Episode image is a detail from the cover of Lessico Famigliare by Natalia Ginzburg, published in 1997 by Einaudi Scuola; cover image: Antiche case di Torino (part.) by Francesco Garrone.
With a clock ticking implacably in the background, Charles Adrian meets mother, mobile artist and edible gardener Viviana Rossi-Cafell for the 76th Second Hand Book Factory. They talk about the transformative effect of gardening, a warm feeling of friendship and a feeling that comes just before crying. Italian is spoken in this episode, both well and badly. You can see some of Viviana’s work here.
Lessico Familiare by Natalia Ginzburg is also discussed in Page One 183.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 11th August, 2015.
Book listing:
The Edible Garden by Alys Fowler
Di Noi Tre by Andrea De Carlo
Lessico Familiare by Natalia Ginzburg
Links:
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Do you want to pour the tea first or...?
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yes.
sound
[tea pouring into cups]
Charles Adrian
Oh, that's such a good sound. So hello and welcome to the 102nd Page One. This is the 76th Second Hand Book Factory. I'm Charles Adrian and my guest today is Viviana Rossi.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Thank you for having me.
Charles Adrian
My pleasure. You are still Rossi, aren't you?
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
No. Actually, no. I am Rossi-Caffell.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Oh! Rossi-Caffell. That's right.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[speaking over] But I keep forgetting. [laughs] Thanks for asking.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] No, I did know that. That was... Yeah. I forgot. Viviana Rossi-Caffell.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yes.
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
So hello Viviana.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Hello Ade.
Charles Adrian
Thank you so much for... for... well, first of all, agreeing to do the interview. And thank you for hosting me here in your beautiful house.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
It was a treat. It was a treat.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] It's so nice to finally visit you here. And the first thing I'm going to ask you is how you describe yourself.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Wow. How I describe myself. At the moment, I am a mobile artist—not in the sense of somebody who moves a lot, which is true. [laughing] It fits.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] [speaking over] That's... I mean, it used to be truer.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yes. Yes.
Charles Adrian
I suppose it's less true nowadays..
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
But I'm making synetic [/saɪnetɪk/] sculptures that hang from the ceiling or that hang from supports. I mean...
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] You mean kinetic [/kɪnetɪk/] sculptures?
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Kinetic [/kɪnetɪk/]. Thanks. Yeah. Please do correct me. My English is still a bit...
Charles Adrian
[laughs] Your English is wonderful but I suddenly thought... I was going to ask what a synetic sculpture is and then I thought, ‘Ah, no, [laughing] maybe I do know what that is’.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yes.
Charles Adrian
Yeah. [laughs]
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
If you know Alexander Calder then this is who I'm referring to.
Charles Adrian
Okay, no, I don't know the name..
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[speaking over] He's the master.
Charles Adrian
Okay.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Maybe you know [with French pronunciation] Calder?
Charles Adrian
Yes! Okay, that does...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[speaking over] [laughing] He's the same guy.
Charles Adrian
Ah! Okay.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yeah, yeah. In France, he's obviously known as...
Charles Adrian
I must have... I must have seen... I don't know if I've ever seen any of his work but I must have seen pictures.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yes. Oh, it was a huge retrospective at Pompidou and there will be one in Eng... in London now. This... This summer. Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Oh okay. So... So you're a mobile artist.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yes, I spend most of my time as a mother but whatever time is left at the moment is either sucked by my garden, which has become an obsession recently—a very healthy obsession, I have to say—or I dedicate it to making these sculptures in different materials. Aluminium, brass, copper, paper. And I just had a show in Italy, which was very, very good for me—and [laughing] for most of the people who came as well. I organise exhibitions for other artists as well so I've set up a business with Max—my partner—in this country. And... And we shall see. I just hope I will live long enough to explore whatever is still there to be explored. So.
Charles Adrian
I'm not sure that's ever possible.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
No.
Charles Adrian
There's too much to be explored. But you'll get quite a long way down the road, I think.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
You mean I look healthy?
Charles Adrian
You look very healthy.
Viviana and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
That's reassuring.
Charles Adrian
I think this... I think this... This...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
The lifestyle.
Charles Adrian
... lifestyle suits you.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yeah. Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Yeah.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
I'm a slow burner for many, many things. And I am a touche-à-tout. I'm somebody who loves...
