August 10/22: Things that go bump in the night
I’ll skip details about a frazzled morning with kids and grandkids off to Rome. Leaving everyone except Mark and me. He drove half of them into the train station in Arezzo with the others following. Alone with the sounds of the dishwasher and wash machines, the emptiness hits. Now what?
It will be hot, so I close doors and windows against the noon sun. This VRBO villa is perfect for our family, but too quiet for two. The three-storey house sits on the edge of town between vineyards and the Tuscan Hills and Apennine Mountains in the distance. There’s not another soul in sight, and tonight it will be just us and the night noises.
When Mark returns, we plan the next few days, alone. The void fills with anticipation as we drive to Pieve Santo Stefano, home to the Little Diary Museum. Pieve is an unassuming town of 3,320 but was once loved by Lorenzo de’ Medici. Located 70 kilometres east of Florence, Pieve must have offered refuge from mosquitoes and heat, and relief from political intrigue. During the Second World War, the town was evacuated and razed by the fleeing Nazis. Only the former palace and a few churches hint at its ancient charm. Each year the town and museum host a three-day event to announce the winner of the best diary of the year.
Mark knows I journal and found us this unusual, out-of-the-way museum to explore.
Who reads the diaries of other people? Are diaries and journals the same? Why do I think diaries are the more scandalous form of auto-writing? And what country collects the diaries of its ordinary citizens as part of its national archive?
When we arrive, our introduction to the Little Diary Museum starts in the hot office of one of the historians. Mark and I are embarrassingly unilingual so the guide provides a personalized tour in English. We will not be able to read any of the diaries and once again, I regret my inability to learn other languages.
The strangeness of the day wears off, replaced by the magic of the museum. Hours evaporate as we hear stories that are the “accidental social history of everyday Italians.” There’s the story about a solider and his love, a memoir by an architect who was the victim of a terrorist attack in 1970, a Jewish man who writes about fascist racial laws in Italy, and a farmer from Naples remembering his years in a Siberian prison.
We drove through a narrow river valley in a forest reserve with steep mountains that was more like BC than the Tuscany of countless books or movies. Where are the pastel towns, domes, towers and endless vineyards?
A narrow corridor houses the overflowing Memory Wall. The alphabetized 20-drawers are filled with ephemera: mementos, letters, drawings, photos and postcards and, when opened, a voice. Actors were enlisted to read each diary to give voice to that story. Did I mention there are currently over 10,000 diaries?
The term diary is used in the broadest sense, as some are no more than scraps of paper. There are those smuggled out of the infamous Regina Coeli prison in Rome where 335 prisoners were held and executed by the SS. Among them was 17-year-old Orlando Posti, student and partisan, who rolled notes into his shirt collars which his mother collected for laundering. He wrote about his dreams and desire to become a doctor, about his girlfriend, but not the war or life in a closet-like cell with four other men.
In a windowless, air-controlled room, behind glass is the Bedsheet Diary of Clelia Marchi. A peasant woman who lacked paper to tell her story, she used an embroidered linen bedsheet that was part of her trousseau. In tiny neat writing she filled the sheet from top to bottom, pouring out her grief over the death of her husband of 60 years.
A closet-like room is dedicated to the eccentric founder, Saverio Tutino, a journalist. In 1984 when he was searching for a home for his papers, he asked in a national paper if other Italians had a diary in a drawer somewhere. If so, he said, do not let it become mouse food.
Diaries began to flow in and continue to arrive at the museum at the rate of nearly 200 a year. According to Edward Posnett, in The Guardian, “All are accepted and read regardless of pedigree or literary merit.” He said Tutino collected the “unwanted, forgotten and awkward documents to create a type of literary salvage,” which were alphabetized, catalogued, archived and taken out only a few times a year.
This all changed in 2007, when actor and playwright Mario Perrotta visited the museum for its 25th anniversary. Upon discovering the archived diaries, he spearheaded the drive for a permanent site to display the collection. In his book, The City of Diaries, Perrotta commented that the alphabetical nature of the catalogue forced people into an “eternal closeness,” in which “enforced cohabitation might place a fascist whose surname begins with F next to a freedom fighter whose surname begins with G.”
Both Tutino and Perrotta imagined the diaries moving about at night to free themselves to search for similar stories to share.
Back in our villa, I imagine the drawers on the Memory Wall gliding open after hours and in the inky darkness, luminous beings, flitting about like fireflies, filling the air with rustling, gurgling and voiceless babbling sounds until dawn.
Suddenly, a loud BANG comes from somewhere in the dark of our almost empty villa…
August 11/22: The “rustling of others”
Daylight chases away my irrational fears, though my imagination ran wild last night. Awake long after Mark, in the dark, the loud noise made my heart race and didn’t make sense. The gate was locked, the kitchen grate was closed and the massive front doors were barred with a four-foot arm. If this had been a movie, someone would investigate the shadowy halls and dank cellar – but not me. I stayed put, turned on all the lights and a comedy on TV to lull myself to sleep.
Now in the light, armed with coffee, I search for the source of last night’s noise. I expect to find a wounded bird and broken vase on the second floor, where there’s a large fireplace with a chimney open to the elements. We’ve already chased out stray birds and mad hornets.
There’s nothing out of place when I check, so I return to my journaling outside. While collecting my train of thoughts about my last entry, I absentmindedly notice that the patio is damp. Tutino described the sound of the diaries moving about in the museum at night this way: “There is a type of special noise, a rustling sound of sprouts pushing up from the Archive after all these years… filled with the stories of Italians.”
Rustling, like the word susurrus, is a whispering noise. Not like the one I heard last night, but more like the soft breeze stirring the trees now. Looking up, I see an open shutter on the second floor. Ah, mystery solved! The wind must have come up to catch an unsecured shutter and slam it against the house, startling me.
I finish writing and close my sunflower-yellow journal as it’s time to explore another hilltop town. My thoughts linger on the role diaries play in preserving history and what happens to the “visceral first-hand accounts” of everyday people? Umberto Eco says, “to survive, we must tell stories” and our diaries and journals are home to some of those stories. What will become of them?
Who will mind your diary?
This feature appeared in the October 2023 edition of Boulevard Vancouver.