Tag Archives

Italy

RIVA DEI SETTE MARTIRI, VENICE

If you stroll far enough, long enough eastwards

on Riva Degli Schiavoni (Shore

of the Slaves) – before it was a wide,

stone promenade it was sand and mud  –

stroll away from the crowds, past the Danieli,

the Arsenale, the vaporetto stops

and beyond, with San Georgio Majore

across the Bacino Di San Marco –

you come to the Shore of the Seven Martyrs,

where now private yachts and small cruise ships dock.

 

It was the Riva Dell’Imperio –

built by the Fascists in the ’30s –

when the German Kriegsmarine torpedo boats

moored there. The officers were partying

one July night – the carousing loud

through the blacked out canals – when a sentry

disappeared. A crowd of hundreds was forced

to watch the seven murders – men who were

already incarcerated – and children

forced to clean the blood from the stones. Later,

body unmarked, lungs full of sea water,

the sentry’s corpse washed up against the oak piles

that keep the city safe in the lagoon.

 

Nothing extraordinary here. There are

two other sites in Venice, many more

throughout Italy, with greater numbers –

like the bus exchange in Gubbio,

Piazza Dei Quaranta Martiri,

or Rome’s Adreatine massacre.

Nothing remarkable anywhere perhaps

given half a million Italian war dead

except mostly, despite the witnesses,

the crimes are unpunished.

 

 

 

THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY

‘Senator Boethius is the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged as their countryman.’

Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

 

Dante and Beatrice saw Boethius –

the sixth century consul, chamberlain,

intellectual and family man –

in Paradise: one of the twelve shining lights

in the sun’s heavenly firmament,

along with Solomon and Aquinas.

 

Imprisoned in a tower for alleged treason

and under sentence of execution,

he wrote De Consolatione

Philosophiae, a dialogue

between himself and Lady Philosophy,

reflecting – he in prose, she in poetry –

on wealth’s and fame’s transitory nature,

on virtue transcending fortune: almost

glib, smug if it had been written in freedom.

His paragon, Plato, would have inspired him,

and Socrates busy in prison.

Did he act it out in his loneliness?

 

His assassins – who killed him, according to

conflicting accounts, with axe, sword, club, garrotte –

did not record his last words. He was murdered

on orders of Theodoric, his erstwhile

friend, king of the Goths and Italy.

He was venerated as a catholic

martyr, allegedly walking headless

in death, and a catholic theologian,

his revered writing influencing

Augustine, for instance, as well as Dante,

masters and servants of allegory.

He was without any superstitions

or Christian beliefs, and zealous

for the public good so might have found such

hagiolatry amusing – or merely

a sign of their dark times.

 

 

 

BRUEGEL: ‘RETURN OF THE HUNTERS’

                              i

To choose this as a classic Christmas card –

this composite landscape of Flanders,

Italy, the Alps, this Yuletide Europe – is

unintentional satire. The hunters

have caught just one fox. Even the hounds are hangdog.

Hunched the men trudge on past the tavern.

The sign is inscribed ‘Under the Stag’,

has an image of St Eustace, patron

of hunters, but hangs askew by one hook.

Beneath it a man, a woman and a child

are singeing a dead pig. The flames are reaching

a window of the inn. A solitary

magpie takes our view onto the plain:

the iced up mill wheel, indifferent skaters,

chimney on fire and tiny figures

running with pails; the walled town abutting

a frozen sea; the rearing mountains.

 

ii

We had prints at home – ‘In the Orchard’,

‘Off Valpariso’, ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’ –

but nothing like this. I saw it first

at the back of a schoolroom when I was nine.

My desk was beneath it. I found a copy

ten years later and felt I had retrieved

a lost gift, a book only half read

then mislaid. More than half a century on

framed now it hangs in our dining room.

 

iii

My grand daughter says, ‘I love that picture.’

‘Why?,’ I ask. ‘Don’t know,’ she mumbles. How crass

to have asked! I would not have known then

if anybody had cared to question me.

The print hung on the class wall unremarked.

While we did sums and spellings and tests,

the perspective at the back of my head

beckoned me.

 

 

 

SEAMUS HEANEY: A LIVERPOOL MEMORY

After the reading, we strolled down Brownlow Hill

for a Guinness and a chaser at The Vines

next to The Adelphi on Lime Street –

a Walker’s pub in Edwardian baroque.

The westering sun lit the stained glass windows.

 

We were both young men then. He had been married

the year before. I would be married

later that year. His first book had been published

by Faber and Karl Miller’s prescient review

seemed genuinely to bemuse and amuse him.

We talked of the city’s sectarian split –

the Orange annual march, with drums and fifes,

to Newsham Park, their annual outing

by train to Southport past the Scotland Road flats

festooned with green – curtains, tablecloths.

 

The University was generous

with expenses and paid for a taxi

to Speke.  He had a flight booked to Le Touquet

and a hire car there he would drive through the night

into Italy to join his wife.

He was so unostentatious, so

matter-of-fact, that such travel plans

seemed perfectly ordinary to someone

who had no licence and had only

been abroad on a school trip to San Malo!

 

As he got in the cab and we shook hands,

I knew I had met a particularly

memorable person – modest, kind

and witty – who happened also to be

especially, exceptionally talented.

 

When I opened The Door Into The Dark

some three years later and read ‘Night Drive’ –

 

The smells of ordinariness

Were new on the night drive through France;

Rain and hay and woods on the air

Made warm draughts in the open car.

 

Signposts whitened relentlessly.

Montrueil, Abbeville, Beauvais

Were promised, promised, came and went,

Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

 

A combine groaning its way late

Bled seeds across its work-light.

A forest fire smouldered out.

One by one small cafés shut.

 

I thought of you continuously

A thousand miles south where Italy

Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

Your ordinariness was renewed there.

 

– I knew I had been privileged and lucky

that summer evening to shake hands with

a compassionate genius, romantic,

urbane: a maker of exquisite art

out of the everyday.