An Armful of.

Bougainvillea.

Capri.

But is it really we who are approaching the island, or is the island, having broken loose from its granite moorings, moving toward us?

-ALBERTO SAVINIO.

"The kingdom of Capri," I say to Ed. He's leaning on the ferry rail, taking in the first close glimpses of the mythic island's sheer cliffs.

"I'm listening for the Sirens' song."

"You have to be a poet to imagine that," I answer, looking around at the crude churning bucket we're on, with its load of fellow travellers. I point to white villas with domed roofs and bright boats along the coast.

"Water is probably scarce. The domes channel it to a cistern."

With the others, we thunder off the ferry from Ischia, where we have spent three sybaritic days soaking in the volcanic thermal pools and eating grilled fish with lemon. I approach Capri with some apprehension. The island's reputation does not entice-posing glitterati flashing megawatt smiles as flashbulbs pop, international lounge lizards sipping prosecco in the piazza, and yacht owners parading their nubile companions through shops that sell only about ten items, size zero, all priced to impress. Then, worse, the disturbing sequence of northern European pederasts who preyed on local boys. Some of these decadents' actions are affectionately recorded in local writing, which just ill.u.s.trates the Italian ability to isolate and ignore the elephant in the living room, preferring to focus on the view and what's served at the table. Maybe this talent contributes to their quality of being the most flexible people on earth.

The early history, too, is blotted by the sway of Tiberius, one of the ugliest of the Romans, who built a splendid villa. Some say the whole island was his villa. He often flung those who displeased him from the cliffs. And of course, the Sirens. Easy to see how a ship could crack up on the rocks, song or no song. "I wish I didn't know anything about that pedophiliac revel that went on for years. I wish I could approach Capri as an earthly paradise."

"Paradise will always be full of fools, my love."

"But that's my most unfavorite kind of kinky. And Norman Douglas-one of the grossest-was a superb travel writer. Remember I took his Old Calabria when we went there? He looked for the heart of a place. Civilized, erudite, curious . . ."

"Just think of him as an old pagan. The G.o.ds always sported with anything that took their fancy."

I am offered a paper cone of green grapes at the marina. As always in Italy, the disconcerting touch of the personal, even in unlikely moments. The waiting taxis set a mood-white convertibles, low and slinky, ready to whisk you off to the upper echelon of the island, the tiny village of Anacapri. "They're Fiat Mareas," Ed says, "built especially for Capri. So nice! Marea means 'tide.'"

We are staying in the village below, where no cars are allowed. A man with a handcart takes away our luggage and sets off at a canter toward the hotel. We walk behind our porter and see no Jackie O, no Gina L., no latter-day sirens at all in the piazza. Soon we're following him along the swerves of a winding flowery path with glimpses of the divine sea. No wonder we all swarm off the ferries. No wonder the most glamorous seek this place. No wonder Shirley Hazzard and Graham Greene and Arshile Gorky secluded themselves here for years. For working on a creative project, to be buoyed by the blissful climate must impart a G.o.dlike joy. Waking to the scent of orange blossoms on the air and the temperature that says, You're mine, don't worry, I always will caress you like this-the book or the painting must thrive. The air alone immediately makes me feel rocked in the cradle. I have come to explore this little kingdom, to escape the intricacies of house restoration, and to seek as many shades of blue as the sky and sea can offer. Ed wants to reread Homer, continue his eternal study of the past remote tense in Italian, and write poems. What a luxury. Capri, a place to hide.

We have spent, not enough, but a lot of time in the South of Italy in recent years. The constant presence of the sea, the Greek profiles and eyes, the robust cuisine, and the brink-of-chaos atmosphere appeal to me deeply. Even the refined and educated people have time to give you, not just those you encounter on daily rounds. Days in the South seem long. Nights seem longer. In the South I begin to feel that eternity takes place in one lifetime.

Last May we sailed from Naples to Sicily, then around the boot and up to Venice, with stops in Sorrento, Taromina, Gallipoli, Lecce, Brindisi, Pescara, and Ravenna, disembarking in Venice during a high-water siege. Naples has become a spiritual home. Our first trip south was in the company of our friend from Cortona, Ann Cornelisen, whose Torregreca and Women of the Shadows I consider cla.s.sics. What better person to introduce her loved Tricarico (the town she called Torregreca in her writing), the conical houses of Puglia, the castles of Frederick I, and the austere, time-broken villages of the countryside? During her years of living in the South, Ann absorbed the austerity, or more likely, she took that trait with her when she settled there and found herself profoundly at home. Her move north was a mistake. She thought she wanted a comfortable place to write, but she never identified with the more gentrified Tuscan country life. One side of her austerity was a scrupulous splitting of expenses, down to cups of coffee. She also refused to cotton to the heat. Her car was not air-conditioned, and the summer days were brutal. In awe of her self-denial, I didn't murmur a single complaint. Ed drove; Ann navigated. I was wedged into the backseat with the hot wind from the front seat's windows blasting into my face. For days. Still, the nights were cool and the stories were good.

If I were young, I'd probably up and move to the less-charted, more raucous South. As I am, though, I keep the place as a dream and drop into the reality as often as I can. In less than an hour I already am thinking: Capri may be where dream and reality anneal.

As soon as we check in and leave the bags, we're out in the early October morning. It's seventy-five degrees and cloudless. The shining dome of sky over us resembles an inverted glazed, cobalt, china teacup. On the island's maze of cunning paths, soon we're on not a walk but a hike, down, down, down. We reach a precipice-I can see that precipice is a word I am going to be saying over and over-overlooking a cove that lures you to take a big dive. On a sailboat anch.o.r.ed near rocks, people are clinking gla.s.ses and propping up their tanned legs. The striated blues bring my loyalty for blue back to Italy from Greece. The colors of the water remind me of some of my favorite flowers-lobelia, delphinium, and a particular pansy the color of the sky on a starry night.

