VI.xiv. l'Estro Armonico

"The spectacle of Venice afforded some hours of astonishment and some days of disgust. Old and in general ill-built houses, ruined pictures, and stinking ditches dignified with the pompous denomination of canals; a fine bridge spoilt by two rows of houses on it, and a large square decorated with the worst architecture I ever yet saw."
- Edward Gibbon

Rosie and I decided to go to Venice for the day. I suppose I have just become desensitized to the fact that something like Venice is within a constant two-hour grasp, but every time I go there it seems as though I damn myself for forgetting its closeness.
    At one point, we went into a church that had been converted into a museum of period string instruments, and also a convenient point of sale for tickets to a series of profit-making Vivaldi recitals. These days, I find Vivaldi increasingly alluring, but I have learnt that it is far better to hear his work performed beyond his native shores. In Venice, it is assumed that anyone wealthy enough to spend an evening in the city will also want to shell out for a mass-production performance of the Red Priest's concertos. Needless to say, we returned home to Bologna early.

VI.xiii. A Day's Visit

"Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment."
- Paul Fussell

Before I leave Bologna I think I will have perfected my tour-giving skills, as they are being called upon increasingly often. There is, of course, something wonderful, a harmless pride that comes from having at least the feigned authority of a guide, of someone who knows the place. As a city, though, Bologna seems to exalt this aspect especially, as its chaos affords anyone who knows how to navigate its streets a certain god-like quality in the eyes of the first time visitor. It is not just a labyrinth, but an Italian labyrinth, one that seemed completely beyond reach of understanding mere months ago.
    This morning my friend Rosie arrived with her sister Charlotte and her husband Eric. Rosie is studying in Lyons for the year and was visiting her sister, in Florence for a conference. We spent the day visiting the city, seeing Piazza Maggiore, Santo Stefano, the University, all the sights most evocative of the city. Traveling with three interested intellectuals, who were willing moreover to buy me lunch, is of course a wonderful luxury, though I suppose I have had no reason to complain about this aspect of my visitors in the past, either. It was nice to have some company, though Eric and Charlotte (whom I had never met before) were only here for the day. Rosie stayed on for a few days before going back to Lyons.

VI.xii. General all over Emilia-Romagna

"It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the pope!"
- Pope John XXIII

The weather has only gotten worse since the weekend, with continuous drizzle and freezing rain, accompanied by temperatures hovering around zero, turning the city into a wet mess. The usual contrasts, between inside and out, pristinely kept shops and squalid exteriors, have become yet more pronounced. Add to this the fact that a vicious strain of the flu is making rounds in all of Italy, even reaching the Pope, and life here has all but reached a standstill. "Twenty Thousand Bolognese at Home in Bed" a local paper Il Domani announces from the newsstands, while the national dailies clamor for news from the Gemelli hospital in Rome. I have decided, if I am still in Italy when it occurs, to go to Rome for the Papal election, but for now I am sequestered in my apartment on Via Centrotrecento. Not even a conclave could get me out.
    Those Bolognese who are brave enough to venture out either do so from the comfort of a snow-chain fitted car (one can imagine the clamor of these upon the cobbled streets), or partially sheltered from the falling snow by an umbrella, briefcase, or if all else fails, day-old newspaper. There is a rumour that the University might shut down for the day, but it seems to be unfounded. In a city of covered sidewalks there are no excuses, since someone will inevitably ask "why didn't you just use the arcades?" If only a strike could have been scheduled for this day.


Via Centotrecento under Siege

VI.xi. Via Petroni

"The first time I passed through Switzerland I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt on Italy."
- Ernesto Sábato

"It snows in Bologna once a year" is the standard response one gets from a Bolognese after making a comment about the unpleasant February weather. In the past week it has snowed not once but three times, enough to make life in the porticoes even filthier than usual. The city, being north of the Apennines, is supposed to be able to cope with this by hiring a fleet of specially fitted tractors driven by farmers who, otherwise unable to tend to their crops, become snow removal experts.
    Bologna is a medieval city. It doesn't have the pure, perpendicular lines of the ideal Renaissance city. It is more organic than architectural. The streets are crooked and paved with uneven cobblestones which makes clearing them of any accumulated precipitation rather impossible, and the disintegrating stone columns that support the arcades, punctuated by erratically parked cars and streetside dumpsters, are anything but easy to keep clean. It seems as though the only flat surfaces in the city are the terrazzo floors of the porticoes, often beautifully laid out in geometrical patterns, which become a serious slipping hazard when they get covered in the brown slush that the falling snow quickly becomes. Walking anywhere becomes a treacherous endeavour, undoubtedly accompanied by having to help some fur-clad matron up from a fall.
    Via Giuseppe Petroni, a main artery of the university's tertiary economy of copyhouses, kebab joints, and Pakistani beer stores, is particularly bad under the sleet. This part of the city, a stone's throw from my apartment, is in the so-called "Red Zone", named not for political reasons, but rather because it needs to be cleaned daily by public sanitation crews. Inevitably, routinely, obnoxiously, the narrow arcade gets filthier as the day progresses, as the urine, dog excrement, and vomit accumulates on the speckled terrazzo floor. Occasionally, a concerned shopkeeper will cover an offending substance with sand or sawdust, connoting the middle ages in the worst of ways. Eventually, the mysterious stains that characterize much of Bologna become so dense they are practically impassable. Here the infamous "line of grime", the pronounced black line of dirt that can be found exactly two feet up on all exterior walls in the city, is at its strongest. After lunch hour I prefer to take a longer but cleaner route, but earlier in the day it is fine, as the chlorine stench from that morning's cleaning is still strong enough to block any accumulated offensiveness.
    In Piazza Maggiore, cleaner but less congenial than the more humanely proportioned spaces of the University district, crews of non-Italians were clearing the snow that had been piled into the square over the past few days, excavating the Neptune fountain from its cold white burial.


