Author and Artist
My (Happy) Place
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
On the island of Sicily en route to the Villa Casale, the rolling hills are flecked with craggy boulders. Crops reach skyward. Grazing livestock moo and baa. Crumbling stone houses age gracefully and with character. The air is perfumed with the scent of lush vegetation. Red-and-yellow blossoms are sprinkled over an emerald green-on-green colorscape.
The Villa was the hunting lodge for a fourth century Roman magnate. Like a drunk seeking comfort in a bottle, he came here to escape the cares and callouses of life. I might say the same for me, but my reason is that the Villa has more Roman mosaics in situ than anywhere else in the world.
With bills mounting faster than I can say UNESCO World Heritage and my shitty teacher’s salary not keeping up with inflation, I can’t afford this trip. But here I am.
The Roman gods have summoned me. I really shouldn’t be here, but I need this trip.
In life’s lottery, instead of laboring as a Roman slave placing bits of marble into mosaic patterns in the Villa’s flooring, I teach American high schoolers. As the frantic emails from my principal keep pestering me, I’m way over my allowed vacation time.
Arriving on site, a gauntlet of crumbling wood shacks hawk touristy statuettes, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, totebags. Even though my library shelves are sagging from the weight of books about Roman mosaics, I snag a souvenir guidebook for the same reason a gambler playing the ponies needs a racing form.
A tour bus disgorges gawking, chattering tourists who scurry about making first-impression judgements, molding their memories and preparing travel stories. They are victims of the same shallowness I inflict on my high school students.
My classes are like tour buses racing from one historic date, military battle and political personality to another. In a single year we sail the Nile, learn the unexpected history of Arabic numbers, sign a Magna Carta and fight political revolutions.
No wonder my students pass notes, watch the wall clock or doodle. No wonder I’d rather hide in the faculty lounge with a guidebook than go to class. No wonder not being there feels so good.
Leaving the crowds behind, I wander past porticos and pillars, under Corinthian columns, along colonnades and peristyle courtyards. I soak up the marvel of a thermal bathhouse, massage rooms, saunas, latrines with marble seats, statuary, vestibules, kilns, a basilica. Twelve thousand square feet of mosaic magic. A rush.
Villa Casale mosaics tell the lives of the Roman One Percenters. Chariot races, sea journeys, hunting scenes. Couples in erotic, lusty embraces. Exotic animals caged. Women in beach bikinis working out with weights, playing ball, flinging a discus. I return for the third time to a colorful wall mosaic of a child playing hooky.
After so much gripping beauty, I stop at a ramshackle food stand which itself seems like an archaeological ruin, I order an arancini and lemonata.
“Where you from?” the wizened cook asks. Like a Roman soothsayer, he adds, “You come back, I think. I watch you.” My face flushes to crimson.
My name’s Noah, and I’m a mosaic addict.
