Nick in Italia

X.x. Pilate's Well

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:29:00 +0000

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

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

X.ix. Babylon

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:38:00 +0000

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

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

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

X.viii. In a Milan Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 21:35:00 +0000

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

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

X.vii. A Dusty Altar

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 20:09:00 +0000

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

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

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

The spires of Bergamo

X.vi. Gra Car

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 20:29:00 +0000

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

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

The ornate façade of the Charterhouse

A certain someone in the little cloister

The fantastical, immaculately preserved brickwork of the Certosa

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

X.v. The Spanish College

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 21:42:00 +0000

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

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

X.iv. The Hundred Steps

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:16:00 +0000

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

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

The main square in Cento

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

X.iii. A Picnic

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 18:10:00 +0000

"I chose to recount only certain episodes of my life, specifically those which were most decisive, and most important, for my personal evolution…. The pieces of the puzzle that I'm recalling now seem to form (at least for the time being) a single, homogenous design, a mosaic similar that of my existence."
- Federico Zeri

As we sat in her car and battled the lunch hour traffic, Professor Cavina spoke to us in a pastiche of English, French, and Italian. "I'm just back from Paris," she said, "so I need to get used to things again. Which way am I going, now?" She exhibited her usual frenetic personality, completely unconcerned, as the state of her Audi testified, with the banalities of city driving. Finally free from Bologna's narrow streets, we ascended to Villa Guastavillani.
    Professor Cavina, Matthew and I were going on a picnic, the day before the final installment of our exam. In North America this would be interpreted as a serious conflict of interest, but here it was just a matter of course. In fact, I think that Professor Cavina wanted to show us just what she was up to in her professional life, a sort of apology for the somewhat questionable workings of the University of Bologna as a teaching institution.
    Lost in the lush hills above Bologna, the villa is the temporary seat of a great endeavour, a secret workshop that embodies all the aspirations of Bologna's greatest art historians. Here, in the mansards of a fourth floor attic, a team of specialists is cataloging and computerizing the legacy of their eminent late colleague, Federico Zeri.
    Zeri's collection is enormous; he bequeathed a unique collection of three hundred thousand photos of Italian art, his villa near Rome, as well as an important art history library all to the University of Bologna. He even had the foresight and humility to state that, on his deathbed, there would be over ten thousand books in his library he would never have a chance to read. For Zeri, the mere ownership of a book, the ability to leaf through its pages and stock it on a shelf, was an act of learning. Somehow, through symbiosis, knowledge could be acquired. He must have thought the same of his enormous Fototeca, now in the process of being carefully dissected and digitized by energetic young graduates. At the Villa Guastavillani, Zeri's memory lives on. After his death, his passion has grown into something infinitely larger than himself.
    Zeri's life was extraordinary. In many ways he was the last witness to an era now long vanished. The self-confessed dichotomy of his existence consisted of diligent, solitary research on the one hand, and dizzying social engagements on the other. He was befriended and engaged by, among others, Bernard Berenson, J. Paul Getty, and count Alessandro Contini, constantly treading a careful path through the salons and manors of some of the twentieth century's wealthiest people. A lifetime of jet-setting in Europe and America led him to encounters with Greta Garbo, Diana Cooper, and the Duchess of Argyll.
    Because he was a private historian for most of his career, he was able to launch himself into situations and adventures that many of his contemporaries shunned. He had many enemies of lesser of greater menace, including Roberto Longhi, his famed professor, who effectively blocked his entrance into the world of Italian academia, unwittingly broadening the young student's horizons in the process. Zeri, youthful, acerbic, and verbose, was able to reap the benefit of history; his autobiography, published ten years ago shortly before his death, did not mince words when it came to targeting the adversaries he had outlived. He, an outsider, had the last word.
    Professor Cavina was evidently a good friend of Zeri, for she accompanied him on various trips to the Middle East. The slides she showed us in class of her next to him were only thinly masked admiration for a teacher by a student. It was only natural that now she was one of the chief exponents of his legacy. Professor Benati, with whom I also took a course, was present at the villa as well, along with a host of other historians, young and old, who formed what seemed like a closely-knit, almost idyllic community of continuators. As we ate our picnic on the villa's lawn, with the hectic city below, I couldn't help but consider myself a member, even through proxy, of this loyal group.

