Now that winter has stripped all the leaves off of the chestnut trees around our house, the sea has once again become an overwhelming feature of our lives. We have a startling view of it from the windows in the living room where we lurk together all day long. Around sunset, particularly, it is sometimes hard to get things done.

And now that the tourist season is over, there is plenty of free parking available down at the beach, which is mostly deserted and has the feeling of a summer place that has been abandoned. The gelato store where I had the best gelato of my life back in 1984 is still there, but closed up now until spring.

It is all very beautiful and a little melancholy -- as winter beaches and sunsets always are. And we have started to talk just between the two of us about where we will go next. We have agreed to stay in our house in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea until April 2025. And we are very happy here. But this was never intended to be forever.

When we started the whole project of figuring out the rest of our lives, we had a dream list of places where we might want to visit or live for a while -- some that we had been to and some that we hadn't: The Marquesas, New Zealand, Iceland, Uruguay, British Columbia and others. We came to Italy first because Jonathan's citizenship and language skills made things easier here. But sometimes when I'm looking at the Mediterranean, my head is all filled with South Pacific memories of the turquoise lagoon at Rarotonga, lined with coconut palms and thickets of hibiscus, and I see my boys on horseback galloping through the gentle surf out by the reef. It's not that we don't love Italy, because we do. But there is a whole world out there -- other places and other seas.

So we are once again in the position of not knowing what will become of us. The future is very uncertain. In the meantime, I am trying to savor this place where I am now for this moment,

Highlights of the week:

1. We took the train to Milan to see the opera of "The Little Prince" at La Scala and all along the way, we saw the lovely rose-colored and terra cotta and lemon-yellow houses outside the train windows.

2. I drank a 22 euro gin and tonic on the rooftop terrace of our hotel in Milan. I only drank one.

3. We knew the opera was for children, but we hadn't realized it was also by children -- La Scala has a school for little budding singers. My two favorites were the ones dressed as asteroids in big globe costumes who had to stand on stage and revolve for a good twenty minutes. I almost died from the adorableness.

4. There was a harpist at breakfast in the hotel who played "Moon River," "What a Wonderful World," and "Over the Rainbow."

5. When we got home, Jonathan had to leave almost immediately for a conference in Rome, so I texted him some pictures of me later that day. Or at least I intended to. Somehow, I managed instead to send them to our neighbor Fabio across the street. Now I have to hide inside my house for the rest of my life.

Before sunset, Jonathan and I often walk down to the edge of town. There's a low stone wall there where the hillside drops away in a steep cliff and we can see Pietrasanta like a little toy village down below us and then out past it to the sea. From there, we can see the piers at Viareggio and at Marina di Pietrasanta sticking out into the water. Depending on the weather, we can also see the islands of Elba, Corsica, Gorgona, and Capraia. The sea can be as many shades of blue and green and gray as there are, depending on its mood, and can sparkle or froth or be burnished like iridescent metal. Sometimes, by a weird optical illusion, the clouds seem much closer to us than the plain of the coast down below and it feels like we are hanging in the air. We have abandoned all hope of ever photographing the varied loveliness of the sunsets.

In the summertime, we can see the ferris wheel on the beach at Viareggio, just where two hundred years ago, Lord Byron, Trelawney, and Leigh Hunt cremated the drowned body of Percy Bysshe Shelley, without even waiting for his wife Mary to get there. The legend says that his heart didn't burn and they gave it to Mary in a box. I imagine it was small comfort.

 

Yesterday, we went to Milan to return one rental car and pick up another. Because we are foreigners, the longest amount of time we can rent a car for is six months -- and that only at one place in Milan. So by now we have had many cars of varying sizes and personalities. Our third car was a four-door Renault station wagon -- far too large to really be driving around the roads up here, which were all laid out by wandering goats two thousand years ago -- with French license plates and a fortunately calm demeanor. Because it was French and as big as a cow, we named it Albert Carmus and called it Bertie Car-moo. When we were cleaning it out before we dropped it off after six months, we found a 50 euro note in the little compartment between the seats. We assume it was a tip or a parting gift from Bertie in fond remembrance of our times together. When we later rented a second one of the same make, we called it Bertie Car-two.

