The timelessness of great art is not just a matter of it still being around every time you happen to look. It’s also that the work, whatever it is, and no matter how venerable, strikes you suddenly with a pointed and surprising contemporary import.
Take Dante, for instance: ‘Midway along the journey of our life/I woke to find myself in a dark wood/for I had wandered off from the straight path’. Rich with metaphoric reverberations certainly, but in its third line this famous opening of Canto I of The Inferno uncannily prefigures the modern Italian motorist. He drives as if he has just woken up, he spears towards any daylight between cars as if he’s emerging gratefully from a dark wood, and exhibits an exultant penchant for wandering from the straight path. But wait, I am ahead of myself …
It is a shining May morning in the small southern Italian fishing village of Santa Maria di Castellabate—a region more or less despised by sophisticated Bolognese, Milanese and Venetians, and probably unimaginable to the exiled Florentine, Dante. Such northern loftiness, however, neither impresses nor concerns me. From where I am sitting, which is in the sun outside a bar by the beach, life in Santa Maria looks hard to beat, rough hewn though it may be here and there.
I’ve been in the village long enough to know the bar staff, Maria, Teresa and Costabile; and Angelina at the Paneteria, who advises me on the day’s bread; the swarthy, unshaven blokes who, from the back of their trucks, sell their sturdy vegetables, dug that morning, the earth still clinging to the roots; Guido at the Pesceria who likes to talk about Australian fish; and Massimo, sitting in the sun on the steps of his Salone, where I have my hair cut—una spuntatina, non troppo corto—an instruction which never ceases to amuse him: ‘Just a treem,’ he tries in English, ‘non too shorta.’
This morning every one is out talking and bustling and calling across the narrow, pedestrians-only street, because spring—la primavera—has settled in.
Springtime—which in Australian lore ‘brings on the shearing’, and in England was once the ‘only pretty ring time’ and induced outbreaks of ‘hey nonny no’ and other medieval ejaculations—still loosens inhibitions and changes stodgy routines. People don’t go on pilgrimages any more, but the gusts of new perfumes, the sudden warmth of the air, the seductive budding and leafing, the wanton and