Spoleto -- the ancient cobblestone upper town -- seems impervious to change,
and looks like something a set designer devoted to a picturesque stereotype might build for summer stock.

It is visibly layered, its history an unyielding pile of conquests, each succeeding the one that preceded it like innings in a many-millennium game. The Etruscans, the Romans, the Guelphs and Ghibellines -- each has left its tangible ruins, its ineradicable beauty.

SPOLETO

New York Times
By Rosellen Brown
May 2, 2004

I have always been a hungry traveler, eating up cities -- whole countries, even -- in large, unnourishing bites. This is a common fate for those of us whose eyes are big but whose leisure time is limited: Turkey, Sicily, Cornwall, a stolen week here, 10 days of plane-train-rented-car there, absurdly brief forays into cultures whose surfaces I can hardly scratch before I fly home, hunger barely assuaged.

But even my kind of traveler is sometimes lucky enough to come to ground.

For the last 10 summers, I have taught in a small writers' workshop in Spoleto, Italy, a gorgeous and endlessly intriguing Umbrian hill town, and at two weeks a summer, that adds up to five months in a single place.

Of course, half a discontinuous year lacks the depth of a long sojourn abroad. But an annual return to the same place over a long span of time has its own unique rewards, and at this 10th anniversary, I find it irresistible to review what has changed in a decade and to celebrate -- and occasionally deplore -- the amazing stability of life in an Italian town.

Spoleto, an hour and a half northeast of Rome by train, claims a population of 37,000, but that's variable, depending on how far into the countryside one wants to count. The town is well known to many Americans because for nearly 50 years it has been the site of Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds, with rich offerings of music, dance, theater and, years ago, the literary contributions of Allen Ginsberg and his friends. There are stunning photos of some 15,000 or so attendees crammed (one presumes happily) into the piazza in front of the Duomo, but this is a spectacle I have seen only on postcards.

Our Spoleto workshop (which runs alongside three weeks of master classes in the bel canto style for aspiring opera singers, a class in the local obsession, Umbrian cooking, and the recent addition of a vocal jazz workshop) arrives a week after the hordes depart, when the streets are quiet again and the restaurants have caught their breath.

The mercato in alto Spoleto -- the ancient cobblestone upper town -- seems impervious to change. This teeming agora looks like something a set designer devoted to stereotype might build for summer stock, the pastel walls of the shops peeling picturesquely, soft flowers against gray stone everywhere I turn, the stolid porcheta truck still dispensing the thick sandwiches that send our students to pork lovers' heaven. Zucchini blossoms spread their golden wings in buckets alongside glorious figs and white peaches, and huge, inexpensive bouquets that demand to be taken home, even to the sparely furnished rooms our writers live in.

They stay at a convent where we house them alongside a diminishing covey of full-habited nuns. Some things do change: Years ago there were 100 at the Istituto Bambin' Gesu; now they're down to five or six, so they take in guests. The rooms' simplicity seems to inspire our writers to imagine what it would be like to live a life of undistracted devotion. The courtyard, not the least ascetic, is a riot of geraniums and columbine. The writers' windows open on terraced fields, gold and green, and though some vow to skin the early rising local rooster with their own hands, somehow the rascal -- by now, many generations of rascal -- shows up every year in more than one new poem.

My first morning of a new season, having bought the newspaper from the same kiosk lady who sees a narrow slice of Spoleto from her little blind, I ascertain that the barrista dispensing the cappuccino I have dreamed of all year is still turning out a brew our own indifferent coffee jerks can't manage. Bartenders' jobs, like waiters', are permanent positions. Not temp work for aspiring actors, they are taken seriously.

Then it's off to my favorite shop to lay in supplies. The same shopowner in his white coat and little white butcher's hat, looking ready for heavier work than he is called upon to perform, gives me a squeeze of greeting that I wouldn't tolerate nearer to home -- some allowances must be made -- and I buy exactly the same necessities as always: mozzarella di bufala and spicy olives and tall bottles of agua minerale, which will forever flow like a river through the Italian summer.

Here the only change is that I can finally conduct a moderately creditable conversation (after years of study frustrating to an aging brain) during which I discover that his daughter is an actress in Cincinnati, which she prefers to this boring place. How do I say ''chacun a son gout'' in Italian?

