Pella, Lake Orta
In Return to Valetto, Dominic Smith invents a character who specialises in abandonment.
‘This has always been my quip at academic conferences and faculty gatherings, but it wasn’t until I published a book about vanishing Italian towns that people realised how serious I was.’
That’s Hugh Fisher speaking. He’s a historian who spent childhood summers in Umbria. His aunts and grandmother are among the handful of people who still live in Valetto but there hasn’t been a shop or restaurant in town since 1971, the year an earthquake swallowed homes, businesses, lives.
‘The few tourists who come stay for an hour. They eat sandwiches and apples from their knapsacks, take pictures of the stray cats and the spiral staircase that ends in dead air, and then leave forever.’
Hugh spent many summers researching his book:
‘From Craco in the south, to the hillsides of Umbria and northern Piedmont, I’d walked along empty cobblestone streets and overgrown trails, taking photographs and interviewing current and former residents, including my aunts and my grandmother. And although the towns and villages all had their own abandonment stories - landslides, earthquakes, the ravages of time and urbanisation - there was always somebody who dreamed of a comeback, a return. That hope, however naïve, is perhaps what drew me to these desolate places to begin with: the heroic idea of going up against history.’
You can see how well Dominic Smith sets-up his story. We soon discover that Hugh Fisher has issues relating to abandonment. His family does too. Some of these issues are recent, some reach back to times past, to before, during and immediately after the war.
I’m two thirds of the way into this book. It’s so good I could keep quoting passages from it and up-load a few of my own pics from Umbria and Piedmont and congratulate myself on the best post yet.
It’s a real treat to read a book as good as Return to Valletto, and to travel in the vicinity.
I was surprised to come across abandonment in the towns on the shores of Lake Orta. I’d assumed the wealth and tourist traffic that floods nearby Lake Como would course through Lake Orta as well.
But the first thing I see when we arrive in Pella, a small town with a peerless view of Isola San Guilio, is an abandoned waterfront villa with a top floor loggia. It’s for sale. And of course I dream of the villa’s comeback. I want to sacrifice my retirement savings and turn this abandoned building into a writer’s retreat. We’d have writers in residence, aperitivi at sunset, then grilled sea bass at Imbarcadero, the wharf-side restaurant a whisper away, where two brothers weave their Piedmont magic.
Hugh Fisher’s fascination with the (im)possibility of a comeback speaks directly to many readers, myself included.
I don’t know yet how his story ends, just as none of us know the end of our own. But for some time now I’ve been carrying in my head a few words a North Shore psych once said about my hope of being a father and the way that came to fruition, then crumbled like an abandoned villa.
Naïve, he said. Amongst other things. Then charged $10k for the diagnosis. I might’ve re-wired the villa for that, or at least found a psych more like Vaclav Havel, who told Esquire: ‘Either we have hope or we don't. Hope is not the same as joy when things are going well, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It's not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.’
More than seven years later, I’m glad to have met Hugh Fisher and to have entered his world of abandoned towns. I’m glad to hear Hugh say there’s always somebody in those towns who dreams of a comeback. Because whether they’re naïve or not, restoration dreams keep us going. And I’m not talking real estate. Well, not only.
Before we left Pella this morning, I took a few more photos of our imagined writer’s retreat and a few other old stones neatly assembled, and quietly said: someone will come along soon.
