Astrolaghi on erotic miniature mosaic from Piazza Armarina ©1996 UrbisMedia Ltd.
Since the advent of the Souvenir Shop the word “souvenir” will connote to many, if not most people, something kitschy : the pillow with “Honolulu” embroidered on it; the Eiffel Tower table cigarette lighter; the plastic gondola music box that curiously plays “Come Back to Sorrento.” T-shirts, ash trays, mugs, towels, you name it and some has put some place names or pictures on it. Baubles, googahs, tschochkas, . . . inventory for some future eBay or yard sale.
Yet, as with many things in less than high taste there must be a reason beyond the economics of frivolous consumption that explains the human predilection to fill their baggage and often their closets with “souvenirs.” While I am not fool enough to launch an exegesis on the role of the “souvenir” in the rise (or fall) of Western Civilization, the social scientist in me refuses to be glibly dismissive of some of the aspects of human behavior that can cause head-scratching and sometimes snickers.
It is first necessary to distinguish the souvenir from other acquisitive habits of travelers. Collectors, for example, come from a different motivation, and are often concerned more with adding to a set of the same or similar items. Among my various travel groups there have been collector of such diverse items as dolls, napkins, coke bottles (with Coke in different scripts), ashtrays, chopsticks, and toys. Photographs might also be considered a form of the souvenir, but they are “capture” specifically what is to be “remembered.” It is remembering that is the prime function of the souvenir; it is a selective item in or through which a time, place, even an emotion, can be re-called and mnemonically “re-experienced.”
Consider the souvenir “item”. I have a collection of my own, among them igneous rocks from various volcanos, a chunk of peat from Ireland, a little facsimile krater from Greece, some bones (probably chicken, circa 1963) that I ‘removed’ from a ‘loculi’ in Roman catacombs, a delicate tree frog carved from a tagua, and ivory-like nut in Panama, a little lapis lazuli head of Buddha from Bombay, three eggs, exquisitely decorated by nuns from Romania, three little stone pyramids from Egypt, a clay naked goddess from Teotihuacan, a three-faced goddess from Burma, a carving of the Chinese goddess Quan Yin . . . [OK, there’s a little bit of a goddess thing going on there]
There are dozens of souvenirs. They are mostly small, and they sit on a couple of shelves in my dining room. Some are the kinds of things one buys from a street vendor lying about their wares being just “dug up” or removed from some temple (but the faux antique paint isn’t even quite dry). Some are a bit bizarre; my daughters wonder what possessed me to want to possess a little plastic super hero from Hong Kong that emits a laser beam and sounds that are like those awful car alarms.
But there are also among my collection some “treasures.” One is a handle from a ceramic pot. This one I dig up, with my Swiss army knife, right out of the clay in the Agora in Athens, while my daughters protested but kept lookout for the local protectors of Greek antiquities. I pronounced it—as if I knew what I was really talking about—as “definitely a Euphronius, 5 th Century BC.” The girls pronounce it “Eu-phony-us,” but I do believe it predates my catacomb chicken bones, or the bones I dug up from a mass grave site of 14 th Century plague victims near a church in France. As to “really old dug up things” there are the two little votive figurines from Iraq that I got from a Parisian antiquaire . The little clay heads, one human, one equine, have a provenance of having been unearthed by shells in the Iran-Iraq war. Since I have not visited those two countries they are they are really a souvenir of the time I lived in Paris. But perhaps the most auspicious is the eave cap that a bolt of lightening knocked off an ancient temple in a torrential rain storm in a small village along the Yangtse. Since it landed at my feet I felt it was meant for me, so the hand-sized ceramic cap, its glaze burned nearly completely off by the suns of centuries, but its ambiguous insect relief still clearly evident.
I admit that one man’s precious souvenirs are also another man’s worthless crap. But I love my little “museo” of travel debris, each of them is an aide-memoire . I can remember where each of them came from and how I acquired them. Like a kid who caught a foul ball off the bat of his baseball hero, just holding one of my souvenirs magically transports me back to where I acquired it, but back into its time, not just my time.
No, I’m not going New Age on you here; I’m not likening my souvenirs to crystals, channeling, or the effects of LSD or too much Yanni music. The “magic” is really in the assist that thesouvenir object gives to the calling out of the souvenir mnemonic record. Yes, you have to be a little bit imaginative, a little bit intense, and you definitely have to have been there . And you must have what I call a narrative sensibility, a tendency to see that what remember are stories, our own little stories, but stories that we will one day, if the fates ordain, we can draw from as a reservoir of our travel experiences. At its best, the souvenir is evocative of a “story.”
I’ll try illustrate. In Sicily, at a place near Enna called Piazza Armarina, while roaming about the recently excavated grounds of this former Roman villa, I chanced upon a reddish-brown item I took to be a fragment of decorative ceramic. Smaller than my fist, it appeared to have been shaped in some vague organic form. Piazza Armarina had been a very wealthy Roman’s villa, and contains perhaps the most spectacular mosaic-tiled baths in the Roman Empire. My “find,” which I surreptitiously slipped into a lens case (I realize I am beginning to sound like a tomb raider here) met one of my favorite souvenir criteria—it was old, or seemed to be.
When I later washed of the caked on dirt in my hotel room I discovered that my find was something different than I had first assumed. It wasn’t ceramic. I could the porous honeycombed substructure in a chipped facet. It had to be bone, which was also evidenced by the lightness of the object, although this one would have been that of a monster chicken. I nearly tossed it into the trash, thinking I had just picked up an animal bone of recent origin. But it had that reddish patina that gave it an “ancient” look. I tossed it in the bottom of my backpack.
A few days later I took some members of my group the National Museum in Naples to see a lot of the artifacts and bodies that were exhumed from Pompeii. I still wonder what caused me to glance at a small display case. There they were: smaller, and a grayish color, but the same shape, definitely some joint bone from an animal. I copied the description card, which was in Italian. The first word seemed to be the name for a “heel bone”; the second word was “astrolaghi .”
The museum custodian, who might have spoken some English, dismissed my request for an interpretation with an Italic shrug. The concierge at my hotel was a bit more helpful, speculating that it might have been a bone or bones that were used to do astrological forecasts or read the auspices back in Roman times, sort of like Queequeg did in Moby Dick. Other Italians I asked could only speculate. The word was “ astrolaghi ,” not astrologi, so it may have nothing to do with astrology, or it might be a typo.
It’s a mystery. So my souvenir could be ancient. Romans might have rolled it on those wonderful mosaic floors to urge the Fates to disclose their futures. But when I pick it up and hold it in my hand it instantly triggers my memories of that ancient villa in Sicily and to wonder about those long gone Romans who asked it their destinies.
I have thought of rolling it on the carpet and asking it who will win this year’s Super Bowl.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 1.20.2005)