The Neptune Fountain being Excavated


Piazza Maggiore, the world's grandest shoveled-snow depot

VI.x. Back in Tuscany

"Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany."
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The weather in Bologna has turned decidedly lousy, after what was a beautiful and unusually sun-drenched January. An exceptionally cold front had now descended on Southern Europe, something the uniformed military personnel who still announce the weather on Italian television blamed squarely on Siberia. Together with the cold, a great deal of precipitation fell, ending the drought, smog, and haze that had been jointly blamed on automobiles and the Sirocco, the dusty wind that, at least according to meteorological legend, originates in the sands of North Africa.
    I felt that the best refuge from this on a quiet Sunday would be Tuscany, only an hour south but almost invariably four or five degrees warmer thanks to the tunnel-pierced climactic frontier that is the Apennine range.
    I took the train to Florence, wanting to visit the Uffizi, then perhaps take a bus up to the quiet town of Fiesole in the afternoon. The entrance queue for the Uffizi, unlike when I last visited it in January under quite different circumstances, was not diminished as I thought it would have been on this Sunday morning. Instead, it was even more lengthy than usual. Discouraged and unwilling to wait in the drizzling cold of Vasari's austere courtyard for several hours, I wandered around thinking of what to do. Sunday morning meant that most of the churches were closed, and I had recently visited most of the other museums. At this point, Florence really felt like the small city that it is. Finally, I decided to visit the archaeological museum, tucked into a palazzo off Bruneleschi's Piazza Santissima Annunziata, a place where quite understandably, nobody goes.
    Up in Fiesole things were as grim, if not more so. The view was stunning as usual, though not as beautiful as from San Miniato on the other side of the city. The lush walled villas that ring the eastern side of the city, home to academic institutes and a fortunate few private individuals, were visible below, battened down for the winter season. The rain began falling quite heavily, and to my dismay even the museums in Fiesole were closed. Even the church of San Domenico, where Fra Angelico lived and worked, had its door closed shut. I decided to leave Florence shortly after lunch, and headed to Pistoia, as I had a hankering to see Giovanni Pisano's marble pulpit once more. Unfortunately, the church it is in, Sant'Andrea, was hosting some sort of young pilgrim's gathering, and so it too was impossible to see. Pistoia, it seemed, is even less hospitable on a Sunday in February than Florence is.
    On my way back to Bologna, I had a stopover in Prato and took advantage to stroll through the city, stopping my favourite pasticceria, a place called pane e ciocolatto. I consoled myself with a caramel flavoured cup of Eraclea, the pudding-like hot chocolate that is served all over Italy in as many as thirty-two different variants. The chocolate was so strong, even for my taste, that I had to ask for a glass of water as well.
    Not all days can be perfect.

