LUCCA, Italy — It could be an Italian thing. Or a Mediterranean thing. Or maybe it’s just that the Italian-speaking State College friend we were visiting is so simpatico that troubled souls pour their hearts out to her.
Improbably, we were looking at villas in the hills of Tuscany. I’m not in the market, but my simpatico friend and her husband were. Villa No. 1 was a stunning demonstration of how quickly nature moves in when humans move out. The place was magnificent: high ceilings, enough bedrooms (and bathrooms) to comfortably lodge a baseball team, wine cellar, lush gardens sloping down to the river, and stone walls that were to the walls of a typical American house as Texas toast is to regular sliced bread.
No one had lived there for 10 years, which seemed to so traumatize the house that the walls were weeping, shedding their paint the way a depressed zoo animal might lose its fur. Black mold dotted some of the ceilings. The place could be had for a song, but it would take millions to make it sing. The heating costs were too terrible to contemplate.
Villa No. 2 was at the top of a mountain village with awe-inspiring views of the Apennines, and a gorgeous pool, garden and outdoor kitchen. Inside were gloomy rooms filled with centuries-old furnishings and family portraits and a crypt that held the fingers of a long-dead cardinal. Johnny Depp had slept in one of the 17th-century beds.
After we toured the house we caravanned to the main square of a slightly bigger hill town for dinner. I wound up driving with Francesca, the owner of Villa No. 2. It was one of those surreal travel moments when you feel like you’ve been plucked out of your normal life and dropped into someone else’s.
Suddenly I was hurtling around hairpin turns with a woman I didn’t know who looked like Olivia Newton-John in her “Grease” days and spent the entire drive chattering on the phone to a friend in loud Italian punctuated by raucous laughter.
Over dinner she told us why she was selling the villa: She was undergoing cancer treatments and had been ditched by her second husband (or was it her third?), which added up to a desire to change her life.
It wasn’t just that her latest husband had forsaken her, she confided. It was who he had forsaken her for. And here she pulled out her phone and had us scroll through multiple photographs of her rival, who, we were to understand, was manifestly less attractive than Francesca herself.
We all made sympathetic noises. My simpatico friend and her husband rejected both villas.
The next night, our last in lovely Lucca, we went out for pizza. It was 9 p.m. (Italians eat late. We were trying to act local.) Ana, our punchy server, had been working since 9 a.m. We made sympathetic noises.
Then she told us the real trouble. Her son had been abused by one of the nuns at school. Out came the cell phone pictures to prove it – red bruise marks on his neck. There was to be a hearing the next day. We wound up not only tipping her, but hugging her.
Then we got gelato, which, sorry, Penn State loyalists, was only about 50,000 times better than what’s served at the University Creamery.
The typical response to Francesca’s and Ana’s revelations is TMI – too much information. Long before the phrase entered the language, my dad used to disparage people who, when you asked them how they were, actually told you. The thinking seems to be that it’s tacky to share your personal business with strangers or casual acquaintances, that there’s a boundary between private and public that must not be crossed.
I do not share this view, which probably explains why I’ve devoted so much of my professional life to interviewing people as a reporter and a folklorist and writing columns like this one. I love when people go beyond chitchat to reveal what’s really going on in their lives.
At any given moment most of us are struggling with something or other. We’re worried about our kids or our parents or our marriages or our health or our bank balances or our job or our place in the world. Why pretend otherwise?
Sharing stories connects us. It is how we come to know each other. It is how we feel less alone. The problem with most human interactions, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t too much information, but not enough. Italians seem to understand this. Or at least the Italians who met my simpatico friend.
May Ana’s son recover from his treatment by the cruel nun. May Francesca be cured of what ails her, find a buyer for her villa and a true love for herself. May they encounter more sympathetic listeners and go on opening their hearts.
