We Have One Hundred Towels At Home (Newsletter #6)
Dear all who may be listening,
Good morning in Firenze, again, and for the last time.
Gray, sticky rain follows us through the morning in Florence, puddling up in the river and in the grout between street-stones. Unaware, I wake up sleepless and dress for an 80 degree run, hot pink and orange. Already when I waltz onto the street, my clothing is unwelcome and itchy, the wrong colors for this city; only a few minutes into jogging does the rain start to soak into my bare arms and neck, slipping over my eyelids and catching on the creases of my tired face. My heel hurts. The discomfort tips the scale away from joy; I want to run in Florence when the sun is sparkling on the Arno and the tourists are out in spells. I will return. For now, I return to our apartment, damp, laughing—well, mostly laughing.
Breakfast is an all-weather affair, so we trek out with our luggage but sans AirBnb umbrella, since the fates are against us. We have three lucky fates of our own, though, and we find them at Caffé Mingo (friends of the newsletter know the significance of the name), huddled at a corner table, once again. Sunglassed and shrouded in neutral-dark Uniqlo, they spin and cut threads and tell us that ours are pointing west toward Turin, while theirs lead east, toward Venice. In other words: we out? Yes, but not before breakfast—so make it count while it lasts, advice from the fates. In this spirit I order the entire plate of charcuterie available on the menu, and Carlson bravely asks for a Chai Latte. We all step gingerly around the fact that lasagna and curry are also available at this café at 11am. When the charcuterie arrives it is TREMENDOUS, in the ancient sense, in that tremors dance over the floor and bells tremble and fairies are born. Actually, there are 30 pieces of cold meat and 10 hunks of cheese, eight cuts of warm brown bread and also, a grilled spinach wrap? I don’t want to think about the grilled spinach wrap.
We stretch out breakfast, and I sin against Italy by taking the extra charcuterie in a napkin to go while the waitress isn’t looking — those Americans really can eat, yeah? After that, we skitter across slick cobblestones to a stationary-and-trinket store, the type to magnet me on first glance. (This is how they get me: with hand-bound leather books and stitching behind the counter, sheaths of drawn picture cards and messed-up ancient globes and wooden pencils with pinnochios on top.) We are deeper within the circle now, perhaps running up against an answer to the question I posed last time. Faced with this rigid round border of Art, the people of Florence start to create on their own, concentrically, crafting imitations of the city and its spectral stone lore, its mythology of art. Little pools of people-art start to gather, under corner awnings and at the foot of the Duomo and in the spaces between cheap clothing stores. Spiral notebooks splashed with Botticelli, metal baubles of Da Vinci’s men, posters that un-scroll into every Giotto. I even see it in the fake leather bags paraded out on mats on every avenue. Crafts wash in with the rain. There is maybe nothing diluted about it. I twirl my suitcase around the trinket store, at the art that I can touch and breathe on and take away with me.
Snip, the threads of fate. Jackson, Carlson, and Graham run off to the tram station; Owen and I toward the trains, but first the Duomo on the way, which drops alien from the sky into the center of a plaza circled by gelaterias and tourist shops. Like in a crop circle, there is also a ring of empty space that surrounds the central creation. It is as if the hands that crafted the Duomo simultaneously cleared away all touch of nature and humans around it. Even tourists skirt this dead zone, the inhumanity that seeps up through the ground, leaving bare concrete behind. This gives the Duomo the curious quality of appearing grown straight from that concrete, a settler, a spaceship that landed just here. And it’s difficult to observe more than this about the Duomo. I can only see one detail at a time, one copper and cream-white intricacy or interlocking triangle-circle pattern, never the entire entity. When I look at photos now, I wonder where that structure was, exactly, as we walked through the rain around its sharp edges, eyes always slipping off the full image and falling onto something more human instead, spinning stacks of sunglasses, or a man selling plastic ponchos for a few Euros, without wearing one himself. Of course, this is what a cathedral is meant to be.
We find the train station then, already familiar. We are pros at this train business. Owen and I get to ride a Freciarossa 1000, the sleekest, hyper-sexy, super-graphic, ultra-modern, 10th fastest train in the world. We are practically leaping across the few stops between Firenze and Torino, bright red comet in the countryside. This train is another alien thing, easy to forget there is a human at the front, teasing at the metal to make it sing. So much effort to create things that we can worship from our delicate human bodies, while they endure and leave us behind. We say goodbye to the city of art, and our squelching shoes, and the rain’s kind gesture to soak through my suitcase and every single piece of clothing inside. I wink in and out of sleep as the train takes us into the mountains.
Turin, Torino. The first city that is an open question for me, having visited Florence and heard Instagram legends of Nice. The city is gray when we get there—gray in the sky, heavy, not the kind in Florence but a shade that feels permanently installed. The buildings are tall, think Manhattan, and crammed together, think Manhattan again. But the streets, at least the thoroughfare we walk down toward Owen’s friend Shane’s apartment, are empty. It is eerie, this tall metropolis with its people all tucked away, half-empty streets and stores, a cafe on every corner, supermarkets and device-stores in between. What the hell is a device store? Good question. They pepper the blocks of Torino, stocked to the brim with—devices. Waffle makers, block-shaped cellphones, electronic toothbrushes, coffee grinders, computer mice, thumb drives, toasters, calculators, walky-talkies. They stack up in identical cases, little bricks in box-walls that barricade the stores, invite us to gape like magpies, all the shiny metal and shades of new. This is my first impression of Turin: a gray-grid city, with a thousand purposes, and a thousand devices to carry them all out.
