Italy

R.I.P. Anglo American Book (Rome, 1953-2025)

Photo by Laura Weinstein

Anglo American Book, Rome’s oldest English-language bookshop – founded in 1953 by Dino Donati and run by the Donati family for 70 years – is shuttering for good this week. This is a profoundly sad piece of news, though not unexpected. Skyrocketing rents have buried yet another temple of culture.

I worked at the AAB for five years, from 2005 to 2011. Like the Gotham Book Mart before it, it was a unique place where I met many unforgettable people. One friendship I struck up at the AAB was with Alexander Booth. He would come in often, and we always got to talking about literature, music and Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s. (We had both gone to VCU, a year or so apart, and ended up expats in Rome.) Alex and I were (and very much still are) both poets and translators, and remain close friends to this day despite living in different countries. Alexander published a lively translation of the poetry of Sandro Penna a couple of years ago. I remember seeing it in the storefront window at AAB, not long before they moved to the windowless upstairs location removed from street traffic. Without the Anglo American, would we ever have met?

I remember the evening when we had just closed up and were turning off the lights, and two ghostly faces appeared at the door. It was poet Moira Egan and her husband, the translator Damiano Abeni. I had to tell them to come back during opening hours. We became friends over time, though, and I interviewed them for The American in 2009. When my first collection Unburial came out, Moira was gracious enough to partner with me for the book launch at AAB (photo above).

AAB storefront window – December 7, 2019

Here are the recordings of Moira and me reading on 12/7/2019 at the AAB:

Moira:

Marc:

___

It was also there that I met Mike Stocks, poet and translator of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli. Mike walked in one day with a handful of copies of his newly published translation. Of course, I had to interview him. We went out for pints near Piazza Trilussa while I recorded our conversation on my wife’s handheld recording device. (This was pre-smartphone.) Mike revealed to me his secrets for approaching the great Romanesco poet, notoriously forbidding both for his 19th century Roman dialect and for the volume of his output: over 2000 sonnets (the critical edition of his poems runs over 5000 pages.) That meeting with Mike influenced my approach to translating Mario dell’Arco, convincing me that one didn’t need to have academic chops in order to get the job done. It was an important lesson, and if he hadn’t fallen off the grid I’d buy him a beer and thank him.

Piazza Trilussa, Trastevere (Rome)

The list could go on, as lists do. Bookstores have played an outsized role in my adult life. It has been dawning on me for some time that I have lived at the edge of a disappearing era, a time when independent bookshops were places people went in their free time to meet other people, not unlike a neighborhood pub. They were like secular houses of worship. Relationships could be forged there. Lives could be altered. You were in the realm of curiosity, always bracing for the unexpected thrill of discovering a new book. Those born too late may never know this way of being in the world.

I spent many years working in bookshops on two continents: Strand, Gotham Book Mart, Anglo American Book. It was never a swank job with a good paycheck, but the summation of that experience was for me the equivalent of a university degree. I’ll always remember the names of people who worked at those NY bookshops before me: Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell. It seemed like it might almost be preparation for a future in the arts. Maybe it was.

It seems apropos to round out this reminiscence with a poem about another of my favorite gone bookstores, Chop Suey Books in Richmond. It was my go-to bookshop whenever I was in town visiting the old haunts in Careytown. The poem was published in the Hollins Critic, a quirky little literary journal from Virginia which – but of course – ceased publication last year. It seems like our losses are neverending. All we have is art to push back against the rising tides of oblivion.

from The Hollins Critic, Oct. 2022

Runaway

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I’m excited that my poem “Runaway” has gone up at Baltimore Review! As an ex-Baltimorean, it means something to have a poem – which is an excavation of my own parents’ motives for choosing one another – in a high-quality hometown journal. I don’t want to give too much away, but [spoiler alert] it’s the opener in my forthcoming book unburial. So if you want to know what the book will be about, let’s just say this poem sets the tone. If you like it, you may want to read the rest of the poems, too. (Hint hint.)

