Sardinia Journal I: Alghero

Torre Dello Sperone (photograph by Hallie Cohen)

If you want to see a carousel that’s propelled by a bicyclist who  high fives screaming children as he pedals then visit Alghero one of the two main cities of the Island of Sardinia. On the same main square, Piazza Sulis, you can also watch a puppeteer who delights onlookers with the delicately exquisite movements of her marionette and this right under one of the ancient stone towers (the Torre Dello Sperone) that populate the town and that at one point provided defenses against invading armies. There are streets named after the famed romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi and the Marxist Antonio Gramsci about whom the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a poem, “Gramsci’s Ashes.” When you arrive at the airport there's a colorful mural of the city illustrating its battlements and a poster advertising, "endless island," which is, when you think of it, an oxymoron. During the summer Alghero is teaming with tourists who gravitate towards the art nouveau newpaper kiosk with its L’Unione Sarda” on top. Oh yes and if you’re in doubt, sardines are definitely a Sardinian speciality. There's something garish about Alghero with its late night bazaar, which sells all the cheap memorabilia you will never need and street musicians wailing forth in a folk rock style derivative of American pop stars of the 70’s and 80’s. But Alghero is a place where memories are made and  where many of the supernumeraries who populated Fellini classics like 8 ½ probably learned their tricks.

Rome Journal IX: Rebibbia

photograph by Hallie Cohen

Rebibbia is the last stop on the B line, far from the Center of Rome with it tourist buses and luxury hotels. It’s also the home of the Rebibbia prison. If you walk along the gray stone walls, with their blue guard towers signs note Casa di Reclusione and Casa  Ministero di Grazi et Giustizia. In the early evening sparrows fly over the prison and you can hear the honking of geese along with the ringing of nearby church bells. From l951-3 the great Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini lived in the Rebbibia area on Via Giovanni Tagliere and as you walk along the Via Chiodi Virginia which runs along the side of the prison, a sign reading V. Giovanni Tagliere is mysteriously imbedded in the barbed wire and the air is rife with the contradiction between religion, Marxism and morality that would characterize Pasolini's work. For instance, the 311 bus which takes you from the Rebibbia train station to the prison has stops at Marx, Kant and Spinoza. Rebibbia was a likely influence on the scene in Mamma Roma (1962) when Roma’s son Ettore dies on a gurney in a prison hospital. It’s a scene framed after Mantegna’s "Lamentation of Christ." Rebibbia is still a working class neighborhood today and it even has an Italian branch of Midas Muffler right outside the subway stop. But when you walk along the narrow streets with their modest two story houses that lead to one of Rome’s major prisons you can view first hand the influences that went into the gestation of Pasolini’s esthetic. Verlaine wrote these lines from a prison cell: "Le ciel set par-dessau le toit, Si blue si calme, un arbre par-dessus le toit, berce sa palme, la cloche, dans le ciel qu'on voit, Doucement tinte .." And here is a  Pasolini's "Poet from ashes:" 
                                  
"We lived in a house without a roof or roughcast,
a paupers’ house, in the outer suburbs, near a prison.
There was a foot of dust in the summer; in the winter, it was a swamp.
But it was Italy, naked, teeming Italy,
with its boys, its women,
its ‘odours of jasmine and poor soups’,
sunsets over the fields of the Aniene, the rubbish heaps,
and, for my part,
my honest dreams of poetry."

Rome Journal I: The Whores of Rome

"Death of the Virgin" by Caravaggio (c.1606)