Charles Adrian
Jack of all trades.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Although that's... It's... It sounds more pejorative in English.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Oh, touche-à-tout does the same.
Charles Adrian
Really? Okay.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[affirmative] Mmm.
Charles Adrian
Okay. [laughs]
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
It has the same connotation.
Charles Adrian
What's the book that you've brought that you like? Have you decided?
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
I love...
sound
[some thumping, as of a heavy book being moved onto the table]
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
… at the moment… I have to be honest.
Charles Adrian
Yes.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
It's a non-literature book and it's...
Charles Adrian
That's absolutely fine.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
It's Alys Fowler, The Edible Garden.
Charles Adrian
[affirmative] Mmm hmm.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
This book has been a revelation for me. She... She's an amazing woman first of all. She's not just a gardener but she's a writer. And it's a book that made me see things that I['d] never seen before. I live in the countryside with my husband—and I didn't want to live in the countryside with my husband.
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
I was very happy to live away from my husband—seeing my husband occasionally—in Paris. And I had... I got married and we still decided to stay in two separate countries, him being in England—in the countryside—and me living on the fifth floor with no lift in this place where all you could see was roofs—zinc roofs. And there was not much green in my life apart from the green line of the Métro that I had to take...
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
—the orange and the green—every day to go to work. So coming down here was not my choice. It's a gift that I owe to my son Marcello because when he was born I realised that it was not going to work. I couldn't be living in Paris with a baby with a husband in another country. So I moved down here and I was probably depressed for a good year with the wisdom of afterwards. I didn't know at the time. All I all I knew is that I was struggling.
Charles Adrian
Mmm.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Obviously because I had to rebuild the life and I had no more job, no more... no more flat, no more family. My family is in Italy. And now I realise that apart from other benefits that I get from this country—which is a lovely country—I got to know what gardening is about and how you can create an architecture through gardening and how you can eat your landscape.
Charles Adrian
Do you want to read...? Read us the first page of the book.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
So it will not be the introduction. It will be the real first page.
Charles Adrian
Right.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Here we are:
The New Order
I think this has been a long time coming. For a while, I've kept my subversive gardening thoughts to myself. So I may have put the odd patch of flowers at the end of the vegetable bed (a little whimsy) or left the rocket recklessly to flower (a moment of weakness) or grown clover under the cucumbers, but it could all be seen as just an experiment. It's only possible to keep quiet for so long—or, in my case, until I started to notice others coming out of the wilderness. I'd read about their work on the net, or they'd notice the way I'd done something, and suddenly we were all admitting our own mildly eccentric growing pattern to each other. At the beginning of the year, someone came into my garden and said, ‘Oh, I like growing weeds too!’ This was one of the forem...
Charles Adrian
[laughs]
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yeah!
This was one of the foremost organic gardeners in the country—a woman with not a lazy bone in her green fingers—recognising that the sterility of traditional growing methods might not work for everyone.
When I was recently brambling (botanical rambling) over the internet, looking for some fellow polyculture growers, I came across the site Punk Rock Permaculture E-zine. I knew that [sic] that things are changing, and rather rapidly. Punk Rock Permaculture is an online magazine dedicated to the cooler side of permaculture. Its tagline is: ‘A place to make places better’. Entries have included simple DIY medicinal herb gardens, how to rip up your lawn to grow vegetables, and something called a permaculture geek wrap. The point is not so much about the site—though I'd recommend a visit—but that a young man in the U.S. is writing about growing vegetables using a language that absolutely no one would have predicted five years ago. Slightly anarchic, a little punkish, it reads more like an album review than a site on environmentalism.
So here we go. This is what she talks about. I mean, obviously she's done this from a very young age but it's... it's just become my biggest addiction. Of course, I'm addicted to my son who's two and a half years old so the feeling is incredibly strong but this book and what happened since has eradicated all these moments of bore [sic] or... We were talking about it earlier. What is the word? Torpore.
Charles Adrian
Torpor.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Torpor.
Charles Adrian
Mmm.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
I don't know what topor is any more [laughs] since I've started being interested in gardening.
Charles Adrian
Right. Well, that's wonderful. We're going to play some music now. You have to decide what we're going to play.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Okay.
Charles Adrian
Do you know what...? Shall we take a little pause?
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Okay.
