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…

Stories from Lodi

In the connecting study area of Lodi’s library, there is almost calm, a few Paris Hilton sunglasses, the odd I-pod, but mostly this is serious nose-down time, dress code: studious. Shoes: vaguely glamourous. Large oils hang on two walls, on the third the remains of a fresco. The poster outside, Shakespeare with a construction helmet, tells that works are going on here; inside all is work also.

I imagine this is in preparation for the school exams, though the kids look older; there’s a middle-aged pony-tail with laptop: he’s probably writing about me. I assumed I’d be able to ask about life in Lodi here, but it would be like disturbing someone in Humanities One at the British Library and saying: “So: London?”



I haven’t known such calm since the BL, thinking about it; the BL and a few churches and cathedrals along the way without either tourists, or congregations. Milan was a heavy metal town, in every sense, even the massive cathedral. The only difference from the BL here is that people sip from bottles of water, and there is only one blonde, that’s me.

I guess it will have to be the smokers outside, narrowing the demographic, but not so much: despite the ban on smoking inside, everyone puffs away, either standing in the street or sitting at the terrace.




“We live out our lives,” Alastair MacIntyre writes in “After Virtue”, “both individually and in our relationships to each other, in the light of certain conceptions of a possible shared future, a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and others repel us, some seem already foreclosed and others perhaps inevitable.”




In the time of Thomas Coryate that ultimate future – the telos – was death and some kind of deal with God; for many now there is just death, and thus the journey, and the consumption of these futures, has taken on a more pressing urgency. As MacIntyre writes: “like characters in a fictional narrative we do not know what will happen next…the narratives which we live out have both an unpredictable and a partially teleological character…it is always the case that there are constraints on how the story can continue and that within those constraints there are indefinitely many ways that it can continue.”



As I look around this room I wonder about these students’ lives: how “betwixt” will they become? Do they study in order to travel, to get away from little Lodi, or for the pleasures of scholarship? Do they believe God, the Catholic church, the muslim faith? Or something in between?

A Tourist Observes: the only things that the Italians do un-stylishly are ring-tones and tattoos. They are world leaders in: jailbait, testosterone, arguing publicly and giving very bad directions; pushing the Hungarians on smoking I couldn’t say where they stand on infidelity – traditionally the Magyar Gold Medal Event.

MacIntyre continues: “…man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”


Doing the quiz in "Psychologies" magazine

Lorenzo is a lawyer in Lodi, but he dreams of being a professional photographer. He and some more experienced friends are having an exhibition next week, this morning is was going to begin tonight: he’s handing out promotional cards, the second of the day. He’s not interested in photographic work about here: the show is about Paris, “pictures of Parissians and tourists,” he says. “Next September, we’re going to Belfast. This is a farming town, there’s not enough here for photography.”




Carla and Livi are missing their mother; there has been a divorce. They are staying with their father in Lodi for a while: they use video chat via the internet to keep up with life in Turin. Their older sister links them to a “Picassa” file of family photographs, a new set of the babies in the swimming pool. Livi is animated, catching up with the news; Carla is upset. When it is her turn for the headphones and microphone she cries, she’s missing her home. Angry with her mother for letting her be here, “what happened?” she says, “what happened?”. Livi plays patience online whilst she waits her second turn. The Dutch family on the other terminal are on holiday, also no dad, he’s working back in Rotterdam. The kids talk to him live from his office; mum doesn’t need much of a chat.

Antonio studies in Pavia, but lives in Lodi. He’s home revising for his university exams. “There’s not much to do in Lodi, it’s a ghost town. There is a faculty for vets, and for agriculture, of course, because this is farming country.” When he graduates he wants to work as a psychologist in Milan. “They need it more there,” he says. Sometimes he goes over the bridge and has some beers in the pub, otherwise he’s revising. “When we want to go out, we go somewhere else. In Pavia, where I study it’s good. From Lodi we have to go…somewhere.”




Olivia and Francesca work in an employment agency, for fun they get to Crema and Cremona as often as they can. “The people here are too old,” they laugh. The jobs they have on offer aren’t based around here often, unless it is shop work. Mostly it is in Milan or Cremona. “You have to drive, or take a chance for the trains or buses. Never take the buses,” they say.

My Italian is getting better, this from the Roxy café, by the bleak bus station. Fat man with Hungarian Hussar moustache as non-descript middle-aged woman leaves the café [it is hot and Hussar and Elderly Friend are knocking back a bottle of chilled white wine.]. “She’s a lovely woman.”
Elderly man: “No! Sophia Loren is beautiful, she is a lovely woman, This…?”
Hussar: “She is a lovely, lucky woman.”
Elderly man: “Why?”
Hussar: “She has a magical cunt.”
Elderly man: “Oh, god, god god! It’s too much. [Exit to take a leak]

Returns, engages a woman who is now sitting outside with an espresso.

