109. Love Among the Castelli Romani

The Castelli Romani are a cluster of hill towns just to the southeast of Rome. This podcast reviews a good new book that explores four of them shows how travel can stimulate our thinking as well as our other appetites.

If you are wondering why I am breaking my long silence and publishing a new podcast today, the answer is easy: I just finished a good book on a subject closely related to Rome, and I’d like to call your attention to it.

Its title is Love among the CASTELLI ROMANI: A Midlife Crisis for Two, and it is cowritten by Scott and Trang Crider. The former is a professor of literature at the University of Dallas, and the latter is a librarian there. They spent 1998-2000 on the University of Dallas Rome Campus, and then they returned twenty years later and worked there again in 2018-2020. During this second sojourn, they explored the immediate surroundings of the university’s campus and have written this book about their experiences in them.

As you may remember from my podcast on Castel Gandolfo, the Castelli Romani are a charming cluster of hill towns positioned on a huge but extinct volcanic group about twelve miles southeast of Rome. The book is partly an introduction to these wonderful hill towns—and especially to four of them, Albano, Castel Gandolfo, Frascati, and Nemi—but as the authors succinctly declare, their book is not a travel guide. It is rather a travel memoir. It includes descriptions of many things to see, do, and eat while visiting the Castelli, but its focus is on their own experiences there. In fact, it is more than a travel memoir, for it takes us to their many reflections on their travels, as is evidenced especially by the frequent and rich quotations from serious authors, such as Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Livy. Even more fundamental than their interest in the Castelli is their interest in life, love, art, and human goodness. Scott, after all, is a professor of literature, so it would be odd if his travels, like the waters of Lethe, erased his background and life-long interests.

Our authors do not announce directly that love is the main theme of their book, but I think it is. It is the first word of the book’s title, which presents the Castelli Romani as the setting for love, not a subject superior in importance to it. Love is at least a subject that returns regularly. It does so partly occasional references to the authors’ own love, which gives the book a surprising and unexpected intimacy. Their description of themselves visiting the archeological sites of Albano, one of the fifteen or so towns that comprise the Castelli, ends with one of several kisses reported in the book; handholding gets several mentions; and we are also told how they met and married. Even a boiling teapot makes a cameo appearance as a stimulus to love. And the book’s last pages return to this main subject and declare the authors’ love to be “the true beauty of [their] adventure” in the Castelli.

These final pages also confirm that their love is not, or not only, raw passion; it is the kind that is made over time, changes over time, and includes what they call “the art of married life.” This helps explain why their son, Kiên, plays such an important role in the book, even though he was working at the University of Texas at Austin during most of Scott and Trang’s explorations of the Castelli.

Different sorts of love turn up on other occasions, as for example in their discussion of Bernini’s most famous statue, his Apollo and Daphne, which represents an attempted rape of a chaste nymph who spent her time hunting with the goddess of chastity.

Love is at the core also of their discussions of Catholicism and the papacy, crucial subjects for their encounter with the Castelli (and Rome), for they call attention to the inclusive loving practiced by Jesus and St. Francis. As compared with this admirable loving of neighbors and strangers, they observe that the papacy or Catholic Church in general fall short. They do all this with a light touch, but they are remarkably frank in discussing both their love and, sometimes, their opinions on major issues, especially when, as often happens in our modern world, love of others would make things so much better but yet is hard to find. Insofar as their reflections invite us to think along with them, their travel-based thinking becomes more engaging than the recitation by tourist guides of fact after fact about one tourist site after another.

So, then, as their title indicates, Scott and Trang’s book is about love in or among the Castelli Romani. It is also about love for the Castelli Romani. They make this love so believable that I can’t imagine a reader who could finish this book without checking Airbnb for accommodations in preparation for a wished-for visit. Their love for the Castelli has many sources, but most are related to the joys of discovery on a human scale, where “discovery” includes discovering how to enjoy a meal. In contrast to Rome, the hill towns of the Castelli are not crowded with tourists, and yet the sites are sometimes as beautiful and often as intriguing as those in Rome. And then—a unique advantage of life in or near a small town—they got to know the locals, and this makes everything so wonderfully personal. No one can really enjoy being herded around multiple tourist sites in a group of fifty, can they? Wandering among the Castelli with friends is a whole different experience.

