Jelin's Adriatic Journal

January 2004…the Balkans and Adriatic and Renaissance Italy Lufthansa’s Boston to Frankfurt was delayed almost 2 hours due to some unspecified problem involving a missing suitcase, but we were boarded and I had a row of 4 seats to myself; so I slept blissfully cushioned on blankets and pillows well beyond my quota for almost 5 of the 7-plus hours. Then I had a foreshortened layover in the hub of Europe, reading fiction, old Yugoslavia guidebooks and new Croatia guidebooks, but mostly watching a divertingly motley and exotic array of people schlepping strange purchases like cribs and air-conditioners and pool cues and rolled carpets to all sorts of places like Tunis and Belgrade and Kiev and Mumbai. It was cosmopolitan, hodgepodge and totally delightful, a melange of costume, language, race and curiosities. Croatia, with about 4 million people in an area the size of Ireland, is far more reminiscent of the Baltic countries that I just left 6 weeks ago than I had anticipated. Just emerging into independence (note I did not say “democracy” which is a bit premature for this part of the world) after a half-century of Communism and domination by Serbia, it seems at first blush shabby, with little money to refurbish its provincial Hapsburg facades that seem a Budapest backwater. Zagreb, with some 800,000 people, sprawls outward in apartment blocs and suburbs of little distinction or appeal, from an undamaged-by-war, but run-down center, built nicely around parks and squares in a low budget, unpretentious mittel-European fashion. A half day’s walkabout, and one night in a former Intercontinental Hotel that is now run locally and poorly, sufficed inasmuch as there were no operas or concerts on the boards, and the weather was chilly and damp. Day 2 took us by bus across the border into Slovenia, an extraordinary change for one who had wrongly lumped the Balkans together in much the same way that I had erroneously homogenized the Baltics. Slovenia has always been the Balkan’s richest country/region/duchy/province/sector (depending on when and under whom). In the 18th Century, Maria Theresia, who was so much more than just Marie Antoinette’s horse-faced mother, decided that vast tracts of her lands were under-populated and under-utilized. So, after ordering the first empire-wide census and the universal adoption of street numbers, she used free land in Slovenia to entice skilled Italian subjects to come establish a still-flourishing wine industry in Istria, and skilled Hungarians and Poles to come and set up wood-working and farming businesses in Slovenia. Her only condition was that they continue to work in the industries in which they had demonstrable expertise. This rather advanced socio-economic planning and people-moving produced a cosmopolitan, ethnically diverse, economically rich little duchy, that capitalized on the rich forests, coastal fertility, snowy Julian Alps and crystal lakes, hot springs, rushing rivers, to become in effect another Austria. Franz Ferdinand continued the program by moving lots of industries including entire factory complexes to Slovenia in order to keep his Vienna clean and pretty…but he was smart enough to include rail lines in the plan. So for 300 years this little pocket of religiously homogeneous but ethnically diverse little region prospered quietly. It slithered undamaged through both world wars; and its breakaway from Yugoslavia took one week of negotiations, one bomb dropped, and 7 people killed. By contrast, Croatia lost 20,000; and though Zagreb was spared, Vukovar was levelled; and Bosnia lost 200,000 and every city suffered horribly. It seems that the more Muslims, the worse the pain of splitting off. Anyway, Slovenia is in fine shape…neat, tidy, no shabbiness, new cars in nice suburban driveways. Ljubljana, the capital and banking center, has 300,000 people out of a total population of only 2 million, its own world-class opera and ballet and symphony, an important arts festival and several big trade fairs, and a goodly number of fine art nouveau buildings mixed in amongst the pastel painted baroque and belle epoque left-overs. Except for a 30,000 student university, nothing is very big; but the promenades of cafes, the market squares and pedestrian walkways on both sides of the narrow river, all are very pleasing…a kind of little Prague. Alas, here too, it was bitingly chill and nothing was open or performing. The industrial bas is still furniture and wine-making, but Jeep and Chevrolet have huge assembly plants outside town, and major consumer items like washers and dryers are being made with financing from the large banking community.
Our hotel is a “4 star”, nice, lake-front resort smack on Lake Bled, a charming, totally Tyrolean resort (alas a SUMMER resort) with a photogenic castle perched atop a 500 foot rock, a tiny jewel of a Baroque church on a half-acre islet in the middle of the Lake (reachable only by rowed or electric boats, as Tito banned noisy power boats to keep his lakeside villa quiet). There is also a nice little ski slope and chair lift right in the middle of the town, a ban on all new construction, and a Chinese restaurant that serves moo shi venison. The ambience is of bourgeois affluence, and feels very Swiss. The only problem is we are here for 2 and a half days with nothing to do. I cannot spend that long in Bern or Gstaad or Lausanne, and (I may not have mentioned this yet) my “group” is 100% ghastly, obscenely obese, staunchly right-wing, mostly deaf and screeching at one another, and pretty universally stupid. They all went off to watch cheese being made. The guide speaks weasel-English. The food, while plentiful, is Polish-Hungarian in its dependency on cabbage and potatoes. Grain breads and yoghurts save breakfasts, and the adequate beers wash down the other stuff. The wines are like foot baths. It is going to be a long visit. A 2 hour walk around the lake, in solitary, soft snow was very pleasing, with the rock castle and the island church reflected in the black mirror of the lake. Then a Turkish steam bath, perhaps the last vestiges of the Ottomans besides coffee and eggplant in all of Slovenia. There are basically no Muslims here, despite 400 years of on again/off again Turkish marauding and rule. Indeed, Slovenia’s extraordinary Europeanization and strong economy made it immune from both Tito’s ham-handed Serbianization and the brutalities of the split-up of his country. All of this makes Slovenia’s impending entry into the EU this year both natural and understandable. They are far readier, economically and socially, than any of the Baltic states and certainly way ahead of the rest of the Balkans. After my steam, I sat in a Jacuzzi, perched in a glass enclosure cantilevered out over the lake, beer in hand, watching the snow. It was a lazy and lovely escape…though it is a helluva long way to come.
Today, in a foot of snow, our bus took us back to Croatia (where the currency is disarmingly called the “cuna” which means “weasel”…far less pompous than “eagle” or “doubloon” or “gilder”)…and down the mountains to Opatija, the primary resort of the Istrian Riviera. In the 1870’s, the combination of one very rich local industrialist, and a peripatetic, easily bored Viennese nobility did for the Kvander Peninsula what the Prince of Wales did for Brighton and the Milanese new money did for the Lake Country…they created a fashionable spa, reachable by train, that reminds one of a leadenly Austrian version of Stresa or Como. It stayed chic right up to the second world war, thanks to a mild Adriatic climate, fertile soil, lots of transplanted palms and cypresses, seaside gardens and promenades, and handsome if slightly seedy hotels and villas. One has the feeling that fairly soon Croatia will allocate some money to fixing up and re-popularizing this place and it will emerge from run-down to Euro-gold-mine. Of course, a chunk of its appeal is that it was part of Italy, along with Trieste and Istria’s vineyards and beaches, from the end of World War I until the 1956 settlement with Tito; and it had been part of the Venetian Republic for almost 1000 years before Napoleon. So its Italianate charm is deeply rooted, and I suspect easily resuscitated. En route here, we had a mini-train ride thru the Postojnska Caves, the largest in Europe…discovered in 1818 and illuminated handsomely by the 1850’s. The blind, four-legged, pink fish-worm called “proteus” was discovered here; and we saw some in a tank, looking wierdly translucent and prehistoric. We also saw skeletal cave bears, gorgeous alabaster linen-fold curtain stalactites, and enjoyed a fine little outing that was totally unexpected.

Today we spent 4 hours each way on a bus, to visit Venice for 5 hours…not a masterpiece of tour planning. We were rewarded with a half-hour walkabout the glorious golden interior of San Marco, another 45 minutes standing in sun-drenched and tourist-free Piazza San Marco (a rare treat of off-season timing) and then a Murano glass sales pitch and show room huckstering which I passed up even though it included a free lunch (the old saw being 100% true) in order to take a long solo walkabout, up to the Rialto, over to the Bienniale Park and the sculpture gardens. I’ll be back on my own after the tour, and can do interior spaces when the weather is less perfect. It is a sensational prowl and meander city. I was last here in 1985 with Bemy on her graduation present trip, so I have a few shadows to exorcize. And before that I was here in 1952 on my first European experience, a study tour with the Students for Democratic Action…part of the lifelong legacy of which was an incident in a gondola on the Grand Canal (in the days when one could still afford such indulgences). One of the girls on the trip complained (my life of travel is dogged by complainers) that there was garbage floating in the canal. Our tour leader, whom I remember as a doppelganger for Maggie Smith replied “Honey, you’re in Venice…Look UP!” It has remained with me as a kind of travel anthem for nigh onto 52 years. I then stuck my head into the Royal Danieli where Bemy and I had lunched, and the Fenice des Artistes where we had stayed, and then into Harry’s American Bar for a nostalgic Negroni. They have all aged far more graciously than I have, but then they have also raised their prices a lot more than I have. Venice is very, very costly. I then spent almost 2 hours at an extraordinarily user-friendly American Express travel office, making hotel reservations and getting bus and train schedules for my post-tour solo wander about Italy. The Venice day ended with a perfectly timed sunset ride for 45 minutes down the Grand Canal in a private (for our group) motor launch, like a small vaporetto. The palazzi, many of them cleaned and restored since my last visit, exuded a gorgeous richness of soft colors and golden glisten. Their architecture remains magical beyond words. I spent the entire ride with my head and shoulders sticking up thru the open roof of the boat, like a giant old grey dog, sniffing and absorbing La Serenissima at her very best. Today I got up at 5 AM to peel away from the group and venture solo to Trieste, an hour plus bus ride from Opatija. Despite all the guide books, it is a city that intrigues, partly because of the remembered controversies over its ownership during my school years, partly because it seems a historical mosaic of the Adriatic, partly because James Joyce wrote most of “Portrait of an Artist” and a chunk of “Ulysses” while living there (there is even a James Joyce Walking Tour, which sadly involves only looking at the outsides of a shabby apartment house, a restaurant and a book store). Indeed touristically it is a 2 hour city in which I spent 6 hours. The high point, both topographically and for sight-seeing is the hill-top Basilica of San Giusto, two side by side 9th and 13th century Byzantine churches that were transmuted by some edifice-complex during the Napoleonic wars into the side naves of a big church when some Austrian general roofed over the space in between them. What emerges is a surprisingly enchantin architectural camel, filled with elements of every style from 850AD to 1977. It is also the Carlist Escorial, the burial church for 10 or so of the right-wing faction of the Spanish Borbon/Hapsburg royal family, who lost out in the post-Napoleonic tussle for the throne and spent the long years from the Congress of Vienna until 1977 (when, unnoticed, they finally died out) sitting on the second floor of a palazzo in downtown Trieste, bickering and kvetching (I’m not that is exactly le mot juste for Carlist pretenders, though). Some of them even supported Franco, in the same misguided spirit as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s Hitler flirtation. The other sight to see is the super-grandiose, Austro-pompous, now sparklingly cleaned and scrubbed to the point of being disconcertingly Disney-like, snow-white marble Piazza de L’unita de L’Italia, which opens on one side to the sea which made this city rich. The rest of the place is a warren of heavy, dark buildings on narrow streets, distinguished by screeching sea-gulls and piles of dog droppings, populated mainly by elderly men scraping the soles of their shoes with their canes and even more elderly women with bad henna hair, teetering on high heeled shoes and smoking cigarettes. Full length furs also seem the style. They all look like Slavic dumplings with greasy lipstick, a kind of déjà vu of the fashions of the 50’s. There is a very large university somewhere about, but I saw no young people. There is also Italy’s only WW II crematorium, San Sabba, where some 20,000 Jews from Italy and Slovenia and Croatia (including the entire 6000 Jewish community of Trieste itself) perished. An unused, handsome Austrian-looking synagogue survives. For info, the local food specialties are leaden gnocchi and “bravada” (turnips marinated in discarded grape pressings). I can understand now why Italo Svevo’s writings are so dour and melancholy. Still, I had to find out for myself. From Opatija we took yet another uncomfortably long bus-trip down the coast toward Dalmatia. The cliff-side corniche, without guard rails, was startling, with its limestone cliffs plunging straight down into the sparklingly clear (and even occasionally azure) Adriatic. Just offshore, creating beautiful sea-scapes, are Croatia’s fabled 1000 (actually 1100 plus) islands, many uninhabited and many national park-lands. The country has got the idea to develop, a la Costa Rica, an eco-tourism industry, which is just fine if you can preserve some stability long enough to attract tourists and foreing investment capital. So far they are still struggling with infra-structure repairs, and the rest of Europe seems unconvinced, despite the unspoiled natural beauty of the coast (and the prices, which are rock-bottom compared to the EU. Zadar, one of the many medieval walled seaport cities that Venice (who owned the entire coast, plus Corfu, Cyprus and Crete for almost 1000 years) built to fend off pirates and Turks, is of only passing interest, alas, because once again our guide has ti9med our arrival when absolutely everything is closed. There is not much worse than being shown the outside of a famous museum. Split, however, may well be the high point of the trip, vibrant with lots of young university students, booming as a port city, but with the extravagant enchantment of its still-lived-in, still bustling antique Venetian center, all built within (and using and preserving and respecting) Diocletian’s 4th Century, 800 by 900 square yard, stupendous, walled, seaside palace. It is an absolute dazzler, to wander about, to find superb little treasures like his imperial mausoleum converted into a moody, idiosyncratic little round church. Again our guide struck by giving us 90 minutes in a place worth days. He says there is no good hotel in Spl;it. It is the country’s second largest city and university. I suspect Vantage Tours could not get a price deal, so they rushed us back onto our bus for another 4 hour drive to Dubrovnik. All told we shall have 8 days of 8 hour bus rides. I cannot wait for tipping time and the comment form.

