‘What a Language, What Girls, What Wine!’: Herbert In Italy
‘We really don't know what is better: the fate of a beggar in Spoleto or the fate of a valued poet on the Vistula’, Zbigniew Herbert commented somewhat jokingly during his first visit to Italy.
When he sent the letter with this statement to his parents, he was 35 years old and had two volumes of poems to his literary credit, which were indeed very well received ‘on the Vistula’. He was able to leave Poland thanks to the political ‘thaw’ – the easing of terror in the Soviet Union and its subordinate countries in Central Europe – that began after Stalin's death. When he was heading from grey Warsaw, battered by war and communism, to Paris, where he made a pilgrimage to the Louvre, to face the Mona Lisa, he felt like a representative of the ‘lesser’ part of the continent, damaged by history, but also – despite everything – like the heir of Greco-Roman civilization, completely different from Russia, as he believed, which was Asian and foreign to Europe.
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Spoleto, photo: Aleksei Smyshliaev / Getty Images
Thanks to the help of friends in the Polish émigré community, he was also able to visit Italy in the late spring of 1959, arriving in Spoleto its Festival dei Due Mondi. This festival was inaugurated by the composer Gian Carlo Menotti and intended as a meeting of European and American cultures, which also had political significance in the Cold War world. The guests included Louis Armstrong and Luchino Visconti, while Herbert – then still completely unknown to non-Polish readers – was only a spectator, but he enjoyed these days to the fullest, tasting wine, flirting with girls and above all celebrating just being in the country of Petrarch and Dante, as he writes to his older friend, poet and future Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz: ‘I am in Italy, that is, on my knees at the fount’; ‘I’m all swollen with happiness’, in the letter to his parents already quoted, he says, ‘It’s so frightfully beautiful here that I’m afraid to move vigorously for fear it will all shatter like a dream’. He is seduced by the Umbrian landscape, the arch of the Roman aqueduct and the frescoes of Fra Filippo Lippi but also by the famous Italian joy of life, the hospitality and spontaneity of the inhabitants of Spoleto, even the melody of their speech. No wonder the letter is full of exclamation marks: ‘What a language, what girls, what wine’…
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Commemorative plaque at Albergo Tre Donzelle, Siena, photo: Booking.com
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After the festival, he undertakes further escapades, and it is during this first journey that he makes it to Monterchi, Arezzo and Sansepolcro [formerly Borgo Santo Sepolcro, ed], and he does so, of course, because of Piero della Francesca so as to later see in his Resurrection a Christ with ‘the abyssal eyes of Dionysus’); he visits Naples, Paestum, Rome, Florence, Venice, Ravenna, Orvieto, San Gimignano, Perugia, Assisi and finally Siena, where he lives at the Albergo Tre Donzelle, today bearing a commemorative plaque on its facade. It can be added that, at least in Tuscany, he traveled partly in the footsteps of other Polish writers, the above-mentioned Miłosz or Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who also received a commemorative plaque in Italy – on the wall of one of the tenement houses in San Gimignano.
Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Barbarian in the Garden’, photo: Czytelnik The fruit of these days was a collection of essays published in Poland in 1962 with the symbolic title Barbarzyńca w ogrodzie (The Barbarian in the Garden), in which Herbert included, among others, a sketch about Signorelli’s frescoes in the Orvieto cathedral, as well as a story about Siena, the most important Italian city for him at that time. Being a keen and sensitive observer, Herbert’s sketches are far from both touristic banality and pedantic antiquarianism. He describes the history of the city, especially its lost rivalry with Florence (discreetly making it clear that, as a Pole, he is closer to the fate of those who failed), and talks sympathetically about the unfulfilled idea of building the largest temple in Europe there, a plan whose only trace is the lonely fragment of a wall, a window overlooking the void. He reconstructs the history of Sienese painting, admiring Duccio, whom, contrary to official hierarchies, he appraises higher than Giotto, just as he elevates the ‘masculine’ and determined Signorelli above the refined Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel. He explains to the reader what il Palio is – a traditional horse race on the Sienese campo, which in turn is considered one of the most beautiful squares in the world. But he also recounts how he reverently drinks a glass of Chianti to recapture ‘the smell of mammola – a bouquet of violets’ and ‘the fragrance of ripe grapes and earth’. And finally, he regards the people he meets in Siena, talks to them, looks at them, as he puts it, sometimes ‘ironically, but with love’.
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Piazza del Campo, Siena, photo: Pol Albarran / Getty Images
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From the beginning of the 1960s, Zbigniew Herbert’s life had a nervous rhythm in which shorter or longer stays in Poland alternated with (sometimes long-term) trips to Austria, West Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States. Translated into English and German, liked and even admired by Western readers, Herbert received honoraria and awards and won scholarships, most often spending them on further travels to Greece and the Netherlands (to which countries he would devote separate volumes of essays) and, of course, to Italy.
Although his youth, which was at least partly joyful, gave way to a difficult, sometimes even dramatic maturity – marked both by the painful history of Poland and, even more so, by bouts of severe personal depression – travels always helped him escape demons and dig himself out of despair – especially perhaps his trips to Italy, during which he could say with relief that once again he ‘got some sun and sea and refreshed his eyes with good paintings’. So he went on pilgrimage with a bouquet of violets to the grave of Shakespeare’s Juliet in Verona and discovered further painting fascinations – for example, by fighting for historians to appreciate the achievements of Altichiero, the thirteenth-century painter of frescoes in Padua. He described one of the most beautiful episodes of these journeys, a visit to an open-air performance of the opera Turandot, in a letter to his wife:
It is a moving spectacle, especially if you buy cheaper tickets and sit among Italians who are simple workers. A large bottle of white wine passes from hand to hand. I was also drinking (a little) with the man sitting next to me, Massimo, who was singing along, nudging me with his elbow every now and then, making comments such as ‘look at the breasts on that singer’, and at the end, all those around me went crazy with enthusiasm and roared at the singer with those breasts: Io voglio per te morire! [I want to die for you!]
Reconstructing Herbert’s Italian travels precisely would give us a spider’s web connecting what were most likely all the most important cities of this country and also marking the thousands of kilometres travelled by trains. To the places already mentioned, we should add Lucca, Pisa and its wonderful Campo Santo or Milan, where the Polish poet lived at the home of his friend, the essayist Francesco Catalluccio. Some of these places would find their way into Herbert’s poems – for example, the small Rovigo, of which the writer only knew the railway station with the signs ‘arrivi – partenze’ [arrivals – departures] but which, precisely for this reason, became a symbol for him of the mystery of fate, of its other line, which it was now too late to choose. Or Ferrara, both the ‘real’ one and the one known from Renaissance paintings, which reminds Herbert of the city of his childhood, Lviv, lost by Poland and over which clouds glide majestically. In their shadow, the poet would portray himself as both ‘delighted’ and ‘tormented by the beauty of the world’.
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Piza, Camposanto Monumentale, photo: Atlantide Phototravel / Getty Images
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At the end of his life, Zbigniew Herbert, seriously ill and immobilized in Warsaw, would dream of an ‘old stone’ house in Spoleto. Two months before his death, he’d plan a trip to Venice – a journey, or rather a last escape, intended to mislead the pain that was fiercely pursuing him. He could then remember the sentence with which he had closed the story of a few days spent in Siena more than thirty years earlier: ‘If I weren’t afraid of this word, I would say that I was happy’.
