The Booker-longlisted Cork writer William Wall’s love affair with Italy may have spanned decades and inspired such gorgeous novels as Empty Bed Blues, but it got off to a slightly rocky start.
The year was 1979, and Wall and his then fiancee Liz were getting married. Money was tight, as they were both in their first year of teaching, so they went into Joe Walsh Tours in Cork city and booked the cheapest honeymoon they could find: a package trip to the Hotel Alaska in Rimini. They arrived at their hotel at 1am, to be told by the owner that there was only one room left and it had bunk beds. “She promised us champagne when the ordeal was over. We spent the first three nights in bunk beds,” he laughs.
Though Rimini had a Blackpool-in-the-sun vibe back then, with hordes of holidaymakers crammed on to the beach by day and into the clubs by night, the newlyweds took pleasure in exploring the ancient part of the city. Wall knew little about Italian literature at the time, but a visit to the magnificent Malatesta Fortress, also known as Castel Sismondo, ignited his interest. He learned about Giovanni Malatesta who killed his wife Francesca and his brother Paolo in 1285 after catching them “in the act of love”. This moving story of murdered lovers, immortalised in Dante’s Inferno, captured Wall’s imagination.
Upon returning from his honeymoon, he immediately bought a copy of Inferno in Italian, together with a 19th century translation of the work. “I started piecing together bits of the Italian and bits of the English, trying to work it out like that,” he says. “I fell in love with the Italian people first and then I fell in love with the Italian language.”
Wall went on to become “about 90 per cent fluent” in the language, but his love affair with Italy had to remain long-distance for many years. “We couldn’t afford to go back afterwards. That was in the days when you paid a lot for a flight.”
Eventually, they made it to the beautiful island of Procida in the Bay of Naples, which features in Wall’s novel Grace’s Day. But it wasn’t until 2009 when he was awarded a “godsend” of a writing residency at the Liguria Centre for the Arts and Humanities, that the couple found their true Italian heartland.
During the six-week residency in the town of Bogliasco, the author took a trip to an old monastery and was struck by the beauty of a little fishing village that he passed through called Camogli. Its view of the bay put him in mind of the tiny Cork village of Whitegate where he grew up, and he thought to himself that Camogli was “the perfect place for me”.
He and Liz returned to the picturesque Ligurian village time after time, and eventually, when the opportunity arose to buy their own place there, they went for it. “We haven’t regretted it since. It’s been an amazing experience.”
They felt an instant connection with the local people who share a “nice sense of self-irony” with the Irish. “We were hardly a week in Camogli before we had made a friend,” he says. “Meeting friends is a huge thing in Italy … People will say to you, ‘oh it’s so long since we’ve met’ and it’ll only be the previous week. It’s a very social life. Italy has made me see that actually we need to work at friendship. It’s easy to remain friends at a distance, but you’re not learning anything from each other.”
The sunshine and light of the Italian Riviera are also a massive draw. He not only writes better in good weather but finds that the climate helps “hugely” with his health problems which include Still’s Disease, a form of rheumatoid arthritis that has been with him since childhood.
“I’m much healthier in Italy than I am here,” he tells me over the phone from Cork. “I have to take less medication. I think it’s definitely one of the critical reasons why we go to Italy as much as we do … It’s the lack of dampness I think really … Once I get there, the symptoms begin to go away. I can walk further, climb steps and all that kind of stuff, all things that are difficult here.”
Beneficial as Italy has been for his health, everything changed when the northern part of the country became the European epicentre for the pandemic in 2020. The couple was staying in Camogli at the time, and quickly realised they needed to get home to Ireland, especially in light of Wall’s medical conditions. “It was a Sunday morning. I was listening to the Italian radio and I heard that they had sent the army to a town called Cordogno which was about an hour’s drive away,” he recalls.
“I had been reading about the plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Italy and I could see the same thing happening, so I said to Liz, ‘look, we shouldn’t be here because we don’t have the medical network… We should go home where we have our own doctors’.”
The following morning they took a train to Rome to stay with friends, before flying back to Ireland. Every station they passed through was empty. In Rome, they walked to the Spanish Steps, which is normally thronged with tourists. The only other people there were policemen.
“It was the most eerie experience I’ve ever had. We were lucky to get out because not long afterwards they went into lockdown and friends who lived there said it was really a nightmare because they were literally confined to their houses.”
