Altered State.(Pennsylvania)(State overview)

When I hear the children hollering between hillsides, I suddenly get Pennsylvania back in my life. Late one May afternoon, my son stands in the garden of our house outside Turin and yells over to the American kids who have moved in across the valley, three anarchic towheads, whose family comes--it seems significant to me--from my home state. Hey, you guys! Hey! The children's voices, ringing through woods and vineyards where Roman legions and Napoleonic troops once passed, bring back my own childhood evenings in a Philadelphia suburb, where our shouts had an edge of Arcadian freedom to them, and, as we scrambled through the bushes, the earth leaking shadow into the sky, we always had a sense of territory behind us, all that leaf-colored outback.

Pennsylvania is green--not because of its forests or its ecological virtue but because that's the color with which my synesthetic mind defines that particular state. To me, Maine and Virginia are also green, but the former is a dour Nordic spruce and the latter suggests pea soup. Only the Keystone State--a charmless architectural nickname that also has a certain whimsy--is the proper pastoral shade. I recognize it at once, when in a history text I first read William Penn's dreamy yet transpicuous instructions for the layout of Philadelphia:

Let every house be placed in the middle of its plot, so that there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a green country town which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.

His green suggests both utopian ambition and the kind of nostalgia for a nonexistent perfect past that Gatsby feels, gazing at Daisy's green light. It is the green of hope, a color that Benjamin West captures in his iconic painting of the glade beside the Delaware, where Penn and other tricorned Quakers are striking a treaty with the Lenape Indians. It's the shade that European philosophers see when they first gaze over the Atlantic and envision Eden in the virgin New World forests, the same woods that inhabit Pennsylvania's name.

Of course, Pennsylvania has other colors: fieldstone gray; mouse-brown pastures; the black of slag heaps, of shadowy faces under the El; red city bricks striped with graffiti; the blued bronze of Penn himself, in a statue whose tyrannical Quaker hat brim for so long stunted Philadelphia skyscrapers. But the green is always there: inexhaustible, ineluctable bequest of Penn the proto-suburbanite, who died virtually bankrupt--sucked dry by his greedy new colony--yet, one imagines, still expectant, picturing those verdant mansions, each on its own wholesome plot.

Writing about my state brings with it a rush of energy that feels almost like love. I'm not sure I love it, but it's mine.

In fact, from childhood on my idea is that Pennsylvania is a nursery place, to be outgrown and left behind as quickly as possible. I do this early, by moving from college in New England to New York and then to Europe, and also by travelling to Asia and Africa. My rare trips home from what I think of as the great world, the world worth conquering, show me a Philadelphia as eroded by the passing years as my mother's face--and, in the background, the rest of the state, still green, but worn and disposable as an old bathmat. I marry an Italian, settle in northern Italy, and begin exploring, both in art and in life, what it means to be a foreigner.