Lo Stradone
megan chiusaroli
I’m living in a region of Italy that is famous for fog. Something about the hills and valleys of Emilia-Romagna makes the conditions just right for fog to settle in and cover everything. If one winter evening it’s unusually warm and you think, How nice! See? Winter’s not so bad, and you stroll through town with your coat unzipped, you know you’ll pay for it in the morning, when the cold sneaks back in and the fog along with it, and ice crystals coat your car. Sometimes visibility is less than five meters. You drive by intuition, with your third eye, with Google Maps leading you down the road to your home.
When I wake up in the morning, all of the people in my world are fast asleep. Or maybe they’re just going to bed. So I spend my mornings in solitude, counting down the hours until one early riser might awake and keep me company—telepathically, at least. They won’t be here with me in this small apartment on Via Provinciale Uso in Lo Stradone, Borghi, Forli-Cesena, Italy. Street. Fraction. City. Province. Country. So many words to remember and write on letters or applications that all serve to remind me that I’m far away. Here it’s just me and my orange kitchen in the morning after Antonio leaves for work. Me and the elderly couple downstairs and their dog. Mia! Mia! Come back here! they yell. I make sure to open the shutters as soon as Antonio leaves so that it’s not too dark, or else I will surely fall back asleep. Though I usually do anyway, but at least it’s with a kiss of sun on my face and a blue sky emerging if it’s a clear day.
It’s winter now, so I won’t want to leave the house until around noon when the temperature rises just enough to make me feel like the eight-minute walk to the supermarket is a leisurely stroll, so that at least a few times a day, I can feel like the reality of my life here meets the romanticized notion my friends in New York have conjured up for me: the illusion of la dolce vita in Italy, all rolling hillsides and wine and cappuccino all day.
At the A&O market down the street I talk to Claudia, who speaks English with a perfect British accent. Born in London, she’s the only other English speaker I’ve come across here in Lo Stradone. We don’t say much, but her Oh I’m fine, thanks. How ‘bout you? makes me so giddy, you’d think I didn’t understand Italian, that I didn’t speak it every day with my husband. What is it about greetings and salutations that are so hard to pull off in another language? I can never quite get “Grazie, arrivederci!” to fly off my lips just so, and end up with some kind of avvuh-decci stutter and a feeling of inadequacy as I walk out of the store.
Across the street is the bar and the corner tabacchi shop. They sell tickets to the bus, but don’t know anything about its schedule. I downloaded the app the bus advertises and bought tickets through it, but couldn’t get the QR code to work onboard. The app suggests you speak to the driver if it doesn’t work, but the drivers all tell me I need to drive the bus!
If I turn left, heading out of Lo Stradone and veering off the long road our town is named for, I find myself on a little country road, Strada dei Gessi, that my mom and I discovered while she was visiting. There’s a signpost for the Camino di San Vicinio here. Being that Antonio and I met while hiking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, it seems fitting that we live right on the outskirts of another pilgrimage. Sometimes I jog or hike up this road and am terrorized from a distance by countless dogs, behind fences, in fields, and up ahead on hills. They bark their loud Italian barks and all say the same thing, the same thing I hear many Italians saying these days. Go away! Get off our land!
Back down Via Provinciale Uso, heading toward home, there’s the pizzeria down the street that we love. It has no business being on this sleepy stretch of road, and it crushes me when I see all the empty tables inside each time we’re there. Their specialty, which can only be eaten in the dining room, is a half-meter of pizza covered with so much bufala mozzarella, burrata and prosciutto, it’s worth the stomachache that inevitably follows when I finish it all. The crust is a lightness that I’ve never known—a salty crispy cloud that dances on your tongue. We came here with both of our families the night before our wedding, so the cook and the waitress know us. The cook has spent time in my husband’s hometown in Puglia and said to Antonio the other night, “You lost a hand, huh?” Antonio shook his head and laughed, then whispered to me after he passed, I don’t know what that means.
I pass the pharmacy and the bank whose ATM once stole 50 euros from me. I went back every day to talk to the teller, who first tried to convince me it flew out of my hands, and then had the machine checked twice and printed out a sheet of nonsense to prove to me there was nothing more he could do. So I don’t go there anymore.
By now the shops are closed until at least 3:30, so even though my day has just begun, it’s time to go home and rest. If it were summer, I might sit on the balcony for a while, or do some yoga and hope no one sees. Right next to our apartment complex is a small vineyard, so close you can see the grapes on the vines in August and smell the manure in the field almost constantly. In the summer, the owner rides his tractor at night to avoid the heat, and we are lulled to sleep with a bright light and tractor engine sounds outside our window.
When Antonio comes home, we might eat in, or maybe go out for pizza or piadina, or to his parents’. In the evening he’ll be fussing with the ambient lighting in our house, the LED strip behind the television, the color-changing bulbs overhead. My husband has a passion for ambient lighting, which, like poetry, illuminates just the right things. The owls will be hooting in the distance, but we won’t see anything. If we’re lucky we’ll be so socked in with fog that the rolling hills will drift off in the distance and the picturesque bucolic landscape with it, and it will just be me and him, in our orange kitchen, aglow in our ambient-lit love.