Elderly man: “What is the capital of Italy?”
New woman, wearily: “Rome?”
Elderly man holds up hands, makes elderly squealing noises. “Rome? No!”
New woman: “Yes it is, it is Rome.”
Elderly man squeals again. “Palermo, madam, Palermo, the Mafia. Boom, boom! Capitale…”
New woman leaves.
Elderly man shouting: “You are beautiful.”
New woman: “Yes, I am from Rome.”
Elderly man: “See you tomorrow then?”
New woman, winking at me, “Sure. What time?”
Exit New woman.
Exit old man on bike with three plastic shopping bags.

Everyone is complaining about the heat and I’m thinking how did Tom move in this kind of weather? On foot or by horse it is punishing: 33 at midday. The workers, in natty Kate Moss shorts, take long beer and limoncella lunchbreaks and watch the world: “Nice arse.”
“There is home…”




In London this non-working lunch would be three business meetings. But in London it cannot be so hot. [By Cremona it is all-day siesta time, the heat “closes” the internet points, and the town is ghostly between one and six.]

“Johnny” is a Moldavian. He’s travelled all over Eastern Europe, lived in Romania and Ukraine as well as Moldavia. He’s seen Frankfurt, and Dusseldorf and much of Italy. What is he doing? “I am a ‘tourist’” he says with a grin. He has two mobiles and, like me, he’s been waiting three hours for a bus. “And afterwards I have to walk eight kilometres to my village.” What do you do there? “I see my friends, find out about things I can do. Moldovia is beautiful, but the life here is better…more money.” He offers me a cigarette lighter holder made of metal. “From Naples, genuine: 30 Euros…Naples is a bad place, too many with money, too many without. They steal from your pocket, for drugs. I didn’t like it, too big. I like the north of Italy, quiet. You can be quiet here.” Johnny holds up a packet of Marlboro. “Here they are four euros, in London I hear they are seven or eight. In Moldavia, four packs for a Euro. It’s a great place, Moldavia.” Do you miss it? “Every day.” One of the two mobiles rings, Johnny walks away in a flurry of Italian.


The trial in Milan of the CIA agents who renditioned or something is delayed until October

He’s come from Milan, where there was business to do; last night he slept by the railway station; this morning there’s some kind of rail strike. So it must be the bus. Which is three hours late. He is wiry thin with a light stubble of hair; frequently angered by the wait, he fiddles with his phones and smokes.




Paul works in one of the main cafes in Lodi, he likes sparkly tops, and has a small tattoo on the inside of his arm; larger men with forests of arm-ink make fun of it, but it seems good-natured. “It’s a common story, Lodi. Small town breeds small minds, it gets bigger but the minds stay the same. This is no place for young people, they stay they get married to the first person they have sex with. So we escape, go to Crema or Cremona. I live outside, a small village about eight kilometres away, so that’s why I stay late here: there there is nothing. In the other places there is life at night, pubs, clubs, a scene.”



But there is a of culture here? “But it isn’t very, you know, interesting. Farmers fighting in costumes. Discos in the square with a “Queen” theme.” Perhaps it is a measure of age that it all seems quite lovely, and lively to me. And hidden in Lodi’s nooks and crannies are internet cafes run by Africans and Romanians, where the phones are more used than the web. All is neither as small minded, nor as obvious as it seems

It is all about scale and finding a personal balance, I suppose: nobody has much good to say of Milan, but perhaps (as for me) it seems too big to the inhabitants of Lodi, industrially and financially atomised. But they rave about Cremona and Crema, to the disparagement of Lodi. It wouldn’t take much to make Lodi another perfect destination. It seems “mindset” isn’t ready for that.




“I love my job, I get to tell people the stories of Lodi: the cathedral, the civic temple, the castle,” says Maria, who works in the tourist office. She lives in the centre of town and seems an archetypical Lodi-ite, born and bred. “I came from Sicily, four years ago, I was looking for work – there isn’t much in Sicily – so I came here. I love it. I swim, I bike, I like nature. This is a great town.”

Michael was born in Benin, but has worked in Libya and Nigeria as well as Italy, “Italy is my first European country,” he says. He is helping to build a new high-speed rail network across Northern Italy for a British construction firm: he wears the logo’d shirt and bag proudly. “They pay me 1200 Euros a month, but I live in Milan, and after rent and bills and getting to Lodi, not Lodi, but outside, that’s where our workshop is, I have 300 Euros left to save so I can move on.” He’s off to visit his girlfriend in Piacenza for a few hours; the train strike and the bad bus timings, means he’ll only have a short time. “In Milan I have no friends, friends are dangerous. I watch wrestling and car racing, and I talk to my girlfriend on the phone.” He buys a beer at the Roxy, but doesn’t want to sit with the workers and me. He moves to the curb and drinks quietly; later a fellow African, from Nigeria, comes past. They stop and speak for a while in French, explaining their stories. They exchange emails; the Nigerian is going on to Verona, where he has classes.

