I eventually got a lift out of Firenze from a young Parmigiano. Running into heavy traffic on the way to Bologna, Italians migrating homeward after the traditional August vacation break, he decided to turn onto a side road that led us on a leisurely winding tour through the hills of the Emilia-Romagna region. I was dropped off on the east side of the city, not far from the address Sergio had shared with me, promising that his writer friend Maurizio Maldini would offer a warm welcome and interesting conversation. 

Maurizio, better known as Diddo, was actively involved in Bologna’s leftist movement. He had edited poetry manifestos for the Antiterrorism Congress held earlier that month on the first anniversary of the 1980 neo-fascist bombing of the Bologna Centrale train station that killed 85 people and wounded over 200 others. He also edited a broadside series called La Cartana degl’Influssi and an arts-and-politics magazine called Il Cerchio di Gesso.[1] The latter title referred to the chalk outline drawn around a body by police homicide investigators, specifically the chalk drawing of the student protester killed by Bologna police on March 11, 1977.[2] I was impressed by Diddo’s commitment – instead of identifying as un poeta, he referred to himself as un operaio dei paroli.[3]

Bologna and its environs had long been a stronghold of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), whose membership was drawn from the many well-organized cooperative factories, the rich farms tended by contadini with a consciousness, and one of the best and oldest universities in Europe.[4] During World War II, PCI members had spearheaded the Italian Resistance. I went out that Saturday evening with Diddo and his friends for the Festa de l’Unita, a big PCI affair. At a bar, my new friends laughed at but joined in with a chorus of barrel-chested men and their wives as they sang at the top of their lungs “Bella Ciao” and “La Brigata Garibaldi” – anthems of the Resistance and the labor movement.

Sunday was low energy, un giorno adagio – hot, heavy, humid, overcast, reminding me of August days in Iowa, sweating with the corn. In my heart, I was on my way home to Pat, a frame of mind that can be detrimental to traveling because it distracts from the present moment. But on Monday morning I heeded the call to rise and shine with the other workers. While they were heading off to their jobs, I was starting out on mio viaggio, my journey. The destination of this leg of the trip was Kassel, West Germany, specifically the third-floor apartment of my friend Albert “Cruiser” Riesselmann, where I could rest up for a day or two and pick up the cool-weather clothing I’d stashed there in mid-July before joining Jim and Nancy on our wanderlust in the Vosges.

The hitching was laborious, but I slowly made my way north, a ride from a German family taking me to a pretty alpine village in the Val d’Adige. The valley divides two ranges of the Italian Alps of South Tyrol, where more German is spoken than Italian. The German-speakers call the little town Neumarkt; the Italian-speakers call it Egna. In both languages, the sun was shining, the air sparkled, and the mountain breezes refreshed me. Although I’d planned to spend the last of my Italian lire and stock up for the next few days, all the stores were closed. However, I did score a bunch of table grapes and some peaches from the top layer of a dumpster. I treated myself to an espresso and a gelato at an outdoor cafe, satisfying my sweet tooth while also wishing I could be sitting there with Jim, sharing the moment.

Later that afternoon I caught a lift to an area servizio, where I talked up a ride with three young German artists – through the Austrian Alps, into Deutschland, and to a tankstelle south of München as night settled in. I slept in the tall pines behind the gas station until a three a.m. rain encouraged me to move under an overhang. A morning ride from a Frankfurter businessman who, testing the wisdom of the autobahn’s unrestricted speed limit, flew through Bavaria at 150 kilometers an hour and let me off north of Nürnberg. Then a lift from a chatty police officer who put my basic Autostop Deutsch to the test. Even with my limited language skills, I could tell he was talking blather and nonsense, and by the time he dropped me off on the outskirts of Kassel, I was exhausted.

I caught a tram to Goethestrasse 34, a four-story baroque apartment building in tan and red brick, and found the key Albert kept under the flowerpot. He had gone off to Portugal but left a jar of peanut butter, so I settled in for a quiet evening, slipping out only to visit the vending machine on the corner where I could buy a half-liter of good German pilsener at any hour. During my travels, I always carried a book that, when I finished it, I’d exchange for another at the first used book store I happened upon. That night, I read the last pages of Volume I of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, entranced by her perceptive insights about men and women, a far cry from the annoying pronouncements of Norman Mailer, whose biography of Marilyn Monroe I’d read most of while staying with Diddo in Bologna.

