(This is a long post. Mind you, I had two hours to write this—you’ll read why—and three days to edit it while I was sick in bed. So, only read when you’ve got lots of sweet downtime, maybe with a cup of tea, or better yet, with a glass of chianti!)
Mi manca Roma—I miss Rome!
You’re going to think me strange, because I’m actually writing this from the San Francisco airport, worlds away from Europe, as I wait for my trip back to Los Angeles. It’s after two full weeks (and weekends!) of work. Sitting here, looking out at the tarmac as the planes lift off, I’m reminded of a post I’ve wanted to write.
And so, here we go.
I write this today because I’m an obsessively early airline passenger and there’s two hours to go before I board the plane, because this is the first chance I’m getting to blog about anything in over a week (well, two weeks now as of this posting), and especially because sitting in an airport at this ungodly hour reminds me of the early-morning airport wait before that flight to Rome early this year.
The trip deserves a post, maybe the longest one I’ll ever write, because it was actually in the Eternal City that I decided to start blogging. It was a trip of many adventures, but the biggest one for me wasn’t the fact that I was in Europe for the first time, not eating authentic Italian gelato in front of the Trevi, not even gaping up at the colors that had bloomed from Michelangelo’s paintbrush on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.
I imagine that my biggest Roman adventure was actually quite commonplace and would be ordinary to many people. But to a crafter who didn’t speak the language, it was big enough for me to decide to write about my crafting (and cooking) life. That adventure was when, one cold day in February, I worked up the gumption to buy some fabric, in a country I’d never been in before, from a man who didn’t speak a lick of English and was flirting with me the entire time, despite the fact that he was old enough to be my father.
The fabric store of my undoing was Bassetti Tessuti on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 73, Rome, 186. It’s Rome’s largest fabric store, with a fabled inventory that draws famous design houses, seamstresses and crafters to its labyrinthine halls of cloth. It maintains an extensive collection of fabrics (almost 200,000 types) in every imaginable weave, from Lake Como silk to Piedmont wool.
I first read about it on NYTimes.com a few months before I decided to go to Rome. Non-crafters won’t quite understand me when I say that my heart was in my throat when I read that article. It was short but rife with descriptions that spun pictures in my head. I imagined getting lost in the store, half-mad at all those walls of fabric. It would be the highlight of a life spent falling in love with cloth. It’s a fascination that’s grown through the years because it grounds me to a shared history with all the other crafters in my family, especially my grandmothers from both sides.
By the time I took the trip to Rome, I already had the idea to restart a fabric collection. Reading that article made me decide to hunt down the store and make sure I had time for it on my itinerary. I took along a Moleskine journal published expressly for Rome, with maps of the city and pages that I could be creative with (I got mine from Amazon). One of those pages had a part of the NYTimes article, along with Basseti’s address, stuck to it. (You can click on the image for a larger view.)
Below is a group of fabric swatches that I already had in my small collection, most of which I wanted to use for a quilt. I stuck them in the journal as well, to guide me in case there would be any fabric available at the store that would fit well in the quilt’s intended palette. A line from Madonna’s “Material Girl” makes this a pun-y entry in my Roma journal, because I’m silly that way.
(That journal was my lifeline in that foreign city. It had Italian phrases taught to me by my polyglot friend Via, addresses and funny notes like the one below from my brother—an art student—on “Dorking Out Art-Wise” in Rome!)
When we found the store, the friend who was with me probably didn’t know how nervous I was going into it, but really, I was beyond intimidated. I hid my anxiety by gorging on a cone of pistachio gelato, standing outside the store and licking furiously, feeling the nervousness dissipate with each mouthful of the divine sweet stuff. With the last bite, I had enough gumption to at least start making my way up the two flights of stairs from the ground floor to the Basetti main lobby.
I wish I could post pictures, but frankly, I was so nervous that I couldn’t take my camera out. So, I’m posting these, but credits go to Chris-Warde Jones at NYTimes.com. The store’s interior really looks like this, with bolt upon bolts of cloth and staff members at cutting stations, waiting for you to point to your choices so they can cut them to your specifications.
My heart was on the verge of giving out as I stood there, overwhelmed, realizing that what the article said was true: Bassetti was THE Italian’s fabric hub, and nobody there spoke English. I timidly made my way down streets of silk and byways of brocade, around corners of chiffon. One alley led to another, and then another in a dizzying maze of colors and textures.
