II.xviii. L'alloween

"There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world."
- Jean Baudrillard

The tide of decontextualised, meaningless North American rituals that is submerging Europe like a continental Aqua Alta hit Bologna particularly hard on a Sunday night that should have been quieter than most, given that daylight savings time had just been invoked and it was actually an hour later than it seemed. But Ognissanti, a day when most Italians venture out to the cemeteries that since antiquity have been located far from city centres, is a holiday in Italy, and people felt no particular desire to start the solemnities of the following day earlier than necessary. The youth of Bologna were out in droves, even more than usual, and the authorities had simply decided to close Via Zamboni to traffic altogether, rather than have to deal with dispersing stubborn steeet-drunk crowds.
    For some reason, the concept of All Hallow's Eve has become somewhat muddled in transatlantic translation, much like the status of the pumpkin. Trick-or-treating would be all but impossible in a city such as Bologna where the entire population lives in apartment blocks, so the young children who are most intended to benefit from the night actually have no part in it here. Instead, bands of university students prowl the streets dressed only like zombies and witches, holding large bottles of Moretti beer in their hands, and making various sorts of street-side transactions. Some of the costumes are genuinely hard to recognize as such, owing to the huge number of punks who roam the streets in Bologna ordinarily. The idea that people of all ages can dress up as anything they wish and enjoy themselves nonetheless has not yet come across, nor has the widespread distribution of candy, or the acceptance of Halloween as an alcohol-free event for youngsters. A parent would be ill advised to let children out of the house on this night, if any, into the dark streets of Bologna. If it is meant to be a frightening night, it is.

II.xvii. Nacht Zug

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to horses."
- Emperor Charles V

The train that took me to Florence for a second time, on Saturday morning, is a transalpine invader. It is in fact a Deutsche Bahn sleeper train en route from Munich and the Brenner Pass, making its penultimate stop in Bologna. As the Italians have intelligently renamed the Bavarian capital into a more palatable Monaco, one could be mistaken and think that the train hailed from the French Riviera, but this is not the case, as is belied by the German built and labelled train carriages that generally seem to be cleaner than those operated by the Forrovie dello Stato.
    This train, costing only 3.95 Euros for the Bologna to Florence segment, is by far the cheapest option. It is approximately two thirds cheaper than the Eurostar, Italy's premium and supposedly high-speed train, which is only ten minutes faster in this case. Of course, the Nacht Zug train only passes through Bologna relatively early before spending the day at the train station in Florence and heading back northwards again around ten o'clock at night. This schedule suits me very well, as Florence in the morning is at least somewhat devoid of the crowds of tourists that mar it progressively throughout the day. Though it was late October, there were still a considerable number of visitors in the city, but Florence is a city of almost infinite treasures and it is possible to find some solitude if one knows where to seek it.
    A few hundred metres from the train station, then, is the first of many poorly frequented hidden masterpieces of the Tuscan capital; the Cenacolo di Fuligno. All that is left of this once thriving monastery is its enormous dining hall, decorated with a single glorious fresco of the Last Supper painted by Perugino. I rung at the unmarked door that is the Cenacolo's entrance and an elderly custodian let me in, free of charge, into the enormous hall. There was only one other person there at the time, an art student who was sketching the figure of Saint John in a peaceful, quiet trance.
    But today I did not have the luxury of spending the hours I would wish gazing at this tiny, though beautiful, fragment of Florentine art. I went on to visit several other frescoed halls, remnants of old convents, before venturing on to San Marco, the peaceful resting place for the majority of the life work of the blessèd angelic painter, Fra Angelico. He painted in the sweetest, purest, simplest, most gentle style imaginable, and the centuries have remembered him as a man who reflected his art. Such contrast this was to Savonarola, the fiery Dominican preacher who was eventually to exercise an iron grip on this convent some fifty years after Angelico's death.
    And after these sights yet more. Florence is interminable. Its inexhaustibility only adds to mine, and I still managed to have the energy to visit the Medici Palace, the Accademia Gallery, and the Pitti Palace before I returned to Bologna for the night.




Perugino's Last Supper, at the Cenacolo di Fuligno


Fra Angelico's Annunciation, at the Convent of San Marco


The chapel of the Medici-Riccardi palace in Florence, with frecoes by the most successful of Fra Angelico's students, Benozzo Gozzoli

II.xv. Protest

"What great noise there must be, when this enormous school [Bologna] is full, when this army of students and professors give themselves freely to a forceful dialectic that engenders so many ideas and so many paradoxes!"
- Jules Janin

Today classes were cancelled. There was a student strike at the University of Bologna. What exactly was being protested I didn't quite grasp. I understood, at some level, that it was a series of contentious reforms that were being implemented by the conservative government in Rome. To be honest, I don't know a great deal about Italian politics, nor do I very much care. To me, political intrigue, especially Italian political intrigue, is one of those things that is too petty, too pedantic, too inconsequential to really merit investigation. It is something so totally removed from the field of the artistic, the divine, the true, that it is really just a waste of time. Ideas are important, certainly, and people's lives all the more so, but there are better ways of bettering the world and leaving ideas to posterity than to follow politics like some quasi-intellectual spectator sport. My Professors, however, were not as passive as I. Lucia Corrain was certainly in favour of the students, as she had explained at length in class several days ago.
    I find this funny. It is in instances like this that Art History, a subject that is otherwise so rigorous, so scientific in its pursuit of humanistic truth, loses its objectivity through overextension. Aren't professors to be unbiased? I recall a point in time, several years ago, when a favourite professor of mine in Toronto suspended his lecture to have a discussion about the situation in Iraq. What in blazes does Iraq have to do with High Renaissance Art? I make the point only now because I agree with both professors' viewpoints on the respective subjects, but disagree over the decision to broach such subjects in class.
    Academia exposes itself to attack from the Right when it so lamely tries to step outside the ivory tower, and it loses the objectivity it values so much in other contexts. Of course the Universities are dominated by progressive thinkers, as they should be, but intellectuals need to take the moral high ground and not use their position as a platform for opinion à la Fox News. Besides, isn't lecturing a class of twenty year olds about the ills of Thatcherist educational reforms preaching to the converted?
    Not that things will change much once the students have protested. They don't quite have the clout of railway workers or mining unions, and to be honest I don't think they care. After a few hours of picketing in Piazza del Nuttuno, it's back to Via Zamboni for midday pannini and a few drinks, or, better yet, off to Rimini to spend one of the last nice days of fall on the beach.
    I for one didn't even make the protest on Wednesday morning; I slept in instead.

