Making History

And Leaving Some Behind

The first time we set to work in our garden after our house in Italy had been restored, we were given a stern warning by friends and neighbors:

In the unlikely event that our shovel should turn up something old, rusty and distinctly Roman, like a coin or a chunk of wall, we should:

1. Remove it and place it unassumingly on the mantel. (That works better if it’s a coin.)

2. Bury it. (Best choice for chunks of wall).

3. Never say anything to anyone.                                                                                               

Any public exercise of bragging rights, we were told, could result in an orange mesh fence around our dream house and a phalanx of diggers on our terrace. For the rest of our lives.

That’s the thing about history in Italy. The Italians left a lot of it just lying around.

In fact, it’s one of the biggest challenges of urban development efforts in the country, obstructing well-intentioned projects from high-speed internet to road repair. Any construction job requiring something heavier than a garden hoe is bound to hit something lurking below the surface. The place is one big lasagna: a crisp, thin veneer of modernity, and under it layers of Baroque, Renaissance, and Medieval filling, all swimming in a sauce of the Ancients.

In a place with so much way back when, it can be hard to carve out space for the here and now.

A few minutes from our home is the sneeze and you’ll miss it town of Belmonte Piceno, which is home to a one-room museum displaying artifacts from the Piceni civilization, the locals who had the run of the Le Marche region before the Romans arrived.  Many of the items on display were dug up from an ancient necropolis in Colle Ete, a hill outside of Belmonte and nearly in our own backyard.

Uncovered by Silvestro Baglioni in 1909, with additional excavations done by Innocenzo Dall’Osso a few years later, the unearthed antiquities include a wealth of heavy jewelry— pendants and earrings made of out bronze, amber and in one case, the tooth of a cinghiale (the wild pig that even then was ravaging the neighborhood gardens). There are some playful red-clay figurines of men on horseback, plenty of battle shields and a helmet that would not have looked out of place on the guys in Daft Punk.

I was struck by the clear Greek and Asian influences in the designs, and also the sheer amount of weight both men and women chose to hang around their neck. My shoulders hunch at the thought of it.

For all of the artifacts buried under their feet, the villagers of Belmonte don’t seem to be overly burdened by their role as caretakers of history. The first time we tried to visit the museum, it was closed, although Google assured us we were well within the appointed hours. So we checked at the bar up the street— turns out we’d just missed the mayor, who could have opened the exhibit for us. The next time, we phoned ahead and a woman who lived nearby unlocked the doors and let us take a look around.

On our way home, we drove through the Colle Ete, which is back to being farmland, jubilant with red poppies in the springtime, well-trod by sheep who make one of the finest pecorino cheeses in the region. Any secrets not uncovered in the early part of the 20th century are  buried again, deep under the soft green grass.

By contrast, the aristocratic town of Asolo in the prosecco hills of Treviso presents its history with grandeur, even if some of it is more primitive than the Piceni.  Flanked by the Clock Tower of the Asolo castle, the Museo Civico is housed in the elegant Palazzo del Vescovado, and the collection reflects the town’s full thousand year backstory.

In the first century A.D., Asolo was cited by Pliny the Elder as a Roman outpost called Acelum; by the 6th century it  became an early center of Christianity. Later, like Florence and Urbino, it was a hothouse of Renaissance creativity,  thanks to the court of Caterina Cornaro, former Queen of Cyprus.

But that’s all relatively recent news. I had come for the old stuff: a collection of archeological discoveries from the surrounding area that dates all the way back to the Stone Age. You have to respect people whose tools have lasted 350,000 years, even if, to be honest, their efforts seem to have been unduly devoted to the making of hard, pointy objects.   

As I wandered past case after case of what were apparently blades, scrapers, and arrowheads, but which looked like nothing so much as a collection of black nail extensions from the Real Housewives of Atlanta, I wondered if maybe the researchers missed the point, so to speak.  What if these sharp-edged objects were not weapons at all, but rather directional indicators— like the helpful signs that say “go to front door —>” or “restroom <—“.  After all, it was an age where there were a lot more rocks than papers and Magic Markers. Why are anthropologists so negative? It’s always about hunting and killing and never about a guy just trying to find his way back to the cave.

It’s not like the Neanderthals got to choose what went into their own time capsule. Would any of us wish to be judged solely by what the neighbors found lying around our garage?

Having spotted the sign in the museum marked —>Exit,  I wandered down the hill from the main square and stopped into Antico Osteria al Bacaro for lunch. As my eyes adjusted to the dimly lit bar, I realized I’d stepped into a time capsule of a different sort.

Serving a menu of Venetian farmer favorites like rabbit, cheese and polenta, or baccalà (a cod fish dried and cured), this place was a testament to the most precious quality of the Italian trattoria or osteria: a complete unwillingness to update, remodel, or even de-clutter a little.  Founded in 1892,  the restaurant was known in those days for the line of women that would form outside on Sunday mornings, knocking on the door and trying to recover the hats, boots, and other belongings that their husbands left the night before. Apparently they didn’t get everything.

Here is a partial list of what I saw hanging from the ceiling, perched on the counters, and scattered across the floor of Osteria al Bacaro: puppets, cowbells, a bucket with dried sunflowers, a soccer ball, a Vespa, a walking stick, a stove, a cattle harness, a tree saw, a stuffed orange monkey, dried garlic (no vampires in here), a Befana (there are witches though), medieval torture instruments, a sculpture of a cat, an Asolo flag, a collection of toy trucks, and a thousand drinking proverbs scribbled on napkins and pasted on the walls.

“He who is unable to celebrate is better to go to work”.

“If you drink to forget, pay first.”

For all of the history to be uncovered in Italy, these are the discoveries I like best. Osteria al Bacaro is a reminder that the past is not just about lost civilizations or who took power and who had their statue knocked down.  It’s a story about us—people who went to work, stopped by the bar, forgot their hat.

In the end, maybe history is made because everywhere we go, we leave a little of ourselves behind.