Stacy Schiff, “Cleopatra”

I don’t read a lot of biographies, but if more of them were like Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, that would change.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know how there could be more biographies like this, because what Schiff does is more or less turn the genre on its head, simultaneously pulling apart two thousand years worth of misinformation and re-constructing a new version of the Egyptian queen’s life, complete with rich and lively descriptions of the historical context and settings. I have never been particularly interested in the ancient world, largely because it seemed too alien. I could not get a purchase on it, so to speak. Schiff fixes that situation permanently with her sense-rich descriptions of settings: the flamboyant glory of Alexandria, the self-conscious rectitude of Rome, the insect-ridden swamp of Actium, where Antony and Cleopatra’s military strategy came unglued. Schiff on Cleopatra’s visit to Rome, a “provincial backwater” in the year 46: “It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room. As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia.”

You can see the appeal: Schiff writes with graceful, wry authority, able to mobilize the ideal detail and the ideal quotation to make her point. Which is, to be crudely reductive, that history has distorted Cleopatra’s character. After all, the sources are Roman. Winners get to write history, so Cleopatra’s startling intelligence and competence — not to mention her immense wealth — are eclipsed by tales of her beauty and sexual sorcery. What, after all, do most of us believe about Cleopatra? That she seduced both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and later killed herself with an asp.

The true story is actually much more interesting. Cleopatra was not even Egyptian, for starters — the family of Ptolemies from which she descended was Greek in origin. She may not have been beautiful but she was certainly magnetic, extremely well-educated, and a brilliant linguist. Alexandria, the richest and most culturally advanced city on the Mediterranean (remember, the famous library was one of the wonders of the Western world) was the capital city of Egypt, which was in turn a vassal state to Rome. The Ptolemies were thus often called on to provide arms, men, and ships to Roman military efforts. The difficulty was deciding which Roman to back, as the Republic was politically unstable. Cleopatra supported successively  Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, and her support included not only the usual war matériel but also strategy, luxury, and sex. As Schiff says of Antony and Cleopatra, “As of the winter of 35 it is impossible to deny a full-blooded romance, if by romance we mean a congenial, intimate past, a shared family, a shared bed, and a shared vision of the future.” But Cleopatra had bet on the wrong man. Antony’s conflict with Octavian for control of the Roman republic ends in disaster. He commits suicide, messily, and Cleopatra follows suit using, sorry, plain old poison. This final section of the book lays out the inexorable progress of their tragedy in completely gripping fashion. It’s easy to see what writers like Plutarch and Shakespeare have seen in Cleopatra’s story, but for my money Schiff’s version is even more captivating.

Under the Tree

Just in time for Black Friday — which falls on Thursday this year, I’m told? — I’m thinking about Christmas shopping. Naturally lots of my friends will be getting books. For some of them, I’ll pick presents from the latest crop of publications. For others, I’ll put together a few old favorites. I have not read all of the books below but the ones I listed seem like good bets, based entirely on hearsay. The links refer back to original blog entries or directly to Amazon (useful for those of us who never leave the house).

Apparently men like to read biographies. I haven’t read the new Keith Richards bio but the buzz is good, and I’ve also heard good things about the Mickey Mantle book, The Last Boy. I’m halfway through Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra and agape with admiration. Schiff peels away 2000 years of legend and misconception while rebuilding the historical context for the Egyptian queen in a gripping, vivid fashion.

The memoir craze is fading away, but there are still some excellent entries out there. I’m counting on Deborah Devonshire’s Wait for Me! turning up somewhere in my pile of gifts. (Yes, that’s a hint, and you know who you are.) Someone will certainly get Rosanne Cash’s Composed, along with her wonderful CD The List, which is a handful of country basics her father Johnny said were essential. Friends with artistic leanings or a fondness for European history will get The Hare with Amber Eyes, one of the best books I read this year. And I’m putting Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them in the memoir category because when it’s not lovely literary appreciation, it’s howlingly funny tales from academia. (Summer in Samarkand: not as glam as it sounds.) 

