16.1.24
in the soil
This little medieval town is girt round by lakes and by the railway and so remains in appearance at least a little medieval town despite the underwear and watch shops which line the covered avenues beneath which the quality once strolled and despite the unidentifiable industrial structures, a child’s moon-base, which spread out across the plains on the other side of the lakes which supplied once the medieval town and its castle with ducks and heron and great toothy pike. In the grass in the soil by the lake is nothing but dead leaves and grass and bright tufts of horseweed, in the air above an improbable load of persimmon bright orange in a skeletal tree; down the Venice-aping urban creek a kingfisher flicks its blue along, its bright pageant blue along the water.
in the kitchen
There is something medieval too in the sweetness of these tortelli we eat the first night, not just the bland vegetal sweetness of their squash but the intensity of good dried fruits, they have in them amaretti biscuits crushed up and also I think mosto cotto, grape must molasses, which goes also on top of crepes filled too with squash and into a digestive blend of grappa and walnut liqueur. With the sweet-savoury pasta and the well-cooked vegetables and the jugs of wine and the great toothy pike which we do not try grace the menus though they do garnished always with salsa verde and the spicy bread sauce which comes with the boiled meats I feel well-fed and with my humours in order, good-humoured.
on the page
The only book remaining of the ones I brought with me or bought at the airport to read while here is Dorothy B. Hughes’ In A Lonely Place, very far with its grim fog-bound stranglings across the back-roads and beachfronts of LA from this little medieval town watched over by its astrological clock – although out there too is the fog of the Po Lowlands weighing down the air as I read later in The Hunger of Women there is that landscape of fog and crime as Marosia Castaldi’s narrator repeats and repeats and repeats, fog and crime and death everywhere.