hung out with our friends. Once, he picked me up from work and rode me on the handlebars of his bicycle all the way across Georgetown to have dinner at a subterranean chili joint he loved – me, laughing and pushing my long blonde hair out of my eyes, trying to keep my balance while trying to hold my long flowery skirt in place.

One night, he invited me over for dinner at his little flat on the east side of the city. In the midst of his cooking prep in the kitchen, he paused for a moment, went over to his record player, selected an album and put it on.

“Listen to this,” he said. “I love this song so much I’ve memorized the lyrics.”

As the unmistakable notes of Una Donna Per Amico filled the air, I may have stopped breathing, shocked he had the same album. It’s quite possible we were the only two people in Georgetown who owned that record. There was likely nobody else in town he could have invited over for dinner who could also sing along to every word, every song. The improbability of it all toppled me head over heels in love with him, firm in the belief that this serendipity was a sign from the universe.

It was, but only for that one summer.

The title proved prophetic. One day in early September, he went back north to Cambridge and Harvard University. And the Rizzoli bookstore? Not long after, it too, disappeared. One day it was there and the next, the space stood empty. Like a scene from the Night Circus, books, boyfriend and music vanished overnight.

But I didn’t hold any of that against Italy.

In fact, having nearly worn out my Lucio Battisti album, I craved more Italian music. And so, following Massimo’s suggestions, I’d brought back cds by Pino Daniele and Italian rockstar, Zucchero, with whom Massimo said he’d grown up in the nearby Italian seaside town of Forte dei Marmi. I also picked up a recently released cd by Andrea Bocelli called Romanza and another one by the pop music duo, Al Bano and Romina Power, daughter of actor Tyrone Power.

(Sidetrack: I will later discover singer Romina Power is related through her father’s grandmother to author Evelyn Waugh, who will crop up unexpectedly a little later in the making of American Byzantine, inside a Lord’s toilet, of all places.)

I played my Italian cds endlessly, translating and memorizing the lyrics. Italian music became the soundtrack of our home for many years, especially the song, “Felicità” (happiness), which to this day still makes Leif laugh whenever he hears it.

But these songs served me well. I would return to Italy twenty years later to research my grandmother’s memoir in Rome and find myself not only able to get by in Italian, but get by with smiles and laughs from the people I met by speaking to them in rhyming Italian lyrics.

In the years to come, I would also eventually take up marble carving myself and discover a way to take some of my heartaches out of my body by turning them into stone.

Coming up next … There is Meaning in Every Journey