Our "Voyages to Italy"

"She's moved by all these lives that have come and gone before her. It's no longer a matter of history or relics, but of real people who enjoyed life, and who suffered — just as she suffered, just as everyone does."

—Martin Scorsese, My Voyage to Italy

Roberto Rossellini's 1953 Voyage to Italy is one of those nearly forgotten mid-20th-century masterpieces of Italian cinema resurrected by Martin Scorsese in his like-titled 1999 documentary, My Voyage to Italy, available on DVD.

In it, Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders star as an emotionally inert British couple who travel to Naples in southern Italy to sell a deceased relative's house. Katherine and Alex Joyce's marriage is on the rocks, though they don't know it yet. Katherine (Bergman) thinks they just need the opportunity afforded by the trip to be alone with each other. Alex (Sanders) vaguely fears it will bore him stiff for that to happen, but he won't admit it, either to her or to himself.

The strangeness of their new surroundings doesn't rekindle romance as Katherine hoped ... just mental discomfort and anxiety. All the street singing, laughing, talking, and fighting that drifts through their hotel window pains her in particular, for she is slightly more aware than Alex of the dead zone at the center of their lives. It is as if all the sensuality and sheer vitality of southern Italy threatens to poke holes in the bubble they have built around their senses and their emotions.

Out of her need for revitalization, though, is born a hesitant, tenuous reawakening of her spirit. Clueless, numb, defensive Alex is nearly brain- and heart-dead, as he shows over and over. He hangs back as Katherine begins stoking her personal rebirth by visiting museums and ancient historic sites, getting in touch with the life and the death that are woven through the tapestry of a culture that has existed from time out of mind.

Skulls in an ossuary, Voyage to Italy

This life/death duality is betokened by Katherine's seeing from her taxicab all the women on the street in Naples who either have children in tow or are pregnant — Katherine is childless. Later, when she visits an ossuary (right), Scorsese narrates the words I borrow as an epigraph to this post.

As Scorsese makes clear, Katherine is finally beginning to come to terms with what he has already described as a "presence," one that has been subliminally gnawing at her since her arrival: "Italy and its ancient past ... This past is everywhere, and it's not something out of a book. It's very much alive. Katherine opens her eyes to Italy, its statues, its ruins. ... At times, she's not prepared for Italy's effect on her. It gets to her, suddenly, and without any warning."

Scorsese continues, "Rossellini said this about Voyage to Italy: 'Death doesn't exist here, because it's a living thing in Italy. It's a different kind of civilization. There's a different meaning to things here'." That contrasts with the extreme individualism which historically arose in northern Europe in the Middle Ages and (I assume) is not as strong in southern Italy.

Katherine and Alex, amid the Italians, are notably northern in appearance and attitude. It's as if their extreme individualism is the basis for their emotional disconnect, their lack of passion and compassion. Notably, Katherine is accompanied in the scene at the ossuary by a dark, Italian woman who confides to her that she prays there for her brother who died and was buried in Greece during the war. She solemnly prays also that she might have a child.

So the "different meaning to things" in Italy has to do with allowing oneself to reverberate to the unseen-yet-felt "presence" that is all around one: to be woven emotionally into the neverending tapestry of human life, delight, suffering, procreating ... and, of course, dying. This is what no compassionless individual, married or not, can do. Without compassion there is no passion. Without passion, no compassion.


Compassion was what Jesus was all about, says Albert Nolan in Jesus before Christianity. Everything he taught flowed from his umbrage at the sufferings of the "little ones": the vast majority in his society who had no status, no money, no health, and no hope.

Nolan makes clear that what has been called Jesus's "preferential option for the poor" is not just for the impecunious. It's not just for the ill or the spat upon. It's universal love for all of his brothers and sisters, all of humanity.

Even the scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus railed at incessantly because their hard-heartedness and short-sightedness were ruining others' lives — not to mention their own — were linked into Jesus's circle of solidarity. As was the Roman centurion and the Canaanite woman at the well; though Jesus tried for strategic reasons to limit his message of change to his fellow Jews, he was unable to deny Gentiles' faith as well.

Jesus knew it: everyone suffers. Everyone is an apt vessel for compassion.


A passage from a book about what art and literature teach us — mainly, that "there are no borders separating us" — exemplifies what Katherine and later, mercifully, Alex absorb from visits to ancient ossuaries and the like during their voyage to Italy. The book is Arnold Weinstein's A Scream Goes Through the House. The passage is from his preface, pp. x-xi, in which he illustrates the purpose of his book by recounting a dream of his:

July 25, 2001. Brittany, France. My wife and I have been here a week. My daughter, her husband, and their two children — seven-year-old Anna and two-year-old Gustav — arrived today. We allow Anna a special treat: to sleep in the trundle bed in our bedroom. All are asleep and I dream. I am in Memphis, where I grew up, and my mother and father are speaking, in low but urgent tones, in the bedroom next to me. Their voices grow louder, more insistent, moving from what seems a lament to what I can only call a wail. My father, who is depressed and dying, expresses his misery over and over to my mother, but she too utters her pain and anguish. In waves, in a singsong, systolic and diastolic, like a dirge, these sounds of my parents' hurt traverse the wall and invade our room. And, sure enough, Anna, now awake, says to me, "They're making noise." "Yes," I reply. "Yes."

