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  Fishing boats tied up in the harbor of Cesenatico before the Second World War, when many boats were still under sail

  Cesenatico, La Comitiva

  1940

  I AM LUCKY to have spent so many years when I was young in a small, provincial Italian town with a stupendous beach. The sunlit days of that last summer in Cesenatico before the war darkened our sky still shine brightly in my mind. In our comitiva—our “gang”—there were a dozen or more of us, all in our late teens. A few, like me, were natives of the town; others, from Bologna, Milan, and Rome, were there with their parents, who had come for the summer. No one had much pocket money to speak of, or if they did, no one else knew about it. It didn’t interfere with our good times, because there was very little that we needed or wanted to spend money on. We didn’t even have to do very much. I remember long afternoons when we spent the entire time talking about what we could do next. We sat in someone’s garden, or on the rocks by the harbor, or, if we had the money, in the chairs of a gelato parlor, examining and discussing the alternatives, but we rarely felt pressed to reach a consensus. Talking about it was good enough for us, and after a couple of idle hours, we gave up talking and returned separately home. We were happy with life, too happy even to pay any mind to the black cloud of war that was approaching from over the border.

  The most potent draw for us was the glorious beach that sloped into the unruffled Adriatic. It was broad enough to accommodate twelve parallel rows of umbrellas and deck chairs, and it seemed endless as it ran toward infinity along the Romagna coast. We crossed it nearly every morning to run into a transparent sea that was so shallow, one could walk for almost a hundred yards before the water came up to one’s chin.

  The father of one of the members of our gang was a bagnino, the concessionaire of a beach establishment. Public beaches in Italy are parceled out to concessions that put up umbrellas and deck chairs. On the landward side of the beach, the bathers patronizing a concession have access to changing rooms, restrooms, and a bar. On the opposite side, at the water’s edge, there are rudimentary crafts that one can rent for short excursions. In my day, the basic model consisted of two benchlike slatted seats facing each other that were bolted perpendicular to a pair of wooden pontoons. They could accommodate up to four persons, including those manning the oars, which were the sole means of propulsion. Curiously, the boat was called a moscone, Italian for “bluebottle fly.” We had no money to rent one, but our friend’s father, the bagnino, would let us have one or two of them for brief periods during those times when there were few customers on the beach. The sea was not polluted then; it was clear and clean even close to the shore, and we often ran into it for a swim straight from the beach, but it was so much better to take a moscone out at large and splash down from it into water that was exhilaratingly cool and deep.

  At lunchtime, the beach emptied as people headed for home. Only a few returned in the afternoon. Whenever I could get excused from going home for lunch—I used to plead with my mother to

  With some of my “gang” in Cesenatico in 1940, the year that Italy went to war. I am on the left on the lowest step.

  let me take a panino and some fruit with me to the beach—it was a beautiful time, the time I loved the best, because my friends and I all but owned the beach, and after the din of the morning crowds, any loud voices we might hear were only our own.

  Replacing the midday meal with a panino was not as natural a thing to do as one might think. It was, in fact, exceedingly unorthodox. The sacramental quality of the noontime dinner in Italy, il pranzo, when factories, stores, and offices close to allow everyone to gather at the family table for the longest and most important meal of the day, has been for generations a dominant feature of Italian life. It is the central act around which an Italian day turns. It has proved to be the solid foundation of my own marriage. In the years that we spent in New York, Milan, and Rome, the place where we lived had to be within my husband’s easy reach at lunchtime. Even now, in Florida, while our neighbors are playing golf or bridge, or going shopping, or making appointments with their hairdresser or trainer or doctor in the middle of the day, we set those hours aside for our pranzo. I have a confession to make, however. Although I cook a full hot meal every day that we are at home, I still love sandwiches as much as I did on those sunny days of my sixteenth year. If I can fit something from my plate in between two slices of bread or spread it on a single slice, I will do it. One of the nicknames that my husband has laid on me is mangia panini, and I have earned it.

  At some distance from the shore, there was a diving platform—il trampolino, we called it—that we liked to swim out to. It didn’t matter that we could not dive well, because we weren’t really there to dive, but to lounge around and talk while cultivating a devastating tan.

