Read Online Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes - Free Book Online Page A

the ancient dust covers my feet through my sandals; I have seen the unlikely survival of these buildings through rolls and rolls of time. The temples, men selling woven palm fronds for Palm Sunday, schoolchildren hiding among the columns, awed travellers like us with dripping
gelato
—all under the intense Sicilian sky. I'm thrilled. Just as I think that, Ed says, “This is the thrill of a lifetime.”
    Still, at dinner, we find that one temple is beginning to fade into another. Maybe we've seen enough of Agrigento this time.
    By the time we're back at the hotel, I've begun to descend into what I've come to call traveller's melancholy, a profound displacement that occasionally seizes me for a few hours when I am in a foreign country. The pleasure of being the observer suddenly flips over into a disembodied anxiety. During its grip, I go silent. I dwell on the fact that most of those I love have no idea where I am and my absence among them is unremarkable; they continue their days indifferent to the lack of my presence. Then an immense longing for home comes over me. I imagine my bed with a stack of books—probably travel books—on the table, the combed afternoon sunlight coming through the curved windows, my cat Sister leaping up with her claws catching the yellow blanket. Why am I here where I don't belong? What is this alien place? I feel I'm in a strange afterlife, a haint blowing with the winds. I suspect the subtext to this displacement is the dread of death. Who and where are you when you are no one?
    Downstairs in the hotel courtyard, a wedding dinner is in progress. The shouts, bawdy toasts, and slightly disheveled bride intensify my state. Usually I would savor the position of the almost invisible observer at the window, but tonight I am nothing to them. They belong. I'm a free radical. As the band starts up after a break, two small girls in frilly, silly dresses began to dance together. I could be anywhere on the planet, or not on the planet, and they would dance and dance.
With or without
. The groom would turn over his chair. The grandparents in their stiff country clothes would look as startled.
With or without
. The moon would shed its ancient light on the singular columns scattered over the valley, as it has and will.
    Ed already is sleeping. I walk downstairs and watch the party break up. Kisses and embraces. I go in the bar and order a glass of
limoncello,
concentrate hard on the lively citrus taste, conjure to my mind the lovely face of my daughter seven thousand miles from here.
    Â 
    We drive on in the morning, passing some dire ugliness along the way. Petrochemical—what a hideous word. Poor Gela—I see that it has interesting remains somewhere in this labyrinth but it is so intensely ugly that we speed through. Ed remembers that Aeschylus died here when an eagle flying above him dropped a tortoise on his head. Fate, as in a foretold prediction. A mythic way to go. I'm sure Pirandello as a child was influenced by this story.
    Ragusa—we'll spend the night. This hilltown feels like Sicily as I imagined it—provincial, and so privately itself. Like several other towns in the environs, Ragusa was rebuilt in the Baroque style after the terrible earthquake of 1693. There's an old town and an older town, Ragusa Ibla. By now we just expect to get lost and we do. We hit Ibla at a moment of celebration. How this many cars can squeeze into streets hardly wider than an arm's length, is hilarious. We crawl, turning a dozen times, trying to get out. We glimpse the church of San Giorgio, more fanciful than a wedding cake, which seems to be the focal point of whatever is going on. Is the Saturday before Palm Sunday a special day? Finally, we escape Ibla and find our way to a pleasant hotel in the upper town, which is newer but looks old to us. It's drizzling. We sit in the bar with espresso, looking at books and maps.
Americani
are a novelty here. Two men in suits come up and speak to