X.x. Pilate's Well

"In Bologna, I was in the company of men with hearty appetites… and they
talked, as far as I could understand when they spoke Italian, of only three
things: of good food, the joys of love, and the pleasure of music…."
- Otto Von Taube

I couldn't help but smile as little Maristella Patuzzi, the virtuoso eighteen-year-old violinist from Ticino, took to the makeshift stage that had been set up in the cloister of Santo Stefano, a warren of seven different churches much revered by the local population. Maristella was pretty, in a pink dress with her hair made up, gracious under the watchful eye of her father who accompanied her on the piano. The little gargoyles, the audience, even the Benedictine monks on exchange from Ghana, all looked on as the first few notes rung off the enchantress' bow, an unaware Saint Cecilia.
    Or perhaps the enchantress was the city itself, reinventing itself as the summer set in, with its stagnant heat and only slightly cooler evenings. The students and less desirable seasonal occupants had begun to leave, and in their place a flurry of musical festivals had cropped up, part of an ambitious cultural program intended to reinvigorate the parched city. I had to walk past no less than five of these such concerts before taking my seat in the floodlit cloister of Santo Stefano, my back to Pilate's Well, a stone basin said to have been used by the Roman governor himself, but in reality dating only to the ninth century. I wondered if the venue, anchored in the millennial mist of the city's birth, had ever hosted something so young, elegant, and ephemeral as the sweet-sounding violinist.
    Two days prior I had been to a concert of medieval behind the towering apse of San Domenico, watched over in that case by Dominican monks in robes white like ghosts. The performance had included fire-throwers and jugglers, adding to the hues that had been lending the city an air of pageantry all month. Even the pale presiding abbot, introducing the concert, couldn't help but jealously mention the colour returning to the cheeks and tunics of the city's audiences.
    Perhaps I seem to be spending an odd amount of time in the company of clergy, but to experience any sort of culture in the red city one has to be either firmly liturgical in taste or resolutely socialist, and I am definitely more inclined towards the former, all technicalities aside. Santo Stefano, though, a Bolognese favourite, is less ecclesiastical than one might think considering that it is made up of seven interlaced churches. It is more a Pantheon than a place of devotion. Its aged walls, some of the city's oldest, have become an unexpected shrine to the city's war dead; dozens of marble plaques bear witness to the legions of young soldiers who died in distant, far less peaceful places. Corfu, Gorizia, Somalia mark the defeats of a tearful Italian century otherwise forgotten in as capricious a city as Bologna.
    In a lighter vein Santo Stefano is also home to a little museum-cum-apothecary shop, whose elderly guardian surveys a small collection of fourteenth century paintings, sadly not for purchase, which rub shoulders with highly saleable monk-made products such as Camaldolese anti-wrinkle balm and fennel liqueur. An animated if somewhat senile figure, the old Benedictine tends to ramble on about the superiority of his merchandise, the chocolate hand made without preservatives, the rhubarb distillate excellent for adding to an after dinner coffee. I have made the store a compulsory stop on my tour of Bologna. The eccentric monk's salesmanship is as important and unusual a part of Santo Stefano as the ancient decagonal chapel or gloomy Lombard basilica; he once asked my friend Esther, nineteen years old, whether she had gone through puberty and would be interested in acne-fighting cream, all the while referring to my friend Aldous as "the Japanese one." In the niche market of trappist cosmetics, a quaint lack of political correction is an integral part of the customer's experience.

X.ix. Babylon

"In Italy, the bicycle belongs to the national art heritage in the same way as the Mona Lisa by Leonardo, the dome of St. Peter's or the Divine Comedy. It is surprising that it has not been invented by Botticelli, Michelangelo, or Raphael. Should it happen to you, that you mention in Italy that the bicycle was not invented by an Italian you will see: All miens turn sullen, a veil of grief falls over all faces. Oh, when you say in Italy, when you say loudly and distinctly in a café or on the street that the bicycle- like the horse, the dog, the eagle, the flowers, the trees, the clouds- has not been invented by an Italian (for it were the Italians that invented the horse, the dog, the eagle, the flowers, the trees, the clouds) then a long shudder will run down the peninsula's spine, from the Alps to mount Etna."
- Curzio Malaparte

