If I think of myself as hitched for life to the U. S. A., then France is the dear friend I once had an affair with and Italy is that pretty zany who flirts with me and then eludes me at parties. That analogy stands in for the tediously witty paragraph (of pop-socio-politico-ethno-psychobabble) I would otherwise have written as an introduction to my six-month sojourn in Italy, 1961-1962.
I lived in a villa in Fiesole, the hill town above Florence. The family I was renting it from, who lived in an elegant modern home down the driveway, called it a “villa;” who am I to argue? It was a small stucco house, two rooms plus an open kitchen, with much more length to it than width since it was built across the steep southwesterly slope down to Florence. Its two winning amenities, as far as I was concerned, were a large picture window that looked out over a descending cascade of cultivated terraces—olive orchards, a vineyard, a field devoted to an unidentifiable dark leafy vegetable and, closer to Florence, flower gardens, swimming pools and lawns which on week-ends were dotted with huge dining marquees—and a fireplace.
Not that I spent much time there. I had come to write, but soon after I arrived I learned I had won an important short story contest and my soul told me it was allowed a vacation. So, almost every day, instead of writing, I would get in my MG-A and toodle down to Florence.
Charlotte Novitz was in Florence at the time. She had rented a charming house surrounded by vegetable patches below the Piazzale Michaelangelo. Our relationship, which had reached an on-again, off-again stage, was off-again in Florence. Charlotte had just begun an amour with the writer, Mauro Sinesi. So.
Nevertheless, two or three times a week I would stroll across the Ponte Vecchio and trudge up the hill to Charlotte’s, emerging from a pleasant shaded lovers’ lane into the unpleasant heat of the sun or the unpleasant dribbling of an afternoon rain shower to wend my way through the vegetable patches—as melancholy as I could be—toward the little yellow house, flowers nodding over the gravel walk, a tomato patch on one side, a small arbor with a table on the other, pot herbs or pale blue curtains in the windows through which you could look up at the sweeping Piazzale Michaelangelo or gaze down at the Arno and Florence below—the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, and all the rest. It was the house that one of the Impressionists, having decided to come live and paint in Florence, would have chosen.
Mimi Gross, who had been in Florence since 1960, left about the same time I arrived. But just as she did in New York and Provincetown, Mimi had generated a Florentine coterie that continued to gather at parties, at openings and at concerts after she had gone. I fit right in and became the buddy of an American composer whose name, I am embarrassed to say, eludes me.
Here is a letter, as yet unanswered, I sent to the editor of the newsletter of the Society of Composers:
I lived in a villa in Fiesole, the hill town above Florence. The family I was renting it from, who lived in an elegant modern home down the driveway, called it a “villa;” who am I to argue? It was a small stucco house, two rooms plus an open kitchen, with much more length to it than width since it was built across the steep southwesterly slope down to Florence. Its two winning amenities, as far as I was concerned, were a large picture window that looked out over a descending cascade of cultivated terraces—olive orchards, a vineyard, a field devoted to an unidentifiable dark leafy vegetable and, closer to Florence, flower gardens, swimming pools and lawns which on week-ends were dotted with huge dining marquees—and a fireplace.
Not that I spent much time there. I had come to write, but soon after I arrived I learned I had won an important short story contest and my soul told me it was allowed a vacation. So, almost every day, instead of writing, I would get in my MG-A and toodle down to Florence.
Charlotte Novitz was in Florence at the time. She had rented a charming house surrounded by vegetable patches below the Piazzale Michaelangelo. Our relationship, which had reached an on-again, off-again stage, was off-again in Florence. Charlotte had just begun an amour with the writer, Mauro Sinesi. So.
