Fausto.
Fausto Vitali slipped away from his family in January, 2023. I am certain that the tiniest shift in the stars would have meant us reading about Fausto’s passing on the front pages of The New York Times.
I don’t think Fausto ever intentionally tried to teach, but at this hard juncture, everyone who knew Fausto is probably realizing how much he taught. We never knew they were lessons.
Fausto yelled. He cried. He sang.
He sang to his sheep as he walked them to the next pasture, faultless Verdi streaming down the mountain to Lake Como. He sang in church on Sundays. He sang Panis Angelicus at his daughters’ weddings. Sauntering down the road from the cemetery where all his ancestors rest, Fausto sang. He would have just placed a bunch of freshly picked flowers on his parents’ grave. Fausto picked flowers everywhere he went.
Before him, over hundreds of years, at least fourteen generations of Vitali had inhabited Sassella, Fausto’s stone home where he lived with his wife Mariangela and raised two daughters, Stefania and Silvana. Stefania’s sons, Leonardo and Marco, are the 15th generation.
Sassella looks directly across the lake to a dark mound that seems to rest at the feet of the Swiss and French Alps. That mound, on the western side of Lake Como, is the village of Bellagio. Fausto’s village, Varenna, juts sharply into the lake from the eastern shore. Bellagio is called the pearl of Lake Como and Varenna the diamond. Winston Churchill painted in Bellagio, and Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy visited there. Fausto opened the Sassella shutters every morning of his life to the sweet Lake Como breezes and that view across to Bellagio and the Swiss and French Alps.
Until he died at 83, Fausto was movie star handsome: high cheek bones inset with sparkling blue eyes, a fine chin that asked to be chiseled in marble, his hair still rising thickly from his brow.
Mid-life he performed in local theater. A five-star chef once said he would give anything to have kitchen staff that could peel a potato with Fausto’s steady, exquisite efficiency.
Fausto lovingly raised probably hundreds of animals over the course of his life - rabbits, chickens, sheep, hunting dogs and sofa dogs. Wild birds - perhaps off their migratory path - often flew to him. He kept them in a large pen, from which a chorus of different bird songs shimmered.
In the fall and winter, Fausto would go off in his Italian gear looking like the hunter every English gentleman dreamed of being. He almost always returned with a clutch of pheasants hanging from his knapsack. Before removing his coat he would open the sack and carefully take out a package of just-dug porcini and a find of truffles wrapped gently in a handkerchief. Then he would take out a bunch of tender alpine wildflowers - even in winter - for which he would straightaway find a small vase.
There is a castle in Varenna. It sits at the top of the central little hill overlooking the village and is said to have been built by Queen Theodelinda, the Queen of Italy in the 7th century. Fausto was related to her.
“Mari-aaaaaaangela!!!!” - Fausto yelled. No one seemed bothered by his yelling, which was a lot; they often yelled back, but if Mariangela, Stefania or Silvana ever seemed truly hurt, Fausto cried.
He never drove a car or ran a lawn mower, but he was curious about all of it. Once, when I said I had purchased a scythe to cut my grass like him, he said, “why???”
He loved his animals, but he was also sad that keeping them meant he could never travel. He tried in his 70’s to get rid of his sheep, so that he and Mariangela could finally see the world, but somehow that never happened, and then someone gave him more sheep.
There was one place that always made Fausto happy, and he seemed to take every opportunity he could to go there: Grigna, the highest peak - 7142 feet - in the range of Alps just southeast of Varenna. I’ve been there with Fausto and Stefania in August, and we had to warm ourselves at the top with hot tea and pasta in a hut while snow swirled outside. Maybe there, looking across the snowy jagged Alps of three different countries, his village just a speck, Fausto imagined the world. Fausto would almost run all the way down Grigna, but stopped abruptly over and over to pick flowers. By the time we arrived back at Sassella he had a huge bouquet in his arms.
I met Fausto in the early 1980’s when he was still the head gardener at the Villa Cipressi in Varenna. The Villa Cipressi stands on a crest at almost the peak of the village’s lake side, and - like an elaborate gown tumbling from its waist - four stories of terraced gardens ruffle from it to the water. From the lake the Villa Cipressi declares Varenna a regal gem, but from the village itself, the Villa is completely walled away. From the lake side everyone could see the tiers of wisteria, oleander and roses in bloom, but from the village the Villa was a secret.
An Italian Art publisher owned the Villa last. As the gardener, Fausto was only one of two people from Varenna to ever pass through the fifteen foot doors on Varenna’s main street. Fausto and his family became close to the “padrone,” who was single, and had very few family.
When the padrone died, the people of Varenna took on a voluntary tax to purchase the Villa Cipressi; they were concerned the Villa was too important to Varenna’s center not to control. Fausto remained the gardener until he retired, in the 1990s.
In the mid 1980’s, my six foot four inch cousin Ben was working six days a week on Wall St., coming back to his apartment at midnight and arriving at work in the morning before 8:00. For fun he worked out and chain smoked. I convinced him to come to Varenna where I was at the time. That trip ended with Ben arm-in-arm with Fausto, a smile I had not seen on Ben’s face maybe ever, the two of them bellowing in song: Fausto had taught Ben how to sing “O Sole Mio” and Ben had taught Fausto to sing, “New York, New York.”
Mr. Wall Street Finance met Fausto, and his life was changed.
Without ever trying, Fausto taught us all so much. It’s impossible to speak in the past tense of him. He is too alive in all of us to be a part of the past.
On the Villa Cipressi walls that overlook the main courtyard are inscribed the words of poet Christopher Marlowe:
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals
Fausto, they sing for you.