VI.ix. In the Delta

"Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy."
- Fanny Burney

This morning I returned to Ferrara, a place that unlike Forlì, Modena, or other equally nearby towns, needs far more than one or even two visits to absorb adequately. Ferrara has a rich, evocative history and a tranquil atmosphere that lends itself well to the city's location in the flat, misty estuary of the Po valley.
    That afternoon, as Ferrara's shops and museums were closing for lunch, I boarded a tiny regional train and headed East, to Codigoro, the last stop on the line. The train was part of the miniature rail network run by the Region of Emilia-Romagna, in effect a totally separate entity from the state-run employer of ninety thousand souls, Trenitalia. Having arrived in Codigoro, a small, peaceful town only just inland from the Adriatic, I waited for the ride to my next destination. Codigoro is far too small to be served by a regularly schedules bus route, so a Taxi-Bus system has been implemented by the community. I had called ahead to reserve my particular journey to the Abbey of Pomposa some seven kilometers away. The cost of the ride, heavily subsidized of course, was eighty-three cents. Being at the mercy of public transportation in Italy is a frustrating but also a rewarding experience.
    Pomposa, lost in the estuary of the river Po, was once far more than it is today, a picnic spot and stopover point between Ravena and Venice for the erudite, mostly Italian tourists who come to see Vitale da Bologna's frescoes. Long before malaria had infested the surrounding swamps, Guido d'Arezzo, inventor of the musical scale, lived here while his superiors exercised control over a vast and extremely rich fiefdom. All that remains from these centuries as a power centre are a few conventual buildings, the Abbey Church, and the facing Palazzo della Ragione, an enormous hall built by the monks for the sole purposes of secular administration. The building would be more at home in one of the bustling centres of active lay life, like Ferrara or Padova, but instead is left desolate here in a quiet oasis of towering oak trees. The whole complex is surveyed by a prominent campanile, inlaid with ceramics brought from distant Syria in the ninth century, which makes for a stark silhouette against the winter sky. A beautiful place, far from anything, to visit once in a lifetime.
    On the return from Pomposa, stopping once again at Codigoro, I wanted to have an aperitivo before boarding my train back to Ferrara. The café nearest to the station was a bustling affair, and the barman beckoned me to sit down as he brought me a few plates of tramezzini and a large beaker of wine.
    "I haven't much time," I said to him, "because the last train inland leaves in fifteen minutes."
    "Not to worry," he replied, as he gestured to a man in a stationmaster's cap, surrounded by a gaggle of fawning locals, drinking a large glass of prosecco, "the conductor is here too."



The Gentle Winter of Ferrara, and the low sun in a villa's courtyard


The great Abbey church at Pomposa


Inlaid reliefs on the façade of Pomposa

VI.viii. A Villa in the Hills

"Universities are one of Italy's three biggest cancers; bureaucracy is another. The third I won't mention in order not to offend religious people."
- Federico Zeri

"Catechism, do the foreign students know what the Catechism is?" Anna Ottani Cavina asked, as though the world beyond the Alps hadn't been evangelized. Perhaps she intended to impress upon the Italian students that there were other people in the class, people with different sets of knowledge. I certainly found it odd that she, one of the more cosmopolitan members of her department, would ask something so ridiculous, but she had taught legions of American students, both in Bologna and overseas, and so I supposed she was speaking from experience. A scholar of strong but well thought-out opinions, she showed a self-awareness that was lacking in most faculty here. In her introductory class, she singled out the small number of foreign students, including me, and gave us a somewhat undeserving share of her intention. Her class, on the history of art from the High Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, was in fact to be greatly watered down for foreign students, with our requirement being shrunk to about a third of the normal workload. While it would be completely out of the question in North America, this is common practice in Italy, probably based on the assumption that living in Italy for a year is already enough of a challenge for foreigners. The latest female professor of mine certainly seemed to think so, and dwelled for some time on that subject and others, more or less pertinent to the class. Nevertheless, I enjoyed her cosmopolitan, tangential discussions that ranged from the Five and Dime Store empire of Samuel Kress to the birthplace of Frederick Chopin in Poland.
    Professor Ottani Cavina spent a good part of the next class discussing the various villas that eminent art historians had owned, placing special emphasis on that of Federico Zeri, who, along with Roberto Longhi, was one of the greatest Italian art historians of the twentieth century. Professor Ottani Cavina showed us slides of the elderly Zeri sitting in his beloved garden in Mentana, receiving an honourary doctorate from Bologna, and traveling to distant archaeological sites in Egypt and Syria. Intriguingly, close inspection of the photographs revealed that she was often accompanying him; a simple student-mentor type relationship. Zeri, the glamorous yet mythic generalist of academic ages past, led a life that wasn't without controversy, recorded in an autobiography that is surprisingly widely read. Zeri was really the last of his breed, the aristocratic art historian, but he was more than a connoisseur, because his work, unlike that of most of his domestic contemporaries, focused on art history in context, rather than art history as a hermetic study. In 1998, when Zeri died, he bequeathed his villa in the Roman countryside, along with his archive of nearly three hundred thousand photographs, to the University of Bologna, one of the many wooing institutions that vied for his inheritance. This was quite a coup for Bologna, which is normally anything but a philanthropic favorite, and since inheriting the collection, the University has created the Federico Zeri Foundation, of which it turns out Professor Ottani Cavina is the director. The Zeri Foundation has been modeled on Villas operated by other universities, the best known of which is I Tatti, the prestigious Florentine Villa, built and furnished by Bernard Berenson, now operated as a cushy post-doctoral retreat by Harvard University, lending substance to the figurative Ivory Tower, an academic Hortus Conclusus. In these places nestled among the green hills of central Italy, the greatest art historians of the age are given free reign, catered lunches, and stipend. These scholars, working in totally artificial disconnect from the rest of the world, are like Nero and playing his lyre, or at least Ansonius, quietly writing poetry on his estate while the Roman empire crumbled around him; they are oblivious, half-crazy geniuses.

