Here’s a question: what do Ernest Hemmingway, a thousand shards of glass and the Ligurian coastal town of Rapallo have to do with us being in Italy? As it turns out, quite a lot.

In 2014, we were trawling through the program of the upcoming Brisbane Writers Festival and found a session by a writer and photographer who was also the manager of Hemmingway’s literary estate. We’d never heard of Michael Katakis, but thought anything he might have to say about the great writer’s works could be worth hearing. So along we went, completely unaware his words were about to change our lives.

As it happened, Michael Katakis was promoting his book, ‘A Thousand Shards of Glass’, a lament for an America that was, in his view, a place broken by fear and distrust – broken into a thousand shards of glass. (And this was two years before Trump became President!).

But the author told a story that day that resonated with us. He and his wife, anthropologist and author, Kris Hardin, had travelled the world, working and writing. Some years before, they’d landed in Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast just southeast of Genoa. It’s a pretty town where the historic centre is perched on a narrow rocky shore and embraced by hills that rise up immediately behind it. Michael Katakis and Kris Hardin moved into a little house in those hills.

The place itself was tiny, he said, but it had a large, open terrace – much larger than the house itself – that overlooked the sparkling blue waters of the Ligurian Sea. Every morning, the two would work on the terrace, among the trailing vines and flowers, and sometimes, in the afternoon, they would take the ferry around to the next village, Santa Margherita, to visit friends. Their life, he said, was idyllic.

Until the day Kris received a call to say her father, back in the United States, was desperately ill. Katakis described the rushed panic of her throwing things into a bag and flying home. He packed up the house and followed; their life in Rapallo had come to an abrupt end. The couple stayed in the US as Kris nursed her father until his death. Tragically, around that same time, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour that would claim her life in 2012. In Brisbane in 2014, Michael Katakis spoke of Kris Hardin as having been his True North; it was apparent he was still adrift without her.

Meanwhile, Greg and I had been tossing around the idea of living overseas for a period. It had seemed like a potentially good idea, had maybe even become a bit of a dream. But as we listened to Michael Katakis that day, as he urged those of us in the room to make the most of every day, to grasp life at every opportunity, we determined to make our dream a reality, to try to create our own Italian idyll.

We bought Michael’s book, stood in line for him to sign it. When it came our turn, we told him we’d had this idea. ‘Do it!’ he said. ‘Don’t wait. Do it now!’ And so, we did. We began to put in place plans that, three years later, in mid-2017, would see us fly away to live in Italy for two wonderful years.

We didn’t land in Rapallo as Michael Katakis and Kris Hardin had done, but whenever we visit that lovely town, we look up to the hills and try to imagine which house they lived in, which terrace they worked on… And we’re forever grateful to Michael Katakis for the advice he gave us in Brisbane that day.

 

Rapallo