Even a mountain can be a needle in a haystack.
My mountains used to be in my great-grandma’s apartment, close enough to touch, in a painting that she and my great-grandpa bought in 1955 after a trip through the Italian Alps. The many evenings that I spent with her as a little girl were filled with games of honeymoon bridge, and I used to crawl under her table to organize my cards, my fingers being too small to hold them all. Hiding down there, I would look past the table legs and up toward her cathedral ceiling to admire the painting on the wall.
I know what my great-grandma would have said if I’d told her that one day I was going to find the mountains in that painting — the three spiky peaks and the
big burly one next to them, the velvety hills and the crooked church in the foreground: “When pigs fly.” It was one of her favorite sayings.
But unlikelier things have happened. In October 1955, she was living in Germany, several thousand miles from home, where her Army officer husband had been stationed after the war. They were about to leave for their honeymoon — that’s what they called their Italian holiday, having been penniless when they’d eloped right out of high school 25 years earlier. And she, an Ohio girl who never thought she’d make it east of the Appalachians, was going to see the Alps.
My great-grandma wasn’t much of a talker, and her husband died before I was old enough to know him, so it’s difficult to say
what the mountains of northeastern Italy meant to her. In a 12-page letter to her daughter in the United States, a missive in which she detailed every stop on the trip in her lacy Old World handwriting, she wrote a single sentence on the mountains: “The Dolomites were indescribably beautiful — no rain here.”
But there was always the fact of the painting, which was actually the larger and more striking of two mountain landscapes that they bought at the end of the trip. You might not pause over such a purchase. But my great-grandma turned 16 two days after Black Tuesday and had her first child at the height of the Great Depression. She was not the type of lady who toured Europe collecting artwork. Even after I was born, when she had no financial worries, she used pencils to knit me a blanket instead of wasting money on knitting needles.
So why did they buy two paintings instead of one or neither? And why, when my great-grandma moved into a retirement home, did she hang the paintings so that her recliner gave her a better view of the mountains than of the TV or the window, her other outlets on the world?
There was something about those mountains.
big painting has hung in my parents’ dining room since my great-grandma died in 2002, but I always look past it in its new spot. I hadn’t thought of it until two years ago, when my best friend, Chiara — whom I met when she was an exchange student from Italy at my high school in Ohio — and her parents took my family to Switzerland. They wanted us to see the Matterhorn, the mountain re-created in the Disney bobsled ride.
Some people say that the mountains make you feel close to God. Looking at the Matterhorn, I found myself thinking about my great-grandma. That was when I decided to find the mountains in her painting.
So I sent my Italian friends a photo of the painting. Bruna, Chiara’s mother, had grown up in northeastern Italy and said right away that if the mountains were real, they were in the Dolomites. Their rosy tinge, which the Dolomites take on especially in the evening, gave it away.
With that information, I was sure that all we had to do was to thumb through some handy reference book to learn the peaks’ names and geographic coordinates. And who better to ask for the title of such a book than Chiara’s father, Umberto, who has loved the mountains since he was a boy?
But Umberto knew of no such book. Short of driving through every valley of the Dolomites, he said, there was no way to find the mountains in the painting. And even if we did drive through every valley, we might come home having discovered only that they don’t exist.
But studying the painting, I couldn’t believe that the artist, whoever he or she was, had dreamed up those mountains. It’s like believing that Hemingway wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” without ever going fishing. So I decided to proceed.
A quick Google search led me to Gillian Price, the author of several books on trekking in the Dolomites. Seven minutes after e-mailing her, I received a response. She thought that she recognized my great-grandma’s mountains but wanted to check with the Italian Alpine Club.
The next day, “Gillian in Venice” — as she signed her name — forwarded this message from Italy:
“It is absolutely the Catinaccio with the Vajolet Towers. All seen from Tires with the little church at the end of the village. It’s a beautiful painting.”
Gillian explained that the man who wrote that note lived near Tires (pronounced TEE-res) — the village where people wake up to the view that my great-grandma had enjoyed for almost five decades in her painting: the three sharp peaks, called the Vajolet Towers; the big one next to them; and the church, called San Cipriano.
And so it happened that one evening last October, at my friends’ home in Milan, we sat down to dinner and Umberto said, “Tomorrow we are taking a trip.”
During the 3?1/2-hour drive to Tires, my friends never glanced at a map. It was as if they knew the roads by heart. We later talked about whether my great-grandparents might have driven those same roads; Umberto and Bruna said no, that the town is too out of the way. But still I like to imagine them taking a wrong turn, ending up in Tires and liking the spot enough to stop for hot chocolate. It would explain why my great-grandma loved the painting so much.
As we drove on, the Vajolet Towers appeared from around the bend. We stopped at the church. It was a glorious day — nothing like the foggy scene in the painting — and so warm that I took off my jacket. We settled on a hill in front of San Cipriano to take in the scene. The real church was sturdier than the one in the painting, and the artist had changed the angle just a bit, but the resemblance was unmistakable.
As if he were annotating the painting, Umberto began explaining everything in sight: how the green of the trees and the green of the grass contrasted to make the hills look like a patchwork quilt, how streams had worn ribbonlike tracks into the mountains, and did I notice how well-tended the fields were? Even the grass on the hard-to-mow hillsides had been collected for the animals. In the mountains, Umberto said, nothing goes to waste. Just like at my great-grandma’s, I thought. One of her favorite jokes was about an old lady who kept a tin labeled “bits of string too small to use.”
When we got up to leave, I thought about taking a rock as a souvenir, but it felt silly to try to carry away the mountains.
Still, I wanted something to remember the trip by, and another painting didn’t seem right, either. So later that afternoon, when we visited Nova Levante, a few towns over from Tires, Bruna helped me pick out a tablecloth. My great-grandma would have liked the dog roses embroidered against the white weave. I think that she would have been pleased to know that the simple act of sitting down to eat reminds me of the dining table in her apartment, and of all the times I hid underneath it and looked to her mountains.
cards
appalachians, favorite sayings, missive, ohio girl, table legs
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