The great families that built Rome’s magnificent structures during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also had their great architects come out of the city and build summer palaces and churches for them in the Castelli. Castel Gandolfo can boast a charming central plan church built by Pope Alexander VII and his family, the Chigi, and one can walk from it to another such church in Albano. Both were designed by Rome’s greatest Baroque architect and artist, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and our authors excel at bringing out these unexpected riches of small towns remote from Rome’s chaos.

Trang and Scott disclose similar opportunities for those seeking the ruins of ancient Rome in the Castelli. They introduce us to Domitian’s gardens in Castel Gandolfo, to the surviving amphitheater and underground reservoir of the Second Parthian Legion in Albano, and to the site of Cicero’s villa above Frascati, for example. In each case, these visits prompt worthy observations and questions, and they help to add depth to our experiences in Rome as well. The majestic Arch of Septimus Severus in the Roman Forum, for example, honors a dynasty closely connected to the Parthian Legion; and the Domitian we hear of in Castel Gandolfo is also important for having given Piazza Navona its shape and for an extensive palace on the Palatine Hill.

Much of what our authors describe they discovered for themselves, or, in one case, in the company of a museum director who was thrilled that this inquisitive couple had the initiative to discover his small and little-known museum. So, the Castelli are brimful of the sort of riches twenty million visitors go to Rome to see each year, and yet they are still relatively undiscovered. (Personally speaking, I hope it is not terrible of me to hope they remain undiscovered. Slow public transit in the area currently helps to protect them.) I won’t claim that there is a fountain in the Castelli that is quite on the scale of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, but as Trang and Scott make plain, neither is there a volcanic lake in the middle of Rome.

Love of dining well also plays an important role in this book, and Scott and Trang do an excellent job of preventing us from thinking that the quality of the food is the only element of dining well. It this respect, the foodies have it wrong. Perhaps culinary sophistication is not even the primary element. Trang and Scott show that friendliness and even friendship are important elements of a great meal, and they persuade me that they can be found more easily in the restaurants of the Castelli than in those of Rome, and more easily in those of Rome than in the chain restaurants of the United States. As they put it, diners are welcomed as guests of the restaurant, not as “business” or “customers.” Many Italian restaurants are family owned and operated, and dining at one often includes a friendly chat with the owner. Repeat visits may lead to considerable warmth. This is not likely to happen often in the USA, where the wait staff of many restaurants changes frequently and greetings are often a ritualized, “Hello. My name is Matthew, and I’ll be taking care of you tonight.” The Criders document their enthusiasm by reports of visits to Ristorante Bucci, which sits on the rim of the volcanic Lago di Albano, and Da Agnese, which is on the beach of this same lake. I’m ready for either or, better, both.

I’m inclined to think that the charm of the book lies especially in the episodes it reports, while its ultimate interest concerns the deep questions it raises. Examples of its charming episodes include Trang’s experiences as a shopper in Porta Portese and her working in the vineyard of the University of Dallas, where they lived and worked during their two years in the Castelli. I view shopping as a mostly unnecessary evil and try to avoid it, but Trang showed how her bargaining established a bond between herself and a merchant: this is the sort of thing that happens at a market in Rome but cannot happen when making purchases on Amazon. As for her joining an international crew to prune grape vines, what a wonderful way to dive into the lives of the locals. If she has the chance on her next visit, I’d recommend that she also help take the olives to the olive press at harvest time. The presses are then operating twenty-four hours a day, and growers get assigned a time to bring in their olives. Nothing like sipping grappa with your neighbors at 2:00 am to the tune of grinding olive presses!

