VIII.xv. Landscapes

"A man who doesn't love Italy is forever more or less a barbarian."
- Félicien Marceau

Central Italy in the springtime explodes into a sort of wisteria inspired dream. The colour of the hot summer months, the better-known Tuscany of brown fields and sunflowers, is nothing to the profusion of green, green of every shade, that carpets the hills near the very start of May.
    Orvieto, on the crest of a proud Umbrian ridge, shone in the brilliant sunlight of the morning as though it were built of alabaster. A well-conceived cable car system pulls the visitor up from the muggy depths of the valley to the breezy, somewhat austere sidestreets of the upper town. Far enough south to be a convenient ancient Papal retreat from the sweltering Roman summer, Orvieto was once of sufficient political stature to rival Siena. Bitter border disputes, an ongoing war really, dogged relations between the two cities, but art in the middle ages was almost immune to war and human strife, and so Sienese masters happily worked in Orvieto, and left to the city a singular, breathtaking cathedral, a jewel box testimony to the triumph of beauty over conflict, peace over war.
    Inlaid like an Egyptian perfume box, the façade at Orvieto sparkles even on the dimmest overcast day. In the pre-modern imagination, jewels, glass, and precious stones not only reflected light, but contained it as well; here, Newtonian optics are only a ruse and the mosaic wall emanates created light. Inside, dark and light combine with the striped rhythm of travertine marble and blackish-green granite, creating the most spiritual of Italy's large, gothic spaces.
    Venturing north from Orvieto, I crossed the almost imperceptible border back into Tuscany, stopping at the tiny sideline settlement of Montepulciano Stazione. In these, the far southern reaches of Siena province, bus rides are required to complete most thrift-based journeys, and so my circuitous afternoon began. I knew my day would only seem worthwhile if I were to enjoy the journeys as much as the eventual destinations, for transit in these parts is a rather slow but often scenic affair. Gradually ascending to Montepulciano proper, I only wished the ride were longer, because the countryside seemed to me more Tuscan than Tuscany itself. The foreground was rich with that famous local vine, the horizons blue with the purest sfumato haze, and the intervening spaces punctuated by emerald cypresses. This is the earthly paradise, and this is the reason why, for all its horrid clichés and overexploitation, Tuscany is the world's most desired landscape.
    The road further into the hills from Montepulciano to Pienza, even on a larger, faster, noiser bus, was among the most beautiful I had ever seen. Notwithstanding Provence's wilder valleys, the high Tatra Mountains, the pined Jura, the Cabot trail, this was to me the very idea of Eden as the enchanted garden, the fruitful tree. This was a cathedral of nature in hand with man, the very perfect place.
    I let the exhilarating wind flow through an open window as I sat at the back of the rushing bus, raised up, almost feeling like a prince in a roaring litter, wanting more than anything to cast off my crown for a taste of the sprawling fields.
    It was late when I finally returned to Bologna, and I, so imbued with the verdant fire of spring, hardly noticed as April slipped away into the first few hours of May.



The magnificent façade of Orvieto cathedral


A detail of the stone and inlay work on the façade


The Rose Window


The stories of Creation


Wisteria in bloom


A view from the city


A lone car makes it's way through the countryside


A church among the cypresses


Cheeses in Pienza


A view from Pienza's historic centre

VIII.xiv. Cin-Cin

"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

Rebellion is in the air in the streets of Bologna. Not political in nature, at least not overtly, this latest unrest stems from a recently introduced, profoundly incongruous by-law preventing outdoor consumption of alcohol after nine o'clock in the evening. This new piece of legislation, coupled with the indoor smoking ban that has been in place since January, is so completely anti-Bolognese that it has taken even the punk population by surprise. Deprived of the ability to engage simultaneously in their two favourite pastimes, the grossly underachieving children of children of '68 have finally rallied to the cause of nicotine and blended ethanol.
    Fuming and unjustly parched, the proletariat has taken control of Piazza Verdi and the traversing section of Via Zamboni. A large banner inciting the people to rebel immediately and take back the square has been suspended between the opera house's portico and a flatbed truck fitted with speakers blasting continuous reggae music. Somewhat sheltered from the exterior din, the twin busts of Verdi and Wagner look on from inside, scowling. No performances have been cancelled, yet.
    Keen to raise the level of the debate, a group of implicated wine merchants and Pakistani grocery store owners has spearheaded a poster campaign which tells the city that now, in light of this latest affront to intoxicating freedom, the time has come to decide. The proclamation reads as follows:
    Whom shall we toast? Are we to drink to an open city or a closed one? Are we to toast to a landscape of work and private life, or to a city that is an organism, alive twenty four hours a day? To be of the opinion that true citizens are only those of the historic centre, and that all others are intruders, vagabonds, and idlers, shows a marked disregard for demographics, urbanism, and diversity. To think that ideas are only born only in offices, not in streets or squares, to consider leisure and social life optional, of lesser importance than work, is an outdated way of thinking. We can share our dreams with each other through dialogue, not avoidance. Don't kill off, with propaganda and prohibitionism, a city aiming for European status. It's springtime; let's recommend some fresh air to everyone. The cup is brimming. Cheers.
    Having seen this polemical assertion reproduced everywhere, written in quite eloquent Italian, one would almost think that the East Indian alcohol sellers were fully integrated into Bolognese society. The declaration, though it is a poster, follows in the proud tradition of the commemorative plaque, something dear to the heart of every true Italian subject. Marble, glass, metal, or card, there is scarcely a building here that lacks an affixed public oration. Brown, oval discs mark noteworthy architecture; marble rectangles eulogize a once present historical figure; large glass panels mourn war dead; huge towering granites record the speeches of Vittorio Emanuele II, or Napoleon. Public eloquence is the veneer of unity for the Italians, and the small black and red drinking poster is just its latest manifesto.


