Too Much Beauty

Italy, Italy, wherever I go

Bath Abbey, not Italy, despite the headline. All photos mine.

Cari amici,

Of course you know I’m joking; there’s no such thing as too much beauty. But sometimes that which freezes our feet to the ground, deprives us of breath and heartbeat, leaves us slack-jawed and stupefied—well, it comes at a price. One such “pound of flesh” is Stendhal’s Syndrome, a psychosomatic malady that causes tachycardia and fainting in the presence of great art (it originated in Florence). Another is what afflicted me on my recent trip to England: the habit of comparing not-Italy to Italy, with (probably, if you know me at all) predictable results.

I write this in fear because the last thing I want to do is offend my British friends and acquaintances. To paraphrase that famous breakup line, “It’s not you, England, it’s me.” The problem is I met you too late, after I’d gotten to know your southern femme fatale cousin, Italy. And in fact it’s not just you, England; looking back now, I realize I felt the same way about Barcelona, Vienna, and Prague, Zagreb and Dubrovnik, Korcula and Split. Even the first not-American city I’d ever seen, Paris—a showstopper by all rights, and certainly to first-time international traveler me—lost some of its allure after I met Italy. These places are travel-worthy, beautiful and notable in their own ways. But they’re not Italy.

Let me emphasize that England has much to love. Highlights for me: the rugged Cornish coast with its colorful harbors; the velvety green folds of the Devon countryside, speckled with sheep as numerous as stars; architectural gems in London, Oxford, and Bath. I could eat clotted cream every day, and nearly did. The people were warm and kind, the history intriguing, the museums fabulous. (The Victoria and Albert, my God!) And the bookstores, especially the Oxfam ones with all the used books! Suffice it to say I carted 19 books home.

Top to bottom, left to right: Bath, Oxford, London x 4, Cornwall x 3

And yet.

Basically, I missed Italy the whole time I was away. It’s a curse. I am forever enthralled, seduced. Forever corrupted.

Naturally, the romantic in me wants to nail some of the blame for this predicament on my Italian blood, though centuries of writings about travels in Italy prove that no Italian DNA is needed to induce a tourist to go gaga over its cathedrals and piazzas, its brilliant art and astonishing architecture, the gut-punch of its world-changing history. You don’t need a drop of Italian blood to gush about Italy’s spiky alpine fringe and soft mountainous spine, its dramatic coastline, its thousands of postcard-worthy paesani (villages). We won’t even mention the food.

Though I was dimly aware of the comparisons I was making during the first portion of my trip, it wasn’t until I got to London, and its museums, that I realized the extent of my bias. I was like a homing pigeon, zeroing in on the Italian art as if I knew where each painting hung and each sculpture stood. I was an Italian-art–seeking missile with exceptional accuracy. Perugino, Raffaello, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Filippo Lippi, Artemisia Gentileschi, Parmigianino, Bellini, Tiziano, my beloved Botticelli, and on and on—there they were, some having been plundered, many purchased. I was happy to see art by other masters too—Dutch, French, English, Spanish—but I couldn’t resist the magnetic pull of the Italians lurking in the next room.

Top to bottom, left to right: Botticelli, Gentileschi, Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo (unfinished), Perugino, Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, Raffaello, Tiziano. Perugino at the V&A Museum, all others the National Gallery, London.

We need a word for my malady. It’s a compulsion, a bias, that goes beyond italophilia. Italophilia in extremis springs to mind, which could work because in extremis signifies the point of death. Sounds about right.

Alla prossima,

Cheryl

© 2023 Cheryl A. Ossola

---

Books of the week (a few of the ones I bought, in no particular order):

• Amours de Voyage by Arthur Hugh Clough (a book I’d never heard of, given new life by publisher Persephone Books, which, says their website, “reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly mid-twentieth century.” The book’s about Rome and written in verse, so I had no choice but to buy it.)

• Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf (the epitaph reads: “Nothing but this: we have loved reading”)

• The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas (who is a woman, and French, and her crime novels tend toward the poetic)

• Taking Pictures by Anne Enright (Irish author, short stories)

• The Last Painting of Sara De Vos by Dominic Smith (recommended by one of my co-travelers)

• Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller by Oliver Darkshire (Except he’s not a bookseller who is rare; he’s a rare-book seller. Unless he is rare; who knows? I started following him on Twitter—he’s Sotheran Rare Books and Prints’ resident tweeter—in the beforetimes, when you could still find the tweets you wanted to read, and he’s funny as hell. I bought the book at Sotheran’s, but unfortunately Oliver wasn’t there and even worse HE HADN’T SIGNED THE BOOKS. Sigh.)