Born in North Italy from a Southern mother, a significant cut of my summers has been spent in the part of Italy that pronounces tré, for three, not trè (as we do, North).
A thousand kilometers, not one more, from down-my-stairs to down-my-Grandma’s-stairs. Nonna Tetta, who still waits for my arrivals looking from behind the curtains (spying, as she says in dialect), ready to turn on the fire under the steak (there’s always a steak waiting, to make sure I get enough proteins).
As a kid I hardly got the pleasure of traveling through these one thousand kilometers by car. Train, instead, with no string to keep the luggage closed but the blue-white-red striped nylon bag, that one yes. And the arrival in Milan Central station, right on time two hours before the train leaves (you never know), that also was quite quintessential emigrant. We would load our baggage and our patience on the train then, with a Mickey Mouse comic book in our hands, would wait for hours, hours (and hours of delay) then get to Rome, and from Rome it was almost done, soon we’d see from the train the skyscrapers of the financial center (I think I learnt who Kenzo Tange was when I was about ten) and we’d be arrived. Napoli Centrale, Napoli Centrale station.
A month after, the trip back. In Naples station trains were longer than the platforms and we always ended up in the last carts, so we had to walk through the tracks, to hop on. Nonna Tetta would come with us to the station, carrying a portable refrigerator packed with meat because she didn’t trust northern meat (!). Once arrived, she’d take from her bag two eggs à-la-coque for the girls, the girls being me and my sister, so that our protein needs for the night trip would be matched. She’d feed us the egg there, on the platform, before waking us to the train.
Once, I remember, they were testing a new train called ETR500, if I’m not wrong. That the train wasn’t so long, and the platform was magically long enough. A few months after they christened it Eurostar, but from that point my travel memory gets confused and runs fast to the moment when, to Naples, I started going by plane.
But with the plane, my beeline has nothing to do.
It has instead a lot to do with curves and my notorious car-sickness, that when I was a kid would express itself in retches of vomit every kilometer. Explosions that sometimes wouldn’t allow the time to leave the car, with the damages you can imagine all over the back seat.
So from Naples to Nonna Tetta’s place, lost in the mountains of High Irpinia, it’d take an hour, but to me it seemed an eternity of curves and vomit pit-stops. So, everytime we had to leave, the little girl would complain.
The girl would complain for that and also because when her friends asked her where was she going on holiday she didn’t know what to answer, because nobody knew her grandmother’s hometown and nobody knew what the word Irpinia meant. The girl would have loved to say she was going to Naples, because everybody had at least heard of Naples, but between the city on the sea and the place where she used to spend every August, a place where nights were cold even in summer and one would need blanket to sleep, there were ninethousandmilions curves.
So one day, providing a solution to both pre-departure complaints and the necessity of clear geographical coordinates, Nonna Tetta introduced in my life the idea of “beeline”. Convincing me that, despite the road seemed never ending, Naples was actually very close. “In beeline”, she said (and says), “Naples is right here”.
Which was not incorrect.
At that point Naples could become a honest benchmark, and complaining for that trip of stomach sufferance simply became accusing the poor car road that simply wasn’t able to be as the beeline.
Well this concept, this idea that the distance between two places is not measured in the trip but with a straight line in the skies, has become one of the core principles of my life. It means that no matter how long and tiring the path might seem, there’s always a place to go back to and that place, if you look for it with the nose at the sky, is right there. That you must accept it, the imperfection of things, because there is always an easy and direct way to arrive. But it’s not for us.
