Sunday

For this week, just a thought.

Not only are books friends, but they are also what helps make new friends and what connects friends. A way of keeping conversations going when you don’t see each other every day. Or perhaps have never even seen each other. They are such important parts of our lives. Both of them – books and friends.

But maybe I should now stop writing about books. And pay more attention to everyday events such as the so-called antique fair in Piazza della Repubblica with its array of memorabilia, faded newspaper headlines from years ago, tea sets no one wants any more, silver serving pieces, bits of jewellery whose former owners had given up the ghost and whose heirs were disinterested in their stories, old copper pans, an unlikely figurine of Eve or of a Sicilian piece of pottery in the shape of a head, discarded wooden benches consisting of seats and desks with indentations for ink pots (that tells you how antiquated they are!), once unwillingly used by bored students. How many stories lie there if one knows how to uncover them. The Sicilian flower pot reminds me of the girl whose brothers murdered her lover. She recovered his head and put it in a pot of basil where she then watered it with her tears. It was a story that went back to Boccaccio, fascinated Keats, and about which Pirandello wrote a play.  I’m not interested in silver or porcelain but a small chip-carved box from the Val d’Aosta tempts me. Then my mind literally slaps my hands reminding me that at home I have enough objects that would fill not just one booth, but several, ranging from my collection of whistles to a reproduction of the Vaphio cup with athletes leaping over bulls or spreading nets to capture them. 

Best to go on to the Chocolate Fair in Piazza del Duomo with all kinds of chocolate delights. Not sure why this year many of the stands say Dubai. I generally buy one piece, sort of pancake-shaped, dotted with bits of red peperoncino for my son. Chocolate-coated orange peels always come home with me. This year there is a stand where you can watch a man wrapping ribbons of dough over a cone-shaped mold. After being roasted over coals, it is coated in caramelized nut sprinkles.  I think it is a Transylvanian or Hungarian sweet, Kürtőskalács.

My Sunday stops in Piazza Duomo always include a conversation with my ceramic artist friend Marino. He has been trying to recover clay he has had around for ages but apparently it is now good only for making bricks. My son Claudio tells us that the law now limits the weight of whatever a worker may heave is 15 kilos for a woman, 25 for a man. As a teenager I would lug 50-pound bags (around 23 kilos) of pigeon food up the stairs to the attic in our farmhouse for, of course, the pigeons. 

Stories are never orphans but are always interconnected. –what we do today reflects what we did yesterday and what we will do tomorrow. Pigeons make me think of some of the myriad of feathered friends we had on the farm, from peacocks to geese. Well some were friends, others like the pigeons eventually ended up on our table. And then there were the guinea hens who flew up into a tree and refused to come down the year we had an unusually heavy snowfall. My father had to get out a long ladder and climb up to rescue them. No wonder.  I suppose they were flummoxed by this white stuff since guinea hens are an African fowl and are portrayed in Egyptian tomb paintings.

Yes, nothing can be seen in isolation. We too are part of a network of events in the world we live in. Next week is Thanksgiving and that means turkeys and various other stories. So I’ll see what I can do with those.