I’ll never fly over the Dolomites without fearing for my life. The first time was going to Milan at night during a storm, where the woman next to me whispered in a lilting, terrified tone that she couldn’t die yet because she had kids at home. This time, the day was clear, but it was exceptionally windy coming into Turin. I’m sure we weren’t in mortal danger either time, though when you’re on a plane that is getting knocked about by gust after gust of wind, it makes all passengers question their safety at least once. I got so nervous I closed my eyes and hummed quietly to myself. It was better than the Milan flight, where I dug my nails into my wrist so tightly that they left scratch marks.
We lived and landed. I walked out with wobbly knees and feeling cartoonishly dizzy, stars and all. The wind might have made the journey harrowing, but it led to a supernatural air to Turin. Dust devils blew through block after block, kicking up leaves, napkins, and dirt. I wasn’t the only one who stopped to admire them, for they spun through every couple of minutes. The wind itself had whipped everyone’s hair into nests and kids ran with the gusts, holding out their hands as they went into the mini cyclones, which made me think of bad luck, but made them laugh as they kicked at the leaves.
It was a fitting air for the city. I’d come to Turin for three reasons. Two cultural and one silly.
1. One of my favorite authors, Giorgio De Maria, was from here.
2. I wanted to hike Sacra di San Michele, a monastery 30 minutes outside of Turin that’d been the inspiration for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
3. Turin was my favorite level in Assassin’s Creed.
My accompanying book was Ramon Glazov’s translation of Giorgio De Maria’s The Transgressionists and Other Disquieting Works. Giorgio De Maria himself is a complicated man, who was a union socialist in his youth but became increasingly religious, troubled, and conservative as he aged. I’m purely speculating, but he gives off the markings of somebody who suffered from Bipolarism which makes his title story, the Transgressionists, interesting to read as a story of a man suffering from a manic episode. De Maria is not well known in the US and I’m not even sure if he’s well-known in Italy. Ramon Glazov’s translation and introduction was top notch, though the stories themselves were disorganized and a bit choppy compared to De Maria’s most famous work, the Twenty Days of Turin. There’s some beautiful passages in each story, though De Maria’s earlier writing is not as polished as his novella, where I feel he really came into his own in terms of style and voice (very briefly, that is, since De Maria gave up writing fiction shortly after).
Turin is a fascinating city. To be able to read short stories that take place at real locations made it fun as a tourist and also hinted at Turin’s more secretively history, that of a city associated with mid-century occult. I’ve never been to a city with so many covered sidewalks either. It felt like the entire downtown was a roman forum, for every sidewalk was shielded with porticos of varying width and make. The squares were well hidden and there were many old-fashioned cafes throughout the city, giving it a uniquely distinct air.
It’s a city where hidden things can happen. All twists and turns of streets, with the alps crowning it with snow-capped peaks, far off in the distance. The streetcars looked unchanged from the early nineteenth century and the buildings were old and close together, all four-stories high and unending.
The train I took to my hike was an equally old model, though not so antique as the streetcars. The hike itself was a five-hour affair, leading up from a small town to the monastery high on the mountain. I’m not religious anymore, but this was the most religious destination I’d been in a long time. I got trapped in a mass the day prior, having spent too long looking at the Shroud of Turin, and was only able to slip out halfway through. The hike was peppered with Stations of the Cross all the way up the mountain. The carved crosses both guides and rest points with water.
I saw a deer, then a woodpecker, then a rainbow at the end. I went through the church and found out from an old sign that it was apparently on the lay line.
Perhaps that was my ode to De Maria.
Turin is not a city where you can ignore Christianity. It’s in every stone, every plaza, and every street. It is also a place full of spiritualism and the occult, even if the movement has largely left modern day Turin. It’s a place where lay lines mix with a church, nature is lined with crosses, and children dance in dust devils on their way to the market.
The valley dips and weaves through reality and unreality. There’s snow in the distance in spring, while city itself is warm. There’s always something out there in the shadows, watching and slipping down the streets, and turning the air sweet with the scent that anything might happen, it a place like this.
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