Charles Adrian
And we can find it. Because then I can te... And then I can announce it.
Hi, Charles Adrian here, just butting in to say that for some reason we got the name of the track wrong. At this point in the recording Viviana disappeared off to her shelf of records to find out what it was called but we... well, despite that we announced the name of the track as Paris Milonga. That's actually the name of the album. The artist is Paolo Conte, anyway, and the track is actually called Alle prese con una verde milonga.
Music
[Alle prese con una verde milonga by Paolo Conte]
Charles Adrian
So that was Paolo Conte with Paris Milonga. Right. Yes. Eat your biscuits, Viviana...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[laughs]
Charles Adrian
... because now it's [laughing] time for me to talk about the book that I'm going to give to you. Now, this... I don't remember where I bought this. I...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Wow!
Charles Adrian
... don't remember where I was.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
This is one the books on my list.
Charles Adrian
No! Really?
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yeah, yeah, it is.
Charles Adrian
Oh, well, that's a wonderful... That's... That's just luck.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[affirmative] Mmm.
Charles Adrian
The reason that I'm giving it to you... I don't have that many Italian books apart from set texts from when I was at university and I think you probably will have read all of those. This... So a friend of mine gave me another book by Andrea De Carlo called Due de Due...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[appreciative] Mmm hmm.
Charles Adrian
... which I won't give you because it's a gift from him so...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
And I think I have read Due di Due.
Charles Adrian
Oh, this is working out very nicely. And I... So I enjoyed Due di Due. So I then went out and bought... I thought, ‘Well, what else has he written?’ And I bought this. And it's more or less the same book but with different [laughing] characters.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Wow, I love it.
Charles Adrian
It's really... It's so enjoyable. I really enjoyed this. I enjoy... Both of them. I love them. They're so warm and I love these... They're really the stories of friendships. They're stories of... In both of them there's a guy and he has... he just describes going through life and encounters with... this friend, I guess, and how things change as they get older. And I think it's... Yeah, I think it's lovely. I don't remember the story of this particularly well. I just remember the warm feeling it gave me. So I thought I would give that to you in the hope that it might give you...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[speaking over] Beautiful.
Charles Adrian
... the same kind of warm feeling. But I'm going to read you the first page.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Please.
Charles Adrian
So this is obviously in Italian so you have to excuse me. I have practised a little bit at home but [laughing] my Italian is so rusty.
Uno
Misia Mistria...
Sorry. I've already [laughing] messed that up.
Misia Mistrani l'ho conosciuta il 12 febbraio del 1978. Al mattino mi ero laureato in storia antica, con una tesi sulla Quarta Crociata che aveva provocato un quasi-rissa con la commissione per come mi era venuta polemica e coinvolta, dopo di che ero stato liquidato con 110 senza lode, anche se avevo lavorato un anno e scritto duecentocinquanta pagine abbastanza appassionate e documentate. Il presidente mi aveva detto nella suo voce monocroma “La storia è prospettiva. Non si può parlare di eventi di sette secoli fa come se fossero successo... successi l'altro ieri e lei ci fosse stato in mezzo. Le mancano totalmente il distacco e l'equilibrio, la capacità di una valutazione a mente fredda”. Non aveva torto, su questo: mi sembrava che non mi bastassero le scorte di indigniazione e di rabbia e di paura e di parzialità per tornare indietro nel tempo, altro che distacco.
I'm not sure if I made sense of that sentence. Anyway.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[encouraging] Yeah.
Charles Adrian
Anche il mio migliore amico Marco Traversi solo poche settimane prima aveva avuto una discussione furiosa per la sua tesi su Cristoforo Colombo e la distruzione delle Americhe, ma invece di retrocedere sotto l'onda di stizza della commissione aveva finito per mandare al diavolo tutti, rinunciare a laurearsi. Mi intristiva essere stato molto meno fermo di lui al momento buono, avere preferito portarmi a casa il diploma come un bravo ragazzo un po' ingenuo e impulsivo, fare contente mia madre e mia nonna invece di diffendere a oltranza quello che pensavo. Così la sera della laurea non avevo telefonato a Marco come avrei voluto, e per non restare a casa a diprimermi ero andato da solo in un posto che adesso è diventato un finto pub inglese ma allora era una finta cantina sudamericana piena di fumo e musica e ca...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Beautiful. What a gift!