Kassel is a typical central German city, heavy on manufacturing, with a large university established just ten years earlier. During World War II, it was the home to factories churning out tanks and other armaments, and Allied bombing raids destroyed 90 percent of its urban center. I stayed long enough to get a good night’s sleep, exchange a traveler’s check for some D-marks and Dutch guilders, and do a bit of grocery shopping. I caught hitches that took me through the industrialized and blackened heart of Germany as far as a tankstelle near Münster, where I slept in an A-frame autobahn kapelle lit by candles.[5] The next morning was foggy and cold, but a series of rides eventually took me to Dam Square in the heart of Amsterdam. I quickly caught the free ferry across the harbor to Amsterdam-Noord and the Vliegenbos campground.

I set up my tent – two water-repellent Army-issue ponchos that I snapped together and suspended between a tree and a fencepost, using the ponchos’ grommets and some rope, a makeshift arrangement that never led other campers to assume I was a child of the Affluent States of America. After dinner, I returned to Amsterdam and wandered its streets, enjoying the spectacles. In Dam Square, a drag queen or trans woman billed as Fabiola, painted and dressed in silver with a transparent cape-wrap and eight-inch-high platform shoes, posed on a stage and fanned themself and presided like a queen. In Leidseplein, two Brits walked on broken glass and performed other hair-raising acts involving petrol and fire. Also in Leidseplein, three performers identified by signs offered surreal street theatre – the “grootmoeder” pushed the “kind” around the square in a three-wheeled chair while the “moeder” held an umbrella over them, all the while smiling, nodding, and staring blankly at onlookers.

The next morning I went to the flea market at Waterlooplein, a wonderful mélange of trinkets and junk, used clothing, and beautiful imported handcrafts, where I found another cowrie shell necklace to replace the one I’d lost. I discovered an English-language bookstore and exchanged the copy of Coyote’s Journal #9 I’d bought in Firenze for the Penguin edition of The Travels of Marco Polo, getting a good deal because the owner was a fan of Gary Snyder. Reading the opening pages on a bench beside one of Amsterdam’s canals, I was knocked out by its portrayal of old distant worlds. I spent a couple hours in the Van Gogh Museum before returning to my camp for dinner, afterward smoking hash with the French kids living next to me and then reading and writing until dark.

I took my time packing up and moving on the next day, but the hitches came easily. To Breda with a Dutch guy just returned from West Africa, to Roosendaal with a Moroccan who let me brush the rust off my langue française, and to Antwerp with an Aussie driving a rental car. In the heart of the Dutch-speaking Flemish region of Belgium, Antwerpen was hopping on a Friday afternoon – a military parade and martial music in one square, dramatic performances on a stage in another, and a street carnival later that evening, all part of a festival celebrating the city’s heritage. At one point, to escape the tumult of the crowds, I turned into a quiet courtyard surrounded by five-story apartment buildings. Pure silence, lit candles in the windows, it felt like another century. I saw men in black, with long beards and sidelocks, exiting the buildings, and realized it was the end of Shabbat in a city that’s home to the second-largest Hasidic community in Europe.

The citizens of Antwerp were friendly, buying me beers when I stopped in a bar for a bite to eat. As night settled in, I slipped away to the docks by the River Scheldt, the docks of one of the largest ports in the world. I found an open-topped shipping container filled with large bags of some kind of fiber – jute or hemp, perhaps. It had been unloaded and was ready to be trucked to its final destination. Meanwhile, it would serve as an adequate tick mattress for the night.

I awoke early on Sunday morning and hiked through the city toward the road leading south to Brussels. Crossing an otherwise empty square, I happened upon the Vogelmarkt – racing and carrier pigeons, parrots and parakeets, cockatoos and canaries, all in cages and singing their hearts out, all waiting to be sold. Reflecting on the array of experiences I had partaken in, I recalled something I’d written in my journal while traveling with Jim:

Let’s drink to the hypermoment

This breath we steal

from restless air

These split-second velocities

our fingertips tingling…

Footnotes

[1] La Cartana degl’Influssi = The Map of Influences; Il Cerchio di Gesso = The Chalk Circle.

[2] For a good depiction of Italy’s Movement of 1977, read Rachel Kushner’s novel The Flamethrowers.

[3] Un operaio dei paroli = a worker of words.

[4] Contadini = farmers.

[5] Highway chapel.