The Villa Guastavillani

X.iii. More or Less Powerful

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 20:20:00 +0000

"And God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected."
- Spike Milligan

As if to congratulate me for bidding farewell to my last visitors and beginning to study in earnest for my upcoming exams, today my electricity returned. It had not been the extraordinary event I had hoped for, but passed almost unnoticed as I instinctively flicked the light switch this morning, something I had been doing now for more than a week. As I began washing my face, I noticed how bright my sunburnt complexion looked in the mirror before suddenly realizing exactly what had occurred.
Some distant Enel employee, likely fresh from an improvised four day weekend in Abruzzo, had decided to restore my much deserved power. I had this stranger's capriciousness to thank for my newfound filamentary glory.
But I was alone to relish this moment, and so I did so silently and still half asleep. Aldous had once again passed through Bologna for less than twenty-four hours, but now he was gone and my jubilation was solitary. Yesterday in fact had been a great day, as it started with a well-written exam and was followed by a bout of church visiting, an activity to which my friend seemed to have lately acquired quite an affinity. I took him to the great brick church of San Domenico, the resting place of Saint Dominic, to show him what I maintain is the only sculpture by Michelangelo that can be touched without sowing alarm. It is a little genuflected angel, carved by the sculptor when he was only twenty, effectively a disused candlestick holder on the side of Dominic's great tomb. When the eccentric sacristan is out sight one can furtively reach up and touch the angel's foot. He too has long been without light, so perhaps the humble gesture Aldous and I repeated somehow precipitated the return of my electrical power. At this point, I was more than ready to succumb to the required superstition.

X.ii. Dr. Galvani, please help us

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 21:08:00 +0000

"Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy."
- Bertrand Russell

On Wednesday, Sarah had left for Germany to pursue a language course. Abandoning her to Bavaria on a train platform felt like the onslaught of another winter, and so I wandered about Bologna, heeding her advice and not returning alone to my apartment. My life had changed, I think, since the day I had met her and try as I might it could not be changed back. My loneliness, though, didn't last for long, because later that same evening John and Bronwen returned from Tuscany, where we had left them to their own devices. If they minded the lack of electricity in my apartment, they certainly didn't say anything, though secretly perhaps they thought it a bit odd that such a misunderstanding could have occurred between myself and dear old Dr. Caramori.
But John and Bronwen are good old friends, and were a necessary reminder of why the adventure I had thrown myself into could only ever last a year. Italy was not my home, and it probably never would be. In fact, I was coming to realize that my niche in the world was completely independent of place, or at least nationhood, and resided instead in the people, wherever they may be, that understand my universe.
Aldous, who had left Italy for Austria a week earlier, returned at an ungodly hour of the morning and woke us all up in the process, his humour as always making up for his occasionally jarring demeanour. Later in the day, we visited the vast university museums, which include displays on most of the major scientific personalities who have studied at the institution. For obvious reasons, I silently begged a portrait of Luigi Galvani, the discoverer of biological electricity, to help me. Aldous was only stopping in Bologna or a day or so on his way to Naples. Originally, I was supposed to accompany him, but in the end I felt I had more pressing issues to deal with, and he left on his own, though not before a lunch at the cafeteria Al-Salaam, and a splendidly torch-lit dinner of risotto with porcini mushrooms and asparagus. Early the next morning, I was alone again.

X.i. Nick in the Dark

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 21:16:00 +0000

"It is easy in experimentation to be deceived and to think one has seen and discovered what we desire to see and discover."
- Luigi Galvani