VI.vii. North of Venice

"I reached the Alps: the soul within me burned
Italia, my Italia, at thy name."
- Oscar Wilde

Italy becomes a small country quite easily. The Alps are just across the valley from Bologna, and Tuscany is just over the hills. This geographical closeness does nothing but add the compressed, crammed, and conflated nature of this place. Beyond the normal reactions of a North American, the arable, cultured space in Northern Italy is objectively quite limited. The mountains, Apennine and Alpine, force everything into close proximity or else great distance. This is not the case in France, where one only has to see Chartres cathedral rising from the limitless Beauce plain to realize it is an enormous place, or the German world, which divides all of Europe into West and East. Granted, Britain too is small, but the English never did anything even half memorable on their own land, and their empire, a weird and impudent reaction to claustrophobia, discounts them anyhow. Italy is not anywhere else; arguably, never has so much happened in so little space.
    As a case in point, only three hours north of Bologna by train are the approaches to the perennially snow covered peaks of the Venetian Alps. A little farther is Cortina, the preferred ski resort of the Bolognese who seek more than the unchallenging runs of the closer Apennine locales.
    A staging ground for centuries of Alpine excursions, the bustling city of Treviso was my first stop of the day. Greener and more gardened than Venice, Treviso has its own distinct character, though it has its share of Adriatic architecture and languid canals as well. The icy waters of the Sile branch out and breach the still intact Renaissance walls, mingling with the arcades and cantilevered houses of the city. Of strategic importance for centuries, Napoleon built a road from here to the Venetian lagoon that is still in use today, while the Brenta canal, which also leads out to more open waters, is only a few kilometers away. The waterways that course through the old town seem so strange, in our era of landlocked cities, but for the remainder of history they have been much more useful than their current role of providing a backdrop to a patio here or there. Water was the lifeblood of many cities that today seem dry as could be. Even Bologna, at first glance the most parched place imaginable, had and still has an extensive network of canals. These streams, which occasionally surface in areas where they haven't yet been built over, actually extend underneath the city for a great many more kilometers than do the famous arcades above ground. But in Treviso at least, the waterways have been left as they are and there is still a fish market that operates directly above one, so that the offal can easily be disposed of every Sunday afternoon, after the week's sales have been made.
    Treviso has its artistic treasures too. Despite the dampness of its setting, its climate is enough of an inland one to preserve frescoes, unlike that of Venice, where plaster doesn't last a short century. Tomasso da Modena, an itinerant man of obvious origins, came here to work for much of his career. His celebrated portraits of famous Dominicans painted in the thirteen fifties, who stare down from the walls of a chapter house as though they had interrupted in their reading, include the first known depictions of eyeglasses. Corrective lenses, imaginatively captured in Eco's The Name of the Rose, were a necessary invention of the bookish middle ages, and were of use even to the silent timeless doorman who let me in to see Tomaso's frescoes, housed nowadays in a silent and equally timeless seminary.
    Belluno, my second and principle destination, is a confusing place, jointly in the grips of the German and Mediterranean worlds. Here, Venetian palaces rub shoulders with Austrian belltowers, and the whole is surrounded by a magnificent backdrop of mountain peaks. As confusing as the city itself was my reason for venturing this far north in mid-February: an exhibition entitled "North Of Venice, Culture in the Dolomites between Gothic and Renaissance." Laughably obscure to most, this event was on the top of my agenda ever since I saw it advertised in a Venetian Vaporetto some weeks ago.
    The exhibition in Belluno was a coherent, beautifully put together attempt by the people of Belluno to get people to Belluno. It got me there, but I think that I am neither a typical nor ideal economic agent in these sorts of situations. In the tourist office, as I asked whether it was possible to get to Trento that evening (it wasn't), I enquired about staying the night, but declined, finding the twenty five Euro John XXIII residence either too expensive or too orthodox. Deciding art tourism in the mid-winter Alps to be somewhat inhospitable, I had a cup of tea in the Gran Café Leon, a Bellunese institution since Austrian times, before catching my train back to the lowlands.

VI.vi. The Emperor's New Clothes

"I want to the whole of Europe to have one currency; it will make trading much easier. "
- Napoleon Bonaparte

