potrero view

August 2009

Travels in Italy and Beyond

By Jennifer Bryce

Last summer, after being bought out of her long-time rental by new owner-developers on Potrero Hill, Bryce, a massage therapist and jazz singer, traveled to Italy, Montenegro and Greece to perform at jazz festivals and investigate Etruscan sites.  Below are a few excerpts from her transformational travel tale.   You can read more at jenniferbryce.com or on Facebook.  Her first CD At Last is available on ITunes and Amazon.

July 26.  I’m leaving Lucca, Italy, for the first time driving the wild beast truck campervan I just rented.  I hit the autostrada, got to the toll gate and hesitated.  What button do I push?  What do the signs say?  I heard horns and cursing behind me.  Francullo straniera!  Just push a button, any button!  And bingo a ticket appeared!  I grabbed it and was on my way.

First stop for diesel.   Only 122 euro for three-quarters of a tank! @%!#$^@$%^OK!!!!   Well, it’s got to be an enormous tank!  I didn’t want to drive the whole way on the autostrada; I wanted to see the back roads.  There’s Chianti on the map just south of here.  Someone please pinch me!

Gorgeous countryside.  Seemingly every patch of land, cultivated; grapes one way, corn another; a field of olive trees and now a small zucchini farm. This is a core way of Italian life, whether you’re a gypsy living besides the autostrada or a gentile in a villa in Chianti, you have a garden as big as you can make it.

Driving through this quilt of greenery I feel some knotted inner core of me let go.  I see a sign for Formaggi di caprini (goat cheese), and pull off.  Before me lies a classic road.  I drive through its long dreamy passage to a medieval stone farmhouse.

There I meet Elisa and taste all the cheese that she and her husband make.   I ask her if she knows a place where I can park for the night.  Why don’t I park 100 meters down the road and stop by for coffee and fresh goat’s milk in the morning?  Now that’s hospitality, my friends!

So here I am writing you from a meadow in Chianti, 30 feet from the stream I bathed in this evening.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  The greatest birthday present I could have is to be warmly welcomed by strangers.

August 5.  Ronciglione, a town near the first jazz fest I’m attending with jazz greats Kenny Barron and Shawn Monteiro is a medium-small traditional town with Etruscan and Roman foundations.  On the main piazza is a church that was bombed in World War Two and never restored.  Apparently, a number of bombs were unloaded by the American planes on the countryside as they headed home after the war because they had too many bombs to make it over the Atlantic.  This is a sad part of World War Two history that I didn’t know about.

In the middle of the piazza is a beautiful fountain decorated with arching unicorn heads.  One day last summer a huge swarm of bees came swooping into the piazza from the countryside.  It was hot.  Everyone was drinking coffee in one of the many bars on the piazza, or shopping at the morning vegetable market. The bees swarmed around the fountain, drinking thirstily from the spray, something bees never do; they usually get their moisture from flowers.  People scattered in every direction, shrieking.  After a few minutes the entire swarm fell to the piazza, dead.  No one had ever seen anything like it.

I’m finding, as I rove about Italy, a stronger rhythm in people’s daily life, an ebb and flow that seems to create more space for people connecting than in the states.  Every day almost everything closes from 1 until 4 or 5 p.m. That’s inconceivable in America.  The effect this one difference has is far-reaching. People go home for lunch or meet friends, spend time with their family or take a snooze.  When the stores reopen people are out and about again. Pretty nice, unless you want to conduct some kind of business in the mid-afternoon; forget about it.

September 15.  I spent the past few days in Epidaurus, sanctuary of Asclepius, superb doctor-cum-god; the ancient Greeks tended to turn their cool people into gods. Epidaurus’ sanctuary, though a sketch in fallen stones and pillars of its former self, has a feeling of openness and possibility, a different place from the area’s other Mycenaean and Greek temples.  Perhaps that’s because Epidaurus was akin to ancient Greece’s Mayo Clinic.  People came here, stayed in a hostel and were guided on a process of recovery that couldn’t be more relevant today.  They were ritually bathed, and participated in a sacred meal prepared from a sacrifice to help them sleep and dream a dream that would show them the solution to their illness.   Asclepius clearly understood the mind/body connection.

As I walked around the sanctuary and the ancient theater, site of the production of the original Greek plays and the best preserved ancient theater today, I realized Epidaurus embodies two things that are relevant to me: healing and music. I mustered up the courage, stood on the center stone in the circle, and sang for about 75 tourists, on the same stone where other singers and actors have stood and let their voices be heard for the past 2,300 years.  The acoustics in the theater are unearthly.  I was hearing myself as though I had sophisticated monitor speakers in a theater that seats 12,000!

The next morning I dreamed a dream.

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