The Betwixt Instrument

In the 450 years since the violin emerged in Italy it hasn’t changed much: improvements haven’t improved things. Thus the market for Stradivari grows with the bust-proof economic resilience of a north London house.

As with many of the best ideas, the violin is essentially rather simple. Made of pine, a wood with a velocity of “conducting sound” around 15 to 16 times greater than through the air lengthwise, and across only two to four times. It is, I learn, the “most musical of woods” according to the author, Paul Stoeving in his “The Violin”.



The first known violin maker lived and worked in Brescia, which comes on Tom’s route after Venice (the home leg, as it were). Gesparo da Salò’s pupil, Paulo Maggini took this skill on. He died in Brescia in 1632.

But that is Brescia; what about Cremona, where for 100 years the fame of the Amati family’s violins spread far and wide? I suspect the inter-city rivalries of two towns separated by a few hundred kilometres will never be reconciled over the violin. What is clear is that Cremona’s PR has always been better. And in Stradivari it has a Renaissance Brand-Leader whose “equity” has never fallen.

Antonio Stradivari was an apprentice to Nicolo Amati from the 1660s. But it is not until old age, 56 years old, that the violins we think of began to emerge. Why I like the violin within Tom’s World is that ownership of the instrument – not a Stradi, nor an Amati or a Maggini, or a Guarneri – but a “fiddle” was one key to becoming betwixt: the predecessors of the violin virtuosi where what in Germany were called “Spielmänner” and we might call wandering minstrels and strolling players. These were the men and women who wandered from the ninth century onwards; whose lives improved a little with the Crusades, the times of “Troubadours”. And it is worth noting that just as Tom fails to mention violins in Cremona, so too the “Syntagma” a supposedly definitive work on musical instruments published in 1619, and written by Michael Praetorius, a German, does not mention the violin.

Paul Stoeving tells the early story of fiddlers and fiddling (the pre-violin, and pre-orchestral instrumentation) well:

“…a poor despised lot, the company of acrobats, punch and judy men and trainers of performing dogs, monkeys, etc. a kind of free community which had grown out of the barbarous conditions prevailing in Europe for several centuries after the great migration of people. They enjoyed neither the rights of citizenship nor the privilege…of religious sacraments. Their children were considered illegitimate, were not allowed to learn a trade, and what they left by means of property was confiscated by the state…[their hair] the men were compelled at one time to wear short to distinguish them from free born men and women – a cruel, barbarous restriction for which later violin and piano virtuosi seem to have taken their justifiable revenge by allowing their locks to grow, as a distinguishing feature, to about double the conventional length.”

Stoeving paints a picture of the musicians at court, wrestling with “music” and “politics” and laying the foundations for, say, Bach, while, excluded and outside - the fun in Shakespeare - “the poor fiddling, blowing drumming knight errants eked out a precarious living on the high roads.” I like the resonances: to buskers, rock and roll, rebellion; and to the stories that the betwixtness of popular music generates.

Tomorrow night the concert season begins in Cremona.

Half the Full Monty

Cremona is, as I have written already, a music town; it is only in contemplation, which means getting back to real books, and a library, that even a few of its musical hauntings become easier to hear. Cremona is not just about violins, the Amati family and their heirs, the Stadivari; it is also the birthplace of the man who forged “opera” into a separate musical form.

And “opera” – like “Shakespeare”, Rousseau’s “rights of man”, Mantegna’s “perspective”, the Lumière brothers’ “documentary”, Coryat’s “tourism”, to name just a few “ideas” or modes available to witness on my route – is part of Europe’s grand DNA. One of the key architects of post-Second World War European restoration was Jean Monnet, often nick-named the “father of Europe.” He once said (according to Anthony Sampson, in his The New Europeans): “Europe has never existed, one has genuinely to create Europe.”



Well, opera is part of that story, a strand, one of the things that helps to create and recreate “Europe”. As is the story of Orpheus; someone once said that with his first song, “civilisation began”. So too opera: a collage of music, theatre, dance, spectacle and narrative; betwixt each individual form, not for “church” nor a ‘masque, not a play, not a novel. It is holistic, the sum not its parts: Opera’s ‘stretch’ is what film-makers from Orson Welles to Michael Powell, Jacques Demy to Martin Scorcese or Bernardo Bertolucci strive for in cinema such as Citizen Kane or The Red Shoes, Last Tango or Goodfellas. Opera’s reach is what we experience each time we watch a summer blockbuster, a mixture of sensory experiences collected together to show us impossible visions. Opera’s sensory range is what we find in computer games, albeit in five (or 50) interactive levels, rather than scripted acts.

