VII.vi. Tranquillamente Marche

"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated."
- Auguste Rodin

Tranquillamente Marche is the slogan of the tourism promotion board for the Marche region. It seemed a fitting one as I made my way around for the second day to various minor towns on a combination of regional bus routes and century old railway lines. This is not a place for traveling quickly, though careful planning, as always, is the best strategy in successfully unlocking the hidden treasures present but near-forgotten, almost without fail, in every Italian town.
    Being at the mercy of a sparse bus schedule, I left Urbino at six o'clock in the morning for Fabriano, the place where in the twelfth century papermaking was first imported into the West from the Arab world. I was making my way along the Gothic Route, a self-guided art tour that the local tourism board had invented in order to draw people inland from the pull of the Adriatic. Its loose theme was florid gothic art from the fifteenth century, less relaxing but more varied than the kilometers of continuous sand that form the Marchesian coast. Despite these efforts at promoting medieval art, I still felt like the only tourist in the Marche that day, and moreover one who wasn't contributing to the tourism sector in any substantial way. Continuing on my route, I went from Fabriano to San Severino, then to Tolentino, the burial place of the Dominican Saint Nicholas (as opposed to Saint Nicholas Bishop of Bari). His tombstone is enshrined in the beautiful Capellone, a huge vaulted chapel entirely covered in frescoes depicting his life of preaching, almsgiving, and assorted good works. Like numerous other such shrines in Italy, Tolentino attracts a strange assortment of weekend pilgrims, many of whom couldn't care less about the frescoes in the Capellone, valuing instead what they serve to exhalt. Itinerant clergy, old frogs-in-the-holy-water-stoop types, and guitar toting gangs of catholic youth, and me.
    I arrived in Macerata, a vibrant hilltop University town, after the sun had set. The passeggiata there was particularly lively, the rather stark, stony appearance of the place altered by an admixture of bohemian students, matrons, and elementary school students. This was to be my last stop of the day before making my way to Ancona, where I had booked a room at the youth hostel. Just off the main piazza in Macerata, I happened upon a ridiculous live auction that seemed almost Dickensian in its dishonesty, something out of the Victorian world. In a tiny, packed room, the gaudiest oil paintings were being sold by an auctioneer who had no qualms about lauding these works to the skies and displaying his displeasure at the rather unremarkable prices being fetched.
    "Ladies and gentlemen," the man belted out indignantly, "I just don't know what to say here. I don't know what to tell you. This painting is clearly worth much more than the reserve of six hundred Euros (it was an awful florescent-pastel view of La Spezia, of the kind that hang in lesser hotel corridors); another by the same painter was sold in Rome just last month for six times as much, and it was only fifty percent larger. It is a travesty, ladies and gentlemen, that in our fair town these beautiful things are not appreciated. Wait, you know what, I am willing to halve the reserve price. Just this once, I will take the extraordinary step of reducing the reserve price. Three hundred Euros. The frame alone is worth that much (he tapped the spray-gilded frame loudly), but we're not selling frames here, ladies and gentlemen, we are selling quality oil paintings." The crowd looked unimpressed.

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    Upon arriving in Ancona, I had a bit of a run in with the Carabinieri at the train station. As I was about to make my way to the youth hostel, a squad of five friendly officers asked me for identification; a routine check. I politely showed them my Canadian passport, at which they smiled. "Bravo ragazzo," one of them said, "this will only take a minute." While they were radioing in my details to make sure I had my residency permit, one of the officers offered to show me how to get to the youth hostel. Upon returning, his colleagues still weren't able to confirm my identity over the radio. "Are you sure you have a residency permit, sir?" they asked me.
    "Of course, I mean, I went to the police station when I arrived, and I applied, and… " Just then I remembered that my residency permit was applied for with my Swiss passport, and that, furthermore, I had neglected to actually pick it up from the police station once it was ready. I became somewhat agitated at the prospect of having to explain this to them.
    "And what?" They were getting more suspicious.
    "And, well, I think my permesso is on another passport.
    "Another passport?"
    "Yes, I'm also a Swiss citizen. My study permit is on that passport."
    "I see. Let's just step into the office here, so we can figure this out more easily." Fearing some kind of diplomatic incident, I quickly offered up my University of Bologna identification, my Sala Borsa library card, and anything else that might corroborate my legitimacy. Still not finding me registered in their computer, and all of them remarking on how strange this was, their supervisor told them to let me go. "Let's not make mountains out of molehills," he said. "Let him be on his way, but," turning to look at me, "you'll go down to the station first thing next week and sort this out?"
    "Of course," I said, and with that I left the Carabinieri, wondering why on earth they would be so concerned with the comings and goings of a skinny, mild-mannered, only slightly out of order art history student from Toronto.


The town of San Severino, set in a typical Marche landscape, still dormant in the mid-March sun