The upward return completely takes my breath-over and over I have to pause. My Achilles tendons feel like the beef jerky bones that dogs love to chew. I may wheeze. "We're climbing Mont Blanc ten times." My lungs are little hot-air balloons about to burst against my ribs. Going down did not seem so vertical; going up I am suddenly a hundred years old. Ed's long-ago summers spent hiking and camping in the Rockies give him stamina I never had. He ascends like a mountain goat.

On Capri they actually serve caprese, that simple marvel of basil, mozzarella, and tomatoes. And the three textures set the bar because the basil is pungent, the mozzarella fresh from Naples, and the tomatoes grow in the magic soil on the volcanic slope of Vesuvius, which gives them a voluptuous taste. We have lunch by the hotel pool: good bread, caprese, a plate of prosciutto and melon. Basta! Our room at the Scalinatella opens to a terrace overlooking the sea. The room is cool with marble floors, icy colors, gla.s.s tables, and a grand sense of s.p.a.ce. I remember a hotel room in New York where I stayed on a book tour. The bed barely fit within the four walls, and I left with a sc.r.a.ped shin from scuttling crab-style around it and my luggage. Here we could dance. I should be wearing silver lame to dinner. Instead, I am soaking my poor feet in the bidet with a vial of bath gel.

Ed has opened a sweetly sharp white wine and pours a taste of the crags and minerals of this terra into a gla.s.s. We're wrapped in the hotel robes, for a little chill has come in with the evening. A seagull lands on the terrace, eyeing our wine and maybe us. I read that the sea is seriously overfished and gulls get vicious when they come up empty from their dives. For one with a bird phobia-me, for example-a vicious gull is equivalent to a normal person's mugger. Ed waves his arms and says, "Shoo," but the bird only glares and flaps his-my G.o.d-considerable wings. Don't mess with me, it croaks. "Weren't the Sirens half birds?" I ask with a shudder.

"Yes, bottom half."

The sunset tunes high notes of tangerine and rose, followed by throaty ba.s.s notes of indigo and grapey purple. Where shall we dine? My favorite question. We unpack completely in order to more easily pretend that we are living here. Two bathrooms, I like that. I paint my toenails a color called Your Villa or Mine and let them dry while I have another splash of the wine and the sea turns the splotched purple of a fresh bruise. My pomegranate silk pants and shirt are not too wrinkled. We go off in search of pasta with clams.

Early morning, out the door. How simple life is. Houses offering views of the ideal life-long walks with silence, with mesmerizing scents of flowers, swims in a transparent sea layered with emerald, lapis, turquoise water. A house with a terrace over this sea must be the ideal dwelling. Axel Munthe, a Swedish doctor whose villa and garden are open to visitors, wrote about coming to Capri: What daring dream had made my heart beat so violently a moment ago when Mastro Vincenzo had told me that he was getting old and tired, and that his son wanted him to sell his house? What wild thoughts had flashed through my boisterous brain when he had said that the chapel belonged to n.o.body? Why not to me? Why should I not buy Mastro Vincenzo's house and join the chapel and the house with garlands of vines and cypresses and columns supporting white loggias.

I recognize the impulse. Why not, indeed.

Capri must be the most captivating, stupendously beautiful, felicitous place on the planet-but also the most haunted. The plumb-line cliffs inspire vertigo in the happiest person; for the disturbed or depressed, they must lure with a promise of oblivion into beauty. And the history of locals and visitors who simply disappear one day adds to the mysterious magnetic pull of the edge. Of the many, many edges. I am surprised to feel that Capri retains some whiff of ancient mythological origins. Hidden coves, grottoes, dramatic landscape, ruins-all these suggest primal spirits, G.o.ds, omens. At the Grotta delle Felci, locals swear they hear the breath of a buried prehistoric creature, ghosts of Saracens who raided the coast for centuries, or perhaps souls still tormented by suicide or execution. In Capri and No Longer Capri, Raffaele La Capria describes groups going at night to listen to an anguished sigh emanating from the earth. From his terrace nearby, he senses "the bewitched atmosphere that at times the nights of Capri exhale . . . and I await the arrival of the great sigh that the people call il fiatone, the big breath."

Other places have secret grottoes and ravines and tormentors in their pasts, but only here have I actually felt a strange presence of forces. Any sense of place, sense of home on Capri, must have a taproot reaching back to the Sirens' song. But pushing farther, why were the Sirens singing on these rocks? Why here?

Lentisk, p.r.i.c.kly pear, pine, asphodel, myrtle. Perhaps they were planted by the G.o.ds. On Capri, by fortunate fluke, you're out in the Tyrrhenian Sea, riding a rocky fortress, away, lost, in a chosen paradiso but one that-surprise!-gives you the melancholy perspective of the outsider. Islands do that. With the mainland in view-Naples and the Sorrento peninsula-you see daily the fact of isolation. I think six months here would change me completely. I might emerge, finally, as a disciplined writer. I would certainly emerge with iron calf muscles. The outsider's solitude and loneliness breed fantasy. Could not a sea monster arise from the waves, the ghosts of all those women abducted by pirates not cry out from the rocks? Maybe I would finish my abandoned long poem.

With the designer shops-che bella that cashmere blanket-and the luxuries of the Quisisana (Here One Heals) Hotel, the twilight Campari in the piazza, you can drift right through. A gla.s.s of limoncello at midnight and off to dreamland. But if you stay away from the centro and walk all over the island, the complexity and deeper beauty reveal themselves.

Mornings settle into a pattern-an early walk followed by a cornetto and cappuccino in the piazza. I'm surprised at how few tourists are here. I know that in summer this piazza pulsates with the northern nationalities. Americans don't come as much anymore, scared off by the island's reputation for being spoiled by the likes of us. When the first ferry empties a group of bare-chested men, women in shorts that cannot cover the subject, and a bewildered group of ancients in identical baseball caps, we flee before they reach the piazza. If they are American, I do not want to know it. I think of an English friend's remark, "The human on holiday is a sad affair."