The reason for the flight cancellation was fog, local to Venice and its
airport and apparently not at all uncommon there; and it was indeed the thickest
goop I have ever encountered. On arrival at Mestre (via plane from Zagreb to
Bologna, bus into town and train to Venice) I could not even see my hotel just
across the narrow Via Piave; and even worse, the next day the weather prevailed
again. My grand design to spend the day inside the relatively warm and snug
(No one ever called it that before!) Accademia, amongst Titians, Canalettos,
Girogiones, Tintorettos and Ducios (and my most favorite Bellinis) was totally
foiled. There was a 2 hour witing line outside, and that was only for folks who
had reserved 2 weeks earlier. All others...forget it! So I trundled off to I
Frari, an embarrassment of Renaissance riches in a gorgeous church setting,
dominated by the mega-mother of all Titians, his gigantic Assumption Altar
Piece. It is stupendous, though the small Bellini Madonna in the adjacent side
chapel touched me more with its luminous folds of blue silk. The rest of the day I
spent drifting, almost aimlessly, totally carefree and unscheduled, thru the
fog, across bridges and over canals, in an out of buildings that caught my
fancy, and thru the moody Ghetto area. Actually the fog created a lovely,
slightly spooky if chill sense of temps perdu that was not so much melancholy as
appropriate; and I felt oddly at one with my surroundings. I even achieved my one
and only shopping goal: I found a lovely young woman in her shop where she
made Carnavale masks and dominos, and I bought the least fussy one (no feathers,
no jewels) for my mask room. It fills a gap (though hardly a life-threatening
one) in that collection. ...The fog has lifeted just enought to permit a
horizontal view from the window of my Regionale train to Ravenna; and the Italian
agricultural landscape seems meticulous and tidy, with ever square inch
cultivated, in sharp contrast to the helter-skelter and wasteful quality of
Croatia's many abandoned farms. Here, even in the front yards of quite new houses,
one sees a few vines, a few citrus trees and a few chickens. Even in the factory
towns we barrelled thru, there is an aesthetic orderliness...pallettes neatly
stacked, drums for shipping and containers stacked by color like a giant
leggo mosaic, with groves of olive and fruit trees and grape vines growing in
numbered rows right up to the factory fences. ...There is fog in Ravenna, too, but
I plunged into the 5th century with reckless aplomb. St Appolonaire Nuovo
was built by Theodoric in 493 in what is called Palatine style and then
embellished by Justinian with 3-high tiers of gold-background mosaics that manage to
defy the usual monotony of processions of maidens or priests or saints due to
the wonderful and surprising little personal differences, the way the folds of
cloth hang or drape, the gestures of hands, the oddities they are holding. And
then there is an unexpected Greco-Roman liveliness in some of the facial
expressions, or in my favorite of St Peter's net filled with wet, wriggling
fish. It is not the static Byzantine I had anticipated. Theodoric's Mausoleum is
disappointing and barren, but that of Galla Placidia (more about her
astounding life to follow) is a stunner. Here the backgrounds are brilliant navy blue
and the geometric patterns and human figures are mostly in gold and white. The
effect, with the light softened by the alabaster window panes, is truly,
richly gorgeous. The central figure of a saint in billowing white robes tending a
blazing, flickering, red and orange fire, gives a whole noew drama and impact
to mosaics as I had always thought of them. The adjoining Basilica of San
Vitale, like all of Ravenna's interior wonders, is rather unimpressive,
unornamented red brick outside. But inside it explodes into a huge space like Haggia
Sophia in Istanbul, with a seductive optical trick of viewing columned arches and
domes behind and above one another, like clouds billowing heaven-ward in
geometric, round perfection. Only here, it is all gorgeously gold in its mosaics
and frescoes, as the Istanbul interior must once have been, and it is a
stunner! I wandered back thru old Ravenna, a warren of pedestrian shopping
streets, with lots of Benneton and jeans stores. Surprising were the large numbers of
very black Africans, perhaps Eritreans and Ethiopians who (I think) retain
from the old colonial days some access preference as well as some language
familiarity. After 6 hours, I collapsed into BBC World and horizontality....Sunday,
indeed. The sun has returned to the flat, marshy Italian Adriatic coast, so
totally different from either the other side of Italy or the Croatian Adriatic
coast. I hopped an early bus to Classe, the original Roman port built on
filled land and ultimately silted up and abandoned, where stands in a desolate
field the original Basilica of St Appolonaire, with it gorgeous interior of
gold mosaics set against verdant green backgrounds of fields in which flowers
bloomed, sheep grazed, and there was almost a sense of whimsy and rustic charm
about them. Ravenna is also the home town of Arianism, a Christian cult that
flourished in the Western Empire of Byzantium and found favor among the various
Goths who came thru, conquered, liked what they saw, did not destroy but
rather embraced it. Bravo Visigoths! And you, too, Ostragoths! I had always
pictured you as bad guys, like Avars (the word "avarice") and Huns and Vandals, who
did things like sack Rome. But now I find that the remarkable Silver Codex that
I saw in November in Uppsala was written in Ravenna for Theodoric. Of course
there was the rather petulant Alaric, who sacked Rome, kidnapped the Emperor
Honorius' sister, Galla Placidia, schlepped her around Italy for 3 years while
he looked for grain for his army and tried to con her into marrying him. But
she didn't. She waited til he died and married his hunky blond nephew, thereby
becoming Queen of the Goths. When he was murdered, she was brought back to
Rome and forced to marry the Emperor, thus becoming Empress as well. She gave
Aquitaine to "her Visigoths" and bartered food for peace, and watched her son
imprison her daughter for becoming engaged to Attila the Hun. Now, I ask you,
why is this not yet a mini-series?....Today was one of my more antic travel
days, but a testimony to the virtues of total flexibility. Got up very early, had
what should have been illegal, a hyper-potent doppio espresso, and loped
across the cobbles to catch the train to Rimini (on my way but not on my plan),
only to find everything "chiuso" because it is Monday, except for the one thing I
really wanted to see, the Malatesta Temple, a pretentious, grandiose,
slightly pagan-feeling edifice to the powers of big egos and new money. The
Malatestas were parvenus, sort of the Donald Trumps of their century, a ducal family of
not too much consequence except that they were immortalized by Dante and
Tchaikovsky. But they did hire Giotto and Della Francesca to build and adorn their
basilica and it was worth the brief stop. Then on to Pesaro, where Rossini
was born. His house was "chiuso". It is still Monday. Then onto the bus to
Urbino, a ride inland past alot of small industrial parks, notable for two
companies whose names had me giggling for 31 kilometres...A fruit processing plant
named "Smegma" (which I believe is the technical term for belly-button lint) and
a sports clothing company named "Dribling" (which might do for basketball but
not much else)....Got to Urbino early, and it is an exquisite, classic hill
town of sun-drenched, rose-colored brick that is home to only around 6000
although there is a big University with almost 30,000 ratty, pierced, grungy,
smoking, rude, pushy kids just outside of town. It also has the steepest, up and
down streets I have ever had to inflict upon my aging ham-strings. Of course,
everything was still closed as it was still Monday, so I found a hotel and
settled in after a lovely sun-down wander. The 2 Salimbene Oratories are closed for
the month for repairs, and the synagogue has vanished entirely. But the
vistas out over a string of green and cultivated valleys, with tiny towns and
churches perched atop every hill, and in the far distance the Appenines with snow
on their crests, was really glorious. This is how travel days should end..not
with the discovery that a large Tuborg god has leaked its contents in my bag.
Happily there is a towel warming rack in my bathroom which dries wash quickly.
This morning I was delighted to find that the Ducal Palace and the National
Museum are free if you are over 65, and my boldly stamped "Senior" pass from
the MBTA did the trick. In most of Italy you have to be a citizen of the EU to
get that benefit. The Ducal Palace was worth the trip (and the 52 year wait
since I first tried to get here). The rooms are lovely, humanly scaled, perfect
in taste. And the tiny trompe l'oeil wood intarsia "studiolo" may well be the
most perfect distillation of the Renaissance sensibility that all the guide
books say it is. Almost as fascinating as the tricky, remarkable inlays of desk
drawers open, pens lying on papers, books stacked with legible titles on
their spines, views out of windows that look for all the world like the views
still look, etc...are the upper rows of portaits of the great thinkers of history
whom Duke Federico Montefeltro admired and looked to. It is like an index of
the refined taste and perfected sensibility of a Renaissance Prince (and a
great one...he was the model for Castiglione's "The Courtier") . Of course he
was also smart enough to marry a Sforza, whose significant dowry enabled him to
hire two local talents, Bramante and Rafael, and to bring in some out-of-town
boys, Ucello and Della Francesca, to fix up the place. It is all so
perfect...from the first grand staircase of the Renaissance, to Rafael's haunting,
Mona Lisa\-like portrait "La Muta"...even being followed from room to room by a
security guard (I was the only person there) could not spoil the visit. The 2
Bellinis disappointed; but there were 2 Della Francescas, with their sparkling
eyed figures staring straight into the eyes of the viewer, piercingly,
forcing you into involvement in the Flagellation scene being depicted...remarkable!
It is lovely that the Montefeltros passed all this along to the Della
Roveres, who as a Papal family, could afford to maintain it unspoilt. It is a gem of
a town....Up early and via bus and train, I fould myself with a 2 hour,
unplanned layover in Modena...so I trundled the 20 minutes to the Duomo, and
blundered, unplanned, into one of the most sumptuous and moving churches I have
ever seen. Built in 1099 by Lanfranco, it is called his masterpiece for good
cause. Soaring Romanesque columns sit on grand carved lions, and above rise
rounded vaults on diminishing columns in an extravagant billow upwards. The apse
has visible, exposed crypts below the elevated altar, and a rood screen of
superbly carved white marble. But the coup de grace is that, against the backdrop
of the great gold mosaic dome, flying suspended, almost magically, over the
main altar, is an enormous (perhaps three times life sized), very realistic
ivory Christ crucified on a giant (perhaps 40 foot high) silver cross. It is so
powerful, flying 50 or more feet overhead, that one literally gasps, and then
one backs away down the long nave, unable to wrench away from the spectacle of
it. Outside the facade is rich in wonderful details in white marble, columns
on lions, bas reliefs, ceremonial balconies and pulpits, and especially
delightful little souls in torment on the ends of the buttresses and water spouts,
each different, all sort of Hieronymous Bosch like. It was a phenomenal way to
wait for a train connection. I had not realized how the forests of Illyria
and the limestone of Dalmatia, all now Croatia where I have just been, were the
building materials for much of Renaissance Italy. Of course, they were owned
by The Venetian Republic, as was a lot of the Italy through which I am
wandering, so there is a logic to it. ..In 2 hours I am in the Gonzaga's Mantova and
in a hotel right opposite the station (my favorite location for not getting
lost and for this sort of impulsive travel). This is an elegant small city, with
lovely, harmonious Renaissance squares, and some 50,000 well-dressed, affluent
looking citizens. All the big designer boutiques are represented, a kind of
mini-Milan. The wire baskets, on the outside of the fine palaces, in which the
Gonzagas used to suspend their enemies and criminals for public scorn, are a
startling reminder that inside the velvet glove of even the grandest art
patrons was a very tough fist. The Duomo is huge, stylistically reminiscent of St
Peter's in Rome though of course not that huge. And the entire interior space,
columns, domes, walls, all are covered in not wonderful trompe l'oeil
paintings done in gold, dingy grey green, and beige. Fortunately the windows are all
clear glass, which lets enough light in to help break the giddy, not pleasing
sensation that you are being smothered in a giant, dusty , Gobelin tapestry.