Piazza Verdi in protest

VIII.xiii. The Green Heart of Italy

"For the sake of a weathered gray city set high on a hill
To the northward I go,
Where Umbria's valley lies mile upon emerald mile
Outspread like a chart.
The wind in her steep, narrow streets is eternally chill
From the neighboring snow,
But linger who will in the lure of a southerly smile,
Here is my heart."
- Amelia Josephine Burr

The morning train from Cortona to Perugia passes by the calm, deserted shores of Lake Trasimene, silent save for that wailing echo of a military defeat, the same gentle breeze that sifts through the grasses at Alesia, Vimy ridge, or the Plains of Abraham, the howl of history long gone by. Hannibal, twenty-two centuries ago, caught Flaminius' troops on the water's edge here, killed fifteen thousand of them and tainted the lake red. For an entire year thereafter, he roamed unopposed through central Italy, before the Romans were finally able to halt his advance at Cannae, the other mythic locus for those itinerant classics enthusiasts. On these calm banks, though, the towns of Ossaia, place of bones, and Sanguineto, place of blood, are the only faint cries that are left.
    Perugia, beyond the shores, seems a far more joyous place. A second Siena, it is alive in a better past of the gentle sort. On this particular Sunday, the city's elegant streets hummed with the lighthearted activity of vacationing Italians, many of them here since Friday's ponte, that luxurious unauthorized extension of the long weekend particular to Southern Europe's social democracies. The city's sprawling, variegated upper town is reached from below via a system of medieval underground streets fitted with modern escalators and enticing produce vendors. Totally devoid of cars, it is the weekend paradise of the modern Italian family. The wide, central Corso Pietro Vannucci, so-named after the city's most famous son and painter better known simply as Perugino, was a sea of Latin humanity. Fighting through stroller gridlock, it was hard to believe that I was amidst the population with the lowest birthrate in the western world.
    I had to wait in line to see that Perugino's little frescoes in the money-changers lodge. In the Cathedral, the chapel that enshrines the apocryphal wedding ring that Joseph gave to Mary was overrun by curious onlookers. After a season of empty towns and deserted museums, Perugia was alive. Taken aback, I sought my typical refuge at the national gallery.
    A country like Italy, burdened with the blessings of both a meddlesome state and an unparalleled artistic heritage, could never settle for a single national gallery. Instead, the state has created its own museums in every region of the country, the so-called Musei Nazionali. Unfortunately, these institutions often suffer from stagnation brought on by a lack of funds for new acquisitions, declining attendance, and lack of involvement within the wider community. Already in possession of enviable collections, the task of expanding or moving forward seems all too daunting, even pointless. Only in rare cases do the greatest masterpieces find themselves in the hands of regional or municipal authorities, which in turn operate their own system of museums and galleries. Overall, the system is far less centralized than those of France or England; Italy's collections, for reasons political as well as logistical, could never be contained in one single place. For such reasons, the nation's capital, extra-Vatican Rome, is relatively lacking in major art museums.
    In terms of hierarchy, the National Gallery of Umbria is near the top. What sets it apart is its dynamism but also its serenity. Though it is on the tall fourth floor of the Palazzo Pubblico, far above the din and bustle of the city, it still attracts crowds on a Sunday afternoon. Traveling through its rooms I was adrift in a jewel-toned dream. The museum represents all the best and worst of modern museum design. It sets the viewer aloft in a daze of Platonic proportions instead of grounding him in the historical past of the glorious painted paradise, and some is lost, and some is gained.
    One of the gallery's treasures is an altarpiece by Fra Angelico. No artist was ever in his life or work more holy, said Vasari of the blessed man. Palpitant before such a masterpiece, any viewer could credit the claim. Looking over an unspeakably tender Madonna and child, Angelico painted a serene Saint Nicholas, three sacks of gold at his feet, a portrait of his lifelong friend Tomaso Parentucelli, the wise, humanist Pope Nicholas V. In miniature, below, a smaller Saint Nicholas performs his famous caring act, dropping three bundles of gold into the house of three young maidens, sparing them from a life of prostitution and poverty. Reaching up to their window, he quietly pushes the three bundles over the sill, almost unnoticed.
    I thought, as I saw this perfect little picture, about how humble and distant men I would never meet, men like Fra Angelico, had taken such a permanent, irrevocable hold on my imagination. Every passing day, no matter where I am, this unexplainable passion consumes me more and more. These are the characters that inhabit my dreams. They are the apostles, the messiahs who had never bothered to write a word in ink but somehow live on through pictures, through time, through what others say, and become something immeasurably larger than themselves. I though about how little Saint Nicholas, even for all his personal associations, was to me not the saint but rather the painter, quiet Fra Angelico, alive in a fragile, almost permanent gaze, part-painter, part-god.



