Grado, Italy: In the Footsteps of Biagio Marin

Naked we come
to the great harbor
all in the same manner
the great journeyers
—Biagio Marin

With the tourist season several weeks out, the tiny island community of Grado, Italy, seemed remote and spartan. Dozens of dormant sailboats rested in the marina, their naked masts reaching for the skies. Here at the northern fringe of the Adriatic Sea, I could sit with an espresso, all alone on a street patio overlooking the sleeping boats. The stillness was inspiring.

Grado distanced itself from the Italian mainland by a skinny mile-long bridge, the Ponte Matteotti. There was no other way to drive here, except by crossing the lagoon on that bridge. One reached Grado by motoring in from Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, a swath of land stretching from Venice to Trieste, as it arched over the top of the Adriatic with Austria to the north and Slovenia to the east — a part of the world drenched in military history, political skirmishes and ethnic composites leftover from fallen empires. Germanic, Slav and Italian influence fused into a breathless aura of ghosts. Dead novelists, poets and exiled artists seem to stalk the landscape. I was definitely in the right place.

A few miles eastward across the gulf in Trieste, one could conjure up numerous literary troublemakers that once roamed the streets — James Joyce, Svevo, Stendhal, Sir Richard Francis Burton or Casanova — and use their vibrations to harmonize the current day, but I never expected to find any such posthumous companion in the island community of Grado.

Yet I did. Or, should I say, he found me.

On our way back from dinner around 11:30pm, the street, Via Marchesini, was not very illuminated as we sauntered at a snail’s pace from the cobblestone labyrinth of the old town. As the rest of the group continued back toward the marina on the northern side of the island, where our waterfront hotel waited, I stopped to glare at a three-story mansion leering at me from behind a wrought-iron gate. Clean brickwork and maroon shutters punctuated a gray, somber house while stems of ivy snaked across the facade like a road map. It was straight out of an old Hammer film.

To the left was another gate, a more petite chain-link contraption, plus an old rectangular plaque, nearly obscured by foliage drooping over the wall from the other side. “Casa di Biagio Marin,” was all it said. Standing in the desolate nighttime, I became obsessed with this Marin character.

Biagio Marin was Grado’s most favorite son, who before passing away in 1985 wrote volumes of poetry in the local dialect, often simple words about the sea, the flowers, the colors of the lagoon, and the wide expanses of light across the sky. The mysteries of Grado were his muses. He wrote in service to those mysteries. Marin’s legacy still reverberated across the island, both in physical space and in linear time. That’s all I knew, but it was enough to trigger a feeling of camaraderie with Grado, a serene, isolated place that seemed to necessitate poetic longing.

From the sidewalk, I stuck my head through the wrought iron gate and looked into the yard, where piles of rubble, a few concrete urns, and old lumber were strewn about the grounds. Garden hoses tumbled out of stone ornaments. Weeds encroached over walkways. Wooden pallets and rectangular slabs of stone leaned up against parts of the building, as if everything was leftover from a landscaping job that someone quit before finishing.

Upon further look, the house definitely wasn’t abandoned. The pathway to the front door had been cleared, yet postal mail overflowed from the mailbox. Recently-installed telephone wires crept along a trellis and up into a first-floor window, indicating that human activity of some sort was underway, yet each window seemed from a different era. Some of the shutters were closed, while others were covered with iron bars. Additional windows featured new frames on the outside, but were hidden with paper on the inside to prevent anyone from scoping out the interior.

Obsessed, I wandered around to the left side of the house, where a tiny street called Via Leonardo da Vinci dead-ended into the rear entrance of the building next door, Grado’s public library. A modern angular structure, white-gray in color, the library was named after Falco Marin, whom I assumed was a member of the same family.

During the tourist season, there would be throngs of people out until the wee morning hours, masses of sidewalk tables, sunburned Germans everywhere and even surfers. But right now, there was no one around. I seemed like the only person prowling around on the street. Since it was nearing midnight, a poetic silence enveloped the landscape.

Almost on cue, erratic slivers of warm drizzle began to fall. I felt more connected to this old house then I did to my hotel room.

