Vernazza On My Mind

Sunny Pleasures

There must be an awful lot of folk searching for a Brigadoon

--even if it only lasts for a couple of hours.

The place is deadly still. The enormity of nightfall has rendered everything blank, utterly blank. The darkness has a quality of inexorability and menace as though it will never lift, as though without anyone noticing it, the dawn of the day before has been the beginning of the last light ever in the history of the world. 

Then the sky brightens, imperceptively at first, puncturing the murki­­ness with pinpricks of light. Against a backdrop of pale stars, I stumble upon Vernazza. My Italian Brigadoon...

(OK, I know I'm mixing metaphors. Vernazza is neither mysterious nor Scottish. It also doesn't appear for only one day every hundred years. But I like imagine-playing, so there.)

... It is one of Five Lands, Cinque Terre, sloping down on a rugged coast along the Italian Riviera.

The sun slides slowly upon the off-kilter silhouette of colorful, old houses stacked haphazardly on top of each other on the edge of the terraced hillside. The first rays of dawn filter through the olive groves above and in the space between rough stone steps and loose rocky surfaces. A web of golden shadow spreads over narrow, crooked streets and dirt paths.

Sound breaks through the silence - first, a short ding; then bong! – a long deep sound, followed by the excited peal from bells ringing from the two clock towers.

I hear subdued conversation from women hanging laundry on a corded washing line stretched between veranda rails. Morning stirs with the hum of children's voices drifting from the grounds. Footsteps creak along the passage as men go for their espresso and gather under umbrella-shaded tables. Greetings of Buon giorno, signifying a good day, abound.

Shops overflowing with baskets, Majolica dishware, leather shoes, and intricately-embroidered clothing open up. Under makeshift stalls, vendors preside over baskets of various herbs - parsley, yellowish-orange saffron threads, bunches of thyme and rosemary, grapes, sugar beets, corn, tomatoes and citrus fruits. 

Itinerant vendors hawk their goods to the gathering crowd. Limoncello, anyone? Freshly-squeezed.  Ah, that sweet, tart, and refreshing drink. People haggle over prices; money changes hands. Would you take five euros for this?

On a sandy strip, fishermen emerge from docked boats to sell the freshest catch of sea bass, sole, and anchovies - and beyond, the open stretch of the Ligurian Sea. 

Any time now, I can feel in my heart that a tourist, or perhaps someone from a neighboring town, is about to fall in love with Fiona...

(Who's Fiona, you ask? She's the young woman from Brigadoon, who else?).

... I wait for it.

My isolated feelings, heretofore restricted to a secret niche inside of me, are everywhere exposed to the ruddy glow in the east and grown so large and firmly fixed that I cannot separate it from the landscape and the sky.

I will swear, I can swear...

 Why, it's almost like being in love.