Perugia

Usually I don’t mind eating alone. In fact, I kind of like it. Nobody pays any attention to you (including the waiters, which, okay, can be the downside) and I can just sit there unobtrusively drinking my wine while trying to figure out everybody’s story instead of listening with faux-rapt attention to whoever I might be dining with (this is, after all, what a flâneur does).

For instance, last night I ate alone at La Taverna Ristorante in Perugia. While I was waiting for my ravioli di radicchio e speck al gorgonzola e pere, which was very good by the way, two different couples walked in. Both dressed head-to-toe in black (it’s an Italian/NY thing). The women looked so similar they could have been sisters: early 30s, black shoulder-length hair (great cuts), pale skin, dark eyes, Roman noses, hoop earrings (are they back?). One of the guys was better looking than the other: better haircut, better suit. The other guy wore a stretched-out turtleneck and had a Beatles haircut (which, I’ll admit, looked very hip in 1963). Otherwise, demographically identical couples.

One couple—let’s call them the “Cute Couple”—do all the date things: run fingers along the rims of their wine glasses while they’re oh-so-intently listening to the other’s story;  she plays with her hair, he puts an index finger on his cheek; they laugh and tilt their heads at the same time; touch hands, faces, thighs; ignore their food when it comes.

The other couple—“It’s So Over,” shall we call them?—keep their coats on; sit with their hands on their laps; and talk to the chef, Claudio, when he wheels his cart over to slice up some lamb for them, but otherwise ignore each other.

Question: Which couple is going to get laid tonight?

It’s obvious, huh. So what do you think–was it the guy’s haircut? 

We’re not off to a great start, Perugia and I. It’s been a bit of a slog just getting here; two long days of planes, trams, buses, trains. Having arrived close to midnight and finding no taxis around, I consider just trudging up the dark hill to my hotel (it doesn’t look that far on my map), but outside the mostly deserted train station the impervious Umbrian night shows her indifference to my arrival by going cold on me; small rain begins to fall. So I walk a block to a mostly-deserted café and ask them to call me a cab. Just as well. What looked like a short jaunt on the map turns out to be a very long drive up a ridiculously steep hill with perilous drop-offs on both sides of numerous switchbacks. I would have perished walking. 

The taxi driver, unable to proceed past the piazza, drops me off blocks from my hotel, pointing in the darkness up a slick cobblestone street leading to the heart of this medieval town in the middle of Italy. I am soaked and exhausted by the time I climb three flights of stairs (the elevator is out of order) and put the key in the door, revealing something resembling a monk’s cell: a ridiculously tiny room and a bed smaller than the one I slept in as a child. The blanket is thin and my feet hang off the end.

The view from my room. Can this possibly be the sexiest small city in the world?

All night long, the rain beats against an ancient window that does not seal; the cold hilltop wind whistles obscenely at me through the cracks. Beyond tired but still unable to sleep, I lie in bed thinking of a poem from the Middle Ages I memorized years ago to impress a girlfriend in college:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow/The small rain down can rain?/Christ, that my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!  

In the morning I send Hardy a text message: Arrivd Perugia lst nite. Bst pay off bet. 

We were sipping our cocktails, watching the sun exhaust itself behind the silhouetted islands of the Jardines de la Reina in Cuba after a long day of saltwater fly-fishing when Hardy roused our worn-out little group, spread out like drying beach towels on the bow of the Halcon, by positing this gum-drop of a question: “What’s your favorite place in the world?”

Photos by Peter McBride.

I noodled Hardy’s question as two egrets did a mating dance in a nearby lagoon. Someone said Vietnam. Someone else San Miguel de Allende. Did Bruges get a vote as well as Porto Seguro, Brazil? I believe they did. Still, there was no consensus. As the seductive sky slipped on a purple robe and followed the sun into the night, Hardy, offering me a touch more of the Douglas Laing single-malt he’d brought over from London, tapped the ash off his Cohiba and said, “What about you, Lansing? You travel more than the rest of us put together. What’s the best place in the world?”

You know that Johnny Cash song, the one they use for some hotel chain ad? “I’ve been everywhere, man/Crossed the deserts bare, man/I’ve breathed the mountain air, man/Of travel I’ve had my share, man/I’ve been everywhere”? Well, that pretty much sums me up. So I get asked this question a lot. And I always give the same answer: There is no best place.

I mean, really, is Paris better than New York? Barcelona better than Buenos Aires? It depends on when you’re there, what you’re doing, and, most importantly, who you’re with. 

Everyone nodded at my sage pronouncement, ending the discussion. Or so I thought. “What about this, then,” said Fletch, the best fisherman in our group, tossing a new lure into the darkness in hopes of a nibble. “What’s the sexiest city in the world—better yet, the sexiest small city in the world?”

All right. Good. Now, I felt, we had something to talk about. Beginning with the parameters of the question, like what constitutes a small city (consensus: it has to feel intimate and walkable, even if it has a relatively large population). That settled, we began to brood over the larger question: What, exactly, makes a city sexy?

A full moon was starting to rise; we were all feeling pretty good after a glass or two of whisky. Veiled in darkness, we talked about the components necessary to fall in love with a place, and though there were some disagreements, in the end we agreed on three main criteria.

First off, it should be seductive. Which means you should fall in love with the place slowly. There’s got to be a sense of beguilement, a feeling that it’s going to reveal its secrets gradually, that there is going to be a fair amount of discovery involved, and you need to be involved in the discovering. Can’t just hop off the plane and go, Hey, ain’t this the cutest little town you’ve ever seen? Because we all know those feelings last about as long as a Britney Spears’ marriage.

