My son George and I walk
through the pedestrian shopping street in Sassello and everything is exactly
the same. Well, not everything: the butcher has moved across the street, but
the shop still has the red curly plastic strand curtain to keep the flies
out.
The bakery is still
there, the Bellonotto.
The tabacchino is
still there, with the ceramic sign above it, Tabacchi. They also carry newspapers and magazines and
toys. They have a display of cheap toys
hanging outside. And inside, it’s the
same people. I couldn’t have told you
what they looked like if you had asked, but now that I see them I recognize
them.
And the Bar Gina is still
there. It’s a locale on a prominent
corner, and like all Italian bars it’s a bar but it’s open and airy, and this
one is famous for its ice cream, particularly fruit ice cream, made with fresh
fruit in season like peach, raspberry and melon. The sign outside has a big ceramic ice cream
cone, same as it always had. We walk
inside and Gina is there, scooping ice cream.
Of course. What else would she be
doing? She is ancient, but she moves
with energy. She keeps the ice cream in
deep tubs, so she has to lean over and reach deep into the tubs, not an easy
physical thing to do, but she has been doing it for decades and is doing it
still. She’s not personally a charmer,
she doesn’t do small talk, but she’s a local legend.
We order two cones, and
as she begins work on the first one a little bit chips off the edge. She sets it aside, and I tell her it’s okay,
I don’t mind the little chip. She says
no, she’ll give us another one. As we
walk away with our trophy cones, I turn around, and she has picked up the
chipped one and is munching on it.
In the bigger square just
outside the old town, the one with the parking spaces, are the stores that sell
amaretti, almond macaroons that are the specialty here.
Back inside the village
we walk up the other street. This one
has the hardware store, with an outdoor display of brooms, gloves, knives,
mats, watering cans, coffee makers, thermometers, umbrellas, and anything else
you might need. There’s a great Fellini
film called I Vitelloni, in which an old woman walks into a small town store
and asks for, “two little candles like the ones I bought last year.” That’s what this store is like. If you walked in and asked for two
clothespins like the ones you bought last year, they would know what you mean,
walk to the back, and come back with the clothespins you want. Then they would package them nicely for you.
Farther down is the shoe
store. What was always remarkable about
this store is that it had a giant shoe hanging outside. And this big shoe is still there, attracting
shoppers. This single brown shoe is the
length of three shoes. The shop carries
a selection of sensible footwear of all kinds, arrayed in display cases and on
boxes neatly arranged in rows. The sale
items are in baskets, with the low prices advertised with hand-written
signs. I have never bought shoes here
and never will, but many must do.
George likes the big
shoe. He will display regularly an
interest in unexpected things, not the things I’m trying to share with
him. But we share a like for the big
shoe.
As a small child and
later in high school we lived in Milan and spent the summers in Sassello. It’s a little town in the Ligurian
hinterland, hilly, surrounded by woods.
The town is small but it has some stately buildings, some large
churches, and shops.
I love Sassello.
I don’t remember very
much about the early days here, though we have pictures of them. What I think I remember I may have instead
just seen in the pictures. My trip here
today I will also recall from the pictures I’m taking.
My grandparents spent
time here with us. My grandfather was an
admiral and our next door neighbor was also an admiral, and I didn’t really
know what that meant, so I thought all old men were admirals.
I do recall that there
was a big flower bed with dahlias and daisies.
I have put daisies in my garden in New Jersey because of it, but they
were overrun by black eyed Susans. There
was a small chapel. There was also a
large tree stump that my sister and I used as a table. My grandfather’s sister remembered my sister
and I offering her tasty mangiarini we had concocted on the tree stump,
made of dirt and coffee grinds. Behind
the house there was a grassy field with fruit trees.
I recall that there was a
grape arbor in the garden, with a bench at one end. We parked the car at the other end of the
arbor. One time my cousin Nino started
the car and nearly took out the entire family.
From the house we went
hiking in the woods, with the specific goal of mushroom picking. We were good mushroom pickers—porcini
mushrooms primarily. We have a home
movie of my mother holding an exceedingly large mushroom, turning it this way
and that for display, the pride of the pick.
Someone else’s dog, a little caramel colored dog named Dick, pronounced
Deek, accompanied us on our hikes.
My father worked in Milan
during the week and came on the weekend.
My grandfather would go into town in the morning, food shopping. He used to take me, and he called me his nipotina
prediletta, his favorite granddaughter.
I didn’t know what it meant though I knew to be proud of the
moniker. I’m not sure where that put my
sister who was certainly as lovable as I, if not more. She may have been tiny at the time. I was a nice and well-mannered kid, a
pleaser.
On Sundays we went to
church at San Giovanni, a solitary beautiful church on a hilltop surrounded by
a small park with a stone wall, benches, and a merry-go-round. My sister and I wore matching pink and white
Sunday dresses, the same ones every Sunday, we only had the one good
outfit. We weren’t poor, I think the
culture then was you only had what you needed.
And you did need a good outfit for church, but not multiple ones.
Then we moved to Brazil
and this particular part of my childhood ended.
This was a summer place,
but there was a couple that lived here year round, Ina and Paolo. Paolo worked for one of the amaretti
makers, he drove a Vespa. For him a
Vespa was not a cool 1960s means of transportation, it was an inexpensive and
practical means of transportation. Ina
helped out in the summer, she cleaned houses and sold the eggs from her
chickens. If there is one reason I love
chickens, it’s Ina’s chickens, roaming around.
Ina and Paolo did not have any children, and Ina in particular was a
great buddy to us, she would give us chewing gum, which was totally forbidden,
our parents would never give us chewing gum.
We had two friends in
Sassello, two girls the same age as my sister and I—Paola and Maria Elena. They spent their summers thirty meters from
where we spent ours, and we spent hours and hours of every day together.
We walk by the steps
where we used to sit. I expect to see
them, I expect them to be there, but they’re not. No one is.
It’s all the same, but it isn’t.
Memory is a funny
thing. I remember some things clearly,
while other things, details really, I don’t remember at all. But as I see those details again, the
memories of them from back then come back.
Things that I had forgotten I now remember, and vividly. The pattern of the paving stones of the
road—stones cut about 2 by 2 inches square, arranged in interweaved
semi-circles—is not something stored in any photograph and not something
important enough to remember—it was not something I would even have actively
noticed back then. But when I see it
again, it’s so characteristic of the place, I remember it now, seeing it again.
There are things I don’t
remember that turn out to exist. And
then there are things that I thought I remembered that, on inspection, turn out
to be different from what I remembered.
Much of it is related to scale—things appear smaller. And where I remember things that are no
longer verifiable, I have to remain wondering if my recollections are true.