And when I made it back to my room, still obsessed, I stayed up for a few more hours researching Biagio Marin on my laptop as the rain picked up outside. The WiFi was spotty, but it was enough.

Marin lived in that house during the final decades of his life, before dying at the age of 94, I discovered. After his death, his private library of several thousand books were transferred to the town library next door, an institution Marin founded in 1963 and named after his late son, Falco, who had died in WWII. His grandson, Guido, committed suicide in 1977 at a very young age.

Echoes of Biagio Marin still illuminated much of current-day Grado. In addition to the library, there was a school, a research center, an auditorium, a public piazza and a statue. Marin was the town’s iconic hero, the creative voice of the island. He was inseparable from Grado’s past, present and future. And he left much more than a shadow. He was everywhere. Still.

My newly found obsession drove me to revisit Marin’s house after breakfast early the next morning. Downstairs in the lobby of my hotel, I inquired with the concierge, asking who lived in that house nowadays. She didn’t seem to think anyone did. At least not to her knowledge.

I had a few moments to kill, so before convening with the rest of my group for a boat ride, I ambled along Riva Brioni, the waterfront street following the lagoon and the sleeping sailboats. It was early morning and yet again there was nobody else on the street. As I walked, leisurely gusts of wind sliced up the silence with a few scattershot blankets of warm rain that tumbled onto the pavement, harmonizing the echoes of my footsteps.

As the short waterfront lane came to an end, it curled into Via Aquileia, leading me through a small grid of streets and stacks of pastel-colored housing, each tiny yard filled with children’s toys, potted plants or cooking equipment. The streets were named after Italian cities — Udine, Pisa, Genova, Trieste — each one spoken with the rolling syllabic rhythms that made Italian such a musical language. This cluster of residential behind the various waterfront hotels almost felt like Grado’s back side, since the old town area was half a mile away, on the southern side of the island, facing the Adriatic.

Within five minutes, Via Aquileia turned into Via Marchesini, leading me right back to Casa di Biagio Marin, where I again poked around the outside. I noticed another plaque facing the sidewalk, a rectangular memorial embossed within the stone wall. Both the plaque and the wall were a sepulchral gray color. A row of red bricks underlined the plaque. Even in the morning light, I had to move up close to read it: The composer Antonio Smareglia had died in this house, at dawn, on April 15, 1929. The plaque had been installed on the 50th anniversary of his death in 1979 and also listed what I assumed were his compositions: Di Nozze Istriane. Falena. Oceana. Abisso.

My obsession then extended to Antonio Smareglia, why he wound up dead in Grado, or why all this death was following me around. I didn’t know. I couldn’t know. I felt immersed in some twisted Italian equivalent of Lorca’s duende, a dark form of creative struggle surfacing to remind me of my own mortality. No, I wanted to be more positive than that. Instead, duende could be understood as an electric circuit, a spiritual current — in this case a posthumous membrane connecting Biagio Marin to the veins of his creative descendants decades later, in order to carry on the poetic tradition. Exactly. I was meant to be a writer. I belonged to this life. Sometimes it just took a random, impromptu moment of serendipity to remind me. This was one of those moments. The ghosts of Grado had my back.

After returning to the hotel, I met the rest of my group, where an even stronger moment of serendipity emerged, a subtle signpost, but an important one nevertheless. We were then scheduled to visit a restaurant named after Biagio Marin’s first book of poetry, Fiuri de Tapo. I hadn’t known this ahead of time. Marin published the book in 1912 when he was 21 years old. The restaurant, located on a nearby island and accessible only by boat, had opened in 2011, nearly a century after Marin’s debut effort.

I had not come to Grado planning to discover Biagio Marin’s story. Our hosts were showing us the tourist stuff, nothing to do with local poets, and this discovery had happened by sheer chance. When our hosts booked a restaurant named after Marin’s book, they didn’t know that I, by then, would already be under his spell.

Even the most inconsequential coincidence, even the most random dose of synchronicity, can often help rewire my psyche and lead to some sort of heightened sense of awareness. This wasn’t a grand-scale coincidence on the level discussed at conspiracy theory conferences, but it was all I needed. It was enough to reinforce my calling in life: to travel and write and serve the muses of synchronicity. Like Marin, maybe my job as a writer was an act of service; I wrote to serve the muses rather than trying to control them or figure them out. In Marin’s case, his primary muse was the sea.