The five days or less of darkness promised to me by the energy company took on a life of their own as the summer heat arrived in Bologna. Embracing an enforced ecological lifestyle, I began to spend an inordinate amount of time in various civic and university libraries, most of which are air-conditioned and at least more conducive to study than a darkened apartment. My meals, eaten by lamplight, took on a timeless air and were refreshing in their tepidity, harkening back to a time before leftovers were even possible. Even the staff at Plenty Market took note as my visits became more frequent. Showering was less pleasant, and reminded me of a summer I spent in rural France some years back, with a cousin who found it unnecessary to pay the summer heating oil bills.
    My friends John and Bronwen, stopping for floorspace in Bologna on their European tour, had offered to take Sarah and I out for dinner to Nicola's, a local pizzeria. The following day the four of us even went to Pisa to see a Cimabue exhibit, all of us feeling like exiles under the sunny skies of Western Tuscany.
    It was only as time went on that I realized exactly what the Enel had meant; five working days. In Italy this was to be expected of an electrical company.
    It was, of course, the beginning of June, and consequently time for the much celebrated Festa della Republica, the closest thing to an Italian national holiday. Held on a Thursday, the following Friday was thus interpreted by the vast majority of the population, including Enel, as a holiday as well. My electricity, then, would not be forthcoming for the better part of a week. In the hallway electrical cabinet, the fusebox for my apartment continued to display an agonizing pair of red lights. Dr. Caramori, for his part, was sympathetic but of little help as he is seldom in Bologna.
    "Perhaps you could talk to them, Doctor?" I naively asked.
    "Nicholas, honestly, it's like talking to a wall," he replied, indicating to what extent even his accreditations were useless in the face of the tenebrous challenges that faced me and my early summer.

IX.xi. A Broken Contract

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Mon, 30 May 2005 20:34:00 +0000

"I am damnably sick of Italy, Italian and Italians, outrageously, illogically sick.... I hate to think that Italians ever did anything in the way of art.... What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament! They themselves think they have a monopoly in the line. I am dead tired of their bello and bellezza."
- James Joyce

Visitors had but come and go. There were four of us in the apartment, taking refuge from the sun during a late spring heat wave, when disaster struck. The tremendous, happy flow of my month of May came to an abrupt end as the power was shut off. With a sick stomach, I made my way down to the fuse box in the ground floor corridor, where a small green notice had been posted.

    "Uh, hello, Dr. Caramori? I'm afraid I have some bad news. The electricity in the apartment seems to have been cut. There was a shut off notice posted above the fuse-box when I checked it, saying the bills hadn't been paid." I was speaking from a phone booth near Piazza Maggiore, nothing more than a greenhouse in the baking sun, with my visitors calmly awaiting orders inside the air conditioned public library.
    "Bills, Nicholas? Haven't you been paying the bills?"
    "Me? What bills? I haven't paid a single bill all year. The costs are automatically debited from your account, since they're all in your name."
    "No no no. I haven't paid anything. Weren't you paying those bills?"
    "But Dr. Caramori, you never gave me a key to the mailbox, so how was I supposed to collect and pay them?"
    "The key to the mailbox? I thought the previous renter had long since mailed it to you."
    "Well, maybe, but if he mailed it to me, it would be in the mailbox then, wouldn't it?!"

    This was how I realized the extent to which my recent power shut off had been serious. Enel, the state owned energy company, was in fact rather fortunate in disconnecting me when they did, for if they had waited six weeks or so, I would have been able to conclude my visit to Italy without paying a cent for electrical power. As it stood, I was the loser, and something needed to be done.
    Enel has the most complex automated answering service I have ever encountered. After much frustration, I was finally able to speak to an operator in the flesh. She seemed as surprised as I was that so much time had passed since the last bill had been paid.
    "The contract was dissolved three months ago, sir. You'll have to make a new one. What happened? Why haven't you been paying?"
    "There was a, um, misunderstanding with the landlord. How do I make a new contract then?"
    "We can do it right now if you like."
    "Excellent." And so, after lengthy pauses and much devolution of personal information, a new electrical contract was at last made.
    "Ok Dr. Caramori (for the operator simply assumed I was the owner of the apartment), power will be restored within five days."
    I wondered what, in Italy, that meant.