The same wonderfully fixed cast of characters obtains in my two favorite restaurants. At the Locanda della Signoria, where one eats on an outdoor platform in the shadow of the Duomo, I am greeted with enthusiasm by Andrea, who, in addition to having a good memory, seems to be getting younger and flatters me (though he has no choice) by reciting the evening's offerings in Italian. The next night, I will check out a nearly invisible restaurant, Pecchiarda, which thrives down an unpromising, rock-strewn alley. A few years ago, the proprietors did wreak a change here -- they eliminated the boccie court that greeted hungry arrivals -- and erected classy umbrellas above the tables.

But the clusters of men who have left their wives at home with the bambini do not change; in an inner room they watch their beloved calcio -- football, which is to say, soccer -- whose pleasures will never fail them.

Nor will the menu ever fail us, which represents either calcification or tradition. The Spoletini want the familiar; we turisti also want lo stesso, the same, precisely because at home, change seems to be our only tradition. Chickpeas and garlic, fava bean stew -- pleasure at its purest. (I will climb an implausible incline to my apartment to repent dessert, painlessly obliterating the calories without having to resort to the gym.)

Carbs -- including the local wide-cut pasta called strangozzi, and farro, a grain that feels healthy while it tastes delicious -- don't seem to stick to the most devoted Atkinsonian here, nor, for some reason, does the local wine make me sleepy, even in the afternoon. (I've heard it suggested that the absence of additives makes the difference.) The 30 or so students and we three teachers have our daily 1 p.m. ''big meal'' together at a trattoria whose buffet plays uncountable variations on the Mediterranean diet. On the way out, incorrigibly addicted to almonds, I dip my hand into a bottomless jar of amaretti, that round, blond-colored comfort cookie that I can always unearth from my pocket when I'm hungry.

Civilization, here, consists of many small comforts. There are still benches where you need them. The streets are impeccably clean: often -- I live out of earshot of the rooster! -- the earliest sound of the morning, even before the church bells, is the whisk-whisk of the street sweeper, who still plies a home-made-looking straw broom.

Though there is a local newspaper, black-framed death notices and acknowledgments of thoughtfulness from bereaved families still appear on walls beside the endless parade of notices for concerts and festivals devoted to whichever cuisine a particular town is known for -- a celebration just for truffles, for strangozzi, for trout!

In the late afternoon photographer's light, my first sight of the 13th-century aqueduct still makes my soul leap. The little ''truffle trees'' -- under which the government has injected the spores of the fungus that (if they're lucky) will eventually fruit -- still cling to the incline beside it. Round and round that scenic road or down below the old town where the modern shops prevail, the early-evening passegiata never changes, that promenade of hundreds, in which the ragazzi -- the kids -- seem to pass before my eyes from flirty teenagers into young families proudly showing off their bedecked babies. Their clothes are wickedly tight by American standards of decency. Only the length of the boys' hair and the proportion of mousse seem to fluctuate from year to year.

What has changed in a decade? There is still no air-conditioning, except in hotels, precious few fans and no screens. (Last summer's heat wave may actually have stalled in its tracks the European derision of American cowards who rely on chilled air.) But cars have swollen to the point where they routinely scrape their doors on the narrowest streets.

Years ago, American joggers attracted curious stares; now, Italians are ''footing'' everywhere. When I first arrived, we were reachable only by means of an unreliable fax machine at the tourist office; now we no longer have to phone home at 1 in the morning, because Internet sites spot the streets like milk on a cafe macchiato. One year, in fact, a young man in the little house where I was staying invited me to see where he had installed a few Macs in an unused kitchen. ''You have heard of Nasdaq?'' he asked eagerly. Since the demise of that blood sport day-trading, I suspect this change was short-lived!

Friends ask me every year as I begin to plan my summer if I'm ''doing it again'' -- they sound oddly surprised, as if I ought to have outgrown or gotten tired of my two paradisiacal Spoleto weeks. But for the same last two weeks of July, I can expect to be overwhelmed a dozen times by the vista across the hills at sunset, where Assisi's lights wink on against a dark pink sky; when I wander a few miles above Spoleto on a hilltop called Monteluco, through what the pagans called the ''sacred grove'' of black-trunked oaks where St. Francis also walked, and crawl into the unbelievably tiny grottoes carved out of rock, in which monks somehow survived minimal diets and loneliness far above the winding road down the mountain. In the last few years, rural tourism (agriturismo) has stimulated the conversion of an old farm near Monteluco into an attractive spot from which to look down the long expanse of rich green into the valley where we live.