Daniele Benati swaggered into the classroom wearing a long black riding coat. His demeanor, as well as his short and rather pudgy frame, contrived to give him an uncanny Napoleonic look which was augmented by his tendency to pace back and forth through the aisles during lecture. Reminiscent of the Emperor General too were his insistent proclamations and his air of authority. He also arrived late, which added to the overall affect, as the class of a hundred or so people, acting as an organic whole, became silent together the moment he made his appearance. Whether or not the audience was aware that Benati was a very accomplished scholar in his field, it sized him up in an instant and gave him the respect he commanded. Such is the authority of the Italian professor.
    Today my first class of the new term began, after a hiatus of nearly two months caused by the commonly accepted agreement that January ought to be braved as time off. The class took place in the Aula Magna of the Ex-Convent of Santa Cristina, a newly renovated complex, somewhat removed from the heart of the university, that is soon to form the new home of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Bologna. Most of my classes this year will be held here, either under the gaze of a sixteenth century fresco and the SILENTIVM inscription in the main hall left over from the convent days, or one of the halls created out of the converted outbuildings. Overall, it is a beautifully renovated complex in typically Italian style. Equally typical, perhaps, are the enormous glass skylights and the lack of slide projection screens that render the place rather unsuitable for the teaching of Art History.
    Professor Benati's course on Italian medieval art is divided into two five-week modules, the first of which is a tediously general overview of basic material. The second part of the course, inversely, is what some pedagogues would term a micro-study, in which a specific theme is studied in great detail. In our case, we would be embarking on an investigation of Jacopo Avanzo, an artist so obscure his existence is questioned. As he mentioned this, I wondered if anyone else present had even heard of Avanzo. I for one was quite pleased, if a little bewildered by the arcane studies promised to us. A few weeks prior, while in Padua, I had seen the one fresco cycle that the artist is thought to have executed, and was greatly interested by it. Obscure, undiscovered, and controversial things fascinate me, and luckily, the history of art is full of them. I guessed at the time, and later confirmed, that Professor Benati's special attachment to the subject was, perhaps in addition to reasons I held, explained by the fact that he was currently writing a book on the very subject. Professors in Italy do this quite usually, in fact. As they are limited in what courses they can offer by ministerial decree, each will take advantage of the situation by molding the course to reflect personal interests as much as possible. Regardless of whether this sort of approach makes for good instruction or not, most of the courses I had frequented were nonetheless taught at a very basic level.
    It's a shame that many professors don't harness the potential of their audience, since, despite all appearances, Italian students do know a good amount about their heritage. Though their university system is perceived as notoriously lax, their secondary school system is much better at producing well-rounded, cognizant individuals. The Liceo Classico, the equivalent of an arts high school, is what most students in the humanities here have attended. Consequently, they are all inculcated with basic principles of Latin, Greek, ancient history, and art history; this is why I was surprised as professor Benati asked the class what, in a medieval painting, a figure carrying a palm represented. I rolled my eyes, thinking no one would be able to answer, as would be the case in the Anglo-Saxon world. However, a combination of catechism and liberal art education seemed to be paying off, at least for the narrow purposes of this course, because the professor was instead met with a chorus of "il martirio", Holy Martyrdom, the correct response. With this, I sat up a little straighter in my chair.

VI.v. Martedì Grasso

"Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left."
- Victor Hugo

The centre Bologna today had erupted into a strange sort of children's paradise, unusual for a city that is normally quite devoid of anyone below the age of majority. Naturally, no parent in his or her right mind would allow children, at any time of day, to wander the university district, but the rest of the city is curiously lacking this segment of the population as well. The real reason is that most families with children have moved to the media periferia, the "mid-burbs" as we would be wont to call it, for better schools, more recreational spaces (as Bologna's city centre is nearly devoid of parks), and stronger neighborhood ties.
    In any case, Bologna within the walls presents an atypical view of Italian demographics, one that is totally dominated by people in their twenties. Bologna is a magnet for youth, and distorts the true image of one of the most rapidly ageing countries in Europe. In more provincial towns, especially in the wealthy, comfortably settled north, retirement homes far outnumber faculties and university departments. There was never a true baby boom in Italy, which compounds the social problems that face most of Western Europe as well. Nevertheless, the dire predictions of economists and social demographers were far from anyone's mind as a huge, grotesque parade made its way down Via dell'Independenza, showered with more confetti than central Palermo on liberation day.
    As night fell, however, the gaggles of children in costume gradually disappeared and were supplanted by the more usual late-night types. Even they took the event seriously, and at the entrance to a nightclub a dark-skinned Pope was accompanied by a Franciscan with a nose ring and a male nun, like a living quotation from an Erasmus proverb.
    Carnival, even in its distilled twenty first century form, is still an escape valve for European society, albeit not in as absurd a manner as Breughel's peasants or Bosch's haywain, More than anything, it is another excuse to dress up and act in an even more nonsensical manner than usual.

VI.iv. Shadows and Sunlight

"Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;
When it sparkled o'er aught that was bright in my story,
I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory."
- Lord Byron

