La Superba. Ilja Leonard PfeijfferЧитать онлайн книгу.
Gras outside? That the gray life in the cloister clashed with that path upwards to heaven, a path as garish and variegated as a rocket, ready to be fired so that it can burst out into a cascade of colors?
Piazza Sarzano is a square that I still don’t really get, a square like a formless mollusk with a Metro station I never see anyone going into or coming out of. But just to the right of it, left of the church, is a secret passageway to another city—a medieval wormhole. With its profound and contented pavement, the street swings steeply up the hill to a forgotten and abandoned mountain village straight out of Umbria or Abruzzo. A handful of narrow, abandoned little streets that rise and fall around a shell-shaped village square that slumbers in the sunshine. But in the distance you don’t see any mountaintops, no hills crosshatched with vines, no goatherds, but the docks of Genoa. This is a magical place you cannot be in without realizing that you actually can’t be there because the place cannot exist. This is Campo Pisano, a perfect name euphonically, an ideal marriage between sound and rhythm. Its meter is the triumphant final chord of a heroic verse. The name fits perfectly after the bucolic diaeresis of the dactylic hexameter. The succession of a bi-syllabic and tri-syllabic obeys the Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder and creates a charming auslaut after the first unmarked element of the dactyl, by which an ideal alternation between a falling and a rising rhythm arises. The sound is carried by the open vowels that shine like the three primary colors on an abstract painting by Mondrian. The falling movement from the a to the o finds a playful counterpoint in the high i before it is repeated.
The cool hard consonants articulate the composition like the black lines on the same painting, with the racy repetition of the p right in the middle. It is a name like an incantation to evoke a magical abode. A spell of otherworldly sophistication is needed to bring to life an impossible place. If someone were to unscrew the street’s nameplate from the wall, Campo Pisano would vanish into the mists of the docks, only to reappear when an ancient high priest remembered the name and it passed through his wrinkly lips between the Barbarossa walls and the sea. Campo Pisano. It’s a happy place with a tragic past, in the same way that only people who have known pain can be happy because people who are painlessly happy like that blow away like a Sunday paper in the wind of an early day in spring. This place was once a kind of Abu Ghraib. Prisoners of war were locked up here after La Superba’s army and navy had finally put down their archenemy Pisa for good. The curses of the defeated and humiliated Pisani still ring out to this day. Symbols of Genoa’s power are worked into the pavement in mosaics made of uneven pebbles. I’m the only person about at this time of day. The green shutters on the houses are closed. The wine bar won’t open until the evening. In the distance I can hear a goat bleating, or a ferry honking.
Vico Superiore del Campo Pisano is a dead end, but Vico Inferiore del Campo Pisano isn’t. Or the other way round. It depends which day it is. One of the two of them is a new wormhole, not back to Genoa and the present, but to America and yesterday’s future. The road curves gently downhill to the left and leads to a grotto. Dampness and vegetation seep from moldy walls. These are the vaults of the bridge that links Piazza Sarzano with the Carignano quarter. The high priest lives under the last arch. His skull is older than the city. High above him, the people of Genoa go in search of parking spots and bargains. Closer to the sea the fast traffic races along the Sopraelevata, the raised motorway along the coast.
The grotto opens out into a post-apocalyptic landscape, or to be more precise: this is the perfect location to film an old-fashioned science fiction film, preferably in black and white. Its official name is Giardini di Baltimora, but people know it as Giardini di Plastica, the plastic garden. It’s a gigantic dog-walking spot that also serves as a shooting-up area for heroin addicts and a kissing zone for young couples without places of their own. It looks like a 1960s or ’70s version of the twenty-first century. Desolate green with charmingly gray mega-office-blocks. Above-ground nuclear bunkers in a field of stinging nettles. Pre-war spaceships that have crashed in a forgotten hole in the city and gradually been reclaimed by nature.
