By Italian Photographer, Tom Wayne Bertolotti
I was standing on the cliffs in Lunada Bay, looking at the Ocean when a white sedan pulled in next to me. A man in his early sixties got out of the car wearing jeans and a white tee-shirt, on a video call. He walked to the cliff, flips the camera away from himself, to the coastline, and said in a delightful accent: “Guarda! La California sembra la Sicilia!”–I could not agree more, California looks like Sicily indeed. Well, maybe not all of California.
“Palos Verdes does look like Italy. To an Italian, Palos Verdes comes across as the dream of some extraordinary people who looked at a stunning peninsula and sought to make it even more wonderful. Not only was it bellissimo, I was back in la mia italia!” -Tom Wayne Bertolotti
As a kid, I had traveled the Pacific Coast from Seattle to Monterey, and it had never struck me as particularly Mediterranean. Southern California is different. I first visited Los Angeles seven years ago, and my initial association was Greece. Big LA, sunny, hot, dusty, chaotic, spreading from the mountains to the sea with gridlocked boulevards connecting her multi-faceted neighborhoods, immediately reminded me of Athens. This impression grew even stronger when, during that first trip to Southern California, I hiked the trails overlooking the Ocean in Crystal Cove State Park. The barren hills sloping down to the narrow beach, the dry brush, the air filled with the smell of wild fennel, I could hardly believe my senses: I had entered a twilight zone, and PCH had suddenly ferried me to one of my beloved Greek islands. I treasured these sensations in my heart, as oddities of restless wandered, but they all came back to me ten times stronger when I moved to the South Bay at the end of 2018. Funny enough, I know the exact date when I discovered Palos Verdes. On December the 11th, 2018, I bought a pair of cowboy boots at that western store on Hawthorne and hurried to the beach to experience a long walk with no sand in my shoes. Bare with me, I was fresh off the plane and still didn’t get that the best way to prevent sand in your shoes is just to kick them off. I had walked the beach, from Redondo to RAT, several times before. For some reason, though, I had never paid attention to that little trail that winds up the canyon at the end of the beach. My boots emboldened me, for if they were not made for walking then they were useless (grazie Nancy Sinatra): I hiked up the hill with a growing sense of wonder as I saw for the first time the delightful villas of Malaga Cove. The sights and the smells gave me once again that sense of being teleported back to Europe. Little did I know, my greatest surprise was still to come. When I reached the Malaga Cove Plaza, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Not only it was bellissimo, not only it reminded me of the country I had left less than a month before: while the past few hundred yards had offered me glimpses of Southern, coastal Italy, at the Plaza I was back in tola mia Italia. If you have travelled to Northern Italy, you know it. Countless villages have a square that looks like this: a main road suddenly opens on a wide piazza, with a classical-themed marble fountain, and porches all around it to shelter people from the sun in the summer, but mostly from the rain in the winter. Mamma mia, I had to pinch myself! I could have been some fifty miles from my hometown, Pavia, in the Bassa del Po(the agricultural plains close to the Po river, which stretches for four hundred miles between Turin and Venice). That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. To me, Palos Verdes became like an island. Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti titled one of his most famous poems “L’isola”: years later, during an interview, Ungaretti said that what he described in that poem were the gardens of Tivoli, in Rome, which are definitely not an island. L’isola–he explained–è il luogo in cui mii solo. The island is the place where I isolate myself. And so is Palos Verdes to me. It’s an island where I isolate myself from the here and now, and lets me travel to Italy in space and time. The coasts of Palos Verdes bring me back to the Cinque Terre, to Liguria, to Sicily, to the chiseled beauty of Capri and Tropea, to the smell of fennel and sea and lemon tree. But the hills of Palos Verdes take me back to Italy, too. To the hills of Bergamo, to Bologna and Tuscany and Umbria–to their ornated villas and sturdy cascine: the “cascina”(pronounced kah-shee-nah) is the quintessential Italian farm where houses, stables and granaries are laid out in a squared structure that develops around a court. You have beautiful examples of cascine around Portuguese Bend. The most difficult question I get from my friends in Palos Verdes is this: “Does Italy look like this?” In jest, I like to answer that Palos Verdes looks like Italy on Tinder. And maybe it’s my love for my new home that makes me add that Palos Verdes is more beautiful than Italy. But this is unfair for Italy: the true answer is “Yes, Palos Verdes does look like Italy.”
To an Italian, Palos Verdes comes across as the dream of some extraordinary people who looked at an extraordinary land and sought to make it even more wonderful. It is humbling, because everywhere I go, I see a love poem to the place I come from, written in my own language. Palos Verdes looks like Italy. Obviously, not all of Italy looks like Palos Verdes, but that’s fine by me: whenever I feel nostalgic, whenever I want to see and photograph Italy and her grande bellezza, all I have to do is to walk there or drive there, and that makes me smile a lot.
