How Renaissance came to be, part II

(Continued from Part I: https://susanfishwrites.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/how-renaissance-came-to-be-part-i/)

My husband and I have three school-aged children and he has an impending sabbatical and we have saved funds to go somewhere. It’s 2009. We consider taking the kids to Africa and no one wants us there. It is a beautiful big world and we are eager to see it but we also struggle to choose where to go – Paris? Portugal? Kenya? Oxford? I am mowing the front lawn of our suburban home when I think to myself: Florence. It is as though a key turns in a lock. We decide we will take the kids on a Western Canada road trip to see the Pacific and the Rockies, but first we will travel without them for ten days in Italy.

We take eight weeks of Italian classes. Our fellow classmates all have Italian nonnas they want to converse with but I say that we are going to Italy in March and we want to be fluent. Our instructor laughs. I mispronounce gnocchi, which is a word that’s used in English, and I become fairly invested in the family of Signor Bianchi who are the characters of our Italian lessons.

Like Liz, we stay with the Sisters of Stability and Charity at a convent that used to be owned by a friend of Galileo’s and about which there is a story about Mussolini. We arrive terribly jetlagged and discover that Italian fluency would have been an excellent asset – that the nuns who conversed with us in broken English emails actually farmed out the communication to their once-a-week handyman. We muddle through conversation with smiles and gestures and eight weeks of Italian lessons. They have not one word of English.

My husband takes the stairs but one of the nuns and I climb into a miniscule wood-paneled elevator with our belongings. On the second floor of the convent we are shown into a room with twin beds and shuttered windows. There are no pictures on the wall. When we throw open the shutters, a la Lucy Honeychurch, it is indeed a room with a view. Our view is that of a hillside of olive trees and a tunnel of tall cypresses. Somewhere on the property is a glycine – a wisteria bush that is a thousand years old, we are told, although we are not there to see it bloom. I sit in the garden one day and watch tiny lizards scurry across the gravel.

We take the bus into town – we are in the hills on the Oltrarno on the edge of the city. We walk into Santa Croce and to the fountain where Lucy saw the Italian stabbed, and across the Arno where she threw her blood-stained postcards. We travel outside the city with a woman who offers pasta-making classes and who offers us red wine so fresh it makes our teeth squeak. We trade – as arranged ahead of time – a litre of maple syrup for a litre of olive oil, and all of us are satisfied with the arrangement.

We rent a car and drive to Parma for the simple reason that it is the home of Parmesan cheese, a substance that likely composes about 18% of my body. There we see North African prostitutes along the side of a rural road, a truck bypass. I feel sick at this. We drive about past a range of castles built as a line of defense by a true Renaissance woman of the medieval period. We drink potent alcohol in Modena with a colleague of my husband’s who lives there. Later we take the train to Rome which refuses to welcome me. It is smelly and there is a McDonalds, and while I know my art history, I don’t know my Roman history, other than to know that Christians were killed for sport and suppression in the Colosseum. What we see at the Colosseum is a costumed interpreter in full Roman regalia, texting on his phone.

Several years later, as I’m beginning the anticipatory grief of our kids leaving home – as an aside, after our eldest was born, the subject of my hormonal sobbing was the fact that “someday he will grow up and leave us” – I began to noodle around the idea of a novel set in Florence. I had just finished writing another novel. That novel involved a woman who was suddenly widowed and who became an environmental activist. Readers of that novel would often assume I had myself been widowed or that I was also such an activist; neither is true. But the emotions? Ah, the emotions were all very familiar to me. At the time I wrote that novel, my beloved grandmother was in her last months and I was learning my first experience of grief. That novel helped me through that experience, but it also went in all sorts of directions my life never had.

I began imagining a novel that was basically about Lucy Honeychurch at 50, deciding to approach the experience as a chance to do something she’d always wanted to do, to visit Florence on her own. I wrote a number of scenes, and some of them are in Renaissance now, but to be honest it was a bit mopey and indulgent, closer to therapy than fiction. At the same time, I embarked on a non-fiction project, reading and interviewing people about the process of children leaving home.

And then we had a series of family events that involved layers of trauma. The trauma we faced was not in the same ballpark at all as those in Renaissance, but just as with my widow novel where I drew on all the feelings of my own experience, so I began to imagine a character who was not going to Italy because it was pleasant and indulgent but because she had to get out, because she had been deeply wounded and was in need of healing.

This was no longer Lucy Honeychurch at midlife. Neither was it me. But she was someone who needed a rebirth. Her last name, Fane, is one I’ve encountered in Waterloo Region where both Liz and I live, but it’s also an archaic word taken from the Latin fanum, meaning temple or place dedicated to a deity. I meant that to be an oblique homage to Honeychurch. Her first name, Elizabeth, ties in with the character of Elizabeth in the Bible, the older woman who mothers the newly pregnant Mary, the woman who carries unexpected new life in her at an advanced age.

To be continued in part III