Next, everything about the place has got to stimulate your senses—all of them—giving you pleasure in the way it smells, tastes, sounds, feels, as well as awakening things in you you weren’t even aware of. Like feeling breathless when you hear opera live for the first time or sampling a Oaxaca mole sauce and wondering why you’ve never tasted that before.

Finally, it should arouse you even when it’s not at its best. Any city can look beautiful on a perfect summer day when the light is just right, but what about on a cold, wet winter morning or a feverishly-hot afternoon when it’s humid and sticky out? A truly sexy city should stir your emotions even when it has a bit of bed-head; it should be a place you love—perhaps even more so—when the landscape has gone bald in winter or when it is a little past its prime. As James Salter wrote of Paris following the First World War: “The face was still ravishing but the tone of the skin had lost its freshness and there were faint lines in the brow and around the mouth.” Which only made him love her even more.

“Think Sean Connery as a city,” I mused. “Or some place that conjures up Sophia Loren. That’s what we’re all looking for, lads.”

“I can’t imagine anyplace that good,” Fletch said.

Hardy issues his challenge to find the sexiest small city in the world.

“I might know a place,” Hardy said in a whisper. He took a sip of whisky and looked up at the full moon rising over the mangroves as we waited for him to continue. The evening was calm except for the night cry of an unseen bird somewhere in the thicket. “It’s been a few years since I was there but I still think about it. It’s like a song you can’t get out of your head.” He took a pull on his cigar. “I’d be willing to bet that if Lansing went there he’d agree with me.”

So in the darkness, 50 miles off the southern coast of Cuba, glasses were clinked and several friendly wagers were placed. Since I was the judge and jury, I was not allowed to bet. Which is just as well. Because although our friends would probably label me even more of a romantic than Hardy, like Fletch, I doubted there really was any place in the world that could live up to the high expectations we had set. At least nowhere I’d been. And like I said, I’ve been everywhere, man.

When it is cold and rainy, as it has been for much of the time I’ve been in Perugia, the Piazza IV Novembre, the center of the old town, seems sad and lonely. But when it is sunny and warm, as it was today, it becomes an outdoor living room, a place where people sit for hours at a time at one of the outdoor cafes or on the steps of the duomo, an odd cathedral that is rather ugly inside but quite striking outside.

Photos by David Lansing.

I have to give Hardy credit—Perugia really is one of the sexiest small cities in the world. Which makes the fact that it has had such a violent history seem so surprising. According to a guide book I was reading at breakfast this morning, “By the Middle Ages, Perugia…had begun exhibiting the bellicose tendencies, vicious temper, violent infighting, and penchant for poisons that would earn it such a sunny reputation among contemporary chroniclers. When not out bashing neighboring towns into submission, Perugia’s men would put on minimal padding and play one of their favorite games, the Battaglia dei Sassi (War of Stones), which consisted of pelting one another with hefty rocks until at least a few dozen people were dead.”

It gets worse. Evidently back in the 15^th century the town was run by the Baglioni family who “turned assassination, treachery, and incest into gruesome art forms. When not poisoning their outside rivals, they killed siblings on their wedding nights, kept pet lions, tore human hearts out of chests for lunch, and married their sisters. In a conspiracy so tangled it’s almost comic in its ghastliness, the bulk of the family massacred one another on a single day in August 1500.”

All this right here in front of the sacred duomo where, as I write this, young lovers wrap their limbs around each other and kiss in blatant displays of public affection. On the very steps of the church where, in July 1216, Pope Innocent III was poisoned by a nun and where, as his body lay in state atop his tomb, the rich garments in which he was to be buried were plundered by Perugians who despised the pope and everything he stood for.

As a medieval chronicler, Jacques de Vitry, who witnessed the pope’s stinking, naked body after the attack noted, Brevis sit et vana huius seculi fallax gloria (“Brief and empty is the deceptive glory of this world”).

I’m going to enjoy the sunshine for as long as it lasts. 

Before heading back to Perugia, Maura insists on one last stop. In the nearby village of Citta’della Pieve, the home of Perugino, the 15^th century artist whose work in the National Gallery I was so quick to dismiss the day I met Maura.

“Do you know why the Madonna always looks the same in Perugino’s paintings?” Maura asks me as we drive through a landscape of hillsides terraced in olives and vines, valleys of sunflowers and fields of grain—barley, spelt, chickpeas, and the small lentils Umbria is famous for.

On her car stereo Maura has slipped in a Katie Melua CD.

If you were a cowboy, I would trail you.

If you were a piece of wood, I’d nail you to the floor.

If you were a sailboat, I would sail you to the shore.

If you were a river, I would swim you.

If you were a house, I would live in you all my days.

If you were a preacher, I’d begin to change my ways.

No, I say, I do not know why the Madonna always looks the same in Perugino’s paintings.

“Because the model was his wife. And he was madly in love with her and kept trying, over and over again, to show the things he most loved about her—her lips, the paleness of her skin, the gracefulness of her hands. But he felt he never got it right. So he kept trying.”

I assume Maura is taking me to the town’s cathedral, where several of Perugino’s paintings are on display, but instead we wander past the church, down Via Santa Maria Maddalena, named after the most famous prostitute of all time, stopping before a narrow street less than three feet wide. The street, Maura tells me, is said to be the narrowest in all of Italy. It is called Vicolo Baciadonne—the Street of Kisses.

The Street of Kisses. Photo by David Lansing.

Maura heads down the dark passage with me right behind her. “How did this street get its name?” I inanely ask her.

“Because they say when a man passes a woman in this street, they are so close together they must kiss.”

She stops and leans against the wall in the darkness.

It is warm and moist in here. The air smells heavily of wisteria. My mouth is dry, my hands sweaty. “Where to now?” I ask her.

She smiles. “That,” she says, “is up to you.”