Story Frame 33 – French Kissing My Way to Italy

For a glittering moment in time, Ravenna, Italy was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire.

Lazy and cowardly as Roman Emperor Honorius was, he did at least have the presence of mind to stay one step ahead of the barbarian hordes roaming throughout his domains. He did this by relocating the capital of the Western Roman Empire in 402 from Milan to Ravenna.

Strategically located a few hours south of Venice on the Adriatic coast, with the vast marshes of the Po River acting effectively as a large moat, Ravenna was relatively safe from direct assault.

“Selected for its isolation,” wrote historian Robert Wernick, “the city became the center for miraculous works celebrating divinity … a beachhead of antique civilization in the rising seas of barbarism. It was crowded with sumptuous palaces and churches.”

To explain the sources of inspiration behind the architecture of the Basilica in Washington DC – and the film’s title, American Byzantine – Martin and I set off to film some of those sumptuous churches.

We had visited Ravenna briefly two years earlier to scout the locations, decide where and what we would film, and in general get our bearings for how and where these stories could be woven into the tapestry of our documentary. Along with the marble carvers of Pietrasanta, this section was one of my favorite parts of our film.

My sister Karen was still alive back then. As a tile artist, she would have loved seeing the mosaics and tiles of Italy but too sick to travel, she told me I was to be her eyes. She loaned me her Canon AE1 single lens reflex to photograph it all for her.

During our first visit, I’d taken photographs and sent her colorful postcards of mosaics and tiles with chirpy little stories of what we were seeing and doing, along with notes of encouragement for any progress she was making in her battle against the cancerous barbarians inside her body.

And now, two years later, Martin and I were returning to Ravenna for the actual film shoot.

A close friend, knowing I hated to fly, had gifted me a thermos of mimosas for the cab ride out to Dulles Airport. Much as I appreciated his thoughtfulness, it may not have been a good idea as I still had a mini meltdown, complete with tipsy tears, once we got there.

Horrified, I heard myself telling Martin, “I don’t want to go, let me stay. I’m worried about my kids. I don’t want to fly. Really it will be okay, I’ve organized everything, you’ll be fine. You don’t need me.”

The words tumbled out in a semi-intoxicated babble of nonsense from my mouth as I fumbled through my backpack to give him the all-important production binder with details and timelines of names, dates, locations, players, permits and mobile phone numbers, all of which had had to be carefully choreographed from across the ocean.

The tricky dance of permissions and wire transfers began, of course, with the Catholic church, specifically in the form of Monsignor Guido Marchetti at the Opera di Religione della Diocese di Ravenna. His very name sounded to me like something from a dark Italian opera, adding a touch of intrigue and drama to the shoot. A payment of more than one million lire was needed to film at San Vitale for the day, an amount which sounded appalling, but was actually only about $500, once I calculated the conversion.

Access to San Vitale and the other buildings was something I could not have pulled off without Ravenna’s lovely tourism director, whose name was a lot more pleasing: Grazia, Italian for “grace.” In addition to the church, Grazia had also negotiated the town permits on our behalf and given us a hotel recommendation.

On the crew side, a guy named Silvio would provide the camera gear, which a guy named Luca Nonni would operate. Cristiano Nanni was scheduled to provide all the lighting equipment.

Marina Ferretti, our government provided translator would coordinate on our behalf with the staff at the historic San Vitale and help with our banking concerns as well as the feeding and care of the crew.

Our dream team, all of these people, with their rhyming names like Italian poetry.

Having worked together for half a dozen years, Martin was all too well aware of my fright of flying. For the ‘house of many colors’ shoot, we had taken separate flights to San Antonio. A few days before I left, I discovered a chunky envelope in my desk drawer at the documentary workshop. Inside was a rosary and a small note in Martin’s handwriting.

I thought I would give you a little something to reduce the shakes when you fly Saturday. When I was seven, a nun gave me these rosary beads and told me they would always mean God was protecting me. Carry them safely to San Antonio. Nothing but good will happen. See you there. M.

It was a sweet and thoughtful gesture. Even though I considered myself an existentialist non-believer, the rosary comforted me. I touched my pocket frequently during the flights there and back to remind myself I had it with me.

But I’d long since returned the rosary to Martin and had no such totem with me now. Martin ignored my protestations and began piling our suitcases and gear – ten in all – onto a curbside cart. Then he told me to buck up.