Nevertheless, two or three times a week I would stroll across the Ponte Vecchio and trudge up the hill to Charlotte’s, emerging from a pleasant shaded lovers’ lane into the unpleasant heat of the sun or the unpleasant dribbling of an afternoon rain shower to wend my way through the vegetable patches—as melancholy as I could be—toward the little yellow house, flowers nodding over the gravel walk, a tomato patch on one side, a small arbor with a table on the other, pot herbs or pale blue curtains in the windows through which you could look up at the sweeping Piazzale Michaelangelo or gaze down at the Arno and Florence below—the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, and all the rest. It was the house that one of the Impressionists, having decided to come live and paint in Florence, would have chosen.
Mimi Gross, who had been in Florence since 1960, left about the same time I arrived. But just as she did in New York and Provincetown, Mimi had generated a Florentine coterie that continued to gather at parties, at openings and at concerts after she had gone. I fit right in and became the buddy of an American composer whose name, I am embarrassed to say, eludes me.
Here is a letter, as yet unanswered, I sent to the editor of the newsletter of the Society of Composers:
Dear Society of Composers Newsletter Editor,
I am writing a memoir of Florence in 1961.
I attended a concert of contemporary piano music there with a composer friend of mine, an American. I have forgotten my friend’s name and was hoping you could help me remember it.
In 1961 he was, or recently had been, a student of Luigi Dallapiccola in Rome; Jewish; in his thirties, I’d guess. I believe he went on to a career in academia. I have perused Wikipedia’s list of American composers, its list of Dallapiccola’s students, even your membership list, but no name rings the right bell.
While in Italy he may have composed music for a chamber orchestra based in Rome, one of whose members was an American flautist who lived on the Piazza Navona in Rome.
Assuming that you, yourself, are a composer, I think you will appreciate what made that that 1961 concert in Florence so memorable.
One of the pieces performed was John Cage’s “4’33””. The applause that followed “4’33””, Cage’s most ineffable composition, was tentative at first but gained in force as we, the members of the audience, showed each other that we could respond to the koan posed by Cage, or that we were in on Cage’s joke, or whatever.
When this extended demonstration at last began to taper off, an elderly man in the second row stood up, picturesquely waved his cane about, and addressed us (in Italian, of course).
I asked my composer friend, whose Italian was excellent, what he had said.
“This is nothing new,” my friend translated, “the Futurists were doing this in 1914.”
Is there anyone in the Society of Composers who knows who my friend might have been?
Yours truly,
~
I am writing a memoir of Florence in 1961.
I attended a concert of contemporary piano music there with a composer friend of mine, an American. I have forgotten my friend’s name and was hoping you could help me remember it.
In 1961 he was, or recently had been, a student of Luigi Dallapiccola in Rome; Jewish; in his thirties, I’d guess. I believe he went on to a career in academia. I have perused Wikipedia’s list of American composers, its list of Dallapiccola’s students, even your membership list, but no name rings the right bell.
While in Italy he may have composed music for a chamber orchestra based in Rome, one of whose members was an American flautist who lived on the Piazza Navona in Rome.
Assuming that you, yourself, are a composer, I think you will appreciate what made that that 1961 concert in Florence so memorable.
One of the pieces performed was John Cage’s “4’33””. The applause that followed “4’33””, Cage’s most ineffable composition, was tentative at first but gained in force as we, the members of the audience, showed each other that we could respond to the koan posed by Cage, or that we were in on Cage’s joke, or whatever.
When this extended demonstration at last began to taper off, an elderly man in the second row stood up, picturesquely waved his cane about, and addressed us (in Italian, of course).
I asked my composer friend, whose Italian was excellent, what he had said.
“This is nothing new,” my friend translated, “the Futurists were doing this in 1914.”
Is there anyone in the Society of Composers who knows who my friend might have been?
Yours truly,
~
Tonalità Gioia was a contemporary music ensemble based in Rome in the early ‘60’s. (How am I supposed to remember what its real name was? And it’s not worth the time and effort involved in a likely fruitless search.) Tonalità Gioia regularly performed pieces by my composer friend. Through him, I became friends with a pair of musicians in the ensemble—a couple, unmarried—an oboist (m.) and a flautist (f.) with whom I began to flirt.