And opera’s story begins in Cremona; begins with Claudio Monteverdi. Later stories might take us to Mantua, Venice, to La Scala in Milan, to Paris; to Bayreuth and Richard Wagner’s own journeys in Europe, both as man and myth and fashionable movement. But in Cremona where, now, as the streets and squares change through a day: from market to restaurant, promenade and café centre and dating-ground, musicality in rhythm and tone, mood and motion, infuses the experience of being present.

Monteverdi was born in Cremona in 1567 on May 15 (he had his 40th birthday on the day that Tom sailed from Dover to Calais); his “L’Orfeo”, not precisely the first opera, but probably the seventh, and the one which we have complete records, was performed at “carnival” in Mantua, four hundred years ago this year. More of L’Orfeo from Mantua, soon.

Monteverdi is, like so many artists of Tom’s time, a figure betwixt. He is seen as the bridge between Renaissance and “Baroque” music. A prodigy who was writing motets and madrigals for his teacher, Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, the maestro di capella of Cremona’s cathedral, at the age of 15, Monteverdi moved 80 kilometers to Mantua when 23, to become first vocalist and viol player, and later, aged 35 conductor to the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga the First. It is in Mantua that “opera” is really born. And it is in the years, often filled with controversy about his “art”, between leaving Cremona and the production of “L’Orfeo” that Monteverdi creates the intellectual framework for “the modern in music.”

In a specific book, investigating the female voice in the late Renaissance and early Baroque, to which I shall return - Bonnie Gordon’s “Monteverdi’s Unruly Women” - the author writes of the composer:

“…his compositions bring into relief points of tension in a rapidly changing culture…few have considered his music in the context of ideas about sense and the body…To be sure, social mores in the decades around 1600 demanded tacit women whose quieted voices supposedly reflected their chastity and distanced them from inappropriate eroticism. But music from that time regularly depended upon and displayed trained women’s voices. This paradox inflected musical productions with tantalizing contradictions that situated women’s bodies and sonorous expression precariously between harmless pleasure and threatening excess. It also created a space in which women could, through singing, seize power…”

Again, half way through this journey, taking a pause to contemplate, it is clear that I have missed so much along the way. The “quieted” woman is one such thing. Tom almost never mentions women until the courtesans of Venice; in Padua shortly I will encounter a “shrew”. And yet all though my journey I’ve been thinking about women, of marriage rituals, family, of how travel and modernity have changed the role of mother, lover and friend. And now, one hour of reading something more researched than Wikipedia or the museum hand-out (in 14 languages) and I am plunged back into “Casaubon Complex”. More of this in Mantua proper. And some context about Google and Microsoft’s plans to “digitize” the world’s knowledge.

How far still we are from a world of portable knowledge: I had thought that the internet, the memory stick, the phone would aid these journeys. And whilst they can help, it is a very different experience I have with “information” and “knowledge” when travelling, being a mobile researcher, juggling the moment and the haunting and the “thing that should be seen”. The result is a surface polishing - one of Cremona’s mysterious varnishes for its famous violins – rather than the depth which comes from just a morning with a library and its books.




For twenty minutes in Mantua Ulrich Rückriem talked to me about the magic maths of triangles; of how explaining the triangle has eluded the greatest minds for so long: for the traveller today, betwixt the moment when the convergence of GPS, data, and place brings ‘knowledge’ to a precise geographical co-ordinate, and the pre-internet world of a guide book and, sometimes, an informed guide in a museum, what is missing is the crucial third point in Ulrich’s triangles of form. What is missing is the experience of depth. That only comes back in the library.

Interesting.

Cremona in four movements

Cremona is a music town; likes to think of itself as the centre for the greatest violin making in history. A hundred metres from its cathedral is a museum with examples from Stradivari, Guaraneri dei Gesû; as well as violins made by members of the Amati family, beginning with Andrea Amati, born in 1566.




