Summer with the Snow Queen

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What's the scariest fairy tale you've ever read, in antiquity? my son asked me, for whom the word "scary" means precisely "wonderful." And antiquity is the 1980s. Indeed, it is. Among the thousand questions I don't know how to answer (what is antimatter? Why doesn't Han Kang want his books translated into Hebrew? Can you explain the Riemann hypothesis to me?), this is the easiest: "The Snow Queen" is without a doubt the scariest fairy tale I've ever read . The childhood story that has stuck most deeply in my memory. Hans Christian Andersen , the cold world, the child whose eye is pierced by a piece of mirror and his heart freezes, becoming indifferent. The queen takes him to her kingdom (on a magnificent sleigh), erasing his memory and condemning him to try to spell out the word "eternity" from fragments of ice cubes, forever half frozen (until Gerda arrives and her tears melt his heart). I read it a hundred times, back in ancient times, and I shivered with fear and loneliness.

My hands felt cold. Especially from the scene, which I remember from the picture book, of the words formed with ice cubes on their knees on the frozen lake: a condemnation both terrifying and wonderful. “If you can form the word eternity with these icicles, perhaps I will set you free,” says the Queen. It's all very different from the Brothers Grimm: from Little Red Riding Hood, from Tom Thumb, from Sleeping Beauty, from the witches who want to cook children: in Andersen, the cruelty of that queen has to do with silence, with a frozen heart, with the loss of something and with diversity . Even with the emptiness around us. In Hans Christian Andersen's stories, everyone loses something: the Little Mermaid loses her voice, the Little Match Girl loses her warmth, dies of cold. Red Shoes: they amputate their feet. And then The Ugly Duckling, The Tin Soldier: how heartbreaking and how novel, what a giant leap in narrative, setting, unease, and macabre, with a happy ending that, when it exists, is always ambiguous. Charles Dickens went crazy for Andersen, welcomed him to England with full honors, only to find him an unbearable, disturbing guest. He couldn't wait for him to leave and even stopped answering his letters. Perhaps because of that uneasy suspension between two worlds, the great North and the continent? Perhaps because it's best never to encounter myths, much less host them in your home for weeks and be confronted with their obsessions.

Anyway, with The Snow Queen, for the first time my son almost listened to me and found the North, the tale of the ice, the never-ending sky, the silence in the castle, frightening—that is, wonderful. We bought a considerable quantity of Iperborea novels, too, to better understand the tale of the North. Unfortunately, since then (but this isn't true: long before The Snow Queen, which he continues to confuse with "Frozen") my son has begun to loathe Greece and ask to go somewhere more congenial to him: not Copenhagen, too low, too low, but right at the Arctic Circle. After all, The Snow Queen lives in Lapland. These, in short, are the literary and winter reasons for a summer choice that I thought was unconventional and solitary: the only family that chooses the Lofoten Islands instead of the Cyclades. I imagined myself as a nervous and ruthless Snow Queen (I'm incredibly nervous about not having gone to Greece), walking for miles without ever meeting anyone and spelling the word "eternity" with ice cubes, half-frozen but full of haughtiness. No swimsuits, no sunburn, no taramosalada and wooden tables under the trees. (It's no wonder the Snow Queen was always in a foul mood and went around kidnapping children.)