  Our diving platform in Cesenatico. I was not alone in doing belly flops.

  We had a fellow from Rome in our company who was older than the rest of us. Most of the company was, like me, sixteen or close to it. He was eighteen, a small, but at that age significant, difference. He stood out both physically and in his manner. He was more than six feet tall, which was an exceptional height in Italy then and is not that common even now. He had strong, austere good looks that were complemented by, or perhaps responsible for, an imperious manner. His name was Vittorio Gassman. He had already achieved a certain celebrity as a star basketball player, but he would become even more famous in later years as one of Italy’s great actors, both in the theater and in films. In the middle of his career he was called to Hollywood, where he stayed for only a brief period, yet long enough for him to marry Shelley Winters.

  Vittorio was always ready to prove that whatever someone else could do, he could do as well, if not better. We once got to the trampolino on a day when a group of local boys had gone there to practice their diving form. They were really quite good, entering the water headfirst, arms extended forward, making hardly a ripple. “Ma che bravi, vero Vittorio?” (“They are really good, aren’t they?”) I said to Gassman, knowing that would get a rise out of him. “Mah!” he said, making a wry mouth. “Non mi sembra nulla di particolare” (“It’s nothing special”). “Vorrei vedere te, farlo” (“I’d like to see you do it”), I said. His ego wouldn’t let him ignore the challenge. He jumped but never managed to stretch his body forward, and he landed in the water feet first. Along with everyone else, I was laughing and clapping my hands when he climbed back up. Because of the speckles in my light brown eyes, Vittorio used to call me la gatta dagl’occhi a pallini, the cat with polka-dot eyes. Glaring at me, he said, “Va bene, gatta dagl’occhi a pallini, provaci tu!” (“All right, you try it!”) I did, performing a perfect belly flop. That evening, at home, my legs, tummy, and chest looked as though they had been spread with strawberry jam. As soon as he got to Rome, Gassman sent me a little book of his poems that he’d had printed and bound, inscribing it to “Alla gatta dagl’occhi a pallini.” I had it with me when we left Cesenatico to pass the war years at a farmhouse on Lake Garda, where it must have remained.

  After the war, when I was in Milan visiting a girl who had been in our comitiva, Vittorio had the lead in a play. My friend and I saw the play and went backstage afterward to say hello. Gassman dismissed us brusquely, unable, he said, to recognize us or to remember anything about the comitiva in Cesenatico.

  Sometimes in the afternoon we went bicycling. It is still the most popular way to move around in my town, and if you visit Cesenatico today, you will find the streets busy with bicycles rather than with cars. At that time, the bicycling was more adventurous because the town had not yet been enlarged by the development that took place after the war, and we were quickly able to leave it behind us. We traveled in rough country, where the ride was spine-jarringly bumpy, provoking shrieks, squeals, and laughs, one of our many occasions to make cheerful pandemonium. There were never enough bicycles to go around, so some of the girls rode on the handlebars or the top tube while the boys pedaled. The position was not kind
to our buttocks and thighs. Our stiff-legged walk, whenever we got off, was regarded as uproariously funny by those who had been spared the martyrdom to which our aching muscles had been subjected. Occasionally, we came upon an abandoned shack that would become our clubhouse of the moment, where we puffed on our clandestine cigarettes, played cards, replayed the funny dialogue of a movie we had just seen, or relieved ourselves of profound observations on the nature of things.

  We were a prankish lot, and no one was exempt from our stunts, not even my father. Some of my companions had noticed that the door to the cellar where Papi stored some wine could easily be unlocked. One day he called me to show, with exaggerated indignation, what he had found hanging on the garden gate. It was an empty fiasco—a two-liter flask of his excellent Sangiovese—and a note attached with the following verse:

  Alla salute di Marcella,

  così cara e così bella,

  questo fiasco benvenuto,

  i suoi amici han bevuto.

  In toasting the health of Marcella,

  so dear and so lovely,

  this welcome flask

  her friends have drained.

  Everyone in our comitiva had signed it.

