Chapter Two Early Days in Nuoro
I was lucky
to have such a good friend in Charlie who had offered to look after my house
after I had gone away and to look in every other day at least until I had
formulated my future plans. I would need to decide whether I was going to
return to live in Bristol or to continue to live in Sardinia and, if the
latter, whether to sell the house or to let it. Initially I was going to Sardinia
for just four months, although my plan was to stay on indefinitely if those
first four months proved agreeable enough and I was starting to feel at home in
my new surroundings. I would have to return to Bristol the following March
anyway, at least for a week or so, to take care of business connected with
things like council tax and car tax etc. It was curious. Although I had no
doubts about my relationship with Maria Rita I was worried that the nostalgia
that I would feel for my native city of Bristol might become overwhelming. But
it proved not to be the case.
After just
over a week of pottering around at home and making preparations, on Saturday 7th
November I flew to Rome from Bristol Airport and met Maria Rita there. We
stayed overnight in the Hotel Torino. My niece Catherine was living in Rome at
the time and with Maria Rita’s niece Chiara, already a long-term resident in
Rome, we were hoping to all go out for a meal together that evening. Unfortunately
Catherine was unwell and in bed with flu so it was just myself, Maria Rita and
Chiara sampling the delights of steak, red wine and a delicious sweet in one of
Rome’s rather noisy but very cheerful restaurants.
The
following day we flew from Rome to Olbia and we arrived in Nuoro at around
half-past six in the evening. Maria Rita had time off from work on the Monday
and the Tuesday so we had a couple of days of taking it easy. It was during
these two days that I met her other brother Raimondo for the first time and,
not long afterwards, his wife Gianfranca. On the Wednesday, when Maria Rita was
back at work, I started what was to become a part of my daily routine: Italian
study. In Bristol a few months earlier I had managed to purchase an
intermediate stage course in Italian: a book containing dialogues, grammar and
exercises along with four hour-long CDs of the Italian dialogues. The book was
called Italian Beyond The Basics and it proved to be very useful, especially in
helping me to speak Italian with a little more confidence. However, I do remember
that when I was studying the explanations of how the subjunctive works in
Italian I began to think that I needed a more instinctive rather than
intellectual understanding of its functioning. Interestingly enough, I was told
that one of the most common errors that Italians made in spoken Italian was to
not bother to use the subjunctive when, strictly speaking, they should have
done. I soon noticed that no one ever corrected me when I forgot to use the
subjunctive whereas they were very quick to correct me if I made the kind of
mistakes that Italians never make, forgetting to change the last syllable of an
adjective according to gender for example. For the purpose of improving and
developing my Italian I was quite lucky to be in Nuoro where most of the conversational
exchanges seem to be in Italian. In some of the smaller Sardinian towns and
villages they speak Sardo almost exclusively even though all Sardinians do
speak Italian. Maria Rita was, and still is, in the curious position of being
able to understand Sardo but not speak it very well whereas she speaks English
fairly well but often finds native English speakers difficult to understand,
especially when their speech is littered with slang and idiomatic expressions. She
told me that when she was growing up her parents only spoke Italian around her
and her siblings, hence she never got into the habit of speaking Sardo. It was
considered by the middle classes to be a language spoken by less educated
people and that it was far better to have Italian as a first language. With
time attitudes have changed, just as they have towards the Welsh language in
Wales, and now it is seen as a source of pride that Sardinia has its own
language. Around about 70% of the islanders speak Sardo and a far higher
percentage understand spoken Sardo. However, it is hard to know what percentage
of children and young people speak the language as it is no longer
automatically passed on to them by their families. This is a situation that
became common in the sixties and seventies and continues to this day.
