Read Online The Figures of Beauty by David Macfarlane - Free Book Online
Authors: David Macfarlane
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area, and tales of accidents in the quarries, and stories of the local marble merchants such as the Welshman, Julian Morrow, whose grand villa once stood, more or less, where Anna’s rented farmhouse stands now.
There were the facts and figures of the marble industry that Anna had acquired at various odd, and usually brief, jobs she’d taken around town. She especially liked to cite them when she thought a flight of aesthetic theory needed to be brought back down to earth—especially when the person doing the flying (me) had never so much as carved a bar of Ivory soap.
“Marble,” so Anna might say during some discourse of mine on Mannerism or Neoplatonic theory, “was quarried by Roman soldiers. This was a few kilometres southwest of Carrara. At the outpost of Luni.”
Shipping marble from Luni to Rome by sea, as dangerous as it was, proved to be far more cost-effective than moving it overland. More than a thousand years later—so Anna explained—this was still the case. Very little of the marble in the great buildings of Milan, for instance, came from the Carrara region, simply because it cost so much to bring stone the relatively short distance overland from the Apuans. In Roman times, stone from Luni was shipped to Ostia and then barged up the Tiber.
My course selection at university was weighted heavily toward the arts—an academic direction that, naturally, hadnothing to do with actually creating art. This, so far as Anna was concerned, left me—as it left most of the gallery owners, journalists, critics, and cultural theorists she enjoyed ignoring—distinctly unqualified. For almost anything.
It’s unlikely that the Romans initially settled in Luni because of marble. It’s more likely that it was a strategically advantageous position that provided access to the Po Valley to the east. Its port was a useful point of transit for trade on the Mediterranean. With the mountains on one flank and the sea on the other, Luni oversaw almost all overland traffic between Rome and the north.
But marble was there. The Apuans had long used it as a building material—and its presence became increasingly important as Rome became increasingly grand. In the second and first centuries BC , Luni gradually eclipsed the Greek quarries of Paros as the chief supplier of marble for Rome.
To this day I cannot see the white stone of an office foyer or the backsplash of someone’s fancy new kitchen without remembering being interrupted by Anna when she’d had enough of my undergraduate aesthetics. “Listen to me,” she would say. “I will tell you about stone.” There was nothing like the history of extraction methods or the annual tonnages for the region of Carrara to get my feet back on the ground.
The Allied advance, and the German retreat, and the bravery of the mountain partisans figured largely, of course, in Anna’s stories—as did the miraculous circumstances of her own survival. But the barest of her own biographical facts were so sad, they always obscured everything else about her background: her father had been killed in a hillside skirmish with German troops less than a week after her mother had been gunned down, along with most of the population of her village, in Castello’s central square. But you already know these stories well. Most people in Pietrabella do.
My Italian memories are not so famous. Nobody knows them—except your mother. And now you. That’s because they have no broader history. Most of them are only memories of my discovery of pleasure. Which does not mean I think of them as trivial. In fact, the older I get, the more important they become. But they come to me as sudden, occasional sensations, over almost as soon as they begin.
The stories your mother and I concocted as we watched the fireflies in the thick dusk are the best way for me to recollect the pace of those few months. They are the best way to remember the day-to-dayness of being in love with Anna. For the truth is: they
There were the facts and figures of the marble industry that Anna had acquired at various odd, and usually brief, jobs she’d taken around town. She especially liked to cite them when she thought a flight of aesthetic theory needed to be brought back down to earth—especially when the person doing the flying (me) had never so much as carved a bar of Ivory soap.
“Marble,” so Anna might say during some discourse of mine on Mannerism or Neoplatonic theory, “was quarried by Roman soldiers. This was a few kilometres southwest of Carrara. At the outpost of Luni.”
Shipping marble from Luni to Rome by sea, as dangerous as it was, proved to be far more cost-effective than moving it overland. More than a thousand years later—so Anna explained—this was still the case. Very little of the marble in the great buildings of Milan, for instance, came from the Carrara region, simply because it cost so much to bring stone the relatively short distance overland from the Apuans. In Roman times, stone from Luni was shipped to Ostia and then barged up the Tiber.
My course selection at university was weighted heavily toward the arts—an academic direction that, naturally, hadnothing to do with actually creating art. This, so far as Anna was concerned, left me—as it left most of the gallery owners, journalists, critics, and cultural theorists she enjoyed ignoring—distinctly unqualified. For almost anything.
It’s unlikely that the Romans initially settled in Luni because of marble. It’s more likely that it was a strategically advantageous position that provided access to the Po Valley to the east. Its port was a useful point of transit for trade on the Mediterranean. With the mountains on one flank and the sea on the other, Luni oversaw almost all overland traffic between Rome and the north.
But marble was there. The Apuans had long used it as a building material—and its presence became increasingly important as Rome became increasingly grand. In the second and first centuries BC , Luni gradually eclipsed the Greek quarries of Paros as the chief supplier of marble for Rome.
To this day I cannot see the white stone of an office foyer or the backsplash of someone’s fancy new kitchen without remembering being interrupted by Anna when she’d had enough of my undergraduate aesthetics. “Listen to me,” she would say. “I will tell you about stone.” There was nothing like the history of extraction methods or the annual tonnages for the region of Carrara to get my feet back on the ground.
The Allied advance, and the German retreat, and the bravery of the mountain partisans figured largely, of course, in Anna’s stories—as did the miraculous circumstances of her own survival. But the barest of her own biographical facts were so sad, they always obscured everything else about her background: her father had been killed in a hillside skirmish with German troops less than a week after her mother had been gunned down, along with most of the population of her village, in Castello’s central square. But you already know these stories well. Most people in Pietrabella do.
My Italian memories are not so famous. Nobody knows them—except your mother. And now you. That’s because they have no broader history. Most of them are only memories of my discovery of pleasure. Which does not mean I think of them as trivial. In fact, the older I get, the more important they become. But they come to me as sudden, occasional sensations, over almost as soon as they begin.
The stories your mother and I concocted as we watched the fireflies in the thick dusk are the best way for me to recollect the pace of those few months. They are the best way to remember the day-to-dayness of being in love with Anna. For the truth is: they
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