It was grey and lonely when I arrived in Pisa. Still relatively early in the morning, the droves of tourists that are usually present here, even in February, had not yet arrived, and the Camposanto, the storied field of miracles, was deserted. I had taken the Nacht Zug from Bologna, switched trains in Prato, and disembarked at the little-known station of Pisa-San Rossore, closer to the historic centre and more convenient than the central station built on the fascist era outskirts that ring many an Italian city. Groggy as I had been all week and a little dazed from sleeping on the train, before beginning the day's explorations I had a coffee served to me by an old curmudgeon of a barman, unsteady as his hometown icon. He leaned against the bar and looked me in the eye severely as I quickly drank up.
    Most remarkable about Pisa perhaps is its quietness. Unlike Venice, Genoa, or other faded maritime powers, Pisa is silent, and the Arno, which flows languidly through the city centre, is totally devoid of traffic. A thousand years ago the banks were thronged with merchants from throughout the known world, but this is no longer so. The inevitable silting up of the channel that led to the sea, and the increasingly belligerent Florentine republic only some eighty kilometers upriver, finally crushed Pisa in 1406 and relegated it to the brackish backwaters of Tyrrhenian history. For these reasons, Pisa is an unspoilt conservatory of medieval art, its chief treasure some twenty immaculate marble-encrusted Romanesque churches and the works of art contained therein.
    Pristine and empty as a painted medieval cityscape, the city is less of a Mecca for art historians than it ought to be, for it was the birthplace of important dynasties of painters and, perhaps more importantly, sculptors. Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, the father and son pair who were the first to put the Ars Nova, the modern way, to stone, set the critical example that Donatello and Michelangelo would follow. Their vision of sculpture was a totally novel one, which placed prophets, saints, virtues and sibyls in conversation with each other across vast architectural expanses, or intimate small-scale spaces. Their carved ensembles have all the rigour of scholastic thought mixed with an almost Baroque theatricality, encapsulating the dynamic concordance of the Christian and pagan worlds. Not only mere sculptors, they were hired to design cathedral façades in Siena and Florence as well, though their most famous achievements are four polygonal pulpits, two of which are in Siena. These monuments, animated by vicious lions trouncing gazelles, muscular personifications of naked fortitude, and scenes from the Passion of unequalled tenderness and humanity, leave the greatest achievements of the Roman sculptors in the dust, and show the complexity and refinement of a civilization that, by this time, had become the most complex the world had ever known. All this is encompassed by Pisa, their birthplace, where buildings are inlaid like Egyptian jewelry boxes and domes pierce the sky like proud Arabic quotations, but the Pisano's work is still supreme. Nicola, and especially his son Giovanni, knew marble as the best writers in history have known words. Andrea and Nino Pisano, another pair unrelated except through their Pisan heritage, cast the first illustrated bronze doors for Florence's baptistery, a century before Ghiberti would repeat the achievement in what Michelangelo dubbed "The Gates of Paradise," probably the most famous doors in the world. Pisa's achievements, or at least those of her artists, are at the root of Western consciousness because, as is so important in the history of mankind, they were first.
    Beyond the Camposanto and the unnerving shadow of the leaning tower, Pisa has much to offer. Most unusually for a Italian city, the religious centre is on the periphery and seated in a large, empty space. The fields around the Camposanto, long off-limits but now cautiously permitted to respectful walkers, must be the only lawns in the Mediterranean world. It is as though an East Anglian cathedral green has been transplanted and grafted to the Tuscan soil, just as the most petty English noblewomen used to bring grass from Normandy to their rocky Welsh strongholds, trying to add some southern beauty to their Gaelic crags. Pisa, though, has more flair and native refinement in its inner quarters, which became an interesting mix of sun and shadow as the sky evolved into a cloudless one. A first class museum, the Museo di San Matteo, occupies an old convent on the banks of the river, far removed from any tourists. As I entered, the three male guards were in the entrance watching television, and they let me wander in peace through the museum unencumbered. I felt the familiar sensation of being the only visitor to have set foot in the museum all day. Italy's treasure houses, useless and vital at the same time, must house thousands of idyll workers throughout the quiet winter months.
    As I left the museum and the evening fell, however, Pisa came to to life. The city benefits from a long and quite determined passegiata, something which Bologna, with its congested streets, unfortunately lacks. Thousands of citizens, seemingly the whole city, strolled through the extensive pedestrian area in the pre-dinner hours, populating, like the Pisano's vivid figures, an otherwise lonely architecture. To them, their city is still the centre of the world.


The Magnificent Camposanto at Pisa


Marble, Mosaic, Stone, and Light are the four elements here


A pensive visitor


The Baptistery


The Cemetery, more reminiscent of Islamic than Western Architecture


The Arno river in Central Pisa, with the little church of Sante Maria della Spina on the riverbank