The Palazzo dei Priori and Corso Vannucci in central Perugia


The Fontana Maggiore at Perugia


A young Saint Nicholas, quietly giving alms

VIII.xii. Hunting Down Hilltowns

"I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself."
- Pietro Aretino

With a quick run and some luck, one can board the 9:09 southbound regionale and all of Tuscany is thrown open. Technically, the train leaves from Florence's Santa Maria Novella station one minute before the Euronight express, from Bologna, arrives, but Trenitalia's non-linear approach to time helps make the connection, and an easy jaunt into the Arno valley, an enticing possibility for the car-less.
    Arezzo, a short hour south-east of Florence, has the peculiar quality of being the birthplace of a great many important people who subsequently rarely returned. Petrarch, Piero della Francesca, Pietro Aretino, and Michelangelo were all born nearby. Even Giorgio Vasari, the first great art historian, was Aretine; in his later years he even built himself a fantastically decorated house here, going so far as to include a scene of God Blessing Abraham's Seed on the bedroom ceiling. It was all for naught, though, since the childless Vasari never spent much time away from the Medici court and was impotent besides.
    A series of frescoes painted by the aforementioned Piero, a token to his hometown, are what draw crowds to Arezzo now. The poor Franciscans have the dubious honour of hosting in their church the incursive groups of mass tourists who arrive here on day trips from Florence, keen to see the three painted walls which so iconically illustrate Saint Helena's search for the buried wood of the true cross. The cult of the fresco, something in which I wholeheartedly participate, is so strange. It pits the camera-toting traveler against the musty ecclesiastical wall, and Piero is just the start of it.

---

    "Nick, what the hell are you doing?" asked Marko, bewildered as I moved between pews. We were in Colle di val d'Elsa, a ridge-top town in the Chianti. I had dragged my poor atheist friend into yet another country church dark as the Nietzschean abyss.
    "I'm trying to find a light switch, man. It's gotta be around here somewhere…" I felt the dark corner of the wall, with no luck, "there are some early Sienese fragments in here, I think. If only I could find the lights…" It took a good ten minutes before I resigned myself to looking at the paltry bits of mural in the darkness.
    I think I had developed my tenacity in fresco hunting from Mr. Di Sante, my charismatic high school classics teacher. When I was thirteen, he organized a school trip to Italy, and I went along eagerly, my first time to Rome, Umbria, Ravenna. I remember him accosting an unfortunate priest in the town of Spello, exhorting him to open his parish during the hot midday hours so that we could see some Pinturrichios.

---

    After Arezzo, I had to autostop to get to Cortona, as it is a hill town with the common Tuscan trait of being virtually unreachable by public transit. Circumvented by the railroad, most of these villages survived the vicissitudes of the nineteenth century unscathed, and where one hundred years ago the citadels bled while the new towns thrived, modern tourism insures the opposite is true today. The station at Camucia, the recent valley settlement, is a steep five kilometers distant. Realizing the effort it would take to climb the winding approach, I stopped by the side of the road until a local man, driving into town to help prepare the following day's pottery festival, offered me a lift.
    Cortona is a city mostly populated by well-heeled American women who have read Under the Tuscan Sun, perhaps watched the film, and have taken it upon themselves to live out a meridional fantasy in the otherwise untouched hill town. Like Arezzo, it has been heavily gentrified, dotted with shops that sell every manner of invented local specialty. Even the Diocesan museum, which owns two exquisite Fra Angelico altarpieces both spiritually and economically more valuable than the entire town, has the gall to charge a five Euro entrance fee.
    Quite a contrast, the youth hostel in Cortona was a desolate affair that occupied a somewhat severe, decidedly ungentrified stone palace. The room where I slept had twenty foot ceilings and giant, creaking Florentine windows. Il papà albergatore, the generic Italian name for the superintendent of a hostel, was an incongruous leather jacket sporting man, keen to let the twelve Euros I owed be the end of it.
    Cortona's spectacular setting, though, is its redeeming feauture. The panorama that unfolds from the very top of the ridge on which the town sits takes in the verdant sloped of the Western Appenines, the Tuscan plain, and the mirror-like Lake Trasimene to the south. As the daylight faded, I was able to enjoy the serenity of an uncharacteristically empty place, totally devoid of its diurnal visitors, calm as the black night that surrounded its walls, besieging them anew.


A picturesque street in Arezzo


An Olive tree lined path above Cortona


Fra Angelico's famous Cortona Annunciation

VIII.xi. Modena City Ramblers

"Long live Italy, fearless Italy,
Long live Italy, seaborne Italy,
Forgettable, forgotten Italy,
Half garden, half hell."
- The Modena City Ramblers

When I arrived with Elizabeth and her friend Peter, Piazza Maggiore was packed with the city's decadent youth. A huge stage had been erected in the centre of the square. Somewhat incongruously, the focus of attention was a group of sexagenarian women chanting about the heady days of the partisans, the resistance movement that helped dislodge the Rebublic of Salo and the occupying German forces in the dying days of the Second World War. Indeed, Liberation Day here is seen as an event celebrating the freedom fighters, the irregulars, much more than the strategically indispensable advances of, say, the fifth Army. Bologna, which has a special and somewhat selective relationship to twentieth century history, celebrates what could have been. A case in point were the communist flags that some spectators waved about during the concert, in keeping with the "Lenin, Stalin, Mao" slogans that accompany the hammer and sickle etched into the backs of the chairs in many a lecture hall.
    The elderly chanters continued for some time, dedicating songs to "youth, the driving force of freedom," while the audience, unflattered, took little note. Clearly, the evening's main act had been delayed, possibly by the spitting rain that transformed the crowd into a seething, unpleasantly smelling whole. Finally, the headliners arrived, shouting raucous political slogans, encouraging in one of their songs the election of a communist, pacifist, filo-american soldier president. The crowd, enjoying every last word, had even grown to encompass the broad steps in front of San Petronio, and the venerable basilica's façade, hung with a banner congratulating Benedict XVI, formed a sort of weird antependium to the stage opposite. Was I the only one who recalled that the new Pope had once called rock music the vehicle of anti-religion?
    The Modena City Ramblers are a rag-tag group of folk musicians who spout out wistful elegiacal nonsense; like the women who performed before them, none are old enough to even remember the war. Beyond a few rehashed liberation chants, they seemed overwhelmingly concerned with outdated ideological notions. If there ever were an opium for modern Italy, one which distracts it and prevents it from becoming a world power, it would be the fatuous dialectic that continues to this day between Marx and Mussolini, carried forward by young and old alike, stubborn, hackneyed, futile, unaware as their country slips away from consequence. These were the flag-wavers in Piazza Maggiore.
    At one point, the lead of the Ramblers remarked that, since liberation day was being celebrated, it would be nice to see an Italian flag in the audience, for instead of the tricolour, only Cuba and the Soviet Union, along with some red handkerchiefs, flapped in the damp evening breeze. It takes sixty years to forget a nation.

