It’s a truism to say that every country has its own characteristics. That’s part of the joys of travelling. I love the diversities of our planet – I certainly don’t try to find a McDonald’s in Amsterdam if I’m hungry (like someone I know) or seek out a pint of Abbott in Madagascar if I’m thirsty. Occasionally I might have longings for baked beans on toast in Tuscany, only to find that ‘fagioli a l’uccelletto’ presents a much worthier alternative. At its worst our facing of different ways other countries have of doing things leads to that indefinable phenomenon of ‘culture shock’.
When my mother came from a war-ravaged Marshall-plan-aided northern Italy to a post-war United Kingdom drizzled in unprecedented depths of austerity and greyness she was clearly culturally surprized by the diversity and characteristics she encountered in the former Roman Empire’s province.
My mother’s visit was ostensibly a study one – to learn one of the world’s supremely illogical but most widely spoken languages: English but it soon ended in her pregnancy, her marriage and….me.
The things that struck Vera about the UK were both positive and negative. The most noticeable related to children’s upbringing. In Italy ‘mammismo’, or being tied to mum’s apron strings until well into one’s thirties (and often beyond), is still the trend (although more rapidly changing now since young people have resigned themselves to travel further from the family nest to find jobs – London remains a particularly sought-after destination and Italian is regularly heard spoken by passengers on many bus routes, the 176 and the 12 in particular. My mother greatly admired the independence English parents gave to their children. Sadly the situation has changed considerably from my own childhood when I could cycle freely around London in my early teens not only going to school but swanning to locations far from South London’s Forest Hill such as Waltham Abbey and Saint Albans – only to be ticked off if I arrived home late.
Although my mother came to enjoy the gentle landscapes of the North and South Downs she greatly missed the mountains of Italy. I remember one late afternoon with her in Lewisham high street when she suddenly became very emotional, confounding the formation of clouds for alpine peaks. (My mother had been a lover of the Alps, so easily within reach of her birth town, Milan, in particular the Bernina range which she had climbed from the rifugio Marinelli, an area I myself visited when barely a teenager.)
(The Bernina Range a few years ago. I wonder if the summer snows are still there)
This longing for mountains, this yearning for their ecstatic profiles of empyrean heights is something I wished for and something which I re-encountered when lunching with some of my Italian ex-students from City University. On that occasion we both praised and trashed the UK: from the ‘Daily Mail’ reader to the absence of mountainous landscapes to the poor sartorial tastes of so many of the island’s denizens to inferior quality of buildings to the absence of reliably acceptable eateries.
There has always been a time of my life when I have had a need to get to the top of hills and mountains, whether they be in Italy, Switzerland, Wales or Ireland.
(The Quirang and Stac Polly)
Perhaps that’s why I’m living in the most mountainous area of Tuscany.
As a social worker for the first part of her working life in the UK (mainly in the field of mentally disturbed Italian emigrant workers) my mother naturally involved herself in the dynamics of everyday social life. I recall an instance when there was a fight in the yard of my primary school (Dalmain Road). Two boys, beating and kicking each other to the ground were surrounded by a circle of mums coming to collect their children. My mother was horrified by the fact that the parents appeared to be just gazing at the event without anyone stepping in to stop the fracas. She reacted, angrily exclaiming ‘will no-one stop this?’ At this stage the other parents did react, the boys were separated and the fight stopped.
As someone brought up in the Roman Catholic religion my mother was not a particularly devoted practitioner but she absolutely detested what had happened to Catholics under the apostate reign of the loathsome Henry VIII. She carried sentiments akin to those wonderful lines in that Shakespeare sonnet which ruefully describes ‘bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’.
(A family visit to Tintern Abbey)
The site of the dissolved monasteries of so many parts of Britain, in particular the abbeys of Yorkshire and Canterbury with its associations with Saint Augustine (my mum’s own middle name was ‘Agostina’) filled her with both wonder and sadness. She happily sought out religious fraternities re-established as a result of the nineteenth century Catholic emancipation act; I evoke visits to the Verona fathers (formerly at Tulse Hill) and other associations. In particular, Vera followed with the greatest interest the refounding of Aylesford friary which we saw from a derelict ruin with a handful of monks to the flourishing centre of religious devotion it has become.
Most of all was my mother’s long-term relationship with the former Italian Hospital in Queen square founded in 1884 by a prosperous Italian business man Commendatore Giovanni Battista Ortelli in and originally manned (or nunned?) by the The Sisters of St Vincent de Paul.
(Sadly the hospital closed in 1990 but happily the building is currently undergoing major remodelling and refurbishment to bring it back into clinical use and will reopen in spring 2020 as the Great Ormond Street Hospital Sight and Sound Centre, accommodating out-patient clinics for ophthalmology, audiology, ENT and related services).
I suppose these interests have continued with me. The English reformation remains an event of immense Taleban-like horror to me: its wanton destruction of magnificent gothic architecture, its burning of great polyphonic music, its obliteration of holy sites, its list of martyrs of both sides of the great divide all point to a particular malign manifestation of the disassociation of sensibility which the poet T. S. Eliot avers descended upon the UK during the succeeding century. It was then that the superb artistic flair of mediaeval Britain, the celebrated ‘opus anglicanorum’ was severed from its association with continental Europe and largely disrupted, vandalised and destroyed in the British Isles. Indeed, it’s paradoxically in places like Pisa museum and the Uffizi that some of the finest English pre-reformation art may still be admired for it was exported to all areas of Europe and therefore survived in a similar way that the great monuments of Nineveh have survived the wrath of iconoclasts by being exported to places like the British museum…
Who sensibly cannot help thinking that the present maniacal foreign policy being pursued by the United Kingdom’s government as a response to an outdated and unfair electoral system is another re-incarnation of the love-hate affair with those living on the other side of ‘La Manica’ (the ‘sleeve’ – the name Italians – and other continentals – give to what is generally known as ‘the English channel’) and particularly encapsulated in the personality of my mother and continued in my own beliefs.
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By the hospital entrance is the ancient convent of Saint Francis whose church has some exquisite Della Robbia terracotte including this one of the Nativity.
