Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town

"The kind of book you want to read out loud to someone.... even the stranger sitting next to you!" Uriel Dana History, eccentric characters & dry wit synergistically arrange themselves into laugh-out-loud combinations in Pasquale's Nose. In each chapter Rips demonstrates brilliant observational and storytelling abilities. By the end of the book, all of these surreal characters began to develop a larger, over-soul quality. They reminded me of cultures like the Aboriginal Australians that perceive realities on more than one level. The stories and the history of this place are not only extremely interesting and funny, but they left me pondering the possibilities for hours.

As one of the many who has fallen in lust with Italy over a too-short visit, I found this a fun read. The author displays a whacked-out sense of humor as he deconstructs the citizenry of a small town (large village?) north of Rome. There seems to be an unusually large number of eccentrics inside those ancient walls, and one more - in the person of Rips - just adds to the brew. He seems out of his element in the beginning, but eventually you start to think he's landed exactly where he belongs, in a sort of beign asylum where the inmates are the admissions committee.The dry commentary reminded me of the great Ludwig Bemelmens, one of the 20th century's premier travel essayists, though sadly largely forgotten today. Maybe you've read D.H.Lawrence's accounts of travel in Italia - infuse an offbeat sense of humor and a semi-fictional tone and you'll come away with a copy of Pasquale's Nose. If you don't get to go to Italy yourself this year - or, better yet, if you do - this may be the perfect vacation read.

I picked this book up praying that it would not be about the exploits of some annoying North American couple who buy an old, decaying villa, purportedly of historic renown, and then hurriedly write a book to pay for their folly. I didn't want Bella Tuscany, I wanted Ugly Tuscany. Something with an edge, rough. Broken terra cotta. Dusty. Weathered. Parched. Pasquale's Nose is all that and more.In this case we get Ugly Tuscia, which rests near between Umbria and Tuscany. Michael Rips is not working and on his wife's suggestion they up and leave the United States for the lovely Italian hilltown of Sutria.He gives us just enough information about himself and why he's in Italy to keep you interested. His wife has coaxed him to go the Etruscan village of Sutria so that she can paint. They have brought their infant daughter with them. If you've been to any tiny little hill in the Tuscan area then this book will fill on the pieces you may have wanted to remember when you returned home but forgot. Rips recounts some of the history the town, which is wry and funny like most things in Italy. The local characters that he describes throughout the book are what I remember vividly-coarse, refined, and yet slightly tart. You'll find out who Pasquale really is, who the outcasts of the town are, and more dirt than Bella Tuscany was willing to reveal.Think of this book as `Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' in Italy.

Read this book! It is an inspired, hilarious but ultimately subtle take off on Dante's Purgatorio. Rips goes from the bottom of Purgatory, his local coffee shop, to a medieval village at the top. On his way, he encounters a glorious flock of off-beat characters, including one who seems to be the incarnation of Heidegger. They teach him something about himself but also about the mentality of village life. I read a lot of travel memoirs and cannot remember one which has the debth of this one. I could not recommend this book more highly.

"I hate travelling and explorers" declared Claude Levi-Strauss at the beginning of his anthroplogical masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques. In a similar vein, Michael Rips starts this unique travelogue by announcing his longstanding belief "that the place where I am living, however wretched, is preferable to anywhere else, however pleasant." Reluctantly dragged by his wife to Sutri, an ancient town north of Rome, the author, a former trial attorney suspended in an existential crisis, was confronted by a bizarre gallery of local characters and, eventually, himself. In an echo of Baudrillard's description of his own journal as 'a subtle index of idleness', the book is subtitled 'Idle Days in an Italian Town'; for in Sutri, Rips succumbed to his propensity to while away the day in apparently inconsequential conversations with the townsfolk. The resulting series of vignettes is not only outrageously entertaining, but also stands as a complex commentary on the means by which communities forge identities by their stories of themselves, and the way in which writers are implicated in such collective myths. This is a very clever, very distinctive achievement.