IX.x. Shakespeare, Soave, Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 22 May 2005 21:42:00 +0000

"Wine gives courage and inclines men towards passions."
- Ovid

Aldous wanted to attend Sunday morning mass in Verona, for some reason that still evades me. Having arrived, we borrowed a pair of bicycles from the local tourist office and made our way through the silent, perfect streets to the monumental basilica of San Zeno. Esther, perhaps tired of our theistic approach to things, wisely chose to sleep an extra few hours and meet us later.
    I felt, at the handlebar of that rickety, bright yellow public bicycle, as though I had simply taken up where I had left off before my departure for Italy, embarking on yet another adventure, reunited with one of my greatest friends. The roots of my friendship with Aldous reach back to the heady days of high school, with our efforts to topple our principal through an underground newspaper, more of a pamphlet really, polemically entitled Socrates. Aldous, incognito at first, accepted my help in getting the pamphlet out to its audience, evading interception and certain banishment. Nowadays we laugh heartily about this and anything else from our past, but we never fail to realize that a beginning, no matter how risible, is a sign of greatness to come. Years on Aldous' responsibilities have certainly shifted but he still works as an editor, still delighting in controversy, still master of his own rag. In my mind, he bears more than a striking resemblance to Aldus Manutius, the sixteenth century Venetian humanist turned book printer. Manutius , in addition to single-handedly recovering many of the Greek classics from obscurity, assiduously studied Petrarch's handwriting, and even engaged the great Bolognese painter Francesco Francia in the creation of what we today know as italic script. Our Aldous is somewhat less of a maniac for typography, but remains creative, contrarian, implacable: a polymath. One day he ought to have his own ex-libris made, like the one from the Aldine press, to insist on the past not being completely dead.
    While we were back at the station waiting for Esther to arrive on a late-morning train, I had the uncanny luck of seeing Simon walking through the arrival hall. Simon and Mila had left Bologna three days ago to go to Bolzano, and, coincidentally, they were now switching trains at Verona. We had a reunion on the platform, all five of us, though it only lasted the length of the stopover. Still, after eight months of distance from my oldest friends, it was a joy just to see them for a few extra minutes before we parted ways and got on with the day.
    Notwithstanding the plurality of glorious marble and granite churches that punctuate the banks of the Adige as it flows through Verona, the highlight of our afternoon was without a doubt our unexpected stopover at the tiny Enoteca dal Zovo, its labyrinthine walls lined with hundreds of dusty jet-black bottles. Much to our surprise, Aldous, Esther and I were greeted by a jovial, corpulent black woman who introduced herself, in a hearty mid-western accent, as Beverly.
    "I call Chicago home," she said to us, hunched over the bar, "but I've been living here for, oh, a good ten years. You'd like to try some local wines, then? Let's see what he has…" With that she began serving us brimming glasses of local wines: Soave, from the vineyards surrounding a little crenellated town to the east, and Valpolicella, from the lush terraces of the valley to the west between the city and Lake Garda. These are the great, serious inland wines of the Veneto that export themselves all over the world like the empire Verona never had. I assumed that they had even played their own subtle part in winning over Beverly.
    "He knows his wines. I'm not much of a connoisseur, myself, but I do what I can," she explained to us just as passersby would occasionally appear at the doorway, soliciting replies in highly accented Italian. "He's friends with the locals."
    He was evidently the owner of the tiny, wine-stocked bar, the man responsible for sealing with red wax the jet black, grime-encrusted bottles that certainly pre-dated Beverly's arrival in fair Verona.
    In a scene reminiscent of Othello, a well-dressed black man and a gracious Arab entered upon the scene, followed by the staggering drunk Italian Beverly had promised us would soon arrive. As the only native out of the seven people now in the room, he put up a rather slovenly, though gallant show, as he approached the bar and handed Beverly a red rose, fresh from someone else's garden. The bar tendress added it to a small vase of wilted cousins and began to pour him a highly diluted spritzer.
    Once we were ready to leave, we asked Beverly to add up our tab, at which point she refused to bill us for anything more than the first round of drinks, an act less Italian than even her accent. "Don't be silly," we said, "here's the rest of what we owe you. You keep it for yourself, since the owner doesn't seem to be around to do any work."
    "The owner? You mean my husband. What's mine is his, love. You can tell him on your way out if you want." As we walked out the door we noticed another rather inebriated local, sprawled out languidly on a reclining chair in the street, chatting with the clientele while his wife, inside, continued to work the bar.