The pleasures can be petty, but they add up: I don't get lost anymore; I know the shortcuts. I know which pizza will disappoint and where you can get a good salad after midnight, and how bad the music is at the annual Communist Festival in the park and how laughable Italian television is, with its scantily dressed morning-show hosts and the weather report delivered by a man in a uniform decorated like a major general's.

I instruct our students that the riposo after lunch does demand silence and an end to shopping, even if repose itself can't be legislated. Or perhaps it can: one year, an assiduous music student practiced singing her scales with the windows open during ''quiet time'' and found the carabinieri on her doorstep!

Italians may seem easygoing, but many of their habits are actually stone-rigid rituals, not to be casually flaunted. Order your coffee before dessert and you can throw your waiter into serious confusion. As for cappuccino after 10 in the morning! I order as if I don't know any better and bear their tolerant contempt.

But in the end, beyond the trivia whose mastery makes me feel welcome, a town like Spoleto is unchangeable in far more profound ways. It is visibly layered, its history an unyielding pile of conquests, each succeeding the one that preceded it like innings in a many-millennium game. The Etruscans, the Romans, the Guelphs and Ghibellines -- each has left its tangible ruins, its ineradicable beauty. They have left a Roman amphitheater, a fourth-century house, a simple sixth-century Roman church, a Fra Lippo Lippi fresco in the Duomo. There is a multi-ton stone portal through which Hannibal is said to have fled when boiling oil was dumped on the heads of his men. The bones in the graveyard crypts may be removed every so many years, but the facades of the old city -- cobblestone Spoleto alto, not the basso down below, with its chic stores and uninflected new buildings -- may crumble with age, but they will not disappear. If there are malls to be built (and there are), they will be erected on the flat, somewhere else.

The third summer I taught in Spoleto, my mother died in Florida, and my accidental presence in that static repository of eras, of centuries, of entire civilizations, worked my sorrow toward a strange reconciliation with time: before I hurried myself to the plane to come home for her funeral, I felt her less as a unique loss (which, of course, she would always be) than as if she were also but another stone in a huge wall built across the ages. Somehow, being there, I could see her in her place under the eye of eternity, which is a hard eye to catch in New York, where she was buried, or Houston, where I lived then. Wordsworth's lines seemed very present, when he speaks of a beloved, newly departed, ''rolled round in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.''

So I begin, now, gearing up for another season on that glorious borrowed hilltop. Will there be snow and hail (two years ago, for a strange few midsummer minutes)? Unmoving heat and then a sweet soaking rain (last summer)? One new restaurant? One snail-slow renovation finally finished? Surprise is not likely. For that, all I have to do is walk up the street at home in the United States and find the day's new taste thrill, which may or may not last a year.

FESTIVALS OF TWO WORLDS

The American half of Spoleto's Festival of Two Worlds runs from May 28 to June 13, in Charleston, S.C. Among its offerings are two programs by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Forbidden Christmas, or The Doctor and the Patient,'' a theater piece with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Directed by the Georgian writer-director Rezo Gabriadze, its score includes tango music, Georgian folk songs and Shostakovich. Telephone: 843- 579-3100; Web site: www.spoletousa.org.

>From July 2 to July 18, the 46th International Spoleto Festival in Italy presents a range of events, including film tributes to Jeanne Moreau and Ingrid Bergman; a concert celebrating the 93rd birthday of Maestro Gian Carlo Menotti, the festival's founder; and a jazz performance by Julliard musicians under Wynton Marsalis. Telephone: 011-39-0743-45028; Web site: www.spoletoarts.com.

Rosellen Brown's most recent novel is ''Half a Heart'' (Picador).

The New York Times > Travel > Sophisticated Traveler > Spoleto
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/travel/
sophisticated/02ST-SPOLETO.html?ex=1091168869&ei
=1&en=824a5252031436a4