The Surprise of Cremona
On Edith Templeton’s neglected gem of Italian travel writing.
Splendid travel narratives of Italy are so abundant that to say The Surprise of Cremona is in a class by itself is no small assertion. What makes it so special? Let’s start with the fact that although a reader can rather easily assemble a sizable library of foreign visitors’ excellently written accounts of sojourns in Venice, Florence, and Rome, books that wander off those deservedly beaten urban paths are fewer and farther between. The unexpected purview of Edith Templeton’s 1954 travel diary — which its subtitle announces as “one woman’s adventures in Cremona, Parma, Mantua, Ravenna, Urbino and Arezzo” — is just one of several qualities that sets it apart.
“He who does not take the time to conquer the artichoke by stages does not deserve to penetrate to its heart. There are no shortcuts in life to anything: least of all to the artichoke.”
Alert to the local character — historical, artistic, gustatory — that each of the storied stops on her itinerary radiates, Templeton is a fine, fresh guide to both the sites and the flavors that infuse Italian culture with such pleasure. She is an astute (and often acerbic) guide to galleries and museums, able to convey the active engagement of looking at art rather than merely providing the checklist for categorizing it. Her considerable erudition is supported by a deep curiosity; the combination makes her an ideal companion (her passage through the galleries of the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua is marvelous to share). She is equally adept at directing our attention to the pageant of vegetables in an open market, or to the dramatis personae of the Italian table. (See her take-down of the bread served in Cremonese restaurants, or her ode to the profundity of the artichoke: “It has a melancholy flavour suggestive of mould and dust and of old books rotting away unread in the damp baronial libraries of old country manors. . . . He who does not take the time to conquer the artichoke by stages does not deserve to penetrate to its heart. There are no shortcuts in life to anything: least of all to the artichoke.”) Templeton can capture the personal, social, and commercial tensions exhibited in the eye-rolls and not-so sotto voce mutterings of a husband-and-wife team running a small hotel with the wit and reach of an accomplished novelist. Hers is an Italy in which every observation is an entrée to a wider story, whether she chooses to tell it or not.
The writing in The Surprise of Cremona is so good that one doesn’t get too far into it before one wonders just who Edith Templeton was and what else she may have written. Born in Prague in 1916, she married an Englishman in 1938, then left England in the mid-1950s to live in India with her second husband. In that same decade she wrote several novels and began to publish stories in The New Yorker (which were collected more than four decades later in The Darts of Cupid and Other Stories; 2002). In 1966, under the nom de plume Louisa Walbrook, she wrote Gordon, a novel of a young woman’s obsessive submission to a psychiatrist, which was lively enough to be banned in England and Germany. Rescued by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in Paris (the original publisher of Nabokov’s Lolita), Gordon was finally issued under Templeton’s own name in 2003, when its author was eighty-seven.
Even in the age of e-books and easy internet searches for forgotten volumes, The Surprise of Cremona is nearly impossible to find, but it is well worth seeking out — just like the best restaurants in strange provincial towns, which the author learns are usually discovered by heading down back streets and hidden alleys. How apt.