Tom doesn’t mention the violins, but today, as in 1608, workshops are found all over the town; in the violin museum it is easy to look at the instruments - in glass boxes, under controlled temperatures, with guards strolling and no photography whatsoever – and imagine Amati’s instruments being played in churches here, or in nearby Venice – where Tom does witness, and thoroughly describes, a concert.




Cremona has a musical rhythm: a four movement day, each with themes, developed over time. Mornings are about shopping, markets that arrive with daylight, a blur of colours; of mercantile sounds. Cafés are for breaks in the process, full of men – who will not be moving – sitting over the football papers, and joined sometimes by women in mid-process acquisition (old-school, but true). On Saturday it is the fair of St Anthony, which brings markets to all three of the main squares: get up late though and it will be missed. By one all that is left are white vans taking the unsold clothes and foods away.




The first movement is about bustle and noise, as is the third and some parts of the fourth. Often in these towns, in Lodi, Vercelli, Mantua and Pizzighetonne – merely the ones I’ve seen – the question of where food is bought comes up. Lodi might display its 5000 Euro sofas with some discrete pleasure, where its grocery store is, who knows? Only the local people seem to know, and they keep such secrets with a conspiracist’s joy; often they shop outside, in hypermarkets that we tourist/travellers never see, I suspect.



The open markets change this: an obvious variation. Suddenly cheeses and meats, vegetables and oils are centre stage, along with the shoes and dresses and sunglasses. The result is a Saturday morning of worship, re-acquaintance and bargains. And as the last notes are played, and paid, it isn’t clear, to the uninitiated, what kind of second movement is to come.







In fact what comes is a giant conjuring trick: the market stalls vanish within twenty minutes and so do the inhabitants of Cremona. A few are to be seen having a late lunch, but really the only people on the streets are strangers. Tourists, travellers; and a coach party from America.




To say American tourists are soft targets is a little like saying Stockhausen’s music isn’t particularly easy to consume. In this case horror after horror is perpetrated, said, done: at least the entire “visit” to Cremona only takes 45 minutes, most of which is taken up in an argument about whether “gelato” is ice-cream. The basis of the discussion being that several of the party were sick last night after “gelato”, and they are never sick in the States with ice-cream (do the math yourself). The whole episode is like one of Shakespeare’s vaguely annoying interludes when the clowns come onstage for some audience participation. The group is a kind of base street theatre where despite the appearance of individual and collective confidence and volume everyone – tour leaders, reluctant dads (there are a couple), “chaperones”, “chaperone-groups” [there being a ‘war of terror], texting I-pod kids, the bored, the hungry and the sick – everyone, is nervous. Fearful of difference. “I’ve walked around the entire cathedral [i.e. the central square, a three minute adventure] and there are no take-outs, so if you are hungry: ice cream. Good news is that its food in the hotel tonight in Verona, so we don’t have to worry.”




Young girl: “He said: ‘just find something to eat in one of the streets. But like, does he know where we are?” A question made doubly ironic by the response from a Chinese-american girl. “I want to do something really exotic in Italy, maybe yoghurt and cherry mix with ice cream.”




Americans have become the new “Roma”; gypsies with Gold Cards, welcome because they pay without thinking. “The smaller coin is a ‘one’.” A group leader explains to a 16 year old boy. But scratch the surface in Italy or France and the goodwill that Americans received as a mater of fact in the 1990s, even post 9/11, has eviscerated. It is a great shame; a domino effect. Indifference to and outright displeasure with an American presence leads to a corresponding “siege” mentality, a: “so what, we’re the most powerful?” sense.







I mention them because like me, they are the only ones stupid enough to be out in the blinding heat and sun in early afternoon. Everywhere else, places that in the first, third and fourth movements are a complex arrangement of wind and strings and percussion are now just a fading echo of: “Please join your chaperone group now, please join your chaperone group…”




In the Municipal museum there are more violins, and a great deal of religious art. I am holding fire on art quite deliberately: art and architecture are Tom’s domain, the “principal” concerns of the Grand Tourists, I am trying to only mention these when they are revolutionary. Mantegna is revolutionary; but he doesn’t enter the story until Mantua.




Between 1.30 and five the streets are almost entirely deserted; the large Municipal museum I have to myself – two dogs and five administrators loll about listlessly. Outside the porticoes and the shaded streets are vital; and most shops are closed.