By happy coincidence, Tonalità Gioia was giving a concert the very evening that my mother and her new husband, George, were to arrive in Rome for their honeymoon at the Hotel Excelsior. (Note: In 1961 Rome was all Cinecittà and “La Dolce Vita”; the Hotel Excelsior and the street it was on, the Via Veneto, were central to the film.)
My mother had reserved two rooms for the night before their arrival—one for my sister, Cynthia, who would come down from Paris, and one for me—so we would be there when they arrived and could be in the lobby to greet them, to greet George for the first time as our stepfather. Then we were to spend a couple of evenings with the newlyweds, celebrating.*
I calculated that I could attend the Tonalità Gioia concert, go out with the musicians to a trattoria afterward, and still be back at the Excelsior by the time Martha and George were dropped off by a cab from the airport. I could not foresee that, having drunk more red wine than usual, having pressed my flirtation with the flautist beyond the limits of what was civil and, having accepted the oboist’s challenge to a round of fisticuffs, right there in the Piazza Navone, I would straggle into the lobby of the Excelsior, where George and Martha impatiently and Cynthia and her boyfriend Horst** bemusedly awaited me, with a black eye so fresh that it still was surrounded by a rosy aura of broken blood vessels, tie awry, shirt torn, and jacket wine-stained. (A bottle of wine had somehow been involved in the Battle of the Piazza Navona).
To the question, what happened? I replied, I got in a fight. As for the details of the fight? They were not worth talking about, I said.
It was so remarkable***, my getting into a disheveling and disfiguring fracas the night I was to meet George as a stepson, that a Freudian explanation for it loomed as most likely—even though I was already well on my way to realizing that Freudianism was just cocaine-fueled mumbo-jumbo.
My dismay over ruining my mother’s honeymoon—she couldn’t smile without looking grim—was somewhat offset by the fun that Cynthia and Horst seemed to get out of my mishap. Cynthia probably was pleased that Horst could get a view of my usually hidden beatnik side.
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*Celebrating, for example, by having a Caesar salad prepared for us at our table by the owner of the very restaurant where it originated.
**I had met Horst once before, a few months earlier.
A girl in Florence needed a ride to Paris, so I phoned my sister, who had an apartment on the unfashionable side of the Boulevard Montparnasse, to tell her I was coming.
The door was opened by an unshaven, somewhat dissolute version of the smug rich American on his post-graduate Grand Tour. Four others of his ilk were lounging around the living room, drinking beer and watching a soccer game on the teevee. They were all smiling that particular kind of smiles that’s set in being stoned. I was not smiling. One of them motioned toward the door to Cynthia’s bedroom and I stormed in.
Cynthia was lying on the bed, reading ”Molloy”.
“They have to go, Cynthia,” I growled, gesturing toward the other room. “I’m kicking them all out, right now.” After a moment’s thought, I added, “Unless there’s one you want to keep.”
At that moment the bathroom door opened and Horst, slim, blond and ur-German, appeared with a towel wrapped around his waist.
“I’ll keep that one,” Cynthia said.
***Remarkable, since I had been in only two other physical altercations since grade school:
1) A similar desultory scuffle over a girl. Instead of the Piazza Navona, the venue was the hallway outside the girl’s apartment at the top of a steep narrow stairway of a building on Hudson Street right across from the White Horse, where José Garcia Villa’s big Friday night table in the back room, which had included me and the girl, but not the guy who pushed me down the stairs, had just broken up.
2) A pummeling more than an altercation. The pummeler was a man with a family and a little business, who had just been called up as a Marine reserve after the Bay of Pigs debacle and who had been complaining loudly about it to his audience of fellow subway passengers.
Such was the pummeler from the pummeled’s point of view. The pummeler’s impression of the pummeled was just as accurate: a smug, rich college student draft-evader, without a job, without a wife and kids, who should have been called up instead of him.
