Giornale Pugliese VI: Train

 Drawing by Hallie Cohen

You meet an Argentinian couple on a train from Bari to Rome. It’s one of the high-speed trains that make the whole trip in approximately four hours. You start at the sleepy Bari station, where an impoverished beggar woman is urging a child barely capable of walking to panhandle. Poverty creates a certain discipline, and the child runs assiduously after the coins pitched in her direction, arousing both pity and respect. She chases after the money the way the pigeons scamper for crumbs in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. The couple on the train is almost dissolute looking, the woman bored and her companion unshaven, but they have a cultivated air. They are generous with information about the train’s stops, even though they’re not inhabitants of the country. You wonder if he knew Borges. Trains are a dominant means of transport in both Italy and France and play an enormous role in the way society conceives of itself—a way that is largely absent in America, where long-distance trains are curiosities whose breakdowns and eccentricities of schedule are a constant source of grousing among those who attempt to use them. Preston Sturges immortalized the train to Palm Beach in The Palm Beach Story, with its outrageously funny Ale and Quail Club scene. Then there’s that wonderful train carrying the innocent fugitive through the Scottish highlands in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. And of course there’s Strangers on a Train, based on the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. This Rome-bound train is not lacking romance or eccentricity, but it is all business, arriving at its terminus without fanfare only twenty minutes after its scheduled TOA of 6:15.

Giornale Pugliese IV: L'importanza di chiamarsi Ernesto

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen

The Theatro Comunale Piccinni, an imposing pink structure on the Victor Emmanuelle II, Bari’s main drag, is now staging L’importanza di chiamarsi Ernesto. It’s nice to know that Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which recently starred Brian Bedford in a revival at New York’s Roundabout Theatre, is being produced in this Adriatic City. But it’s been decades since a great Italian classic like Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author appeared on the Great White Way. Cultural appetite is hard to fathom. For instance, there are constant surprises in the world of Internet fashion, where the greatest common denominator of taste often runs in contradistinction to what E.M. Forster called “the aristocracy of the sensitive.” Posters of Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean, which opened to record breaking box-office sales in both Europe and the United States, are already beginning to peel off Bari’s walls. Yet the lady concierge at Bari’s Hotel Palace, whose marquee is shaded by gentle palms, interjects the word “onomatopoeia” into a conversion with a guest and goes on to talk about Hemingway and Italo Svevo, a writer whose works are enjoyed by a mere sliver of Italians and Americans alike. Everyone talks about social networks like Twitter and Facebook, but the notion of a shared sensibility derived from reading great literature creates a certain magic for the wanderer. Just when life seems most chaotic and lacking in the profound connections that can link individuals, an association about a writer or a book brings two people together in a strange city. “Only connect” is something else that Forster wrote.