Titania Veda |

Communal Life and Leisure at Italy's Serydarth

Call me curious, but the thought of joining a sharing and caring commune intrigues the hell out of the selfish individualistic creature that I am. So I made for Serydarth, an intercultural commune nestled in the church-speckled Italian town of Casale Monferrato.

In truth, it was the free bed and breakfast with a dose of culture that drew me in. The commune’s founder, a young Italian called Cristhian with a row of widely spaced upper teeth and sleepy almond eyes, pitched Serydarth as a place where travelers can stay a week without any obligation except to observe, enjoy and participate in local community events, many of which he organizes.

During their stay, wanderers and the general crowd of restless youngsters looking for a cool place to rest their weary heads connect with each other and tap into their creativity for everything from an impromptu cello composition to painting the garage a new shade of soft pink.

Travelers weave in and out of Serydarth, leaving their mark like colorful pieces of diverse tapestry. Occupying a first floor flat in Casale, the commune is a testimonial to the handiwork of past visitors with its lilac hallway, sky blue bathroom, tangerine door frames and kitchen the color of cornfields.

Alas, I wasn’t the first Indonesian to step into these rooms. A Rp 1,000 bill (10 cents) hung above the bathroom door, a souvenir left by two Indonesian girls who left Serydarth the week before I arrived. I was, however, the first new arrival this month. One of many. A German, a Japanese and a Portuguese traveler soon followed. All on the same day.

Delia, a plump yoga teacher from Berlin, had come to hike the trails of the Italian Renaissance, which surround Casale and the nearby town of Alba. A former Italian teacher, she dreams in Italian and took to bossing people around, giving them unwanted advice about traveling the region.

An aspiring fashion designer, Toyo, is studying aesthetics at Osaka University, but doesn’t want to create anything yet. The only fashionable evidence on him was the fact that the whippet-slim boy had taken to wearing kitchen utensils as head gear, with a chopstick protruding from his ponytail and a three-pronged fork tip as an earring. He was on his way to the Venice Biennale and may well suit the inexplicable modern art shown there. Chico, with frizzy curls and John Lennon glasses, talked incessantly. Mostly he sang Portugal’s praises. It struck me as mildly ironic when he confessed the need to escape his self-confessed slothful country by coming to Italy.

“I realize I need to go out of my country where there is no one to help me, so I can start doing something,” said Chico, a high school dropout who had spent the last four years checking water meters in Lisbon. Then, with flair, he announced he would paint the organ the next day.

Our days were lengthy due to the lack of work. Leisure time abounds at Serydarth and I was left wondering how Cristhian funds the place. For someone used to working regular hours, or any hours at all, so much freedom to do nothing can prove disconcerting.

Waiting in vain for our muses to inspire us to paint the flat and at a loss for what to do, our potpourri of nations took walks, discussed our countries and cooked.

At Serydarth, the creation of meals could only be likened to an impromptu jazz performance. They were fun ensemble experiments. Each individual contributed a dish, improvising with whatever ingredients we could find, often not knowing what the results would be. But when the food was laid on the table, it was a feast for our hungry eyes.

Held in the cozy hand painted living room, mealtimes filled with food and languages provided me with the best entertainment of the day. Conversations ping-ponged across the dining table in a smorgasbord of German, Italian, English and Portuguese. Sometimes, a spattering of Japanese came from Toyo, as he often thought aloud, attempting to translate his words into English. I was left grasping at Latin roots, praying for cognates, attempting to make myself understood in a mixture of French, Spanish and English.

But even though it offered friendship from different cultures and a chance to be communally creative, I wasn’t ready to live in the small pocket of society that is Serydarth, where we were a haphazard congregation of outsiders confronting conventionality by either living or sampling an alternative lifestyle. The days were too empty and the pace slower than a drunken frog’s leap.

Leisure time is still a stranger I’m unaccustomed to and the novelty of communal living wore out as quickly as a pair of run-down socks in the harshest tumble-dryer.

So after less than two days, in the early hours of the morning, I slipped on my knapsack and closed the wooden doors of Serydarth behind me.

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