There was also a German car called Horst that we had only a short time last spring. It became quite hysterical whenever the driver got (what it considered to be) too close to any outside objects, such as low stone walls, for instance, or other cars. In Capriglia, we are always too close to outside objects -- the roads having been laid out by goats, etc. -- so we drove around with Horst in a pretty much constant state of frenzied alarm bells beeping and screeching at us. This is not particularly soothing for a driver trying to negotiate the hairpin turns of the Via Cappezano Monte, which make the charming Via Capriglia looks like the Champs Elysée. Horst also actually fought us whenever we tried to change lanes without using the turn signal, yanking the steering wheel back into line. So despite his obvious overwhelming care for our well-being, we were relieved -- for Horst's sake -- to return him. We can only hope that he went on to live somewhere with fewer narrow lanes edged by low stone walls, someplace we he could get some peace of mind.

Our new car is tiny and black, like a bat. Naturally, we call it the Batmobile. But "bat" in Italian is "pipistrello" -- one of my favorite Italian words. So the car is actually the PipiMobile. As Jonathan and I continue to age -- and to laugh uproariously -- this name becomes increasingly accurate for all of our cars.

In Milan, taking a taxi from the place we dropped off the old car to the place we picked up the new one (the same rule that limits us to six-month leases also prohibits us from just renewing the current lease of even just getting another car from the same place), the cab driver was surprised (as people often are) that we speak Italian. Most foreigners visiting in Italy apparently just don't bother to learn even the basics. 

"Yes," Jonathan said. "During the Covid lockdown, I made myself a project of trying to memorize as much of Dante's Divine Comedy as I could."

"Ah," the cab driver said, picking up the book that he had next to him on the front seat. "That is what I am reading now." And he showed us his copy of The Divine Comedy. We all laughed. He told us that he had not been able to complete his secondary education until he was in his 30s. He is now in his 50s and says that he is not a "cultured" man, but that he tries to improve his mind. On the back of the seat in front of Jonathan was a quote (in Italian) from Hamlet. The cab driver is not big on religion, he said, but The Divine Comedy, for him, is all about the interior journey. He told us that he was very pleased to meet us. I left his cab feeling that I had been lucky.

Update: Tonight Nonno balanced a glass of wine on his head for a full two minutes. The free bar "snacks" were wild boar cutlets in a light tomato sauce and fresh baked bread. Also homemade pate on crostini. Alice has put twinkle lights up around the railing to the terrace. Jonathan and I taught Renata how to play backgammon. The sea is socked in with fog and only the brightest lights from the ships are visible, but it has not yet begun to rain. We did not go to the beach today or read great books or look at famous paintings. I regret nothing.

 

We had our first fire of the year yesterday. I felt that we should.

There are so many things that we should be doing that we don't. We should, for example, be down at the beach, basking on the sun-drenched shores of the Ligurian Riviera -- but instead we are at the Ikea in Pisa buying potholders. We should be travelling around to all the famous towns in Tuscany, soaking in art and culture -- but instead we are going down to the pub again and talking with the guys about the new stop signs in town. And given that we have three (3) fireplaces and a never-ending supply of cut wood neatly stacked and waiting for us to use, we should be having fires on rainy days.

So yesterday we did.

I'm a little skittish about the fires because we had about half a dozen of them last winter and half the time they were merry and bright and cozy and the other half, they filled the house with smoke and we had to open all the windows to clear it out and sit there in our coats, blowing on our fingers to keep them warm.

So during the intervening summer, we have asked around (mostly at the pub) for fireplace tips.

We have been told to burn a small piece of paper first to check if the chimney is "drawing" before we go full-on inferno. We have also been advised to light a very miniscule fire and let it burn a bit to "warm up" the chimney first before moving on to larger conflagrations.

We did both of these things, hovering over a crumpled piece of smoldering printer paper with the flashlights from our phones trained on it and gazing at the smoke like a couple of very intense soothsayers from Ancient Greece. Then we lit a large pine cone and watched it burn. The smoke from both went happily straight up the chimney. All systems go.

So we built a roaring blaze and fifteen minutes later, the living room was filled with smoke and I was actually getting rained on sideways while the wind whipped through the now opened windows and washed over me where I was sitting on the couch. 

Today, everything in the house smells like beef jerky. But it was lovely while it lasted.