Of course fiction is the meat and drink of my reading habit, so many of my loved ones will receive novels. Anyone who missed Wolf Hall in hardcover should be given the slightly more portable paperback. Among the contemporary literary novels I read this year, I especially liked The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The City of Tranquil Light. You could make a nice New York fiction package by wrapping up two or three of the following: Brooklyn, Netherland, and Let the Great World Spin.

I participated in a blogging challenge in November that prompted me to read three novels from the enticing catalog of New York Review Books. I struck gold with Summer Will Show, Great Granny Webster, and Indian Summer, all of which are beautiful volumes and not widely read. For lighter reading you could not do better than to select some of Elinor Lipman’s charming and moving contemporary novels which are published in a uniform edition. Just be sure to include her most recent, The Family Man.

One thing I can never, ever have enough of is literate escape reading, especially what I think of as “girl books.” This year I was given a copy of Stella Gibbons’ Nightingale Wood which is sheer heaven. So is Eva Rice’s The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, and I’ll throw in, to make it a trio, Dodie Smith’s classic I Capture the Castle. All three are English inter-War upper-crust novels featuring comedy, romance, and attractive Young People.

Finally, regular readers here will know that about half of what I read is murder mysteries. This year I made a wonderful discovery: the novels of Fred Vargas. She (Frédérique) is French and the exotic settings, tricky plots, and quirky characters are intensely satisfying. Look for the Inspector Adamsberg mysteries, the first of which is The Chalk Circle Man. I was also thrilled by the publication of Tana French’s Faithful Place, which joins her two earlier books (In the Woods and The Likeness) as among the best mysteries ever.

Now you tell me — what am I missing?

Jane Gardam, “God on the Rocks”

To me, “on the rocks” means on ice, so this title skews flippant. But I don’t think that’s what Jane Gardam intends. Those rocks are literal, since God on the Rocks is set in an English coastal resort with a pier and tide pools and a beach. As for the God part, he is very much present in this novel. Or at least, his followers are. Followers in a variety of flavors, with different levels of sincerity and effort.

Honestly, as I read this novel I had to marvel at Jane Gardam‘s imagination. God on the Rocks is less exotic than The Man with the Wooden Hat or Old Filth, and its structure is less complex. But Gardam has a startling way of creating drama. The big events here occur offstage, while the small events — a failed tea party, a walk in the woods — are crammed with conflict. Maybe you could say that her approach to life was elliptical. And make no mistake, this novel may not be long but it encompasses the big things in life: love, death, faith.

geographically inaccurate but atmospheric

For much of the book, the protagonist is the eight-year-old Margaret Marsh, a clever, observant girl. Gardam does a wonderful job imagining her tart and unsentimental but necessarily limited view of the world. In fact Margaret’s interpretations and misinterpretations of the world around her, especially her vivid apprehension of adult sexuality, are reminiscent of those of some of Henry James’ worldly children. What Maisie Knew, for instance, comes to mind. Also Jamesian are the crucial sights that become plot points: a pair of hands on a woman’s back, for instance.

Margaret’s father Kenneth Marsh is a Primal Saint — an adherent of a very strict branch of fundamentalism that rules out most fun. The Marsh household is severe. Margaret’s mother Elinor has just given birth to a baby, Terence, and as Gardam says, “The almost permanent pietà of Mrs. Marsh and the baby was the only sensuous thing in the house.” The nursemaid Lydia, with her brassy hair and her loud wardrobe, is an exception: it is Lydia who unsettles the household’s balance. Also in play here are Elinor’s long love for the effete Charles Frayling, Charles’ passive dependence on his sister Binkie, and their misunderstanding of their embittered mother. The novel eventually leaves Margaret to visit the concerns of all of these characters, which intersect in unexpected ways. There is a storm, several deaths, redemption arriving in a back-handed fashion. There is a fabulous scene involving, literally, worship on a rocky seashore — does that remind you of anything? In fact now that I think of it, there are little glancing allusions to Biblical images or themes everywhere. An adult Margaret says of her father, “he left me with a sense of God… It is a big present.” Yet in the end, Gardam seems to suggest that the path to God is found simply in caring for people and trying to be good.We could all do worse.

Elinor Lipman, “The Family Man”

Elinor Lipman is one of my favorite authors, but the problem is that I’ve read all of her books. Sometimes I eye them on the book shelf and mentally test myself — am I ready to reread this one or that one? What good news, then, to find that I had not read The Family Man. And I must say that I found it entirely delightful.

