August in Italy

I just let myself be

It is August and I am in Italy with my family, the staticky thrum of the cicadas in the trees nearly constant, the unyielding heat warming the bricks of the house long past sunset. I am never sure how many readers of this newsletter know the story of our house here, so I will briefly explain.

In the late 1970’s, upon their retirement, my maternal grandparents left Rome and bought an old farmhouse in ruins on a sprawling piece of land in the countryside near the Renaissance jewel of Urbino, which is in the region of Le Marche. My grandfather restored the house (my grandmother died of a vicious brain tumor a year after moving) and spent the next 25 years of his life here, planting hundreds of trees, making his own wine, riding his tractor in the fields until an accident at 88, which ended up with him pinned under the tractor, brought an end to that activity, and sitting on a homemade bench in front of the house, contemplating the beauty of the natural world around him.

I have been visiting this place since I was a baby in diapers; my aunt and uncle who live in Brussels owned a separate house in the same village and so my summers, and some winters, were spent running back and forth on the sloping road between the two houses with my cousins. The village is at the top of a crest of hills in the Montefeltro region and as you drive down towards the coast, the winding roads through fields of sunflowers and grain give way to flat state highways that pass warehouses of furniture companies and kitchen manufacturers. The beach is about 35 kilometers away, a forty-minute drive, more or less.

When I was little, we went to the beach most mornings. The rules were strict: we had to get on the road to the beach by 8:00 am, the beach loungers that the grown-ups rented were for their use only, and we absolutely had to leave just before midday (after all, only mad dogs and Englishmen…) and go home for lunch. Sometimes, our mothers would bring the enormous peaches that we bought at a roadside stand along as a mid-morning snack; sometimes a woman would walk down the beach pushing a cart filled with squares of homemade pizza rossa and we would be allowed to buy a piece. The section of beach that we went to had orange beach umbrellas and blue beach loungers in neat little rows and was run by a fisherman who fished in the Adriatic during the cold months and ran his beach in the warm ones.

In Italy, beaches are divided into two categories: spiaggia libera, meaning free beach, where you can just show up and throw down your towel wherever you want, and spiaggia servita, which translates literally to “serviced beach.” On those stretches of beach, umbrellas and loungers are available to rent (either by the day or by the season), there are changing rooms, showers, a toilet, sometimes even a little playground or a small bar serving both morning coffee and afternoon cocktails. The bagnino who runs the place has a variety of responsibilities aside from collecting rent and keeping his beach clean and tidy; he also works as a lifeguard and monitors the cleanliness and quality of the water.

My aunt and my mother were first told about “our” little beach by local friends. During the early years in Torre, we only ever went to the beach in Pesaro, a turn-of-the-century beach resort town, which was crowded and where the water was not the cleanest. When our friends promised quieter beaches and cleaner water just a little bit further south, we followed them and stayed. So since I was Bruno’s age, we’ve continued coming to this same bagno, in various constellations of people. There is a large palm tree out front, a kicker table in front of the changing rooms, and recent years have seen the installation of a vending machine for coffee drinks. The fisherman retired and passed it on to his son, who was a gorgeous young man when we started coming and is now a gorgeous older man with grown children of his own and a beautiful blonde wife who swims out to the deep water past the rock breakers wearing black flippers and a floppy-brimmed straw hat. His section of beach is about 60 meters long and completely unremarkable to the untrained eye and yet it contains, to me, an entire universe of memories and feelings.

A million things have changed since those early days. My aunt and uncle sold their house and moved to France. My grandfather died at nearly 100 and my mother took over his house and, astonishing all of us, discovered a passion for country living. I spent almost two decades in the U.S., coming to Italy only for a handful of days each year, even those passing too swiftly through my desperate fingers, the distance taking my breath away. I nearly married someone who didn’t think much of this place; I ended up marrying someone who loves it as much as I do.

My mother never goes to the beach anymore; the sun is too intense for her and besides, she’s far too busy with her work in the garden and with the trees to sit around doing nothing on a sun lounger. Now I am the mom at the beach with lounge chair privileges, doling out water crackers, rubbing a white cast of sunscreen onto my fair-skinned children, ever vigilant to their location in the water and to the ticking of the clock, because we leave at midday too, of course, though there are now two simple restaurants behind the bagno where we can decide last-minute to eat tagliolini allo scoglio and fritto misto while the kids scribble on the tablecloth.

Yesterday we were at the beach again. The boys were perched on the stone breakers with their dad, peering out at the open water, watching schools of small fish chase each other at the surface. I was floating with my back to them, looking back at the shore. The water was only a foot or two deep, but I felt weightless and at peace. We are not the only repeat customers at our bagno. Almost everyone there I recognize after decades of seeing them each summer. We never really interact, besides a polite nod if we happen to pass each other at the open-air shower spigot. But watching them reappear each summer, the shapes of their bodies and the shades of their bronzed skin far more familiar than any other stranger’s will ever be, fills me with a sense of delight and equilibrium.

Time slows down here, the rhythm of our days determined by old rituals and the strength of the sun, and they bleed into one another. Is it Thursday or Saturday? Did we already have a gelato today? Do we have enough bread for dinner? When was the last time I had a moment to myself? Will cooler temperatures return? The earth is scorched, at night we move ventilators from room to room in the dark. When I stare up at the night sky now, I no longer see the Milky Way that my grandfather showed me proudly when I was a child. There is too much light pollution at the faraway towns along the horizon that glow gently against the velvety black sky and I scowl at them for a brief moment before turning in.

We are now the ones who will one day take over the house and bear the responsibility for it. I don’t think too much about that time, not just because I cannot bear to contemplate the events that will bring about that shift, not just because I cannot bear to contemplate the weather that will come to define everything about our time here. When I am here, it is the only time all year that I am both willing and capable of living in the present moment.

For now, all is as it should be. My mother sits out front on the same homemade bench her father once did, chatting with a neighbor, drinking ice tea. My children futz around in the living room, concocting complicated games, drawing pictures, licking the plastic rubies in Playmobil swords to make them gleam like the real thing. My husband reads in the hammock, works diligently on the olive trees, coaxes the kids into playing ping-pong in the cool downstairs room. And when the sun recedes and the wind rises up and whips the tops of the trees, I walk down to the edges of our land and I look out as the wild mint crushed under my feet wafts up and I just let myself be.