A Series of Interludes (Orvieto)

Yesterday evening we sang and danced a short piece (from the larger ensemble we'll be performing on Saturday) at the library as part of a reading and discussion with the Italian author Susanna Tamaro. It is so wonderful to be singing like this again! Today we had our last class with Scott (he talked to us about matters of faith and poetry and art and where/how they intersect), and Jake and I rigged up part of the lighting for Saturday. We built an apparatus to suspend two bright spots inside the well in the courtyard so that they can send a beam shooting up at a dramatic moment. We'll test that tonight.

Here is the travel writing independent piece I wrote for this class. I apologize for the poor formatting that Blogspot forces upon me...well, you. It's titled A Series of Interludes (Orvieto).



I will not try to tell you what Orvieto is. This will save you heartache and me misery.

What gives any person the right to cast off his label of “stranger”? How long do you need to stay in a place, how well do you need to know it before that identity can be relinquished? I have a sense that people who have lived here their entire lives—and their fathers and mothers before them—have not noticed things apparent to me, the stranger. There is a time in between arriving brand new and leaving a veteran in which the eye stays fresh, a time when some familiarity with a place brings a little knowledge that has not yet been tainted by numbing comfort; I have tried to remain on this plateau of unjaded understanding, with its steep drops at either end that mirror the carved crag on which the city is built.

But I am beginning to see that time and familiarity may have little to do with each other, and maybe are not important at all, anywhere.

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When you travel to Orvieto, first travel to millions of years ago—to a volcanic landscape bubbling and heaving as creation takes form around it, as it settles and cools and becomes richly fertile. The soil is remarkable for what it gives to the vegetation, and the indigenous Vitis vinifera grapevines have given the inhabitants of this area their foundation from the earliest recorded moments. Actually, the foundation is what lies beneath the soil, the rock that breaks through the thin skin of cultivated earth at points to form large, exposed outcroppings. This volcanic stone is called tufa, and it too is a provider. Etruscans discovered the potentials of this stone as they discovered the fortified safety of Velzna’s insular mesa; the igneous rock is light and porous, like a combination of sandstone and pumice, and is soft and easy to cut when first excavated. With exposure to air, however, it hardens and increases in strength, while still retaining its lightness. While it proves drafty and absorbs moisture in the winter, in the summer it is cool.

In this city, with its emphasis (born out of necessity and maintained out of pride) on local resources, all of the buildings employ tufa in some way. Orvieto is built on top of tufa and out of tufa; the ancient stone born of fire and gas provides our first step into the city’s history, the first hint at its nature.

The final step is the same; the tufa cliffs are further fortified with tufa blocks in many parts. The grass seeds lodge in the pores and grow and moss softens the edges, and there are sections where natural cliff and made wall meld together and are once again the same after centuries of separation.

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When I arrived, my Orvieto was brand new. Now it is close to four months old, and is still being constructed, sometimes reconstructed. On a map there is a whole town with solid form, but what does the cartographer know? Orvieto is laid out with a walk around the circumference, main guidelines on an axis, a few lines twisting out from the center. It is an unfinished web; my eyes and feet work with my mind as tandem spinnerets. Yesterday I walked down a new alley and a new strand was spun; Orvieto grew.

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The German couple next to me stares from paper to the tops of buildings, wondering where is Point B. Perhaps if I spoke their language I could tell them how to reach it; instead, I ask myself from where did Point B come? What is it that has caused this city to be, given it its impetus and identity? Surrounding me is coherence, even if an incomprehensible coherence; this city is named, and so it is a thing, it exists. Orvieto. But where, and when? In which stratum of this layered place is the buried kernel of distinctiveness to be found, the small but significant seed that determines all that sprouts above it? I begin to see that it is not one thing, but that each of the strata makes a facet, all of which twist and reflect and meet along many points.

Everyone flocks to the Duomo, the cathedral built hundreds of years ago in a splendor that is now rare, and still was rare then. For these spectacle-seekers, this is Orvieto, one building (and maybe the funicolare to get there). For the old man in the hat shop, this corner of the corso is Orvieto, and he tries to share it with the crowd that is intent on finding “Duomo Orvieto,” for a profit. For the students, school is Orvieto, and they feel the dread of exams; this is relieved when they sit on the curb and do shots, having become citizens of “Caffe Cavour Orvieto.” For the woman pushing the stroller, her baby is Orvieto.

