The Painted Altar

Chapter Nine

The hire car was a Fiat, some model of family saloon. Its handling was different from my smaller, lighter Renault back home, and this plus the fact of having to mentally reorientate things from left to right provoked several irritated beeps from local motorists as I attempted to navigate my way from airport to the southbound carriage of the main coast road. At one point a van driver chose to express his scorn for my driving skills verbally, the words he thundered through the opened window as he overtook me accompanied by wildly gesturing arm. Che cazzo! It was an expression I doubted would be listed in the Italian phrasebook I'd picked up at Stansted.

The expression which would be most useful to me had already been committed to memory, needless to say.

Sto cercando...

I'm looking for...

As George Shreeves of the Ravensby Evening Rcho had unwittingly informed me the day before, I had an uncle.

Uncle Salvatore.

*

It was early evening when I arrived at my destination, this following a sixty mile stretch of the coast road, the sparkling blue waters of the Adriatic revealed in periodic teasing glimpses to my left beyond the vines and olive groves, the white cluttered buildings of passing port towns.

I'd visited Italy twice before. Once, the sweltering, shoulder-barging chaos that is Venice in August; the second time, an altogether more relaxing sojourn amidst the smoky green hills of Tuscany during whit week half-term. Whilst by their nature very differing trips, there was something familiar and thus mildly disappointing to both experiences - almost as if those views I dutifully photographed had already been glimpsed, the sensations they evoked already lived. Italy is like Coca-Cola. Like MacDonald's. An ubiquitous logo you just can't avoid. It's there on the inside pages of the newspaper you're leafing though. There flickering pleasantly away in the background of the Sunday afternoon matinee you're half watching. There in the roots of every other polysyllabic word you utter. A sprawling theme park of marbled Roman columns and vine-bearded hills, of towering rennaissance-era cathedrals and gloriously precarious hilltop citadels.

Rolling along amidst the impatient, horn-beeping traffic of Punto San Giacomo that June evening, it felt as if I'd been ushered behind the scenes however. Had somehow breached a secret portal, been deposited into that other Italy - the one they don't tell you about in the travel shows on TV, the one the Hollywood film directors have never ventured to. Real Italy, in short.

The town revealed itself as long, sea-hugging grid of narrow streets, the buildings mostly three- or four- storey, their stuccoed facades cracked and crumbled by decades of what I could only imagine were lethally hot summers alternated by wind-ravaged winters. Washing loads hung from upper floor balconies, underwear and all; with the car windows wound all the way down, I could hear the housewives call out across and down and up to each other as they busily pegged and unpegged. Ground floor doors meanwhile opened straight onto the street, breeze-flapped net curtains revealing humble interiors. Here, each slammed door echoed the length of the street, each cry of a baby, each crossed word. In Punto San Giacomo, privacy came at a premium it seemed.

I ducked into the first hotel I came across, where a pleasantly smiling woman ten years or so my junior eventually responded to the repeated and increasingly impatient ping of the reception bell. The difficulty I had in communicating to her that I would be requiring a single room for at least two nights and possibly longer seemed somewhat inauspicious. Here in Real Italy, I quickly realised, a foreign visitor would not find it easy to make themselves understood. Our dialogue amounted to a succession of embarrassed smiles, futile hand gestures, my repetition of half-remembered words from French O'Level in the hope they might be similar in Italian. Sal du bain. I would like a sal du bain per favore.