Book Review : A Pilgrim’s Journey of Reconciliation

Italian Days by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $19.95; 494 pp.)

Not the kind of travel book to pack, but one to read before you go, “Italian Days” is a perceptive writer’s thoughtful, strong-minded exploration of her background. She calls it “a journey of reconciliation,” finally discovering “everything I feared and everything I loved.”

Altogether, the hegira covers four years during which Harrison lived for weeks at a time in Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome; then journeyed to the Mezzogiorno, where the harsh realities of life are a stark contrast to the lush sophistication of the northern cities; continued to Molise and the Abruzzi, from which her mother’s family emigrated to the United States; not stopping until she had seen Puglia and Calabria, the home of her father’s people.

This is not a tourist’s book but a pilgrim’s; a sometimes joyous, often arduous diary of a search for an essential self, recounted by a mature and sophisticated essayist. Though the Italy presented here is uniquely Harrison’s, she shows readers the way to find their own.

Her first stop is Milan, where Harrison feels she could be anywhere in the modern world, and her disappointment is palpable. She stayed for a month, her mood matching the gray, wet weather, her reactions muffled by the pervasive mist.

No Warmth, Vitality

Living alone in an apartment, she attempts to submerge herself in the life of a city that seems to have no discernible personality. Polluted, dreary, expensive, rude--Milan is the diametrical opposite of the warmth and vitality she expected. Nevertheless, she perseveres, conscientiously balancing her personal impressions with quotations from writers who found Milan a better and brighter place.

The food, at least, is magnificent, and Harrison is briefly consoled by salads with “as many shades of green as a Persian garden,” by the lightness and freshness of a cuisine that delights her, even when no other prospect pleases. On the four days when the sun shines, she glimpses a different place, but the month drags, the people she meets are jaded, shallow, extravagant, and she leaves with relief for Venice, having done more than her duty by Milan.

But Venice is not an unalloyed joy either. “After three days, the magic may wear off and a dull disenchantment set in. . . . Turner’s paintings of the place--a fusion of light and dancing water in which solid objects are hinted at and float--seems more like the place than the place itself, the actual touristed Venice a collection of snapshot cliches.”

This time, Harrison wisely does not overstay, setting off for Florence before her ambivalence can entirely taint her observations.

Beginnings of Discovery

The glorious Tuscan landscape, seen from her train window, restores her spirits, and the Florentine segment of the book glows with aesthetic insight and historical lore. Harrison meets stimulating people and begins to discover the sources of Italian character.

In Rome, the author reaches full stride. There, for the first time, she feels as if she has come home, reveling in every impression, agreeing for the first time with the earlier observers she cites. To her, as to Montaigne, “Rome is a pleasant place to live in . . . I never tasted air more temperate for me or more suited to my constitution.” The noise, smog and contemporary intrusions that so distressed her in Milan only seem to add to Rome’s vitality and charm.

Harrison is happy, and her joy illuminates the prose. The Piazza Colonna, where musicians once played in the shadow of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, has been turned into a car park, but even that desecration cannot spoil Harrison’s pleasure in watermelon gelato with seeds made of bitter chocolate. She’s found the secret of the Italian character.

“You are becoming so tolerant in Rome,” a friend says. “It amounts almost to a vice.”

Ready for Anything

By the time the author arrives in Naples, she’s ready for everything the Mezzogiorno can show her; prepared for her long-deferred encounter with the Italian relatives she’s never known, the family who lives not just in another country, but almost in another dimension.

Though she continues to augment her own comments with excerpts from a variety of sources, this section of the book becomes increasingly emotional; the meetings with relations unsettling, astonishing and wonderfully rewarding.

After this, Puglia, at the very tip of the Italian boot, seems “fairyland,” and the mysterious stone structures called trulli become the lasting symbol of Harrison’s extended journey.

“In my dreams of trulli, the cones are made of crystal . . . ancient women dressed in black come out of the trulli; they wear Coptic crosses and Oriental turbans; they look like my grandmother.”