This is a haunted place, and it is governed by ghosts. Layered specters of its history fill in the cracks, move the streets, and give promptings for what will come. All around I see palimpsests. Nothing has an age because there is no point in thinking like that. The function of this building is to create art students who may or may not impact the next age; broken plaster on the wall that has been crumbling for fifty years exposes the tufa stone blocks that comprise the building’s structure. The Etruscans sat above this one block before it was a block, when it was earth and unnamed and created millennia before any man was. It was soft and secret and remained that way until recently, when it was named “block,” and “Orvieto,” and solidified.

And the building next to it tells a story that we also call Orvieto, along with the four-star hotel and the Etruscan tomb, mottled like the door against which I am leaning. Also the bread I can smell, and the tall cyprus trees and new grass in the gated garden, and this road sign brought from many miles away has also become Orvieto.

Perhaps, for a time, I too have become one of these facets called “Orvieto.”

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Sweaters and scarves become light cardigans, which become sundresses and linen shirts, the top three buttons undone. With this change of seasons comes an exponentially increasing number of foreigners. Brits, Japanese, Swiss, Swedish, French, Germans, Canadians, and loud Americans surface for an instant and then disappear. They usually make no visible mark, certainly not individually. But each of these invisible marks gives life to this place, and grouped together change the surface of Orvieto as insolently as raindrops carving canyons in a flash flood.

You cannot tell foreigners from locals by what they actually are, in many cases. The giveaway is those things with which they surround themselves—clothing, cameras. This is consistently true, of course, only at the most superficial degree: observation from a distance. Their identity is constructed from things which are not them. The French generally wear loose and soft looking fabric, and Germans have a penchant for earth-toned cargo pants or shorts, paired with sandals. Sandals and socks, likely. Americans wear baseball hats and hiking pants, the sand-colored transforming kind that zip-off to create shorts, and hiking boots. Decrease the physical distance between cultures, and the distinctions become more subtle, but this remains: identity is constructed directly around the person, not from what he actually is.

And it is, naturally, the same with the locals. They are not foreigners in this place, simply through the accident that they were born here.

This is why you must never merely pass through an area unless your intent is to distinguish nothing and learn nothing.

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The open-air market in Piazza del Popolo is an exemplification of a foreign thing being part of Orvieto, so much a part of it that if it disappeared, something of the city’s nature would be lost. And another paradox: all that is here in this market exudes impermanence, and I know that by evening there will be no trace that such a thing ever happened. Necessities and treasures, food and utensils and clothing purchased will have dispersed throughout the town, placed in cupboards or on windowsills.

If one expands his view to look over the centuries, the amount of time that the market exists in Orvieto—a few hours twice a week—is so brief that it may as well not exist. But I see the old woman trundling her rolling grocery bag along. The bag makes a rumbling of plastic wheels on stones and cracks between them, a sound that crescendoes and decrescendoes in a rhythm that matches the rise and fall of limping legs. They have been walking to this piazza for this market for close to a century, I am sure. Will you tell her the market does not exist? She spends her week benefiting from it—it nourishes her and her family, gives them life and sometimes excitement, sustains them through their lives. Man cannot live on bread alone, but she spends much of her time selecting bread, regardless. Other time is devoted to thinking of this market, planning for it—the market is not only in her physical world (a world growing less real), but, crucially, it is a central location in the world of her mind. This is the same for many, if not most, Orvietani. So for centuries, likely millennia, the market has been a permanent fixture in Orvieto, beginning when it was Velzna. This temporary collection of physical objects and foreigners is perhaps the last thing you would assign to the realm of metaphysics or whatever you want to call it, but what the market is most is an idea. The idea is important.

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I want there to be a conclusion, but other than leaving this place and recommencing in another, there is none. I will continue to imagine that time and familiarity interact, fighting each other and dancing together (depending on something inane like my mood or the weather), but it will be somewhere else. Orvieto is no developed story, consistently and smoothly moving through rising action, climax, dénouement, final page. It can be introduced; from there it must be observed in pieces, separated artificially into interludes, pauses in something that does not stop or end.

Orvieto began as the rest of the world: without form and void, unnamed. With the first unknown inhabitants it received its first lost name, followed by a series of other names in other tongues. It is foreseeable that this progression will circle back on itself until there are no longer inhabitants and Orvieto becomes again an unnamed formless void. There is no place without people.

What gives any person the right, ever, to cast off his label of “stranger”?