海角大神

Standing in a police station in late '60s Rome, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi waited for a clerk to decide her fate. She was 26, American, and in need of a work permit. She鈥檇 traded tenure at an Oxford technical college for the uncertain life of a writer. Scanning her application, the clerk dictated a new statement for her. 鈥淚 came to Rome because I was a writer and I needed the inspiration of ancestors, the classical world, the sound of feet on stones.鈥� He stamped the approval, chiding, 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 say just one book. You need time.鈥澛�

The Other Side of the Tiber celebrates the spontaneity, bureaucratic complexity, and cultural abundance that is Italy today. Permesso, the Italian word for work permit, gave Mennozi what she was really after in 1968: permission to write. She never forgot the clerk鈥檚 clear instruction. Books. Plural. Now a published novelist, poet and translator, Menozzi is best known for her acclaimed memoir "Mother Tongue." 聽

This sequel, an insider鈥檚 reflections on 30 years in Italy, resists the clich茅s of split vision 鈥� ancient/modern; north/south; timeless/chaotic. Instead Menozzi focuses on how such opposites can nurture a life in search of transformation. Menozzi is an elegant writer who never falls into contemporary memoir鈥檚 culture of complaint. Her subject is Italy鈥檚 layered identity. But the memoir鈥檚 deeper story reveals how buried parts of herself surfaced. Over time, she discovered a deep capacity for commitment, not just to creative work, but also to a new marriage, motherhood, and a settled life in Parma, where she now lives.

The eye 鈥渦sed to the bluer light of the Midwest鈥� from a Wisconsin childhood soon adapted to 鈥渢he scorching raven black streets of Rome.鈥� Menozzi turns that eye on a Mediterranean world, 鈥渃lustered excess to be admired, picked, displayed, eaten, enjoyed.鈥� The memoir is itself an open market. Written in short, self-contained sections with headings such as 鈥淢emory,鈥� 鈥淟ayers,鈥� and 鈥淗ungry and Untrained Eyes,鈥� it offers glimpses of the Pantheon鈥檚 light, paving stones, kiosks, volcanoes, Italian donuts, pink marble, walking shoes, the frescoed walls of empress Livia鈥檚 dining room, 鈥渄epicting palms, cypresses, quince, pomegranates, doves, and laurel.鈥� Together, these short sections mirror the working of memory itself, offering a slideshow of Italy across time, from the Etruscans to today鈥檚 Slow Food movement.

Italy possesses 60 percent of the world鈥檚 art. Many of the book鈥檚 strongest sections involve artists: Duccio鈥檚 Sienese Madonnas, Correggio鈥檚 frescoed domes, Caravaggio鈥檚 dirty-soled pilgrims. Menozzi鈥檚 own life is guided by two principles of Italian art: perspective and restoration. In Michelangelo she recognizes someone instinctively drawn to subjects 鈥渢o express freedom and potential鈥� so his work 鈥渢hunders with the process of release.鈥� She laments his being, 鈥減ressed by taskmaster rulers hungry and impatient for his talent to mirror their power.鈥�

Nowhere is free will and choice more poignantly examined than in Menozzi鈥檚 sections on southern Italy and immigration. She takes readers from Pythagoras鈥� Metaponto to the blue-tent refugee camp of Manduria. In Puglia, thousands of Somali do seasonal migrant work, while others wait for years in legal limbo. Like her, immigrants from North Africa stranded at Lampedusa ask to be taken in by Italy鈥檚 emblem, the she-wolf nursing Rome鈥檚 two fabled founders, 鈥渃apable of nurturing, even creatures foreign to her species.鈥�

Italy鈥檚 鈥渢angled and mysterious strata鈥� of human quest and survival play out in Menozzi鈥檚 stories of her first years in Rome. The most haunting is a clear-eyed account of a scene of domestic violence she witnessed in a courtyard. In telling that woman鈥檚 story, Menozzi subtly reveals her own. While keeping details about her own crippling childhood and first marriage spare, she uses the wife-stabbing story to explore women鈥檚 powerlessness and a paradox in Italian law:聽 鈥�Il condono is perhaps the most pragmatic and extensive of Italian solutions for certain kinds of wrongdoing. Wait long enough and the penalty will be reduced or eliminated,鈥� Menozzi notes.

The Tiber, the river cutting through Rome, is Menozzi鈥檚 symbol of 鈥渕emory鈥檚 capacity to reach over time and cast sharp, contrasting light.鈥� In the city shaded by plane trees, she first saw that Italy 鈥減ossesses extraordinary master keys that it offers to everyone, even without their asking.鈥� "The Other Side of the Tiber" is itself a master key that unlocks Italy with its centuries of 鈥渃onnectedness and community.鈥� They provided Menozzi with the 鈥渘ourishment鈥� she needed.聽 Yet the discipline, commitment, and authenticity she鈥檇 been seeking had been waiting within her all along.

Alexandra Johnson, the author of "The Hidden Writer," is working on a travel memoir about southern Italy, "The Saint鈥檚 Laundry."