Mamma
A day late for Mother’s Day, but no matter. Insider’s Italy, the 32 year old personalized travel planning company I run with my husband Robert, is a direct result of my mother, who transmitted to me the intellectual curiosity she had about everything — large and small — Italian.
In my father, who discovered Italy thirty years after her, she found the perfect travel mate, a Roanoke VA boy whom adulthood was thrust upon by the War. He was an Army B17 navigator and survived; after the war, he stayed in Europe to study in Strasbourg before returning to the United States, longing to live in Europe. And he had his way, establishing himself in the 1950s as a novelist in Rome. From the time he and my mother met, they began to travel, often accompanied by my grandmother (always photographed looking trim and jaunty in her Italian suits), exploring regions where Americans did not go : Sardegna, Valle d’Aosta, Marche, Irpinia, but most of all the Etruscan sites that they both loved.
When I was four, my mother took me to Venice’s Marciana Library. She managed to persuade the director to bring out the 16th century Flemish Grimani Breviary … just so I could see it. This he did, after some time, carrying it very carefully, and with white gloves, a scene I won’t ever forget. It is an enormous codex, and I remember him arranging it with some trouble on a stand, then lowering it to my height. My mother was absolutely delighted, as she had had the same experience when she was a child on an early visit to Venice. For the first time I saw an illuminated manuscript, and for the first time, perhaps, I realized the value of looking closely, deeply, of losing yourself by looking.
Lions, flowers, gorgons, laughing faces, insects, women in deep blue dresses with sashes, serpents, gold lettering, swirling leaves, pastel ribbons, leopards pouncing across the page. We spent some time in the Library, my mother expressing greatest appreciation to the director, asking him occasionally if he might be so kind as to turn with his gloved fingers a page. When at last we left, the director (after taking off the white gloves, I remember) kissed her hand, saying how happy he was to see a mother so happy and so emozionata, a small child so absorbed. I remember emerging into Piazzetta San Marco, in the evening’s golden light, and turning the corner to stroll through pigeons and to Florians where we settled down at a table in the square, likely for a Negroni for my mother and a gelato di cioccolato e crema for me. “Wasn’t that lovely, Lovey ?” I suspect my mother said. “Isn’t it wonderful to look closely at things in Italy ?
My mother, though no longer living, is with me always in my life. She was a keystone of Insider’s Italy for its first 25 years.
I hear her voice (and that of my father) in all the places she first took me to. And in the Travel Plans I develop, I try to bring the magic of those first visits — and the art of looking closely, with wonder — to every one of you.