Verona, gateway to the northern world, is where I was left alone again. This sort of occasion was almost becoming routine, a necessary product of visitors and weekend excursions. Leaving Lissone and the generously lent apartment of a friend, the two of us arrived in the city on a Sunday morning, while it was still relatively quiet, in that treasured gentle silence of timely arrival.
    Apart from a few lonely sacristans and senile priests, we speak to very few people on our travels. Alone, I am forced to be rather more verbose, chewing the fat with barmen, trying sometimes vainly to decipher the various accents Italy's regions can concoct. With a companion, things change. Things had changed quite decisively in past year or so, actually, quite unrelated to being abroad; Italy was just a happy coincidence, the final flourish in a long sought apotheosis.
    But saint Cecilia would chastise me for my hyperbole, god-like or not, and so I'll return to those topics that are more mundane, less self-aggrandizing: bicycles, for example.
    Quite Austrian in its demeanour, if not its glorious, garden-hung architecture, Verona is a well-organized city. It goes so far as to offer free bicycle rentals for tourists, provided these are returned the same day before three o'clock in the afternoon. Perhaps this requirement is due to the looming Dolomites casting unusually early evening shadows upon the city, but it is nevertheless symptomatic of the sort of scheduling problems one can face here or anywhere in Italy. Certain attractions do not close for lunch, but consequently close by three or four in the afternoon, while others that do close for lunch only reopen at about this time. Add to this a mix of late closings, early openings, holidays, and workers' strikes, and organizing a day of traveling, or anything else for that matter, quickly becomes nightmarish. In the end, I left some identification with the bicycle renter, promised to return the two vehicles by mid-afternoon, and set out with my travel companion to do precisely the opposite.
    The most beautiful northern Italian city after Venice, Verona became awash with visitors as the morning ended, progressively crowding the verandas of the Listòn, a landlocked equivalent of the Venetian Riva. Bicycles, then, are essential for reaching the city's lesser-known parts, away from the crowds that mingle strangely between the enormous mock-Egyptian sets for Aida that were temporarily set out in front of the roman amphitheatre, one of Europe's premiere opera venues.
    Verona's monuments are definitely in the class of those which inspire inadequacy. From a strictly artistic point of view, perhaps only from an artistic point of view, most of northern Italy feels this way, civilized enough to throw one's own civility into doubt. It charms you, it wins you over in ways the opulence of Paris or the grandeur of New York cannot. It is the land of merciless captivation.

---

    Surrendering my companion to the neat German train that sped out of sight at six in the evening, I pondered my options. I still had the keys to the bicycles, but lacked any sort of motivation to prolong my day, as well as the driver's license I had surrendered earlier as collateral. I would eventually need that document back, and I began to doubt whether keeping the bicycles for three hours beyond the closure of the rental office was really worth having to apply for a new permit. I made up a package containing an apologetic note, a self-addressed stamped envelope, and the keys to the bicycles, forced it through the opening at the darkened office door, and hoped for the best.
    Three days later I got my driver's license back in the mail.

X.viii. In a Milan Garden

"But Fancy with the speed of fire
Hath passed to Milan's loftiest spire,
And there alights 'mid that aerial host
Of Figures human and divine,
White as the snows of Apennine
Indurated by frost."
- William Wordsworth

Not much is left of the Milan where Augustine gave his sermons. The roman walls and academies have been replaced by fashionistas and haughty storefronts, but the occasional quiet garden can be glimpsed through the closing gate from which a businessman or black Mercedes exits. The outer face of the city is grim, grimier even than Warsaw or Pittsburgh, but it hides unique treasures, cloistered away from the frenetic tempo of the sprawling city.
    Mediolanum, meaning "middle of the plain" in the drawn out Latin, is where Lombardy comes together and finally confides in the Po valley to take it east towards Emilia. Like Bologna, it used to be a city of water, crisscrossed by canals, but its constant wealth has made for dense, often unrecoverable layers of history. Most famous is Leonardo's Last Supper, so unendingly controversial, that, like the past, disintegrates a little more each day.
    If Leonardo was the intellectual that definitively ended the middle ages, eleven centuries earlier someone else was in Milan instigating them. Saint Augustine moved to the city in 383, still reeling from a youth of theft and recklessness, not yet entirely sure what he was. He became friends with Ambrose, a bishop whose immense basilica is still one of the city's major monuments. Augustine is in the shoe-soles of my first adolescent steps, or at least the gentle, passionate part of him that penned the Confessions, the instigator of my journeys through Petrarch and Keats. I had less time for the eight hundred or so sermons he left behind, but being in Milan, the city where he settled, converted, and ultimately found great fame, I thought a great deal about him, his uncanny self-awareness, his humanity. I think that if I could I would aspire to be another Augustine.
    In Pavia, two days ago, Sarah and I had even been able to glimpse the saint's tomb, a haughty affair of marble angels, but that was all. In Milan we were on the hunt for early medieval ivories and a certain fifth century mosaic fragment of the good shepherd, but no Augustine. By the end of the day, Sarah had seen her mosaic and even purchased a handbag from a suitably elegant shop on Corso Ticinese and I, I had no more reason to continue on to anxious Petrarch or tragic Keats. The day was done.