This was like eating too much tortelli, the local pasta specialty stuffed with
pumpkin, macaroons, mustard and a variety of nuts...not light and fluffy! But
Virgil was born here. And Mantegna, whose crypt is in the Duomo. And hosiery
was invented here in the late 1500's, as was the Harlequin character of the
Commedia dell Arte. Alas, when the marriages to the likes of Isabella d'Este
stopped producing little Gonzagas, they simply died out, and in the ensuing
struggles for this rich little duchy, the Hapsburgs won and the place lapsed into a
sleepy little bywater of Vienna until Italy rebelled and became a nation. I
did find the fake, tourist-attraction called "Rigolletto's House". It's the
closest thing I have come to opera in Italy. Today is chilly but sunny, and the
whole town has turned into a giant flea market...every loggia and square jammed
with stalls selling cheap everything, and lots of pushing and shoving by
little old ladies, some ferocious on bicycles.I escaped into the great ducal
palace, covering 11 acres, a walled city within the city. Aside from its enormity,
the high points for me were two beautiful courtyards, one fully colonnaded with
serpentine columns in two tiers high, open air on one side to view thru the
columns the lakes of the town, and the other a perfect formal parterre with
primroses in bloom and a giant resident cat on the prowl. Inside, most of the
renowned Gonzaga art collection that rivalled the Vatican's was stolen by the
Hapsburgs and is now in Vienna or sold off to the French and is now in the
Louvre. The most arresting things left are some immovable cieling frescoes, one of
the celestial system in cobalt blue with gold stars and constellations and
astro-symbols all in shining gold. Then there is the biggest Rubens ever (and he
liked big!) which was cut into numerous pieces, only some of which have been
recovered. It shows clearly what a homely lot the Gonzagas were, even when
painted by an artist who surely was smart enough to flatter. There are 9 great
tapestries, done to designs by Rafael for the Vatican. I am not a huge tapestry
fan; but these, shot with silk to enliven the play of light on beautiful folds
of red and blue robes, and on Christ's almost translucent white garments, are
superb. In the Mantegna frescoed bridal room, I actually found the
backgrounds, the perspective tricks and the details of life shown , more intriguing than
the portraiture. Most of the rest of the "acreage" consisted of long
galleries, periodically redecorated by whomever was in residence, filled with
paintings and Roman marbles and partially restored frescoes. It was mostly second rate
and in toto too much. I finally retreated to the outdoors, the
Florentine-feeling squares and streets, the infinite number of small local banks and barber
shops. (In one I saw an elderly barber wearing a Red Sox cap, and could not
resist asking him...but he spoke no English, did not seem to know where he got
it or what it meant, and besides he was at 11 AM far too drunk to be using
scissors or razor in proximity to body parts.) ...I just calculated that I can
spend adequate time in Ferrara, squeeze in another unplanned detour to Parma, and
still have plenty of time in Verona even with day trips to Vicenza and
Padova. This is definitely my kind of romp...see the great stuff, mooch around for a
taste of ambiente, and on to the next impulse without risking overload by
looking at alot of the second-rate (and there is alot!) Besides it is so much
more suited to my fickle attention span. Italian trains (the Regionale, at least)
are ubiquitous and very cheap; and, while I know this ain't PC, they really
do run on time. I have never been a huge lambrusco fan, but it is the local
specialty so I felt obliged. I am still not a huge fan. I did however pass on
the Mantovan stewed donkey, specialty or no...I wonder if that is the source of
Hamlet's "mewling and puking to an early grave"?? Enough for now. One more
chapter will follow in due course.

The Ducal Palace was worth 52 years of waiting…I first tried getting here in 1952! The rooms are splendid, perfectly proportioned, exacly and faultlessly right. And the tiny trompe l’oeil, wood intarsia studiolo is a wondrous and miraculous as every guide book says it is…worth the trip, the essence of the Renaissance. Almost as curious as the trick-playing inlays are the upper rows of portraits of the great thinkers of history whom Duke Federico di Montefeltro admired most. It is like an index to the taste and sensibility of the Renaissance mind…the man whom Castiglione profiled in “The Courtier” as the ideal ruler. Of course, it didn’t hur that he supplemented his income by marrying a Sforza, which enabled him to hire to local boys, Bramante and Rafaello, and to import out-of-town talent like della Francesca and Ucello, all in the interests of “fixing up the place”. And did he ever. From the first grand staircase of the Renaissance to Rafaello’s portrait of “La Muta” (which truly rivals the Mona Lisa with its perfect, haunting, mysterious juxtaposition of voluptuous silken robes and an oddly detached stare)…even being followed from room to room by a security guard (I was the only person in the place due, I suspect, to the early hour and the out of season) could not spoil my astonishment. Even the somewhat second rate pair of Bellinis, one of my favorite colorists, didn’t matter, compensated by the remarkable della Francescas with their sparkling-like-glass eyes staring piercingly straight out at the viewer, forcing him into the scene of the horror of the flagellation, unable to remain detached. I shall always be grateful to the Montefeltros and their heirs the della Roveres for keeping Urbino perfect until I could get here. Another case study in flexibility in travel. I got up for an earlier train than planned, and while the sleepy student night clerk struggled to process my credit card, I swilled strong coffee and chomped wonderful pastries. Then a bus to the bus to the Pesaro train to Modena, another addition to the route. With 2 hours to spare until my train to Mantova, I rushed the 210 minutes up to the Duomo of Modena, and blundered almost by chance into one of the most sumptuous, beautiful and moving churches I have ever experienced. Built in 1099 by Lanfranco, it is considered his masterpiece. Soaring Romanesque columns sit on bases that are great carved stone lions, and above them rounded vaults rise on top of diminishingly thin columns in a constant upward billow that feels like clouds. The apse has visible, open, colonnaded crypts below and a mind-blowing rood-screen of 11th century carved white marble that has aged to look line finest buffed ivory, carved with Asian delicacy. Against the huge gold mosaic dome above the apse, flying like magic over the main altar is an enormous (double life-size, at least) and very realistic crucifix with a carved ivory Christ on a great, 20 foot high silver cross. It is so powerful, floating perhaps 40 feet overhead on almost unseen cables, so splendid and painful and magnificent, that one gasps audibly. Alas, it devastates by comparison the several other beauties in the church…a chapel with an exquisite terra cotta manger scene from the 1500’s, and the fine marquetry of the choirstalls, a white marble angel holding a glorious fleur de lys, ceremonial balconies and pulpits of whitest marble, marvelously idiosyncratic, Hieronymous Bosch-like, quirky, little naked souls in torment on the ends of all of the exterior buttresses. What a way to wait for a train connection! The train route this time was through a lot of industrial towns…Forli, Faenza (of ceramics renown), Cesera and of course sprawling Bologna. Still, all the land between the factories and warehouseswas cultivated in an almost Japanese frugality. Good soil is precious and appreciated. I had not realized before that the Adriatic cities of Ravenna and Rimini were originally built, mostly for defense, like Venice, on wooden pilings driven into marshy mud and then connected and filled to form islands with bridges and canals. But unlike Venice, instead of opting for navigable harbors and canals, they simply filled in and ultimately silted up, and moved the cities inland. The forests of Illyria, that much fought over portion of Northern Croatia, and the limestone of Dalmatia, supplied 1000 years of building materials to bothe the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and to both sides of the Adriatic (as well as the lovely spotted dogs, whom Diocletian is alleged to have loved and brought from one of his Turkish campaigns to his home in Split and then on to Rome and Ravenna). Everything is so close here. In 2 hours on a student commuter train, I was in the Gonzaga’s Mantua. In another 20 minutes I was ensconced in a hotel right opposite the train station, my favorite location for this kind of travel, and out walking the Renaissance squares of this elegantly laid out small city of 50,000. The colonnaded shopping squares contain all the swank boutiques from Milan and Rome, and the severity of the architecture is periodically softened by an explosion of mannerist marble or an opulent café. The iron cages for suspending the Gonzagas enemies for public scorn and torture reminded one quite forcefully that inside even the most gorgeous pearl-lined velvet glove of the grandest art patron was likely a blood-covered fist. I am saving the great Ducal palaces for tomorrow when I have more time, but I did take a swipe at the Duomo, which made for an interesting contrast to the perfection of Modena’s. This is the Renaissance in all its opulent excess, grandly reminiscent of St Peter’s in Rome, though of course not in size. But there any similarity to anything else ends. Every interior inch (walls, columns, domes all) are covered in not totally successful trompe l’oeil paintings, mostly in grey, dingy green-beige and gold. Fortunately all the windows are clear glass or one would feel smothered in a giant, uncleaned Gobelin tapestry. Still this had the effect of eating too much tortelli, the local pasta goodie stuffed with pumpkin, macaroons, mustard and miscellaneous nuts. It is not light and fluffy! But Virgil was born here, and Mantegna too. Hosiery (at least in its made for commerce form) was invented here, which gave the economy an early leg up in the 1600’s. So too was the Harlequin character of the commedia del arte. Alas, when the marriages to the likes of Isabella d’Este and the Paleologus girls from the Byzantine royal house stopped producing male heirs, the Gonzagas simply died out (or perhaps it was those tortellis); and, in the ensuing struggles for succession, the Hapsburgs whipped the French branch of the family and (save for a brief period during Napoleon in Italy) this place became a dingy Austrian provincial backwater, a lot like Trieste, until the Risorgimento and the creation of Italy. Happily they never bothered to remodel or update the town, so one is still lulled to sleep by the sonorous peals of bells from the 17th century campaniles…brick towers of no charm, but bells of enormous personality. OH! “Rigoletto’s House”…a totally made up tourist attraction that follows the descriptions in the Verdi stage directions and in Victor Hugo’s Triboulet, on which the opera was based. Still, it’s the closest thing I’ve got to Opera in Italy, so far.