We walk. Of all the books and articles I've read, not one has said that Capri is stupendous for those who like to see on foot. We're walking all over the island. The tiny lanes must be former donkey paths. Palm, mimosa, olive, dried fennel stalks, laurel. We meet few others, and of course no cars. Like Venice, Capri is jammed only in the center; strike out, and the place offers solitude. We spend hours in the library at the Certosa di San Giacomo, the Carthusian monastery. The young man who works there brings out ancient books bound in vellum and first editions of Norman Douglas's Siren Land, long out of print. He shows us watercolors by artists who've visited the island.

In the bookstore in town, we talk to a woman who has lived all her life on Capri. She says Tiberius has been refurbished; he had good traits after all, and that Krupp-of the bomb and coffeepot family-definitely was misjudged. There is no proof at all that he diddled little boys, not her words, and his suicide over the accusations was a tragedy because he loved the local people. We'd noticed a vicolo with his name. But Fersen, the Frenchman-well, that is another story; yes, he lived with a fifteen-year-old Roman boy. The opium parlor at his house . . . She moves on to the Scottish writer Compton MacKenzie, also ahead of his time in kiddie p.o.r.n, and I tune out. Ed switches the subject by asking, "What are your favorite restaurants?" Since I've been here, I have come to realize that the decadence of these men had more to do with who they were in the repressive countries they were escaping than with Capri itself. The tragic slant, to me, is that island families sometimes encouraged their boys to make liaisons with the sugar daddies. And that speaks more to the poverty of their expectations for their sons than to their approval of s.e.x with old roosters. The writer I admire, Norman Douglas, at eighty, with his thirteen-year-old boyfriend. How t.i.tillating. The knowledge taints, when really these perverts are no more than small gargoyles on the rocky cathedral Capri.

I reread instead Greene on Capri, less for what Shirley Hazzard has to say about her friend Graham Greene than to learn what kind of writer she is, and how she quietly goes about crafting her fine novels. Her intense sense of Capri, the enchanting place, comes clearly through.

Afternoons, we retreat to our serene chamber above the sea. Ed reads about the flora of the island and the small blue lizards found only on the Faraglioni, the prominent offsh.o.r.e rocks where the surf perpetually fizzes.

Another walk, out to the ruins of the mean Tiberius's villa, scattered over a vast area of primo real estate. How can the paths be so endless, when the island measures only four miles long and two miles wide? One of Capri's primordial appeals must be the scale. In a lifetime you could know the island as well as you know the loved one's body. Know each carob, every stone wall with dangling capers, all outbreaks of yellow broom, all caves and coves.

The Italian custom of naming their homes has a mysterious aspect. A house named becomes more of an ent.i.ty. The name becomes its fate and charm. All over the island owners have designed individual name tiles for the gates of their houses. I take photos of the tiles of Casa Mandorla (Almond House), La Veronica with a spray of flowers, Casa Amore e Musica (House of Love and Music), La Falconetta (The Little Falcon Roost), L'Aranceto (The Little Orange Grove), La Raffica (The Squall) with its boat, La Primavera with birds, L'Agrumeto di Gigi (Gigi's Citrus Grove), Casa Serena with facing dolphins, La Melagrana surrounded by pomegranates, and Casa Solatia (Sunny House). We glimpse columned pergolas tangled with roses and wisteria, kitchen gardens, and shady terraces where cats sleep among geranium pots. Simplicity shines from these essential island homes. Move in, and soon you would be painting the walls blue, setting a pot of basil by the door to keep out the bugs, and napping away the hot hours under a grape arbor.

Along the walk we meet a group of six women holding paper plates piled with red rose petals. A bride is expected soon, and they are out to strew her path. They joke that we are the bride and groom. They have vibrant faces. I would like to stay with them all day.

Something ugly becomes apparent at this divine hotel. On the stairs to our room, I look and look again at a bronze bust. "Is that, it can't be, Mussolini?" We look more closely. Benito, why yes. Then when we're asking at the desk about the boats to the Blue Grotto, we spot a large print of his potato face again on the wall. In the peaceful garden we find a marble monument to Il Duce. What arrogance and gall. The hotel may be splendid, but this offends me. I would never again stay here or at the Quisisana, owned by the same people. If they love the fascist, fine-but please don't subject me to his mug.

The Blue Grotto. I am glad to go, just to see that particular shade of blue water. The experience requires that you suspend expectation of fresh experience because you are piled into a boat, then near the small opening into the grotto you are handed onto a smaller rowboat. Going becomes real only when you must duck, and flatten yourself across others in order to squeeze inside. We waited three days because of high seas, and this morning was still choppy. You easily could sc.r.a.pe your back. Caves give me the creeps. It's too late when I decide I don't want to go. We're all scrunched down in the boat, then suddenly we emerge inside, floating in the legendary water. And blue it is, the color of the blue band at the bottom of my computer screen. No, the blue of a damask chair at my sister's house. Or the brilliant tropical fish in my dentist's aquarium. An explanation is given: because of the angle of the small opening, the red part of the color spectrum is kept out and only blue is refracted from outside.

You must imagine, because it will not happen now, that you can row yourself into the grotto, slip over the side, and swim like a mermaid in the excited blue water with your mercurial body sending off a silvery sheen. Instead, you are uncomfortable and jammed with others, wishing they would be quiet at least, but they won't and you're in and out of there quicker than you can say "ten euros."