With the reds and greens and oranges (a browny-orange) of pre-supper drinks the town revives. Each of the three main squares has its vibe: the cathedral square, Piazza dei Comune, is older, quieter, content to watch the world wander, rather than pose. Ice cream rules. The piazza Pace is very young; off its exits the children play at sophistication on their bikes, here at the cafés the rituals of the cathedral square and the square are utterly drowned by a street disco, playing Madness, Boy George – an 80s panoply. These are the people who will drink – very slowly, often soft drinks – all evening; whereas in the Piazza Stradivari dinner is part of the process. This is the to-be-looked-at square, a counterpoint of flesh and pouting and cocktails. Woman look like Dominique Sanda; men like Paulo Maldini: a “retro-is-chic”, feel (for a small northern town in Italy – though Italy does have that retro thing everywhere; I think it always has since the 80s). Here the music is “Jamiroquai”: not new, not ancient; danceable yet not techno, neither fashionable not unfashionable. For all those things there are discos, presumably.







By eleven the kids’ square, the Piazza Pace, is a sea of youth-club mixed with high street fashion; Cremona is not the centre of bohemian Italy; it’s only obvious centre is a pub behind the cathedral where students and their teachers argue about Dante, and Capello.





It’s hard to describe the sensation of viewing this shift from almost deserted town to musical riot. I suppose the experience of crossing Italy has acclimatised me to siesta culture, but this is the largest yet: Milan and Turin are different kinds of locations. As with Lodi there is not a seat in any of the squares by eleven, and many just walk around: what was food and clothes market is now meat market, though I don’t see the “market forces” working here, I sense a series of well-scripted family sagas being played out, generation after generation. The themes are much the same as a hundred years ago, perhaps - as Donatella and Milena suggest - things have changed a little, but not so much. By one the kids have vanished, to home, “chez maman” or to the discos; in Cremona’s fourth movement there are twin tracks: the youthful locked in cellars; and the rest of us, lingering, wandering, catching a very late bite somewhere, drinking to watch, to be watched, to talk or to listen. Nowhere does anyone seem to be drinking à la Anglaise. Drinking for Drinking’s Sake seems further away than England or Germany; it is a lifetime away. It occurs to me that Tom might even have found Italy “civilized” in comparison to London. I’ll have to think about that.

Making hay Betwixt Cremona and Mantua

Tom's Cremona

My observations on Cremona.

“Cremona is a very beautifull citie, seated under a very pleasant and holesome climate, built with bricke, and walled with bricke wals, wherein are five gates; and it is invironed with trenches and rampiers, and pleasantly watered by the river Abdua. There is a pretty bricke citadel at the entrance to the towne, a little without the wall, even at the west end. It seemeth to be very auncient, but it is exceeding low: it is guarded by a Garison of Spaniards in the behalfe of the King of Spaine, to whom it belongeth as being a member of the Dukedom of Milan. In the citie I saw many faire and sumptuous buildings and some stately places. The principal Church hath the highest Tower in all Italy…This Tower is easily to be seene to Milan in a cleare day, being full fiftie miles off. [not as tall as Salisbury, taller than Strazbourg…story about Governor Gabrinus Fundulius wanted to have Pope John 22 and Emperor Sigismundus thrown down from top, but his “heart failed him.”




…In this citie are made passing good swords as in most places of Italy….I did eate fried Frogges in this citie, which is a dish much used in many cities of Italy: they were so curiously dressed, that they did exceedingly delight my palat, the head and the forepart being cut off. [in suburbs outside the Pulsella gate is a well, “which when it had once very foule water, and unwholesome to drinke, was so purged of the impurity by certaine signes of the crosse…[war history..] [ends by mentioning Virgil, “whom in my youth I reverenced as my master: and therefore I will ever till the fatall day of my life honour the memorie of that incomparable man. In this city did that famous Poet consecrate himselfe to the Muses, and spent some time on the study of good letters, according as hee did in Milan, as I have before mentioned. Thus much of Cremona.



