La Nebbia

My last address in Perugia was a narrow cobbled street called Via Nebbiosa or Foggy Street. It seemed an ideal street for me and Desiree to live on as it did not face a road with cars that could possibly run over her, but instead turned inward toward a courtyard though did not look directly onto the courtyard, but was rather to the side, under a little archway that served as a kind of tunnel leading into the courtyard that had a kitschy feel to it because a junk-collector had decorated it by hanging a dead bicycle from one stone wall, and an old rug with a Greek key from another, plus he’d set out big pots full of plants and had hung at least a dozen wind chimes that made a melodious racket night and day. My little street was only a few doors long and was aptly named because fog would get trapped under the archway and fill up the courtyard so that on most fall mornings I would open the door and feel mist rush in to envelope me and it did indeed seem to have a living presence that could possibly inspire horror films like “The Fog,” only my version would not be a horror film but more tender-hearted romantic. The presence I attributed to it was nurturing and consoling: clouds falling from heaven to earth just to wrap me in their splendors, cotton batting of comfort, or protective shield like the kind in MacBeth when men move through fog mistaken as trees, or cloud as magic carpet floating down to offer a ride or the mystic puzzle posed by Shelley in Mt. Blanc on the sublime, the whiteness calling forth from deeper depths projections of who we are.

One tends to forget about the glories of fog in the heat of summer, so when I moved to Spoleto in May I had no idea what foggy feasts awaited my terrace life at the foot of Monteluco where the fog settles sometimes for days and days at a time without lifting or burning off in sun. I can always find the Chiesa di San Rocco, its cupola and cruciform stony shape always visible to the right of my panorama, at night especially, bathed as it is in the orange-ish light of street lamps. I step outside and the dampness appeals to me, like stepping in a cool-ish steam bath, the pores of my skin grateful, my human edges softening—fog has a taste, has a smell, earthy and refreshing, like Ferretti mineral water, the kind too strong in mineral tastes for some tongues, but delectable for mine. I am like a child licking a snowball, sipping at the gift of warmer, cozier fog and there are days I think my progression through foggy places is significant, an aspect of who I am and the way I think, a mirror of the expansion of my inner world.

It occurs to me that my love of fog is yet another advantage of not owning a car. I do understand why people who drive through mountains live in terror of it and personify fog as a devouring beast, looming at the next wend in the road, its ghostly mouth wide open and ready to swallow the anxious driver whole. I forget about such dangers, until Daniela balks at a proposition for night-time adventure on the basis that no one in their right mind drives after dark in fog. Am I pazza? What am I thinking? Do I intend to kill us both? It is startling for me to even consider the limitations of not being able to maneuver through the night, but I attribute this misfortune less to fog than to the absurdity of owning a car when one could be hurtling through the glory of night- whiteness in a train with no worries, no constraints at all.