The View From Castelletto

Patrick Symmes rented a stone house in Castelletto (population 4,400), an “obscure village high up in the Arda Valley” of Italy.

His goal was “to go local in every sense: language, cooking, daily life.”

This was not the region of the best known Italian cities. Neither Paris, Florence nor Venice were nearby neighbors.

The cities of this region – Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara and Ravenna – were not nearly as well known but offered “more than enough.”

Symmes summarized:

“. . . I would see Florence (the magic Italy, the famous Italy). . . amid roaring buses, be elbowed off the tiny sidewalks . . . and have my pockets cleaned out by the exorbitant fees for museums and meals that came with free jostling. In Parma, by contrast, we had our own little Italy almost to ourselves.”

And then there’s Ravenna:

Symmes had “seen Roman and Byzantine mosaics in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon. But the art of stone tiling reached its zenith here, in glittering works of gold and blue that put even Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to shame. In Ravenna, we devoured the famous portraiture in stone of the Basilica di Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo and the tiny but stunning mausoleum of Galla Placidia.”

Such experiences enhance the appreciation of the beauty to be found in the smaller, less well known places – and revive the meaning of Goethe’s description in 1786 of the “lovely great depopulated” Ferrara.

To read Patrick Symmes' excellent article in its entirety: Conde Nast Traveler, September 2009, p. 155.