Today we got up at dawn, parked our car at Livo, and then set off up the Livo River Valley. Our destination was a beautiful natural cirque of mountains surrounding a small lake, the Lago di Darengo. We set off from Livo at 7.35 and reached the lake at 11.35 – not bad for a climb of over a thousand metres in roasting heat (the last steep stretch, on an exposed mountainside, was tough). Our reward was the beauty of this remote spot (the Swiss border is just on the other side of the cirque) and the cool waters of the lake itself, in which we swam before eating our lunch. We also had the satisfaction of knowing that we had got to the end of a trail up which we had trekked previously, but without having the time to go all the way. A few hardy walkers were on the same path, since the rifugio, Capanno Como, at +/-1,800 metres, is a good base camp for attacking the surrounding mountain peaks. What I particularly like about these mule paths is that they feel so ancient (a Roman bridge halfway up the valley attested to this). They are also prodigious human works, consisting of huge, heavy cap stones transported (how, I always wonder?) across the mountainsides. Trekking along them, I have the sense that man has been coming this way for a very long time.

One of the many interesting things we learnt from Francis (Jacobs) was about the very different fates meted out to Protestants in the seventeenth century in the neighbouring valleys of the Valchiavenna and the Valtellina. In the latter, they were massacred (there is an account of the bloody affair here), whereas in the Valchiavenna not one was killed. Francis recounted a theory for this very different treatment. The Valtellina, it is said, is an East-to-West valley, leading nowhere. As such, its societies were pretty much self-contained and inward-looking. The Valchiavenna, on the other hand, is a North-to-South valley, connecting Italy with the north and therefore mercantile and outward-looking in spirit. A terrible fate awaited many of the Valchiavenna’s Protestants all the same. In 1618 a mountain collapsed suddenly onto the predominantly Protestant town of Piuro, killing over 900 of its inhabitants (shades of Vajon!). Only a few Protestant tradesmen abroad at the time survived the disaster. (By chance, surfing on the internet, I discovered that Nevil Shute’s very first short story was written about the Piuro disaster.)

On a sun-roasted hillside we passed two old men making hay, turning the cut grass with long rakes. We stopped to talk with one of the men, Ugo, who was in his late sixties. The other man was his older brother. Ugo had cows. Each cow consumed 13 kilos of hay a day. Each bale of hay weighed 18 kilos. The hillside they were working probably produced about 50 bales. The rest of the animal feed was bought. Ugo went on to explain that they harvested hay four times a year from the field. There was even a harvest in early November, around the feast day of San Martino, when a dry wind blew down from the Valtellina and across the lake. It was hard work under that roasting sun. I imagined that this was work that had been done for centuries. It was clear that nobody would take on the task once Ugo decided to hang up his rake which, in turn, meant sadly that the landscape would change. Ugo pointed out, though, that twenty years ago the field had been covered in vines. They had been grubbed up and the field given over to grass because viticulture was too labour intensive. So the landscape had in fact changed in the recent past. It was the same up in the forests in the valleys. Francis (Jacobs) pointed to the terraces, hidden by undergrowth, that had once been cultivated, the unruly ash trees that had once been regularly pollarded to manufacture charcoal, and the ancient chestnut trees, their trunks strangled by undergrowth, that had not so long ago been tended and harvested to manufacture flour.

I have written several posts about the way further studies result in further ‘diasporas”. I last met my good friend, Francis Jacobs, currently Head of the European Parliament’s Dublin office, in Dublin in May, as this post records. Francis is part of the Johns Hopkins diaspora, having studied at the Bologna Center seven years before me (our paths later crossed through our mutual enthusiasm for European studies). Francis is half Italian. His mother comes from the Valtelina and Francis and his wife have a summer house in the Valchiavenna, just above Chiavenna. And that’s where we had lunch today, halfway up a remote mountainside, surrounded by chestnut trees gone wild and amid deserted terraces. Francis is erudite and polyglot and I couldn’t even begin to tell you everything we learned today about the area about us. But I’ll try to draw a link with America, in light of our recent trip and the fact that Francis himself worked on Capitol Hill for a while. A lot of people left these valleys in the late 1800s to find work in Sicily, notably picking citrus fruit for the candied fruit industry (a major, if brief-lived, export to America). When California started producing its own candied fruit, it was a logical next step for these workers to leave for California. On the hills around us were many religious shrines paid for by donations from these workers, including a small but touching 1890s shrine just near Francis’s house inscribed as a gift from the ‘Mericani di Menarola’.

For several years, as a relatively young thing in the European Commission’s Secretariat General, I followed the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. And so I got to know an Anglo-Danish official in the Parliament working for that Committee, Per Sommerschield. When Per heard about our Lario hideaway he insisted that we should go to the gallery of his artist brother, Kim, at Chiavenna. And that is precisely what we did this morning. Kim loves the mountains. He climbs the mountains – frequently alone. And he paints the mountains – well, as you can see by visiting his website here. If ever you happen to be in Chiavenna you should visit his gallery, located on the town’s main piazza (Pestalozzi). You’ll be guaranteed a warm welcome and a dose of Kim’s infectious enthusiasm about the mountains.

