The Lady or the Turtle? Navigating La Agrodolce Vita
I was brooding by the lake one afternoon last spring when a magnificent sight passed before my eyes.
A woman in her late 40s or 50s or maybe even 60s (I’m terrible at guessing ages, you’re either a baby, child, adult or elder) in an immaculately tailored white linen suit, Jackie O sunglasses pushed back in a cloud of hair miraculously impervious to the humidity, was gripping a large primordial-looking turtle in her multi-ringed manicured hands. One of many that hang out in the port and occasionally wander too far inland and get turned around — the turtle not the lady — this one had lumbered up near one of the caffès and was now being ferried back to home base by Sophia Loren’s double. Long slimy strands of lake weed trailed off its spiky spine like horror set dressing while the woman’s heels click-clicked primly past me. She smiled at me and said in the breeziest of tones while shaking her head, “They do this sometimes, silly things.” Beauty having restored the beast, she returned to her table, company, and cocktails without so much as a crease or hair out of place.
It would have made an award-winning portrait. The lady, the turtle, the backdrop of Lake Como: the exquisite juxtaposition of it all. It was a perfect shot and I didn’t take it and only half-heartedly considered doing so. The memory — the story — was enough. It still feeds me.
I’ve had so many of these moments since officially moving to Italy some six years ago and captured next to none. And I realize how precarious that can be in this age of pics or it didn’t happen. For many, and I’m hardly immune, reality has taken on a kind of if-a-tree-falls conundrum: if it’s not documented and shared is it valid? How else will others consider it when considering you, who you are, your very own work of art called life?
And let me be frank, living in Italy only compounds the dilemma.
Certain countries project a kind of hyper-allure and Italy sits at or close to #1. There’s a popular notion that one doesn’t move to Italy so much as vacation there indefinitely, a cinematic shimmer around the word expat, which is just Hemingway speak for “white immigrant.” There’s a glossing over of what happens when tourist season ends and the credits wrap and you’re left standing in a new part of the world that doesn’t owe you anything, with only the vaguest outline of the fantasy you arrived with. And make no mistake, we all have one.
There’s that Condé Nast fixer-upper from Under the Tuscan Sun, Liv Tyler’s dopey ingenue in Stealing Beauty and of course the formidable Eat Pray Love parable; two out of three supposedly true stories, all of them allegory. Even the upper pedigrees of A Room With A View and The Portrait of a Lady, two examples of what can go totally right or terribly wrong when expats go rogue, make for superb propaganda.
In the end, all are variations of the same myth that’s been fed to us all our lives: Go somewhere else and you’ll become someone else — a better someone else.
I’ve been advised by well-meaning souls to go the expat influencer route but just can’t bring myself to pose strategically on a Vespa or with a random assortment of fruit & pastries on a balcony at sunrise or in a pouty gondola or whatever and caption it with some trite BS intended to elicit goodwill and envy, which is impossible sorcery. Filtered through the lens of social media, self branding or maybe just the absurd standards we set for ourselves and inevitably others, one’s life is either relatable or aspirational, a comedy of errors played for sympathetic laughs or else cited in someone’s very own Disney “I Want” song. I honestly don’t know where I fall. I’m Anita Ekberg in Trevi Fountain and Lucille Ball faceplanting in a vat of grapes; sometimes the lady, sometimes the turtle.
In any case it isn’t that simple, I’m not that simple, and whole-ass countries will never be so simple. Our lives may be movies unto themselves — killer soundtracks included — but the cast have minds and roles of their own and sometimes the setting is the bigger picture and it ain’t about you at all. It seems a number of Italian locales are starting to concur.
PASTA+PLAGUE has grown from the first Italian lockdown into a kind of cabinet of curiosities, meaningful and hopefully of some use but above all mine: the food I enjoy prepared by those I love and then annoy for recipes, history and tales, and fellow weirdos putting some good back in our naughty world (and in the case of La signora del lago, looking like a million euros doing it.)
As I’ve gotten older and time has simultaneously sped up and slowed down, life in both its moments of heartbreaking stillness and post-worthy action has grown increasingly, almost desperately, precious. Make no mistake, not all who peek in on your world wish you well in it, or are even capable of understanding what they see. We humans have quite the penchant for projecting our insecurities, ignorance and brazen entitlement onto others — usually just minding their business — and I long ago opted out of participating. What my life looks like to outsiders is none of my business, I know what it is behind the scenes and so do those who matter most to me. That they continue to embrace and celebrate me is all the validation I need. Everything else is archival.
As our planet burns and the plagues of our time sweep through our bodies and the future feels impossibly fragile and more than a little hopeless, perhaps all we’ll have are those Lady & Turtle episodes to sustain us: unexpected but not unwelcome, and at times so fantastically peculiar you have to wonder if they were meant for your eyes only.
“But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and — which he held more precious — it gave her shadow.” (E.M. Forster)
