In the movie Wings of Desire, the director Wim Wenders posits the idea that angels are all around us, but not in the manner depicted in religious art. His angels most emphatically don’t have wings.
Instead, they appear to humans simply as the anonymous people you sometimes see on street corners and alike. They just stand there, not doing much of anything really, and if your brain registers them at all, it assumes they’re maybe waiting for the bus.
Wenders’s angels do have a purpose, of course, which is to look out for their charges, but in a way that never seems obvious, either to other people around them, or of course to the charges themselves.
Most fittingly, while the angels can speak to each other, they’re forbidden by edict from on high to ever speak in a language that is intelligible to the human race.
And finally, in a nice touch that is especially helpful for the viewer, in the movie all the angels are differentiated from everyone else by the long, black leather coats they wear.
ooOOoo
Recently, Wings of Desire was very much on my mind in Italy, after spending an improbable time with Maurizio. And it wasn’t just because he never seemed to take off his very well-worn three-quarter length jacket (made of black leather, of course).
We first met Maurizio in Marrakesh, along with his good friend Giovanni, the brother of the woman who owned the riad where we were staying. We shared the commons room there, because Maurizio and Giovanni’s visit to Morocco over-lapped with ours by several days.
Neither Giovanni nor Maurizio spoke any English, but that didn’t stop them. For Italians, words are just the foundation of how they communicate. Inflection and the use of gestures are if anything more important, and in Maurizio’s case he was as fluent as any PhD in linguistics. In no time at all we were getting along really well, laughing and joking as we engaged in something not too dissimilar to charades.
Amazingly, in a few relaxed sessions we managed to work out that Maurizio and Giovanni worked installing and repairing telecommunication cables in Rome; that Giovanni had two children who were fluent in English (and have English-sounding first names); that Maurizio was once a well-known water polo player in Italy; and, finally, that Maurizio had a 12-year-old daughter from a failed marriage that he absolutely loved and adored.
Before we left Marrakesh, Maurizio asked for our email address, and the phone number of the apartment where we would be renting a room in Rome. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. It was just one of those things travellers always do.
So imagine my surprise when several days later there was a knock on our bedroom door in Rome. “Someone phoned for you and left a message in Italian,” our landlady said. “He says his name is Maurizio, and he’ll pick you up at the end of the subway line Sunday morning at 8am.”
I have to confess I wasn’t sure what to do. We didn’t really know Maurizio all that well, even though we had at least shared a few laughs. And just what did he have planned?
My first thought, thanks to that perverse kernel of fear the media has by now firmly planted in everyone’s brains, was that this might be a set-up. Bad things do happen, after all (I mean, we see it every night on TV!). And don’t Italians have a bad reputation, at least as far as people in the English-speaking world are concerned?
But then a second idea occurred to me. When we aren’t open to random acts of kindness, does it also mean that we wouldn’t do something similar ourselves? And what does that say about us? Could it be that we’re not really all that nice after all?
Some would call it naivety. But I’d like to think faith in my fellow man won out. And so on the appointed day my wife and I took a bus to Roma termini, and then a subway ride as far as it went out west. It was so early, and on the Italians’ sacred day off, that it was really eerie. There were virtually no other passengers on either of the rides.
We walked up the empty stairs leading from the station, not knowing where we were, and even less what to expect. But then we saw Maurizio, all 6’4” of him, wearing his black leather jacket, and a big grin on his face. He shook our hands, false-kissed us on each cheek (in the universal Italian way), and introduced us to his girlfriend Amalia.
It was then that we breathed a sigh of relief. Amalia at least spoke some English. She was from Moldavia, had moved to Italy when she was in her twenties, and along with perfecting her Italian had learned at least a few Anglo basics from DVDs produced by the BBC.
What then unfolded was easily the warmest and truest Italian experience we had in almost two months, off and on, in this country. Real Italians were taking us on that most treasured of Italian leisure experiences – a Sunday outing to the coast.
Maurizio, you see, had grown up in a beach-side community called Terracina, about an hour and a half drive from Rome, and his hometown turned out to be a wonderful (and somewhat familiar) place.
Terracina has about 40,000 people, a sandy beach that goes on for at least 10km, and a rock promontory that overlooks the town. In fact, apart from having the remains of a 3rd century BC temple to Jupiter it could almost be the Mount (Mt. Maunganui, just down the coast from where we lived in the Bay of Plenty, for you non-NZ readers).
Maurizio was wonderfully proud of Terracina, although he confided that it was a bit too low-key compared to Rome. And he needed to stay in the big city since that’s where his daughter and her mother lived.
He instead visits his home town once or twice a month, always on Sundays, to give a kiss to his momma, and have a meal at Dal Pescatore (literally “From the Fishermen”). Because what we hadn’t realised was that Maurizio had grown up in a restaurant. But not just any restaurant…Terracina’s best seafood establishment, complete with its own small fleet of boats.