VIII.x. Trenta Lode

"Energy and curiosity are the lifeblood of universities; the desire to find out, to uncover, to dig deeper, to puzzle out obscurities, is the spirit of the university, and it is a channeling of that unresting curiosity that holds mankind together."
- Robertson Davies

"You're what we like to call a bravo, bello ragazzo," said Professor Lenzi at the end of the exam. "What should we give him?" she asked her assistant who was sitting at a desk nearby, putting another student through her paces.
    "I don't know. I mean, he was quite good. I could practically see giving him a trenta lode."
    "Right. Trenta Lode, Nicholas. What about the girl in front of you now, though?"
    "Well, I'm not so sure," remarked the assistant.
    By this process I was awarded the highest possible mark on my Modern Architecture exam. I almost burst out laughing when I was told, though I was able to stave it off until I got into the hall, for concern of the Italian students who likely didn't have it so easy. I had been waiting, once again, all morning to take the exam, and the combination of relief and flying colours made me feel elated as I left Palazzo Poggi and made my way through the sun striated arcades of Via Zamboni.
In my defense, I had studied a significant amount for this exam. Most of my work had been the translation of architectural vocabulary from English to Italian. I had been familiar with the architecture of Bologna for some time now, since I'm never really at ease with a city until I understand its buildings.
    Formally speaking, the exam was a joke. To begin I was seen by the assistant, a boring, withered doctoral student who expressed far more interest in his ideas than in my own. "Tell me about Brunelleschi," he began.
    "Well, Brunelleschi was one of the Florentine republic's foremost architects in the early fifteenth century, responsible for designing the dome of the city's cathedral…"
    "Yes, of course, you could say that. Everyone mentions the Duomo, sure. I like to focus more on his earlier buildings. These were much more important. Can you name some? Doesn't matter. See, look here for example, the Ospedale degli Innocenti…"
    "Built 1418-1419," I hastily tried to interject.
    "Sure, if you want to be dry about things. What's more interesting, in my view, is his use of columns. See, these things? And what is this called?"
    "That?"
    "Yes, that."
    "That's an arch," I replied, not believing my ears.
    "But what kind of arch?"
    "A… A round one." And so the absurd first part of my exam continued for about a quarter of an hour, most of which I spent listening to the assistant pontificating about his own ideas which perhaps Professor Lenzi was too domineering ever to consider seriously. As I was given over to the Professoressa proper, I already felt quite comfortable, as though I could get used to taking seven years of these exams on my way to a first degree.
    Professor Lenzi's questioning was far more substantial. She was much more personable and far less senile than I had remembered from lecture, and seemed to find it quite interesting that I was from Canada. She didn't seem to mind that one or two dates slipped my mind, or that I was wrong on a few attributions, in fact she repeatedly complemented me on my Italian, even commenting to her assistant that I was far more idiomatic in the use of the language than other foreigners. When I explained to her the use of architecture as a political tool whist Bologna was ruled by Julius the second, she asked me if I though leaders still built for power in our day, actually quite an intelligent question that goes beyond rote knowledge and into more critical realms.
    "Well," I said, "just look at your Berlusconi. He wants to build that ridiculous bridge across the straight of Messina." I seemed to have caught a nerve.
    "Does he ever! And he wants to name it after himself, too. Can you believe that? Caesar had the same ideas two thousand years ago." She also asked me what were my favourite buildings in Bologna, where I had traveled, what I had seen; the whole exam took close to an hour. In her was all that typical ebullience Italians direct towards foreigners familiar with their culture, a certain pride but also an appreciation of another's interest.

---

    I was, disappointingly, not in Rome for the Habemus Papam. I was in the Plenty Market, shopping while my laundry spun in the Laundromat next door, still very pleased from my exam result. The elevator music usually being played was interrupted by the news. "Oh, shit," I thought, as I picked up a sheaf of asparagus. I had completely forgotten about Rome with all the recent worldly tumult that had so been effecting my life. Between the postponement of my exams, my projects, my travels, and my study, I had neglected to get anywhere close to Rome for the conclave. So, it was under the glare of the fluorescent lights and the banality of the vegetable aisle that Rome, so near yet so distant, imposed its will.