Henry Archer is a kind, appealing, faintly anxious gay man whose conscientious good manners get him into a world of trouble. The problem is that he once rashly married a woman of titanic energy and egotism. She’s a familiar avatar in Lipman’s fiction, the woman whose sheer nerve appalls and fascinates. In The Family Man, this creature, Denise, skews slightly unpleasant, and I admire beyond words Lipman’s ability to leave her annoying but ultimately benevolent. And, of course, Denise is hilariously funny. I especially enjoyed her aggrieved rants into Henry’s answering machine.

The problem is that Denise has been recently widowed and her stepsons intend to kick her out of her massive Park Avenue apartment. (Shades of the more recent Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmans of Westport.) And because Henry is a good egg, he doesn’t quite have the chutzpah to tell his former wife to take a hike. Besides, he has recently reconnected with her daughter Thalia, whom he adored while he and Denise were married. He feels guilty for leaving Thalia in the lurch when he divorced Denise. The now-grown Thalia, a 28-year-old actress, bears no resentment, though, and is quite delighted to embrace Henry as a father. A father with a lovely town house on 75th Street, and a budding romance of his own.

For Lipman, families are miraculous entities, formed as much by volition as by blood ties. Henry’s romance with the effervescent Todd is one of the great charms of this book — and Lipman’s strong suit has always been charm. Thalia embarks on a romance of her own, and even Denise ends up more or less settled. Tolerance, kindness, and an unlimited supply of good coffee seem to be what promotes affiliation in Lipman-world. Sounds good to me.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, “A Fountain Filled With Blood”

Oh, well. So much for the thrill of discovery. I was really excited when I read In the Bleak Midwinter, Julia Spencer-Fleming’s first mystery in this series. The character of the Reverend Clare Fergusson, rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Millers Kill, New York, is very appealing. But what totally hooked me was the sexual tension between Clare and the married but craggily attractive police chief, Russ Van Alstyne. Those features, mercifully, are still in place. But the plotting was not the best thing about In the Bleak Midwinter and it’s not the best thing about A Fountain Filled With Blood, either. In fact, it was a little bit clunky. A hefty portion of the book is taken up by the helicopter ride from hell (as if there could be any other kind… but this is really, really bad). And the helicopter is signaled as a plot point very early on — the gun that is shown in the first act, etc. etc. In fact maybe Spencer-Fleming needs to sow a few more red herrings, because I am usually pretty dim about plotting, and I identified this baddie quite early on. Worse, none of the potential killers was much more than a cartoon figure with a few unattractive characteristics. And while I’m complaining, I have a little trouble suspending disbelief when folks get as spectacularly bashed up as Clare and Russ do in this novel, without showing any lasting damage. Mind you, these quibbles will not prevent me from reading the next novel in the series. At some point, Clare will have to meet Russ’s wife, right? I want to be there.

Ivana Lowell, “Why Not Say What Happened?”

I’m not very happy with myself. I just gulped down Why Not Say What Happened with unseemly haste and for all the wrong reasons. Ghoulishness, schadenfreude, voyeurism — that about covers it. Not a pretty cocktail. But oh, while we’re talking about cocktails, what oceans of booze keep this book afloat! Vodka, beer, caipirinhas, Chateau Margaux, whisky and a very great deal of champagne; but Ivana Lowell regrets a lot of it. 

Why Not Say What Happened, naturally, is a follow-up to Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster. The latter is obviously somewhat autobiographical and Ivana Lowell, Blackwood’s daughter, clears up some of the confusion about which loony ancestor behaved in which horrifying fashion. She also describes Blackwood’s own highly erratic parenting skills. Fine. We’d expect as much. But somehow the book never really lifts off into something besides a list of people, places, drinks, and misbehavior. True, the latter is dreadful and certainly Ivana must have been very damaged by her childhood which included sexual abuse and a terrible accident with boiling water. Not to mention some very mixed messages about her fatherhood — though the poet Robert Lowell, her mother’s third husband, adopted her, other candidates for paternity rather crowd the book. The narrative is structured so that this question nominally provides the suspense, but I wasn’t all that interested.