Dubrovnik remains a fine tourist destination, albeit somewhat Disney-esque in its totally rebuilt, restored, perfectly reconstructed medievalism. I was last here with Bemy in 1985; and I approached it again with a bit of trepidation, particularly when I realized we were staying in the same hotel, a cascade of rooms down the cliff-face, connected to the beach below and the lobby above by a funicular instead of an elevator…still memorable architecturally and charming, though now falling apart quite literally (and litorally) due to lack of maintenance and originally shoddy construction. Both my door knob and my closet door fell off, sua sponte, the heat was unregulatable except by opening the windows, and the 4-star walls and carpets were leak-stained and musty smelling. Perhaps it should have been shelled by the Serbs but it was not. Several others were. I had read of the stupidly spiteful bombing of this city by Milosevic, but perhaps his troops were as inept as they were mean-spirited, for all that was damaged in the old walled city were some tiled roofs and street pavement, all quickly and easily repaired. The whole place has been destroyed and rebuilt so often over its 1000 year history, that it is a lot like grandpa’s axe, anyway ( 6 new handles, 4 new heads, but still “his”). It lacks the spontaneity and lived-in-ness of Diocletian’s Split, where laundry still hangs from inhabited windows in 4th century buildings, but it is definitely worth a visit. One good folkloric recital in our hotel, especially the mandolinist, playing a tiny 3-string “pico” like a six handed wizard. One nice enough string quartet in a small church downtown. And one absolute massacre of the Faure Requiem in honor of St Blaise’s Day, in the great hall of the medieval fortress…an acoustically awful hall, which proved a blessing as the singing (and accompanying slide show of the director’s long career) were even worse, prompting a mid-performance departure by the culture-starved wanderer. On to the bus again for another very long, although very beautiful ride all around the justly famous “secret” (because it is tucked invisibly behind cliffs, with only a winding 400-foot-wide channel entrance from the Adriatic) Bay of Kotor. Of course, the Church of St Luke, with its vaunted Byzantine iconostasis, and the Maritime Guild Hall that rivalled Amalfi for maps and charts and trained most of Venice’s great admirals, were both closed…disappointment but hardly surprise. Our last 2 days were spent in an ice-frosted national park called “Plitvitce” taking nature walks around frozen lakes and waterfalls. It was pretty, but another stupid allocation of time given our hour and a half visits to Split, Zagreb and Ljubljana. It was sunny and mild, and proved a quietly contemplative and suitably odd and remote place to observe my Mom’s Yahrzeit. I even found an emergency candle in my bedroom drawer. It will not last the night but she always liked Dorothy Parker. At Zagreb airport I at last escaped the group, and was awarded a guest pass to the Austrian Airlines Executive suite, where I swilled rum/tonics, gorged on peanuts, and caught up on this journal. Then, as if to disabuse me of my delight, my connection from Vienna to Venice (a wierdly circuitous route anyway) was cancelled due to a dense and long-lasting fog enshrouding Venice, and I was rerouted to Bologna by plane and then by bus and train at long last to my hotel in Mestre Venezia. I arrived after midnight, and could barely see the hotel across a narrow street from the train station, the fog was that impenetrable. The Hotel Stazione is a Best Western, sleekly modern inside, comfortable; and the coffee and pastries at breakfast are wondrous. It is an indulgence, though half the price of the hotels around the lagoon, which is in the throes of Carnavale with already high prices even more stratospheric. As I think back, probably for the only time, about my Balkan sortie, I realize how little was memorable and why. If you visualize Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Serbia/Montenegro and Macedonia as a kaleidoscope, and then you imagine each of those usually brightly colored glass shards as being instances of cruelty (mostly religious but also premised on differing ethnicity, language, political agendas, territorial grabs, etc) and local greed, you begin to fathom the place. Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb, Grey Falcon” (she really was a better writer than either her lover, HG Wells, or her son, Nathanael) chronicles it all…Phoenicians, Greeks, Illyrians, Celts, Romans, Goths, Avars, Turks, Venetians, Austrians, Italians, Germans, and most recently Serbs and local monsters in almost every city and province. The deals struck were Byzantine (even when Byzantium was not involved)…Dubrovnik playing footsie with the Turkish Sultan to remain a republic independent of Venice, even at the price of Montengro becoming Turkish. Maria Theresia agreeing with the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church to move Orthodox Christians out of Turkish areas to create buffer zones against Islam for the greater good of Catholicism. The seeds of the recent horrors of Mostar and Vukovar were quite intentionally planted a long time ago by people whom history has never really held accountable. In one day we crossed 5 different frontiers, because the gorgeous coastline reflects even now the crazy quilt divisions that gave little countries access to the sea or to important shrines or to past glories. To this day there is hassling, mercifully but probably temporarily without gunfire. Croats still won’t accept that their late President Tuchman was every bit the vicious criminal that his Serb rival, Milosovic, was. There are still posters all over proclaiming as heroes generals who are on trial at the Hague as war criminals. Bosnia and Serbia still refuse full cooperation with Carla da Ponte and her tribunal, and will never make it into the EU until they do so (though candidly they seem a decade or more away economically anyhow). Italy is now renege-ing on its deal with Tito not to claim reparations for the 300,000 Italians he forcibly repatriated from Istria, even though Trieste was supposed to have been the quid pro quo. Germany, after having 600,000 nationals repatriated forcibly after WW II, and after taking 700,000 refugees in the 1990’s during the Fragmentation of Yugoslavia wars (which was more than all the rest of Europe combined, and done as a sort of expiation of its sins, though it also helped with their unskilled labor shortage at the time) has finally said “enough…no more” but then they have East Germany now. The USA, which is still beloved even by Muslims throughout the Balkans due to Madeleine Albright’s forced brokerage and Bill Clinton’s funding of the Dayton Peace Accords, has now under Bush-ism dis-involved itself from any further role and moved oil-ward. And even our Croat guide, who loves all things European, lets slip some occasional vestige of bigotry like “Montenegrins are very tall…and lazy”. It has only been 9 years since the Peace of Dayton, 6 years since the embargo against Milosevic’s Serbia/Montenegro was lifted. Craina Province, through which we passed, is still a horror-scape of sacked, abandoned villages such as one sees on TV but rarely on tour. The much-photographed Turkish Bridge that once united Muslim and Catholic sides of Mostar, and lasted for 500 years, probably never will be rebuilt in the interests of brotherhood and coexistence, which it once symbolized. Clearly, it ain’t over. I saw lots of fat ladies, and none of them was singing. And the posters, and the rhetoric, and the slips of the tongue all suggest that the lessons of history will continue to go unstudied, ignored and repeated in this centrally located corner of the world.


The first day of my viaggio tutti solo was chill, foggy and swept by wind and drizzle. My Plan B was to spend such a Venetian misery in the cozy warmth and snugness (I suspect no one has EVER before described the vast, uncompromising architecture of the Accademia del Arte using those words) in said museum, amongst the Titians, Giorgiones (a current special show), Canalettos, Tintorettos and (my own personal favorite) Bellinis. Maledizione!! There was a 2-plus hour wait outside in the weather, and that was only for those who had booked a reservation 2 weeks earlier. All others, forget art. But there was Plan C. I trundled off to I Frari, an embarrassment of riches housed in a splendid church, dominated by a mega-Titian, The Assumption Altar Piece, that had to be 70 feet high. It is stupendous, though I must say the elegant “little” life size Bellini Madonna in the side aisle, with its indescribably luminous Venetian blue/green richness, appeals more and touches more. The rest of the day was spent drifting, carefree and almost aimlessly (though map in hand, which is essential in Venice if only for the bridges), in and out of happenstance churches and shops, through dense and softening fog, through the mercifully unrenovated and redolent of the past Ghetto. The mood of the day was melancholy temps perdu, but deliciously satisfying at the same time. I avoided the jammed vaporettos and crowded tourist shopping streets; and, in the process, achieved my only shopping goal of the trip. I found a lovely young woman, all alone in her studio down a tiny side street in the Ghetto area. She hand crafted/carved Carnavale masks and dominos, and I bought the least fussy (to wit, no feathers, no jewels, no sequins) one with the most personality for my mask room. It was an addition to the collection that I had long wanted.
\ The fog has lifted just enough now to permit a horizontal view from the window of the train to Ravenna, and the Northern Italian agricultural landscape is meticulously tidy, occupying every square inch with vineyards whose plants are almost sculpturally pruned, and manicured farms…a startling contrast to the disarray, abandoned and ill-used shambles just across the Adriatic in Croatia. Supply and demand, a half-century of no war, and the local sensibility all at work. Even in the small gardens of new row houses, one sees a few grape vines, fruit trees, chickens and geese, coexisting with a sleeping dog. Towns like Voltara and Porto Maggiore seem domestic and almost rural from this train window, though that is misleading as they are part of the industrial dynamo of Padania (the still non-existant, but proposed split off nation of Northern Italy that, freed from the economic support burdens of Sicily and the South, would be far and away the richest per capita country in the world). This is the diametric opposite of the impression of American cities from the few train windows left in our country. But then Europe embraced its rail system early and again after WW II. Where there are factories along the rail lines, as in Alfonsine, they are clean, colorfully painted, and even the shipping drums and pallets of boxes are neatly stacked by color, like a grand Leggo mosaic, and the fruit trees in numbered rows grow right up to the chain link fences of the assembly plants. It is an unfamiliarly aesthetic vision of heavy industry, and clearly explains how Visconti’s Red Dust could have been both menacing and gorgeous. The fog holds Ravenna in thrall, too; but in a whirlwind of energy I checked in and rushed headlong into the 5th Century AD. Two doors from my hotel are the ruins of Theodoric’s Palace, fenced in and not much left, and the adjacent red brick tower with its double row of pierced white marble Byzantine columns. Next to that is St Appolinaire Nuovo, a basilica in Palatine style built to elegant proportions by Theodoric in 493AD and then embellished to breath-taking effect by Justinian. The 3 high tiers of gold-background mosaics, despite a somewhat processional monotony, are superb, especially taken as a totality that is almost geometrically abstract. Then on closer inspection one finds surprising little personal touches, distinguishing individualities, in the folds of robes, the gestures and positions and contents of hands. In the scenic panels some extraordinary Greco-Roman liveliness creeps in, such as St Peter'’ net filled with almost palpably wet, wriggly sea-critturs. Then on to the disappointingly barren and severe mausoleum of Theodoric, but then to the astonishing, dazzling mausoleum of Galla Placidia (much more about this mini-series-worthy, larger than life woman later). She was the sister of the Western (i.e. Roman)
Emperor, Honorius, who moved the capital from Rome to Ravenna, and she actually ruled as regent after his death at a young age. The background of her mosaics, in the design of which she actively participated during her long life, is a brilliant cobalt blue, and the geometric designs and human figures are mainly gold and white. The effect, in light softened by alabaster window panes, in a small and intimate chamber, is gorgeously rich; and the central figure of a saint, in billowing white robes, tending a blazing fire with flickering scarlet and orange flames and gray and white smoke, is of drama and vitality that I had never associated with the static medium of Byzantine mosaic art. Sad that the lady never got to be buried here, but more of that later. The adjoining Basilica of San Vitale, like all of Ravenna’s wonders, is unornamented and unimpressive on the outside…plain red brick with a touch of marble trim. But inside the explosion of immense space, and layer over layer of rich mosaic art is like Frank Lloyd Wright’s notion of interior as surprise. The domed, columned round basilica, rather like Haggia Sophia in grandeur and loft, also has similar optical illusions of columns and arches seen through and behind others. Only unlike Istanbul’s stunner, this one is totally ornamented everywhere with mosaics and frescoes that are vivacious and brilliant. It is literally worth the trip!! I wandered back, with a slight case of sensory overload (Italy does this to me every time) through “old” Ravenna, a bustling, pedestrian-malled series of old, some collonaded, streets, mostly filled with Benneton and Levis shops, cafes, street buskers playing a whacky assortment of instruments (ranging from harps to tubas to African horns that look and sound like they were meant to rouse and frighten elephants) …many of whom, alas, also had amplifiers. Surprising to me were the substantial number of black Africans (perhaps Ethiopians and Eritreans, who do retain as one of the few perks of having been occupied by Italy, some sort of immigration preference). Still, I haven’t noticed this racial concentration anywhere else in Italy, so far, or in recent other trips. After 7 hours, I headed back to BBC World and recumbency. These aging legs do get tired.