Charles Adrian
Well, I hope you enjoy it.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
I will. This book will come to [sic] me on the beach if you don't mind.
Charles Adrian
Wonderful. No. Get sand in it.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[speaking over] Get sandy.
Charles Adrian
Yeah.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Okay.
Charles Adrian
It's yours now.
Viviana and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Charles Adrian
And what is the book that you think I should have?
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
I think you should have Natalia Ginzburg's Lessico famigliare, which is...
Charles Adrian
[whispering] Which I already have.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
You already have it? Oh. I'm glad you already have it because you're a good one.
Viviana and Charles Adrian
[laughter]
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
And also because I don't really [laughing] want to give you this one because it's mine.
Charles Adrian
[laughs] I'll reread the edition that I have.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[speaking over] This is mine. But this book brought lots of feelings to me. A very big feeling of magone. Um... [laughs] Magone is a difficult to translate word. Magone... Actually, it's something that happens when you're very close to crying but you're crying with troppo pieno. You're too full... too full of emotions and magonozo. It's melancholic as well.
Charles Adrian
So it...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
It's melancholy which is... It's very full.
Charles Adrian
Okay.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
It's also when everything makes sense because it's a book that talks about everything that I've experienced in life—and obviously talks about many more things that I have not experienced yet and I haven't recognised in this book because I don't know what they are. I don't know what they feel like. But there is the feeling of family. When I read this book... I didn't have a family when I read this book. I was... I was a wife—a young wife—from a few months before... since a few months and—however you say that—and I had very strong feelings—which I still have—with my parents and with whoever came before them. With my roots. With Naples, with Italy, and with all those old buildings—old neglected buildings—that you see in Italy and I hope are going to stay up for a while still because there's so much that these walls have seen and... Yes. And there's also a love story in this book. And even though it's not said in this book there is death at the end of this love story. And still Natalia had the strength—and actually death probably gave her the strength—to come out with this amazing... It's an autobiography... partly... primarily.
Charles Adrian
Read the first page of it.
Viviana Ross-Caffell
[speaking over] Yes. I will.
Nella mia casa paterna, quand'ero ragazzina, a tavola, se io o i miei fratelli roveciavamo il bicchierre sulla tovaglia, o lasciavamo cadere un coltello, la voce di mio padre tuonava: – Non fate malagrazie!
Se inzuppavamo il pane nella salsa, gridava: – Non leccate i piatti! Non fate sbrodeghezzi! Non fate potacci!
Sbrodeghezzi e potacci erano, per mio padre, anche i quadri moderni, che non poteva sufrire.
Diceva: – Voialtri non sapete stare a tavola! Non siete gente da portare nei loghi!
E diceva: – Voialtri che fate tanti sbrodeghezzi, se foste a una table d'hôte in Ingilterra, vi manderebero subito via.
Aveva, dell'Ingilterra, la piú alta stima. Trovava che era, nel mondo, il piú grande esempio di civiltà.
Here we are. So if I were a writer this is the book I would like to say I've written.
Charles Adrian
Really? Ah. Nice.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[speaking over] Even if that is the only thing I do in my life.
Charles Adrian
That's good to know.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Why? Can you turn me into a writer?
Charles Adrian
I can't wave a wand, no.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[laughs]
Charles Adrian
I can't... And you will have... You will never have [laughing] written...
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[laughing] No.
Charles Adrian
... Lessico familiare. I'm sorry. That's never going to have happened.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
[speaking over] It will be my lessico.
Charles Adrian
What's...? So we're going to finish now. Thank you so much, Viviana, for doing this.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Thank you.
Charles Adrian
What is the...? What is the...? So the second track that you've picked. Sorry. [laughing] I know what it is because I asked you earlier. So this is Reginella and it's by Alberto Murolo [/mʊˈreʊleʊ/].
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Roberto Murolo [/ˈmʊreʊleʊ/].
Charles Adrian
Murolo [/ˈmʊreʊleʊ/].
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Murolo [/ˈmʊreʊleʊ/].
Charles Adrian
Murolo [/ˈmʊreʊleʊ/]. Lovely. Okay. We're going to play out with that.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Yes.
Charles Adrian
[speaking over] Thank you so much.
Viviana Rossi-Caffell
Thank you.
Music
[Reginella by Alberto Murolo]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]