  Maria Carla was a Cesenatico native like me and a friend since childhood. Her family’s house was near ours, but they lived most of the year in Rome, where her father, a concert musician, taught bass at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia. She did not run with our “pack,” but moved in a small circle of her own. Maria Carla had allure and sophistication beyond her years and ours. Soon after the war ended, she met and married an older man, a distinguished Neapolitan lawyer who practiced in Rome. It was an achievement that none of us, at the time, could have pulled off, and we all felt painfully callow by comparison. We gloated briefly a few years later when Maria Carla found that her husband was sleeping with their maid and divorced him. But she one-upped us soon enough again by marrying a handsome and prominent architect.

  Her Cesenatico house lay at an angle to a large lot that had been transformed into an open-air movie theater for the summer. It was not a drive-in, but a sit-in, with as many rows of rickety wooden seats as the lot could accommodate. Even though Maria Carla did not frequent our comitiva, we were friendly enough that from time to time, when she and her own friends or her parents did not choose to have the place to themselves, she let us into her house to watch the movie being projected on the open-air screen next door. A strategic placement of chairs by the rear windows of the house enabled us to watch and hear a movie very comfortably without having to buy a ticket.

  We followed movie nights at Maria Carla’s with a cone of gelato or a piadina. If it was a really steamy summer night, the choice would be gelato; otherwise we preferred to go down the street where, in a shack by the harbor canal, Tonina made her incomparable piadina. This ancient specialty of farmhouses in Romagna is a yeastless flat bread, made to order, like pizza, for immediate consumption. One may cover it with a soft cheese, or prosciutto, or fold it over a clump of wild greens sautéed in garlic and olive oil. In the latter instance, it is called a consùm. Tonina rolled out an eight-inch disk of dough by hand with a rolling pin, then cooked it over a searingly hot terra-cotta griddle. It came off that griddle charred, crisp, mingling the tangy tastes of smoke and hot terra-cotta with the nutty sweet one of freshly grilled wheat dough. There are scores of roadside stands in Romagna today that make piadina, but none makes it like Tonina’s. They roll out the dough between steel rollers and cook it on a steel griddle. It is limp and tastes bland. Today, in Cesenatico, if I were looking for an after-the-movie, late-night snack, I would settle for a pizza, which was unknown in northern Italy before the war.

  All the girls in the comitiva loved to dance, and so did some of the boys. This was the age before discos, however; before cassettes, not to speak of CDs; before transistors and boom boxes. There were elegant establishments with live orchestras and waiters in dinner jackets, but we were too poor and too young to dream of admittance. When we did dance, and it was not very often, we were hemmed in by dark furniture in the parlor of someone’s house where we played music on a wind-up gramophone. The most glamorous place where people then danced in Cesenatico was on the terrace of the Grand Hotel, a white, lacy art nouveau structure on the beach, the only hotel on the beach in those years. It looked to us like something out of a romantic Hollywood movie. The terrace was a few steps above the level of the street, from which it was separated by a balustrade of curvaceous marble posts. There was just enough room for our heads in the gaps at the bottom of the posts, allowing us to observe the dancers above, on whose skill, or lack of it, on whose attire, on the nature of a couple’s relationship, we would maliciously comment and elaborately speculate. From time to time, we danced in the street to the music floating down from the terrace. In Fellini’s Amarcord, his evocation on film of a comparable period in Romagna, there is a similar scene, on a similar summer evening, that takes place in a similar hotel, so true to life that when I saw it in a Manhattan theater my cheeks were suddenly overrun by tears of overpowering nostalgia.

  By the end of August, everyone left for home, and soon after, we packed and moved north to Lake Garda, where we thought we would find refuge from the war. There were other good summers in Cesenatico after the war, but none filled with such simple-hearted joy. Neither we nor the world would ever again be so young.