VIII.ix. I Glossatori

"I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom."
- Edith Wharton

My mother had left now and I was once again on my own in my habitual world of Bachelorship, with an elongated dishwashing schedule and a perpetually unmade bed. Owing to my various visitors and my exams, I had been rather incommunicado with my circle of friends here, holed up in libraries or museums for long hours while the weather turned to spring, unnoticed by me and the parkless city alike.
    I had been working rather vaguely since my arrival on a study of the tombs of medieval jurist tombs in Bologna. This project had grown immensely larger than I had originally intended, becoming a sort of synthesis of all the scholarly thoughts I had assembled during my time in Bologna. Lately, I had been spending an inordinate of time working in a variety of libraries, the resources of the dear little art history department here having long been exhausted.
    In Bologna, libraries are still seen as the reserves for a select view, treasure houses of some kind of occult knowledge. The procedure for actually consulting books is just as Cabbalistic. No two libraries share the same cataloguing system, so each needs to be memorized as much as possible, at least when the shelves are open to the public; generally, they are not.
    Usually, a fair number of libraries indicates a healthy university. At Bologna, there are ninety-three in total. Many subject areas overlap, since some libraries are full and need to have their newer acquisitions sent elsewhere. The average library here is eight times smaller than the median at my home university, which makes for frustrating study hours, most of which are occupied by transit through the perilously distracting streets of the university district.
    At the Italian Studies library, books need to be ordered from the stacks on small slips of green paper. Author, title, date, physical description, each of these need to be provided in order for your book to be found. Then, once an hour, there is a retrieval run, and a worker is dispatched to fetch your book. Once it has arrived for your consultation, you must sign a form and surrender a piece of identification until you are done. Permission to borrow a book is simply beyond question. How anyone succeeds in reading an entire book this way, while staying at one of the cramped, crowded library desks for hours at a time, is beyond me, but apparently no one else.
    At the Archiginassio, the venerable ancient seat of the University, now a major library, the process is equally counter-intuitive. Here, the user is not allowed to enter the library with books from the outside world, except if he manages to get a hold of a precious outside book pass, only a few of which are issued each day.
    The Sala Borsa, that beautifully renovated public library just steps away from Piazza Maggiore, is still a choice place to study, of course, but it too is beginning to look somewhat run down, victim of the uniquely Italian plague of public vandalism. Often, in this country, a new public building remains beautiful, gleaming in typical Italian style, for only a few months before it is defaced and dirtied by ungrateful crowds. The same is true of train cars inside and out, which often become defaced with graffiti in a supposed act of rebellion, simply stupid considering that railways are among the more progressive forms of travel. So, slowly, the Sala Borsa is becoming slightly unpolished, not with spray paint, but with the gradual neglect that is both this nation's scourge and its charm.


A student in the fourteenth century


One of the exterior Glossatori monuments, from about 1268

VIII.viii. Postponed

"Is not, indeed, every man a student?"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You're practically Bolognese now," Professor Cavina said as we spoke during intermission at the Teatro Manzoni, a real lieu de rencontre for the local upper crust, that segment of Bolognese society that still speaks in the elegant, rounded accents inherited from the ecclesiastical governors of distant times past. We had been enjoying a performance by Andras Schiff, a world-renowned pianist who was on the program tonight as part of the Bologna festival, a perpetuation of the city's long heritage of musical appreciation.
    I had had an interesting day. The exam I had been scheduled to take that morning had been postponed, in a typical act of total disregard for student time, for six days. The entire ritual of student evaluations here, in fact, is one that borders on the absurd. An opportunity to take an exam is known as an appello, and is offered approximately once a month, at the professor's discretion. Of course, these oral exams can be taken repeatedly until a mark acceptable to the student has been achieved, so technically they ought to be stress-free. For us foreign students who can't afford to spend seven years doing a first degree, they are a nerve-racking experience, especially, as in this case, the first time along. After signing up in advance to be on the list, the student has to arrive at the appello as soon as it begins, usually in the morning. The names are called out, and anyone who is not present is removed from the list. Then, the presiding assistant sets out a schedule for the exam, ranging anywhere from a few hours to several days. It is then the student's responsibility to be present when his or her turn comes. This requirement means gauging how long others will take in the exam, and nervously waiting around in decrepit hallways for countless, needlessly wasted hours. There is no set time for each student. In my case, the assistant was kind enough to inform us that only fifteen students would be examined today, and that the rest would have to return the following Tuesday. I was number seventeen. At any rate, he added, the fifteen wouldn't be able to take the exam until after lunch, as the Professor had another class to teach. Why the exam had been booked on a day when the Professor had a class was beyond question. I left, infuriated, feeling even worse for those who had wasted an entire preparing to take the exam.
    The reason why student evaluation practice is so byzantine here stems not from a lack of resources, but instead from a totally outdated contanentalist notion of the Administrator's Supremacy. Keeping a hundred odd students waiting for half an hour while finishing lunch, answering cell phones while giving lectures, arbitrarily postponing exams, these are all insults to the student's time and energy, and are rewarded with requisite apathy. What's given is gotten.
    If Professor Cavina was right, then my integration into Bolognese society had come hand in hand with the inefficiencies, the injustices, and the frustration that necessarily accompanies life in such a wonderful place.

VIII.vii. The Invention of Celebrity

"A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts."
- Joshua Reynolds

This time, Professor Cavina didn't take the Audi. She actually had ridden her bicycle to the station, and climbed aboard the rickety regionale to Ferrara with the rest of us. At the ungodly hour of eight fifteen, our entire class of a hundred students was off to the Reynolds exhibit that was currently on in Ferrara. This was our latest fieldtrip in Professor Cavina's ambitious program, which she tried so valiantly to implement in spite of the often counter-productive inner workings of the vast University that surrounds her.
    I was with my mother, who had principally come on the trip in order to meet the famous Professoressa, when we bumped into her. "Visiting Nick for a second time? You are worse than an Italian mother!" she said, only partly joking. In her usual frenzied state, she excused herself from morning chitchat in order to study, to cram for her tour. This is something the common professor would try to hide, try to conceal beneath a veneer of preparedness. Cavina, the real thing, had no qualms about doing a bit of last minute underlining on the train.
    "Nick, tell people to meet on the corner," she said to me once we had arrived at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, the venue for the show, "I have to go get a coffee." A few minutes later, she re-appeared at the intersection facing the Palazzo, and, unfazed by the rush hour traffic, proceeded to introduce our class to the wonders of this renaissance architectural gem, a palace faced with 12,500 blocks of diamond-shaped marble. Just as quickly, she brought us into the exhibit and changed subjects completely to talk of Reynolds, who himself would probably be spinning in his grave at the sight of his beloved aristocracy hanging together on the walls of some draughty Italian mansion, gawked at by hordes of irreverent students.
    I had to bear the brunt this time of Professor Cavina's constant and unwarranted worry about her English skills. She would constantly turn to me expectantly while giving the tour, making sure that her pronunciation was acceptable, even as she struggled to find Italian equivalents to terms such as "bird brained," which she used to describe Reynold's airier female models, and "armchair traveler," her epithet for many a kilted Scotsman posing imperiously in front of some Roman ruin or another. Altogether, her use of English is probably seen by my classmates as something quite modern; while many Italian academics purport to be fluent in English, few can even read it, and so she is a rare exception, especially for her generation, weaned on the elegant diphthongs of dying Francophone cultural hegemony. Now, Bad English was replacing Good French in Italy, and Joshua Reynold's portraits were a case in point.