At last we take one of the glamorous taxis up to Anacapri. Next time I will find a hotel here. Axel Munthe's garden views stop the heart. The tunneled green paths seem familiar. We walk by a grand hotel where my sister once stayed when she was in her twenties and travelling in the Mediterranean. I would like to see her walk out the gate, her fresh laughing face, heading toward the shop where sandals will be made to measure just for her foot. For a moment I try to conjure that image into my mind. The ceramic scenes in the church beguile with their strangely mixed religious and pagan images. A big golden sun on the church floor jolts all my expectations of what I will see in a church. The walks are even more rigorous, with views across the known world, and sheer knife-pleated cliffs dropping into the sea. The mind goes plunging, happily, scarily, vertiginously. I step inside an armoire-size shop where a woman is sewing baby clothes. Soon we are talking about our families. I buy a yellow playsuit for my friend Robin's new grandchild. The woman shows me the French seams, all hand sewn with crocheted edges, like the mice's st.i.tches in The Tailor of Gloucester. She opens a cupboard and brings out christening gowns and smocked dresses. Then I notice the clippings on the wall. She has been photographed and written about in American magazines, as has everything commercial on Capri. Ed waits outside in the Piazza della Vittoria on a tile bench. He has found a gelateria and holds out his cone of pistachio, lemon, and melon. I have not seen him so relaxed in weeks.

Odd, so much said about Capri in the books I've read, and the essence missed. What comprises the essence of this place? The guidebooks don't tell me; I had to come here. The waves on the rocks tell me, the fisherman's blue shirt shouts it out, the delicate shadow of an almond tree on a white wall scrawls three reasons in black. Capri-combing the island, inhaling the sun-baked scents of wild mint and the sea, making love in a mother-of-pearl light, joking with the woman chopping weeds along her fence, memorizing a tumble of pink and apricot bougainvillea intertwining on a white wall, picnicking on a pebble beach and leaning to catch a hot grape Ed tosses toward my open mouth.

For Example.

Mantova.

Rain and fog alternate with snow and wind all the way to Mantova. Driving from Cortona, we are shocked to see, so soon, piles of snow north of Florence, and then a Christmas-card landscape. "Freakish for mid-November," Ed observes. We pa.s.s farmhouses with roofs that look frosted with boiled icing. Not-yet-picked olive trees stand in p.r.i.c.kled white fields.

As soon as we cross into Lombardia, the land flattens and the eponymous poplars appear in long windbreaks. They rise in plumes from the land where large barns catch my eye because of their brick salto di gatto, cat exit, ventilation windows. I could spend a happy week roaming the countryside photographing these patterned barn windows. The ghostly trees are mesmerizing, flashing by the window. I sink into a kind of daze thinking of Mantova, made famous by the ruling Gonzaga family's love of art. While they held sway from 1328 until 1707, they kept a coterie of artists on ladders in every room of their palaces. They left their little city to the world. Suddenly I remember Romeo. Hot for Juliet, he thundered out of Mantua (the English name) toward Verona, only twenty miles away, and with such immortal results.

Three lakes surround the city. In the 1930s, someone planted lotus along the edges, and I've read that in summer the blooms add a touch of the exotic. Pleasure boats ply the waters in warm weather, but today they are huddled at the sh.o.r.e, pelted by rain. We find our hotel easily. The lobby, all pale marble and Bauhaus leather, zings with contemporary art, but the spirit runs out on the floors above. Our room is ordinary. A salesman of machines for the vast agribusiness in the Po valley might sink onto the bed and surf the TV channels. The large painting reminds me of a blown-up Rorschach card, a smashed, magnified spider in a pool of blood. We drop our bags, take umbrellas, and walk out into the early afternoon.

That quality a homing pigeon possesses, Ed has for his bar. As soon as we land somewhere, he navigates toward what will be our destination several times a day for the duration. We always try others, but his first instinct proves right. And so we turn in to La Ducale, with their excellent coffee and pastry and an owner who p.r.o.nounces each word with the enunciation of a speech teacher. She tells us about their special chocolates flavored with black pepper, cardamom, and cinnamon, then offers a piece flavored with peperoncini, little red peppers. This, she says, stimulates amorous activities. Espresso purist that he is, Ed is lured into having his coffee with one layer of zabaglione and another of cream. Other coffees come with liqueurs or rich concoctions of orange, almond, and lemon. The owner recommends a spiced pumpkin tart. We have that and a layered chocolate meringue tart, also with zabaglione that is violently gold because of the very fresh eggs. All this before we've walked two blocks.

The compact historic center is lined with colonnaded arcaded sidewalks. The marble columns are of different orders, as though brought from various sites for new use here. The shops are small and chic, one after another, with no chain stores, no junk. The people on the street look as though they have stepped just now out of these stylish shops. We pa.s.s several made-to-measure shirt makers' windows, herbal cosmetics shops, displays of slippers of natural wool and fine linen nightgowns and comforters, many baby shops, luxurious lingerie and hosiery boutiques, and bookstores. Cooks must be happy. Gastronomie glisten with an array of salume, marmalades, vats and jars of mostarde, varieties of local rices, and chocolates from Lombardia and Piemonte. Torrefazioni send layers of roasted-coffee-bean aromas to the sidewalk, bread stores are abundant, and one has loaves like works of art. We pa.s.s several wine bars. Che elegante questa citta!

As in many Italian towns, the human scale of the buildings and the lack of cars in the centro make wandering a joy. We linger in front of the pastry shops, where we spot the treats we want to try next. An anello di monaco, monk's ring, a big cake that looks like a frosted chef's hat, looks appealing, as does the sbrisolona, a polenta and almond crumb cake usually served with a strawberry, fig, or cherry confiture. Paved with round stones, the streets and piazzas would be ankle breakers in Prada heels. In the rain they are shiny and gleaming. Little neon-green plugs of gra.s.s poke up from cracks.

Around the Piazza Broletto, presided over by Virgil who was born nearby, you can see contrasting medieval and Renaissance structures, even the revision of the former for the latter: square windows have been superimposed over arched ones, leaving the original idea in place. A little dolphin fountain may be too small for the s.p.a.ce but gurgles happily anyway. The thirteenth-century town hall and the surrounding buildings each have something to offer the eye: the dome of Sant'Andrea over one, wonderful chimneys that look like houses, a tower, oculus windows, denti trim, lanterns, even a subtle McDonald's, barely distinguishable from other facades and fortunately not emanating its usual noxious odor.