All kinds of pathways go back up to the Middle Ages from here, or to Piazza Sarzano or Via Ravecca. But you can also walk under the supports of the rusty behemoths, across the underground car park beneath which the motorway runs to the sea, past peeling bars and clubs with unimaginative names, under the skyscraper, to Piazza Dante. The city will reveal itself to you there once again, with an ironic smile. Yes. After your epic journey, you’re simply back on Piazza Dante. Thousands of Vespas, Porta Soprana, Columbus’s house, the cloisters of Sant’Andrea, in the distance the fountain on Piazza de Ferrari and, on the other side, Via XX Settembre. You know every street here. It’s just a three-minute walk to your favorite bars. You burst out laughing in surprise. But how am I ever going to write about this, my friend? How can I ever make people believe that a city makes me happy?
11.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. Although Italy has flirted more often and more intimately with Marxism than most other Western European countries, it is one of the most drugged up countries I’ve ever seen. The Holy See actively gets involved in politics. The pronouncements of the Holy Father are even widely reported in progressive and left-wing newspapers. Not a week goes by without a public debate that is only a debate in that the Vatican has regurgitated one of its anachronistic opinions in a press release. There are few politicians who have the courage to commit electoral kamikaze by distancing themselves from the dictates of the Holy Mother-Church or casting doubt on the authority of the old right-winger who believes himself Christ’s terrestrial locum.
Genoa is a civilized, northern, and even explicitly left-wing city, where money is earned, where people can read and write, and where all the old people go to church. Or they take communion at home if they live on the seventh floor, with their fluid retention and their walker and the lift’s out of order again. The tabloids scream outrage. In Genoa, a salesman’s healthy skepticism is the norm, just as the pleasant shadow in the alleyways doesn’t evaporate under any amount of sun. Jesus said that Peter wanted to build his church on a rock. Peter’s church in Genoa is on Piazza Banchi and it is built on shops. The foundations of trade still lie under the church’s foundations. But even here, the mayor only has to come up with the idea of organizing a Gay Pride parade for the archbishop to put a stop to it the next day.
Being a Catholic doesn’t have to be a conscious choice, not like the existential struggles in Dutch Protestantism that go with being doubly, triply, quadruply Reformed or Restored Reformed. In the fatherland, conversion to Catholicism is for men of my profession worthy of a press release, guaranteed fodder for an endless series of discussion nights in community centers. In Italy, it’s something you’re born into, just like being born a supporter of Genoa or Sampdoria, and just as you’re born someone who eats trofie al pesto and not egg foo young with noodles. God isn’t someone you search for on a hopeless path with your hands cramped into a begging bowl, but someone like the coach of a football team or the chef in a restaurant: he’ll be there, and no doubt he’ll do his best, because that’s how it’s always been. So you get baptized and you marry in a church, not because you particularly want that, but because it makes Granny happy and because that’s the way it’s always been. Catholicism is the default, the standard setting, and too many complicated downloads and difficult processes are needed to deviate from it. Most people won’t go to all that trouble.
But this wasn’t what I intended to talk about at all. Religion is a bit of a woman’s thing after all. The men in Italy celebrate their own holy high mass every Sunday at three o’clock on the dot. Since time immemorial the year has unfolded around the cycle of friendly duels and preliminary rounds that lead to the championship and the final position. The religion is called Serie A. Mass is each team’s weekly match. At three o’clock on Sunday afternoons, millions of Italian men sit in their regular parish to be flagellated for ninety minutes by the live coverage on Skynet or some other subscription channel. Sampdoria’s church is the Doge Café on Piazza Matteotti; Genoa’s church is Capitan Baliano, diagonally opposite. At halftime during the service, everyone smokes a fraternal cigarette together on the same square before returning to their own temple at exactly four o’clock for the second half and another forty-five minutes of suffering, hell, and damnation.
Nobody enjoys it, as befits a religion. I’ve watched a football match in a bar a few times back home.