L’ARIA DEL MARE

BY PAIGE STRIGEL

Away from the tourist-heavy shores of Cinque Terre, far from the well-known Amalfi coast, down the coastline from Nice, France sits Liguria, Italy. A retreat for Italian families on their weeks-long summer holidays, the water’s edge is dotted endless by colored umbrellas and lounge chairs.

Near the end of my summer as an au pair for nine-year-old Elisa in Trento, my host family set off for the five-hour road trip from the Alps to the sea. The importance of calling it the sea and not the ocean was made clear early; Elisa scolded me for using the terms interchangeably. The sea, she explained in all her ferocious enthusiasm, is much smaller and much warmer. She was right, of course: the Ligurian Sea stretches just between the Italian Riviera and the French island of Corsica. On the tail end of the European heat wave which knocked me flat, it was almost too warm to be refreshing. Almost, but not quite. And of course, the most important part for my host mom, Francesca, was to breathe the sea air, l’aria del mare, which she considers essential to health.

Though we will spend each day at the sea in the village called Loano, our destination is perched away from the coastline in tiny Balestrino. Our little Fiat winds its way high through blue-green hills until, after a hairpin turn sharp enough to warrant a threepoint approach, we drive through a gate, across a flagstone drive, and up to a warmly lit butteryellow house with evergreen shutters. Nerves triggered by my imperfect Italian struck me shy as Nonna Gina and Nonno Ezio — my host dad Edoardo’s parents — emerged from the wide-open front door trailed by Fiore, their limping, elderly labrador.

Almost immediately, Nonna Gina guides me through the vast garden. We move in linguistic circles, her broad gestures and slow Italian gradually giving name to the wild rosemary, laurel and myrtle bushes crowding the front yard, their soft scents rising through the heated air. Fat, slow-moving bumblebees buzzed through the lavender surrounding the back patio, unbothered by our proximity.

“My mother practices wild gardening,” Edoardo says, emerging from the house to join us. “Where it grows, let it be.”

LUEHMANN , ITALY

kitchen, I often find Nonno Ezio holding court with the moka coffee pot and a small breakfast spread, the news playing on TV.

Outside, there is a heavy fog on the hills. Through it, a decrepit abandoned village is visible. The bees are still humming — drunk on the lavender, I suspect. Tretre the little tabby cat might rub up against your ankles if you’re lucky and quiet. And as the sun gains strength overhead, we toss towels and sunscreen and books into beach bags, gather Elisa’s sand toys and inflatable raft, and begin to snake through vine-covered hills once again. We wave to the donkeys perpetually grazing roadside and emerge into Loano, navigating to my family’s chosen beach and our designated canvas chairs. That’s where we remain: slicked in SPF 30, feet caked in sand and books acting as sun shields.

Around noon each day, Francesca awakens from the heat stupor to send Edoardo in search of lunch. He returns triumphant, bearing greasy paper bags stuffed with hot, fresh focaccia or farinata, with tomatoes unlike any I’ve tasted before, with sun-warmed fat purple figs sweeter than candy.

After all of that, there’s no choice but to sleep. So we do — my chair carefully dragged into our umbrella’s shade and straw hat tipped over my face to placate my host parents’ (well-founded) fears for my fair skin in the 2 p.m. glare. The heaviness of humid, salty air presses down until I wake feeling as if my bones have melted. I wade into the seawater

just to feel like my body exists again as a thing with structure — that I haven’t actually become one of the near-formless jellyfish happily drifting through the temperate water.

How many times did I shake my head in those days, wondering how I’d found myself in a dizzying prelapsarian Eden?

When the sun begins to dip, we move in reverse through the morning’s routine, trundling back up the hills, now purple in the fading sunlight.

Showers are in order, suntans are examined, Tretre and Fiore are scratched, and a table is set. Its surface is crowded with green plastic liter bottles of acqua frizzante, dishes of trofie pasta doused in vibrant pesto, errant slices of bread and plates of vegetables.

Our meals were simple but filled with laughter and storytelling, with memories that fill the house to its vaulted rafters. My tired brain follows the trailing sentences, chasing the conversation and translating until I exhaustedly slouch back in my wooden chair, sipping homemade red wine — “like Jesus drank,” according to Ezio — and letting rapid words fly by.

The wine, I would soon learn, was not all Nonna Gina and Nonno Ezio made from scratch. After dinner, Ezio shows me the side shed where fresh olives are pressed into oil — several gallons of which we take back to Trento to last until the next summer — and the small wooden barrels for homemade grappa and mirto — a strangely sweet-spicy liqueur of myrtle with ac blue-purple color dark enough to appear black in the bottle.

One morning, Gina proposes that I learn more about Liguria and Ezio agrees, saying that I should have adventures. From then on,

di Rocca Barbena, a medieval village abandoned but for fewer than 200 residents. Life moves slowly inside its quiet stone streets. Later, a village called Albenga, where Ezio guides me through its ancient ruins and baptistery. Afterward, we always drive through town, whereI hop out and jog to the beach to flop on a canvas chair for the rest of the day.

some days when my host family bundles into the Fiat and down to the beach, the grandparents and I cruise through the hills in their white Jeep. The first time we take this journey, I clench my hands in my lap as we rumble over rutted dirt roads, surrounded by trees not quite thick enough to obscure the near-sheer drop to our left.

The wind howls when we reach the place, the highest peak as far as we can see. A small church is filled with pastel ribbons and papers — cards of thanks and blessing requests. We walk the perimeter and Gina points to the place: from where we stand, the edge of the earth. There, she says, the Virgin Mary appeared to a woman decades back.

“Do you believe it?” I ask.

“Well...” she begins with a smile, “I’m not sure. But sometimes, in a place like this, it makes you believe.” Elsewhere we visit Castelvecchio

After weeks of homesickness and weathering a loss in my own family an ocean away, Ezio and Gina’s gentle acceptance felt like the warmest hug I hadn’t known to ask for. I feel the dread of departure long before it arrives. My final breakfast stretches as far as I can make it, ending with Ezio pressing his and Gina’s phone number on me with his blessing, a promise: whether with family or friends or all alone, I am welcome back to the butter-yellow house in Balestrino. I swallow tears through baci e abbraci, kisses and hugs of goodbye. Just before we clamber into the car for our return journey, Nonna Gina takes my face in both her hands.

“At goodbyes, my mother would always say tante belle cose,” she says softly. I nod speechlessly and with that, we’re off.

Her words echo in my mind. Tante belle cose: So many beautiful things.