Shakespeare chose well Romeo's departure point. Mantova is a storybook setting. It looks constructed by a child with a great set of blocks; at the end of the day the castles and arches go back in a box under the bed. If circ.u.mstances had turned out better, perhaps Romeo would have brought Juliet back for a visit, because surely he would have been impressed with this small elegant city almost surrounded by water, with s.p.a.cious piazzas, castles, and substantial churches, all filled with art. The poet Politziano, born in our area of Tuscany, left the Medici patronage for a while to live under Gonzaga patronage. Verdi's Rigoletto is set here, and also a novel by D'Annunzio. All these artists are eclipsed by Pisanello, then by Mantegna, who wielded many brushes for the Gonzaga households and made Mantova a crucible of Renaissance art.

A pa.s.sageway links to the market Piazza Erbe, with a clock tower and the charming round church dedicated to San Lorenzo, which looks like a big cupcake with a small cupcake on top. From there we walk over to the grand Piazza Sordello, which feels way back in time with its stand of trees, the duomo anchoring one end and the entire side flanked by the old Gonzaga palace. We cut back through the piazzas, admiring facades with ornate windows and wrought-iron balconies still trailing a few summer geraniums. Slipping through small streets, stopping to look at churches, and pausing for yet another espresso, we while away the afternoon, ending at the rio, a little river that cuts across town from one lake to another. Houses along the water make me reach for my camera-jutting balconies, reflections, trees dipping their branches, a small boat tied to mossy steps.

What is up with the Mantova restaurants? Something contagious happened with the naming. One translates as the Black Eagle, others as the White Griffon, the Swan, Two Ponies, White Goose. We choose L'Aquila Nigra, on a cobbled vicolo off the Piazza Sordella. All the guidebooks agree that it's the best in town, and the desk clerk at the hotel concurs. We do, too. A few tables of diners are scattered about a s.p.a.cious room with a lofty ceiling and walls of ochre Venetian plaster with remnants of frescoes. The room could welcome the bon vivants of the nineteenth century just as it is, except for the lighting, downfall of many Italian restaurants. I can't forgive them for the spotlights in the four corners and the ugly black modern lights jutting out into this otherwise splendidly traditional room. At our neighboring table a woman in her thirties is dining with a man in his late seventies. They do not seem like father and daughter, but they both order poached eggs with truffles to go with their merlot in oversize gla.s.ses. Eggs seem like a familial thing to order together. Every few minutes she swishes out in her short skirt to smoke at the wine bar in the foyer. He looks sad and dejected the instant she leaves. Does he begin to brood about the family he left behind for this chain-smoker with great legs? Still, eggs with white truffles-a sublimely sophisticated dish. They eat with relish and drain their gla.s.ses of wine.

We're wild about the food. When I go home, I will be re-creating the insalata di f.a.gianella al melograno e arancia candita, slices of pheasant with pomegranate and bits of candied orange. Ed gives me bites of his local culatello, house-cured rump of pork, and local salume with mostarda of apples. Nearby Cremona is most famous for its mostarda, but actually it first appeared at the Gonzaga tables in Mantova. Various fruits and vegetables are put up in jars of sugar syrup and that hit that makes the difference, ground mustard seeds. Since the Romans, and even earlier back to the Greeks, Mediterranean people have enjoyed sweet/sour tastes.

Ed orders the quintessential Mantovana pasta, tortelli di zucca. Pumpkins, big green ones as well as the usual orange, star in the cuisine around here. The little tortelli are stuffed with spicy mostarda of pumpkin, ground almond cookies, and walnuts. The taste seems quite medieval. Mostarda seems deeply familiar to me because in the South I grew up with spicy chutneys, peach pickles under vinegar, something called chow-chow, and watermelon rind pickles. The mostarda provides a light touch-a taste here, a taste there-to complement a texture or taste with a gossamer sweetness and a kickball punch.

Then our secondi arrive-guancia di vitello, meltingly tender veal cheeks with thyme and artichokes, and for me lombatina di vitello con tartufi bianchi, ah, white truffles smothering a piece of delectable veal roast. We thrill to the sips of Nino Negri Cinque Stelle Sfursat-tops on Ed's lists of Lombardia reds. We contemplate the menu, discussing the dinners we did not order: a snail strudel, little pig feet with fennel seeds, pike in anchovy sauce with parsley, capers, and green peppers, wild boar with prunes. The chef, Vera Bin, is ambitious. Her restaurant introduces the food of Mantova with imagination and panache. After our cheese extravaganza we congratulate her on her fine kitchen. The evening is winding down so she has time to chat for a while.

A pleasure of a small city: you can walk. I love to walk at night. In Italy usually one can, even a woman alone. The blind beggar we saw earlier under the sidewalk arcade in the Piazza Erbe still sits there with his accordion. Ed gives him five euros and wishes him a buona notte. As we walk away in the fog, he begins to play and we pause in the piazza. Then he sings, breaks out a big romantic voice that totally belies his circ.u.mstance. Several books describe Mantova as melancholy, and we have not felt that emotion here until now.

Back in our room we're talking about Shakespeare because I'm still thinking of Romeo. "Shakespeare never set foot in Italy, and Italy was a major locus of his imagination," I begin.

"What plays are set here besides Romeo and Juliet? Wonder why he didn't use the Italian, Giulietta."

"Let's see. Oth.e.l.lo, Two Gentlemen of Verona. What else? What was the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow set at a villa?"

"That wasn't Gwyneth Paltrow; it was Emma Thompson in The Taming of the Shrew. And there's The Merchant of Venice. I really prefer the Italian p.r.o.nunciation of Romeo."