VIII.vi. Barbaro

"A Master, then, is he who can express new things that others understand."
- Carlo Scarpa

Our four-day visit of the Veneto Villas was, until the final afternoon, unaffected by the dire weather predictions that had preoccupied my planning. It had spat rain as we donned the slippers compulsory to the visit of Villa Barbaro, perhaps the greatest of them all, the fruit of a concerted collaboration between Palladio, the superlative architect, and Veronese, the greatest large-scale painter of the age. Still lived in, some of Villa Barbaro's rooms are amusingly sealed off with removable glass panels, allowing the curious visitor to peer into the off limits, fully-furnished rooms still used by the owners. Stuffy leather furniture, mementoes of all sorts, portraits of military men, all these things contrast with the light, almost Arcadian frescoes. In one room, a spotted terrier peers out from one of the walls, painted in trompe l'oeil. The family that inhabits the place seems to be a tenacious bunch; could the State buy the place, it would. Veronese-frescoed Palladian Villas don't grow on the willow groves that stretch to the damp horizons, either those painted in jest on the walls or in the real landscape that extends beyond the windows.
    The genius of Italy, though, didn't end in the sixteenth century, something about which I need constant reminders. I suppose my tolerance for the pre and slightly post Raphaelite is far greater that that of most people. I knew this, and planned accordingly. On our itinerary was a supposedly extraordinary creation by the modernist architect Carlo Scarpa, a cemetery tomb in an otherwise unremarkable village. Unfortunately, the cemetery we eventually found was the wrong one, and it took my asking of a poor mourning woman where the Scarpa was.
    Eventually, we found the place, an odd concrete construction, like something out of another world, the anti-type to the Palladian Villa. Sophie and Gerry loved it, both of them having been builders in their former lives. I was pleasantly surprised, too, by this strange arc, and it was a welcome contrast to the rest of the sites we visited.


In front of Villa Emo in the rain


Mom and Sophie in the Gardens of Villa Pisani


A Lichen-Covered Statue

VIII.v. Four at Ca' Sette

"The place is nicely situated and one of the loveliest and most charming that one could hope to find; for it lies on the slopes of a hill, which is very easy to reach. The loveliest hills are arranged around it, which afford a view into an immense theatre."
- Andrea Palladio

Asparagus season happily coincided this year with mid-spring in the Veneto, when the various fruit trees that dot the landscape start to bloom, brightening the often dull weather. It was nice to get out into the country, to go northward as spring advanced. Bologna is so completely urban, so devoid of public greenery, that at times it can seem more of an unabated metropolis than even New York city. Granted, the concealed courtyards and verdant rooftop terraces must provide some respite to those who have them, but for the student the city is nothing but bricks, marble, and books. When the sun becomes strong again and casts long shadows along the porticoes, wider spaces beckon.
    I had for these reasons willingly consented to touring the Veneto in a group consisting of my cousin once removed Sophie, her late-life partner Gerry, and my mother, who had arrived the previous day for a two-week jaunt in Italy. Sophie and Gerry, living comfortable in the outskirts of Geneva, have become world travelers in their later years; their week in Northern Italy was somewhat tame compared to their other destinations, which made me all the more determined to plan for them an eventful few days.
    My Swiss relatives, especially the Genevois, have always treated me well. I spent a crucial summer in Switzerland once, hosted by them. I was always on the outside, as the visiting cousin, and therefore didn't have to deal with the almost endemic animosity that exists within that side of the family. Sophie, to me the dearest of them, takes it all in stride, and fortunately sees the humour in the fact that eleven out of the thirteen cousins in her generation have divorced.

