One Saturday in February we drove
from Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport
north up the valley of the Tiber
to Umbertide in Umbria,
a town bridging the river’s upper reaches,
and that had guarded the northern Marches
during the bloody and iconoclastic
turbulence of the Renaissance.
We passed Orvieto and Perugia.
The sun shone unseasonably unfettered,
emollient as a British day in late June.
Folk were sunbathing on the grassy banks
of the motorway service stations.
When we reached our hotel on the town’s outskirts
the air was soft as on a summer’s evening.
Next day, St Valentine’s, the cathedral’s bell
ringing for mattutino, the flat fields
of vines, where lovers and iconoclasts
might lie – between the curving river
and the long road south – were drowned in mists.
This month, that here always used to be bleak
and wet, has become a changeling. Years
after Umbertide, on another
Valentine’s, we sat on a council bench
beside the corniche in the lee of the Orme,
sunning ourselves like superannuated
terrapins. The uninhibited sun
burned through a haze of blushing coral
above Penmaenmawr over the bay.
Februarius from februum,
‘purification’ – perhaps like the heat
and the calm of love’s absolution.
By David Selzer