Puglia: Un Posto Al Sole

Francesca wore more gold than Montezuma.

She'd swagger around her Puglian villa half-naked, drunkenly clutching 100 euro bottles of wine like a Crusoe character. Todlerishly bumping into the furniture as she screamed manically between rooms, ranting about whatever came to mind.

She was a Divia in her own self-created, aristocratic kingdom, chain-smoking as we'd sit and peruse the art books she'd collected studying at Sotheby's and drinking from glasses worth more than everything I owned combined.

That I owned only what was on my back, a few shirts, shorts, a laptop, a moleskin, old letters, and some books, was as astounding to her as her wealth was to me.

Her ex-husband owned Italy's largest publishing house, and she hailed from old money.

It was Medici Money.

The kind of deeply entrenched Italian wealth that owns the Palazzo Michelangelo had lived in while he was painting the Sistine Chapel. They'd had a wild, albeit loving, marriage until she'd realised they were sleeping with the same toyboy, she casually explained one afternoon over lunch.

It was the Bold and the Beautiful.

Held together solely by her housekeepers, who cooked, cleaned, massaged, and consoled her.

Having convinced the Australian government of my desperation to reunite with my fictional Milanese wife, I departed a week before the borders were closed for two years.

In Italy only a few months, the mystery of my ending up at a billionaire's summer retreat mesmerised me as I sat reading William James, drinking by the pool overlooking the olive groves nestled into the heel of Italy with Gaetano, a new friend of mine and an old friend of Francesca's, and - I suspect from their sudden disappearances throughout the day - her occasional lover.

Francesca and I would spontaneously speed around Bari, scoring her weed. She'd blast her opera, screaming at anyone on the road and amassing several near-casualties while Pavarotti bellowed through the open windows, and we stopped for fresh gorgonzola.

She had a sense of dysfunctionally endearing entitlement that only the generationally rich possess. The precession of the equinoxes could be momentarily abated if she willed it.

For her, money and, therefore, time were curiously valueless.

We'd return with the goods to a poolside gathering: usually startlingly beautiful young women from Milan, artists and designers she funded who were as out of place in their patron's world as I was.

It was the kind of existence I'd only seen in Fellini films, yet the full dysfunctional reality of Francesca's world manifested with her son's arrival.

Mici was living in Manhattan with his model girlfriend Chiara, and they were visiting Mama for the summer. We were both the same age, and we hit it off immediately while Chiara sunbathed nonchalantly, looking like an oiled Greek sculpture by the Yuccas.

With Mici around, Francesca's intoxicated neuroticism transformed her into a jealous, suffocating, smothering mix of mother and Queen of Hearts. This was amplified tenfold by Chaira's presence and her mother-in-law's ever-increasing desire for numbness. It was like watching a scene from The Beautiful and the Damned - Idle, intoxicated, wealthy beyond measure, yet fucking miserable.

They were a family loosely held together by social custom and euros, and I was a transient fly on the wall of their fractured life. Francesca would drink and rant, shouting into the ether all day. When she wasn't shouting, she'd be on the phone manically talking at a volume I'd only heard in Indian train carriages. Mici was perpetually wincing at her coarseness, caught between scolding his mother and attempting to shield Chiara from her vulgarity.

Meanwhile, Gaetano and I would open endlessly appearing bottles of wine all afternoon. I listened to stories about the Puglian Mafia and his dreams of quitting banking as the waves rhythmically lapped against the craggy Adriatic coastline, both trying to ignore the Telenova train wreck unfolding around us.

On one of my last nights, we all went to a fancy bar in town. Drinking overpriced G&Ts at the back of the bar, Mici expressed his desperation to run from it all. The money, the vacuousness, the banal frivolity of the unchecked abundance.

He wanted to escape and travel with Chiara, read and write, and pursue his ideas of success: A simple life. A life where experiences were earned and where their acquisition had a semblance of achievement. He yearned to explore the world outside of the stiflingly gilded cage created and sustained by Francesca.

It was my first contact with the cliche of the miserable rich, and it was very ugly indeed. Here was a young man granted everything he could desire for 1000 earthly incarnations, and he was telling me it was empty.

It rocked me.

The next morning, I boarded a ship to Pathos, Greece, sleeping in the cafeteria surrounded by large Bulgarian truck drivers, happily playing Poker as they barked and smacked the whiskey-soaked table all night.

My savings were rapidly decaying, but I was happy, invigorated, alive.

As we passed by the Ionian islands, the sun rising above us, I thought of Mici's own Odessesian adventure awaiting him. His words and the absurdity of the last week's scenes were rattling around my skull.

It reminded me of the first line I'd once read from a sermon on 'The Seven Social Sins' given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in the 20s:

Wealth without work.

My Puglian adventure had taught me what Jay Gatsby had figured out:

Fulfilment derives from the pursuit and achievement of worthy goals; humans live through value hierarchies, and a life without values, no matter how privileged, becomes a burden in itself.