II.xiv. Guided Tours

"It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy’s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses."
- Anthony Burgess

This morning, my History of Modern Architecture class consisted of a guided tour of San Petronio, the great red brick basilica that dwarfs Bologna's Piazza Maggiore. It was quite basic, and a little bit reminiscent of those broad, vague introductory art history courses, but it was wandering around in a church, and there isn't much I prefer to do no matter how elementary.
    At one point, while our group of fifteen or so was wandering through the aisles, a chorus of women began to sing through a mass that was being celebrated in a side chapel. They were atrocious, and definitely an argument in favour of ordaining women so that they would be able to sing less and speak more.
    Even professor Denzi, usually as oblivious as can be to her surroundings (she speaks at a whisper, even while taking her class through the busy, ear ringing clamor of Bologna's streets), noticed the inability of the old women to carry a tune.
    "Do they sing that badly in church in America?" she asked me.
    "I'm Canadian", I said. The wit of her ad lib diminished quickly.
    "Oh. Well, in Canada do they sing in church? Any better than that?"
    "Um, generally, I suppose", I answered.
    "Good." She said, before continuing to explain column structure to us, as the makeshift choir sang on.

II.xiii. Visitors

"Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!"
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

My friend Marko and I were each born on opposite sides of Europe; he remembers living in Tito's Yugoslavia as a child, while I remember yearning for each trip across the Atlantic. His past memories are much more dramatic than mine, as he has witnessed the birth and rapid development of his country; Canada in all its youth is an ancient land when compared to the Republic of Slovenia, though in truth nationhood and independence are two very different things.
    Marko and I became friends this summer, at a conference in Toronto, and we promised to visit each other while I was to be in Europe. We had in fact planned to embark on a slightly ludicrous road trip across much of Western Europe in his car, in order to attend a get together some other friends of ours were having over the weekend in Brussels. After our initial enthusiasm with the plan wore down, we decided that we would stick to Italy for the time being, since the drive from Ljubljana to Bologna is less than four hours.
    Marko and I had a grand time over the few days he was here. The two of us have a very similar sense of humour, one which indulges in irony and takes nothing more seriously than necessary; it was a welcome break from the earnest Italic sentiment. Thus, we mingled with and mocked the great crowds who gather nightly on Via Zamboni, we went on a day trip to San Gimignano, Siena, and other small Tuscan towns, and we even ventures out to the Ikea that lies on the outskirts of Bologna.


Marko and I, in front of the small Tuscan village of Colle Vale d'Elsa


A view of the church of San Domenico and a blazing sunset in Siena

II.xii. The Faculty Club

"Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation
Limps after in base imitation."
- William Shakespeare

Well-preserved older women have been teaching me a lot of Art History lately. My professors, for example, are all roughly the same type of glamorous female academic that has no real equivalent in North America. They yet again serve to illustrate the idea of bella figura so prevalent here, a dignity and poise that has its roots in the Renaissance and Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. For these professors, lecturing is a stage show, even if the audience is loathe to demonstrate its appreciation
    Firstly, of course, there is professor Muzzarelli, with a university-wide reputation for being a snob, intellectual or otherwise. She presides over my class of medieval history, and teaches it in an abstract but not altogether disengaging way. Her outfits, however, blend her seriousness as a scholar with a panache and originality seldom seen among her kind. Just last week she arrived in class wearing the severest of black suits accompanied by garishly multicoloured socks. It was not something just anyone could get away with, but somehow she was able to pull it off.
    Secondly, there is Deanna Lenzi, the professor with whom I am least familiar, and perhaps also the least stunning of the trio of Bolognese women I take notes from. She is old, and has the faded but still domineering presence of a woman who had to teach through years of being among the few women in her department. Now things have changed, but she remains my sole prima fascia, or first rank, professor, though she is perhaps a little worse for the wear, in terms of memory and appearance. She teaches a small Modern Architecture course that focuses on Bolognese monuments. It fascinates me, and I am looking forward to the classes that are devoted to walking tours of various city districts. Her class is dominated by Americans who seem bewildered that Modern in the Italian dictum begins with Ghiberti and not Gaudi. I sit near the back of this surprisingly empty class, and Deanna and I have a good working relationship. As she is forgetful and has trouble identifying the odd slide, I help her out with my arcane but vast skill in identifying the interiors of old churches. This is a skill I learned by sifting through hundreds of old black and white photographs I once found at my Grandmother's house, taken by my Grandfather in the early nineteen fifties, before over-cleaning campaigns had bleached every great Cathedral from Palermo to Saint Petersburg a whiter shade of stone.
    But most glamorous of all is Lucia Corrain, though her stunning presence seems to be ignored by most students in her rather large Semiotics of Art class. She is, truly, a beautiful scholar, though not the first Bologna has known. A fourteenth century chronicler speaks of a certain Novella d'Andrea, a docent so beautiful she had to keep her face veiled so as to not distract her male students from the pursuit of knowledge alone. Lucia Corrain is perhaps not quite so distracting, but her fashion sense is by all measures second to none. Just the other day, for example, she arrived in class wearing a black jacket with oddly spaced white fur patches. It appeared as though she had been attacked by some large quadruped, or had some sort of run-in with bleach, were it not for her usual flawless poise and elegant gestures. An extra thirty years of age were all that prevented her from being on a runway in Milan, sporting Gianni Versace's latest creations. This is a sort of style I am totally unaccustomed too, even for female professors. In Toronto and most elsewhere, Medievalists and Art Historians form an odd bunch, slightly aloof and certainly at a considerable distance from the latest fashion trends. At the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, tethered thick-rimmed glasses take the place of Pashmina shawls. Among the Art Historians the situation is not much better, and even among male professors the turtle neck with blazer is most common. Here, three-piece suits are the norm, and there is never even the slightest confusion of ranks. I haven't noticed the famed pedestals of Italian professors in terms of attitudes or actions; I have only noticed them in terms of clothing.
    But Italian style, so stereotypical and so symbolic, is reserved for the older generations. How wrong I was about bringing my nicest clothes here. Every student in Italy wears jeans, most have sneakers, and a good part sport dreadlocks. There is an element of Bohemian chick, I suppose, but mostly it is just a glaringly obvious attempt to differentiate young from old.
    The generation gap manifests itself most clearly in terms of glamour. Older women here have a style and presence here that the younger half lack. It puzzles me more and more each day that in this land where painters so often depicted the most beautiful women imaginable the female youth of today seem so plain to me. All one has to do is walk into a church to see the most voluptuously beautiful Madonnas and saints peering back from candle-lit altars, but the pale, perfect faces of Raphael, Francia, and Fra Angelico certainly don't peer back from the hordes of ragazze that dress without much care, smoke cigarettes in the faculty courtyards, and tan to absurdity on the beaches of Rimini. It is a disappointment I suppose I will have to get over. In this country, I only will be paying attention to older women.

