A Moveable Feast, Pt. I

This is a short narrative that I wrote while in Italy, decided to bring it back from the ashes of memory. Will serialize it for short attention spans of today's fast-paced world. Prego.

A Reading.

A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s book about his youthful exile in Paris during the 1920’s begins with the enigmatic phrase, “Then there was the bad weather.” At first glance, this may not be curious at all for the casual reader. In fact, I would hazard to say that very few people even notice this phrase. But then again, I believe that reading is an art, and like all arts, it takes practice.

The reason this opening sentence has caught my eye has several layers. For the first layer, I need to talk briefly about the course that I taught my first semester in Italy, entitled: Exiles in Time, Memory, and Place. We read works by Hemingway, Salinger, and Joyce for the primary texts. I chose to begin with Hemingway’s Moveable Feast for several reasons, also because it is the most accessible in language for foreign students. However, it was also because he is talking about a specific time in his life that he remembers from the vantage point of a sixty year-old man, the year before he shot  himself in Ketchum, Idaho. His circle was closed, he left America as a rather young man with no experience, and he died in America, older in experience than years.

Hemingway was writing about the time of a life that seen from its twilight, he regarded as the best part in retrospect. He closed the book saying, “But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.” If Hemingway was ever really happy after those years, it is difficult to say. Just as difficult to say is whether he was ever happy at all. Or, was this an embellishment seen through the eyes of a broken, alcoholic and embittered man? Such questions can generate good discussion, but ultimately we may always be left wondering.

However, let us return to the beginning of this work, or better, before the beginning, namely the preface. As my students quickly learn, I have a strong interest in prefaces, introductions, and beginnings. They are components of a text that are easy to breeze over, taken without concern or notice, but they can also be treasure troves of insight to the book and often are a direct communication from the author who may later hide himself in the text completely, leaving the reader to walk through his own dark wood, wandering and wondering.

Not quite Proust, but...

I was cooking a pasta dish the other evening, tagliatelle with gorgonzola, pear, and nutmeg spices, and I was reminded of perhaps one of my most cherished eating places in Italy, La Bottega del Vino, owned and operated by Marco, who else? In Castiglion Fiorentino, there are a surprising number of good restaurants for such a small Tuscan, hilltop town, but Marco's was the best.

Affable, talkative, and a true lover of food and wine, Marco was the consummate host for the consummate consumer.

His pere e formaggio pasta was signature.

We had been living in Bologna for the past year, a city known throughout Italy as the place to go eat, though more importantly, also to shop for fresh pasta and cook yourself, so CF had some serious competition to stack up to. I arrived a couple of weeks early, as Vanessa was in Rome for a month, to set up the apartment with the two cats and the sundry items we had carried with us to Bologna from Austin and those accumulated while in Bologna and set out on the town to find some good restaurants.

Though the first evening I ended up at the "23" pizzeria, which had a stunning backyard and view of the valley, the second evening I went an epicurean step up and found La Bottega and had an incredible crepescular dinner, chatting with Marco (quite proud of my Italian) for a couple of hours over a multi-course cena italiana, featuring the pear and gorgonzola pasta, finished with a divine cheese plate that Marco crafted each evening with a medley of cheeses that had to be eaten in precisely the right order.

While making that pasta, I was reminded of Marco, his large laugh, his hospitality and his love for what he did.

A fine memory indeed.