Sunshine on the Po – Sunday 22 April 2012
Walking through a shower of blossom.
Sitting on planks over the river drinking a coffee.
Sunday morning market along the Murrazzi.
Two sparrows squabbling, making enough noise for an army.
White lion guarding the base of Garibaldi’s statue.
Light glinting off the river.
Car horns on the bridge, boats on the river.
Ducks swimming and a bloom of brown blossom petals on the surface.
A couple slow dancing under the arches of a bridge, the woman softly crooning.
A black crow perches on a white log in the river, pecking at something invisible.
Everything is good. Sun on my face. The river, purposeful yet calm, unhurried.
I cross the river, and catch the bus to Sassi, then the old rack railway up the mountain. On the train from Florence, before we reached the city, I noticed this white Baroque church, perched on the top of a mountain, with no apparent reason for being there. When the train reaches the top of the hill, I can do nothing but marvel and point my camera. Round central tower in yellow stucco, surrounded by classical white pillars and porticoes, topped with a grey dome housing the bell. However high I am, I’m always driven to go higher, so in the yellow church I climb the steps up to the top of the tower and look down on the terracotta roof of the nave. The white peaks of the mountains surround and mesmerise me.
Notes from a mountain – Monday 23 April 2012
Ilze’s back at work today.
‘Why not take the train into the mountains? she suggests. ‘It takes 29 minutes to get to Avigliana and 1 hour 22 minutes to Bandonecchia’.
I get out at Avigliana and walk around the town. There doesn’t seem much to see and I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I walk towards a church, past some pretty old buildings, along a road out of the town and up a hill. Along a path through woods to a spot by a small stone tower with a view out over the valley and towards the bigger mountains. I’ve brought a picnic of bits and pieces, a salad of cherry tomatoes and mozzarella left over from last night’s dinner, a packet of Tuc biscuits bought from the trolley-man on a train somewhere (Rome to Florence, I think, or Florence to Turin), a Bounty, an apple and a Ritter sport with nuts. A feast. This seems like a good place to eat it.
Sometimes I find myself in a place, and I don’t really know why I’m there or what I should be doing or where I am exactly. Most often, it’s in a city. Today it’s on the side of a mountain. Not a big, glamorous mountain, I don’t know its name, maybe it doesn’t have one. It’s just part of the great chain of mountains, I guess, a fractal part of something bigger, where does it end and where does the something else begin?
In the valley below me is a house with a balcony and steps up to a terrace above part of the ground floor. Earlier I saw a person moving and then an animal, I think a cat, though it could have been a dog (hard to judge size from here) walking across the terrace. On the walk up here from the station I was thinking about the similarity of the Latin words for the cat family, Felis, and for happiness or good fortune, felicitas. And it seems appropriate, so I wonder if it’s coincidence or if there is some deep connection in the roots of language.
There seems to be someone on the balcony, leaning on the rail, but they haven’t moved for a while, so maybe it’s not a person at all. Or maybe they’re looking and thinking: ‘there’s a person up there, sitting on a rock up on the side of the mountain’.
Now there’s a car, or a white van, moving away from the house. I can hear birds all around, and distant traffic, an intermittent sound that could be humming if it was more regular, maybe someone chopping logs. A plane. Sounds that could be thunder in the mountains but hopefully is just more planes.
Into the soundscape comes a train. I wonder if it’s going towards Bardonecchia or back to Turin. Whichever, I’ve missed it now.
from Single to Sirkeci, by Linda Rushby