I rode from Cremona about five of the clocke in the morning of the eighteenth day of June being Saturday, and came to a solitary post-house twenty miles off, by a little brooke about noone. The first wheat that I saw cut this yeare was at that posthouse, which was about sixe weekes sooner than we use to cut our wheat in England….came to Mantua, which was twenty miles beyond it, about halfe an houre after seven of the clocke in the evening.

The Excluded Family

Just a few hundred metres from Lodi’s Romanesque cathedral – and thus also very close to its centrifugal squares, where the town comes together – is an octagonal church, the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin Mary crowned. It is covered in frescos and paintings, some by ‘Il Bergognone’. What I like though is that is was built on the grounds of a brothel, as a kind of alms house, to try and help the poor and destitute of the town. There is a civic logic to Lodi, roads lead inwards to the centre (and, as these are old streets, by implication to the centre of Godliness).




The same feels very true in Cremona, albeit on a far larger scale. Here there are three large, interlinked squares surrounding the massive cathedral and the highest tower in Italy. In another piece on music I’ll talk more about Cremona but what is so striking there is how early on Saturday morning, St Anthony’s day, the patron saint, these Cremonese squares are marketplaces, by lunchtime they are empty; in early and late evening they are for promenades and romances, and in the middle evening for eating. It is not that there is no other choice in Cremona, though somehow there is a sense of social gravity, that might be construed as “political”, pulling the inhabitants inwards. The squares heave in all the social times, and are vistas of panoramic emptiness at siesta.



In a way the towns, Lodi and Cremona, Vercelli as well, act as macrocosms of the gravitational sway of ‘family’ – it might be thought. Options are available, but home, the centre, is ‘best’. Why? Because these places have kept their historical paths, streets and roads; only on the outskirts where industry and mechanised farming brings motorways and railways, does the history fall away. And history, as Donatella and Milena say, ‘is’ important in Italy.



For an atheist “north” European without children, and used to a different kind of social gravity, one pulling towards achievement and status (that isn’t recognised in the town square, but in print) on one hand, and the labyrinthine connections that come with the digital, and the limitless possibilities of travel, on the other, the ideas of these small towns is more foreign, more difficult to comprehend, to ‘know’, than any city, be it Milan or Budapest or Buenos Aires. I can see “family” in action, Italian style; perhaps discern differences between this style in Lodi and Cremona, if I look hard enough. I can learn histories, talk to people; I could just stop and live somewhere a while, pilling up the data. But truly I am excluded from knowing.




In a fascinating and thought provoking review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A search for the six million” Adam Philips, asks many questions, and references Mendelsohn’s striking ideas: somewhere among these ideas are questions for the traveller: for Tom Coryat, me, the “Betwixt”; all of us, really who want to ‘know’ about the way other people live their lives. The quotes are Philips unless obviously Mendelsohn’s.

“What kind of history do we want, history that enables us to live in the past or history that enables us to live in history without living in the past? History as refuge or release, inspiration or consolation? These were the questions in ‘The Elusive Embrace’…[Mendelsohn’s first book, he…] wanted to know – it is his favourite verb in both books – what the desire for history, especially personal history, could be a desire for; and he wanted to know what it was about the lost, the absent, the haunting that recruited him so effectively.”

Mandelsohn is gay, and his writings – from the way Philips describes them – combine autobiographical narrative and self-questioning with the detective-historian’s pursuit of the “story”. In “The Lost”: the holocaust. What is taking place for me walking and travelling in Tom’s footsteps is a pursuit not of the “history-story”, nor even “Tom’s exact footsteps”, it is far more about wanting to try and understand “him”, and yet at the same time “something” - highly intangible, but obsessive – of the places he walked, and the inhabitants of these places but today.

“Proust writes in excruciating detail about the way the desire for knowledge of other people is born of exclusion.”

I think Tom was “Betwixt” many kinds of life, and thus multiply “excluded”: the countryside, the court, England and Christendome; eventually the worlds of Persia and India. What was his need to know about these places predicated on? His travels did not make him rich; and yet he travelled on. What did he want? Was it: not to feel excluded? I suspect that is our generation’s ultimate hang-up; explains much of the culture of ‘self expression’, of ‘reality television’, of…blogging, of course. We must not be excluded.

“The real torment begins when wanting turns into wanting to know. When ‘what can you know?’ becomes the question rather than ‘what do you want?’..."