“You’re coming,” he said, slinging the last one up on the pile. “This is your shoot. You’ve done all the work to organize it. Come on, let’s go.”

He grabbed my arm firmly and steered me into the airport. We checked the suitcases and gear bags in, then cleared security.

“Okay,” he said, once that was done. “Now let’s find the bar.”

A few hours and two beers later, I took the middle seat next to him on the plane. Channeling Meg Ryan in the 1995 film, French Kiss, I tried to distract myself from take off by chatting with the guy sitting on the other side of me. I don’t remember what we talked about. Unfortunately, it wasn’t about sex – I would have remembered that. I think it may have been about geology and Italy. On the other side, Martin read a book in stony silence, ignoring me.

Much to my surprise, I found myself enjoying the flight. It began to occur to me that my anxieties may not have been about flying per se, but perhaps had something to do with the process of getting ready to fly? Perhaps about leaving Zoë & Leif? What if something happened to them while I was more than four thousand miles away?

And of course, something did happen.

We landed safely in Italy and made the drive to Ravenna without incident. Once there, we checked into our rooms at the Hotel Bisanzio (Italian for Byzantium), conveniently located just three blocks away from San Vitale, the location of our primary shoot.

Knowing I was stressing about potential home fires, Martin suggested I call the kids if it would give me some peace of mind and get me to pull focus on the shoot. International phone calls were very expensive back then, so it was a thoughtful gesture.

“Just a few minutes, though,” he added, as he headed off to his room. I dialed the number of the house where Steve lived with a woman he’d married after we split up.

Leif, who had just turned nine, answered.

“Hi Mom!” he said, then paused. He tried to muffle the phone with his small hand, but I still heard him say the words, “Should we tell her?” I presumed he was talking to his sister.

What’s going on now, I wondered. I’ve been gone less than 12 hours!

“No, don’t!” I heard twelve-year-old Zoë hiss fiercely to her little brother. I could imagine her pinching his arm to add a little emphasis to her words. “Not until she gets back!”

“I heard that,” I called into the phone. “So now you have to tell me!”

Wild imaginings ran through my head while I waited, listening to the whispers from so far away.

“Here, give it to me!” I heard Zoë at last say in a tone of exasperation to Leif. And then, speaking into the phone she said, “Hi Mom. Dad’s getting divorced.”

Steve had been re-married less than two years, but it hadn’t gone well. This is when he decides to tell the kids their lives are going to have another major change, I thought – when I’m more than four thousand miles away? I always felt responsible for managing their happiness, for damage control. Why couldn’t I shed that for just a week, like a heavy backpack, and leave it hanging on a tree or in a storage locker somewhere back home?

“Okay, no worries, you two, you’ll be fine!” I heard myself saying brightly into the phone, not believing a word I was saying. “I’ll be back home in a few days and then you can tell me all about it.”

After a few I love you’s, I put the phone down, changed from my airplane clothes, and washed up. Work was calling. Sleep deprived and trying to ignore the dissonant clatter of thoughts in my head, I put on my game face and went down to the lobby to meet Martin, find some coffee, and discuss the production days ahead.

In order to reach into the upper recesses of some of these ancient structures, as well as provide a more dramatic effect, Martin had decided to use a Jimmy Jib – a versatile camera and crane combination with a counterweight on the opposite end of the crane to balance the weight of the camera. Filmmakers and cinematographers appreciate the flexibility of its maneuverability for pan, tilt and zoom angles. And its reach of 6 feet to 30 feet allows for amazing sweeping visuals, which are exciting to watch and perfect for the architectural heights and crevices inherent in this particular shoot. Using this camera would enable us to access the mosaics in the upper reaches of these churches in a way that wasn’t available to visitors, bringing the ancient figures in the mosiacs down to earth and eye to eye.

Between getting the permissions, wire transfers, and insurances needed in addition to finding local crew and gear, and then coordinating everyone’s disparate availabilities, planning for this shoot had taken months of preparation. The paperwork alone – emails and copies of letters – was more than an inch thick. But it was essential to the story we were telling.

The Byzantines, of course, didn’t have films, documentaries, photographs, or graphic novels as mediums with which to tell stories back then. But what they did have, in addition to paintings, were mosaics. They told the important stories using thousands and thousands of tiny squares of colorful glass, stones and ceramics known in Italian as tesserae. Together, these bits of glass catch and bounce and reflect the light in a transporting and colorful dance designed to dazzle those who gaze upon them and make them believers.