I must
confess that in those early days it was a real struggle to understand very much
of the Italian that was spoken to me. If people were speaking directly to me it
wasn’t always too bad and they tended to make allowances for the fact that my
ear wasn’t fully accustomed to hearing spoken Italian incessantly. I often had
trouble with words and grammatical concepts that I was already familiar with
simply because I wasn’t used to hearing them spoken all the time. And the
comical misuse of the language continued! Just a few days after I had arrived,
and having caught a bit of a cold, I created great hilarity around the dinner
table by saying: “ho un tosse sul pene”.
I thought that I was saying: “I have a chesty cough” when what I was actually
saying was: “I have a cough on the penis!” I had confused the word pene with the word petto (chest) and without realising that it’s not even an
expression that Italians tend to use. They don’t talk about having chesty
coughs. I then compounded the error by pronouncing the word petto like peto (fart) causing even greater hilarity. I have often been
reminded of how important the difference is in the pronunciation of hard (eg.
double ‘t’) and soft consonants (eg. single ‘t’) in Italian. It can change the
entire meaning of what you say and it can prove embarassing!
When Maria
Rita was working mornings I got into the habit of walking up to the shop in the
Post Office where she worked, il
posteshop, then having a very quick coffee before going for a walk
and exploring parts of the town that I did not know particularly well. It
wasn’t very long before I became very familar with all the backstreets around
two of the main streets in town, il Corso Garibaldi and Via Lamarmora, as well
as the centro storico district of
Santu Predu and the walk towards la
chiesa della Madonna della Solitudine which is where the tomb of the Nobel
Prize winning writer Grazia Deledda is. For the first two or three weeks after my
arrival we were lucky to be having dry and very warm weather for November, even
in Sardinia, so it was a good time for exploring the city.
Another
activity that became part of my routine in my early days in Nuoro was, after
having been out for a walk mid-morning, to sit down and to translate the songs
of the legendary Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio de André into English. But
I was never satisfied with a straightforward translation. I wanted to translate
his songs in such a way as to make them singable in English, retaining the
original meter and use of rhyme, while still remaining faithful to the original
text. De André, who died of lung cancer in 1999 aged fifty-eight, is one of
Italy’s most celebrated singer-songwriters. Originally from Genoa he actually
lived in Sardinia for several years and was even kidnapped by Sardinian bandits
in 1979! This incident, however, did nothing to lessen his affection for the
Sardinian people as a whole. The quality of his lyrics means that he is
considered something of a poet, Italy’s equivalent of Bob Dylan or Leonard
Cohen. I had only become aware of him a few months earlier, while I was still
in Bristol, when I read an article in The Observer newspaper about how there
was a three-hour documentary about him on Italian television, tucked away on
one of the minority channels, that drew about 30% of the total audience share.
When I spoke to Maria Rita about it via Skype she told me that she had been one
of the 30%. Soon afterwards I received another present from her: a box set of
three CDs of De André’s music. So the work of trying to translate his songs had
already begun. The results were variable although I was quite pleased with a
translation of one of his best known songs Amore
che viene amore che vai:
Love
Comes And Goes (Amore che vieni amore che vai)
Those days
that are gone with the winds that we chased
And the
pleading for hundreds of kisses to taste
Some day
you'll remember while thinking of them
How love
that had flown has come back again
Some day
you'll remember while thinking of them
How love
that had flown has come back again.
And you
with those eyes so blue and so clear
Are
whispering sweet words of love in my ear
In a month
or a year you'll forget what you said
A love that is fresh now will surely be dead.
A love that is fresh now will surely be dead.
In a month
or a year you'll forget what you said
A love that
is fresh now will surely be dead
It came
from the sun or the sands that will freeze
Was lost in
the fall or with the cool summer breeze
I loved you
forever or never it seems
For love
comes around and then fades into dreams.
I loved you
forever or never it seems
For love
comes around and then fades into dreams.