The central problem is Lowell’s vacancy as a narrator. She tells you lots of things that could be fascinating or tragic or amusing, but her matter-of-fact delivery leaches out the drama. Perhaps it’s a deliberate choice: some of this stuff almost has to be told flatly, or else it would blow the top of your head off. But even the supposedly funny bits lack humor. Lowell keeps repeating her mother’s refrain for when the two of them got into dreadful scrapes: “Honestly, it’s too bad, even for us!” Hmmm — “even for us.” Exceptional “us?” Narcisisstic “us?”  You decide.

And finally, I know it’s really hard to avoid in this kind of gruesome-childhood memoir, but Lowell sometimes falls into the self-pity trap. (A trap avoided by Wendy Burden’s Dead End Gene Pool, which is comparable for grandeur and dysfunction, but far more entertaining.) For instance, there’s the story about when she was at the Oscars with her boyfriend Bob Weinstein, and he yelled at her because her John Galliano dress looked ugly, and he had the maids at the Peninsula Hotel trim the hem… Huh? This is a problem?

A friend has recommended Nancy Schoenberger’s Dangerous Muse, a biography of Caroline Blackwood, but I may be done with these women.

William Dean Howells, “Indian Summer”

The jacket copy calls Indian Summer “one of the most charming and memorable romantic comedies in American literature,” so I took the bait, despite skepticism. I have read  William Dean Howells before and he wasn’t charming. But for once the jacket copy approached accuracy. (Maybe that’s one thing I like so much about the New York Review Books editions: you pretty much can tell a book by its handsome cover.)  Indian Summer is honestly delightful.

ever-picturesque San Miniato

There are certain pre-sold audiences for this book. Italophiles, of course — it is set in Florence, in 1885, so you get a wonderful portrait of expat sociability 125 years ago, plus enough weather and topographical details for any armchair tourist. Fan of the 19th century that I am, I cherished the details of behavior, especially Howells‘ keen appreciation of women and their wardrobes. Fans of Henry James might like Indian Summer, too. It is not as dense as James, not as aristocratic: in fact at one point the characters are discussing themselves as if they were in a James novel and they have this to say: ”Don’t you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case!” Yes, self-referential fiction, in 1885, who knew? For me the big difference between Howells and James is that Europe is not a character in this book, it is a setting. An important one, but the characters and emotions of Indian Summer are transplantable in both location and time.

Yes, it felt very contemporary. The main character is Theodore Colville, an American of forty-one who, having just ended a successful newspaper career in Indiana, has returned to Florence where he once studied architecture. Also, he was jilted in Florence twenty years earlier and has never married. Naturally, on this return visit he encounters a woman: in fact, two. One is Lina Bowen, the pretty and clever best friend of the girl who jilted him. She is now a widow, educating her daughter in Europe. There is also her protégée, the magnificent Imogene Graham, the classic American girl abroad.

Do I have to tell you that a love triangle results? What’s endearing here, though, is Colville. This is a real guy. He’s a guy you know and probably like a lot. He worries about dressing correctly for parties (really funny passages about him thinking about shaving off his beard). He worries about his weight — 182 pounds, if I remember correctly. He is funny, ironic, rueful. Howells sometimes mocks his masculine denseness but we always sympathize with him, especially in the part of the book when he gets involved in a hectic social whirl and cannot stand the lack of sleep. So inglorious! So human. The Indian Summer of the title is, of course, his. Howells focuses on how the different ages process emotion differently. Indian summers, by definition, don’t last. But it’s a comedy. Things work out, though Howells keeps you on the hook until the end. Very satisfying.

This is my third and final entry in the NYRB Reading Week co-hosted by Mrs. B of  The Literary Stew and Honey of Coffeespoons. It’s been fun, ladies, thanks!

Caroline Blackwood, “Great Granny Webster”

I’ve always been fascinated by the combination of glamor and emotional mess that seems to surround the Guinness clan of Ireland and England. Reckless marriages, feral parenting arrangements, and stunning looks seem to be pretty reliable family markers. All were features of the life of Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was married to painter Lucian Freud, composer Israel Citkovitz, and poet Robert Lowell. And none of this would matter if Blackwood weren’t a steely observer of her own family’s rather spectacular foibles.