Naked we come
to the great harbor
all in the same manner
the great journeyers

Even though Marin’s first book never appeared in English, Fiuri de Tapo roughly translated to “Flowers of Cork,” referring to a lavender wildflower that grew throughout this region. My hosts might never have told me about any of this, but as we headed for the boat dock in downtown Grado, I mentioned my new obsession with Marin’s life and the mystique of his old graying house. Our guide then burst into a spirited history of Marin, his service in the Great War, his connections to the arts intelligentsia of Trieste, his friendship with the director Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Marin’s use of the local dialect in his poetry. After which the guide then told us Marin’s first book inspired the restaurant.

However, this was not the first time Marin inspired creativity in someone else, I learned. In 1925, when the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola was still in school, he wrote a trio of melodies for voice and piano called Fiuri de Tapo. He later wrote Due Canzoni di Grado, also with text by Marin.

The serendipity of the moment was subtle but dramatic, mind-blowing yet comforting, reassuring me that I was in my element. That’s how the muses worked. As we climbed into the boat, I realized I was meant to visit Grado.

Reaching Fiuri de Tapo required a short journey into the lagoon and then through the Anfora Canal in a small skipper boat. The motorized vessel had room for about a dozen people on two wooden benches inside a covered area but with ample standing space on the deck, right behind the driver, if one wanted to savor the chilly lagoon breeze. An electric post-storm clarity began to characterize the air. It was June 8th, 2018.

Upon departure we ventured into the water, initially going south from Grado into the Adriatic. For a few moments I could then look eastward, about 10 miles across the gulf, and view the hills above the historical port city of Trieste.

“That first hill is in Italy,” our guide said, pointing toward Trieste. “The one behind it is Slovenia. There are still trenches from World War One.”

Circling back into the lagoon, we sailed along the Anfora Canal, past several tiny forested islands, some of which barely rose above the water and showed no signs of life except for old fisherman’s huts, casoni, with straw roofs. Many of the huts were crumbling and abandoned, remaining only in pieces to serve as ghostly testimony from earlier decades, while other huts were fully rebuilt and converted into hotels or restaurants. Pasolini even filmed parts of Medea out here in the lagoon, at one particular casone, which is now a tourist attraction.

In other areas, various sandbanks characteristic of the Grado lagoon, tiny islets of clay and mud, gently lurched above the water. Since we were here in the summer, entire meadows of lavender-colored flowers bloomed on the islets, which were called tapi. The singular form was tapo, so the flowers were called fiuri de tapo.

Such was the dual meaning of the phrase, our guide explained. In one sense, fiuri de tapo translated as flowers of cork, like he told us earlier, but it also referred to the lavender flowers, the ones that inspired Biagio Marin’s poetry and the restaurant to which we were headed.

Within minutes we were sailing along Porto Buso, denoting the western edge of the Grado Lagoon, with the guide then breaking into military history. Before the Great War, Porto Buso was the final outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, marking the boundary with Italy.

Our guide let us know that we were traveling right where Italy entered World War One in 1915, when the Italian Navy attacked the Austrian border station at Porto Buso. By agreeing to ditch the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary and instead enter the conflict on the side of the Allies, the Italians were promised Trieste and all the Italian-speaking lands at the north/northeastern fringe of the Adriatic. The entire area turned into a slaughterhouse for the next several years, especially up in the mountainous areas north of Trieste.

The trenches, said the guide, adding to what he said earlier, still existed over in what’s now Slovenia. The trenches were leftover from the Battles of Isonzo, through which the Italians suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties.

“Then in World War Two, there were dead Germans floating all over these waters,” the guide said, moving his arm in a sweeping gesture. Nowadays, he added, the Germans and Austrians comprised the majority of tourists in Grado.

I was getting hungry, so when Fiuri de Tapo finally emerged on the northern edge of Porto Buso Island, I was more than ready for a meal. As we pulled up to the dock, I proclaimed myself an honorary creative descendant of Biagio Marin and prepared myself for the restaurant named after his first book.