Late August, 1981. Jim Prchlik and I had been hitchhiking, backpacking, and camping for a month. We were nearing the end of our first extended trip together since hitching from Akron to Cape Cod the summer after high school. What I loved about traveling with Jim in 1972 was still true – his unflappable gregariousness, his ability to adjust to any obstacle and draw pleasure from every experience. We caught a ride from Rome with two Parisians returning from a vacation on the Greek isle of Hydra. They dropped us off in Orte, where we left the autostrada, following roads that took us north through the Umbrian valley, past vineyards and olive orchards, past Spoleto, Assisi, other hill towns behind whose fortified walls we imagined the Renaissance still in full bloom.

We hiked into Perugia as the last hour of sunlight highlighted the reddish-brown walls of the city, that color, umber, derived from terra d’ombra, the iron-rich soil of Umbria. We headed directly to the centro, teeming with Saturday night life. Jim found a spot where he could spread out his leathercraft work while I went off to explore the steep winding streets, scavenging for a couple of untouched slices of pizza. Near the end of the night, Jim made a big sale, which brightened our outlook. Feeling the satisfaction of that commercial success, we located a grassy nook at the end of a street “senza uscita,” and laid out our sleeping bags.[1]

The next day, we tried to make our way to Siena, a hundred kilometers northwest of Perugia, but three hours of halfhearted hitchhiking got us nowhere. We walked back to the city, where Jim spread out his blanket and leather goods, only to get shut down by the polizia municipale, a rather desultory day salvaged by us splurging on a bottle of wine. 

Monday morning, I awoke from a dream of walking through a drizzly rain in Anchorage to see overhead a half dozen arcobelli playfully dancing and dividing as if in mitosis, as if someone were projecting a lightshow upon the firmament.[2] It actually had begun to rain. We picked ourselves up pronto and made for the shelter of a stone archway at the city gates, pulled out our little campstove, and brewed two mugs of coffee. Later that morning, halfway to Siena, we got a ride from a family, an art historian and a teacher from Milano and their three children. They invited us for un pranzo at their friends’ fattoria, where they were staying on holiday.[3] It was a typically hearty Italian repast, much of it produced on the farm: spaghetti, pan-roasted quail, a pignoli-loaded sweet bread, melon, red and white wines, concluding with vin santo (strong and sweet, made from dried grapes) and grappa (a brandy distilled from the remains of pressing the grapes for wine). He was knowledgeable but opinionated; she was more inquisitive, more interesting, but often distracted by the demands of their bambini. 

After lunch, they drove us on to Siena, dropping us off near the Piazza del Campo. Still pleasantly tipsy from all the alcohol at lunch, we checked out the Gothic red-brick tower, so tall it divided the sky in two.

Ricordo Siena

Remember, Jim, that summer we bummed around Italy,

wandering through Tuscany from hill town to hill town.

One day, we strolled into Siena, packs on our backs,

looking for a smile, a friendly face, a place to spend the night.

Where do the ragazzi hang out? Y’know, the raggedy ones.

In the center of town, we discovered the Piazza del Campo,

a vast open area – larger than a football field –

all in bricks, sloping down toward a knockout bell tower,

and surrounded by cafés and those faded ocher palazzi  

that have probably been here for a thousand years.

They have a crazy horse race here every year, but not now.

Now is noon. Except for the pigeons and café crowd,

the piazza’s empty. You and I put our packs down,

and look at that open field. Then the nod of recognition.

You pull the red-white-and-blue Frisbee out of your pack

and we go to work, measuring the distance between us,

continuing the kinetic conversation we’ve had many times.

You cast the UFO-ish disc on a straight line. I snatch it

out of the air and sail it back to you on a sweeping arc.

You grab it on the run, catching it behind your back.

We stretch to display our wacky American athleticism

in this performance, this duet, this Frisbee ballet.

I flick the disc into the air with a quick wrist snap.

As it sails toward you, it slows down, spinning, 

floating, adagio, until time almost stops. Then

from the windows of the third-story studios

that open onto the piazza, the music reaches us,

timeless and perfect. Here, an aria in mezzo soprano.

There, a harpsichord, a violincello, a lute.

Jim and I connected up with a band of vagabonds, drinking wine and playing music and carousing into the night. We slept with five or six of them on a knoll beside a stadium under a clear starry sky, comfortable and undisturbed, relocating in the morning to a nearby park for coffee to go with an unopened package of biscotti liberated from a trash can.

We stayed another day in Siena to take in more of the city. Because of the excellent music school at the Università degli Studi di Siena, one of the oldest in Italy, live chamber music seemed to emanate from every street corner and quiet piazza. We checked out the thirteenth-century Duomo di Siena, its gorgeous Romanesque layering of black and white marble balancing the Gothic spires of its facade and bell tower. When free movies were shown in the Piazza del Campo, we watched Charlie Chaplin’s The Little Tramp.

It took one hitch to get to Firenze. We spent our first night in a small park outside the city walls near Piazzale Michelangelo, but the next day moved into the nearby campground. Our rationalization for the expense of the camping fee: with all the food free for the taking from the camp trash cans, we’d save money on provisions. A casual stroll around the campground our first morning supported that, netting grapes, tomatoes, lemons, an eggplant, dijon mustard, potato chips, and a candle. After our coffee, a two-kilometer walk down to and across the Ponte Vecchio took us into the heart of the city. 

We were sitting on the steps of the Piazza della Signoria after visiting the nearby Galleria degli Uffizi, lounging in the sun under a blue Tuscan sky, admiring the facade of a thirteenth-century palazzo. A couple of young Italians sat down with us to share a hash spliff. Finding a copy of the International Herald Tribune, we caught up with news of the world, reading about the tax cuts Reagan was signing into law, cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy but would, he promised, “trickle down” to the rest of us. (Funny thing, that never happened.)

That evening, using some of our scavenged food, we concocted a vegetable-rich sauce spooned over bavette, a long ribbon noodle popular in Genova, naming it pasta frugando.[4] After dinner, we moseyed over to a patio at the campground, met some German and Italian travelers, shared their wine and conversed late into the night before stumbling back to our tent. 

Our last day in Firenze, Jim tried his hand at selling his leathercraft wares while I shopped among the street vendors for a cowrie shell necklace like the ones I’d seen my Roman friends wearing, which I thought would look good on Pat. I found a sunny table at Caffé Le Rose, on a little piazza near the beautiful fourteenth-century Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, and wrote to her: “Only a month and I’ll be back. I’m missing the entanglements of our life, and a bit tired of the skimming across the surface that travel can be. I guess I love the complications of a sedentary life as well as the novelty of a transient life. Can we make a life together that allows room for both?”

The time had come for Jim and me to head off in different directions, the end of our traveling partnership. I would miss the benefits of sharing the work and combining our resources, but more than that, the simple joy of being in his company. We sat down for one last meal at our campsite before packing up our gear. A long hug, an espresso at a nearby bar, then off to the autostrada, Jim going west toward Genova and the vendange in the south of France; me, north to Bologna.[5]

Footnotes

[1] Senza uscita = without exit, that is, a dead end.

[2] Arcobelli = rainbows.

[3] Pranzo = lunch; fattoria = farm.

[4] Scavenger’s pasta.

[5] Vendange = wine grape harvest.