In Sorrento I stopped at a little shop in the maze of lanes to admire the numerous cameo brooches in the window. This is a major area for shell cameo carving and has been for a long time, I inherited my grandmother’s cameo brooch that she bought there on honeymoon almost a hundred years ago.
The selection was good so I went into the shop. All that separated the one room up, one down, bead curtain to the back door, shutter to the front, from the identical shops in Pompeii, just an hour away on the Circumvesuvio train, was time. Skills in the little jeweller’s shops are thousands of years in practice; all the coral has gone from the bay, Roman tourists were just as pleased to collect the carved pieces as more modern visitors.
The jeweller was a young man, probably in his early thirties, busily bending silver mounts to solder later. As I admired his efforts we fell easily into conversation. I had done a little silversmithing thirty years ago and complimented his sure touch, a great asset with a metal that becomes work hardened and intractable very readily. With ease and accuracy, holding the U shaped metal channel briefly against each idiosyncratically outlined shell, the form of which is entirely dependant on the vagaries of nature, he encased the shell with his fingers and a small pair of pliers all the way round in practically one smooth movement and cut the end perfectly, aligned for soldering, all the while talking to me in English.
The conversation got on to mothers. Italians are world famous for having Mothers. When you stroll the streets of any Italian town and look at the array of stunningly lovely young ladies out promenading, or regard the beauty depicted by Italian painters over the centuries, it is difficult to know whether this is exceptionally good luck or some cunning form of natural selection. Whatever the cause there is no doubt that the country is heaving with potential mothers. They’re an abundant resource, as gratifying to the youth who seek to create them as they are a trial to the children who qualify them for such elevated, dignified and irreproachable status.
The jeweller indicated a tray of cameos and said he would mark the price down if I was interested, as they were stock he did not wish to take with him if he managed to move shop. If only he could get over the problem with his mother, he was planning to leave, he said. He was making a bid for freedom. At his age he had had enough of his mother telling him what to do. He was going to sell the stock slowly so when it was all gone his mother would not be able to argue the difficulty of leaving her to deal with all his stuff. It was his business, she said. Why should she be landed with the goods of an entire business to look after while he took himself off to start again? She simply wouldn’t do it, she said, she had enough to do already. He had a business here and must stay and make the best of it.
The jeweller sighed and put down the cameo in case the weight of his passion broke it. What had he done to deserve such a mother? I made the right international sympathetic noises, so he warmed to his argument. Only the previous day she had thrown a fit of hysterics while making his dinner. He had injudiciously told her where he was planning to go. Had described in detail a shop he had seen elsewhere that would be the perfect next step up for him. Just what he wanted. Bigger, he told me, and, more importantly, away from his mother.
His mother had been very unreasonable, he said. She had called on the Virgin to assist her with her difficult son. She had called him names. She had accused him of ingratitude. She had predicted his likely starvation, far away with no mother to cook for him. Who would ensure he was wearing clean matched socks? And how would he get any customers at all without clean matched socks? Eventually after lengthy sobbing, involving throwing her apron over her head and rocking back and forth, she had even prayed over him. Pushed to his limits he had left the kitchen and sought strong drink. Who could blame him? Not I, especially if it involved a reduction on the top notch big cameo brooch carved with a very pretty girl, in a modern style, which I had my eye on.
Simpatico and admiring of the work as I could be, brought forth a further clinching reduction, so I bought the cameo as a present to give to my mother when I got back to England. He wrapped it, saying he would do it beautifully, as a present for a mother is very important, yes? Of course I agreed, it is and he did it very well. As he handed it over, I wished him well in his quest to escape and enquired the location of the shop he had seen that was the objective of his journey to self determination.
Oh, he said, it’s in Meta.
Meta? I asked.
Yes, he replied, you know Meta, it’s the next stop on the Circumvesuvio railway from here. It’s nearly four kilometres away.
My grandmother’s cameo.