Sunday, indeed. The sunshine has returned full blast to the flat, marshy Italian Adriatic…so topographically different from the Croatian side or the other Italian coastline. I slept long, arose early, breakfasted mostly on surprisingly awful instant coffee…and changed hotels. It has become clear that I shall finish with Ravenna today so I have moved closer to the rail station (and a decent cup of coffee) to catch a very early “diretto” to Rimini…not on my original itinerary but half way to Pesaro where I was headed and a potentially interesting quickie stop. Then I hopped a bus to Classe, a scant 5 KM away, and the original Greek and Roman port for Ravenna that silted up. There in a barren and desolate field stands the original Basilica of San Appolinaire, again unimpressive brick outside except for its added 11th century bell tower, but inside ravishing in its golden 6th century mosaics, this time set against verdant green background tiles of fields with flowers blooming and sheep grazing. I never though of Byzantine mosaics as being even a tiny bit whimsical or smile-inducing, but then I was never here before. Besides, Ravenna is the home town of Arianism, a Christian cult that flourished in the Western Empire and under the diverse hordes of Goths who came here, conquered, liked what they saw and opted not to destroy it, but instead settled, married into it and even embellished it. Bravo, Goths! And Visigoths! And Ostrogoths! Indeed the astonishing Codex Argentus that I sawin November in Uppsala, Sweden, was writ on its silver palate for Theodoric right here in Ravenna. Of course my effervescent “Go, Goths” really does not include Alaric, who in a fit of pique at his sometimes allies sacked Rome an kidnapped the young Galla Placidia (remember her from her gorgeous tomb). He then schlepped her around Italy for 3 years, looking for food for his troops and hoping she would marry him. She didn’t. She simply waited until he died and married his hunky blonde nephew, thereby becoming Queen of the Visigoths as well as sister and regent for the Roman Emperor. Then when he died, she went back to Rome (actually she was sold back for 300 tons of wheat) where she was forced to marry the new Roman Emperor, whom she promptly survived. As Empress she gave “her” Visigoths Aquitaine and much needed food in return for peace. Then she watched her own weak son return in safety she had engineered to Rome, take the throne, imprison her and imprison her daughter as well for having agreed to marry Attila the Hun. I do not know why this has not all become a mini-series. There are plenty of meaty roles for muscle bound men and pouty beauties. Among other things that I never quite thought of (because I never thought much about them) is that the Burgundians and Swabians and Aquitainians were all technically barbarians…which might have some bearing on the behavior patterns of their contemporary lineal descendants, the Parisians and the Berliners. I had always thought Goths were all bad guys, like Huns and Vandals and Avars (as in avarice). But their favored form of Christianity, Arianism, or Monophytism, believed that Jesus was only partly divine, and his humanity exerted a strong appeal to new converts from the more extreme paganisms. Supposedly this is what most captured Justinian’s wife, the Empress Theodora, with of course enormously important historical consequences for the religion, the church and the history of the region. Back to town, and a long walk, highlighted by Dante’s Tomb, a touching, spare little mausoleum befitting his death as an exile from Florence but hardly his role as the creator of the modern Italian language. Then a few more museums, baptistries, churches, a street market of artisans, some book shops, museums stores and antique dealers. The pedestrian walkways are filled with women in full length furs, despite 60 degree sunshine, numerous dangerous elderly folks on bicycles with shopping bags full of dinner, families with kids in strollers and an asatonishing variety of dogs. It is Sunday in Ravenna, and I am very happy to have seen it at long last, even if I did once again strike out on opera, dance or classical music. Don’t they know this is Italy? Today was unquestionably one of the whackier days of travel even I have ever spent, but still a testimonial to the virtues of maximum flexibility. I awoke very early, braced by an almost unlawfully potent doppio espresso, and loped across the cobblestones in piercingly cold fog to catch the early train to Rimini. Arrived to find everything closed (it is again Monday, and “chiuso” has become my curse) exscept the one and only thing I really came to town to see…The Templo Malatesta, a grandiose, somewhat pagan-feeling testimonial to the power of new money and super-sized egos. The Malatestas were a ducal family of not much consequence except that a few of them married well, Dante and after him Tchaikovsky immortalized them in Francesca da Rimini, and they were smart enough to hire Giotto and della Francesca to build and adorn this basilica for them. It was certainly worth the two hour stop. Then back onto a train to Pesaro, a town of even less importance except for the fact that Rossini was born there. His house, now a museum, was of course closed for Monday. AARRGGHH!! So, onto the bus to Urbino, a ride inland past numerous small industrial parks, noteworthy for 2 factories that kept me giggling for 31 KMs. One was a fruit processing plant called “Smegma” which if I recall correctly from my scrabble days is the technical name for belly-button lint. The other a sports clothing company named “Dribling” which seems all wrong for everything except basketball. Urbino, which I have always wanted to see, is an exquisite hill town of sun-drenched, rose-colored brick, that is home to around 5000 in its superb medieval walled old town, on many of whose walls you can still walk as in Dubrovnik or Lucca. It is a treasury of Renaissance beauty, only slightly spoilt by 30,000 rather ratty and ubiquitously piewrced students at its overpoweringly large university. It also has the steepest up and down streets of any inhabited community I have ever been in. Goat-like, I struggled up from the bus depot to the tourist office where I discovered that the hotel I had booked was out of town, beyond walking, on an adjacent hill that might as well have been in Scotland. Besides, I was a day and a half early. So I found another hotel, marginally closer, cancelled the first one, checked in, strolled back into town and found everything closed…it was still Monday!! Alas, the two Salimbeni-frescoed oratories were closed for repairs not just for Mondays; and the old Synagogue has totally disappeared and become either a church or a university office depending on who points out to you where it used to be. Tired and frustrated, and yearning for Tuesday, I walked back to my hotel, barely able to resist the sunset views out across green, tended valleys with tiny towns of buff and rose stone perched atop every hillock, and in the far distance the Appenines, some with snow caps. It is a ravishingly beautiful setting; and some sort of extraordinary self-control, taste or legislation has kept even the newestsuburban and university clusters in the cream and rose and ochre brick and stone, with terra cotta tile roofs, so the visual harmony is perfect. This is how a travel day should end…rather than with the discovery that a large size Tuborg Gold has leaked all its contents into my bag. But there is a towel warming rack in my bathroom, and I figure I will smell like the 30,000 students for a day or so. A good early breakfast, a leisurely stroll into town, and the delight to discover that the great Ducal Palace and National Museum are free if you are over 65. There are occasional compensations. I think, at least in most of Europe, you must be a citizen of the EU for this rule to apply; but my boldly stamped pass from the MBTA worked like a charm.

The time has certainly come to apologize to any dear, benighted, loyal friend who has slogged this far. This is not meant as an amateur course in Art History 2004, but only as an aide memoire for myself so that I can, if need be, remember some of the miscellany that caught my fancy. Forgive and forget, as you wish. I probably will, too; but then the memory is the second thing to go. On the train to Verona I helped a young couple (he was in a wheel chair) aboard, and we had one of those John Guare “Six Degrees of Separation” experiences that my peregrinations seem fraught with. Guido and Sylvia are from Trieste, and seemed actually delighted that I had visited as so few tourists do. She has an American mother, and is colloquial and fluent in English. Imagine my surprise that they just spent 10 days (I’ll bet it seemed longer) in New Brunswick, New Jersey and Piscataway at a Rutgers-sponsored neuro-science work-shop. Guido is specializing in the disease from which he suffers, a rare and unpronouncable one (especially in broken Italo-English). It snowed the entire time they were there, but they got into Manhattan both weekends. Now they were weekending in the Renaissance cities, which is what affluent young Triestinos do to escape a city that is, as I had quickly surmised, a kind of large, pasta-laden New Brunswick. They loved America, clearly seeing beyond Piscataway in winter. At first blush, Verona (with some 200,000 persons and at least as many dachshunds) is almost daunting to one who has spent ten days in towns of 6000 to 47,000. It has broad, multi-lane boulevards, lots of traffic, and the walking distances from the station to the old center and from sight to sight seem quite far. But I blundered into a lovely little albergo, well located and very reasonable, which is no mean trick in Italy today, a country that has grown quite expensive (I do not know how the locals, especially the many pensioners, manage). I do know that, since the switch to the Euro, there ain’t no coins in the fountains. The bad news is that, effectively, tutti Verona is chiuso, not for Monday but for restaurazione, which in Italy is an indeterminate sentence. The Museum, the Castel Vecchio, the Scaligeri Tombs and the Arena (i.e. the 4 sights one comes here for) are inaccessible; which means this is a wander and poke inside churches city. Happily it is sunny and mild, there are lots of pedestrian promenades and fine squares, and numerous churches that are immensely improved by the fact that the local building material is a dark rose-colored marble that can make almost anything beautiful. It is actually an odd hodge-podge of millennia…far and away the most Roman city thus far, with numerous triumphal arches, a still-used-for-summer-festivals amphitheatre that was in its prime second only to the Colosseum, but was then overlaid with medieval forts, towers, ramparts and moats, which were then in turn overlaid with Venetian and Renaissance and Baroque stuff. Jumbled, yes; but intriguing, too. The Church of San Zeno, despite the fact that its exterior is disquietingly striped in red and white in an unfortunate style called “Lombard”, contains a splendid Romanesque interior, a gorgeous Mantegna altar-piece (with all his Venetian colors, tricks of perspective and folded garments trapping light) and one of the largest, most peculiar modern paintings I have ever seen. It is a 30 or more feet wide representation of the crucified Jesus, painted in Dali-like realism, floating in a cloud of light high above the Italian farm-scape, but the perspective is that the viewer is looking ip from the soles of his feet, up his legs, actually into his crotch, with his head and torso disappearing into the upper background and his face not really visible except for his beard. Cascading down upon him and spilling all about is a torrent of real, rusty nails. It is clearly a sort of hommage to Mantegna’s famous study in depth perception that looks up at the Crucifixion, but it is very strange nonetheless. Also in the church is a charming, life-size statue of St. Zeno, about whom I knew Zero. He is holding a golden bishop’s stave, from which dangles a fish on a line, and he is laughing (Zeno, not the fish) quite heartily. Actually there are quite a few smiling and laughing statues all around Verona. Two of the Scala family tombs, which are fenced off but sort of visible, have sculptures (one riding a horse, the other laid out dead) that are both grinning quite cheerily. Perhaps it is because the Emperor gave them this rich turf. Perhaps because dachshunds poop so much less than Dalmatians. Or perhaps because they got Dante and Giotto to come for nice long visits. The old Roman forum, which became the Medieval herb market and which still contains the last 14th century frescoed exterior house in town, plus a Roman fountain and a Venetian column and a lot of cafes and T-shirt stalls specializing in “Romeo and Juliet University for Lovers” and ugly pashmina shawls and silly feathered carnavale masques, remains nonetheless a lovely spot to stop for a glass of local prosecco (quite nice) and watch other old men ogling young girls in super-tight jeans and spike-heeled boots. Clearly Romeo’s spirit lives long and dies hard in Verona. Seduced outside again by 60 degree sunshine on all that brick and wine-colored marble, I spent 4 more hours afoot, barely bothered that San Giorgio with its Veronese altarpiece was closed, and that the Duomo (primarily noteworthy for its rose-colored columns) wasn’t. I found a public foot-path through the Castel Vecchio and across the ramparted, crenellated, brick Scala Bridge. It is absolutely a stage set for Mercutio and Tybalt to duel upon. The fortifications, the cobbled streets, the heavy iron casement grills and gates and torch sconces, the nasty iron spikes against intruders, and the views and sound of the rushing Adige (shallow but torrentially swift between the Roman built embankments that make it more a channel than a river) had me in Capulet-land for most of my walk. The snap-back to today came as I joined 7 others on the ramparts to look down as a middle-aged, paunchy back-packer of decidedly Austro-German appearance, put down his pack, stripped from the waist down, strode into the river, squatted and nonchalantly (it must have been sans chaleur as the water was freezing) took a dump, washed off, didn’t bother to dry, re-dressed, waved to us and left. Talk about sang froid! Later, as I was contemplating the perfect view from the roman stone bridge, the sun-shadowed ruins of the Roman theatre behind which rose a medievally spare monastery, and above that the steep terraced gardens and tall cypress trees of a late Renaissance palace called San Pietro, I had an Edmund Wilsonian Shock of Recognition…this is where the likes of Visconti developed their warm lens/nostalgic eye skills. It soaked into their pores. It is everywhere. Then I saw the men fishing in the river, and considered warning them what might be headed their way from the squatting back-packer. But on such a die…carpe carp! Incidental trivia…a scorpion crawling on the table of the last supper is a symbol for Judas. Also the telling of rosary beads, originally a Byzantine practice, was suspended by the Western Church around the time of the Schism, but then heartily reintroduced after the Turkish defeat at Lepanto. I love that stuff! It was great luck that I took my long walk around Verona yesterday. Today is cold and grey and Verona does not enchant. Up early and onto a