He had me down, straddling me, on the subway seat. (It was one of those old subway cars, with two long rows of inward-facing seats under the windows.) He could have really hurt me, he could have killed me—he was in the Marine reserves, after all—but he was basically a nice guy. Drunk, pushed over the edge by circumstances, still railing against his fate, he gave me a severe cuffing, nothing more, between 72nd Street and 42nd Street. There, as soon as the doors opened, a busybody fellow-passenger burst out to find the cops. (No cell phones sixty years ago.)
I didn’t press charges. After all, the whole time he was pummeling me I was saying “You’re right, you’re absolutely right.”
~
-
**I had met Horst once before, a few months earlier.
A girl in Florence needed a ride to Paris, so I phoned my sister, who had an apartment on the unfashionable side of the Boulevard Montparnasse, to tell her I was coming.
The door was opened by an unshaven, somewhat dissolute version of the smug rich American on his post-graduate Grand Tour. Four others of his ilk were lounging around the living room, drinking beer and watching a soccer game on the teevee. They were all smiling that particular kind of smiles that’s set in being stoned. I was not smiling. One of them motioned toward the door to Cynthia’s bedroom and I stormed in.
Cynthia was lying on the bed, reading ”Molloy”.
“They have to go, Cynthia,” I growled, gesturing toward the other room. “I’m kicking them all out, right now.” After a moment’s thought, I added, “Unless there’s one you want to keep.”
At that moment the bathroom door opened and Horst, slim, blond and ur-German, appeared with a towel wrapped around his waist.
“I’ll keep that one,” Cynthia said.
***Remarkable, since I had been in only two other physical altercations since grade school:
1) A similar desultory scuffle over a girl. Instead of the Piazza Navona, the venue was the hallway outside the girl’s apartment at the top of a steep narrow stairway of a building on Hudson Street right across from the White Horse, where José Garcia Villa’s big Friday night table in the back room, which had included me and the girl, but not the guy who pushed me down the stairs, had just broken up.
2) A pummeling more than an altercation. The pummeler was a man with a family and a little business, who had just been called up as a Marine reserve after the Bay of Pigs debacle and who had been complaining loudly about it to his audience of fellow subway passengers.
Such was the pummeler from the pummeled’s point of view. The pummeler’s impression of the pummeled was just as accurate: a smug, rich college student draft-evader, without a job, without a wife and kids, who should have been called up instead of him.
He had me down, straddling me, on the subway seat. (It was one of those old subway cars, with two long rows of inward-facing seats under the windows.) He could have really hurt me, he could have killed me—he was in the Marine reserves, after all—but he was basically a nice guy. Drunk, pushed over the edge by circumstances, still railing against his fate, he gave me a severe cuffing, nothing more, between 72nd Street and 42nd Street. There, as soon as the doors opened, a busybody fellow-passenger burst out to find the cops. (No cell phones sixty years ago.)
I didn’t press charges. After all, the whole time he was pummeling me I was saying “You’re right, you’re absolutely right.”
~
-
To keep the above two reminiscences from being regarded as binary, as poles encompassing some mysterious meaning, one more story from Italy in 1961 is required.
Let’s see... How’s this?
Charlotte and I were in Rome. I can’t remember the reason. Perhaps she’d had a fight with Mauro.
We went to an afternoon concert in a public park, Orff’s “Carmina Burana”. It was a rousing performance, spirited and good humored. Afterwards we heard one well-coifed Frenchwoman in the audience say to a similarly coifed Frenchwoman beside her, “Très intéressant!”
Charlotte being a virtuoso in oblique mockery, “très intéressant!” now plays an important role in her repartee.
Let’s see... How’s this?
Charlotte and I were in Rome. I can’t remember the reason. Perhaps she’d had a fight with Mauro.
We went to an afternoon concert in a public park, Orff’s “Carmina Burana”. It was a rousing performance, spirited and good humored. Afterwards we heard one well-coifed Frenchwoman in the audience say to a similarly coifed Frenchwoman beside her, “Très intéressant!”
Charlotte being a virtuoso in oblique mockery, “très intéressant!” now plays an important role in her repartee.
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