II.xi. A Technician from Calabria

"Italy is only a geographical expression."
- Clemens von Metternich

Alessandro Rusco moved to Bologna some time in the late nineteen nineties. He took the train North, with all his possessions, and hasn't seen his mother since. On Monday morning, he met me outside the entrance of Via Centotrecento 12. As he arrived, I explained to him that the name on the buzzer had not yet been changed, and that I wanted to make sure he found the apartment all right. Via Centotrecento 12 is, after all, a rather labyrinthine structure. I live in apartment eleven, in staircase B, on the mezzanine level. I would be rather difficult to find, I suppose, for someone not in the know. Even my mailbox still sports the old renter's name. I would change this, but Dr. Caramori and the woman who acts as superintendent have lost my mailbox key, and have only just initiated the long process of getting a replacement made. For the moment, I am reduced to using a pair of scissors and a length of wire to fish for my mail, and yet most of it remains inaccessible, though visible through a small unopenable window at the bottom of the box. Perhaps, I think, it is not worth the effort to extract my mail, as most of the residents now eye me with a certain suspicion. I wear khakis and pilfer advertising supplements. I am probably German, in their opinion. Occasionally, when mail arrives for me that is not labelled with Dr. Caramori's name as well, the postal delivery lady can be heard yelling through the apartment halls "Herman, Nick", as though the cisalpine character of my name makes it all the more suspicious that I do not have a proper mailbox.
    Recently, internal politics at Via Centotrecento 12 have become even more tense. On Monday afternoon, an unknown resident broke their key in the lock of the main door to the street, necessitating an expensive repair and a great deal of inconvenience for everyone. The short woman who smokes Camel cigarettes and assisted me when my electricity went out reluctantly tended to this new problem, angrily cursing as she opened the door for each resident before it could be fixed. Frustrated by having to assume these extra duties, she posted a series of strongly worded, hand-written notices all along the corridors of the building. "I should really like to know who broke the key in the lock without informing the superintendent or paying for the repair", one notice said. The other, even more severe, was posted near staircase B, in the sector of the building where the rent is cheapest and where most students, including me, live. This notice suggested that the building was not an asylum but rather a condominium for adults willing to take responsibility for their own actions. Hoping that this notice wasn't referring to me, I made sure to make plainly visible to the short woman the next time I saw her that all the keys on my key chain were intact and unbroken.
    But, of all this, Alessandro Rusco was not aware. He arrived on Monday morning to install my Fast-Web service, and to offer his various insights on Northern Italy, and more specifically Bologna. Alessandro was quite a friendly chap, and as soon as he noticed that I was a foreigner he seemed genuinely interested and all the more eager to converse.
    "I can understand you" he said, as I apologized for my rather rudimentary skill in his language, "and that's what's important." As went about his work, he talked about his life here, about his longing to return to Calabria. In his mind, the place of his origins was distant and exotic, a faded memory, far away. So too psychologically did he differentiate Calabria from Bologna. "People are more relaxed there", he said. "this city is a casino by comparison. You really need to come down to Calabria."
    "I'm sure I will at some point, in the middle of the winter, when I really need to get away from Bologna." I found it strange that this man was reminiscing about his homeland while at the same time explaining how he could never return. I wanted to ask him to explain myself, but my Italian was failing and the installation was finished, and our brief conversation was over as soon as it began.

