“Will you begin at the beginning?”

Well, where else would one begin? But then again, a beginning is subjective and not at all where one would think it to be. Were one to ask, ‘Will you begin at the beginning?’ Would you? Really?

My beginning began in the apartment above the Barber Shop on the old Appian Way. The building next to the one that is adjacent to the small and narrow winding cobbled street, pleasantly quiet as it curves up through scented flower-strewn olive and citrus groves, circling and winding its way up into Il Centro Storico, where the end begins.

The Hospital with walls of thick mortar, crumbling under the years of salt-air dampness, has its back against the cemetery, and overlooks it with views the convalescing would rather not have. A cemetery that slides its glance, ever so slowly, along the Ulysses Coast then across the azure of the Mediterranean below. Ignoring the sparse war torn buildings, the cemetery stands as Monarch over all it surveys.

 Early every morning, the Spazzino would clear away debris along the periphery line of the negozi with his straw-broom, swishing debris, the wind had carried into doorways and along the curbs’ edge throughout the night, into a pile. 



Hansom cab
Adolphe Valette
 French Impressionist
Manchester Art Gallery

~

There were Hansom cabs back then. I can still hear the echoing sounds of horses’ hooves passing underneath my window,

clip-clop-clip-clop. 

Swish-swish-swish. 

The broom played Second Fiddle to the hooves’ First Chair, and another day began.