train to Vicenza, Palladio’s city…where everything in town down to the laundromat is named for him. As there was never a great ducal family here, there is no castle or palace or museum. Instead, the good wool merchants and gold smiths put themselves under the governance and protection of Venice, and thus grew very rich. They showed off in a frenzy of competitive palace-building, first in town, then on the surrounding hills, and along the Brenta River. There was only one architect to use, and he was local, available, talented and incredibly prolific with his designs and variations, which perhaps was abetted by the fact that his aesthetic was premised on rigorous symmetry and repetition. No quirky wierdness or idiosyncracy for Palladio! The local gentry seemed quite content to have their trophies look essentially alike (like Nantucket shingle) and the builder could grind them out like sausages. While this created a town of harmony and classical tidiness, I confess to a heresy…it gets monotonous. His greatest building, the Basilica (not a church but a huge meeting hall for civil ceremonies and business and guild meetings) is undeniably spectacular from the outside, with its white marble colonnades atop one another. Of course the interior is closed for restoration. His Olympian theatre is classically semi-circular with a brilliant proscenium arch, but pales by comparison with the Farnese in its radical departure and forward design. For the rest, it has been a nice walk-by on a chilly day. The unilluminated churches were so dark inside that one could not see the paintings at all, and kept banging into baptismal fonts and folding chairs left in odd places. On the train back I had a major confrontation with a conductor who tried to charge me 10 Eros more for a 3 Euro ticket because he said this was a “special” train (it was 15 minutes late, which I guess is special, made all the same stops and took exactly the same time). I said “NO” and he was stunned. I told him the ticket window man who sold me my ticket had directed me to this train by track and time, and if this was wrong it was not my fault. Seemed reasonable, if not totally comprehensible. Finally we blundered into the fact that we both spoke French, and I told him to call the police at the next station. Despite losing face with all the other fascinated passengers, he initialled my ticket and left grumbling (anti-Americanisms, I am sure). This prompted a sotto voce “bravo” from the passenger opposite me, a ravishingly beautiful, extremely fey, raven haired, translucent skinned, young MAN with the most arresting deep purple eyes I have every seen. It turns out he is, no great surprise here, a fashion model en route to Milano for a week long gig at the big style shows. His English and my Italian were not adequate to a lot more communicating, but he really could have been Thomas Mann’s Tadzio or one of Raffaelo’s or Botticelli’s androgynously exquisite youths. It is sad when the most gorgeous Italian I have ever met is male. Another foggy morning in the river valleys, and there is even frost on the fields. The two tiered trains give fine views (when the fog allows) from the upper decks, but alas the fog is thickening as we move toward Padua (and the general direction of the Venice Airport, which I choose not to think about for a few more days). Padua, had I seen it 2 weeks ago, might have impressed me more. It is a big city of 200,000 with a somewhat seedy center, that reflects little of its history as a great Roman horse-trading center. The University is large, and second in age only to Bologna’s, and housed the likes of Dante and Petrarch. And of course it was (and in a way still is) the home of the hermit, Saint Anthony, whose tongue, lower jaw (with teeth!) and vocal chords are quite visible in three separate, glass-fronted reliquaries behind his mercifully closed tomb in the main aisle of an enormous basilica styled loosely after Venice’s San Marco. It is a pilgrimage shrine owned and operated directly by the Papacy, complete with ushers in very formal uniforms and more places to take confession than in the rest or the world combined. I have never quite got the hang of venerating body parts, but clearly this is the primo place for it, and it obviously makes more money than Disneyland and Sea World combined. What Padua does have is the Scrovegni Chapel, with its totally frescoed interior done in an extraordinary 2 years (1303 to 1305) by Giotto, in a frenzy of creative genius that transformed Western art forever. How dumb-lucky that I saved this for my last day of roaming/gawking. I had been here 52 years ago as a quick side-trip from Venice because our tour-guide, whom I had a crush on, said it was “important”. Since then, the entire place has been structurally stabilized, cleaned, climate controlled, and attendance limited to 25 at a time (by advance reservation…but I got very lucky as there were 5 of us in the opening group and well over 100 waiting behind us). Still one is not hurried through, and the cleaning and the new illumination serve Giotto’s amazing pallette of colors dazzlingly well. The over-arching blueness of the sky, the almost baroque softness of some of the pastel robes, and the perfect details (the tears on the cheeks of the mothers at the slaughter of the innocents…in 1303!!!) (the droplets of water glistening on the perfect grey-green leaves of the olive trees) (the translucency of the water which one can see through to Christ’s lower body as John baptises him) (the grey/white/black almost grisaille horrors of hell with really ugly, scary critturs doing really ugly, scary things to naked human sinners and to one another, my favorite of which is the central monster eating one person and simultaneously evacuating another). Surely Dante saw this variety of sins and punishments before writing the Inferno. Indeed it seems as if the Renaissance (the Studiolo in Urbino, the Baptistry, all of it) began in this brilliant little room, with this brilliant man. It is the perfect coda to my two weeks of sensory overload and aesthetic indigestion; and it is one of the few things that I have ever RE-visited after a very long time only to find it better than remembered. My last day, and my mood did not improve with a scant 5 hours of sleep when my norm is 9 or more, due to the total lack of sound-proofing or double windows or drapes in a room that faces the bustling Mestre train station whence every 3 minutes 24/7 a piercing electronic “ding-dong” followed by a horrific screeching platform announcement entered my room and my consciousness. This is the priciest of all my hotels on the trip, and just received its 4th star…from the hearing impaired association of Northern Italy, I presume. I got even by breakfasting to grand excess, then reorganized my luggage for the trip home, and then looked outside at the drizzle, snow flurries and windy greyness of Venice. Sensing self-protectively that one more museum would have produced a catatonic seizure or vertigo (a tough choice), I took a brief walk of farewell, and hopped the bus to Marco Polo Airport which is trumpeting its 25% increase to 5 million passengers in 2004 (of whom I would wager at least 4.79 million were really unhappy!) First of all, Lufthansa was atypically rude, unhelpful and more Italian than worldly. When I expressed concern about the worsening weather and the dire forecast, and recounted my miserable ordeal getting to Venice 2 weeks prior, I was told that any change of planes would cost me twice as much in surcharge as my entire original ticket from Boston, and they said it venomously. I said, OK, I shall just check my 2 big bags and hang out. No early check ins. No lounge for waiting. Airport closes. No staying in public spaces. Go away. Come back at 5AM. Don’t be late. I stashed my big bags, for $12, found a nearby small hotel, and read Jim Doyle’s manuscript which materially improved my mood. Bravo, Author! But how does it end? Back at the airport at 4AM for another confrontation with the Nazis, who now decided that the same carry-on I had brought over was too big or too heavy to carry on again (admittedly it had some extra books and liquor bottles in it). They said it was a security threat! I had to check it and pay an extra $100 for a 3rd bag; so I grouched my way to Frankfurt’s long walkways to get the once-a-day direct flight to Boston, which is worth the trouble. The George Clooney/Catherine Zeta Jones comedy was about as unfunny as possible, but some of that may have been residual pique. I tried to ready Italo Svevo’s “Confessions of Zeno” which I could not engage with, so I decided to drink as much Lufthansa booze as I could to recompense my excess baggage fees, and I succeeded brilliantly, arriving in Boston on perfect Teutonic time (though I really could not read my watch face). Then the baggage carrousel broke down and it took 95 minutes to get my 3 bags, which of course were 3 of the last 4 to spew forth. I was sound asleee=p at Herbie and Ellie’s by 5 PM which was midnight Venice-time; and then awake at 3 AM drinking coffee and watching bad TV. The net result of all this is that I arrived in Hyannis 4 hours ahead of the next ferry…the high speed being once again hors de combat until March for more repairs. I am almost home…closer to seeing Chicken Little than the Quattrocento; I have 8 days to move the furniture and all the artwork out of 4 rooms for the painters to come in, to re-pack after doing laundry, to race up to wallow in Cecilia Bartoli's glory, race back, kiss the dog bye bye again, and leave for Ethiopia. Somehow the differentiation between “antique” which I am fast approaching and “antic” which I patently already am is blurring…but we shall deal with that when I have more time. Love to all.
Today is chilly, though sunny; and the entire town has suddenly turned into a giant flea market. Every square and loggia (and there are many many) is jammed with stalls of cheap everything…a strange juxtaposition with the chic and pricey boutiques that form the backdrop behind the windows. The pushing and shoving, mostly by little old women of truly Biblical ferocity, is life-menacing, especially the stubborn ones on bicycles. I fled, retreated, escaped into the great Ducal Palace, my destination anyway. It covers some 11 acres and is fully walled…a city within the city. Aside from its sheer size, the highpoints were two gorgeous courtyards, one fully colonnaded with two tier high columns of perfect proportions, all columns serpentine and beautifully carved, with one side left open to the manicured small lake adjacent. The other was a sensational formal garden, a parterre filled with blooming primroses in riotous color among the clipped boxwoods, and a giant resident cat on the prowl among the flowers. Inside, most of the vaunted Gonzaga art collection, the Titians, Caravaggios and Raffaels that made it the rival of the Vatican’s, are all gone…stolen or sold to the Vatican, the Hapsburgs or the Louvre depending on when and by whom. The most arresting remainders are some extraordinary ceiling frescoes that were simply not takable…especially one cobalt blue dome with golden stars and the images of all the constellations of the zodiac…great rampant gods and rams and bulls. It is lavish, dramatic and brilliant. Then there is the biggest Rubens one could imagine…and he liked BIG!! It was cut into pieces at some point, but enough has been reassembled to impress, and to show that the Gonzagas (even though I am sure Rubens and his atelier were smart enough to try to flatter) were even homelier than the horse-faced Hapsburgs. And there are nine enormous Belgian tapestries, done to cartoons by Raffael for the Papacy. I am not a huge tapestry fancier, but these are shot with a lot of silken thread to enliven the play of light on the folds of the red and blue robes, and on Christ’s almost translucently white garments. They are truly spectacular weavings and art. Indeed they were so good that the Hapsburg Emperors kept them in their private apartments in Vienna for a century or more. And finally there is the bridal room, totally frescoed by Mantegna in a remarkable series of eye-tricking, perspective-deepening scenes in which I found the backgrounds far more intriguing than the main figures. This happens to me a lot with Dutch and Flemish paintings, too. Much of the rest of the “acreage” were long public galleries, frequently changed to accord with changing tastes and fashions over 300 years. Once filled with famous art, there are now lots of Roman marbles, fresco fragments, and stuff. There are some recently rediscovered Pisanello fragments of frescoes of huge battles that the art world has gone nutsy over but which I did not follow easily. Overall, it is the size that startles. One really has a sense of the Renaissance at its most florid, grand and newly moneyed. Outside, the streets and squares have much the feeling of Florence; and then just beyond is a newer old centre filled with some Renaissance and many Baroque Palaces, with iron gates, courtyards, balconies and evocation of temps perdu. Most are now doctors and lawyers and corporate offices, but finely and tastefully preserved, and give the town a far greater importance than its present commercial or financial circumstances warrant. There are, however, a zillion small local banks, each with different names, that appear to be either private or agricultural co-ops. And there are almost as many barber-shops. In one I saw an elderly man cutting hair and wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. I had to ask, but he spoke no English, did not seem to know where he got it, or what it meant, and besides he was far too drunk at 11AM to pursue dialogue, much less be using sharp scissors in proximity to human body parts. En route to Suzzura, to change trains for Ferrara, we stopped at Romanoli, home to a huge fertilizer plant, that smelled more fetid than the Proctor & Gamble Ivorydale plant in Cincinnati on a bad wind day. At least the fields all around were gloriously green. But I fear so were the kids on the playgrounds. I just figured out that I can spend adequate time in Ferrara, add yet another detour to Parma, and still have enough time in Verona even with time for day trips to Vicenza and Padua. I am really into the spirit of this romp… see the truly great stuff, mooch about for a whiff of ambiente, and on to the next impulse. And looking at only the truly wonderful avoids that sensory overload that can come on with lots of mediocre. It is so much more suited to my fickle attention span than pottling through closed resort towns out of season and taking long bus rides with dreadful companions. Italian regional trains are ubiquitous and relatively cheap, and whilst this may not be P.C. They really do run on time. Besides, a la Cole Porter, we opened in Venice, we next played Cremona, then on to Verona…lots of quail in Cremona…Then on to Bologna, that hokey, pokey menace…Then Mantua, then Padua, then we open again …where? In Venice. I have never been a great fancier of Lambrusco, but it is the local specialty and I feel a sense of duty and obligation. I remain not a huge fan, but I have to admit that in its lovely hometown context, it ain’t all bad. Sort of the way I feel about scrapple or cheese steaks or Buffalo wings. My sense of duty did not extend so far as to require that I try the OTHER local specialty, stewed donkey. One must have standards and draw lines, si?
