Italian Windows

In literature, if a young woman wants to learn sophistication, she goes to Paris. If she wants to learn passion, she goes to Italy. Young men of means famously spent the 19th century wandering all over Europe on their Grand Tour, absorbing culture to likely variable degrees and filching pieces of the Parthenon like we now pick up seashells on holiday in Ocean City. As the Victorian era began to come to a close, it began to seem possible for young women of means to achieve something similar. The Victorians, while valuing passion in much of their art and poetry, did not necessarily want to encourage it in their young women, but in sending them to Italy they could hardly avoid it.

I cannot speak for the Italy of reality; I have only been to Italy once, at 17, and I was already a reader of novels then. I had not yet read what would become one of the most influential novels of my life, A Room With a View, but I felt myself living in its wake nonetheless. A Room With a View is a 1908 novel by E.M. Forster. It is not his most famous, nor his most acclaimed, but it is likely his most beloved. The first half of the novel is set in Florence and follows the awakening of prim Miss Lucy Honeychurch, a young English woman who is as emotionally buttoned up as her Edwardian garments. Lucy is in Italy with her poor relation and chaperone, Charlotte, trooping from one cultural landmark to another with Baedeker in hand. Lucy is demure, but she has potential. One character, hearing her play Beethoven on the piano, remarks,

Does it seem reasonable that she should play so wonderfully, and live so quietly? I suspect that one day she will be wonderful in both. The water-tight compartments in her will break down, and music and life will mingle.

The action opens shortly after they’ve alighted at the Pension Bertollini and been given rooms with only an inferior courtyard view. Overhearing their plaints, an eccentric and infinitely dear man named Mr. Emerson, who is traveling with his son George, offers to trade rooms with them so that Lucy can have her view. When Lucy gets to enjoy this kindness, throwing open her shutters as it were, she thinks,

It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.

There is a moment in novels and movies like this (and the movie version is one of the best movies there is) when the traveler from either an overly buttoned-up or culturally deficient country (read, England and America) wakes up on their first morning in Italy. They have inevitably arrived either amidst a great storm (The Enchanted April, Under the Tuscan Sun) or have otherwise been somehow prevented from yet viewing the glories of the Italian countryside (A Room with a View). They wake in a dark room (for the shutters must be closed to make this trick work), they stretch (for a moment forgetting that they are in Italy), they rise, walk to the window with something almost like panic in their gait, pause, then fling wide the shutters, open the sash, and lean their torso out into the sunshine. This is how every heroine must greet Italy.

Forster is probably to be credited with this wonderful trope, although his contemporary and friend Elizabeth von Arnim deserves a share as well. She was a madcap countess who did things like fall in love with H.G. Wells and hide away in Italian castles to write novels. Her most famous, The Enchanted April, is a sadly overlooked masterpiece that was so influential in the interwar period that it has been credited with singlehandedly turning Portofino into a tourist destination. The novel begins in an interminable English drizzle that inspires its downtrodden British protagonists to run away from their lives, throw their lot in with total strangers, and rent a medieval Italian castle for the month of April. The advertisement that catches their eye reads:

To Those who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine.
Small mediaeval Italian Castle on
the shores of the Mediterranean
to be let Furnished for the month of April.
Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times.

Who could possibly pass up such a call to adventure?

The two original protagonists: frantic, desperately unhappy Lotty and deceptively serene and overly dutiful Rose, find two more to join them: Mrs. Fisher, an elderly Victorian who talks constantly of the famous (and dead) Great Men she knew in her youth, and Lady Caroline Dester, a divinely beautiful aristo who hates the men who fawn over her for her beauty and just wants to be Left Alone. All four are, predictably, transformed utterly by their month in Italy. Here is their window-opening moment:

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in color, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colors of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.

She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light.

There is something about these scenes that requires them to occur in an Italian setting. There are novels where heroines awaken in all sorts of foreign climes, but they make their business about romance or mystery or politics; in literature, it is only Italy where you go to awaken your soul.

I remember waking up in Italy, leaning my elbows on unfamiliar windowsills, looking out on a world that couldn’t possibly look like that, not really, not when you’ve endlessly seen it in commercials for Prego and on preloaded Windows desktop backgrounds. In a 1935 essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” the philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction has devalued art. If you can Google Venus on the half shell, not to mention come across her hawking hair dye and Dolce and Gabbana mini-dresses, does her aura remain untarnished? Is she still even art? Andy Warhol famously decided to find out, hawking his own mechanical reproductions of that Venus using the same logic that had won him acclaim with his version of the Mona Lisa, sneeringly titled “Thirty are Better Than One.” But how did that grubby patron saint of cynicism get into my Italian encomium? I suppose I just want him to know I proved him wrong before I’d ever heard of him; wandering into the Uffizi at 17 and coming face to face with Boticelli’s goddess, I wept.