IX.ix. The Cold War

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sat, 21 May 2005 19:40:00 +0000

"Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal."
- Voltaire

As the weather heats up, so too does the Gelato War, an unspoken but plainly fought campaign to win over the estival loyalty of nearly every citizen in Bologna. The battle for the best paletta, or scoop, becomes Bologna's own take on the fervent neighbourhood based rivalry of other Italian cities, the only difference being a much freer, though no less earnestly considered, choice of camp. The city has no great geographical rivalries, no horse race, no jousts, but it takes its culinary mission seriously, and Gianni, one of the more famous frontrunners, has even set up a chain of franchises throughout the region in an attempt to evangelize and fatten the Emilian masses.
    Gianni's, in fact, is the original, the gelateria most worthy of status as a local institution, though it dates back only to 1976. Its founder and namesake has acquired a sort of mythic status since his death several years ago, and the main branch displays over fifty flavours with such notoriously non-specific names as Purgatory, The Animal in the City, The Lawyer, The Saint, Giotto, The Two Towers, and so on.
    The Sorbetteria Castiglione, in the south end of the city, is, in terms of sheer volume, Gianni's principal competitor. It is also elegant, one of the few places in Bologna confident enough to store its gelato in covered steel bins, away from prying eyes, delighting in the unappealing, unaltered colours of its product. So serious are the Sorbetteria's owners that they name flavours after their children; Michelangelo, Edoardo and Karin thus take their places beside the darkest ciocolato and the richest crema in the city.
    More down to earth is Moline, in the university district. Somewhat of an underdog, it is noteworthy for producing unadulterated, smooth gelato as well as extremely intense granita. Close to my apartment, my friends and I have finished many a stroll in front of its fluorescent counters, discriminately choosing our scoops before retiring to the plastic chairs outside.
    Il Gelatauro, a relative newcomer with its gelato-eating beast as mascot, has created a great deal of commotion considering its rather poor location in a dimly lit, run-down portico. The flavours here have an exotic, southern flair while the décor speaks of American influence; one of the three Figliomeni brothers who together own the place is married to a girl who was first in Bologna as part of the Brown University exchange program. As for the brothers, they own their own organic citrus grove in Calabria that provides a key ingredient for the unsurpassed orange chocolate. Other flavours, such as the proudly named Prince of Calabria or King of the Two Sicilies include such exotic ingredients as jasmine, fennel and bergamot. Any server will also gladly confirm the plurality of factors that make the Bronte pistachios, grown only on the western face of mount Etna, the best in the world. Umberto Eco, who keeps house nearby, is a known regular, as his waistline would testify.
    The possibilities are almost inexhaustible, and it is only possible to detail the best of the best. I would even venture to say that Bologna, in a general sense, has the best gelato of any northern Italian city. As with the city's art and architecture, the median quality is high. There are, of course, countless superlative gelaterie all over Italy, small holes in the wall that seem to appear out of nowhere to outnumber even churches during the summer months. Other cities also have their own touted flagships, such as Nico or Alaska in Venice, Vivoli in Florence, and the Bottega del Gelato in Pisa, a place I had recently discovered with my friends while on a day trip. In the end Bologna has the highest concentration of worthwhile locales, each trying to trump the other, each a little different from the last.
    The consequences of such fierce competition are far reaching, because gelato in Bologna is world-class. London's Observer pronounced Il Gelatauro's product the best ice cream in Europe, while international culinary references constantly site one of the aforementioned concerns as a front-runner. Scarcely a day goes by when I don't treat myself to a gelato. Still, I refuse to play favourites. I am a citizen of the whole world, and I can do nothing but bask in delicious impartiality.

The range of flavours at Gianni's

A detail view of some of the more popular choices

IX.viii. Ambitions

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Wed, 18 May 2005 21:33:00 +0000

"My travels in Italy make me be more original, more ‘myself’. I am learning to
look for happiness intelligently."
- Stendhal