  The War

  1940-1945

  IT WAS THE WINTER of 1939. Germany was at war with Britain and France, and Italy was waiting for an advantageous moment to join her. Zio Tonino, a well-connected uncle by marriage who lived north of us, on Lake Garda, in the town of Desenzano, had formed a syndicate with a few prominent members of the government, a cabinet member, a senator, and some others. Their purpose was to acquire agricultural land as a sound investment for money‚ whose value was likely to collapse in the coming war. Someone had to manage the large farm they had assembled by the lake, but when Tonino found that the draft was taking all the capable local men, he turned to Papi. Papi had shown, by the skillful management of our own small farm, that he could handle the job, and moreover, the chronic emphysema that he lived with and would not kill him until decades later exempted him from the call to arms. Garda was, and is, a famously beautiful lake, but its appeal to our family at that portentous moment lay in what was optimistically presumed to be its remoteness from military targets. That optimism would eventually prove to have been gravely misplaced.

  Papi left for Desenzano ahead of us to take charge of the farm and to prepare for our arrival. War was approaching, but its rumble was still too distant to intrude greatly on my parents’ thoughts. Their foremost concern was my education. In the Italian educational system of the time, schooling began with five years at the elementary level, followed by five years in middle school, known as ginnasio, that in turn led to three years at the liceo, the rigorous upper school whose diploma qualified you to study for a doctoral degree at a university. I had half a year left at the ginnasio, which my mother decided I should complete before moving to the lake. At the end of school, the summer season began in Cesenatico, the happiest time of the year for a beach town, so when my mother proposed to postpone our departure until September, I threw my arms around her with joy. There were no further postponements after that. We had left Papi alone for almost a year; I had to enroll in the liceo at Desenzano, so my mother, my grandfather, my two grandmothers, and I packed up, said arrivederci to Cesenatico, and set off for Lake Garda. I went gaily, looking forward to the new world on the lake that I had started dreaming about.

  The farmhouse Zio Tonino had allotted us resembled nothing I had seen in my daydreams. There was no heat, and the sole bathroom, at the top of the stairs that led to the upper floor, had only a toilet and a sink. We sponge-bathed for the duration of our stay. The bedrooms were bare of all furnishings save for rickety iron beds with squeaky, sagging springs and lumpy wool mattresses. We hung our clothes on tautly strung metal wire and stowed other items in pack
ing boxes. Papi had bought an ancient wood-burning stove for the kitchen and a long, rough wooden table to work on. For the other room on the ground floor he had found two large, dark cupboards, a battered and immensely heavy walnut dining table, and a miscellany of chairs. Twenty years later, when my husband and I were living in Milan, we restored that table, converting its top into a large coffee table and recycling the massive base as sturdy support for a handsome writing desk.

  I remember the cold of that winter, the first I had ever experienced without heat indoors. We spent as much of the day as we could in the kitchen, where we kept feeding the stove. An hour before retiring, we warmed the beds with a contraption that we irreverently called il prete e la suora, “the priest and the nun.” The “priest” was an open wooden frame placed between the top and bottom sheets; embraced within it was the “nun,” a terra-cotta brazier filled with hot embers from the stove. We had brought only our personal effects to Desenzano because my mother expected it would not be long before we could return to Cesenatico, and in the farmhouse, we had found only one thin blanket for each bed. For more warmth, as we took off our clothes we spread them over the top sheet and then covered them with the blanket, tucking it firmly under the mattress.

  While I was still in Cesenatico, completing my fifth year at the ginnasio, Italy sent its troops into France, entering the war at Germany’s side. Many years later, living in America, I remember hearing a recording of Roosevelt’s speech when he declared, “The hand that held the dagger has plunged it into its neighbor’s back,” a description of the event quite at odds with the one our leaders had given us. At the beginning, the war did not seem to affect our life too much. On the lake, it was so quiet that we felt justified in expecting that the war would pass us by. Then the Allies’ planes began to fly over us, dropping bombs or diving to strafe anything moving on the road or the railroad tracks, the supply lines that connected the Axis forces in Italy with Austria, our neighbor north of the border. When the Allies landed in southern Italy and the Fifth Army began slowly to push the front northward, the German High Command for Italy moved north too, establishing its headquarters little more than a mile from our farm. Hoping to take Italy out of the war, the king had had Mussolini arrested, but the Germans liberated him and brought him north. Where? To Lake Garda! There, in the neighboring town of Salò, he formed a fascist republic that kept his followers fighting on the Nazi side. Not only was the war not passing us by, it had made us one of its prime targets. Every day there were more planes and more bombs.