---

    We met in the morning at Padova and drove west to Vicenza, the next city inland. Vicenza is the centre of architectural tourism in Northern Italy. Palladio, the famous villa-builder, was born here and examples of his work dot the surrounding landscape, each bearing the name of the wealthy patrician family who commissioned it. This is the domain of the Italian garden, the green, flowerless terraces that often outdo the buildings they encircle in grandeur. Many of the villas are still owned by the ancestors, reduced in means, living frugally from admission tickets bought by the general public. Sometimes, the mere chance to walk through the great rooms of these mansions, still furnished with centuries of family heirlooms, occasionally crossing a forlorn looking marquis, is worth the visit; sometimes, like a neglected plantation or a ancient Greek ruin, it is nothing but depressing. We stopped first at Villa Capra Valmarana, known more colloquially as La Rotonda, one of Palladio's most characteristic creations, copied, recreated, transposed by architects as far away as Saint Petersburg, Delhi, and London. Palladio's vocabulary, much loved in the twentieth century, four hundred years after his death, has become hackneyed the world over. Even Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's slave-built paradise in the wooded hills of Virginia, owes much to La Rotonda.
    Central Vicenza, one of the most beautiful historic centres in the Veneto, has nothing of the outlying Palladian decadence. Elegant, lively, handsome, it embodies the ebullient spirit of the modern Veneto; its political by-product is the Lega Nord, the secessionist political party that is a constant, numb threat to Italian unity.
    We spent the afternoon in Vicenza, saw an exhibition that traced the development of the Villa from Petrarch to Carlo Scarpa, and visited the Teatro Olimpico, another Palladian creation, the oldest wooden theatre in the world. Then, on my directions, we drove north in the little blue Ford Sophie had rented for our tour. I had booked at a hotel for us in Bassano del Grappa, a town at the foot of the first Dolomite hills, on the edge of the Venetian plain, home of the liqueur that has far outshone the town in fame. Nevertheless, Bassano is still a charming place, with its characteristic wooden bridge that spans the Brenta as it descends from the Alps into the wide, green plain. The Ca' Sette, as the hotel was called, was in an eighteenth century villa, impeccably renovated in the most modern way. Our dinner, in the restaurant next door, was among the most refined I had ever had in Italy. Here, well north of Bologna, the cuisine makes use of more complex ingredients, is more subtle, and relies more on the skill of the cook than on the ingredients alone.
    I thought, as I tucked into a plate of white asparagus risotto, about how I had been spoiled by this nation. There are no truly bad restaurants in Italy of the kind that is so commonplace in the rest of the world. I thought further, too, about how, maybe, there is nothing at all truly bad in Italy for whoever remains only a visitor, one exempt from the societal pains and troublesome integration. Then, recalling the events of the day, how I had guided my company around the region as if it was my own, how I enjoyed and delighted in showing other people what this place has to offer, I wondered if I really still was just a visitor.

VIII.iv. Flocks

"Everyone soon or late comes round by Rome."
- Robert Browning

For a few fleeting days, Rome has once again become the centre of the world. Two million pilgrims, more than have ever been in the city at one time, are descending towards the Vatican. Trenitalia has added extra trains, the EUR exhibition grounds have been turned into temporary lodgings, and Saint Peter's is staying open twenty-one hours a day. The event is not only unparalleled in modern times, but in any age at all. The world craves historical moments that for the most part belong in the past, but for these few early days in April, the entirety of modern civilization's gaze is fixed on Rome. Antiquity and the future are colliding, and most people, in some way or another, are fascinated by it.
    John Paul II was the first Pope of the information age, and the uniqueness both of his life and death go to show just how young the modern world is. For centuries, for almost two millennia, hundreds of popes lived and died, their sufferings and triumphs unwatched by the majority of human beings. Even John XXIII, one of the most popular Popes of the twentieth century, did not attract the sort of constant, concerted attention only the twenty first century can provide.
    When did the secular world become so boring? Perhaps when it became so dominant. The global fixation on the Vatican, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is a loudly indirect manifestation of a latent desire to see the world acclaim something as universal amidst a sea of relativities. I don't mean to say that the Pope or that the Church actually are moral absolutes, only that the idea of finding this, however unrealistic that idea may be, is what motivates people to watch crowds in Saint Peter's square fixedly for hours at a time. The mere idea of something universal galvanizes people, because universality as anything but an idea has become totally impossible.
    Everyone will still be watching for the white smoke.

VIII.iii. A Lombard Trek

"The future starts today, not tomorrow."
- Karol Wojtyla

It was probably the most sober Sunday morning Italy had woken up to since that infamous defeat at the hands of the Croatian soccer team during the 2002 World Cup. John Paul II, the beloved Pope who had implored the Roman crowds to correct him if he erred in their shared Italian tongue, had died the night before. All of Italy was draped in black, an inevitable shade, not one of surprise or injustice, but rather of tearful acceptance; this was the end of the most beloved foreigner to ever live in the among them.
    I left Lissone early in the morning, saying goodbye to Cecilia and Sarah. I boarded the train back to Milan without a ticket, because no one was willing to sell me one so early and at such a time. Cecilia joked that I ought to tell the inspector I was on my way to Rome for the funeral, but I feared that the state run railways had gone secular long ago. The reason why they run more trains for Easter is so that riots won't break out, not for spiritual purposes. At any rate, this was my first ticketless ride on an Italian train, and I have taken the train more than a hundred times since my arrival. I even scrupulously keep a record of each voyage through a growing stack of used stubs sitting in my apartment. Still, even a lifetime of good behaviour wouldn't provide a shred of defense in this situation; not wanting to expose myself to a potential twenty five euro fine, I was forced to get off at the next stop as I saw the Capotreno advancing through the cars. I alighted in Monza, the historic city that was now a satellite of Milan, more famous for its Grand Prix than its charming old quarter. In the town, all the flags were at half-mast and the people looked sober. Stuck here for some time, I gravitated towards the Cathedral, gothic, frescoed, founded by Queen Theodolinde in the sixth century. It was the natural thing to do in a time of national mourning.
    Within the glorious multicoloured marble façade of the building people had assembled in a sort of sacerdotal vigil, waiting for the first mass of the day. As the time approached, more and more people started arriving, and finally they came in hundreds, children too looking uncharacteristically grave, dressed in the dark tones of a Lombard Sunday Best. Some were crying but most just looked lost; I was upset not to be in Rome, the epicenter. Not having been weaned on images of the Pope, nor having grown up subject to his doctrine, I couldn't really feel sad. I felt moved more by the unfolding history of the moment than anything else. In ages past, a Pope would already have been elected by the time most churchgoers heard of his death. Queen Theodolinde probably couldn't have conceived of such a timely gathering when she built the Cathedral. Nevertheless, in a world where spiritual centres are increasingly figurative this was a nice dose of actuality. They hardly use the Cathedral, but they still use it sometimes, and that is all that matters. In a time of crisis, head to where the bells toll.