Two weeks
after I had arrived in Nuoro, on the morning of Saturday 21st
November, I had my first experience of La
Festa della Madonna delle Grazie. Usually Maria Rita works on a Saturday
morning but on this day she had taken a day’s leave. It was a beautiful sunny
day, warm enough not to need a jacket or pullover when out of the shade, and around
about mid-morning we walked up to La Via Lamarmora, part of which was closed to
traffic in order to act as host to a seemingly endless number of stalls. They
were selling an extraordinary range of goods, a great many of them reflecting
the character and traditions of Sardinia. Of special interest to me was one
stall selling really intriguing looking musical instruments of Sardinian origin
and another stall which was selling locally produced jars of honey complete
with a display of bees making honey behind a vertical protective glass case.
La Festa della Madonna delle Grazie is a celebration which is
particularly significant for the inhabitants of Nuoro. According to the local
legend, in the 17th century, a young shepherd found a small wooden statue of
the Madonna which had miraculous powers and in 1670 the original church La Chiesa della Madonna delle Grazie was
built to honour the discovery of this particular image. Today, there is a
tradition amongst the faithful of attending the church every day for nine days
prior to the festival to pray to the Madonna for help with any family difficulties
that they might be experiencing.
Aesthetically,
like so many towns, Nuoro is something of a mixed bag. There are parts of it
which are delightful and other parts which are not so delightful. Much of the centro storico in the main part of town
is full of the traditional Italian architecture that we British find so
enchanting. At the same time, the rather sterile architecture that
characterised a lot of building construction in the sixties and seventies is
never too far away. Indeed, a great many nuoresi
live in apartment blocks that were built during that era, as we do ourselves.
But Nuoro is surrounded by mountains and there are some lovely views from
certain parts of the city, like the view from Via Aspromonte out over the
valley towards Monte Ortobene to the east with Oliena and Monte Corrasi visible
further away to the south east. One worries about the future because of the
large exodus of young people from Nuoro because of a lack of work opportunities
in the town. As for me, I have found it a very comfortable place to live; the
people have always shown a lot of warmth towards me and I have always found it
a very unthreatening place. I do like the fact that all the best bars and
restaurants are within walking distance of home. This was never something I was
able to enjoy while living in Brentry in North Bristol on the very outskirts of
the city. While it wasn’t an unpleasant place aesthetically, there was just one
pub within a five minute walk (since demolished) and the nearest shops were
nearly half a mile away. So an evening out nearly always meant that I had to
use the car.
In Nuoro, sometimes
I wonder if I am seen as something of a novelty seeing as there are so few
British people living here, and those that do live here tend to be English
teachers and usually only stay for the duration of their teaching contract. In
those early months, when it was obvious from my accent that I was not Italian,
I was often asked: “Lei è tedesco?”
(Are you German?). I found this hard to understand as I have always thought of
the German accent as being far more gutteral than the English. And some of
Maria Rita’s family had said that my English accent was very noticeable!
However, Maria Rita explained to me that many Nuoresi simply are not used to
hearing certain ‘foreign’ accents and a large proportion of tourists in Central
Sardinia happen to be German.
It didn’t
seem to be too long before Christmas arrived, the first Christmas that I
actually celebrated in Sardinia where the traditional celebrations were a bit
different from those that I was used to. Coming from a fairly small family,
some members of which were scattered around the globe, Christmas had always
been a fairly quiet affair celebrated with just my parents and my brother and
his girls if they happened to be around. So it was quite something to
experience the closeness of Maria Rita’s extended family on Christmas Eve, la vigilia di Natale, when their main
Christmas celebration takes place. This year it was her turn to act as hostess
and in all there were about a dozen of us present, not the largest Christmas
gathering but it was far larger than I was used to and it was quite a jolly
affair. After we had finished eating the ham and cheese, the salad, the pasta
and meat dishes, and of course a piece of panettone
(the traditional Italian Christmas cake), the time gradually drew nearer to
midnight and I was asked if I would dress up as Babbo Natale (Father Christmas) and dish out all the presents. For
Maria Rita’s family this ceremony always commences at midnight and my role as Babbo Natale seems to have become a
regular duty each Christmas! Christmas Day itself was much quieter. I went with
Maria Rita to one of her favourite restaurants in town for lunch, Il Trittico. But there was no roast
turkey or brandy flavoured Christmas pudding on the menu. No, we enjoyed a
rather splendid fish-based dish instead.