There’s more after beginnings if we’re lucky, of course: now I see the tall terraced buildings, their pastel walls undulating over the bus stops, flowers out in flashes; now I see a tent of green military men; now an occasional brutalist apartment building pocked into the landscape. The path to Shane’s apartment is paved with marble mosaic, and his wide curtained window looks over the street, the ordinary people gathered there and stopping in for pizza kebabs. I feel NEW YORK CITY, again. (You thought I forgot about that, did you?) We’re meant to see mountains as well. But the sky is dusty, hesitant to show us. On a clear day, Shane tells us. On a clear day you can see the Alps. Torino never clears up. We never get to see the heart of it.
Shane is generously hosting us—thank you, and thank god. However, this does mean there is one bed, and one cross-hatched wooden floor. Owen and Shane take the bed; I take the floor. I set up my bed there, comparatively luxurious, six pillows and a few blankets. We wonder about taking showers, contemplate that we might have to dry off without towels, forget about it for now.
What’s there to do in Torino? What’s that, Shane—nothing? Can we prove him wrong? We try, take ourselves out on a walk toward where the map on my phone turns green. We are four now: myself, Owen, Shane, and Shane’s twin brother Kai. First, we find a café and aperitivo, apparently a Turin specialty, which in this iteration resembles a bowl full of microwaved hot-pockets, I’m certain they do it differently elsewhere. Little treat aside, green on the map leads into gold, another discarded European castle, on the skirts of stacked-up apartments and thrown away, gate open. We wander in, trespassers on a family four-hundred years in the pas and their princess in a portrait. We slip between ghostly carriages and suitors, across a tiled courtyard which lies gapingly empty. If I were a princess in a painting, I would simply do better. My courtyard would be bristling, uncomfortably full, enough plants to start a rainforest. I think a menagerie of intricate pathways, maybe a garden stashed with my secrets, and evergreen fountains — lost coins swimming in the deep, fish flashing up gold. In my next life.
The sun drops, and the clouds blow-up with royal colors, gold and purple. If not mountains, at least we have this: clouds collect, rising high above city skyline, enveloping each other and snowy from their caps down below the horizon. Endless powdery perfect skiing, shot through with the sun. We follow the clouds out in search of dinner.
The train is still on the tracks, yes? Get ready, because this is exactly where it goes off. This is NOT a hyper-sexy, sleek, jaw-dropping, alien-crafted 10th fastest train in the world; it is a US regional light rail, clunky, ugly, probably historically problematic, almost-but-not-actually useless. Owen and I together pick out a restaurant …. ‘A Smorfia. What does this mean? Good question, reader. At the time, we thought it might mean “Sphinx”. It does in fact mean grimace. It means Grimace??!! I just found this out, at the same time you did, and it seems pertinent. We go to “Grimace,” meeting up with the fifth member of our party, Kai and Shane’s mother. At the restaurant, we are greeted by a grimacing man, which now makes sense, green sweater and round eyeglasses—keep that in mind. He is, we realize, the only person running this operation. When we walk in, he chastises us. We made an online reservation for five people, and online reservations are only for four people. Our fault, that’s on us. He can seat us anyway, and he does. Ok great!!! We order questionable pasta dishes, and start to talk. About P. Diddy? That was not my conversation topic, in case you were wondering. And not Owen’s either.
Eyes start to wander: Next to our table are two pieces of art. One, a man in a green sweater, little round glasses, and two, a frowning dog. A dog that has fucked up. They look at each other. We look at them. Excuse me sir, is this a painting of you? Yes. And is this your dog? No, that’s my son.
We process that one over our pasta with potatoes and pasta with zucchini and shrimp, and ‘vegetable plate’. Our guy sends out excellent vibes to the rest of the customers and grimaces at us in between passes, while he cooks and hosts and waits on everyone in the restaurant. Ah, smorfia. What did we do?? I’ll always wonder. We pay the check and get away, quicker than the high-speed rail can go. Freciarossa 5000, that’s what they called Owen in high school. Fastest train off the tracks in Europe.
After this, we find gelato, natural healing offered up by the universe. In dark Torino streets I also experience my first Italian grocery store, which is uncanny and off-putting in the same way that any supermarket or pharmacy in another place always is, at least for me. Nothing truly familiar, just labyrinth and almost-knowing, new colors and labels all the way down. We’ll return here, later in the story. We look for towels. We find no towels. A few hours later, the four of us are in Shane’s room over drinks, discussing the shower situation, and Kai casually says: “I mean, we do have one hundred towels in our AirBnb”.
One hundred towels, one hundred pencil sharpeners, one hundred unseen mountains, fifty Freciarossa 1000s in all of Europe, twenty gelato flavors, three of us sleeping in one room, and one, only one Torino. I fall asleep on the floor.
No more grimaces,
Frog and Iggy (Laura and Owen)
March 27, 2024