Unlike in Ireland, where you might have a garden or road outside, Italians mainly live in palazzi (although this literally translates to ‘palaces’, it is more commonly used to mean large buildings divided into apartments) so there are generally no outside spaces, and there could be 200 people living in one building. “Our friends in Rome borrowed a dog, because you were allowed to walk dogs.”
Now, post-pandemic, Wall and his wife try to keep flying to a minimum, so they go to Camogli for long stretches at a time. “Because we’re both retired, we have the luxury of saying, well, we’ll go for six weeks or two months. We’re very, very conscious of the privilege of being able to do that. The reason that we don’t spend all year there is because we love Ireland as well. I miss the countryside … Cork is such a small city, in 10 minutes you’re out in the greenery. I miss that.”
Wall, who became Cork’s first Poet Laureate in 2021, also misses hearing Irish and Irish music.
For anyone unable to travel in person to the Italian Riviera, a vicarious taste of la dolce vita can be found in the deliciously atmospheric Empty Bed Blues. The protagonist Kate is an Irish Joycean academic who, upon her husband’s death, discovers that he has mired them both in atrocious debt arising from Celtic Tiger-era financial speculation of which she was completely unaware.
(Interestingly, a woman wrote to Wall after reading his novel to say, “You described exactly what happened to me, except the b*stard survived.”)
To top it off, Kate’s husband has been hiding a young mistress, and a love nest in Camogli. When the mistress gives her the keys, Kate flees her inherited financial problems and hides out in said love nest. There she finds solace not just in the Italian way of life, but in the friendship that springs up with the redoubtable Anna, an elderly neighbour who is a communist and former resistance fighter.
Wall got the idea for Kate’s character while attending the annual Trieste Joyce Summer School as a speaker. “I was working on the book at the time. I didn’t want her to be a victim as such. I wanted to give her a good job and a brain and so on. And so I came up with the idea of making her an academic who teaches Joyce.”
Joyce has been revered in Northern Italy ever since his self-imposed exile in Trieste, where he was beloved not just for his literature but also for his mastery of the Triestine dialect. In Empty Bed Blues, Kate — who is also, in a sense, exiled — is taught Italian by her neighbour, and Wall’s love of what he says is a very affectionate language shines through. When Kate encounters the word carissima, she thinks: “There is, I realise, simply no English word that expresses such warmth and affection.”
Wall, who in 2017 became the first European to receive the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, has learned that some English phrases also defy translation. When a translator was working on a poetry collection of his, she told him there was no equivalent of the expression “ghost estate” (the title of one of his poems) in Italian. At first, he thought that couldn’t possibly be the case. But it turns out that even the concept of housing estates, in the Irish sense of several hundred individual houses, does not exist in Italy, let alone ghost estates. In the end, the translator had to leave the title in English.
Perhaps it is Wall’s passion for translation as well as his deep connection with Italian people, literature and politics that has resulted in his work being so well received there. Unusually for an Irish writer, he has an Italian literary agent and his novels are released in Italy before they even come out in Ireland. “If I do four or five readings here [in Ireland] for the launch of a book, I’ve done a lot,” he says. “I think I did 25 readings for Empty Bed Blues in Italy.” (He points out that he has also given talks on Ireland in Italy.)
These readings and talks have taken him all over the country. One of the most interesting venues was in the city of Ravenna, in a library that began collecting books in the year 1,000 and that is said to have inspired the fictional library in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. “Dante is buried there [in Ravenna] so every time I go there I have to pay my respects to the old gentleman,” he adds.
And it turns out Joyce and Wall are not the only Irish men to have garnered an Italian following. Last year, Wall was giving a translation workshop at a school in Genoa. When it came to question time at the end of the session, three girls told the writer they’d done some research on him and discovered he knew the actor Cillian Murphy. “Is this true?” they asked. When he replied that it was — not only was he Murphy’s teacher, but he encouraged him to pursue acting — the girls “almost passed out on the spot”.
“I was actually telling Cillian about this,” Wall says. “He thought it was hilarious.” Murphy’s hit show Peaky Blinders, it turns out, is huge in Italy.
As we wrap up the interview, I joke that perhaps Wall owes a book dedication to the Cork travel agency that arranged his Rimini honeymoon all those years ago, in light of the reciprocal literary love affair with Italy sparked by that fateful trip. He laughs and says: “We’ll have to put up a monument to Joe Walsh!”
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