More than words

I’ll admit to a bit of anxiety when I heard the invitation. Lia Bonacchi, our realtor’s mother and the secret key to local life, asked us to go to a literary event she organized in nearby Prata. An actor from the regional hub Grosseto was to dramatically retell parts of The Decameron, the 14th century Italian classic written by Giovanni Boccaccio.

This is something like being invited to hear Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Old English. The Decameron is a similar set of 100 stories a group of young Florentines supposedly told to each other while waiting out the Plague in the countryside.

Cecile checked out an online English edition of Boccacio and read enough to see that the original seven young women and three young men used well-honed wit and bawdy innuendo to enliven a life in a pandemic. A bit classier than firing up Zoom.

I had no cause for anxiety.

Prato is a Tuscan hilltop town of about 500 souls. It had a few more when it endured a siege in 1285 or when it harassed Napoleon’s troops in 1799, but now welcomes both tourists and countrymen to its rustic beauty. That night it was mostly the latter – we seemed to be the only Americans in the audience.

Lia had arranged to use the historic garden of an extremely tiny stone church in the old town. (The garden is another of her projects: Conserving fruit tree varieties dear to Tuscan hearts). Sweet Tuscan night air under the branches of a heavily-laden pear.

Actor Giacomo Moscato was amazing, as was his accompaniment on the lute and other stringed instruments by Paolo Mari.

It was all in Italian, very little of which I understood. But not to worry. In a way, it reminded me of opera. Moscato’s face and pacing spoke volumes. I could focus on the rhythm of the words, the story in Moscato’s gestures and the soothing sound of the lute. The words were important (and funny, if the chuckles from the audience were evidence) but I knew that could read the details of the story later. 

It was pure performance. Molto bene.