FIFTY YEARS OF SLEEPING

When I was a child in the early fifties of the nineteenth century I came here in Bonassola from my birth city of Florence with my parents, brothers and British/American babysitters, to discover the sea…

My adored Ligurian sea, which is so green and blue and deep in its state of bonanza, but in the storms it grows almost white in its wrath when – like an enormous and furious ghost - it gets angry pushed by the strongest conceivable winds against the coast line. That where the highest possible foaming waves break their impetus splashing down in an apotheosis of sprays and spurts, roaring and neighing like thousands of wild white horses,
or bisons, or tigers restless for their bridling damming by the solid rocks and the pebble beaches.

Now, after half a century of absence and on my pathway to the last third of my days, I have decided, to recompose and complete myself and my life, to come back here and to retake possession of the inner strength which I can receive by the intimate ghost-spirit of my sweet and never lost childhood, when - in this splendour - I learned for the first time of the existence, beside Gulf of Tigullio to the northwest, of the phantasmatic and unique “Gulf of Poets” to  the southeast.  Indeed this is not on the official Italian maps and guidebooks:  coming from La Spezia, it ought to stretch from San Terenzo and Lerici at least as far as the Promontory of Maralunga,
if not Fiascherino and Tellaro, and even White Point.

San Terenzo in particular became, thanks to the Byron’s friendship, Shelley’s home in Villa Magni: as we know he was wrecked and died in the open sea of Viareggio while sailing back from Marina di Pisa to his last residence and in some sense his ghost-spirit lives again in all the poets who try to compose anywhere along this coast.  For me it is a singular coincidence that the exotic name of  Maralunga had been used by the great designer Magistretti to name the armchairs and sofa that happen to be opposite my fireplace in the sitting room of my penthouse in Rome, overlooking the Vatican’s Medicean walls, enjoying the wonderful panorama of Michelangelo’s pale dome (as he admitted, larger but not handsomer than Brunelleschi’s red Florentine dome) and of the Janiculum hill, with its fancy lighthouse which evokes a sort of marine atmosphere around my ‘sailing-boat house’, like Mary Poppins’ house in London run by its retired admiral, but set in the nicknamed “Gran Pretagna” (very close to the name of Great Britain in Italian language and by me so called for the overwhelming presence of Catholic priests in the area).

I must admit that in my infancy I completely confused all the “Cinque Terre” (or the five lands of Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore) with Portovenere and the “Gulf of Poets” where I guessed that Montale too originated (he actually came from Monterosso), or even Cardarelli, whose romantic verses, in a moving poem on the Ligurian cemeteries, are forever written in gigantic letters on the side wall of Manarola’s small city of the dead, to be read from the sea by all the navigators.  Not to mention, in my later days, meeting with giants like Yeats and Pound, or Italian poets of the stature of Campana, Sbarbaro or Caproni, all poetic ghost-spirits who are surviving for us in the great bay of small bays which is this extraordinary region of Liguria.

My shaping, my first imprinting, my primary perceptions of beauty were given to me in summertime by the “Genius Loci” or  “site-phantom”  of Bonassola, a tiny blue-green bay from which I pretended that I could swim as far as Levanto just before the “Cinque Terre” where my mother (“mamma”) Gabriella was born in a Villa on the waterfront of “La Pietra” (“The Stone”) in a very cold winter day, which prevented  my grandfather (“nonno”) Enzo from bringing her to the registry office to record her birth.

“A Thing of Beauty is a Joy for Ever”, in Keats’s words, leads me to reappropriate my true âme in rediscovering symbolic places and images like the unique “Madonnina della Punta”, a small chapel devoted to St. Mary on a rocky point facing the sea from three sides, and the white “Madonna del Rosario”, a sculpture over a side altar in the parish church of Bonassola. Together they definitely inspired the touching poem “Madonnina tutta Bianca” written by my lamented father (“papà”) Max and used as the mourning announcement card, when he died during my tenth year.
This shows why I refer, in the title of this poem, to half a century of sleeping to reach my present age of composer.
Now here (and nowhere?), a true spiritual reincarnation is happening in my second but first life, with Byron and Montale who graduated like me in Cambridge and the regretted Shelley and Keats buried together with my preferred Italian philosopher Gramsci, all of them in the Non-Catholic Cemetery close to the Caius’ Pyramid
in Rome.

Marco Maria Eller Vainicher
(June 25, 2005 in Bonassola.)