I stopped and had to take a long, deep breath.
And then I turned around, retraced my steps back to the entrance, down the flights of stairs and was back out on the street in under 10 seconds.
I was too chicken to do anything! I left without so much as a square inch of cloth. I mumbled an excuse to my friend who had been waiting outside. “Nothing matches my swatches,” I said. Which was partly true, because I couldn’t find any cotton suitable for quilting, and mostly that was because I was too nervous to actually look for it.
As we walked away, I heard my mom’s voice in my head (which often happens!): “Your trip to that store should be spontaneous. You go because you want to go, for the pleasure of it. Don’t let your swatches dictate the experience.”
And so, from across the street, as my friend withdrew some cash from an ATM, I looked up at the store, knit my brows, clutched my journal and declared that I was going back in. I marched my nervous (but determined) self back into Bassetti, into the belly of the beast, where I finally found a section with cotton bolts from floor to ceiling. Opening to the page in my journal with the Italian phrases, I called out timidly to a man with salt-and-pepper hair and flushed, red cheeks who had been regarding me quietly, with one bushy eyebrow raised: “Puo aiutarmi?” (Can you help me?)
His face broke into a slow grin, and the raised eyebrow turned into a wink. I was petrified. He ambled slowly over to me and mumbled something which I now forget. I just pointed to a bolt of cream cloth with tiny blue clubs on it (like the symbols from a suite in a deck of cards) and said, “Vorrei un metro, per favore,” looking down at my journal the entire time.
He glanced at it and bust out laughing. I joined him, collapsing in nervous giggles; his laugh was just contagious. He was so amused he was practically wheezing.
I was so relieved that I pointed out two more bolts of cloth. Most of them were simple printed cotton, but I’d never seen patterns like those in all my years of fabric sleuthing. Mr. Wheezy carried all the bolts to a long wooden table and started to cut them.
Over the sound of snipsnapping scissors, he raised his bushy eyebrows at me quizzically and asked, “Filipina?” I answered, “Si.” And then, he pointed to the cloth and with broad sweeps of his hands and arms, asked what I would do with them. I used my own hands to demonstrate a purse, a skirt and a blanket/quilt. He guffawed, suggested I buy more than a meter for the skirt print. I nodded a yes. I was fascinated that I was communicating with him, and not with a foreign language, but with sewing gestures as words!
Then, he asked, “Marito?,” a word I didn’t know. I looked at him skeptically, and suspected that he was asking me if I was married because the word sounded like “marital.” He held up his left hand and pointed to the ring finger, pretended he was hugging someone in the air and pursing his lips as if he were kissing an invisible wife. I laughed and shook my head, signifying a no. His eyes lit up. “Ahhh, (mumble Italian mumble some more Italian)…bella,” looking at me. I knew he was saying something about me being pretty, and I tried to hurry him, because all I wanted was to pay for my cloth and get out of the store.
After some more mumbling and more staring at me, he finally walked me to the front of the store to pay for my cloth. The sharply-dressed lady at the cashier was trying to explain something to me, but I had the most confused expression on my face that she probably took pity on me and decided to iron the matter out with Mr. Wheezy. He verified the amount, counted up my cloth, and handed it to me, making sure to hold my hands as he placed the bag of fabric in them.
And then I was out the door.
I looked down at all the fabric I bought. All very quiet, unassuming fabric, but all of which I love, because of what I had to go through to buy them. That night, back in my hotel room, as my big day drew to a close, I stared at my cloth once more and decided: I would write about that day. About how a love for fabric took me out of my self, and how it had reminded me that my creativity is only as rich as I’m willing to feed it—with new experiences, and people and places.
Here’s my loot from Bassetti Tessuti. Someday, the one with multicolored flowers is going to be my “Campo De Fiori” skirt. The nautical one will be book bags or totes with anchor appliqués for friends. The one with small blue chicks, a baby blanket for the friend who taught me to be brave with all those Italian words. And someday, the cream one with clovers/clubs, a quilt for my own daughter, who will fall asleep to the magical tale of how a girl with a curl found herself lost in the thick woods of an enchanted fabric forest (those velvet vines can be pretty scary!), and how she found her way out.
And someday, I hope to go back to Mr. Wheezy, flirt with him in fluent Italian, and buy myself a measure of fine Italian silk. 
j.ana | 
10 7th, 2008| 