Philips looks at some ideas from Mendelsohn about his sexuality and how that might affect his vision and his pursuits, both romantically and professionally. This is interesting, I think:

“Women are the future for a man, what Mendelsohn calls a ‘destination’: the object of desire for a gay man is an unending solipsistic past, a closed circle. In this version gay desire is a stalling of history, the gay man is driven hopefully and hopelessly, to find the new thing, to know something other than himself…Gay desire is the desire for the past, and for the past that wants to pre-empt, to foreclose the future. ‘Children are the secret weapon of straight culture,’ Mendelsohn writes later in the book: ‘they have the potential to rescue man from inconsequentiality. Fatherhood has the power to confer authenticity on men; it can be what saves them from being eternal boys themselves.’

“There is something about the quest for knowledge about other people that makes us frantic. History writing, as Mendelsohn both shows and tells, can be a struggle to hold one’s self together.’




“When knowing is what you spend your time doing…you get the need for ‘more space’, Lebensraum.”

And this is where Italian ‘family’, and the ‘claustrophobic’ nature of its domestic rituals can appear to be both alien and alluring; romanticised and contrapuntal to city life. And why writing about ‘knowing’ such a thing – let alone speeding past in a car or a coach and complaining about the locals’ insularity – can seem so “excluding” an activity. Blogging heightens this effect; hours rather than days or months are the period for contemplation; a contemplation based on a little sleep, a little food, and another journey to the next place, endlessly seeking the points of connection, either ‘suddenly there’ in a moment of insight, comparison with life “at home” or via information on the memory stick or found online.

“ ‘Proximity’ he [Mendelsohn] ventures at one point, ‘brings you closer to what happened, is responsible for the facts we glean, the artefacts we possess, the verbatim quotations of what people said; but distance is what makes possible the story of what happened, is precisely what gives someone the freedom to organise and shape those bits into a pleasing and coherent whole.’ This is the conventional view, and indeed the way many men think of their lives: you get the best version when you get away. What makes ‘The Lost’ unconventional is the way Mendelsohn comes to suspect that this very freedom to organise and shape is complicit with so many of the things he fears most: the tyrannies of exclusion, the manipulation of material. However well drawn the characters, however good the story, we are always aware of what has been lost in the making.”

I suppose the lesson of Lodi and Cremona (there’s more Cremona to come) is that in his texts Tom sticks mainly to buildings and observation: in so doing he invents tourism. In following him and asking questions of people about their lives, their children and desires for escape or not, I find an analogy with Tom’s wonder. I simply wonder how and with what glue these cultures hold together. The wonder is, they seem to.

Perhaps it is something to do with having such terrible internet facilities…

All in the Family

“The thing you need to understand about Cremona is that it is having a little war with Piacenza, that’s where we are from. You find the same thing everywhere in Italy: rivalries. Maybe it starts with football, but it’s not really that. It’s about a style, a lifestyle, a way of doing things, how to live the life. It goes back forever.” Donatella is an architect, she works with her father in a practice in Piacenza. Her great friend is Milena, a teacher in a secondary school. “History, art, Palladio, Michelangelo…the greats…” she laughs. “Italy has the longest history, it goes back a very long time – it’s important to us, to me…the tradition we have.”




“Piacenza is a beautiful city too, but the Duomo here [we are sitting in a side street looking at the floodlit façade of Cremona’s huge cathedral] is magnificent, no?” Milena says.




It’s like every town and city is in competition with each other? “Yes, that’s what I mean it’s not just football,” Donatella says. “Travel 20 kilometres from here and the dialect really changes; travel eighty and we can’t understand what’s being said. Go the south, past Naples and it’s impossible…”

“We are a very closed country,” Milena says. “We keep to our traditions, especially the idea of ‘family’.

Family is really the subject of the evening.




These are young working women from northern Italy. One has a Spanish boyfriend from Gallicia, the other lives with a local Italian. “I work in a catholic school, they don’t approve of this,” Milena says, pointing at a ring on the “incorrect” finger. “It should be on the third, we should be married.”

“Everything revolves around Il Papa,” Donatella says. “Even now. The big Papa in Rome and the small Papas everywhere. They still have the power.