II.x. I Cross the Apennines

II.x. I Cross the Apennines

Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore
- Lord Byron

I am not going to attempt to explain or catalogue what there is in Florence. I am not going to go into detail about the thousands of masterpieces each worth a thousand pages of deliberation, nor am I going to talk about how Florence is the heart and soul of Western Civilisation, how for two hundred bright years it was the centre of the world.
    When I visit a new or unfamiliar art museum I always do a first quick overview, walking somewhat briskly through the rooms, getting my bearings and estimating exactly how much there is to see, how much time I will need, before returning to the start and beginning to examine things in earnest.
    Such was my trip to Florence on Thursday, my first visit to the city in over six years. In those six years the city has stayed the same but I have changed somewhat. Somewhat, but not entirely, for I still have that thirst for Giottos, that certain distaste for the High Renaissance, that only slightly tempered disregard for Michelangelo.
    And so, barely an hour south of Bologna, I was in Florence Thursday morning chiefly to reacquaint myself with the place, more than to see anything specific. There were a few things, however, things that I had studied to my whit's end in the intervening years without actually having ever seen. This is a dangerous tendancy for art historians (or prospective ones), and so many have written with feigned authority about monuments they have never been able to see for themselves. I needed to see four things.
    The first, in many ways, was the most evocative. In the church of Santa Trinità, often overlooked by tourists, is the Sassetti chapel, covered in frescoes that are Ghirlandaio's masterpiece. The frescoes are famous, and like Raphael's Madonnas and Da Vinci's drawings, they are indelibly burned into our western minds, even if we have never seen them, for they seep into our common definitions of genius, civilization, beauty. Collective consciousness is what the socially minded scholar would call it. But Ghirlandaio, criticised by some as being a characterless painter, did well here. His images might not have the status of some of the more frequented gems of Florentine art, but they speak of the fervour and perfection of his time. He painted them in 1485, a few years before Savonarolla, the fiery Dominican who was eventually burned at the stake, took power in the city and a few years after the Pazzi conspiracy, in which Lorenzo de Medici narrowly escaped being murdered during mass in his own city's Duomo. These were dramatic times; art and politics were at a fever pitch.
    But these frescoes, showing miracles from the life of Saint Francis, patron of the Sassetti family, don't even have a hint of drama. Even the blond haired boy, sitting up placidly after having fallen from a building and resuscitated by Francis, doesn't even have a bruise. I couldn't see this scene though, or for that matter many others, because the Sassetti chapel was occupied.
It was, in fact, occupied by a huge, custom built metal scaffold. The frescoes were being restored. The Italian State, which inevitably involves itself in these sorts of endeavours, had contracted a private company to clean and retouch the works. Art restoration is big business in Italy, and ever since the 1966 flooding of the Arno, Florence has been a hive of activity. The work, unbelievable, is drawing to a close, and the Sassetti chapel is among the last monuments to be tended to. As I approached the scaffolding, I noticed that it was being more than just cleaned, in fact. An art restorer, who in this country usually has the allure of a lab technician, was standing on the second level of the scaffold with a palette in his hand, touching up the Stigmatation of Saint Francis. He was using watercolours, plain pigment bound only with water, and a tiny sable hair paintbrush, and he was at work on Francis' feet, then the cloud of cherubs, then the distant hills. I was somewhat surprised at this rather dubious art restoration practice, especially on such a famous piece. It was, after all, an A1 monument, if we are to use such a glib rating system.
    But there he was, the art restorer, carefully and lovingly filling in the tiny fragments of plaster that had flaked off the walls with the centuries. Nothing drastic, nothing that couldn't easily be removed by later restorers, but nonetheless, he was editing a Ghirlandaio, like a proof-reader would edit an essay. He made me jealous, and I had half the mind to ask him if I too could climb up on the scaffold and add a tiny little dot of paint, seamlessly blended into the already existing colour. I wanted to leave a mark. It was the same impulse that leads adolescents to scrawl lovers' names into the wall beside Juliet's balcony in Verona (like I did, I'll admit, at one time).
    But I didn't ask, and instead I watched, fascinated, for some time, before finally moving on. My next stop was the Brancacci chapel, across the river in Oltrarno, a tiny chapel that is home to Masaccio's Tribute Money cycle; so iconic it is hardly worth mentioning. I don't agree particularly with its status in the history of art, but that's not something one can easily change. True, Michelangelo would come here when he was young and sketch the stern figure of Saint Peter, but that doesn't make it good art. As one of my professors would point out, Michelangelo made edits.
    And then, east to Santa Croce, the monumental preaching barn of the Franciscans. The Florentines, too, charge admission to their churches. This must be a good idea, as even on a blustery Thursday afternoon in October there were at least a thousand visitors in the cavernous church, come to see the masterpieces by Giotto, Gaddi, Bruneleschi, or furthermore the tombs of Galileo, Michelangelo, or Rossini. This is, after all, a sort of Florentine Pantheon. There is even a grandiose monument to Dante, l'optissimo poeta, even though the Florentines exiled him from their city and left him to die in Ravenna. Yet again, the lack of an irony manifests itself triumphantly.
    Finally, before leaving Florence, I climbed up to the church of San Miniato al Monte, a glorious structure almost a thousand years old built entirely inlaid of green and white marble, so beautiful it resembles one of those Egyptian intarsia boxes they sell in Arab markets. From the terrace in front of the church, the famous view of Florence unfolds like an unbelievable painted panorama. As I looked out, I resigned myself to the fact that Florence would take a thousand visits to digest completely. Then, it started to rain.


A view of the Sassetti chapel before restoration


The Stigmatation of Saint Francis being "restored"


Masaccio's Tribute Money, in the Brancacci Chapel


The façade of Sante Croce


The façade of San Miniato al Monte


The view of Florence from the terrace of San Miniato al Monte

II.ix. Fast-Web

"All Italians are plunderers."
-Napoleon Bonaparte

I am not going to pretend in vain that I am a nineteenth century wanderer, doing a grand tour of the Italian peninsula. I am not Goethe or Byron. I don't live in a house by the Spanish steps like Keats or Shelley. I have passion, that is for sure: cartloads of it, and I would be the last to dispute that I don't quite live in the world of today. Nevertheless, the Modern World does seek me out, and sometimes I seek it out, else I wouldn't be writing this at all.
    I was bamboozled, the other day, while walking down Via Zamboni, into signing up to FastWeb, a startup Italian telecom company that is doing remarkably well. The woman who was searching for potential customers was obviously working on commission. Six months free Internet. Free phone calls. The whole package. She insisted that I sign myself up, and assured me that what I was signing was totally non-binding, that in a few days time I would receive a phone call and that then I could decide if I wanted the service or not.

---

    This morning I did receive a phone call from FastWeb. I have paraphrased the following:
    "Mister, uhm, Hhhherman, this is FastWeb calling."
    "Yes, well, I have decided to not go ahead with it."
    "Really? Why not?"
    "Well, to be honest, it is too expensive."
    "Oh, but it is not expensive."
    "Well, for me it is."
    "No no no, I shall transfer you to our headquarters in Milan, they can speak to you there."
    "Really mam, I've decided not to do it."
    "Well, I have to transfer you. I am obliged to do so." After some time, another voice, this time male, with a slight Lombard accent, picked up.
    "Mr. Herman, what's this about not wanting to proceed with FastWeb?"
    "Well, sir, I have decided it is to expensive."
    "What do you mean it is too expensive?"
    "Well, I'm a student, I'm only here for a year, and for me it is too expensive."
    "But why did you sign up? What's the idea?"
    "Well, I was told that I could make my mind up later."
    "Fair enough, fair enough. How's about me make a deal- I give you a discount of 120 Euros, and you sign up?"
    "Well, no, really, I can just go to internet cafés and call shops. It is much cheaper."
    "Ok, ok, discount of 240 Euros." I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This was effectively a seventy five percent discount on the price of Internet for ten months. I had to accept, it only made sense.