Other charming moments include experiences on the highways in fast cars and amusing misunderstandings that arise when we don’t shy away from practicing a foreign language. Hence the amusing exchange between Scott and Mauro, the friendly owner of Da Agnese, when one was speaking of a month of the year, febbraio, and the other was speaking of a fever, febbre. It’s pleasant and useful to try to learn Italian by speaking it, but one must be prepared for misunderstandings. Back when we first lived in the Italian countryside, a few poorly understood exchanges led some Italian friends to bring my wife a birthday present, even though we have no idea what we had said that made them think it was her birthday.

As for the ultimate interest in the book, it lies in its thinking and in its ability to get its readers to think. It is not ponderous, its chapters are short, and its reflections are brief. The book is only a little more than one hundred small pages. It is intended more to stimulate thinking than to present a treatise that settles life’s great mysteries once and for all. Love Among the Castelli would be spoiled were it to become more pedantic, more like a lecture, and yet, perhaps to contradict myself, I find myself wishing it were sometimes longer. It can be hard to leave a great question too soon, even if the circumstances are not right for pursuing it.

A thoughtful visit to Rome and to the Castelli requires some thinking about popes and the papacy, which ruled central Italy for over 1,500 years. In this connection, Scott and Trang, who declare themselves not to be Catholic or Christian, make an important case for thinking more highly of Pope Francis than of his two predecessors, for example, for Francis puts aside the Church’s finery and pomp and encourages us to welcome and love our neighbors, no matter whence they may have arrived. They add force to this judgment by introducing us to an African immigrant, whom they befriended in Albano and who, of course, struggles to get by, very much an outsider in a small Italian hill town. Pope Francis, however, calls upon us to welcome and give aid to such outsiders, and he thereby reminds us of his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, and of Jesus. The pope well illustrated this value in dramatic fashion by adding a new statue group to Piazza San Pietro in Rome, one which calls dramatic attention to the plight of refugees and which I think is the only addition to the Piazza in the last several centuries. Honoring brotherly love all makes good sense, but I can’t help but think about the cases that might be made on behalf of the previous two popes. Pope Benedict, for example, was often credited with being a profound student of St. Augustine and of the relationship between philosophy or reason and theology or faith. One might say that careful thought on this vast question does no one any immediate good. Rousseau observed that that the qualities of the philosopher are not those of a good neighbor. But the questions of whether faith can guide itself without reason and whether reason can fully support morality without faith strike me as vital, so I would be happy to look longer into the competing virtues of our recent popes. And if Love among the Castellii should prompt me to follow through and do so, wouldn’t this be a fine result?

Another case in which the nature of the book rules out further discussion that would otherwise have been welcome is that of their reflections on Cicero and, in particular, his and Socrates’s arguments that death should not be feared. I welcome this conclusion but would like to tarry on the way to reaching it. And if death should not be feared, should it be welcomed? Since Cicero did so much to bring out in his writings the disagreements among the Stoics, Epicureans, and Academic Skeptics on precisely questions of this sort, I should seize the occasion our authors provide to review their and other contrasting positions on them.

Other questions raised by the book that deserve further exploration include the trial of Galileo by the Catholic inquisition and Thomas Merton’s understanding of silence and its importance. How pleasant it would be to sit down with Scott and Trang, perhaps at Ristorante Bucci with a full moon rising over Lago di Albano, and explore these topics further!

The subtitle of Love Among the Castelli, is “A Midlife Crisis for Two.” Based on my reading, I might have suggested, rather, “A Midlife Adventure for Two,” for there are no signs of a crisis in the usual sense. They seem to anticipate my reaction and explain that midlife makes many of us wish to “start over,” which they declare to be impossible. “Your youth is gone forever,” they tell us, and the lives we have lived cannot be re-lived. (I don’t like hearing this, but I don’t see how not to agree.) Meditations of this sort led them to this mantra: “Plan for the future, but enjoy the day you are in.” The result of applying this mantra was for them a second two-year stint at an American campus in the Castelli, and a wonderful opportunity to get to know the area. In their book, they share this opportunity with us.

I’ll conclude with the reminder that our authors are Scott and Trang Crider, and their book is Love among the CASTELLI ROMANI: A Midlife Crisis for Two. It’s available on Amazon, and it’s a great way to get to know about the Castelli, while also being stimulated to think about life more generally.