Making memes

When I was in college I was there to study graphic design. When I began to study, however, I realized I wanted nothing to do with the graphic design crowd (and my teacher and I mutually loathed each other) so I opted for “sculpture”, a loosely-defined major which basically included anything you could invent in three spatial dimensions. We sculpture majors looked down our noses at our ad-agency peers. “They aren’t real artists,” we’d scoff. “They just want to get a good job one day.” We still believed real artists lived in broken-down lofts without plumbing and ate ramen noodles for lunch and dinner (black coffee for breakfast, please). This, of course, made them artists.

Of course, I’m no longer eighteen. I have developed an – ahem – appreciation of other forms of creativity that don’t perforce involve splattered paint and vodka. One of them is the internet meme. Meme is an interesting word because most people who use it use it to mean ‘internet meme’, or photos with catchy slogans or witty quotes. Memes, of course, were coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene in 1976. They are a bit more complex than lolcats, but we can love them both.

I have recently taken to reworking some of my photos via cool apps that make it simple to do. Here’s one I like – made with Phonto – which uses a photo taken at the Museo della Tortura in Montepulciano, Tuscany to make a point I feel is worth stating. I’ll upload some of them here from time to time. I hope you enjoy them. Feel free to spread them.

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Sin City!

Every time another Vatican scandal crops up in the news this song begins playing automatically in my head.

La mentalità italiana

Here’s a cartoon I drew with an Italian translation of a joke I posted here.

The Facebook atheist

ImageI recently started a group called Atheists Assisi on Facebook, that notorious maker and breaker of contemporary friendships. The group — the first and only one to my knowledge — is devoted to forging a community of atheists in the Assisi area. As one member jokingly put it, “In the land of St. Francis are you sure they won’t burn us as heretics?”

Believe it or not, the first problems I encountered weren’t from vigilante Franciscan monks but from well-meaning expats like myself. When I posted a link to my page on a popular expat group on Facebook, I was considerate enough to tag it “for anyone who might be interested.”

Of course that didn’t stop a minor deluge of comments along the lines of, “Please refrain from preaching, moralizing or ridiculing others’ beliefs” and “I was brought up to respect other people’s beliefs” and “Talking about religion only destroys friendships.” At one point I was even compared to the Seventh Day Adventists.

Thankfully, a few had my back. My critics were reminded that I wasn’t proselytizing or poking fun at others’ beliefs. In fact, all I had done was post a link that contained the word “atheist.” Apparently, that was enough to start the machine gurgling and sputtering. You’d have thought I’d announced the successful cloning of Torquemada and the reconstitution of the Spanish Inquisition.

The idea lurking behind these disputes is that atheists — at least those of us who make a point of talking about it openly — are a kind of militant faction roughly comparable to Al Qaeda. We fanatically harangue passersby about their beliefs, insult them, beat them, spit on their prophets and leave them to suffer from internal bleeding before an oncoming rig — all the while laughing our heads off at their credulousness. We’re a callous bunch, aren’t we?

The truth is that most atheists, even the angriest and most militant, bear no resemblance to the caricature. Most of us are animated by a love of logical argument and a desire for evidence in support of claims. We love to talk, discuss, provoke but also listen and attempt to understand why others feel as they do. We don’t generally carry explosives. We don’t overpopulate prisons. A quote that represents our position might be, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

It’s a pity I feel the need to write a paragraph like the one above. It’s disheartening that atheists remain the target of hostility, not only from true believers but also from decent people who claim tolerance for everyone – except atheists.

In fact, the one piece of advice my critics had for me was, “Just shut the hell up. You’re ruining the party for the rest of us.” What we were discussing wasn’t religion or atheism, though. It was the right to discuss religion and atheism. I had been accused of parachuting my beliefs behind the wall erected to shield them from inquiry, a wall behind which they can never be questioned, ridiculed or challenged.

But what good are belief systems that go unquestioned? What good is it to carry beliefs in your head that never see the light of day? How do you even know you believe something if you’ve never inspected it sufficiently to see what it’s actually made of?

It seems to me about the worst decision one can make is to insulate cherished beliefs and make them inaccessible to inquiry. It also suggests that such beliefs can’t stand up to even superficial scrutiny. Hence the fear of discussing them openly and the desire to censor those who would.

This is a recipe for disaster. There’s no better way of weeding out bad ideas than letting them get some fresh air. I for one am content to let others question my most strongly-held beliefs for the following reasons:

  • If my beliefs can withstand logical inquiry then they are probably constructed on solid ground and therefore generally sound (ok to keep until further notice)

  • If my beliefs crumble at the first sign of resistance they are at best poorly developed and at worst worthless (best to get rid of these ASAP).