---

    So there you have it. I will soon be wired. I will soon be freed from the chains of Internet dependency, figurative ones, thanks to the wonders of wireless, or senza-fili, in a more correct Italian. It will no longer be necessary for me to drink coffees in front of the Hotel Métropole and mooch off their free signal. No more constantly having to visit Easy Internet Café, a soulless chain that is becoming ubiquitous in the New Europe. They have branches in the hippest of places, Schengen and beyond: Potsdammerplatz in Berlin, Rynek Glowny in Krakow, there is even a branch just next to the Duomo in Florence, right under the shadow of Giotto's bell-tower.

II.viii. Restauration

"Of the industries in Bologna, the sausage-making one is of considerable importance. They are well known, and they are exported everywhere. I have had them in America, but it still seems to me that they are better here, in the place where they are made."
- Jean-Baptiste Labat

The rain has come to Bologna, and along with it the cold as well. The weather up until now had been too good to be true, but now, suddenly, it has soured.
    I could sense the cold front moving in late Saturday night as I returned from Ravenna. It had arrived in earnest Sunday morning, as my alarm clock failed to function and I awoke late, far too late for Florence, as had been the plan, to the pouring rain. This was my first rain in Bologna, but it was not altogether bad. The cold was bothersome and damp, and my stubborn frugal instincts are going to hold out their longest at not turning the heating on in my apartment, I know. But for now it is a delight to stay indoors, spending time in these small, cosy apartments either my own or invited out to dinner with my slowly growing group of friends. It is the sort of weather that has you drink tea.
    Or cook, as it would be in my case (since I don't have a kettle). I have been working on my Bolognese dishes as best as I can, being slightly handicapped by not having an oven, either. But I am perfecting my version of that famous sauce, rejoicing at spending two-thirds less on cheeses twice as good, and honing my knowledge of Italian geography by reading wine labels.
    I did make one excursion on that rainy Sunday, however, down to the Mercato Centrale on via Ugo Bassi. This place, one of the many centres of supply in a gastronomic Mecca, has somewhat more allure than the Plenty Market around the corner from Centotrecento. It is here that the Bolognese come to shop, restaurateurs as well as homemakers, and the competition is cutthroat. The mercato is a cross between a sprawling urban market and Paris' Rungis, compressed into about one tenth of the space. Here, like the train lines that converge at the central train station, all the flavours of Italy coalesce, and fish caught that morning in the bay of Naples are side by side with Speck from the Trentino-Alto-Adige, freshly cured by Italian butchers speaking German cured by Italian.
    Walking home from the market I noticed a door open to San Giorgio, a church that is famous principally for being closed. I entered, curious, carrying bags of meat and broccoli with me, and was fascinated and surprised to see the place in disarray. Not complete disarray, however, because about two thirds of the ceiling and the entirety of the walls were gleaming, freshly cleaned and well lit, with grandiose designs painted impressively in trompe l'oeuil. The restorers were at work. There were tarps and tools everywhere, and two giant cranes in the centre aisle of the church, reaching upwards to the vaults and making an echoing hydraulic racket. Meanwhile, a few hat-wearing old ladies were kneeling in front of their altars, silent and unperturbed.
    Atop one of the cranes, at least twenty five metres above the pavement, two young women in overalls were scrubbing away at the ceiling with what looked like simple rags. Mesmerized, I stared at their work for a few minutes, enough to see them uncover about a square metre of an incredible faux marble cornice. Two hundred years of grime from tallow candles and greasy incense sprinkled to the floor like ashes. Elsewhere in the church, a girl was touching up a frieze of garlands and putti with a paintbrush and a few coffee cups full of colour. I asked her if I could watch a while, and she nodded. The restorers were not Italian; they were Portuguese, here on a cultural exchange. They were doing their part, too.

II.vii. Tesserae

"Let us not speak of them; but look, and pass on."
- Dante Aleghieri

Unlikely heroes uncover the past. In 1902 schoolchildren playing with colourful dice led to the discovery of the finest mosaics in Northern Europe, which had lain hidden beneath three hundred years of plaster on the vaults above them. The place was Gémigny-des-Près, and what those youngsters discovered was the private chapel of a Byzantine princess, created by artists fleeing the iconoclasm of Asia Minor some eleven hundred years prior.
    Ravenna never suffered the insult of being plastered over by later tastes; it died a slower, more painful death, gradually forgotten as its link to the sea silted up irrevocably. The glory that carpets the walls of Ravenna was always plain to see, and that is perhaps what makes it most haunting. This was the great port of Classis, that Caesar Augustus had built in order to defend Rome’s Adriatic hegemony, this was where Theodoric, a barbarian, asserted himself over a Latin people, and this was where Justinian the Great, all dressed in purple and gold, set out to reconquer a lost empire. This was once the greatest city in the west, a port that opened up to worlds beyond the horizon, to North Africa, to Greece, to Constantinople. But this is Italy, that is a common epitaph, and forgotten babylons are everywhere. It is difficult to escape them.
    The mosaics of Ravenna aren’t just Italy, though. They are the Known World, a microcosm of civilization like New York or San Francisco are today. They are extraordinary because in them are not only the Goths, the Romans, the Byzantines, but anyone else who had ever dipped a toe into the Mediterranean or scaled the Alps southwards. All these artistic heritages blend together here into millions of fragments of stone and glass coloured like a peacock’s plume. The mosaics are exotic; they delight in depicting palm trees, tigers, oranges, lemons, ferns, birch trees, snow, sand, silk curtains, jews, gentiles, orange domes and golden skies. They are an encyclopaedia of the pre-modern world.
    And all this is surprising, if for a moment it is possible to suspend the disbelief and awe at seeing these blazing walls of colour and speculate on how these things came to be. Italy, which now seems so homogenous and enclosed, perhaps even xenophobic, was once a paragon of multiculturalism, embracing the other to the point of laying patterns on walls that, one and a half millennia later, are still as bright as the day their scaffolding was taken down. Seeing the mosaics at Ravenna is a bit like seeing the stained glass windows at Chartres; they are glorious because they are pristine. They have not faded with time and light like paintings do, they have not been covered over in centuries of soot and grime, and they have not been ripped out of their contexts by greedy museums and hung in hallways that hide their truths. Unlike Chartres, though, the mosaics don't vie with other artist's trades. There is no fantastic sculpture, no awe-inspiring architecture to compete with the singular glory of the brilliant walls. The churches and chapels in Ravenna, indeed the whole city, are plain and stark as can be from the outside. Ravenna is dead, in several senses of the word. But the mosaics are still brilliant, complete, and watchful, with those round Byzantine eyes. I stared them down in the Baptistery of the Arians (so named after an early Christian sect), where for nearly half an hour I was alone. I laid myself down on the floor, using my knapsack as a pillow, and gazed upwards.
    Seeing an iconic picture in mosaic is different from seeing a famous work of art for the first time. Reproductions of canvases can often be better than the real thing. There is no glare, no shifting spots of light, no reflection. But those are what mosaics are designed for. Their nature shifts with the viewer's pace, and each miniscule cube, each tessera is purposely inserted unevenly to catch the light of the passing day, or better yet of the flickering candles on an altar. But they have done away with candles in Ravenna these days. They have been replaced with throngs of British, Germans, and Japanese.
    Still, I was alone for thirty minutes. I could even have lit my own candles; they sell good ones at the Euro Store.