Before we
welcomed in the New Year Maria Rita and I went to see the Moscow Ballet dance
to Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite at the ‘Teatro Eliseo’, a concert hall in
Nuoro, on the evening of Sunday December 27th. Maria Rita was very keen to see
it as she had practised ballet for several years as a teenager and young woman
and such shows are rare in Nuoro. Although I'd been to a few classical music
concerts before I had never actually been to watch a ballet and didn't know
quite what to expect. Well, visually it was stunning and you couldn't help but
admire the grace and athleticism of the dancers and, in the case of the male
dancers, their strength too. I was reminded of something my late father said to
me when I was about ten or eleven years old and I was never happier than when I
was kicking a football about. I had been rather dismissive about ballet dancing
being a manly activity when my father said, "you'd be surprised how much
fitness, strength and skill is required in order to be a male ballet dancer.
Probably more than is needed to play football." After seeing the male lead
effortlessly lift the female lead above his shoulders, and turn with such
elegance and precision during this performance, those words and the obvious
truth of them came back to haunt me. Ironically, I was also reminded of
something a young footballer said to me many years ago, about how some ballet
training was a huge help in strengthening the muscles around his ankles with
which he was having some problems. All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable
and uplifting evening.
We went out
for dinner at the Maurelli restaurant on New Year’s Eve, a place on the
outskirts of Nuoro not far from a shopping mall and industrial estate called Prato Sardo. The musical entertainment
there was provided by a band called I
Frammenti Anni Sessanta (Sixties’
Fragments) in which Maria Rita’s brother Mariano plays Bass. I thought that
they were rather entertaining, playing songs from the sixties, mostly in
Italian, although they did play a few in English as well as in Sardo. However,
until that particular evening, I had never realised how many songs originally
recorded by British and American artists had been nicked by the Italians and
given Italian lyrics which had little relation to the original lyrics in
English. I can remember thinking on hearing the opening chords of certain
songs: “Ah, this is Elenore by The Turtles.” But no it wasn’t. It was Scende la pioggia by Gianni Morandi.
“Ah, this is The Pied Piper by
Crispian St Peters.” But no it wasn’t. It was Bandiera gialla by Gianni Pettenati. And there were quite a few
more, not just those two songs!
The winters
in Nuoro are not usually as cold as those in Bristol but they do tend to be
rather wet and sometimes windy. It can be quite chilly at times especially late
in the evening. It does snow from time to time although when it does snow the
temperature usually rises sufficiently during the morning for it all to be gone
come the afternoon. Further south on the island, around Cagliari, and also in
the seaside towns in Ogliastra, the winters tend to be milder still. However,
in Fonni, a small town not far from Nuoro and situated at the highest altitude
of any town in Sardinia, the winters are much colder and they have snow that
settles for a decent period of time practically every year.
A couple of
weeks into 2010 and most of the family travelled down to Lotzorai to celebrate
the traditional festival of Fuoco di Sant’Antonio which takes place
on the 16th and 17th January. Firewood is gathered beforehand and, with food
and drink in generous supply, a huge bonfire burnt on the 16th January, the eve
of the 17th, the day which actually honours Sant'Antonio. It was on Friday the
15th January that we travelled from Nuoro and there were about a dozen members
of the extended family there for the celebration. Unfortunately, I started to
feel unwell on Saturday so I wasn't able to involve myself as much as I would
have liked. However, I was well enough come Saturday evening to partake of the
rather sumptuous feast that we all indulged in as we sat around the blazing
bonfire. Jokes and stories were told and everyone seemed to be enjoying the
food, the conversation and the warmth of the fire. It was quite an experience
for me as I tried to listen, sometimes following the thread of the Italian
being spoken and understanding quite well, and other times completely losing
it. Unfortunately, on Sunday I started to feel very queasy and extremely
delicate and it was a relief to arrive back in Nuoro. I spent the following two
days in bed with gastric flu!