If you look at societies that ban free inquiry and doubt you’ll find them all to be oppressive if not downright totalitarian. Toleration of free speech and free thought is the essence of a free society. The paradox is that some use the right to try to shut up those whose speech they disagree with.

I’m not implying that’s what was being done in my Facebook episode. I don’t think there was an actual desire to tamper with my right to free speech. What I think happened was that a few people overreacted to a word they dislike, one that challenges their beliefs without their needing to put on armor or pick up a sword. They instead imagined the battle as it might have been: the besieged castle, the hot oil, and the fleeing king galloping through the woods naked.

And that was enough for them. Because the king is naked, and the only person who will remind you of that is the pesky little atheist on your Facebook page.

The Italian psyche

A joke.

A: “Did you know that in every public schoolroom in Italy the law requires a crucifix and a picture of Garibaldi to be prominently displayed?”

B: “Really? Why Garibaldi?!”

Assisi has atheists!

The light of reason breaking over Assisi

This is just a quick, informative post to let readers (and search engines) know that there is a new group on Facebook called Atei Assisi | Assisi Atheists. The idea behind it is to give atheists and other non-believers in the Assisi area – or Umbria, Italy and anywhere else they might live – some much-needed visibility.

Assisi, as most people know, is famous in all the world for one thing: St. Francis. A man who spoke to animals. A magician. And probably a charlatan (he was supposed to have stigmata – a red flag if ever there was one.)

It goes without saying that such a place probably has a bunch of frustrated atheists chomping at the bit. Plus, it doesn’t cost anything at all to “like” us. It’s free and always will be. So let’s show the theocrats we’re here to stay!

The importance of being Catholic

There’s been a recent crackdown on religion teachers in Palermo, Sicily. Apparently, they’ve been asked (required is more like it) to produce a certificate of Catholic moral fitness in order to keep their jobs. These, mind you, are teachers of Catholic religion in Italian public schools, chosen by the Vatican and paid for by the State. Now it seems the Vatican has begun to notice that not all Catholics are quite as obedient as they’d like them to be.

How many of those who call themselves Catholics follow the teachings of the Church to the letter? How many of them go to mass, confess, take communion, avoid sex which isn’t for reproductive purposes, don’t use contraception, don’t get divorced, don’t have abortions, haven’t betrayed their spouses, don’t steal, lie and so on?

It’s seriously funny, isn’t it? I wish I were optimistic enough to agree with some people that we are witnessing the death throes of Roman Catholicism, but harmful and ridiculous ideologies have a way of sticking around for millennia.

But guess what? The teachers are really pissed off about this! Which is a good thing, and I hope their anger spreads more generally through the population and Italians finally realize they’re sick of being preached to by a corrupt gang of homophobic sissies. Most Italians have better moral values than the Catholic Church peddles, despite the fact that they often define themselves – erroneously – as “Catholics.”

They’re not, any more than I’m a Hasidic Jew.

***BREAKING*** Millions of Italians are atheists!

Gosh, living in Italy is just too damn funny sometimes. I mean, where else can you meet people who say things like, “This is a Catholic country” and “Catholic traditions must be respected?” These are people, I might add, who get divorced and use birth control. 

They couldn’t pack more irony into a phrase if they tried. Of course, when they say “respected” they mean “submitted to without complaint.” After all, that’s what’s at the heart of the whole “Italy-is-a-Catholic-country” schtick. It means, If you don’t like our bigoted traditions, you can go home. As if everyone who disagreed with Catholic traditions were an immigrant (and immigrants, as we know, have no right to complain). Try pointing out that there are plenty of native Italians who disagree with having a de facto state religion and you just get blank stares. Incredibly, many Italians still think all other Italians are Catholic! Ha!

So sometimes, being the militant secularist that I am, I like to point out to them that

***BREAKING*** Millions of Italians are atheists! Others just don’t give a fuck about religion! Still others are Jews, Muslims or other despised religious minorities! You Catholics are not the only ones on this peninsula! Get it into your heads! There’s room for all of us!

This country is in serious need of hearing dissenting points of view.