"As in Alfa Romeo."

"Yes, and one of the great Alfas was the Giula. There was a Giulietta, too. I miss my first Alfa." Long an alfista-there's actually a word for an Alfa lover in Italy-he's mourning the silver 1972 GTV that he drove throughout the 1980s.

I veer back to the subject. "When Juliet took her sleeping draught, the nurse told her that when she woke, 'that very night/Shall Romeo bear thee hence to Mantua.'"

"Star-crossed."

The room feels stuffy. When I open the window, the main street into town three floors down is empty with a light mist falling around the lights. No stars at all.

A night of insomnia. When I have one, I try to think of new projects or good things that have happened instead of swirling down some drain of regret. Often the thoughts tumble like coins in a dryer, circling, banging, going nowhere. So now I think of Mantova, walk again all the streets, focusing on details I liked such as the enormous magnolia in the middle of a piazza, or surprises such as coming upon the remaining house of the ghetto and the sign over a trattoria saying Lo Scrittore Charles d.i.c.kens stayed there in 1844. Mantova has two fabulous wedding-cake theatres with tiers of gilded boxes. I count five other theatres for plays. The season for opera and music runs long. Italian towns offer astonishing cultural activities. Consider what an American town of fifty thousand offers culturally, then glance at the brochures from similar-size towns in Italy. Art and music, plays, even poetry still resonate in everyday lives.

Take, for example, a city I love down in Puglia. Like Mantova, Lecce is a small proud city unique unto itself: flamboyant baroque architecture, loaves of bread the size of two s...o...b..xes, the antique craft of papier-mache angels and creche figures-a dignity. Mantova has the close attractions of Verona, Ferrara, and Modena. Lecce, way down on the heel of the boot, has the Puglian beaches and the charming town of Gallipoli nearby. Another small city where I could set up household is Ascoli Piceno in the Marche, inland from the Adriatic beaches. Self-contained and cared for, Ascoli Piceno, set in sweet countryside, has one of the most glorious piazzas in Italy. Citta di Castello, a Renaissance jewel cask over the hills from us into Umbria, is another town not overtaken by tourists, where one's child could roam free and grow up in a place full of beauty. These are cities for lovers. Lovers of good life. Imagine the clean days behind one of those ornate facades, a little view into a piazzetta. The butcher can deliver a pheasant or woodc.o.c.k the next day. The wine comes from the valley below the town. With your ten best friends you go to the opera all winter and feast afterward until late, late. Your child remains a child for the normal period and doesn't nag for things. The priest comes to bless the house in spring, just after cleaning, even if you are a pagan.

When I asked my friend Fulvio where he thought the ideal place to live might be, he said, "Nowhere, close to somewhere." A wonderful answer. But these magnetic small Italian cities may be even better because they offer a grounded sense of community, which seems to me more and more desirable in a tilting world. I would prefer to have several lives.

Ed stirs in his sleep. "Much Ado about Nothing," he says, "and All's Well That Ends Well. I think there's one more. He should have come here."

"Right. Good. I can't sleep. He should have written one called Buona Notte."

Washed by the rain, Mantova looks splendid in the morning sun. No wonder the Gonzaga boys loved the sun so much in this place of winter mists and summer humidity. In earlier centuries a rain cloak was called a mantua. The city has been misty since the first Gonzaga rode into town. This morning the air sparkles like the local Franciacorta wine. We will devote the day to the Gonzaga, but first a chocolate cornetto at our bar, at our table by the lace-curtained window. I see the waiter from last night ride by on a bicycle. Grabbing the moment, cafes all over town are setting up outdoor tables and washing the sidewalks under the arcades. Mantova has the most good-looking men I have ever seen in one place. Fine features, alluring eyes, slight and tall, black, black hair.

I wish we did not have to see the Palazzo Ducale in a group. What a thrill it would be to roam at will through the five hundred rooms, the dusty unrestored ones as well as the famous ones. We are lucky that our group numbers only six, plus the guide who simply announces where we are, as we go, and offers a few remarks. The major art here, Mantegna's La Camera degli Sposi, the Married Couple's Room, dominates the attention of art historians. If it were not here, the sequence of other utterly stupendous rooms would be joy enough. The apartments of the Gonzaga family, spanning several generations, attest to their exuberant love of art and to their own personal lives. The frieze of children and dogs playing, the faces in the portrait room, the hand holding a letter and another reaching down to pet a dog while something auspicious is happening in the rest of the painting, the painted frames at child height of rabbits and birds, the many, many horses so loved by the Gonzaga, the dog resting under a chair, the child holding an apple-so many of these details bring the cold fortress rooms close and say to the viewer, We were here. There are dogs everywhere; even their rear ends with dangling b.a.l.l.s are rendered precisely.

Pisanello worked here prior to Mantegna. His large sinopie-the artist's design under a fresco-remain. Seeing his terra-cotta and black underpinning is like glimpsing someone in their underwear-possibly shocking and very revealing. When the Gonzaga fell on hard times, most of the incredible collection of art was sold. What paintings-not frescoes-remain have migrated back there over the years. One painting of the family adoring the trinity by Raphael was cut into bits by marauding soldiers and has been patched together again.

We pa.s.s through long galleries of dark paintings. We both stop to examine Karl Santner's Annunciation, with a companion painting of the angel from 1630. The Virgin's basket of sewing and scissors sits at her feet. The angel carries a big lily you almost can smell. Santner was probably a Bavarian monk, one of many artists invited to create this city.

I lag behind in the music room, where Apollo pulls the chariot of dawn across the ceiling. This room feels different, with long windows on one side, mirrors on the other. The guide says it started as a lodge. Eventually the Austrians remodeled it; hence the gilt. What attracts me are the painted allegories of eloquence, kindness, immortality, intellect, magnanimity, affability, and generosity. In another s.p.a.ce: harmony, humility, magnificence. On the southern side: innocence, happiness, philosophy. Where is my group? Which way to go? Lost in Gonzagaland.