X.vii. A Dusty Altar

"Painting throughout its history has served many purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been left borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant.... The act of faith consisted in believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance."
- John Berger

In the tiny church of San Bernardino in Bergamo there is a priceless painting by Lorenzo Lotto, hung high above the altar, difficult to see beyond the railing that separates the choir from the rest of the church. An older parish priest, sweeping up dust, beckoned Sarah and I, together with another woman interested in the painting, to come closer, beyond the threshold that usually divides the clergy from the populace. As we stepped forward, he seemed most interested in conversing with me.
    "You are a student?" he asked.
    "Yes. Not here, but in Bologna for a year. We're from Canada, though, we're only spending the day in your city." I tried in vain to include Sarah in the conversation, but he was uninterested either because he had been trained to distrust beautiful young women or for other, more deeply felt reasons.
    "Ah, a young student, soon to be a doctor in fine arts."
    "Well, hopefully, but not all that soon."
    "Yes, I can see it in your eyes. You will be a great doctor. I can see it in the clarity of your eyes. Use them. Look at this beautiful work!" He gestured towards the looming, jewel-toned canvas hanging above a forest of candlesticks.
    "Yes, Lorenzo Lotto was a very interesting painter you know, one with a very profound sense of spirituality…" I found myself, for the second time in three months, engaged in a Sunday morning conversation about Lorenzo Lotto with a priest.
    "And you're Catholic or Protestant?" he asked me, as though those were the only two categories he had learned about at his seminary.
    Caught completely off guard, I paused for a moment, and then answered cryptically. He smiled, and I turned away to continue examining the painting. It was only as we were about to leave that he spoke to me again.
    "You love beauty."
    "Yes."
    "And beauty will save the world." I wasn't sure if he meant this last phrase as a question or as a statement.
    "Yes," I answered, plainly, for it was an axiom I had cherished since long before I had known Lorenzo Lotto, maybe even before I had ever known Keats.
    "Are you sure of it?"
    "Of course," I replied, as though it were so obvious it needn't be said. He then became less grave, almost as though he had found the assurances he was seeking in my unqualified answer. He shook my hand, said goodbye, and returned to his work.
    To me that priest treaded the most Christian of lines, one which falls between doubt and certainty, failure and confidence. He wasn't just a literary topos, some ineffectual Friar Lawrence or Dostoyevskian monk. He was real, and he swept dust off the altar of his little parish church as the world outside was collapsing in on itself, oblivious, entranced by the bright eyes of a younger man.

---

    "You lied to a priest!" she said to me in a half-mocking tone as we exited the church and walked up via Pignolo on our way to Bergamo's upper town, repeating, as usual, what we both had on our minds at the exact instant.
    "I did not lie to a priest," I said, "what I am isn't considered protestant in Italy. Besides, I'm not protesting anything." I was being glib, a sign of defensiveness, totally unnecessary in the face of perhaps the only individual who understood my actions totally.
    "And I'm Catholic in sentiment, anyways." I said, after a long pause, concluding the conversation.



The spires of Bergamo

X.vi. Gra Car

"As the train moved along the bank I awaited from afar the lantern and the spires of the Certosa. Behind a gathering of poplars it appears; its bricks form clusters of columns and the square towers of the apse support their little pinnacles with ease, perhaps too much ease. The reddish church stands out in the middle of the alluvial plain, among the marshes. It searches in vain for the city that guaranteed its prosperity. The wall that surrounds the complex out of which this tanned giant rises never encircled anything but a tomb, separating its silent custodians from the rest of the world…"
- André Maurel

