IX.x. Shakespeare, Soave, Chicago

"Wine gives courage and inclines men towards passions."
- Ovid

Aldous wanted to attend Sunday morning mass in Verona, for some reason that still evades me. Having arrived, we borrowed a pair of bicycles from the local tourist office and made our way through the silent, perfect streets to the monumental basilica of San Zeno. Esther, perhaps tired of our theistic approach to things, wisely chose to sleep an extra few hours and meet us later.
    I felt, at the handlebar of that rickety, bright yellow public bicycle, as though I had simply taken up where I had left off before my departure for Italy, embarking on yet another adventure, reunited with one of my greatest friends. The roots of my friendship with Aldous reach back to the heady days of high school, with our efforts to topple our principal through an underground newspaper, more of a pamphlet really, polemically entitled Socrates. Aldous, incognito at first, accepted my help in getting the pamphlet out to its audience, evading interception and certain banishment. Nowadays we laugh heartily about this and anything else from our past, but we never fail to realize that a beginning, no matter how risible, is a sign of greatness to come. Years on Aldous' responsibilities have certainly shifted but he still works as an editor, still delighting in controversy, still master of his own rag. In my mind, he bears more than a striking resemblance to Aldus Manutius, the sixteenth century Venetian humanist turned book printer. Manutius , in addition to single-handedly recovering many of the Greek classics from obscurity, assiduously studied Petrarch's handwriting, and even engaged the great Bolognese painter Francesco Francia in the creation of what we today know as italic script. Our Aldous is somewhat less of a maniac for typography, but remains creative, contrarian, implacable: a polymath. One day he ought to have his own ex-libris made, like the one from the Aldine press, to insist on the past not being completely dead.
    While we were back at the station waiting for Esther to arrive on a late-morning train, I had the uncanny luck of seeing Simon walking through the arrival hall. Simon and Mila had left Bologna three days ago to go to Bolzano, and, coincidentally, they were now switching trains at Verona. We had a reunion on the platform, all five of us, though it only lasted the length of the stopover. Still, after eight months of distance from my oldest friends, it was a joy just to see them for a few extra minutes before we parted ways and got on with the day.
    Notwithstanding the plurality of glorious marble and granite churches that punctuate the banks of the Adige as it flows through Verona, the highlight of our afternoon was without a doubt our unexpected stopover at the tiny Enoteca dal Zovo, its labyrinthine walls lined with hundreds of dusty jet-black bottles. Much to our surprise, Aldous, Esther and I were greeted by a jovial, corpulent black woman who introduced herself, in a hearty mid-western accent, as Beverly.
    "I call Chicago home," she said to us, hunched over the bar, "but I've been living here for, oh, a good ten years. You'd like to try some local wines, then? Let's see what he has…" With that she began serving us brimming glasses of local wines: Soave, from the vineyards surrounding a little crenellated town to the east, and Valpolicella, from the lush terraces of the valley to the west between the city and Lake Garda. These are the great, serious inland wines of the Veneto that export themselves all over the world like the empire Verona never had. I assumed that they had even played their own subtle part in winning over Beverly.
    "He knows his wines. I'm not much of a connoisseur, myself, but I do what I can," she explained to us just as passersby would occasionally appear at the doorway, soliciting replies in highly accented Italian. "He's friends with the locals."
    He was evidently the owner of the tiny, wine-stocked bar, the man responsible for sealing with red wax the jet black, grime-encrusted bottles that certainly pre-dated Beverly's arrival in fair Verona.
    In a scene reminiscent of Othello, a well-dressed black man and a gracious Arab entered upon the scene, followed by the staggering drunk Italian Beverly had promised us would soon arrive. As the only native out of the seven people now in the room, he put up a rather slovenly, though gallant show, as he approached the bar and handed Beverly a red rose, fresh from someone else's garden. The bar tendress added it to a small vase of wilted cousins and began to pour him a highly diluted spritzer.
    Once we were ready to leave, we asked Beverly to add up our tab, at which point she refused to bill us for anything more than the first round of drinks, an act less Italian than even her accent. "Don't be silly," we said, "here's the rest of what we owe you. You keep it for yourself, since the owner doesn't seem to be around to do any work."
    "The owner? You mean my husband. What's mine is his, love. You can tell him on your way out if you want." As we walked out the door we noticed another rather inebriated local, sprawled out languidly on a reclining chair in the street, chatting with the clientele while his wife, inside, continued to work the bar.