In ancient times Rome was a palace of debauchery. Gore Vidal wrote the script for Caligula, the story of the emperor who epitomized the debauchery that was Rome. In Mamma Roma, Pier Paolo Pasolini tells the tragic story of a retired prostitute who seeks to better herself and the life of her son. Indeed, the poverty of post-war Rome forced many women into prostitution. But today Rome’s primary business is tourism and as you negotiate your way through the buses of American, German and Japanese tourists who flock to the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla and the famed wedding cake, (the monument to Victor Emmanuel II), there’s nary prostitute in sight. Where are the whores of Rome? Well here is a comment on TripAdvisor written by a guest who stayed at a hotel on the Viale Guglielmo Marconi in the EUR, the area where Mussolini built his fascist housing  (remember that scene in Mamma Roma where Anna Magnani goes to locate one of her old sex worker friends in a similar part of town?): “THERE ARE PROSTITUTES ALL UP AND DOWN THE AVENUE!!! SO as you are walking back from the metro to your hotel you are bombarded by women with bras showing and butt cheeks hanging out. I was horrified and immediately felt unsafe.” In an article in The Guardian (“Rome red light district given green light,” 2/7/15) a neighborhood organizer named Cristina Lattanzi, who has lobbied for restrictions and who originally spoke to La Repubblica is quoted thusly, “Eur is already the city’s red light district with more than 20 streets under siege day and night. There are streets for transvestites, streets for very young girls, streets for male prostitution. Us residents need a bit of peace.” So Rome hasn’t really changed since ancient times. It’s just that the prostitutes have merely moved from the great monuments of antiquity, where they once openly plied their trade, to a different part of town.When in Rome...but even in Rome whores today are not what they used to be.

 

Don’t Bite Your Nails!

In commenting on his toughness in being able to endure despite his low numbers in recents polls (and stave off Donald Trump’s repeated tweets that he drop out of contention), Jeb Bush told CNN's Jamie Gangel, “I’m a grinder. I eat nails before I have breakfast." (“Bush Keeps Hitting Rubio,” CNN, 11/3/15).There’s a famous scene in Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a masterpiece of depravity, far exceeding even the Republican presidential debates, in which the feckless victims are forced to eat apples laced with nails. It’s one of the more harrowing interludes of a film that's both brilliant and well nigh impossible to watch--comprising as it does coprophilia and numerous other eccentricities that leave little left to the imagination when it comes to the indignities that human beings are capable of perpetrating on each other. Pasolini himself was murdered shortly after Salo was shot. But getting back to Bush when you watch the interview he doesn’t look like someone who has eaten nails. Let’s go back to the video, as Warner Wolf used to say. If you look at Salo you will get a pretty good facsimile of a normal human reaction to eating nails and it isn’t something that’s going to turn a politician into a great interview subject on CNN.  Huge cries of anguish emanate from the nail grinder and then there's the inevitable damage to the gums and teeth. If Bush's claim about his nail eating ability is simply afflatus, he should watch out what he wants for he may get it. How is someone going to get on the horn with Putin, speak to the UN or negotiate Iran-Contra II when they chew their nails?

Giornale Adriatico-Mediterraneo IX: Orvieto’s Unconscious

watercolor of dovecotes by Hallie Cohen

 Pasolini famously shot The Gospel According to St. Matthew in the Matera caves (the Sassi di Matera) of Southern Italy, which have been inhabited since prehistoric times. Orvieto is another city with storied caves, in this case going back to the Etruscan era between the 7^th and 2^nd centuries BC. Orvieto was struck by a volcano over 100,000 years ago. Tufa, the rock produced by volcanic ash, can be particularly malleable yet strong. It’s estimated there still are over 1200 caves lying under Orvieto today. The Etruscans used caves for their cisterns but they were also the site of tombs and necropoli. It was only after the middle ages that caves started to be employed for more mercantile uses like making olive oil, wine and also raising pigeons which nested in dovecotes. Pigeon shit was an industry until a papal decree forbade the openings through which the pigeons flew and which were being used by people who wanted to sneak into the city without paying taxes. Rope making from hemp and pottery soon supplanted pigeons. In a kinder world, Terry Malloy, the character Marlon Brando played in On the Waterfront, who found peace raising pigeons on his tenement roof, might have retired to a pigeon coop or co-op in Orvieto. Even though Orvieto like Siena and Rome was a so-called Citta Aperta (and hence  protected from bombing during World War II), there were caves that were used by the local hospital as bomb shelters. Orvieto is a resplendent medieval city built high above surrounding vineyards and the caves constitute a kind of hidden world that’s far more extensive than the basement or cellar you find under a typical home. Orvieto’s caves are like an unconscious, a massive dark and hidden place that’s the repository of the long history lying under the veneer of everyday life.