A Small Place in Italy

Who wouldn't love to have a second home in Europe?  Italy, or perhaps France?  Back in 2017, I discussed Peter Mayle's book, A Year in Provence, about his adventures among his French neighbors.  This past week, I read Eric Newby's 1994 memoir, A Small Place in Italy.   

I actually chose Newby's book -- a British paperback edition obtained from a second-hand bookstore through Amazon -- simply because I wanted to read something else by Newby.  In the past, I've discussed his more famous books, The Last Grain Race and A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, as well as (last month) his collection of essays, A Traveller's Life.

While not the best of Newby's writing, A Small Place in Italy -- as it turned out -- had a special interest for me.  The house he and his wife ended up buying in the mid 1960s (named "I Castagni") was near Sarzana, in the hills about five miles behind Lerici on the Ligurian coast.  Lerici is just five miles south of La Spezia, and La Spezia is the southern entrance to the Cinque Terre.  As some will recall, before the pandemic, I had planned a birthday celebration next month with 30 guests for Levanto, at the north end of the Cinque Terre.  Lerici is also where the English poet Shelley drowned, although that's not relevant to Newby's story.

Reading the book was the next best thing to actually visiting the area, although as the book makes clear, the area changed radically between 1967 and 1991, when the Newbys sold their house and moved away.

Readers of A Traveller's Life will recall that Newby temporarily escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Italy during World War II, and wandered about the Apuan Alps, holing up in a cave during one winter with assistance from local sympathizers.  The nearness to that area -- between Lerici and Parma -- was one factor in his decision to purchase property where he did.  He hoped to -- and did -- look up people who had become good friends and allies during the war.

For those of us who are physically lazy, the book is somewhat exhausting to read.  As with Mayle's story of Provence, and other books by English writers describing life in southern Europe, the Newbys made close friends, friends of peasant stock who were largely friendly, good-humored, and close to the land.  But the book describes in detail -- for me, excessive detail -- the hard physical labor required to restore the house from virtual ruin to an inhabitable residence, and their work harvesting grapes and olives on their own property and, reciprocally, for their neighbors.  All accomplished, year after year, during time he managed to take away from his job in London as the travel editor for a London newspaper.

You may learn more about grapes and olives -- not to mention mushrooms -- than you hoped to know.

As you would guess, from reading Newby's better-known works, he and his ethnically Slovenian but Italian-reared wife Wanda, are a hard working but easy-going couple.  They make friends easily.  Wanda is fluent in Italian, and Eric is close to fluent.  (Although their neighbors generally spoke a local dialect among themselves, which is largely unintelligible to Italian speakers.)  They knew both how to offer hospitality to their neighbors, and how to accept hospitality freely.  They accept without hesitation all the peculiarities they encounter among their peasant neighbors, and are able to relate to them on their own terms.  They came to Italy to learn to be Italian farmers, not to bring the joys of British civilization to the Italians.

A lesson we can all carefully note.

They managed to get along well with everyone, aside from a malicious and unpopular neighbor named Arturo, who tied them up in litigation for years in an attempt to wrest from them an easement over their property.  There's one in every crowd, as they say.

The last three chapters are a heartrending story of the deaths of one friend after another.  Young children became middle-aged adults, with less interest in tending vines or olive trees.  The help their neighbors had so willingly provided with the crops, and the hospitality and huge meals they had provided, became less available.  Even this backwoods, mountainous part of Italy was becoming part of a standardized, modern world.  All of a sudden, television was everywhere.

The words Newby provides describing a town on the Parma side of the mountains -- a town that was grim and somewhat closed in on itself, and full of old people dressed in black, when first visited -- serve as a requiem for the peasant life throughout the Apuan Alps -- and all of rural Europe, perhaps.

The year before we left I Castagni, Sassalbo had changed not beyond recognition but sufficiently to make one rub one's eyes.  It was not only the village that had changed, the inhabitants also had undergone a degree of metamorphosis. ... But there were still shepherds who had big flocks of sheep; and the shepherds still sold the cheese, but nobody sold the wool any more; and no one spun it; and very few people wore black; and the place was full of teenagers, mostly students.

In one way, the people were "more allegro," happier.  But something real and authentic had been lost.

Eric and Wanda, no longer able to tend their vines and trees, sold their house and returned to England.