The adventure begins

The little boy behind me at the airport check-in was on his way to visit family in Turkey, first stop Istanbul. He’d been there before so I asked him what he liked about it. After a very thoughtful moment or two, he replied: “It’s not new.”

Indeed. It’s one of those places where we can see antiquity with our own eyes and imagine that long line of civilisation – lives and living – that went before us and reaches forward to connect us to it. Hard to find in Australia, unless you venture to the canyons and caves of Kakadu or Uluru in its red centre.

And this is one reason I am here, for that perspective. I find it soothing to walk over the stones and between the centuries-old walls that have witnessed so much and survived. (Like many Australians, I was deeply rocked by the recent horror in New Zealand, the peaceful, brave home of our neighbours across the Tasman Sea, and search for a way to hold it.)

On Wednesday I will buy fruit and vegetables and fish at the market that bursts to life in the Piazza Baldaccio once a week, covering it with stalls and open-sided vans before disappearing at the end of the day. This has been happening regularly since 1388.

I’m in Anghiari, “The Town of the Battle”, saved for Tuscany by the Florentines in a famous fight against the Milanese in 1440. Encircled by a wall, it has ramparts and fortifications and arched stone doorways, including one that once had a drawbridge that opened over a moat.

My apartment is in the medieval section of town, the centro historico. I can’t imagine tiring of the views of terracotta rooftops I look down upon from each window. The ancient bell tower I see from my bedroom was originally built between 1234 and 1323. After a more recent restoration, it now houses a clock and is so close that the sound of the hour striking seems just outside my window, right through the night. “Boing, boing, boing” it goes, followed a minute or so later by a distant echo from a clock on the other side of town. Is this timing intentional, I wonder? Surely it is. I have so many questions, but stay mostly tongue-tied due to my lack of the language. I am here to learn.

Lately, ‘my’ clock has been repeating itself, but only on the hour. It strikes its one or two or whatever o’clock, there’s the distant reply, and then, as if it has to have the last word, it strikes the hour again. (I know people like that.) This doesn’t happen on the half hour when “boing, boing, boing” is repeated, followed by a “clang” in a completely different timbre to indicate the half.

But who is responsible for fixing the clock? I will need to ask someone who speaks English.

It is now just before 6.30am and the world below is emerging with the light. A great blanket of mist covers the valley and the silhouette of a line of mountains stands solidly beyond. Exquisite.

I moved my desk to this window yesterday. It had been facing the opposite wall – and I’m not here for penance. Quite the opposite. I’m giving myself a fabulous gift, for which I feel incredibly grateful. I’ve never lived anywhere other than Australia, which is not how, as a young woman, I had expected my life would run.

Around the time I turned 60, I was keenly aware of the prospect of the ultimate decline into nothingness, particularly with the loss to cancer of dear friends and a precious cousin only in their 60s. Life’s short. So I left my marriage to an imperfectly good man who remains my very dear friend (I like to say we are all perfectly imperfect), and set off to carpe diem. And I certainly don’t say that lightly.

I have little patience with constant lamenters – it’s too easy, and they bring us all down – but increasingly I find it hard to maintain my naturally optimistic “glass-half-full” attitude. Australians of my age really have been so fortunate in terms of our place and time in the world. Yet my inner lamenter worries about the future of the world on one hand, and berates me for not making more of the golden opportunities that came my way on the other. Down, boy. Partly I am here to shut the lamenter up.

Apart from reading, writing, learning Italian, walking, yoga and so on, I intend to read a poem each day, and one I read this morning describes better than I can how I feel.

The poet desired to die “like the quail after crossing the sea inside the first bushes because it has no wish to fly any more. But not to live lamenting like a goldfinch blinded.” (Giuseppe Ungaretti)

Exactly. Don’t want to be a goldfinch; want to be a quail.