Wedding I

Europe but mostly Italy

People, art, landscapes, the culture

As a child in the thirties and forties most of what was happening in the world had passed me by. I preferred wandering barefoot in fields and woods, alone. I would lie down in the grass, among sun-kissed wild strawberries, and watch the clouds move slowly across the sky. When I did have friends, and there were never many, I was drawn to those who talked, while I would listen. In other words, I was a loner.

There are no barriers to where your thoughts will take you.

1937-1939-1940

I was ten. Memories included a rare visit to the movies in 1937 to see The Good Earth with Paul Muni. Movies were always double features and included news shorts with shots of planes dropping bombs as well as the comics with Mickey Mouse and Laurel & Hardy. World War II had begun. In 1941 America entered the war and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States. The 1940s were marked by Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, both disparaged by my father. Cinema stars included Ingrid Bergman, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy. The bikini did not appear until 1946.

All this was many years ago and now, in 2025, as I looked out over the valley from my house on the hilltop, with a bird streaking across a reddening sky, my thoughts went to the past. To 1955, the year that eventually brought me to Orvieto in Italy and would determine my future, with marriage and two sons.

In 1955 the United States was in the throes of integration. Names one read about included Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. Eisenhower was president with Nixon vice president. James Dean and Marlon Brando were the cinema heartthrobs, with East of Eden and On the Waterfront. Girls still wore skirts and heels. Censorship marked the TV shows (cover that cleavage!) and by 1955 at least half of American homes had TV sets. While transatlantic travel was still mostly by steamer, air travel was gradually taking over.

I was 26 and about to embark on one of those steamers for an adventure that would last almost a year and that turned into a life. Even though I was not stylishly slim, I was self-assured, unquestioning, as I followed the path indicated by fate.

Since 1955 I crossed the Atlantic two more times, one going back home to the US and one returning to Italy for the rest of my life. There would be other crossings but they would be by air.

And then – then it was 1957. I was coming back to a man who said he loved me and had asked me to marry him, whose spirit and thoughts I had come to love through his letters. They were in my suitcase, all 64 of them from the time he had first said “I’m afraid I’m in love with you.”

After crossing the Atlantic that third time, I once more reached Florence, where Mario was waiting for me. I had hoped he would sweep me off my feet passionately. But then I remembered that in addition to the strangeness between us, it was illegal to kiss in public in Italy. “Mario”, I called and ran forward to the figure anxiously looking up the platform. “Mario”. We put our arms around each other and kissed one another on the cheeks in the ritual of greeting. I wonder if anyone noticed the uncertainty and welcome which sat side by side in that embrace. In the letters of the past year Mario and I had become convinced that we were somehow right for each other. But now it was no longer letters, it was reality.

As we crossed the Arno I could not help noticing that the street to the right of the pensione was still blocked off due to the reconstruction of Ponte Santa Trinita, which had been destroyed in the war. Now three graceful parabolic arches reached across the river, and the bridge itself was open to pedestrians, some of whom were always leaning on the lopsided light wooden fence, watching the workmen chipping away at stones and marble blocks scattered around like bleached white bones, until a slight change in the light revealed them to be grotesque masks and scrolls. It was a gentle dignified bridge and had been rebuilt according to all the old plans with much love. Its neighbor, Ponte alla Carraia, with its five open arches rushing into each other, was unseemly in its haste.

In the pensione I was escorted to my old room. Nothing seemed to have changed. Over the table by the wall there were still the marks where I had taped a reproduction of a Giotto Madonna. A white cat sat on the bed. The rose-patterned curtain stood stilly by the window waiting for the sun to break through on the roofs and distant hills which looked like a fourteenth-century painting.

Out in the street, the houses across the river were glowing in the sun and stood golden against the black rain clouds, marveling at their reflections in the Arno. Once I got settled, back down to where Mario was waiting for me. We crossed the Arno, and we even found the tail end of a rainbow as we stood on the bridge, just plain looking. All around me I recognized the Florence that I knew – as fleeting as a shadow that exists and then is gone, but that like the shadow that an object casts in the sun, always returns.

Mario touched my hand and smiled. “You know that when someone has good luck they say he has discovered America. I have discovered America, my friends say, but they are even more specific. America, they say, is a contraction of the words ‘amo Erika.’ I love Erika.” “I like that very much, Mario. But you’re not worried about what your other friend said – moglie e buoi del paese tuo?” “Wife and oxen from your home town. No. For after all, what is our country? It is where we feel at home. and if together we feel at home, then our native country is wherever we are.”

Yes, my native country now would be Italy and a week later we were in Perugia. It was after all time to meet Mario’s parents. I was not all that sure of myself for when Mario had written his mother he was going to get married, she had fainted.

At this point the date had been set. But first there were protocols and documents to see to. So off we went to the city hall. The little government officials, their fingers reluctantly untying the miles of red tape around our documents, finally decided they could find nothing more wrong, could find no more room where tax stamps could be pasted and official seals stamped. Finally, we were ready to present ourselves to the marriage clerk, ensconced at his desk in the medieval palace that is the city hall of Perugia. Being very official and very important, he sat there behind the counter, his thin nose scanning all the papers, gleefully hopping from one irregularity to another and then explaining with much sorrow in his voice that the young man before us would have to go back to the office of origin of the document and ask them to do it properly. He was extremely sorry, there was nothing he could do. We were next. Our papers were this time in order, but he saw that Mario had the title of Dottore and delightedly explained the previous situation to us in full detail, as well as the complications in our own, couching his points in long-winded phrases, slowly expelling the air, only to find another one ready, ever so pleased that he could let the waiting peasant couples admire his wisdom. As if he had their futures in his hands. A buyer and seller of marriages. What will you have, sir? A short happy one with a little bit of tempest? or a long safe one, but slightly dull? He assiduously leafs through his folders to find a good second-hand one for those who can’t afford otherwise. One of our witnesses, a friend of Mario’s, had brought a bottle of cognac for the clerk, according to custom. This official wrinkled his elegant nose as he pocketed it and muttered something about its not being very big. “You can come back in two weeks,” he said, and turned to the other couples, people from the country, their faces dark and closed, a heaviness to their spirits that seemed to be part of the soil binding them firmly to the earth. Our intentions had been declared. Our names would now be posted for two weeks and anyone with reason might intervene before the marriage actually took place.

The two weeks passed rapidly. Mario and I returned to Florence where my parents came to meet him to give their blessings before taking off for the States where my father had to begin teaching again. Mario in the meanwhile came down with the flu and Giorgio and I did our best to figure out how much 100° Fahrenheit (the only thermometer I had) was in centigrade. By the time we had come up with the answer, Mario was in the kitchen preparing himself a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce. He recovered from the “asiatica” or flu just in time. As I clutched a bunch of white gladioli and carnations from the pensione, we sat squeezed between our suitcases in Giorgio’s car and just barely made it in time to catch the train to Perugia.