Suddenly I remembered a holiday from thirty years back. Our local church had organized a trip to Thassos during the summer holidays and we travelled to Greece by train. A journey that took three days during the hottest time of the year. In those days trains had no air conditioning, nor did they have today’s sleeper cars; and at the end of the journey the toilets were so soiled they were hardly usable anymore. Nonetheless I remember this journey as one of the happiest I‘ve ever been on.
It was sweltering hot outside during those three days and we often stood at the window – like my daughter and me now – to get a bit of a breeze. Outside a seemingly endless procession of green and golden yellow fields (of what was then Yugoslavia) rolled by. During this journey I began to equate summer with a sense of freedom and a serene carefreeness.
For me this feeling is strongly (although not exclusively) tied with Italy. I was four years old when I went to Italy for the first time. My mother wanted to study for some exam during the holidays and going to Italy was both cheaper and more convenient than holidaying at home, since Italian hotels offered some entertainment for children. I remember very little about this holiday but some of my experiences have remained with me. There are a couple of photos of me where I don’t seem to be aware of being photographed, because I was so intent on swimming and jumping off the diving board. The joy of swimming was a real discovery for me and to this day I love to swim. My mother also took a photo of the fully laid tables in our hotel. For years after I couldn’t look at that photo without immediately remembering the scent of the bottles of oil and vinegar that stood on every table. And I can still picture the plate with the minestrone we often got for dinner, and the fruit salad which they invariably served for dessert. Since then the Mediterranean Cuisine is inseparably linked to summer for me (as it probably is for countless tourists).
During my time as an au pair in Rome my host family spent the last few weeks of my stay in Anzio. Ten people squeezed into a smallish four room holiday apartment. My mother was shocked when she came to visit me for a day. But I was very happy there. The flat was sparsely furnished, but no-one, including me, seemed to miss anything. I spent a large part of the day with the children on the beach and got to know the routines of the holidaying Italians. Most of the people on our beach were from Rome. They had been renting the same umbrella and sun loungers for years and knew each other well. There seemed to be few foreign tourists on our stretch and the ones that did appear, often unintentionally broke the unwritten rules. Once, for example, two Swedish women sunned themselves topless. People disapproved and I felt slightly offended, because they immediately assumed that the women were German.
My work with the children meant I had a fixed routine and to my surprise I quickly got used to spending a large part of the day in a bathing suit. I secretly envied a couple of the Italian girls, real beauties, who seemed to have a whole range of fashionable bathing suits. I only had one of my mother’s (it looked ok). After a while I began to love the pleasantly laid back life at the beach. The ancient hit Sapore di Sale by Gino Paoli describes that particular atmosphere very well. With few words and a simple catchy melody, Paoli manages to convey everything: the mediterraenean leisure, the heat, the sparkling sea, the sexual tension and a certain melancholy. Different, because it’s set in the American South, yet not dissimilar, because it also re-creates the mood of summer so well is the wonderful Summertime.
Have a good summer.