Julia Roberts, a Turtle, and Other Signs
Five months is a good stretch for radio silence. My last entry here went up just after orders to my next assignment were released, and just before the chaos moving a family across an ocean descended. An overseas move consumes every bit of energy not strictly necessary for survival, and for that while, writing was not strictly necessary. Now we are here, settled enough to think, and Naples already has given me more to say than I know what to do with.
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My family and I arrived in early January, though I had to return to California to finish my last assignment before coming back at the start of this month. The movers arrived with our household goods the day after I did. I had been awake for geological epochs when I found myself directing strangers where to put furniture in a house I had yet to live in. Naples does not ease you in.
My first images of this city are its gray January sky and diesel exhaust. I cried the entire three weeks I was here the first time. Sunny Southern California had not prepared me for a southern Italian winter, the air thick with burning and cold stone. I am not crying now. That is progress.
My children were entirely unbothered. Within days they were in school, playing baseball and soccer, collecting new friends. They found the pizza. (Or did the pizza find them?) Children have a casual confidence of people who have not yet learned to be guarded, a genius we adults slowly forget.
Speaking of pizza: the first time we went looking for it, the recommended place was not yet open. We were hungry, wandering around streets tourists find when they are lost, and happened across a small pizzeria open at 11:00am. (Italian hospitality meets American impatience.) After being seated, I noticed the photograph of Julia Roberts on the wall behind my son. We were eating in the restaurant where Eat, Pray, Love was filmed. I was sitting in her seat. Of all the pizzerias in Naples to happen across…
I am not a foodie. I eat to fuel a life. What I will say is that for the first time in longer than I can remember, I have eaten bread and cheese without consequence. Real ingredients grown for the table rather than the supply chain. Naples is teaching me what food actually is, fixing something in me I did not know was broken.
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Italy began teaching me its language before my intensive language instruction did. On my first train ride to class, I noticed a poster of a rope tied into the shape of a heart. I figured the word in the advertisement, cuore, meant “heart.” That first Italian word I learned on its soil felt like an introduction.
The language class followed. My teacher is extraordinarily patient, which says everything given that her student keeps answering in Spanish. (Spanish is my strongest second language, and the two share enough that I understand far more than I can produce.)
My music background has helped in ways unanticipated. Years of ear training are proving useful, opening up Italian rhythm and sound faster than the classroom is. For practice, I am translating songs I already know. To start, Volare, perhaps popular culture’s equivalent to Beethoven’s Ninth, known the world over by most of us who cannot tell a single word of what it says…except the “oh oh” part. (I now know it’s about flying in the blue sky and his lover’s eyes.)
My teacher is deeply proud of her heritage, and her pride is contagious. Each lesson moves between language and food and history as though they are the same subject, which here they are. She has spent her 27 years inside a culture that knows exactly what it is, a rootedness I find compelling. The Stoic conviction that belonging to a place and a people¹ has walked these streets for two millennia. Learning the language is learning the culture.
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My route from the train to the centro storico (historic center) courses along Vesuvian lava stone pavers that have outlasted every person who ever crossed them. These vias pass fish markets, fruit stands, shops selling handwoven baskets and another selling only doorknobs, all aligned by walls covered in graffiti. Traffic operates by a logic I have not decoded except that it is some kind of dance. I successfully cross the street by finding a local and staying close.
Life here is dense, a compression of people and smell and history into very small spaces, and rather than feeling crowded, it feels alive. The Stoics held that the cosmos is one living whole.2 Walking through Naples, Marcus Aurelius makes more sense than he did in a library.
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Our house has a pond with a turtle. We thus named our place Casa della Tartaruga. There is something to be said for a creature that carries its home with it wherever it goes. After five months of boxes, temporary addresses, and flights, I understand the appeal. Our turtle seems unbothered by our arrival. I take that as a good omen.
Two and a half weeks in. The jet lag has passed. The boxes are unpacked. The language is coming, one word at a time. Cuore first. Always.
NOTES
1. The Stoic conviction that rational beings exist for one another is in Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.13: “Just as it is with the members in those bodies that are united in one, so it is with rational beings that exist as separate, for they have been constituted for one cooperation.” https://lexundria.com/m_aur_med/7.13/lg
2. The cosmopolis concept holds that all rational beings share membership in a universal community governed by reason. See Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.4: “If the rational part is common to us all…we are fellow-citizens…the world is in a manner a state.” https://lexundria.com/go?q=M.+Aur.+Med.+4.4&v=lg
The early Stoics also held that the cosmos itself is a single living organism, animated by a rational principle running through all things. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.138–139, reporting the positions of Zeno and Chrysippus. https://topostext.org/work/221. Marcus Aurelius inherits this directly. See Meditations 4.40. https://lexundria.com/go?q=M.+Aur.+Med.+4.40&v=lg
Captain Reverend Mother 
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