A view of the Mosaics in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna


View number two


View number three


View number four


And finally, the apse mosaics of Sant Apollinare in Classe, a few kilometres outside of Ravenna

II.vi. Balmoral

"Fools are without number"
- Desiderius Erasmus

A friend informed me that tonight there was to be an Erasmus party in Bologna. The irony of naming a debauched pub-crawl after a Christian Humanist who espoused tranquillity was lost on most. If any of those present had read In Praise of Folly it certainly didn't show. Erasmus was now synonymous with the greatest of all European Union exchange programs. This was to be an affair organized by and for foreigners, where nary an Italian would be found. Great, I thought. Just what I needed. More Americans and Brits. We met in front of the Balmoral Pub at eleven o'clock, and it was thronged. The Balmoral Pub flanks San Petronio directly, and people were even crowded onto the venerable basilica's steps, where barely two days before Saint Petronius' head was being displayed with an appropriate solemnity that had rapidly vanished since then. While we were standing in Piazza Maggiore, shooting the breeze, we noticed an important sector of the Italian economy, the stolen bicycle trade, was in full operation.
    "Just what I need!" I said, "A bici, cheap." We halted a punk who was riding a fairly nice bicycle, swaggering incredibly as he spoke to us in a slurred Italian. As it turned out, he was selling this bicycle, which he had "found", or rather, that his girlfriend had found. There was still a lock attached to it for which he had lost the key, unfortunately. He wanted thirty Euros for it, but we would have none of it.
    "Twenty-five."
    "Well, I don't know man, I'll have to go ask my girlfriend. She lives at the train station. Give me your number and I'll call you back in a while." I was impressed that he had a cell phone far fancier than mine, but this is technitalia, after all, and cell phones are the ultimate social leveller.
    "Um, how bout you give us ours?" Finally, we reached a tentative deal. He would return in fifteen minutes, and we would purchase the bicycle.
    After a certain amount of time (which was markedly more than fifteen minutes), we gave him a call, and the man returned. This time, however, he was riding an entirely different bicycle, a far less desirable one, that he pretended was the same one as before.
    "It's not the same," we protested, "the deal's off." And so the arrangement fell through, and I am still without transportation, and I have met even more foreigners.

II.v. Francesco

"Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible"
- Francis of Assisi

I feel horrible. Yesterday, in all the hubbub of Bologna's civic holiday, someone very important, far more important in fact than old Saint Petronius, got left behind. Yesterday, October 4th, was also San Francesco, Saint Francis' Day, the patron saint of all of Italy.
    I suppose he doesn't get much respect here among the bon vivant Bolognese, who value gluttony more than asceticism, but he does deserve a certain amount of respect, doesn't he? Didn't he renounce his father's clothes to go nakes into the wilderness? Didn't he preach to the birds? Poor saint Francis.
    But Bologna is not poor, Bologna is rich, and Saint Francis doesn't get much respect these days. Feeling guilty yet again, I decided to go visit the Franciscans, to attend a concert they were holding in honour of their patron namesake. The concert, well attended by the Bolognese establishment, was in fact a fundraiser for a choral group, which was apparently quite well known. It was an event entirely organized by volunteers, and it did seem rather lacking in preparation- as I entered the makeshift concert hall, which was in fact the magnificent monks' library, there was a flurry of activity- black-robed Franciscans scurried about setting up additional rows of chairs, as there were somewhat more spectators arriving than had been anticipated.
    Eventually, everyone found their respective places and the concert began. It consisted of a solo classical guitarist, followed by a jazz band of rather older gentlemen whose goal was to blend Baroque with Bee-Bop. A somewhat odd combination in a centuries old hall overlooked by a stern thirteenth century crucifix, hung high above the stage. But the concert went on and it was quite a success; the Franciscan choral group would likely have enough money to continue for another year, and all was well.