Great Granny Webster, a slender 103 pages, was published in 1977 and short-listed for the Booker Prize. Honor Moore’s introduction to this New York Review Books edition says it lost out to Paul Scott’s Staying On because Philip Larkin thought it was too autobiographical. Moore also says that “Blackwood is Merchant Ivory from hell” and maybe it’s that furious darkness that makes this book so… bracing. So…piquant.  So …irresistible.

Clandeboye, where Blackwood grew up

The narrator is a young, observant girl, sent to recover from anemia at the home of her great-grandmother in 1947. (Father dead in Burma, mother otherwise occupied.) Even though she spends only two months in this gloomy luxurious seaside villa, her great-grandmother’s character is so remarkable and so poisonous that we can see its mark on all of the subsequent generations. Great Granny Webster does not yield; not to emotion, not to gravity, or kindness, or fear. She has all the humanity, as Blackwood observes, of a piece of teak.

Then there’s Aunt Lavinia, only sister of  the narrator’s dead father. This one’s a charmer; gorgeous, luxury-loving, always the life of the party. The first sign of trouble comes when she telephones her niece, laughing. She is being detained in a hospital after having failed to commit suicide. “‘I had it all perfectly planned, darling. It couldn’t have been more Roman…I was in my bath with my bottle of whisky for courage, and my gleaming razor. It all went like a dream. It didn’t even hurt.” But “‘There’s something unexpectedly ghastly about finding oneself in a bath full of gore and melting soap.’” A subsequent chilling visit to Aunt Lavinia gradually reveals the mental imbalance. “She took one of her poodle’s charcoal biscuits out of the packet and ate it herself. ‘Either these are quite delicious or quite disgusting. Like so many things in life, it’s hard to tell which,’ she said.”

There’s no mystery at all about the intervening generation, Aunt Lavinia’s mother and Great Granny Webster’s daughter.  This woman lives in a mouldering Anglo-Irish ruin and fancies herself a fairy — the kind with wings. Blackwood’s meticulous description of the ludicrous discomfort and indignity of this menage is the richest thing in the book. The damp wallpaper peeling off the walls in lush coils, the dried-out pheasants served at lunch and dinner every day of the week, the pieces of string cunningly attached to oozing ceilings to guide leaks into the ready jam jars littering the floors… It could only be true.

Blackwood gets revenge, of a sort, in the final scene involving the burial of the great grandmother. Which just goes to show that those of us with pencils or keyboards must always be placated, don’t you think?

Another entry in the NYRB Reading Week co-hosted by Mrs. B of The Literary Stew and Honey of Coffeespoons.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, “Summer Will Show”

In other hands, this premise would have been clumsy. Sophia Willoughby, an upright well-bred English matron, finds herself liberated when she is caught in Paris during the 1848 Revolution. Her personal sloughing-off of class limitations, her eager lurch toward love and individual satisfaction are mirrored by the Parisian revolutionaries’ equally eager grasp at liberty. It could have been so schematic, so dull — but Sylvia Townsend Warner is a really good writer, and Summer Will Show follows no predictable path. In fact until the very last page (which finds Sophia reading the first few paragraphs of The Communist Manifesto), I had no sense of how Townsend Warner would conclude the book. On the one hand, the seductions of comfort and security repeatedly flare up but Sophia is so much more likable — indeed, likes herself so much better — as a Bohemian that we are torn about what fate to wish for her.

And oh, the ironies! Sophia is driven to Paris on the trail of her handsome, feckless husband, but she finds herself enchanted by his discarded mistress, Minna Lemuel. Townsend Warner’s descriptions of Minna, streaked through with casual anti-Semitism, may be the reason this book has been out of favor for so long. But Minna is also the most compelling, magnetic character in the book, a story-teller both professional and habitual. “She lives on her own applause, thought Sophia, watching Minna’s revival into charm. This is what it is, I suppose, to be an artist, cheered and checked by the April of one’s own mind.” It is through Minna and her revolutionary friends that Sophia becomes a “carrier pigeon” for the eventual uprising — after pawning her diamonds, singing on the street for pennies, learning to bargain in the street market.