What life among all these riotous walls and ceilings! I wish I could photograph the painted borders around doors, one after another, lovely foliage and flower designs, fake marble, grotesques. One room has eight panels of decoration around the doors, each six or so inches to a foot wide, like the borders in an intricate rug. The vast painting of the Judith legend must have scared the tunics off the Gonzaga tots. Seen through heavy brown tents, the ugly scene plays out, brooding across the wall to the head of Holofernes on a stick. One of the best rooms has a lapis-blue ceiling painted with the fabled zodiac figures connecting the stars.

The family loved labyrinths, possibly because they lived in one. The boxed coffers of a remarkable green and gold boxed ceiling form a labyrinth. It makes me want to lie on the floor and trace the route to the center. The words forse che s, forse che no, perhaps yes, perhaps no, repeat along all the paths. In another room we see a startling painting of Mount Olympus rising from a water labyrinth, with boats in the circular lanes of the water. Fantasy all over the place. Startling-what will ambush you in the next sala?

When we finally reach La Camera degli Sposi, the room is full of children on portable seats, listening to the teacher. I hear a skinny boy say che bella, how beautiful. I'd expected the room to be bigger. Instead, the intimate scale intensifies Mantegna's experiment with reality and illusion. The children fold their seats and move on. The celebrated Gonzaga family group, arranged above the mantel, causes the odd effect of making the mantel appear to be painted, too. The Oriental rug under them drapes down the wall beside the fireplace, a fantastic touch that stabilizes the vision of them on another tier of the room. Though the sections suggest narrative, no one knows whether the painting commemorates an occasion or was just an ambitious, extended portrait of the family and court life. After the completion of the work, the Gonzaga children were brought into the room and shown to visitors so Mantegna's skill could be appreciated. The wonderful faces are realistic, but more goes on than depiction. Rich draperies appear to be flung aside so that we can view the Gonzagas. I imagine Mantegna decided that he was going to have some fun as long as he was spending over ten years closed up in that tiny room. The background landscapes, cla.s.sical ruins, intricate details of farming and daily life, luscious fabrics, borders (where the artist included a small self-portrait), putti with b.u.t.terfly wings, and most of all the oculus in the center of the ceiling give him room to dream and play. The oculus seems to be his big joke. He pulls out all the stops with perspective and foreshortening as he allows women, roly-poly putti, and a peac.o.c.k to stare down into the room from the seemingly open dome. A wooden bar painted across an edge of the dome supports a pot of lemons-a fantastic trompe l'oeil detail. One of the women is Moorish in a striped turban; the three looking down on the Gonzaga spectacle below have enigmatic expressions on their faces.

We are allowed to linger. The sign says groups are limited to five minutes, which is absurd. A pleasure of late November travel.

Let out into the light of day, we are dazed. What rambunctious art-pagan and secular! Strenuous G.o.ds galloping their chariots and feasting among satyrs and buxom mortal nudes. Not a moment of piety, no cycle of a saint's miracles and tribulations, nary a Madonna.

We seek refuge at an osteria off the old piazza of Matilde Canossa, who ruled before the Gonzaga group. The iron kiosk for newspapers and the intimate chapel for the Madonna of the Earthquake are situated in the piazza, not far from movie posters for my friend Audrey Wells's new film. We take a picture to send her of the magnified face of Richard Gere looking out toward the rusticated stone palazzo of the warring Matilde.

I order shrimp with carrot veloute, which I don't like, and Ed has a selection of salume served on a piece of butcher's paper, with dabs of chestnut honey and apple mostarda. Then we choose tagliatelle with quail, the boned stuffed rabbit, and a gla.s.s of merlot from Lake Garda. We split a piece of the local sbrisolona served with a dish of cherry preserves. In Turkey we loved all the "spoon" tastes like this, fruit condiments served with tea and desserts. As with many cherished Italian desserts, the famous cake does not enchant me. The dryness seems deeply wrong to one raised on coconut cake, pecan pie, and chocolate icebox cake. Ed likes it. He likes most desserts. The man we pay, who walks us to the door, is stop-traffic gorgeous. He's more handsome than any Gonzaga face Mantegna captured. He smiles like a flood of sunlight, and if I were twenty-five and single, I would be coming back tonight for dinner. As it is, I say to Ed, "His mother must be so proud of him." All the beautiful men of Mantova are reincarnations of Romeo sent to grace the city. Longing for him, Juliet said: Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.

In high school I memorized many parts of the play and have them with me this afternoon in Mantova.

We make it back to the hotel for a long pause with the books we've acc.u.mulated since we've been here. So frequently when I travel, I have to rest to absorb all I've seen before I can go on. The local books help, providing context, facts, and places not found in guidebooks, and always maps, which we both pore over, imagining how the city works.

One of those books, A tavola con gli Dei, contains antique recipes of the Gonzaga court with ill.u.s.trations from psalters and ma.n.u.scripts: a pig about to be slaughtered, a boar among flowers, a woman gathering honey from hives under a charming pergola, a sheet of music decorated with an artichoke, a bird, and a moth. I read about almond confiture, offelle, little cakes made of two disks and filled with marmalade or marzipan. This is how the nuns make biscotti: cook them in a slow oven, and halfway through, sprinkle them with sugar. Still good advice. For Pesce in Agrodolce, sweet and sour fish, you're told to mix strong vinegar with sugar and boil it with good olive oil to dissolve the sugar, then to add sweet spices (unspecified), laurel leaves, and pepper. This and the fish go into a little barrel for pickling. Since polpettoni, meatb.a.l.l.s, are one of my favorite Tuscan dishes, I'm interested to read a 1714 recipe that calls for adding eggs "conforming to the quant.i.ty of the meat" and seasonings of cheese, pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg, all well incorporated. If you cook this slowly in broth, you will have a dinner "stupendissimo." Other recipes call for saffron, vanilla, ginger, cloves (a quite rare spice at that time), caxo, which I take to mean ground chocolate, and-what's this-nitro, also listed as salnitro, nitrate salt. Olive oil is recommended in buona quant.i.ta, a given throughout Italy forever. In 1519 Isabelle d'Este wrote from Mantova to her brother the Duke of Ferrara her recipe for cabbage, and suddenly I imagine the smell drifting through the palace's zodiac room, the garden room of the river G.o.ds, and into the quarters of the court dwarf. (If only her memoirs would surface in some remote armadio.) The aromas and imagined tastes of food reach across centuries. The duke opens the letter. He instructs the cook. But isn't his sister's recipe rather plain, cabbage just boiled until tender and dressed with oil and vinegar? "Add some garlic," he tells the cook, "and some of the little raisins soaked in wine, and a few sliced eggs on top."