---

    The train schedule back to Bologna this Sunday morning was difficult, and so I decided to make a day of it and move further into Lombardy rather than out of it. I went to Bergamo, a bustling medium-sized city with an exceptionally beautiful old town, nearly but not quite ruined by the masses of English and German tourists who make convenient stopovers here thanks to a prominent low-cost airport that attracts, for the most part, a set of decidedly low-cost people. The airport is notorious for being difficult to reach, even though some carriers insist on it being in Milan. A clever advertising campaign by less low cost competitors announced that they flew to Milan sul serio, for real, rather than to Orio al Serio, the name of the Bergamo airport. The last time I was in Bergamo, more than three years earlier, it was much different. Ryanair was still an obscure entity and the city was essentially unscathed by mass tourism. Now, in the narrow cobbled streets of the ark-like upper town, visitors jostle to window shop the plethora of newly opened boutiques.
    Bergamo still delights, though. It is home to one of the region's better art galleries, its hilltop location makes for spectacular panoramas, and it is ringed by villas with stunning terraced gardens, all of which were alight with the product of an early spring. I was able to continue my Lorenzo Lotto tour, one I had begun in the Marche a few weeks prior; the painter worked here, quietly and unnoticed by his Venetian competitors, for some of the most productive years of his life.
    Before returning home on a long and complicated three leg train journey, I stopped at one last city, Brescia. Dustier and less trafficked than neighbouring Bergamo, Brescia still has its treasures, among which are the two little Raphaels in the civic museum. The old town, ringed by fortifications, is embellished with buildings in almost every architectural style imaginable, from decaying Roman temples to the severe façades of the fascist-era edifices that intrude on almost every Italian city.
    Finally, I headed back to Bologna and fell asleep on the train, with all the world in limbo.



The Marble Façade of Monza's Duomo


The Exquisite Architecture of Bergamo

VIII.ii. Milano Centrale

"I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country."
- Ian Rush

When I arrived at the Milan train station, Cecilia was talking to one of the very determined suitors she quite often seems to attract, while a bored looking Sarah looked on. I pretended not to find the situation funny, and introduced myself to the rather tedious looking, somewhat oblivious young man, who proceeded with his monologue. "I am not liking this kid," Cecilia remarked to me in English edgewise, whether or not the bystander understood.
    Perhaps I ought to clarify things, to explain that this was not a chance meeting with Saint Cecilia and Forlì Sarah on a platform of Milano Centrale at eleven o'clock at night. My word, what would those two be doing together if it wasn't to scold me for some transgression or another? This was an entirely different Sarah and Cecilia, meeting me as I got off my rather tardy train from Bologna.
    Cecilia, in the most positive way possible, is an Italian matron in the making, though luckily she remains childless and young. She is a friend of mine from Toronto, an extraordinary girl who I can only describe as the centre of many different universes, an entrepreneuse, an administrator, and an objet aimé of many a hapless Italian man. At twenty-four years of age, she has inherited what to most of us would be a real estate empire, packed up her bags, and moved to Italy. She has all the sprezzatura of Professor Cavina, forty years sooner. Her life in Lissone, a quiet dormitory city north of Milan, has become the makings of a soap opera. Key to the cast are the two forty year old women who have attached themselves to poor Cecilia, eternally exchanging and producing gossip, a young Canadian lad occasionally employed as a handyman (not me), and finally, the visitors, those occasional cameo stars.
    Sarah, the internationalist, is yet another Canadian employed in Europe, in her case at the expense of the aforementioned nation's government. She works in Vilnius for UNESCO's European regional branch, which for some reason happens to include North America as well, and is thus compensated for the Lithuanian winter via transatlantic payments. As Cecilia tried to shake off her unwanted consort we looked at each other and shrugged; another devotee of the great Ceci tried his luck.
    Finally, after an agonizingly long wait, our train to Lissone left and we abandoned the suitor, who meanwhile had been joined by a friend of his, to the station platform.

---

    Unfortunately I didn't get much sleep while I was visiting Cecilia, as the night and day vigil being held by the Italian media for the ailing pontiff seemed to me too fascinating to miss. For the first time in months, I was able to watch television, though I was reminded just as soon why I haven't missed it during my time in Bologna. The iridescent glow on the makeup of the commentators, growing increasingly tired and irritable as the hours dragged on, seemed to revel in their morbid wait; some of them looked as though they were in more dire condition than the Pope.



Enacting an unspeakable Milanese tradition in the grandeur of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele

VIII.i. An End

"Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways: women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one."
- Pope John XXIII

The Pope is dying. Thousands of people have gathered in Bologna's Piazza Maggiore, and on television every channel has interrupted normal programming.
    I'm not quite sure where things stand with my pledge to go to Rome to witness this event. I have to go to Milan later this evening, so perhaps I will wait until to Papal conclave, something far less morbid. Still, the images show flocks of people descending on Saint Peter's square, mobbing Bernini's colonnade. The media circus is gearing up for a glimpse of history in an era that is so often deprived of it. Every major international news organization has been preparing to cover this event for years, and most have contracts with Roman hotels and owners of rooftops with views over saint Peter's square. For historians, who see the passing of eras as somewhat vaster than mere lifetimes, this is almost a routine event; for others, history is colliding with an ahistorical world, and all they can do is watch.