My Ferrara frolic, a full day amongst the d’Estes, was a sequence of highs and lows. No opera or music, of course. I wonder if Italy chose to give it up for Lent instead of smoking and shouting. The Duomo’s extravagant white marble façade, replete with tiers of columns, lions and griffons and divers beasties, belies another gloomy, all-over grey-green interior worsened and darkened to the point of unbearability by heavily draped windows. But the unprepossessing exterior of the Palazzo Schiffanoia Museum belies its interior delights: (1) a famous group of frescoes of the 12 months, with delightful scenes of the d’Estes benignly and certainly metaphorically overseeing the various harvests and plantings, the dispensing of justice, and all that good Ducal stuff. Over each month is not merely the astronomical sign but lovely Egyptian/Arabic 1st Century calendar symbols dividing each month into 10 or 11 day periods with strange icons called “deacons” for each. I was most intrigued by the depictions of the city and countryside in the 1400’s and of the many peasant trades and crafts at work. Accompanying all this are a series of brilliant stone carvings of the months, by a late 15th century unknown, perfect in every detail (I loved the hairnet and bare feet of the grape harvesters, a man sucking milk directly from a truly distraught looking goat, all in remarkable 7/8ths relief. (2) Unheralded by any guide books are two marvels…a white marble, 3 foot high, almost full relief series of scenes from the Stations of the Cross, salvaged from some small church when Napoleon conquered and closed all religious buildings, in which all the background figures, with intensely personalized and individual faces clearly intended as portraits, are darkened and shadowed, while the Jesus figure in each is polished to a gleaming, surreal white. A superbly theatrical device. And finally a collection of Goan ivory carvings brought back anonymously, coupled with the Ferraran carvings they inspired. Quite marvellous and unexpected. Otherwise, a surfeit of partly restored frescoes and fragments, lots of dark tapestries and Roman relics and copies, lots more lovely facades and a few handsome piazzas, but not the ambiente of the Renaissance that one felt in Mantova perhaps because Ferrara is three times larger. The d’Estes were always richer and more influential than the Gonzagas, producing an endless stream of well-endowed (meaning dowries) women to marry off in alliances. One d’Este killed his wife for adultery, prompting Browning’s “My Last Duchess”…one married Renee of France, protector of the Calvinists…One married Lucrezia Borgia (her 3rd husband) despite her well known reputation and her infamous ring. Calvin and Copernicus spent years here. Ariosto lived here. Tasso spent most of his life here. The d’Estes were uncommonly hospitable to all religions, even those considered heresies in other ducal courts. They welcomed the world’s Jewish community, whose long prosperity and assimilation and finally false sense of security ended so sadly with Giorgio Bassani’s portrait in “The Garden of the Finzi Continis”. Interestingly, it was only after 300 years of significant Jewish presence that, in 1624, the Papacy ordered the creation of a gated Ghetto. The swynagogue dates from 1481, and has 3 small chapels for the separate Spanish, German and local Italian traditions and languages and rituals. As it is Friday, I am going to try to figure out when sunset will occur on a cloudy day, and go to services tonight. Absent opera, it beats CNN as a cultural experience. As it turns out, the synagogue was not quite the romantic cultural wallow I had anticipated. I arrived too early, smack in the middle of a pre-Sabbath study session with a rabbi who was a doppelganger for Mel Brooks. There were 5 men and 10 women, several English-speaking, although after the discussion and before the services not one made a single gesture to welcome the obvious “stranger in their midst”. I was treated more like the gorilla in their mist. This has never happened to me anywhere else in the world, and I have ventured into many many synagogues in far wierder places. The prayer service was neither led nor chanted, so much as muttered individually, added to which the wooden benches were contoured as torture racks, perhaps also by Papal decree. I retreated to CNN which was actually better, as Cyprus is trying to reunite before joining the EU and before my possible adventure there next winter. The joy of hopping about Northern Italy is that, for a grand investment of one to two hours and less than $10 (even at today’s dollar-Euro disaster rates), you can change centuries or even milennia, move from one fascinating and idiosyncratic duchy to another, and always find some glory or story. It truly is beyond belief that this Po Valley, which was blessed with sun and fresh water and flat arable land but in truth not much more in the way of natural resources than a central location for maraquding hordes, could produce so much richness of sensibility and talent. Unlike Ancient Egypt, which could flourish on the Nile for thousands of years protected by huge expanses of uncrossable desert and develop art and culture and thought, this little region was able to do so between the wars and invasions and swirling cross-currents of Euro-history. Parma, where I am now ensconced in a dump of an albergo, but centrally located and with prices from the days when the dollar was beloved, started out as a scramble due to the fact that on Saturday the great “chiuso”plague returns and my hotel did not accept plastic. But the Duomo is only a half block away, and it is a handsome 12th century Romanesque structure whose frescoes are livelier and more personal than others seen. It’s greatest glory is the interior of the dome, Coreggio’s “Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven, in clouds of light and thousands of angels and seraphs and apostles and local benefactors.” It is even today, much less for its time, a tour de force of perspective and visual trickery, though candidly I have never seen quite so many feet and legs swirling upward. Fault-finder I may be…but NOT with the softly pink Baptistry next door. Built by Antelami in 1196-1216, the 8-sided exterior is spare and grave but so perfectly fine, with its 6 tiers of diminishing columns and its 76 small medallions of dragons and chimeras and fanciful reptiles, winged goats and gorgons, encircling it just a eye-level, that one enters it smiling…unprepared…seduced. OI!!! Does not seem quite le mot juste for the most perfect Renaissance interior in the world. Its 16-ribbed, soaring Gothic dome is a stylistic shocker but it works magnificently. Everything is frescoed and in a perfect state of preservation, never having been limed over and peeled clean, which was the fate of so much in Mantegna’s Ferrara. Here the months and the seasons are all personified, not just with symbolic fresco/figures, but above them in a higher colonnade with sensational full-round sculptures of farmers and harvesters and animals (and of course a few dignitaries). The 16 supporting columns for the first tier are each unique in the materials used, the style of the columns and the capitals…serpentine, grooved, split and tied, all perfectly worked. Whimsical beasts abound, and all is bathed in the glory of pinky orange Italian sunlight streaming throug some 48 windows (only recently glazed to protect the soft frescoes.) It is not excesively large, but it literally overwhelms one with perfection. Even Florence’s, with the Ghiberti doors thrown in, takes second place to this. The big problem for me is that I have found perfection and I still have 3 cities to go. Not wanting anti-climax too soon, I next attacked the Lombardi Museum, the Riserva Palace where Marie Louise lived for the last 3 years of her 31 post-Napoleonic life, as the Hapsburg (which she was) Duchess of Parma, after her long-time home was blown up by a revolutionary’s bomb. The one thing that can be said for this equine-faced lady was that she collected more stuff than even I (although of course I am still “active”). I then roamed about…saw the Charterhouse that Stendhal, who lived her quite a while during the Frenchified period of Napoleon and his widow, modelled his novel on. The archaeological museum was a bore. Most interesting, amongst the broken shards, was the fact that our old chum, Theodoric the civilized Visigoth, like the place and did a lot of reconstruction and resettlement in the area. Also Paul II, one of the Farnese Popes (as in the second act of Tosca Palace) gave the City as a gift to his son, commencing 2 centuries of Farnese rule. I did not realize that Popes acknowledged their kids quite so brazenly. I also did not realize that a Bourbon Duke of Parma became King of Naple and ultimately King of Spain, and founder of the Spanish Borbons. Not bad for a road crossing town. I did know that Toscanini was born here, but I am saving his house for tomorrow. The late afternoon sun on the pink stone is so seductive that I had to go out into it…even into 2 more gloomy churches, even one with an earlier Coreggio Dome with many fewer feet, and another with the tomb of Niepperg, Marie Louise’s boy-toy and eventual 2nd husband. In snowy marble it showed a life-sized nude youth, listening in erotic rapture to a somewhat (but perceptibly) older muse playing a lyre. It was almost a bad joke…but then the old muse was already gonzo when it was done. On impulse, I returned to the Baptistry, and found things I had been too dazzled to notice before…the incredible lightness and delicacy of the the pink marble ribs that support and divide the dome…the color scheme, with the dome frescoes dominated by rich burgundy and navy blue spiked with gold, and the lower scenes all lighter and brighter. I will probably return, moth-like, tomorrow. The warming sun and golden light have brought out tutti Parma, women in long furs, men carrying Valentines of flowers, noisome gaggles of students all smoking, lots of blacks hawking books about Africa and carved trinkets, lots of elderly couples classically promenading before the evening meal. It is a lively, lovely town with busy handsome piazzas that are clearly enjoyed. Up early to find the bustling town deserted, Casa Toscanini closed (it is Sunday and closed on Monday is not enough!). But amazingly, the Farnese Theatre and the National Gallery were opened and empty at 8:30AM. The theatre, built inside what had been a huge jousting room and first utilized for a spectacular Farnese/Medici wedding in 1619 (much painted and well-documented, even down to guest lists, who sat where, menus and gifts). Almost totally bombed out in 1944, it was rebuilt from the original detailed plans. Because it had originally been rushed for the wedding, it was built of unfinished wood, the numerous Roman-copy sculptures were plaster casts, and the few real ones that did survive are now displayed in packing cases in the museum. The restoration is faithful to the original, at least. But despite the cheap construction, the impact is immense of this first modern theatre, a real working theatre, with the first ever oval elongated seating plan, the first recessed proscenium with huge wings and flies (as though anticipating the enormous machines that would soon be demanded for sets) and the first real concern with sight lines and acoustics. It truly is history’s stage. The Museum is an exhausting schlepp of a place, though beautifully presented inside this gigantic, medieval-feeling, totally barren brick palace (or what survived the bombings…the ruins have been incorporated ornamentally into the adjacent park). The entire presentation is suspended free-standing on a huge grid of white skeletal pipes and black rubber-paved walkways. Some art is on the brick walls, some on lucite panels incorporated into the grid. Most of it is beautifully illuminated. It offers a grand chance to see, up close, works by fresco-masters like Coreggio and Parmigiano without lying on a church floor or straining your neck beyond endurance. There is a wondrous da Vinci sketch of a young girl, a Breughel portrait of Erasmus, a lovely El Greco…indeed these were great works, which came as a surprise after reading that the famous Farnese collection had gone to Naples and Madrid when the Duke became King, and enriched the Prado. It turns out these few gems remaining were bought by the later Parma/Bourbon Dukes. There are of course interminable ramp-walks of “school of “ stuff…lots of Mannerists, with their weird little symbols, rabbits, dwarfs, zonked looking men holding statues of naked ladies under waterfalls, mythic but over-sexed monsters…I quite liked the way the craziness was incorporated into the backgrounds of quite conventional portraits. I wonder what the people who sat for them, and paid for them, thought. I also like the Caraccis and their followers, heavily influenced to monumentality by Michelangelo and to astounding feats of light and shadow by Caravaggio, muscular, spare, swirling…almost a 19th century dark sensibility. But finally I O. D.’d. I checked out and fled to Verona, again a day early.

