Talking Location With author Elise Valmorbida

29th June 2018

We recently reviewed the wonderfully atmosperic Madonna of the Mountains by Elise Valmorbida set in the Veneto (you may remember that this is the book with the wonderful cover designed by Liberty of London for Faber Books). Now Elise talks to us about locale and shares fabulous insider tips!

Most people are familiar with the sophisticated university cities of Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Venice, but the setting of my novel The Madonna of the Mountains is the rural Veneto. This is a landscape of peaks—the Dolomites and Alps bordering Austria to the north—and fertile flatlands that extend to the Adriatic Sea in the east.

Starting in 1923, the story moves from a remote mountain hamlet to a small country town in the plains, spanning the decades of Fascism and the era of post-war reconstruction. I think of the protagonist Maria Vittoria as a kind of Mother Courage. She’s an ordinary country woman of her time, and she is very much of her place.

My family hails from the Veneto, and I’ve loved the region since my childhood, thanks to migrant tales and countless trips. I’m a tourist, a foreigner and a local all at once. I’ve succumbed to the classic seductions of art and architecture—Palladio, Tiepolo, Bellini, Titian, and so many others—but I’ve also sought out places that don’t figure on the usual tourist maps, places I’ve visited with local friends and relatives, places that reward writerly research…

LANDSCAPE, NOT SCENERY

Seeing the landscape with Maria Vittoria’s eyes, I do not see ‘scenery’. I see the rituals of work in rhythm with the seasons and saints’ days. I see food to forage, medicinal plants, springs and canals for water, smallholdings for vines, corn, stone-fruit, nut trees and vegetables. I see and hear each steepled campanile, a row of cypress trees along a church road, the sound of local bells. In the mountains, an icy river at the start of Spring marks the end of a snowbound winter; it’s exciting, the sound of rushing water everywhere. In the plains, a ditch is a place to find wildflowers, herbs and frogs, often a line of mulberry trees, the leaves of which are harvested to feed silkworms. There are ditches everywhere in this region. Fosso, the fictional town in my book, means ditch. It’s the kind of name a real town here would have.

TIP: Search for sagra or festa, and you’ll find a rural celebration of a local dish or natural seasonal delicacy. It might involve an artisan food fair in a piazza, special suppers in a trattoria or in a field (paper plates on trestle tables), and other traditional ways of celebrating a specific beloved ingredient. Think cherries (Marostica), fish (Chioggia), pumpkins (Pastrengo), snails (Valdobbiadane), wild mushrooms, asparagus, DOC wines, cheeses…

 SIGNS OF WAR

There are signs of war elsewhere, embedded within the region’s beauty. In the last years of WW2, under Nazi occupation, Italy’s north-east was still being devastated long after the liberation of Rome. Venice was officially spared bombardment, but the Nazi-Fascists did not spare Venetian Jews. Today, the names of deported individuals are engraved in gold plaques set into the pavements outside their homes.

Bassano del Grappa is a town gracefully situated on the Brenta river, with historic arcaded streets and squares set against a mountain backdrop that rises dramatically from the plains. The town’s avenues are flanked by ornamental trees. Local people can’t see those trees without recalling that Nazis turned them into gallows in September, 1944. At this time, posters throughout occupied northern Italy made a certain kind of arithmetic very plain: 1 German = 10 Italians.

Pasubio, a mountain north-west of Vicenza, was a crucial defensive position against the invading Austrian Army of WW1. In 1917, the Italian Army engineered the extraordinary ‘Road of 52 Tunnels’ to transport men and supplies without being seen or shot by the enemy. Hiking here is an experience I will never forget: precipitous, stunningly beautiful, and marked by war.

TIP: You can hike the Road of 52 Tunnels by day, or on a clear summer night by the light of a full moon. There are four monumental ossuaries in the mountains near Vicenza, all worth visiting for their architecture, landscape and history: Pasubio, Tonezza del Cimone, Monte Grappa and Asiago.

HISTORIC MOUNTAIN HAMLET

Contrada Bariola, at Sant’Antonio di Valli del Pasubio, is an old hamlet restored and transformed into a living museum. Here, domestic and public spaces are populated by life-size figures whose faces are modelled on individuals who live here. They’re so real, I have to look twice to make sure they’re not breathing. The historical details are meticulously authentic, and their professions are of another time: the bird-catcher, the vine-trainer, veteran soldiers of the Great War. There’s a woman seated at her doorstep stripping corn-cobs, and another climbing rough wooden steps to a granary. They could be characters from my novel.

TIP: Go at Christmas-time to see a Nativity scene like no other. Wander about, inhaling the cold mountain air and the comforting smell of woodsmoke, sampling mulled wine and homemade pastries proffered by real people. Then ask someone to recommend a good local trattoria or osteria…

Thank you so much to Elise for sharing such wonderful and unique tips for the Veneto. Another destination to add to the bucket list. Do follow Elise on Facebook and via her website.

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