Giovanni Pisano's pulpit, in the Cathedral of Pisa

VI.iii. On the Trading Floor

"By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success."
- Gore Vidal

In Piazza Nettuno, the Communists were out. They were protesting the relatively recent opening of the Sala Borsa, an enormous new public library that has been created out of the disused central stock exchange, itself within the walls of an austere fifteenth century castle. The Sala Borsa is the new nerve centre of Bologna, or at least it feels that way, being one of the most successful redevelopment projects in recent Italian memory. The old trading hall has been exquisitely restored, its airy, three storey atrium fitted with a glass floor that allows the remains of the Roman city to be viewed underfoot, while above an extremely trendy café and wine bar attract a mix of Italo-hipsters and elegant fur-lined intelligentsia types who come to people watch. Exhibits compiled by the European Union's public relations sector jostle for space with curious residents. In the frescoed sitting rooms, rows of study desks and computers are lit by Tizio lamps, and the public reads, listens to music, or watches movies in square leather chairs, while in the entranceway flat screen monitors broadcast the latest news from around the world in a plethora of different languages. It is certainly the finest, classiest, most impressive modern public space I have ever seen anywhere.
    So why, on this Friday morning, is there a small red tent with hammer and sickle flags waving about positioned in front of the Sala Borsa's main entrance? Certainly, this is the most visible place in town, for unlike Piazza Verdi it is within the commercial as opposed to academic heart of the city, and unlike the contiguous Piazza Maggiore, it is smaller in scale and more open to direct confrontation. More of a stage than a stadium or crossroads, it is perpetually occupied. Here Bologna's martyrs, old and new, are commemorated. Large glass plaques and floral wreaths remind the flanêur of the darker points in Bologna's history: the battle against Austrian domination, the Nazi massacres, the Red Brigade bombings of 1980. But the communist party was up in arms against something entirely different; the inclusion of a private bookstore in the Sala Borsa complex. Indeed, the whole complex had only been made possible through a number of public-private partnerships. Indeed, it did seem rather absurd that the best places in the development were reserved for saleable books, many of which were not even in the public library's own collection. The communists, for their part, were offering free books to the general public as a publicity stunt. Curious, I went to see what they had to offer, expecting Marx and Engel but instead finding a regular crop of airport fiction and harlequin romances. Next to me a shouting match started between two elderly men, not regarding ideology but instead who was the rightful owner of one of John Grisham's newly translated novels. I quietly walked away.
    The atmosphere today was perhaps unusually tense. In Genoa, the trial of sixty policemen accused of covering-up the deliberate targeting and assault of student protesters at the 1998 G8 economic summit was getting underway. In a surprising act of judiciary independence, the high court had ignored political pressure from all sides and pressed the investigation through, but this was still a critical time, and police were out in even greater numbers than usual. The violent tensions of the near and distant future also wind their way into Bolognese consciousness, adding, like the excavated remains of the Roman Via Emilia, yet another layer of complexity to this place.


The atrium of the Sala Borsa


The Communist bookstand

VI.ii. Remnants

"Why are Italians at this day generally so good poets and painters? Because every man of any fashion amongst them hath his mistress."
- Robert Burton

In a contrast as stark as the opposing shafts of gloom and light that fan through its arcades, this week Bologna had sprung back to life. The legions of students, punks, policemen, and professors who patrol the streets and cafes were back from the long academic holiday, and the bustle that lately had been lacking once again invaded Via Zamboni, beckoning me out of my apartment. I went to see the Saint Cecilia chapel, where the guardian is perhaps starting to recognize me as a regular yet still lets me speak to her undisturbed.

---

    "Finally, Nicholas, you are alone. Always coming in here with other people, showing me off impersonally, as if I were mere paint on the wall."
    "But that's what you are! Don't take offense; 'The paint on these walls is the blood in my veins'… as the poem goes," I answered.
    "I think that was a poem you wrote. I've never heard it before. You went to see my tomb in Rome, I see."
    "Yes."
    "But you didn't but a rose on it, like you did for Raphael. A lily for Fra Angelico, a daisy for Keats, a rose for Raphael, and nothing for me."
    "But you're not dead, you're a saint. You're not an architect of my being, like they are, you're more just part of it. Another half, a mirror. "
    "I certainly felt like I was looking in a mirror when you brought that girl in here the other day. Do you want to explain yourself?"
    "No. I have to go now." I started walking towards the door.
    "Nicholas, you can't run away from me just because I am a fresco!"
    "Yes I can," I said over my shoulder as I sped out the door.

---

    At a loss for diurnal structure, I stumbled around Bologna. The daily schedules, to-do and to-see lists that had been such a part of the previous months' existence were gone, and I had little with which to occupy myself. I slid back into my routine of daydreaming, vaguely studying, and altogether not doing very much. The city, though, still had a lot to offer me. I put up only a feigned resistance, always my reaction to the Baroque, when it came to seeing Elisabetta Sirani, Pittrice Eroina (1638-1655). Though the dates alone made me shudder, I gave the exhibition the benefit of the doubt and entered under the distinctive bright red banners that in this city usually signal cultural events, communist party gatherings, or both.
    Strangely enough, this exhibition, billed as a blockbuster and sexed up with a steamy Artemesia Gentileschi type spin, was housed in the archaeological museum, perhaps the driest, most didactic monument in all of Bologna. Not much changed since the nineteenth century, except, admittedly, for a stellar new Egyptian section, the notorious second floor of the building presents thousands upon thousands of finds from Felsina, the very boring Etruscan settlement only perhaps matched in its boringness by Bononia, the subsequent and rather tiresome Roman city. These remnants, normally the sort of items sold on Ebay, are laid out on withered felt of a very particular shade of green, housed without explanation in cabinets themselves worthy of archaeology. It feels like the museological equivalent of a cold shower.
    Among the more important pieces of Roman sculpture on the first floor was the entrance to the Elisabetta Sirani show. Thankfully and refreshingly modern in its conception, it showcased the tempestuous life of the paintress, whom Malvasia, an early local art historian, named the "virgin angel" of Bolognese painting. The girl, dead at twenty-seven, was supposedly poisoned by a maidservant in a vicious love intrigue. A suitably baroque death for a suitably Baroque artist. It makes for good fiction, or art history, however one chooses to look at it.
    Bologna has long had a love affair with female painters. Saint Catherine of Bologna, not the beautiful homonymous Alexandrian martyr but the homely artistic nun who patiently decorated manuscripts for pontiffs, started a trend with her canonization. Elisabetta Sirani had many sisters in her field. Properzia de' Rossi and Lavinia Fontana, perhaps not giants of their age but certainly known to more than a few, cemented the female tradition in Bologna with their successes. That so many women painters were so prominent here baffles many a scholar, but the reason is simple. It is evident in the markets, churches, libraries, and anywhere else where work gets done. Bologna is a seductively feminine place, overrun with flocks of men but secretly ruled, from the cigarette-smoke filled examination halls to Anna Maria's trattoria, by women.