Early on a Thursday morning I met Sarah at the station in Milan, not as auspiciously as in Paris for the fascist gargoyles of Milano Centrale are no Gare du Nord, but the prospect of four Italian days, reunited, was nonetheless a joy. We had planned for a busy first day, somewhat ambitious considering our mutual lack of sleep. It was not even eight o'clock however, and the day that lay before us was long. We made our way to the Brera after a cappuccino that seemed to recall my companion to her thoughts, then to the Poldi-Pezzoli museum, and to the Duomo, centre of Milanese congestion. Finally, out of the city to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and to Pavia itself, then back across Milan to Lissone and the apartment of my friend Cecilia, who had graciously lent it to us. It seemed an impossible itinerary for one single day, but in the end we were successful.
    The world has changed a lot since the Grand Tour. Things are closer together than in the time of Goethe and Byron. Trains rush incessantly between cities, museums are open late, and seeing an altarpiece no longer requires a protestant pleading letter to a romish bishop. This is a remarkable change.
    Even within the past few years, a revolution has occurred for our purposes, and the internet is now the traveler's greatest friend. For the tourist it is a false front, luring him unawares into package deals and all-inclusive cruises, but for the traveler, the real, hardened lover of exploration, there has been no greater leap forward than this. Knowledge has been grandiosely democratized, and every itinerary, down to the smallest detail, can be planned with a few clicks. My technique of sketching out the planned route of each day of travel on a sheet of paper, filling in the hours each museum would be open, when each train or bus would leave, what alternates were available, and so on, would not have been possible ten years ago without a flurry of frustrating phone calls. Fifty years prior it would not have been possible at all.
    With a little bit of planning, more is within a day's reach than ever, and those lengthy peregrinations of two centuries past are all but obsolete, because modernity, for all its discontents, has distilled the world that lies before us. A few days here and there, a steady heel and a well-packed lunch, and everything is possible.
    "Europe used to be cheap," our elders always said, but Europe also used to be closed, dilapidated or under interminable restoration. Now it was open, and even the Carthusian monk who that afternoon noiselessly guided us from one part of the Certosa to the other seemed pleased to see us, even as we declined the opportunity to purchase the premises' namesake liqueur. The charterhouse, intact down to the brass taps that feed the ancient lavabo in the cloister, is the privileged home to some twenty-four monks who guard the tombs of the once-powerful Visconti dynasty. Each of these custodians lives in an identical miniature brick house, complete with garden, fireplace, and personal well, arrayed in rhythmic intervals around an immense cloister. Called the Gratiarum Cartusiae, the charterhouse of the graces, it surges up from the lush Lombard countryside, underrated because no other romantic adventure travel tales have sprung from it, however fertile the ground might be. The whole complex is surrounded by several kilometres of a severe wall, which evidently fell beyond the spectrum of our meticulous planning, and we were forced to circumvent it on foot in the baking sun of a very hot day before finally reaching the single entranceway that even modernity couldn't bring closer. Still, the trek was worth the reward of a cool, oasis-like interior, though before long we were out again beyond the walls, continuing our day in the verdant but shadowless plain.



The ornate façade of the Charterhouse


A certain someone in the little cloister


The fantastical, immaculately preserved brickwork of the Certosa


The larger cloister, surrounded by twenty-four identical monk houses

X.v. The Spanish College

"One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves."
Miguel de Cervantes

Tonight I was invited to dinner at an apartment shared by three Italian girls, across the street from one of Bologna's most reclusive sights, the Collegio di Spagna. This institution, built and founded in 1364, annually hosts twenty-four students from Spain who have demonstrated outstanding ability in the field of jurisprudence. The students must be male, catholic, and of a good family, and in return they receive full tuition, prestige, and a generous stipend. The College building, which I visited in the fall, is rarely open, as it has the same status as an embassy; officially it is Spanish soil and all its students are subjects of the Spanish crown. Dark and forbidding, the building contrasts with the rest of the university in its exclusivity.
    The trio of girls who cooked us dinner seemed to be quite enamored with a number of members of the Collegio, and one of its members visited us later in the evening. He was rather arrogant, denying the mere possibility that I could ever have been allowed to visit the institution. I left without much regard for the royal subject or his college.

X.iv. The Hundred Steps

"Guercino was a great draftsman and a felicitous colourist."
- Ludovico Caracci

Cento, some forty kilometres north of Bologna, is almost solely known for being the birthplace of the Baroque painter, Guercino. In Italy, a painter gives his native town prestige almost to a greater degree than a poet or a pope. Of course, this might only be the result of aggressive tourism offices keen to promote a local who can make for a guided itinerary that passes by storefronts and restaurants. Either way, the stock of otherwise unremarkable villages and communes dot Italy like the freckles of a pretty girl's face.
    Cento is one such freckle. True, it is typical if not picturesque, and Goethe seems to have enjoyed his stay here on the way to Bologna, but aside from Guercino, Cento has very little to set it apart. I ventures here to see an exhibit of the painter's sanguine drawings, far more seductive to my tastes than his large, imposing finished works. Upon entering the town's little art gallery, I noticed a wall of posters, each celebrating an exhibition of Guercino's works held in the town. Clearly there had been many, the obvious work of a mad, persistent, or charming curator.
    Continuing northwards from Cento, I went to the yet smaller settlement of Bondeno. My photographer aunt Gabrielle, who had visited me in March, had some of her works featured in an exhibit entitled Seno Guerriero: Images of the Amazons, the myth of the armed woman from the XVII century up to the present day. The exhibit was interesting, and certainly quite different from the usual stops on my travels. Most of all it was astoundingly cosmopolitan, quite rarified for a town the size of Bondeno anywhere but in Italy, where such precociousness is to be expected.



The main square in Cento


My Aunt's photographs as the Seno Guerriero show in Bondeno