The time has certainly come to apologize to any dear, benighted, loyal friend who has slogged this far. This is not meant as an amateur course in Art History 2004, but only as an aide memoire for myself so that I can, if need be, remember some of the miscellany that caught my fancy. Forgive and forget, as you wish. I probably will, too; but then the memory is the second thing to go. On the train to Verona I helped a young couple (he was in a wheel chair) aboard, and we had one of those John Guare “Six Degrees of Separation” experiences that my peregrinations seem fraught with. Guido and Sylvia are from Trieste, and seemed actually delighted that I had visited as so few tourists do. She has an American mother, and is colloquial and fluent in English. Imagine my surprise that they just spent 10 days (I’ll bet it seemed longer) in New Brunswick, New Jersey and Piscataway at a Rutgers-sponsored neuro-science work-shop. Guido is specializing in the disease from which he suffers, a rare and unpronouncable one (especially in broken Italo-English). It snowed the entire time they were there, but they got into Manhattan both weekends. Now they were weekending in the Renaissance cities, which is what affluent young Triestinos do to escape a city that is, as I had quickly surmised, a kind of large, pasta-laden New Brunswick. They loved America, clearly seeing beyond Piscataway in winter. At first blush, Verona (with some 200,000 persons and at least as many dachshunds) is almost daunting to one who has spent ten days in towns of 6000 to 47,000. It has broad, multi-lane boulevards, lots of traffic, and the walking distances from the station to the old center and from sight to sight seem quite far. But I blundered into a lovely little albergo, well located and very reasonable, which is no mean trick in Italy today, a country that has grown quite expensive (I do not know how the locals, especially the many pensioners, manage). I do know that, since the switch to the Euro, there ain’t no coins in the fountains. The bad news is that, effectively, tutti Verona is chiuso, not for Monday but for restaurazione, which in Italy is an indeterminate sentence. The Museum, the Castel Vecchio, the Scaligeri Tombs and the Arena (i.e. the 4 sights one comes here for) are inaccessible; which means this is a wander and poke inside churches city. Happily it is sunny and mild, there are lots of pedestrian promenades and fine squares, and numerous churches that are immensely improved by the fact that the local building material is a dark rose-colored marble that can make almost anything beautiful. It is actually an odd hodge-podge of millennia…far and away the most Roman city thus far, with numerous triumphal arches, a still-used-for-summer-festivals amphitheatre that was in its prime second only to the Colosseum, but was then overlaid with medieval forts, towers, ramparts and moats, which were then in turn overlaid with Venetian and Renaissance and Baroque stuff. Jumbled, yes; but intriguing, too. The Church of San Zeno, despite the fact that its exterior is disquietingly striped in red and white in an unfortunate style called “Lombard”, contains a splendid Romanesque interior, a gorgeous Mantegna altar-piece (with all his Venetian colors, tricks of perspective and folded garments trapping light) and one of the largest, most peculiar modern paintings I have ever seen. It is a 30 or more feet wide representation of the crucified Jesus, painted in Dali-like realism, floating in a cloud of light high above the Italian farm-scape, but the perspective is that the viewer is looking ip from the soles of his feet, up his legs, actually into his crotch, with his head and torso disappearing into the upper background and his face not really visible except for his beard. Cascading down upon him and spilling all about is a torrent of real, rusty nails. It is clearly a sort of hommage to Mantegna’s famous study in depth perception that looks up at the Crucifixion, but it is very strange nonetheless. Also in the church is a charming, life-size statue of St. Zeno, about whom I knew Zero. He is holding a golden bishop’s stave, from which dangles a fish on a line, and he is laughing (Zeno, not the fish) quite heartily. Actually there are quite a few smiling and laughing statues all around Verona. Two of the Scala family tombs, which are fenced off but sort of visible, have sculptures (one riding a horse, the other laid out dead) that are both grinning quite cheerily. Perhaps it is because the Emperor gave them this rich turf. Perhaps because dachshunds poop so much less than Dalmatians. Or perhaps because they got Dante and Giotto to come for nice long visits. The old Roman forum, which became the Medieval herb market and which still contains the last 14th century frescoed exterior house in town, plus a Roman fountain and a Venetian column and a lot of cafes and T-shirt stalls specializing in “Romeo and Juliet University for Lovers” and ugly pashmina shawls and silly feathered carnavale masques, remains nonetheless a lovely spot to stop for a glass of local prosecco (quite nice) and watch other old men ogling young girls in super-tight jeans and spike-heeled boots. Clearly Romeo’s spirit lives long and dies hard in Verona. Seduced outside again by 60 degree sunshine on all that brick and wine-colored marble, I spent 4 more hours afoot, barely bothered that San Giorgio with its Veronese altarpiece was closed, and that the Duomo (primarily noteworthy for its rose-colored columns) wasn’t. I found a public foot-path through the Castel Vecchio and across the ramparted, crenellated, brick Scala Bridge. It is absolutely a stage set for Mercutio and Tybalt to duel upon. The fortifications, the cobbled streets, the heavy iron casement grills and gates and torch sconces, the nasty iron spikes against intruders, and the views and sound of the rushing Adige (shallow but torrentially swift between the Roman built embankments that make it more a channel than a river) had me in Capulet-land for most of my walk. The snap-back to today came as I joined 7 others on the ramparts to look down as a middle-aged, paunchy back-packer of decidedly Austro-German appearance, put down his pack, stripped from the waist down, strode into the river, squatted and nonchalantly (it must have been sans chaleur as the water was freezing) took a dump, washed off, didn’t bother to dry, re-dressed, waved to us and left. Talk about sang froid! Later, as I was contemplating the perfect view from the roman stone bridge, the sun-shadowed ruins of the Roman theatre behind which rose a medievally spare monastery, and above that the steep terraced gardens and tall cypress trees of a late Renaissance palace called San Pietro, I had an Edmund Wilsonian Shock of Recognition…this is where the likes of Visconti developed their warm lens/nostalgic eye skills. It soaked into their pores. It is everywhere. Then I saw the men fishing in the river, and considered warning them what might be headed their way from the squatting back-packer. But on such a die…carpe carp! Incidental trivia…a scorpion crawling on the table of the last supper is a symbol for Judas. Also the telling of rosary beads, originally a Byzantine practice, was suspended by the Western Church around the time of the Schism, but then heartily reintroduced after the Turkish defeat at Lepanto. I love that stuff! It was great luck that I took my long walk around Verona yesterday. Today is cold and grey and Verona does not enchant. Up early and onto a train to Vicenza, Palladio’s city…where everything in town down to the laundromat is named for him. As there was never a great ducal family here, there is no castle or palace or museum. Instead, the good wool merchants and gold smiths put themselves under the governance and protection of Venice, and thus grew very rich. They showed off in a frenzy of competitive palace-building, first in town, then on the surrounding hills, and along the Brenta River. There was only one architect to use, and he was local, available, talented and incredibly prolific with his designs and variations, which perhaps was abetted by the fact that his aesthetic was premised on rigorous symmetry and repetition. No quirky wierdness or idiosyncracy for Palladio! The local gentry seemed quite content to have their trophies look essentially alike (like Nantucket shingle) and the builder could grind them out like sausages. While this created a town of harmony and classical tidiness, I confess to a heresy…it gets monotonous. His greatest building, the Basilica (not a church but a huge meeting hall for civil ceremonies and business and guild meetings) is undeniably spectacular from the outside, with its white marble colonnades atop one another. Of course the interior is closed for restoration. His Olympian theatre is classically semi-circular with a brilliant proscenium arch, but pales by comparison with the Farnese in its radical departure and forward design. For the rest, it has been a nice walk-by on a chilly day. The unilluminated churches were so dark inside that one could not see the paintings at all, and kept banging into baptismal fonts and folding chairs left in odd places. On the train back I had a major confrontation with a conductor who tried to charge me 10 Eros more for a 3 Euro ticket because he said this was a “special” train (it was 15 minutes late, which I guess is special, made all the same stops and took exactly the same time). I said “NO” and he was stunned. I told him the ticket window man who sold me my ticket had directed me to this train by track and time, and if this was wrong it was not my fault. Seemed reasonable, if not totally comprehensible. Finally we blundered into the fact that we both spoke French, and I told him to call the police at the next station. Despite losing face with all the other fascinated passengers, he initialled my ticket and left grumbling (anti-Americanisms, I am sure). This prompted a sotto voce “bravo” from the passenger opposite me, a ravishingly beautiful, extremely fey, raven haired, translucent skinned, young MAN with the most arresting deep purple eyes I have every seen. It turns out he is, no great surprise here, a fashion model en route to Milano for a week long gig at the big style shows. His English and my Italian were not adequate to a lot more communicating, but he really could have been Thomas Mann’s Tadzio or one of Raffaelo’s or Botticelli’s androgynously exquisite youths. It is sad when the most gorgeous Italian I have ever met is male. Another foggy morning in the river valleys, and there is even frost on the fields. The two tiered trains give fine views (when the fog allows) from the upper decks, but alas the fog is thickening as we move toward Padua (and the general direction of the Venice Airport, which I choose not to think about for a few more days). Padua, had I seen it 2 weeks ago, might have impressed me more. It is a big city of 200,000 with a somewhat seedy center, that reflects little of its history as a great Roman horse-trading center. The University is large, and second in age only to Bologna’s, and housed the likes of Dante and Petrarch. And of course it was (and in a way still is) the home of the hermit, Saint Anthony, whose tongue, lower jaw (with teeth!) and vocal chords are quite visible in three separate, glass-fronted reliquaries behind his mercifully closed tomb in the main aisle of an enormous basilica styled loosely after Venice’s San Marco. It is a pilgrimage shrine owned and operated directly by the Papacy, complete with ushers in very formal uniforms and more places to take confession than in the rest or the world combined. I have never quite got the hang of venerating body parts, but clearly this is the primo place for it, and it obviously makes more money than Disneyland and Sea World combined. What Padua does have is the Scrovegni Chapel, with its totally frescoed interior done in an extraordinary 2 years (1303 to 1305) by Giotto, in a frenzy of creative genius that transformed Western art forever. How dumb-lucky that I saved this for my last day of roaming/gawking. I had been here 52 years ago as a quick side-trip from Venice because our tour-guide, whom I had a crush on, said it was “important”. Since then, the entire place has been structurally stabilized, cleaned, climate controlled, and attendance limited to 25 at a time (by advance reservation…but I got very lucky as there were 5 of us in the opening group and well over 100 waiting behind us). Still one is not hurried through, and the cleaning and the new illumination serve Giotto’s amazing pallette of colors dazzlingly well. The over-arching blueness of the sky, the almost baroque softness of some of the pastel robes, and the perfect details (the tears on the cheeks of the mothers at the slaughter of the innocents…in 1303!!!) (the droplets of water glistening on the perfect grey-green leaves of the olive trees) (the translucency of the water which one can see through to Christ’s lower body as John baptises him) (the grey/white/black almost grisaille horrors of hell with really ugly, scary critturs doing really ugly, scary things to naked human sinners and to one another, my favorite of which is the central monster eating one person and simultaneously evacuating another). Surely Dante saw this variety of sins and punishments before writing the Inferno. Indeed it seems as if the Renaissance (the Studiolo in Urbino, the Baptistry, all of it) began in this brilliant little room, with this brilliant man. It is the perfect coda to my two weeks of sensory overload and aesthetic indigestion; and it is one of the few things that I have ever RE-visited after a very long time only to find it better than remembered. My last day, and my mood did not improve with a scant 5 hours of sleep when my norm is 9 or more, due to the total lack of sound-proofing or double windows or drapes in a room that faces the bustling Mestre train station whence every 3 minutes 24/7 a piercing electronic “ding-dong” followed by a horrific screeching platform announcement entered my room and my consciousness. This is the priciest of all my hotels on the trip, and just received its 4th star…from the hearing impaired association of Northern Italy, I presume. I got even by breakfasting to grand excess, then reorganized my luggage for the trip home, and then looked outside at the drizzle, snow flurries and windy greyness of Venice. Sensing self-protectively that one more museum would have produced a catatonic seizure or vertigo (a tough choice), I took a brief walk of farewell, and hopped the bus to Marco Polo Airport which is trumpeting its 25% increase to 5 million passengers in 2004 (of whom I would wager at least 4.79 million were really unhappy!) First of all, Lufthansa was atypically rude, unhelpful and more Italian than worldly. When I expressed concern about the worsening weather and the dire forecast, and recounted my miserable ordeal getting to Venice 2 weeks prior, I was told that any change of planes would cost me twice as much in surcharge as my entire original ticket from Boston, and they said it venomously. I said, OK, I shall just check my 2 big bags and hang out. No early check ins. No lounge for waiting. Airport closes. No staying in public spaces. Go away. Come back at 5AM. Don’t be late. I stashed my big bags, for $12, found a nearby small hotel, and read Jim Doyle’s manuscript which materially improved my mood. Bravo, Author! But how does it end? Back at the airport at 4AM for another confrontation with the Nazis, who now decided that the same carry-on I had brought over was too big or too heavy to carry on again (admittedly it had some extra books and liquor bottles in it). They said it was a security threat! I had to check it and pay an extra $100 for a 3rd bag; so I grouched my way to Frankfurt’s long walkways to get the once-a-day direct flight to Boston, which is worth the trouble. The George Clooney/Catherine Zeta Jones comedy was about as unfunny as possible, but some of that may have been residual pique. I tried to ready Italo Svevo’s “Confessions of Zeno” which I could not engage with, so I decided to drink as much Lufthansa booze as I could to recompense my excess baggage fees, and I succeeded brilliantly, arriving in Boston on perfect Teutonic time (though I really could not read my watch face). Then the baggage carrousel broke down and it took 95 minutes to get my 3 bags, which of course were 3 of the last 4 to spew forth. I was sound asleee=p at Herbie and Ellie’s by 5 PM which was midnight Venice-time; and then awake at 3 AM drinking coffee and watching bad TV. The net result of all this is that I arrived in Hyannis 4 hours ahead of the next ferry…the high speed being once again hors de combat until March for more repairs. I am almost home…closer to seeing Chicken Little than the Quattrocento; I have 8 days to move the furniture and all the artwork out of 4 rooms for the painters to come in, to re-pack after doing laundry, to race up to wallow in Cecilia Bartoli's glory, race back, kiss the dog bye bye again, and leave for Ethiopia. Somehow the differentiation between “antique” which I am fast approaching and “antic” which I patently already am is blurring…but we shall deal with that when I have more time. Love to all.