I fear it won't be like that (nervousness aside), I fear that as soon as I answer the question that unfortunately no one has the tact to avoid these weeks, where are you going on vacation? and I say quickly, looking down: down North, everyone responds: oh sure, me too, my cousin too, my boss too, where else do you want to go? Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, all the way to the North Cape: they all go there, or have just returned from there. Last Sunday, at a table of very '90s-esque relatives (in the sense that they were all smoking), my teenage nephew said: yesterday I was in the fjords in Norway, it's as hot as Milan and more chaotic than Mykonos. His voice was lost in the smoke rings. I didn't register the idea of the crowds up North, since wherever I go the same thing happens to me, at least on the first night. I always ask myself one question: what did I come for? But the news didn't leave me indifferent. I made some rather arbitrary and alarming calculations and came to an angry conclusion: does this mean Greece is empty this year? Deserted beaches, empty taverns, no one stealing anyone's shade under a tamarisk tree. Empty planes, empty ferries, the Acropolis without lines to enter, the islands as wild and shocking as when Simone de Beauvoir went there with Sartre. Under the trees, many beautiful wooden tables with paper tablecloths, and no one has yet ordered saganaki and that light, watery white wine, the only one I can drink without feeling impending doom. Simple but beautiful rooms on the beach at thirty euros a night, with terraces overlooking the sea where yogurt with honey is served. A Greek wind that isn't absorbed by the excess of humanity. Mosquitoes are nonexistent; they've all left for Norway. I'm even more nervous at the thought of what I'm missing. I keep thinking about that head of Aphrodite in the Acropolis Museum. It looks like she's crying and her mascara has melted because her bronze eyelashes have oxidized over two thousand years. I know, Aphrodite, but you're actually crying for me, who's going down to the North and never coming back to you.

I drag myself to the tobacconist's to pay a fine, and he tells me he's closing for vacation soon and is going to Iceland. Why Iceland? Where else do you want to go? he replies. Can't you see what it looks like out there? And he points to the asphalt sidewalk where I've just left the imprint of my heels. From Rome, in fact, Greenland is almost closer than Pinzolo. Where else do you want to go? everyone around me repeats, like a Greek chorus (I feel like crying at the sound of the word "Greek").

A dear friend of mine has been tormenting us for years with photographs and memories of her only trip to Iceland. She says it was the best trip of her life. For years, she's been begging us to go to Iceland instead of Greece. For years, we haven't even answered her; we just turn away, huffing and puffing, telling everyone: kalìmera. Until this summer, when it became clear she's right: we'll all end up in Iceland, on the geysers. Or in the Lofoten Islands, where she predicts a real estate boom. Let's buy a house there, she says. With global warming, it will soon be like owning a house on Paxos; the future of vacation rentals is up North. Aside from the fact that we can't even afford a garage in Ladispoli, what does that mean for our lives? That we'll be eating the meat of a small reindeer? That I'll go to sleep while the sun is still high? That from now on I'll pack those hideous shoes with laces and non-slip soles? That I'll buy vacuum-packed smoked salmon?

Packing is a major issue on a Northern vacation, because the risk is that you think it'll be cold. Like Totò and Peppino who arrive in Milan with fur hats, fur coats, and sheepskin gloves, and Totò says: dressed like a Milanese, you're laughable. The trouble is, everyone says: you have to dress in layers. Like onions. What a terrible image, it makes me want to cry again. Because in essence, while recommending you bring something waterproof, but also something heavy, but also something light: it's your problem if you don't go to Greece. It's your problem if you have to rush to Decathlon to buy what you're missing, like a thermal T-shirt and a flannel shirt.

In my suitcase, as an act of rebellion against the Snow Queen, who's too elegant for me, and against the flannel shirts and thermal shirts, I've packed the usual things, even a bathing suit, because I really want to see what an icy sea means today. If I can dive in, even for a few seconds, maybe the little piece of ice that got into my eye and froze my heart will melt? More likely, I'll get bronchitis, but the part of my luggage not occupied by the thermal shirts is full of medicines. The problem is mine, I know. The problem is mine, that I don't know how to leave or stay, and if I do leave, I'd like the sirtaki to always welcome me. "Tourism is the art of disappointment," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, who grew up in Scotland and perhaps has never been to Greece. But I also have faith in icy seas, especially those inside us that at a certain point are split by an axe. I really want to see, Snow Queen, if you're still so cold. Or if, like Aphrodite, in all these years you've let out a tear that melted your frozen heart.

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