Kerouac once wrote, “Why travel if not like
a child?” I used to value that, to hold it forward in my mind as I moved around
the world. Now, too often, I travel like a child sat bored in the back of a car
in a traffic jam with nothing but a completed colouring book for distraction.
The scenes I too often now see, I coloured in with my mind’s eye many years
ago.
Too many of these scenes of today seem
stunningly, stuntingly similar. Homogeneity has spread like foot fungus across
cultures and places that were recently vibrant and complete, confident in their
individuality. The places touted as living heritage are often just the carcass
of a culture, hung to dry cure in the butcher’s shop of tourism and devoured by
directionless daytrippers. Overpriced
coffee, ice cream and dust collecting trinkets replacing self-sufficiency,
creativity and regional communality.
Give me Stiava over Sienna, Coullias before
Carcassone. Their history might be whispered not screamed, but they are honest.
Imposing ancient edifice and streets sanitised for sightseers are nothing
compared to the intensity of a sitting in someone’s home eating food cooked by
them to be shared with me. The variety that was once in these places is now
just in the people. It is their lives and loves, pains, past and dreams that
interest me.
As hierarchy and commerce close in for the
kill, as their economy of scale, profit ethic and avarice paints the whole
world corporate grey, so colour burns brighter in any person with generosity.
And the generosity we have been shown has been complete, though I have had
little if anything to give in return, not even conversation as my second
language skills are so blunt.
Florence was dirty and crowded, Sienna
pretensions and expensive, Pisa a pantomime. All communities large and small
can be closed, cliquey and insular, but cracked open they are a cornucopia.
Behind the façade the cosmetically enhanced cities of history are surely just
as inviting and charitable. But Stiava? Yes, We have had an invite in, but that
has not been enough to explain their depth of giving. That place was honest,
welcoming and generous, and with no facade.
Route, photos and more at www.thelongandwinding.co.uk