VI.i. Forlorn Forlì

"Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

I felt the February cold on my spine as I walked back to the bus stop outside Ridolfi airport this morning, though it was a day of raking sun that could as well have been mid-winter anywhere in Ontario. A sizeable snowstorm that had spared Bologna but struck nearly everywhere else in Italy, including Calabria and Sicily, had transformed the Romagnola countryside into something easily reminiscent of the Niagara, with fruit trees and vineyards frosted over and the long, straight spine of a mountain ridge, the Apennines in this case, rising above the plain in the distance. There was slush in the streets and I had the strange sensation, one I get every year in Toronto, that it was time to change from leather shoes to winter boots.
    As with all the other outposts of Ryanair's Low Cost empire, calling Ridolfi an airport is a bit of a stretch. It is located at the end of a suburban street in Forlì, a town on the Emilian way some eighty kilometers east of Bologna. A miniature electric bus brings people there from the city centre, coming to a halt just beyond three old mothballed trainer jets, alumni from the Italian air force, decaying by the side of the road. When I was a boy I had a passion for airplanes, and I could have named the three makes in an instant, but I no longer identify tailwings and air intakes; only brushstrokes and monograms instead. I have forgotten what used to be my calling, sure, but I still crane my neck upwards more often than most when a jet roars overhead. Recently rebuilt, the terminal proper of Ridolfi is slightly more dignified than its sad surroundings, though it could easily be mistaken for an elementary school or a supermarket, surrounded by a sea of parked cars, each waiting for its owner to return from abroad. It is little more than a glorified airfield, and like its similar cousins, it is in the middle of nowhere. Paris-Beauvais, Frankfurt-Hahn, and Copenhagen-Malmo all share with it the dubious double-barreled distinction of the low cost airport, namely that they are at least an hour's drive from their purported location, with transportation to and from often costing at least the price of the flight. Any impecunious European traveler knows the drill, packs right up to the strict fifteen kilogram limit, and grumbles at the thought of having to take another flight dominated by sojourning Brits, boisterous in a cacophony of hideously accented self-congratulatory remarks about having paid only ninety-nine pence for this flight or that.
    Looking back at the terminal and the lone tailfin protruding behind it, I trudged over to the stop, heaved a sigh, and waited for the bus. I felt as alone as I had the day I left Toronto, perhaps more, and Italy seemed as strange a land as it had ever been.
    Sarah had left. A month had gone by with her, and it had been more than two since I was last alone. I felt a strange sensation as I realized that there would be no one, not even a well-dressed Dr. Caramori, to greet me when I returned to Bologna. I lingered before going back, lost in a parting daze, sore for describing words, and angry at the parting circumstances of the world.

---

    Forlì didn't have much to recommend itself. The Pinacoteca was closed because it was Monday, so I resigned myself to not seeing the little Fra Angelico that was its main recommendation. In a few of the Churches there were some works by the mediocre locals, Marco Palmezzano and Melozzo da Forlì, who even in the fifteenth century brought some civility to this place with their painting. Melozzo went on paint for Sixtus IV in Rome, famously depicting the founding of the Vatican library in what has now become a favourite cover image for renaissance history texts. For this reason alone, Melozzo is probably Forlì's most famous son, unless one is to include the not altogether willingly forgotten Mussolini, born in the hills not far from the city. Il Duce's memory is still everywhere here, from the fascist-chic wine sold at the airport duty-free to the immense Palace of Postal and Telegraphic Communications that looms over the main square. A prodigal son of the highest order, he ensured that the streets of Forlì were lined with the proud buildings of the New Roman Empire, just as he guaranteed, for the first and only time in Italy's history, that the country's railways ran on time.
    My train back to Bologna was thirty-five minutes late.