Pasquale's Nose : Idle Days in an Italian Town

by Rips, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780316748001
• ISBN10: 0316748005
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-05-21
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co

Summary

Everywhere hailed for its quirkiness, its hilarity, its charm, PASQUALE'S NOSE tells the story of a New York City lawyer who runs away to a small Etruscan village with his wife and new baby, and discovers a community of true eccentrics--warring bean growers, vanishing philosophers, a blind bootmaker, a porcupine hunter--among whom he feels unexpectedly at home. . A book of odd delights--great reading for the armchair traveler. . A tonic for readers who find Peter Mayle's Provence and Frances Mayes's Tuscany lacking in spice.

Author Biography

Michael Rips, a fifth-generation Nebraskan, currently lives in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City.

Table of Contents

The Guidi	5	(7)
The Blessing of the Bean	12	(8)
The Hand	20	(5)
The Postman	25	(5)
The Piazza	30	(18)
The Philosopher	48	(20)
Luciano's New Home	68	(5)
Pontius Pilate	73	(22)
The Boot Maker	95	(18)
Times Ravishes the Day	113	(6)
Skinning Spinoza	119	(16)
Astrid's Story	135	(11)
The Guy and the Non-Guy	146	(22)
Marcella's Cantina	168	(5)
Pasquale's Nose	173	(18)
The Ping-Pong Table	191	(13)
Poets of the Arm	204

Excerpts

Excerpt

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from the belief that the place where I am living, however wretched, is preferable to anywhere else, however pleasant--the brown grass here is better than the green grass there.

My brown grass that spring was the Riss Restaurant, a purgatorial place where I would sit day after day doing little or nothing, surrounded by others doing less. It was at the Riss that Sheila found me, at the Riss that she suggested that we move to Italy, and at the Riss that I refused to go.

Sheila, an artist, had just given birth to our child. With no reason to believe that I would ever work, she felt compelled to earn money. That's where Italy came in.

Sheila knew of a medieval town at the top of a hill in central Italy. Artists lived there and one of them had a vacant house and studio. The town and studio would inspire her to complete a new series of paintings, which she would sell to support us. As for me, Sheila claimed that the town had two or three coffee shops that were as awful as the Riss.

I began to assemble the excuses for not going. But Sheila didn't need to hear them--she knew them from countless other conversations, all of which ended the same way: I would not leave.

But that afternoon something happened. A sheet of paper taped to the cash register. A sign.

The Riss, which had been open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for seven decades, was closing.

It should not have surprised me--unlike Heaven and Hell, Purgatory was bound by time, subject to decay and oblivion.

Days later we left for Italy.

That Sheila was responsible for the sign on the cash register did not occur to me until it was too late.

Copyright © 2001 Michael Rips. All rights reserved.