As a result, as part of our Sunday excursion we were treated to our very first full-on Italian meal. We all eat Italian food, of course, no matter where we live in the world. I’ve had wonderful cannelloni in Tokyo, and even a very nice pizza on Guadalcanal. But how many of us can claim to have attempted the full extravaganza – antipasto, then pasta, followed by a primo, a secondo, and finally dolce, caffe and a digestivo.
I’d seen all these courses on Italian restaurant menus, but I just couldn’t figure out how anyone could manage to fit it all in. Some bruschetta and a plate of pasta is one thing, and maybe a gelato if there’s room. But a primo and a secundo, as well? That just didn’t seem possible.
So here (along with closing shops for four hours in the afternoon, drinking coffee standing up, and paying €400 for a pair of men’s shoes) is perhaps another reason why Italians are different to everyone else. They can all (every last one of them) eat and eat and eat.
In our case, lunch (yes, the mid-day meal, not dinner at about 8pm) started with a fantastic/great tasting/very large plate of cold nibbles, the antipasto. There were several types of olives (and small black ones that were just divine); big capers (the berries, not the buds); a couple of types of cheese (including a white, chewy ball of buffalo mozzarella); prosciutto (air-dried ham); char-grilled and pickled red peppers; and beautifully fresh (truly Italian) bread.
Next up was the pasta course (and no, in this restaurant the pasta course and the primo course are definitely not the same). In our case it was that most exacting of Italian dishes, a risotto (although I still don’t know why Italians always classify rice as a pasta).
And what a risotto it was – truly creamy, but at the same time crunchy (I quickly realised I’d always cooked my own attempts far too long), combined with delicious garlic-fried scampi, a few mussels, and just-warmed cherry tomatoes. It was so good you simply had to eat it all. But the fear was what might come next.
It was the primo, of course – steamed mussels, a big mound on each plate. And they were truly a revelation. They were very slightly smoked, but at the same time also poached in a sauce that included garlic, and fresh oregano, and something I just couldn’t figure out. And each mussel literally melted in the mouth. I’d never had mussels before that weren’t at least somewhat chewy. I only wish we could cook our NZ green-lipped version this well.
Time for a breather? Well, how about a limoncello sorbet to clear the palette (and since limoncello is the famous Italian liquor, a wee hit of alcohol as well).
Now came the signature dish, the secondo. In this case it was what the Italians called fritto misto di pesce, a mixed variety of seafood, all lightly battered (even less so than tempura) and quick-fried in light olive oil. Our plates were huge, and contained what looked like just about every sea creature swimming off-shore.
There was squid, and baby octopus, and something long and extremely thin called sand squirts (at least I think that’s the English translation). Prawns made an appearance, and with them at least three varieties of fish, including small sardines that you ate whole and a six inch long thinnish species with little teeth and a mischievous grin.
This is the sort of dish you sometimes see Italians eating at the seaside as a take-away, served in a big paper cone with a slice of lemon. I’ve had a couple of these myself, but the way Dal Pescatore did it was quite frankly beyond any sort of compare.
Sad to say, once we had more-or-less cleaned our plates, we simply had to beg off the rest of the meal. We just couldn’t handle any more food. For the dolce we were supposed to have the restaurant’s famous tiramasu (and believe me, every restaurant in Italy says it has “famous” tiramisu). We instead managed to compromise with that tiny Italian shot of caffeine, the espresso.
Dal Pescatore is these days run by Maurizio’s sister, carrying on the traditions handed down by their mother, who along with their fisherman father founded the restaurant just after the war.
It’s not a flash place. Customers sometimes get up and clear their own plates. But it’s always popular, especially on Sundays, and in the summer there’s a queue out the door from mid-day to late at night.
Maurizio also took us on a walk through the old quarter of Terracina, which contains the required Roman ruins (it was once a small port on the Appian Way), and a number of houses that date from before the Renaissance. And he wouldn’t let us leave town until we’d sampled the delicacies at what he reckons is the best gelateria this side of Rome.
Finally, Maurizio took us home (after making a quick visit to his mother’s, of course). But we weren’t allowed to take the subway. It was too dangerous late at night, he said.
So we drove through Rome, he not being able to say much (because he had to keep both hands firmly on the steering wheel!), and Amalia fast asleep in the back, the mental effort of searching for the right English word having finally exhausted her ability to supply.
And really, what could we say in return? “Thank you” was so inadequate it almost seemed contrived. “Come visit us sometime” sounded equally strange. We would probably never see each other again.
In the end, I gave Maurizio a big bear hug, and my wife kissed him on the cheek. And I promised myself that when I got back to New Zealand, and met some foreign tourists near my home looking a bit lost, I’d ask them to sit down and have a cup of coffee, and maybe offer to drive them around Mount Maunganui and show them the sights. That is, after I buy myself a leather coat, of course.
~originally composed in December, 2011~