Earlier I
wrote about how I started to try my hand at translating the songs of Fabrizio
de André. Well, since I had arrived in Sardinia Maria Rita’s older brother
Raimondo had given me the gift of a book of his poetry that he had published: I tamburi del cuore (the drumbeats of
the heart) and as a further exercise I began to try to translate some of his
poems into English. Perhaps the fact that I have written poetry on and off for
most of my life, and also had some published, was a great help in developing a
sensitivity towards Raimondo’s work and guiding me in the process of
translation. The following is an example of one of my early efforts:
A
Dedication To The Sea
by Raimondo Selenu
I sit silently beside you
between the memories
of an old sailing vessel
and the future hopes
of a speedy motorboat.
I feel
like a small child
who listens attentively
to what it is you have to say.
Your way of speaking impresses me.
I am the sand that loves the waves
and lives in the immensity of your breath,
listening to the song
of the reef.
Alongside you I appear so small
amongst the pebbles
smooth with age
and shells
that dwell within you.
I curl myself up like a small child
finding nourishment
in fairy tales and adventure stories.
I adore your way of speaking.
by Raimondo Selenu
I sit silently beside you
between the memories
of an old sailing vessel
and the future hopes
of a speedy motorboat.
I feel
like a small child
who listens attentively
to what it is you have to say.
Your way of speaking impresses me.
I am the sand that loves the waves
and lives in the immensity of your breath,
listening to the song
of the reef.
Alongside you I appear so small
amongst the pebbles
smooth with age
and shells
that dwell within you.
I curl myself up like a small child
finding nourishment
in fairy tales and adventure stories.
I adore your way of speaking.
And this is
the Italian original:
Dedicato Al Mare
Mi siedo silenzioso accanto a te,
tra i ricordi
di una vecchia barca a vela
e le speranze
di un motore fuoribordo.
Mi sento
come un piccolo bambino,
che ascolta
ciò che hai da dire.
Mi impressiona il tuo modo di parlare.
Sono sabbia che ama le tue onde
e vive nell'immenso tuo respiro
nell'ascolto del tuo canto
alla scogliera.
Mi faccio piccolino accanto a te
tra i sassi
levigati dai tuoi anni
e conchiglie
che abitano in te.
Mi accuccio come un piccolo bambino
per nutrirmi
di fiabe e di avventure.
Adoro il tuo modo di parlare.
Mi siedo silenzioso accanto a te,
tra i ricordi
di una vecchia barca a vela
e le speranze
di un motore fuoribordo.
Mi sento
come un piccolo bambino,
che ascolta
ciò che hai da dire.
Mi impressiona il tuo modo di parlare.
Sono sabbia che ama le tue onde
e vive nell'immenso tuo respiro
nell'ascolto del tuo canto
alla scogliera.
Mi faccio piccolino accanto a te
tra i sassi
levigati dai tuoi anni
e conchiglie
che abitano in te.
Mi accuccio come un piccolo bambino
per nutrirmi
di fiabe e di avventure.
Adoro il tuo modo di parlare.
© Raimondo Selenu
La festa del fuoco di Sant’Antonio is the beginning of the carnival
period in Sardinia which ends on Ash Wednesday. In February it is in full swing
and there is a lot of dressing up and wearing of masks on the days when events
are held. On the evening of Saturday 6th February we returned to the
Maurelli restaurant for one such carnival celebration. I Frammenti Anni Sessanta were providing the music again and we
went along with Gianfranco and Patrizia. Maria Rita and I dressed as pirates
(rather appropriate for me coming from Bristol where the notorious and
legendary pirate Edward Teach, or Blackbeard, is supposed to have lived). It
was a really fun evening and an enjoyable time was had by all.
