Buonanotte, Summer

Remember when summertime meant the living was easy? Quiet? Peaceful, even? After a summer like this one,  we all need a vacation from vacation season.

In Italy,  2023 kicked off with expectations of a bonanza: a record-setting number of travelers were scheduled to visit the Bel Paese in June and July. Then the country went from floods in May into the frying pan by July. By mid-summer, Sicily, as well as some of the Greek Islands and other parts of the Southern Mediterranean were on fire. For the finale to this particular pyrotechnic display, Mount Etna erupted in August, closing Catania airport.

Of course, the crowds showed up anyway (that’s what pre-payment of travel bookings will get you), but wound up hot, sweaty, disgruntled and sometimes stranded. None of it made for great Tripadvisor reviews.

America was no less disaster-prone, with extreme heat across the country that left even desert-dwellers wilting like parched cactuses in the dust. We all complained about the travel chaos until the explosive fires in Maui reminded us what real tragedy looks like.

As I write, Hurricane Hilary is bearing down on Southern California and Arizona. I know there are a good number of Life Lived Italian subscribers on the West Coast. I’m praying that the storm will take a detour and for at least once this summer, things will prove less dire than predicted.

To be honest, in many ways New York has been the easiest place this year. Aside from a few days of asphyxiating smoke blowing in from Canada, the spotted lanternfly  invasion, and sharks (I’m thinking of the ones in the water, not the kind who lurk in the city), we’ve been spared anything catastrophic.

Despite it all,  I’m happy to return to Italy this week and close out August with what I can only hope will be a few weeks of utter predictability.  Our town of Monteleone di Fermo is a world away from the tumult of tourists and traffic and TikTok travel tirades. It will be hot of course, but the days will be getting shorter now. The grapes will be ready for crushing; the olives still ripening in the late season sun. The little hill town’s “sunset bar” will be busy, but the stony alleys of the old medieval village will be meditating in 14th century silence. Same as it ever was.

August in the Italian countryside always feels to me a little like the morning of New Year’s Day. The party is over— only the clean-up remains. The stems of the fallen sunflowers are scattered across the fields like confetti; the colors of the landscape are as washed out as an overexposed photograph. Some of the beachgoers are pretty overexposed as well. The exhaustion of  the restaurant and bar owners is palpable.

But no one is in a hurry to move on. Better to savor the sweetness of the last of the summer fruit, enjoy one more swim in the sea, one more evening on the terrace with friends, one final limoncello.

After a summer like 2023, too many people will find no time for rest— only rescues and recovery and the rebuilding of lives. All of us carry with us now an inescapable sense of just how precarious paradise—any paradise—can be. For those who have been directly affected by the calamities of the past few months, I hope you can find the strength to sustain yourself and your community.  And I hope that the rest of us can find one last moment in this season to relax, reflect, and say ciao…. ciao…  buonanotte to summer.

When I began this Substack newsletter back in April, I braced myself for a long sojourn into futility, filing dispatches into the void, with a subscriber list too small to even make up a decent cocktail party guest list.

But now it seems we could have a pretty good aperitivo together after all:

Life Lived Italian just hit 100 subscriptions!

I am so grateful to all of you for supporting this newsletter— for subscribing, and even more for taking the time to read, share with friends, and offer your comments and likes.

Some of you may know that I was once a songwriter. So I’m not unfamiliar with the loneliness of writing or the accompanying sense of shouting into the abyss. But that feeling of isolation is one of the most difficult aspects of any creative venture. To have this interaction with all of you is an incredible gift. I hope you’ll continue to enjoy Life Lived Italian and spread the word. Grazie tante, tutti!

To celebrate, I thought I’d share another playlist— a counterpart to the “Spritzing Season” that kicked off the summer. This one is a send-off, “Buonanotte, Summer”, for the inevitable wind down of August. It features a couple of tracks from the legendary Tony Bennett, who was the subject of a previous post, D.O.C.G (Calabrian Cool in a Kid from Queens), as well as music from one of Brazil’s greatest jazz singers, Leny Andrade, who also passed away this month.   Enjoy!!