Michael likes moving on; he’s the only one in his family not in Benin. His brother has gone home after running travel businesses in Germany; his grandfather runs safaris in Benin. “We have many tourists in August, Christians coming to see the leg of Mary Magdalene,” Michael says. “It’s good, moving. If you don’t move you mind goes soft. You get complacent: don’t think properly. I study computer sciences, I can build satellite networks, rework the computers. I couldn’t afford last term so I just read, read, read. It’s easy to learn if you want to. You shouldn’t write about Europe, that’s easy. You should write about Benin. It’s like a ‘warehouse’ for slavery. You would get better stories there.”




Michael’s girlfriend rings, and he explains the delay. “I know, I know, I have a fish brain,” he says [in English]. “So where from the station, which way?” A pause.

“Run? What run like Ben Jonson?”
Ben Jonson, Tommy’s friend. Even if it is a reference to the disgraced Canadian sprinter it feels like an omen.

The Dream in Lodi

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

My Midsummer Nights starts slowly: Titania is 14 and Oberon is over-charging on iced-teas at the next-door bar. Lysander and Puck are comparing tattoes over beers, and somewhere in the forest, over the Lodi bridge where Napoleon fought a winning battle, the revising students and resting actors are retired at the “Wellington” pub. Lodi’s little joke, I suppose.

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine."

The star-crossed lovers are either texting someone else, or hanging around the Piazza Castello, a Visconti construction – both the castle and the neo-realism of the punks. The “Dream’s” Bottomy style street theatre punctuates Lodi’s summer, though I’ve managed to miss the jousting and the archery; and the tin-horse pallio isn’t until September, almost a Winter’s Tale: the heats were last week. I should be in Padua, where Shakespeare set Kiss Me Kate, or Verona or Messina or Venice. But Lodi will do, it is Shakespeare country, even if he never came near the place.

"What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here,
So near the cradle of the fairy queen?"

In “Europe” Norman Davies notes that Shakespeare played his “overseas” very cleverly, set only ten plays at home; the rest in not-too controversial places. He avoids anything to do with Spain, and the Spanish Netherlands, and Ireland – where there was much dissent, the blarney stone being invented, Essex going double…Censorship didn’t help, perhaps that’s why Shakespeare didn’t print his plays for such a long time, and he had a few years before being given a coat of Arms. He wasn’t just a player, he was a “player” as well.

"What revels are in hand? Is there no play,
To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?"

Thomas Nash, a jobbing journalist and bar-room wit, writes in his “Unfortunate Traveller,” of 1594, (fourteen years before Tom’s journey) about “christendome” with as much overseas experience as Shakespeare, his sources the commonplace books of the “Sanger-google” school (explanation on its way). He asks: “Italy, the Paradise of the earth and the Epicure’s Heaven, how doth it form our young master?” Without much delay comes the answer: “From thence he brings the art of epicuracy, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomy – it maketh a man an excellent courtier – which is by interpretation, a fine closer lecher, a glorious hypocrite.”

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind".

Shakespeare makes a more persuasive case for Italy, at least in “All’s Well,” and “The Taming of the Shrew”, though – of courtier-training – there is the curious matter of Tony Blair’s holidays with Silvio Berlusconi: didn’t Blair break Berlusconi’s foot?

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact."

Somewhere in the recent past I’ve read of a new take on Shakespeare: an Italian academic, or conspiracy theorist, believes the Bard was Italian. Thank goodness for Google. During a clear-out of damp photocopies this morning I discover that Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia has cautioned the British Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, for suggesting that the internet was good for children’s learning.

"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night."

“I’m astonished that Alan Johnson does not realize the many problems affecting Wikipedia” These include management issues, an often dysfunctional community, frequently unrealiable content – and “scandal”.

“While wikipedia is still a quite useful and an amazing phenomenon, I have come to the view that it is also broken beyond repair.” And so: www.citizendium.org has been founded with more “reliable” editors and sources.

"The true beginning of our end"

Unstable as Wiki or the Lovers in Midsummer night’s Dream might be, Lodi is a kind of lodestone for me as Tom feels very present. He was locked out here, and hurried ontowards Cremona, but I like to imagine him in the central square watching the world for a while. On Midsummer’s Night. Did he see the civic temple, a church built on what had been a brothel – and funded by a man who had a “vision” after coming off worse in a stabbing incident over a member of the brothel’s entourage.

I like to think so.

As the night in Lodi moves on, with no great action or sense of ritual, the suits and slinkies and sling-backs come out for camparis and jokes. The man in the perfect light blue suit with the blue shirt, white collar, shades “look” does not speak all evening, just guards his animated “prey” from the other men at the table. But from another square: music. I feel a Shakespearian hey nonny no moment about to happen. In the small square by the cathedral a crowd is sitting over drinks. In front of them: a karaoke machine, and quite simply the flattest Celine Dion the Titanic’s going Down, I’ve ever heard.



By midnight, well met, I am home and watching a Kevin Costner, Anthony Quinn movie about infidelity, machismo and revenge. I dream of nothing much at all.


Curtain down

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear."

Lodi is lovely - official

Afternoon in the Lodi Cathedral