II.iv. Petronius

"This is the land of debauchery, music, and devotion"
- Montpellier Ange Goudart

The head of Saint Petronius is in the basilica of San Petronio in Bologna. Just his head. Not because he was decapitated by some Roman emperor, but because the rest of his body is in Santo Stephano, another church just down the road. A pope had to give permission for his head to be translated (that is the official term for these things- the bones of Saint Marc were translated from Alexandria to Venice, not stolen) to the new basilica when it was built.
    Old Saint Petronius' head is the star of the show in Bologna once a year. Here, every October fourth is a public holiday; it is the festival of San Petronio. Concerts are held in his name, sausages are stuffed, and even his statue in Piazza della Porta Ravegnana gets blessed with incense and oil. The main event, though, is the High Mass held in the saint's namesake basilica, and all the fanfare that goes along with it.
    I didn't quite have enough courage to go to mass on San Petronio, even though I felt as though I should ever since I found out from a fellow student that climbing the Asinelli tower, something I did last week, is bad luck for undergraduates. I felt as though I owed some sort of debt to the city, so that my bad karma from being presumptuous enough to enjoy the view without a degree would somehow be erased.
    Still, I didn't consider myself quite Bolognese enough to go to mass. I hardly knew Petronius, anyways. Some bishop of the fifth century who had Christianised the area and built a few churches. They still had ninety-two of the sermons he had written, or something. I stood outside the basilica with the thousands of others who must have felt the same way. At about seven o'clock, the great ceremonial doors opened. They themselves had been for the past few weeks decorated with a huge image of Petronius holding a model of the city in his hands, an attribute he is never without. Slowly, a long procession of what must have been three hundred priests of various orders began to exit down the steps of the basilica, into the Piazza Maggiore. A route around the square had been prepared and secured by all three police forces, of course. In fact, there was a surfeit of security, it seemed, as the head of Saint Petronio, encased in a golden monstrance and covered at all times by an immense silk damask baldachinno, circulated around the square. At all times the relic was surrounded by highly decorated members of a ceremonial guard, complete with feathers and Bonaparte hats. They joined the procession only outside the basilica, as their arms prevent them from being able to actually enter. One marcher held the civic standard of Bologna; "Libertas" spelled in gold lettering on a blue background, somewhat ironic for a city that was ruled by the pope for much of its history. In addition to this entourage, security guards with earpieces, at least twenty of them, kept an eye on the proceedings. The archbishop, in his resplendent array of robes, led the tail end of the procession, with two novices holding his robes, lest they trail on the ground, while another swung enough incense around to perfume the gathered masses. Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, all followed rank and file. Nuns and Abbesses, of the kind that are still easily spotted in Italy, held their own as well. Even the Knights Templar attended. Perhaps they too where there for security. The whole affair reminded me of one of those great coronation canvasses by Jacques-Louis David or Ingres, with dignitaries and churchmen present by the dozen.
    Soon though, the whole procession was swallowed up again by the massive unfinished brick façade that is the basilica. When everything was tidied up, the fireworks began in the square. All of Bologna was on holiday, even old Saint Petronius.



Crowds were gathered in the square by the thousands



Eventually, the main door opened…



…and out came a magnificent procession…



…that circulated around Piazza Maggiore…



…and came to a halt on the steps once more

II.iii. No Rest, not even Light

"As for me, I am astonished that they [the Bolognese] aren’t even more insane"
- Stendhal

This weekend I was supposed to follow Dante’s path, voyaging first to Verona then to Ravenna. However, like many plans in Italy (such as national unification and roadwork), mine was stymied by unforeseen complications. Upon returning from a long but truly inspiring day in Verona, tired from visiting at least a dozen churches and museums, I was somewhat distressed to find that the apartment was without any electrical power whatsoever. Thankfully, a friend from Toronto had given me a pocket sized reading lamp as a gift before I left for Italy, and now seemed a perfect and fortuitous time to put it to use. Checking my watch with this light I found that it was far too late to call Dr. Caramori, even on a Saturday night.
    I woke up the next morning, cringing at the thought of having to call poor Dr. Caramori and break the bad news. I imagined him doing some suitably important Sunday morning activity while I dialed his number. Sponsoring a child at a baptism or marrying off a daughter or something.
    As it turned out, poor Dr. Caramori was alone at his country house, 30 kilometers from Bologna, working in his garden on this beautiful October Sunday. Perhaps this didn’t necessitate perturbing his green thumb, so we attempted to resolve things over the phone. I was convinced that the bill had somehow not been paid (this was officially his responsibility), likely due to the fact that we had still not found the key to the mailbox downstairs and were therefore unsure as to what bills had arrived. "Anyways," he said, "they would not cut the power off on a Sunday." This had to be a local problem of some sort.
    "There is a panel in the corridor downstairs, Nicholas," he said in an English that had for once seemed to have gotten worse. I descended the stairs to the corridor, wearing my bathrobe, and eventually found the panel. The electricity for each apartment was controlled by a separate complicated looking white plastic box. The box marked "Caramori" had two red lights flashing.
    Suddenly, a very short, lively Italian woman arrived on the scene smoking a cigarette. She gestured for me to hand my phone over to her.
    "Ciao, Giorgio" she said at once, and then began to engage in a conversation heavy in Bolognese dialect, which is impenetrable at the best of times. Finally, she hung up and informed me that the problem was a fairly complex one, and that Dr. Caramori would be arriving shortly to see what could be done.