First on our shot list was the Basilica of San Vitale which, despite a rather plain exterior, contains a jewel box treasure trove of frescos and mosaics that still sparkle as enticingly and brightly now as they did more than fourteen centuries ago.

We set up to film the mosaics and, at Grazia’s suggestion, interview mosaics expert, Wanda Frattini Gaddoni, author of Ravenna: Art and History. This was the one on-camera interview Martin said I could do, perhaps because I was more comfortable talking about art.

“In the early 400s, after Ravenna was declared the capital of the Roman Empire, all of the best artists were invited to come decorate the city’s public buildings with visual stories in fresco, marble and glass,” Wanda Gaddoni told me gently when camera was rolling.

“And these works of art acted like a biblio pauperum, a visual bible of stories as most people at the time were illiterate. Instead of reading, they could see and feel the stories on the walls all around them, kind of like an illustrated book.”

Kind of like a graphic novel, I thought, intrigued.

“According to the religious or philosophical meaning of the Byzantine art, our world is considered to be an illusion,” she explained. “The real, the only world, is represented behind the golden background (of many mosaics) which is acting almost like a barrier, a curtain, between our world, which is an illusion, and the real world, which lies behind it. But our eyes can’t see it.”

At the end of our interview, Wanda gave me a present.

“Hold out your hand,” she instructed me, smiling. I did as I was told and into my upturned palm, she placed half a dozen old stone tesserae. All these years later, I still have them in my studio – a handful of tiny, precious memories of that film shoot.

The concept of the golden barrier caught my imagination. And so, during a break, I found some dark and narrow stone steps to the side of the apse – an area off limits to the public – hoping our film permit would permit me access. There was no one around to ask, so I climbed up to a narrow stone balcony overlooking the apse to get a closer look at the mosaics. Walking from the dark stairwell, I came face to face with the large ancient mosaics and was startled at the physical sensation in my body looking these figures right in the eye. I think it was the closest I’ve ever gotten to a religious experience.

To celebrate the end of a successful and interesting shoot, on our last evening in Ravenna, Martin and I ate dinner at Spasso Bistrot, a cool little restaurant on the Via Mura de San Vitale. Afterwards, we walked around, enjoying being amongst Italian families out for the evening passeggiata, pretending we were part of them and not just passing through briefly.

We were in Ravenna a tantalizingly short time. But what I saw and experienced left me wanting more. In my usual effort to carry pieces of where I have been back home with me, I bought the most appropriate and inappropriate treasures of all – glass. I was unable to resist buying a mirror attached to an old and heavy piece of wood and hand decorated by an artist in a beautiful pattern of blue and gold tesserae as well as an extremely beautiful and fragile handblown glass carafe with two impossibly slender and fragile glasses in pastel gold blue and rose tones. All of which, of course, had to be carefully packaged for travel, then hand-carried throughout the long trip home due to their fragility. After some teasing, Martin offered to carry the heavy mirror for me.

Boarding our trans-Atlantic flight clutching my precious packages, I saw with dismay our seats were in the very last row of the plane. Not only the last to disembark from but also usually the bounciest in turbulence, I thought in dismay.

To my surprise, it turned out to be a memorable and delightful flight. Despite the turbulence, during which I closed my eyes and tried to pretend I was riding a galloping horse, our proximity to the cabin crew galley turned out to be very fortuitous. The flight was not full and I was reading Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil.

But as we progressed over the ocean, the attendants – with not many passengers to take care of – became increasingly chatty and attentive, I remember them gifting us an entire bottle of Italian white wine, much to our delight. Just before landing, they handed us another bottle to take home with us – so they didn’t have to inventory it, they said.

I realized during that flight that getting on a plane to fly back home was not nearly as stressful as getting on one to fly away from home. That was a hugely helpful insight for me, cutting as it did my worry time in half. And I don’t think it was just the free bottle of wine.

The filming in Ravenna experience was another turning point. It gave me the confidence that, with clear instruction as to what was needed, I could negotiate and organize an international shoot for a small crew and do so despite a language barrier.

What’s more, I enjoyed navigating the customs and quirks of another culture. In time, I would draw upon those experiences when circumstances finally opened up the opportunity to live and work in Europe.

But first, we were heading to Istanbul – and a very nearly catastrophic film shoot.

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Coming up next … A Character without a Script in the Wrong Movie: Lights Out in Istanbul

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