Believers in the Loch Ness Monster might be interested to know that the Lago di Como has its own version – the Lariosauro, which is a borrowing of a name of a real dinosaur that existed in the area – as does the Lago di Garda. (‘Lario’ is the traditional name for the Lago di Como.) In November 1946 two hunters at the northern end of the lake saw an aggressive lizard-like animal. Shot and wounded, the animal swam away, and was seen again at Varenna, further south, before disappearing altogether. There have been other sightings since – probably all hoaxes. Anyway, today I read a novel based loosely on the original episode by Giovanni Galli. It’s a sort of Don Camillo and Peppone  meet Nessie affair and, with its mixture of local history and colour with the bare bones of the original case, enjoyable enough in its own sweet way. Northern Italy remained troubled in the immediate post-war years and Galli uses the sighting as a sort of metaphor. But readers should be aware that the monster on the cover of his book has nothing to do with the eyewitness accounts – T Rex couldn’t even swim, could he?

Today, as a sort of homage to Monument Valley and Goulding’s (see this post), I watched John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach. This film, regarded by Orson Welles as a budding cinematographers’ text book, launched the career of John Wayne (until then a B-movie staple with a major slump to his name) and would forever associate John Ford with the Western movie and the Western movie with John Ford. It also indelibly associated the Western with the landscape of Monument Valley. The David Cairns article at this link provides a good summary critique of the film (though note the apparent mystery as to why Ford used Monument Valley – anybody who goes to the little museum at Goulding’s knows the answer to that). This is a cleverly geometrical film in its composition and it is easy to see why Welles loved it, from the different camera angles through the innovative lighting to a plot involving several complicated characters ‘evolved’ by the unfolding plot with its religious and mythological undertones. The distinctive geological forms of Monument Valley provide not just an arresting backdrop but an integral part of the film; Ford would surely not have left the camera’s gaze to linger so long on a simple image of a stagecoach crossing countryside if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary nature of that countryside. The Apache Indian, in the form of a renegade Geronimo (handsomely played by a real chief), is cursorily sketched as a villainous threat. There is no attempt to explain why he might have jumped the reservation or been angry with whitemen in general. And at least two of the characters, who shout consistently throughout, had clearly not yet made the transition from silent movies to the talkies. Many of this film’s iconic moments would become Western clichés, and the viewer has to usher them away in order to see the movie for what it was when it first appeared. It also stands as a monument to Ford’s belief in Wayne’s star quality – as the latter would go on to prove again and again in his illustrious career.

This evening I at last watched Nanni Moretti’s 1993 Caro Diario (my thanks to E for the loan and the patience). It won Moretti the prize for best director at the 1994 Cannes International Film Festival. I hadn’t known quite what to expect, thinking it to be an autobiographical film about a brush with cancer. Well, it is that, in part, but only in part. As the title suggests, it is a series of diary entries, written, spoken and acted primarily by Moretti. There are three sets of entries: on my vespa, islands, and doctors. In the first, which I found the most lyrical and evocative, Moretti drives his vespa around a mostly deserted Rome, accompanying the images with a series of apparently unconnected disquisitions on cinema, films and urban life. This section ends with Moretti seeking out the place near Ostia where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered (he finds a decaying and apparently forgotten concrete monument). On a few occasions I knew that Rome. It is the Rome of very early summer mornings when only the cats in the monuments seem to be alive. The next part is a journey, by ferry, through the Aeolian islands, accompanied by a Joyce-loving friend who becomes fixated on American soaps. Here, Moretti mixes farce and satire but keeps those disquisitions going. The last part is a reconstruction of Moretti’s quest to find the cause of a mysterious ailment he experienced. Depending on which branch of medecine (including Chinese and reflexology) he consults, he is given different diagnoses and treatments. Finally, after an X-ray, he is correctly diagnosed with a treatable lymphatic system tumour. Moretti describes the sequence of events but lets the experience speak for itself. If any of the treatments he had been prescribed had worked, he would probably have believed that that particular diagnosis was correct. On the other hand, when the true cause of his illness is identified, the indicative symptoms were precisely those that he had been suffering. There is an excellent passage where Moretti is told that his symptoms are psychosomatic. He finds this so obvious that he believes it, although part of him knows that it cannot be true. Yes, this film is a vehicle for Moretti himself (a distinctive element of his art) but it is also an almost Montaigne-like collection of essays and reflections about life and art.

Was that what he meant?

Today we drove (through five European countries on our way) to Italy, including through the original Switzerland, and so had the time to talk through some of our conclusions from that coast-to-coast trip. It’s a cliché, but the country is still so young (when we went to Johns Hopkins it still hadn’t celebrated its bicentenary) and there is still a strong sense that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. This time I had a stronger sense of the loss of America’s original peoples, whose latest migration across the Bering Strait landbridge probably took place only some 12,000 years ago (compare that with the 17 million years it took to carve out the Grand Canyon). We also had a better sense of the relative youth of America’s political institutions and of the evolution that is still underway. For a bit of fun, we tried to imagine what sort of President Europe might have one day. It would have to be somebody recognised throughout the member states, with some linguistic ability, and with a lot of money. A sportsman, then, like Michael Schumacher or Michel Platini or Christian Ronaldo or ‘the special one’ (José Mourinho)? And then the true meaning of ‘I’ll be back’ suddenly came to me – for Arnie still has his Austrian passport, doesn’t he? Could it just be?

One of my companion books as we travelled across the United States was Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York, by Michelle and James Nevius. I found the book on the eve of our departure from New York and it might seem strange to have been reading about a city that we had already left, but the book, which is divided up into 182 entries and is thus ideally designed for ‘dipping into’, is an excellent thematic and subject-based account of New York’s history and the people, buildings and places that have made it the city it is today, from the original Lenape Indian inhabitants through to the 9/11 attacks and their architectural aftermath. This includes instructions as to where traces of those earlier developments can still be found. The authors, both tour guides, also helpfully provide fourteen walking tours which cover much of the ground set out in their book. If you’re interested in the history of cities and you are going to New York, think of taking this book with you.