Freya Stark's Asolo: The Heart Of An Italian Town

ASOLO, Italy - For years Asolo was nothing to me but a name at the top of letters in a book. The dates that followed it - 7 August 1930, 24 April 1933 - were as distant, as foreign, as the place seemed to be. It was somewhere in Italy, that's all I knew, and the home of Freya Stark, the author of the letters and one of the century's great travel writers.

You didn't read Freya to learn of Italy; you read her - in "Baghdad Sketches," "Beyond Euphrates," "East is West" - to dream about Arabia.

Then, before a recent trip to Venice, I picked up "Beyond Euphrates" and was stopped by a line: "There in the foreground was beloved Asolo, its castle and small hills like the stitching on a sampler, and the Dolomites behind it - all within sight of the campanile of St. Mark's in Venice on a clear autumn day."

I got out my atlas to have a look. And the little town of Asolo went from being an address on a letter to a dot on the map, a stop on my itinerary.

Bus stop

It was raining in Verona the morning I got the train to Vicenza. (I had expected more sun in northeastern Italy.) Outside the station I found the bus to Bassano del Grappa where, an hour later in a noisy cafe, I bought another bus ticket and a glorious cheese sandwich. The small round loaf was out of a da Vinci; the flour from the crust dusted my jeans as we sailed past gas stations and classical villas. I had no idea where to get off.

"Asolo?" I asked the only other passenger timidly, wondering how this name I'd come across in fine editions could also, somehow, be a bus stop. It was like asking, "Byzantium?"

But without a pause, he said, "Prossima."

I was dropped at a major intersection. It didn't look like much. I stood with my bag, wondering why I had come. At least it had stopped raining. In the roadside restaurant a waitress told me a bus would be by in about five minutes, to take me up the hill.

It was a jitney, really, filled with schoolkids. The road climbed past trees - the famous mulberries? - and brushed stone walls. A Roman archway crowned our arrival, still rising, into an enclosing whirl of narrow streets etched by gothic arcades topped with dark green shutters. Flowers dripped from lofty balconies.

I stepped out onto a fine sloped square and looked around. The name on the letter which had become a dot on the map had further evolved into a bodily place, where I now had to find a room to sleep in.

A kind woman directed me across the square to the Hotel Duse, named for another famous resident, the Italian actress Eleonora. I walked through the centuries' old doorway into a boutique lobby.

A beautiful young woman checked me in, another one led me to my room. It gleamed with modern fixtures and featured a bowl of candy, a dish of potpourri and a view of the cathedral. I plopped on the bed in that rush of euphoria you feel when, after entering what seems the ideal town, you find the perfect hotel.

But the town, now made real, was still a mystery, a maze of shadowy arcades and unintelligible inhabitants. I went out hoping to use Freya as my key.

... and a terrifying driver

Freya Stark came to Asolo before she turned 1 - her father, visiting on a recommendation from Robert Browning's son, had bought a house from the local cure - and she died here three years ago at the age of 100. In the years between she traveled widely, especially in the Arab world, and wrote nearly a dozen books.

Her heart, however, was always in these hills.

"There is," she wrote in "Perseus in the Wind," "a pleasantly pagan atmosphere about the countryside of my Italian home."

"So you want to know about Freya," Giuseppe Kamenar said, laughing as if at the impossibility of my request. "I knew her for 30 years. Come sit down. I will tell you only 20 percent of what I know. The other 80 percent, you understand, I cannot tell anyone. It is like a doctor and his patient."

The general manager of the Hotel Villa Cipriani led me to some chairs in the high-ceilinged lobby. Tall, spotless windows looked out onto the garden, which too expensive a place for me to stay in.

"Freya helped design the garden," Signore Kamenar said. "One day she came, took a disapproving look, and said: `Peppino,' - she called me Peppino - `you need some red here.' " He laughed at the memory of her resoluteness.

But for all her doughty escapades, she was, he said, unadventurous in her menu. (Veal one day, sole the next.)

She was a terrifying driver. "I eventually convinced her to move to an apartment just up the street, so she could walk to lunch."

He told of how she had become a writer:

"She said that one day, when she was a little girl, she came back from an outing and her father asked her what she had done. `We went to Bassano,' she said. `That's not good enough,' he said to her. `What did you do there? What did you see? What were the people wearing?' And the next day she went out again and when she came home she had a detailed report."