I awake. All is quiet. Anna sleeps in her trundle bed, and my wife sleeps next to me. A minute later, I hear, from the third bedroom, Gustav wake up and cry, and I hear my daughter go into his room to comfort him. He goes back to sleep. But I am awed by the cogency and reach of this dream. My father has been dead for twenty years, and my mother now lies, stroke-ridden, in a nursing home in Memphis. Yet, time avails not, and their plaint enters me, through this dream, with sweet and brutal force. A scream goes through the house, one person's pain becomes another's, across time and space; there are no borders separating us. Life is a shadow play, and we are mummers all, visited and doubled by the ghosts of the past, invested with their pain, living a continuous drama that does not know closure. Brittany is Memphis, my children and grandchildren are my parents, the dead still live, the voices are not stilled.

This, I imagine, is precisely what the skulls in the ossuary whisper to Katherine in Voyage to Italy: that life is "a continuous drama that does not know closure," and that we participate in it fully only when we have compassion for all who have ever experienced its "sweet and brutal force."


What exactly is compassion? A story of a trip to the vicinity of another Naples, that in Florida, gives a clue.

The incident is written of by Jonathan Franzen in "My Bird Problem," a lengthy reflection printed in The New Yorker of August 8 & 15, 2005. Mr. Franzen brings off a guided tour of the history of his interior life, all 44-plus years of it, while at the same time telling us why he loves the pursuit outsiders call birdwatching and insiders call "birding." Here is a snatch of his prose, which I take the liberty of reparagraphing:

In Florida, at the Estero Lagoon at Fort Myers Beach, where, according to my guidebook, I was likely to find "hundreds" of red knots and Wilson's plovers, I instead found a Jimmy Buffett song playing on the Holiday Inn beachfront sound system and a flock of gulls loitering on the white sand behind the hotel. It was happy hour. As I was scanning the flock, making sure that it consisted entirely of ring-billed gulls and laughing gulls, a tourist came over to take pictures. She kept moving closer, absorbed in her snapshots, and the flock amoebically distanced itself from her, some of the gulls hopping a little in their haste, the group murmuring uneasily and finally breaking into alarm cries as the woman bore down with her pocket digital camera.

How, I wondered, could she not see that the gulls only wanted to be left alone? Then again, the gulls didn't seem to mind the Jimmy Buffett. The animal who most clearly wanted to be left alone was me.

Farther down the beach, still looking for the promised throngs of red knots and Wilson's plovers, I came upon a particularly charmless stretch of muddy sand on which there was a handful of more common shorebirds, dunlins and semi-palmated plovers and least sandpipers, in their brownish-gray winter plumage. Camped out amid high-rise condos and hotels, surveying the beach in postures of sleepy disgruntlement, with their heads scrunched down and their eyes half shut, they looked like a little band of misfits. Like a premonition of a future in which all birds will either collaborate with modernity or go off to die someplace quietly.

What I felt from them was beyond love. I felt outright identitication. The well-adjusted throngs of collaborator birds in South Florida, both the trash pigeons and the trash grackles and the more stately but equally tame pelicans and cormorants, all struck me now as traitors. It was this motley band of modest peeps and plovers on the beach that reminded me of the human beings I loved best — the ones who didn't fit in.

These birds may or may not have been capable of emotion, but the way they looked, beleagured there, few in number, my outcast friends, was how I felt. I'd been told that it was bad to anthropomorphize, but I could no longer remember why. It was, in any case, anthropomorphic only to see yourself in other species, not to see them in yourself. To be hungry all the time, to be mad for sex, to not believe in global warming, to be shortsighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren, to spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit-bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind: these were ways of being like a bird.

Later in the evening, in posh, necropolitan Naples, on a sidewalk outside a hotel whose elevator doors were decorated with huge blowups of cute children and the monosyllabic injunction "SMILE," I spotted two disaffected teen-agers, two little chicks, in full Goth plumage, and I wished that I could introduce them to the brownish-gray misfits on the beach.

Outright identification, beyond love, with the misfit and beleaguered. The only major differences I can spot between Jonathan Franzen's description of his feelings about the endangered shore birds and Goth teens of Florida and Albert Nolan's description of how Jesus felt about his "little ones" are that the latter were all human and that there were considerably more of them in first-century Palestine. The downtrodden and alienated whom Jesus championed were anything but "few in number."

So, I feel, that is the essence of compassion: outright identification, beyond love, with all who suffer, who are threatened, or who feel unwanted — which includes all of us humans, at least some of the time, if we'd only just admit it.


Outright identification with those, human or animal, who are not us seems then to be the principal spiritual grace. This is the milk of human kindness that flowed through Jesus's veins at all times, and which flows through the veins of each of us some of the time — when, that is, we can manage not to be hungry, or mad for sex, or unable to believe in the danger of global warming, or shortsighted, or heedless of our own born or unborn grandchildren's lives.

When we are not focused like a laser beam on our personal appearance and grooming, when we are not perpetually on guard, or compulsive, or habit-bound, or avid, or unimpressed with humanity, we are truly capable of compassion. Especially when we step outside the customary preference we exhibit for our own kind, we truly have a potential for solidarity.

And that, if Albert Nolan is to be believed — and I for one think he is — may be the principle teaching Jesus meant to leave with us. We are to make of each of our lives a continuously compassion-resurrecting "voyage to Italy," as it were.