We emerge for a late dinner on the Piazza Erbe and eat only pasta with white truffles, 'tis the season, and salad. Tonight I sleep and have one of those single-image dreams that happen often when I travel: in a large gla.s.s of water, a pink flower is submerged. The dream seems heraldic. Is it Mantova in the world?

The other Gonzaga residence, Palazzo Te, is in every way the flip side of the Palazzo Ducale. Built by Federico II right where town now turns to country, the palazzo sings an ode to pleasure and light; the fortress mentality was left on the doorstep of the Palazzo Ducale. Palazzo Te, no longer surrounded by water as it once was, still invokes a sense of leisure and plein air. Here Federico cavorted with his mistress and enjoyed the life-size portraits of his best horses that ring a large entrance hall. Mixed with friezes and niches of putti and pagan G.o.ds, the horses are plain outrageous. You can't help but laugh. I imagine the place was thought to be in quite bad taste back in the sixteenth century; the patina of time allows a suspension of judgment. In a room with salamanders depicted on panels, we read Federico's lament: ci che a lui manca, tormenta me. The cold-blooded salamander lacks pa.s.sion: "what he lacks torments me." Perhaps Federico identified most with the room of Cupid and Psyche and the banquet celebrated with the G.o.ds. In one scene a naked, semi-reclining woman with her left leg hiked about a robust man might have personified his s.e.xual torment. The man, who unfortunately tapers into a merman with a seahorse-type tail, has an erection that puts to shame the poor p.o.r.nographic paintings of Pompeii or Mapplethorpe photographs of black studs. He is aiming straight between her legs. Perhaps this was a very private chamber.

We cross a grand external loggia between garden and courtyard. The palazzo's endless rooms, each with its theme-eagles, falcons, zodiac, emperors-somehow still form a contained villa. We leave with a sense of lived life and a bit of sympathy for the hot-blooded Federico.

The walk back to town takes us past the house of Mantegna, which looks something like a shoe factory. Just a square brick building with plain windows. The inside opens to a round courtyard. The ambience suggests Mantegna's sense of privacy. From the street, nothing is given away, nothing is suggested. We stop at a gastronomia with open crocks of mostarde-orange, fig, pear, vegetables, cherry, cedro (those oversize strange citruses), apricots, so many. Ed buys several to take home-pumpkin and apple, the pear, the plain apple, and the grape.

On our last day we tour the churches. They all are different, and without fail you discover something of interest in each. The duomo on the Piazza Sordello sustained drastic remodeling along the way, so that the facade and the sides have little to do with each other. Still, its lovely sage-green doors lead in to a dim interior with a squared-off feel and gray marble arches. In side chapels, wonderful blue wooden-faced tombs are trimmed with gold. We find their prize objects-sarcophagi from the fourth and fifth century. The dome! Layers, orders of angels, archangels, with G.o.d in the center, eight layers, getting smaller as they near the center, all painted in colors of blue, peach, grayish indigo. I sit for a moment on the old worn leather seat in the priest's confessional, thankful that I have not had to listen to recitals of endless sins. Several people are praying, and we slip out, across the floor paved in big squares of apricot and sand marble, with decorative intarsia panels to interrupt the geometry.

On a brick tower a black iron gabbia, a cage usually for domestic animals, is suspended halfway up. Criminals used to be hoisted up the tower and displayed, as part of their punishment. Only pigeons reside there now. If you lived here, the streets would be as familiar as the lines in the palm of your hand. Mantova, a city to explore on foot, makes me wish for a yellow bicycle. Everyone zips and careens around town, ringing their little bells. A side pa.s.sage from Sant'Andrea leads to Piazza Alberti, where a wing of a Benedictine monastery remains on one side of the cobbled piazza. I turn to look at a yellow house, a ruined house, a pink one, which is the restored right end of the ruined house, a little wine bar, and a trattoria with outdoor tables. Others are ochre and cream, a sweet palette. A little water fountain perpetually runs-they must have a lot of water.

Near San Francesco's church, we enter an area obviously bombed. The Palazzo d'Arco looms over the piazza. You enter a circular courtyard backed by a columned semicircle, with a statue under the trees. Alight from the carriage in your icy blue silk and m.u.f.f of ermine. The persimmon ices and all the cakes decorated with candied violets are waiting by the fire. These Italian aristocrats had their own worlds.

"I wonder if it was the Allies," Ed says. We always hope in towns where the abrupt postwar concrete rears before us that we are not responsible. The church was not spared and lost much wall art. Something strange happens here. We are alone in the vasty church with stripped round brick columns, plain and raw, formerly frescoed. The walls have only fragments. These bits are somehow even more moving for their small survivals. The largest remaining fresco represents the death of Mary or some female saint. First she's seated, then lying on the deathbed, while off to the right three men already are opening a crypt. The compressed narrative reads eloquently.

And then as we walk out, the strange thing: Ed says, "I want to be Catholic again."