Before I left, Signore Kamenar showed me to the dining room and led me to the glassed-in terrace where Freya ate lunch almost every day during her last 10 years.

It levitated at the far end of the garden, its wide, geranium-boxed windows framing a masterful landscape of cypress-spiked hills and distant dark mountains wreathed in cloud. A rose-colored turret punctuated the center.

Added to the perfection of the view was the thought that it had been enjoyed by probably the last survivor from the age when artists could consciously, and successfully, surround themselves with beauty.

Leaving the Cipriani, I continued down the street away from town till I came to Santa Anna Church. The cemetery sat to the side, on a hill overlooking a silent valley walled in the north by misty mountains. The stone over her tomb was engraved:

Freya Stark

Writer and Traveller

1893-1993.

As I lingered, a small woman in a dark raincoat walked up to the grave and made a brisk, concentrated sign of the cross.

I tried to engage her, but she didn't speak English. She took my pen and wrote, in Italian: "I worked for Dame Freya Stark 11 years."

There was so much I wanted to ask, but lacked the words. So I said: "Freya. Simpatica? (Nice?)"

"Molto," she said earnestly. "Molto, molto simpatica."

Back in town I ordered a grappa in a bar on the piazza. A man with a salt and pepper beard and twinkling eyes pulled from under the bar a plastic bottle of mineral water. He wore a jacket and tie.

"Acqua?" I asked, confused.

"Grappa," he said smiling, and then added, I assumed, the Italian word for "homemade." He grinned even wider as I sipped the fire.

Around the block I entered a stationer's shop. Its glass cases were filled with antique pens, ink bottles, blotting paper, period boxes with whimsical logos. I asked if Freya Stark had been a customer.

"No," the young man said. But he knew her, of course, everyone in town did. "She was the last person of really big culture," he said, with an awe that startled me. "And free. Other people always have politics, prejudices. Freya Stark was of all the people I know the most free."

I headed across the piazza and onto Via Roberto Browning. The poet spent his last summer in Asolo, and titled a collection of poems "Asolando." And in "Pippa Passes" it is the Asolo silk-winder Pippa who sings:

"The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven

All's right with the world!"

Casa Freia sat at the end of the street. I stood by the ancient fountain opposite - "It is forbidden to refresh quadrupeds," the sign said in Italian - and gazed at the facade quilted with ivy.

"It offered a home," Freya wrote in "Traveller's Prelude," "a place that goes on whether you are there or not, that you come back to and find waiting with a welcome."

It's now owned by the town and used for official receptions.

In the evening, at Hosteria Ca' Derton, I had one of those simple, unforgettable meals that you often get in Italy, heightened by the amiable service. My penne with vegetables was followed, in honor of Freya, by veal with asparagus.

Afterwards, I went to Centrale cafe for gelato. The stationer was there, reading the paper.

The next morning, taking pictures on Via Roberto Browning, I saw my waitress from the hosteria. She crossed the street to come over and chat.

Inside the post office I ran into the woman who had directed me to my hotel the day before. I had not yet been in town 24 hours.

The meaningless address that had become a dot on the map that became a mystery to be unraveled now blossomed with hellos. I almost sang like Pippa. ----------------------------------------------------------------- IF YOU GO Visiting Asolo

From Venice or Verona take the train to Vicenza and then a bus (or train) to Bassano del Grappa. It is a short walk from the train station to the square, where buses leave for Asolo. Outside Asolo, wait for the jitney to take you up the hill.

-- LODGING: The Hotel Duse (via Roberto Browning 190) was everything I look for in a hotel: pretty, friendly, clean, reasonably priced and centrally located (on the town square). Rates for a single are about $55 a night. Phone: 011-39-04-235-5241; fax: 011-39-04-23-95-0404.

The Hotel Villa Cipriani is at Via Canova 298, 31011 Asolo, Italy; phone: 011-39-04-23-952-166; fax: 011-39-04-23-952-095. Rates start at about $180. (I met an American couple who said this was the most beautiful hotel they'd had ever stayed at.)

-- INFORMATION: Italian Government Travel Office, 630 Fifth Ave., Suite 1565, New York, NY 10111; (212) 245-4822. --Thomas Swick