Fiesole. The high sun and how happy I was that my mother had come to Italy. The bus up into the hills above Florence. I bought our tickets at the kiosk, not knowing whether to admit to her that I usually rode without paying. I found her a seat, and stood behind her, back braced against the window. The ochre walls of the houses lining the switchback road up to the town. The olive leaves, their silver undersides.
They have a small museum there, a collection of strange bits pulled from the knoll behind the building. Etruscan, Roman, unidentifiable. A female bust with a broken nose. A stone comb, the teeth carved to look like antlers. A basket. A breastplate. A black figure oinochoe. In the grass behind the building, Roman ruins lie on Etruscan ruins, another frigidarium, another amphitheater. I climbed into the Etruscan temple while my mother strolled around the exterior walls. It was a temple inside a temple, nested into itself. Midday, and in the quiet air, I heard clearly every sound inside the roofless cella. A quick rustling, the small green lizards that I was frightening, their quick retreats back into their crevices and cracks.
I've always loved the Etruscans, mysterious people with no origins we know of and wonderful funerary practices. On the lids of their sarcophagi, they carve effigies of the interred, always shown living and happy, eating or speaking. Couples are carved together, sometimes sitting up and gesturing to the viewer, sometimes lying down and quite unaware of other people. It's beautiful, it's love in a narrow bed. It's a good way to be buried, I think.They were onto something, the Etruscans. They wanted to be remembered at their best, their liveliest, their most in love. Even now, their ruins refuse melancholy, populated with the bright whips of basking lizards, my bare knees, curious feet. On the other side of the exterior wall, my mother runs her beautiful hand over the rough old stone.