“Our generation is different, is changing, but emotionally and culturally we still don’t get away from family. It is such a part of our history, and our daily lives.” Milena says. What about technology, in Lodi I see families talking by videophone. “It’s not the same; maybe we are a claustrophobic race, but it’s about touching.” Donatella says.

“We can do what we want, of course,” Milena says. “But we do worry: what will my family think? What will their friends think? And what will that mean for my family? I don’t want to go on about family but it is the foundation of my life, my “stone”” she says pointing at the cobblestones. “I have to be near my family – I am a provincial, I suppose you would say.”




The pair, and boyfriends, go to “avant garde” theatre in Parma, to cinema, concerts in Piacenza. “And we come for the night to Cremona, just for a change,” Donatella says.
Both women studied in Milan, but didn’t greatly enjoy the experience. “There everything is work, work, work. Too much work. There is a big disparity between the rich and the poor in Milan, you see it. When I was in London I didn’t see poverty. But then, I know, I was being a tourist, just seeing the obvious things.”




“In Milan family life is harder,” Milena says. “It is a question of time and of rhythm. In Piacenza my boyfriend and I can have a life.”




But people marry so young; how can they know it is right at 19 or 20? “Wait until you are 24, “Donatella says. “It’s true,” Milena says. “Divorce now follows five out of every ten weddings, things are changing fast. And this is very bad for the children.”

“The old idea that we marry the first person we sleep with, that’s gone away, is an old idea. I had many boyfriends before this one,” Donatella says. She thinks she will move to Gallicia, “It is a good life there, a good way of living.” But it isn’t easy. “For everything I say about ways of life I too am also for the family - ”
“ – you’re lucky, you have a sister, you are two, I am the only child,” Milena says.
“Family is just part of being Italian. I think in the end it’s a good thing. My sister, she works in Milan for a big international firm, has a child now, the family is happy. If I move away, I move from family, my profession, ‘home’. It is hard.”




“The Catholic church shows us a vindictive God, it’s true,” Donatella says; both women “believe”. “There is a lot of punishment in the vision of the catholic church, and of the family. I know you see crowded churches, but they are the old people. Church, Sunday, social times. Really it is very hypocritical.”

“Italian men behave as if they own ‘all’ Italian women,” Donatella says. “It’s true, they are very protective. Look at someone’s wife the wrong way in many places and there is trouble. But in a way I like it, knowing your man is a ‘man’. It’s old fashioned, sure. An Italian thing; a Latin thing.”




“But there is a God,” Milena says. “There is a God because it is too frightening to think that for all our troubles and problems on earth there is nothing afterwards.”

But that’s not a reason for god; that’s a fear of death. “Look, in my school we teach religion and we teach astrophysics. And the children ask me: ‘how can the two go together?’ I say: ‘the astrophysicists have many answers, but they don’t have them all. Not everything…”

“Your family and your friends – who you grew up with – this is the foundation,” Milena says. “In America or Britain there are many, many single people, they are working all the time, they move for a better job, they lose themselves, their identity. Then they are just working all the time, the pace is wrong. There’s a separation between people who should be connected. It’s not good, is it?”

But families have problems, don’t they? Marry the wrong person and then what; you say divorce is high in Italy now. “I don’t think that this pressure is as bad as being single in Milan or London or New York. Why do they drink so much in Britain? Even the women – and in Ireland it was insane. Why drink if you are happy? If you are happy you want to be with the people you love,” Milena says, “not to drink all night and have a fight.”




“My sister,” says Donatella, “says that it was much easier being single at her profession in Milan. Work is so hard it’s easier to be fluid, have less responsibilities at home. But that just means you work all the hours.”

“Single women: work; married women: no work, just babies. That’s the Italian way,” Milena says. “It’s one of our kinds of racism. Really, it is racist.”

Sexist? “That’s another thing,” Donatella says. “We don’t bother with languages. English is obligatory at school, and college, but it isn’t taught so well. We – Italians – just think we don’t need it.”

It is two thirty; we are the last in the café. “That’s your English influence,” says Donatella. “But we are having an unusual conversation: architecture, god, existence, family; the way to live your life. We’ve had three drinks; that’s a lot for us.”

They leave for their hotel; we see empty squares. I thought this was a party town, everyone comes from Lodi and Crema for the big nights. “No, they are all in the disco now: work, work, work, if you want that family,” Milena says.

Thus much of family today.