Wallis Wilde-Menozzi ran away to Rome while still in her twenties. She lived there for a while before running back. Many years later, she married an Italian man,settled in Italy, and was eventually encouraged to write about her experience of navigating a new city, new consciousness and new self. The result is this incredible book; a combination of ancient, recent and personal history that is poetic and pointed.
A lifelong obsession with the Tiber begins the book, which is sometimes worrying - there is only so much of Ahab that the world needs. But it never stays, this obsession. Her intense and emotional focus shifts almost casually between that river, Etruscans, a hundred year old man, teaching English, living in a community not of one's making or even really of one's choice and actively choosing to witness a new kind of Original Sin. She sees that every person, by no act or agency of their own, (particularly in the western world) contributes to a culture of oppression and abundance. She wonders again and again about how to live with and mitigate that. It is a question dropped almost casually into the flow of this tale. Its passing ripples far beyond what is physical.
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| Can you even with this cover? Drama! |
I discovered that my love of travelogues went much deeper than I'd supposed when I found and dove in to this book. (the paperback cover is atrocious. FSG is great at content. Sometimes the covers, though, I mean guys...) Wilde-Menozzi's language is like cobblestones or a gravel road on a sunny day - solid and directed and far-reaching. She revels in her culture-shocks, particularly as so many of them helped to crack open the shell of marriage and class expectation that she'd been failing at growing in. While she is, as most good travel writers are, the Observer, she participates in the place and sees, some thirty-odd years later, how the path of her life has changed because of it.
There is a massive amount of privilege in published travel narratives - there isn't a currently viable way around it. That she acknowledges this and asks difficult questions of herself and the world in which she lives is part of what makes this book still relevant on my shelves after almost 5 years there.
It's a bitch to handsell, though. There's nothing comfortable about it. Like, you don't curl up with this one on a Sunday at solo-brunch (The Old Ways), or on the couch (anything by Peter Mayle), or unexpectedly early in the morning at the coffee shop (Dead Ladies Project) or on Valentine's Day with tea and a croissant (The Living Mountain). This is a book for sandwiches in a park and train rides and terrible coffee and bad weather and sore feet and sitting too close to the front door. It needs to be read with water and good bread and the room to close your eyes and Go There from time to time.