About a
week after this we went to see an exhibition of the work of the well-known
Sardinian sculptor and painter Costantino Nivola, grandfather of Alessandro
Nivola the well-known film actor. Nivola came from a very humble background,
growing up in the small village of Orani which is about 15 kilometres south
west of Nuoro. He worked locally as an apprentice stonemason before finding
success as an artist but spent much of his later life in New York after
marrying Ruth Guggenheim, whose Jewish origins made much of Europe an
uncomfortable place for the couple during the Second World War. The exhibition was
showing in Nuoro at the Museo Ciusa
in Piazza Santa Maria della Neve and was entitled L'investigazione dello
spazio (The investigation of space). We found it a very interesting
exhibition, with some curious abstract works alongside others based more in realism,
and we could clearly see how Nivola's native Sardinia influenced his work especially
in pieces like Bozzetto per il pannello murale dello show-room
Olivetti a New York, 1953. One of the most startling and profound works was
the Capella del Corpus Christi (the Chapel of Christ) which was upstairs
in a separate room away from the main body of the exhibition. Entering inside
was evocative of entering any chapel where the ambience and silence can give an
immediate and soothing experience of sensitivity, both physical and emotional.
Nivola had close links with the town of Nuoro and in 1965 accepted a commission
to create a series of sculptures in the Piazza Satta, a square in the central
part of the town, and this was completed in 1967. You can see there just how
Nivola made such creative and intelligent use of space.
I returned
to Bristol for the first time since leaving the city on Wednesday 17th
March and naturally Maria Rita came with me. When I arrived back at my house I
was astonished at how much work Charlie had done, far beyond the call of duty,
and so I was very pleased. We had a curious ten days or so in Bristol, a
mixture of business and pleasure. I had a lot of things to sort out in
connection with the house (like council tax and water rates) and the car, with
the MOT and car tax expiring at the same time as the end of the financial year
at the end of March. Both Charlie and my nextdoor neighbours had very kindly
kept an eye on my car, giving it a run-out from time to time, and we found it
in good working order. It got through the MOT without too much difficulty and
in the ensuing months my nextdoor neighbours continued to look after it,
running the engine regularly and taking it out on the road now and again. It
really is a blessing to have good neighbours and such a shame that bad
neighbours are considered far more newsworthy! I also wanted to sort out which
possessions I wished to take back with me or post on to Sardinia, so that took
up some of our time, but I was mindful of the fact that for Maria Rita this
trip was something of a holiday and I myself wanted to catch up with old
friends as much as I could. So we did go out quite a bit, enjoying some live
music in the evenings and eating out with friends. I also took Maria Rita to
Bristol Blue Glass in Brislington where we were able to watch the glass making
process in progress. But I must confess that we hardly ventured outside of
Bristol at all for the ten days that we were there.
I had now
decided that I wanted to continue to live in Sardinia and that my best option
with regards to the house would be to let it. I visited a local Estate Agents
and Lettings Agency in Westbury-on-Trym and the whole process seemed rather
simpler than I had feared. However, I was made aware of the fact that the house
would need a bit of work done before it was ready to let. This came as no
surprise and anyway there was still a large amount of personal and family
stuff there that I had to deal with
first. It was the family home that I had grown up in and my brother and I had
inherited it when my mother died. When she became very old I bought a flat very
closeby so that I could keep an eye on her. After her death I sold the flat and
bought out my brother’s share in the house which once again became my home.
Fortunately my brother and I had come to a very amicable arrangement that
suited us both. I was happy and relieved that the Lettings Agency were prepared
to manage the property because, living in Sardinia, I didn’t really want the
bother of managing it myself. And so, with everything I had wanted and needed
to do in Bristol pretty much taken care of, Maria Rita and I returned to
Sardinia on Sunday 28th March, a week before Easter.
© Geoff Davis
© Geoff Davis
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