travel books: Italy

"Italy Out of Hand" by Barbara Hodgson
"The Passion of Artemesia" by Susan Vreeland
"Death in A Strange Country" by Donna Leon
"Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" by Ross King
"Cabaret" by Lily Prior
"Italian Folktales" by Italo Calvino
"M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio" by Peter Robb

I find it insufferable when lovers of literature brag about how many books they've packed in their suitcase, or how they sat the night before the plane trip and chucked one last pair of espadrilles in favor of the latest Rushdie novel or some nonsense. Maybe because I find this snooty, when really, packing books shouldn't be any more a point of pride as remembering to take your pills along. Why bother sniffing about it? However, I do find it cool when travellers/book lovers advise me what books I want to read about a place before I go there. There is such an astonishment of synchronicity to experience something so intimately through a book and then to be there, knowing things from many angles, seeing through multiple eyes. Like standing in the flesh before something that you have seen in countless photographs--something iconic like the Pyramids or the Eiffel Tower--there is a strange collision of utter newness and complete familiarity that is a wonderfully disorienting pleasure. At any rate, when I was about to travel to Italy this past May for a month, I thought long and hard about where I most wanted to find those moments, and what books could help me find them.
The last time I was in Italy I was fifteen years old, barely equipped to know much about anything, in addition to being away from home for the first time. It is difficult enough to travel and keep track of everything gliding by you; reading about what you are seeing provides, for me at least, essential little handholds to grab on to something recognizable.
Some of the books I chose were for pure Italian-flavored entertainment. "Cabaret" was the only book I began while still at home in the States, and it was a strange and arbitrary choice. The novel is a bit of a dark comedy, almost British in its sensibility, though Italian in its setting. (The author, as it turns out, splits her time between London and Rome.) The novel was the farcical story of a female undertaker in Rome and the story of how she comes to marry a ventriloquist. It was one of the stranger books I've read, its style teetering between romance, adventure, mystery and comedy, but it was schizophrenic in a way that I soon recognized as quintessentially Roman.
I believed something similar about the Donna Leon book, having been well-aware that she is considered one of the premier mystery writers in the world. I suppose that I couldn't resist the lure of the "wonderfully atmospheric" mystery. I read it in Venice, but the novel disappointed me in a way that the city itself certainly did not. Before I left, I had tried to read John Berendt's "The City of Falling Angels" but I was so disgusted by its superior attitude and tourist-bashing that I couldn't even finish it, a rarity for me with any book. Interestingly, the other book on Venice that I tried to read before embarking was Brodsky's "Watermark" with which I had the oppostite problem: I was too overwhelmed with its beauty, with the desire to go slow and savor, that I realized it wasn't the right time to read it, despite its astonishing meditations on Venice and the art of travel, in the midst of my whooshing rush through a literary tutorial of Italy. At any rate, I suppose I write about these failed attempts with Venice books also as a way of not having to write about the Leon book which was dull and nearly as anti-tourist and anti-American as the Berendt book I tossed aside.
Vreeland's book was good for my purpose. I wanted to learn more about the famous Artemesia, but I knew that with the King and Robb books I wouldn't be able, most likely, to finish my non-fiction book about her, so I brought the novel instead, which I read in about two days. I can't say the book had much redeeming value beyond Artemisia's life which was interesting all by itself. It was floridly written and plainly silly, but it provided me with a lot the essential detail behind the precious few works that I saw in Rome and Florence.
The best choices were the non-fiction, and Calvino. "Italy Out of Hand" was made for people like me, who are interested in the morbid and salacious details of history (and Italy has a lot of those): where to find the crypt of the Capuchin monks decorated in ornately patterned human bones, where to see relics, strange statues, how to eat where Byron, Ruskin, Bonaparte, Browning ate, what churches hold strange and unusual paintings, etc. To be honest, if there were one book that I would recommend as an essential travel guide, it would be this one, far more valuable, in an admittedly impractical way, than any Lonely Planet or Rough Guide.
The King book on the Sistine Chapel was also wonderful. Cleanly written, fascinating from beginning to end, it is a must for anyone who can't bear the thought of standing in front of those rolling transparency stations inside the Vatican Museums hearing a stale script about the painting of the ceiling. King's book set up the tense triangle of the arrogant and war-mongering Pope, the misanthropic sculptor and the handsome upstart, Raphael, painting his own masterpieces just steps away from his rival. Besides, the best part of all are the detailed color photos of the chapel; you can study them intently as you learn all the little interesting flourishes that Michelangelo included (look, that cherub's making the fig!) which you won't be able to see when you're really there, and which you won't want to, given the number of hot, sweaty tourists you are crammed in with, and the fascist guards ready to rip your lips off for whispering to the person next to you.
The Robb book, in many ways, is the exact opposite of "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling." It is a sprawling rambling book, packed with minute details, and loaded with Robb's acid tongue, strong opinions and hysterically contemporary translations of court transcripts, obscene doggerel, etc. Robb clearly identifies with his unruly subject, the great Caravaggio, plagued by weasly rivals who wanted to paint like he painted but without the consequences of falling on the wrong side of a rather shocked religious establishment. Robb clearly believes that Caravaggio was not the wild reprobate history has made him out to be, and so the book, while factual, is nothing approaching objective. However, I doubt very much that lovers of Caravaggio would even desire a book that was not at least as untameable as its hero. This, of all the books, was the most moving to learn from, especially at the moment that I stood in a room of the Palazzo Barberini with a Caravaggio painting on one wall and a painting by his chief rival, Baglione, a smug kiss-ass whose painting of sacred love trouncing profane love appropriated Caravaggio's hallmarks while contorting the subject matter into something religiously acceptable (Caravaggio's homo-erotic "Love the Winner" made no such claims for the inferiority of physical, earthly desire) and topping it all of by portraying an ugly, slobbering devil with Caravaggio's face. While this is perhaps one of the most well-known stories of Caravaggio's career, what matters is that I didn't know it, and would have walked through the room without feeling the reverberations that I did knowing what I was really seeing.
Finally, what trip to Italy would be complete without Calvino? When I was in Ascea, a small town south of Naples on the sea coast, our next-nearest neighbor was a woman named Lina who taught us the Italian phrase for "The Wizard of Oz." If there is, in fact, a Wizard of Italy, Il Mago D'Italia, surely it must be Calvino. Most nights before bed, I would crack open the folktales and read yet another tale of a king's daughter who married a man covered in seaweed, or a witch who tricked a man into marrying a sheep. They, more than anything, provided exactly what I was looking for: a glimpse into a country's deepest heart, and enough comforting universality to assuage the longing for a familiar home.