---

    Poor Dr. Caramori drives a large Audi. Once he had arrived and we established that the solution to our problem lay beyond us, he called Enel, the electricity company. After dialing through an automated sequence at least twice as long as any I have ever witnessed in North America, he spoke with a representative who informed him that a technician would be coming alquanto subito, or, roughly translated, rather soon. Surprisingly, the technician arrived in an hour, but promptly told us that everything was in order regarding the supply of electricity, and that the problem lay on our side.
    Frustrated but still in good spirits, Dr. Caramori called his electrician, who had doubts about being able to make a house call on a Sunday. Finally, he agreed to come at four thirty, in about three hours. Until then Dr. Caramori would run a few errands, then return to meet the electrician. After a relatively short time, the electrician was in fact able to find the problem, which was a defective resistor that needed to be replaced, and the lights came back on. However, soon after Dr. Caramori left to return to the country and his garden, I noticed another problem; the hot water heater, a brand new device mounted on the wall in the kitchen, was not working. After pondering my options for several minutes I decided to go down to the corridor to check if perhaps the fuse for this particular device was off. I left the door open and went down the stairs when…
    Slam! A quick breeze blew through the apartment and the door closed abruptly. I was now locked out, and inside there was no hot water. Dr. Caramori was the only one who had another set of keys. Luckily, I had my phone with me and was, mortified, able to call Dr. Caramori to inform him of the two other problems that had cropped up where one had been solved.
    "I hope it isn’t too much of a problem for you to return…"
    "Well, your problem is bigger than my problem, Nicholas."
    "Really, Dr. Caramori, I feel terrible. I don’t mind waiting if necessary."
    "Well, I believe you will have to wait. You shall wait," he said emphatically, laughing all the while and pleased at being able to use the future tense correctly. He was in fact the first Italian I had met who understood irony in proper terms.
    Soon enough, Dr. Caramori returned, still smiling, still jovial, and we entered the apartment. After a few minutes of uninformed speculation we were able to locate the problem- some loose jury-rigged wiring that we had fiddled with earlier in the day while attempting to solve the first problem. "I am no electrician," said Dr. Caramori, and I believed him.
    "Maybe I should shut off the power first?" I asked.
    "Yes. I agree." One of the connections that had been affixed to a wall socket with hockey tape had come loose, but we weren’t sure where to reattach it. "This could be dangerous, but I need the thrill," Dr. Caramori added sarcastically. Eventually, by putting two brains together we were able to fix the problem, and the hot water heater began to function again. We shoved the mangled assembly of wires back into the wall, and all was in order. After assuring me that he would have an electrician come and do things properly sometime in the next week, Dr. Caramori left and all the problems of the day seemed to have finally been solved. It was now 7:30 P.M. So much for Ravenna, its mosaics, and Dante’s path; those would have to wait for another day. I went to bed early and prepared myself for Monday, October 4th, which was to be a very special day in Bologna…


The Water Heater, cause of so many problems…

II.ii. The March of Verona

"There is no world without Verona Walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banished is banish’d from the world,
And world’s exile is death."
- William Shakespeare

As the 7:37 train from Bologna headed north across the Po Valley plain, the fog grew denser and gloomier. This was not the light morning fog that burns off after a few hours. This was a hazy sort of fog, a northern fog caused by the cold air cascading down the southern slopes of the Alps and colliding with the warmer Mediterranean mass. Visibility was limited to barely more than twenty metres, and when I arrived in Verona things had hardly lifted.
    Nevertheless, this was not going to spoil my outing to Verona, which is perhaps the most beautiful city in Northern Italy besides Venice. Bologna fares well, and it has other attractions, but it lacks the intimacy and charm of Verona. After all, this was the city of Romeo and Juliet, with throngs of tourists and young passionates alike visiting a certain balcony here, a certain tomb there, all hoping to catch a glimpse of Shakespeare’s romance. In reality, the playwright never even visited the place, though certain old chroniclers attest to the two star crossed lovers having existed…
    But I was not in Verona for Shakespeare. I was in Verona for Art, and there was much of it to be seen. To visit the churches here one must purchase a ticket sold rather shamelessly by the city. Luther would have had a field day, but perhaps he didn’t know tourists, who loudly run amok in these places and defile them by treating them like museums. I can’t say I wouldn’t count myself apart from those visitors entirely, but inversely I certainly never would be able to slip by the ticket booth without paying like the old local women, obviously there just to pray. I tend to pace around in Churches, daydream, wander around, touch things if no one is looking, and sit down in a pew to rest. Nothing too transcendental, I don’t think, at least not in the conventional sense.
    But, from the sublime to the ridiculous that is Italy, on my way from San Zeno Maggiore to the Castelvecchio museum I stumbled upon what I had secretly been searching for in Italy- a Euro Store. Here, in a slightly more elegant guise, was all the consumerism of the dollar store, with none of the irony and substantially less buying power. I was astonished to find that most of the goods inside (yes, I went inside) were labeled in Spanish. I suppose for general purposes it is good enough, someone thought. Could it be that no one in Italy would deign to label such low-quality mass produced goods, this being the land of hand made suits, shoes, and cars?
    But consumer culture is somewhat quirky in Italy, and later in the day once all my visiting was done I was rather astonished to stumble upon a Canadian themed store called "Canadiens", seemingly not in reference to the Hockey team, or the illustrious history of the coureurs-des-bois. No, it seemed as though all Canadiens meant here was a misspelling designed to appeal to the upper class Italian who had never been, nor ever had the desire, to visit such a cold land that made such stylish winter wear.
    But I was not brave enough to enter Canadiens and look around, despite my birthright. I only stepped into the doorway to take a photo and when the woman gave me a strange look I explained that I was Canadian, and that these things amused me. On my way out I noticed the price tag on a wool sweater that looked like it came from Roots: 358 Euros. That amused me even more.


The glorious interior of San Zeno Maggiore, with, in the distance, Mantegna’s altarpiece that Napoleon once stole and brought to Paris


The lions of the famous red Verona marble, slightly paler than the stone of Bologna


Not quite the buying power of Dollarama, but still quite a bargain


A dubious brand name good


I was astonished to find a Canadian-themed outerwear store in the centre of Verona…


… complete with RCMP style manequins


Yet I do wonder what Dante would have thought of all this, he who spent some quality exile time in Verona

II.i. An Assumption

"Bologna is to the Middle Ages what Pompeii is to Antiquity"
- Sidney Owenson (Lady) Morgan

October was ushered in with a beautiful, balmy day and as night descended I made my way to the Basilica of San Petronio, by far the largest structure in Bologna but certainly not to be confused with the smaller Cathedral. At nine o’clock, there was to be a concert consisting of three Motets for the Assumption of the Virgin composed by Giacomo Antonio Perti while he was choirmaster in Bologna. I arrived, reasonably well dressed, and seemed to blend in with the masses, also well dressed and present in the thousands.
    After the concert ended, I stayed in the basilica a few minutes, absorbing the grandeur of the space, floodlit for the occasion. Eventually, I strolled out into the Piazza Maggiore where the crowds were dispersing, and the city looked even more beautiful to me than it ever had. It was beginning to familiar to me. People refer to the pedestrian centre of the city as the "Bolognese living room". If that is so, I felt right at home.