daguerreotype of the barricades

What makes the whole tale sing is the way Townsend Warner writes. Here is the end of an English summer squall: “Far off the storm winked and muttered, but louder than its thunder was the sipping whistle, all around them, of the parched ground drinking the rain.” Here is Minna settling into sleep: “The body that by day was heavy, ill-framed and faintly grotesque, at night achieved an extraordinary harmoniousness with its bed, became in its suavity and sober resilience the sister of that exemplary mattress.” Oh, yes, it’s pretty clear that Sophia and Minna are lovers; we learn that much from Townsend Warner’s biography. Equally the insertion of Communism  into the narrative mirrors the author’s political interests in 1936, when the book was published. But for the most part, this is exemplary historical fiction. Haven’t you always wanted to know what it was like to fight on the barricades in Paris? To cower inside a makeshift structure of old lumber and half a carriage, counting the cartridges for your gun as the army marches toward you on the cobble stones? Read on, it’s all here waiting for you.

This is my first entry for the NYRB Reading Week co-hosted by Mrs. B of The Literary Stew and Honey of Coffeespoons. Now I’m going to see what everyone else has been reading, before settling down with Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster.

Stendhal, “La Chartreuse de Parme”/”The Charterhouse of Parma”

Ooooh, Fabrice. That’s what all the ladies think when they see him. And now that I know that Gerard Philipe played him in a 1948 film, I’ve got a face to put to the name — Fabrice del Dongo, the beautiful, naive hero of Stendhal’s great novel. La Chartreuse de Parme, or The Charterhouse of Parma, is one of those titles you wouldn’t normally get around to unless you were assigned it in French 420, “The Romantic Novel.” (Actually, from the skimpy research I’ve done, I understand that it’s really considered more of a bridge to realism, on the basis of the canny psychology. On the other hand, people do sigh a great deal about sublime landscapes and they burst into tears all the time, which seems more Romantic.) However, the surprise is that it’s a really entertaining read, and extremely funny. For instance, the narrator apologizes toward the end of the book for droning on about dull details of court intrigue. “On the other hand,” he continues, “in America, in the republic, one must be bored all day long paying court to the lowest kind of shopkeepers, and becoming as stupid as they are; and there’s no opera over there.”

Gerard Philipe as Fabrice

Here are a few key elements of the novel: the hero, Fabrice, is noble, handsome, and has a winning disposition, but otherwise functions as a blank slate upon which women — many women — project their fantasies. The first section of the novel covers his ardent desire to be part of Napoleon’s glorious return to Europe. Famously, he is present at the battle of Waterloo, but in such an inglorious fashion that he must continually ask himself, “Have I really been in a battle?”

From Waterloo, Fabrice returns to Italy, specifically to Parma. This is pre-unification Italy, so Parma is a small principality run by the unpleasant Prince Ranuce-Ernest IV. Stendhal is playing with us here, as elsewhere: in the years following Napoleon’s defeat Parma was ruled by his widow, Maria Luigia.

Stendhal places an immense “citadel” or walled tower in the center of Parma, where the pretty pink marble baptistery actually stands. The tower is the prison and Fabrice ends up there for killing a sleazy actor in self-defense. It is here that he falls madly in love with the jailer’s daughter Clélia, whom he glimpses as she tends her birds in a room opposite his cell. They communicate by primitive flash cards. If you ask me, Fabrice’s jail cell is the true “charterhouse” of the title, for he is supposed to be in solitary confinement. (I’m pretty sure Patrick O’Brian picked up on the seduction of the pretty jailer, in one of the Aubrey/Maturin novels.)

Fabrice is a Catholic priest. This has no effect at all on his romantic life, except that it makes him more attractive to the ladies. We might call this the “Ralph de Bricassart” factor.

Stendhal dictated the novel in 52 days, which accounts for some oddities like characters who literally appear out of the woods to play important parts. My favorite lapse comes six pages before the end when the narrator says, “Here, we ask permission to pass over a space of three years, without saying a word about them.”

The Carthusian monastery closest to Parma is currently a training institute for prison guards. Italian sense of humor?