It wasn't without ambition that I had my friends visit, for I had taken it upon myself to convey to them, even in the most fragmentary, summary of ways, the wonder that I felt in the face of history's creative masterpieces. I had long since decided that what I have to share with the world isn't easy to convey, isn't particularly proletarian or immediately useful, but remains important, and can still serve to change humanity, albeit in a small, arcane, and counter-intuitive way.
    My friends are not ordinary people, because we had long since abandoned the idea of associating with normalcy. This is not to say, by any means, that I chose them, or that they chose me. Rather, we became friends, some through the unique odyssey of high school, others in later years, by shared experience and a certain collective aversion to plainness. We are a circle, a kind of informal, unannounced, but still plainly existent order that has become one of the chief pillars my life. I wouldn't tell a single one to his or her face, but they are the heroes that inhabit the fantastical theatre that consciousness has created around me.
    The way I wanted to explain Italy's wonder to my spring visitors is a microcosm of what I want to show the world, to make people aware of the greatness that has preceded them and throw into doubt this stable confidence in the present. No easy task even for my inner circle, those people I feel such a connection with as to assume that we must share at least some part of the same psyche.
    The month of May, then, was a key moment of opportunity in my youthful life. Beyond art, or maybe bound up together with it, I wanted to show the highs and lows of culture that make life in Bologna worth living. "This is the land of plenty," I couldn't help repeating as we strolled through the vegetable markets alive with spring colour and then stopped to look at the immense variety of fish, still squirming, freshly plucked from the Adriatic. I also insisted on a detour through the insalubrious Via Petroni, the chaotic clothing market, and the areas of the city notorious for the line of grime, a pronounced, consistent, and unexplained black smudge visible at about knee level on the sides of buildings. We even stopped for the requisite aperitivo, which eventually became a free dinner, at the Café dei Commercianti, where we saw former prime minister and European Commissioner Romano Prodi swiftly walk past surrounded by a large posse of suited men.
    I organized two trips into Tuscany for my friends, one to Pisa and Lucca, and the other to Florence. Our two groups met up on a Monday morning train from Florence to Pisa, somewhat a somewhat unremarkable setting for such a reunion. Two days later we were in Florence together, jumping unpredictably from the least serious of chatter to earnest sightseeing. I couldn't help divulging just some of the twaddle my studies had taught me.
    "The technology to replicate this six hundred year old feat, to cast such huge doors in one piece, does not exist today."
    "Pisano was the first artistic personality of the modern world."
    "Savonarola turned the most sophisticated place in the west into a fundamentalist theocracy overnight."
    The platitudes kept flowing from my lips. I found that my desire to be didactic was often foiled by my, by our, tendencies to act outrageously funny when in a group. It had been, after all, a long eight months of living in different yet parallel worlds. Having collided together in central Italy, the old and new were having a ball.

IX.vii. Peacocks

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:51:00 +0000

"I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love most."
- William Morris

Leaving my visitors alone for the day, I woke up early for the swan song of professor Cavina's modern art class, the long anticipated field trip to Parma and the Villa Magnani-Rocca foundation. At the ungodly hour of seven thirty in the morning we met at Bologna's bus station, where two coaches had been chartered for our purposes. Cavina arrived in the usual fashion, on bicycle, fashionable but not as late as some.
    In Parma we visited the Camera di San Paolo, frescoed by Corregio for a rather secular-minded abbess. Cavina asked me if I had visited this room before, and when I replied that indeed I had, she jokingly questioned the use of my spending a year in Italy. In return, I said that I had never visited Italy accompanied by the eyes of an expert.
    Continuing our itinerary, we arrived at the Villa Magnani-Rocca in time for a much vaunted pastoral lunch break. Walled in and planted with huge sycamore trees, the sun-drenched grounds of the villa enthralled most of us visitors more than the collections of the late musicologist Luigi Magnani, whom professor Cavina had known well. Surprised by our presence, half a dozen glorious peacocks jostled with our class of eighty or so students for prime spaces on the expansive lawns of the English-styled gardens. Seeking refuge in a treetop, a pure white specimen enchanted all of us with its long feathers, rustled by the May breezes, resembling the flowing hair of a maiden, while in the formal garden some of the more brazen classmates tried to provoke a display of the many-eyed plumage. A group of schoolchildren joined in, less inhibited, and openly took to chasing the poor birds. Even while professor Cavina tried to speak to us seriously on the steps of the villa after our long picnic break the pompous avians continued to crow, creating a humorous, raucous, and beautiful counterpoint.
    I think that one of Cavina's goals as expressed in the teaching of our course is to motivate the impending generation of art historians with glamour. Quite apart from her impressively encyclopedic and playful knowledge of all manner of art, she exudes a sense of elegance and assuredness all her own. Based solely on her lessons, it would seem that the world of the art historian is one of private villas, jet-setting, high stakes acquisitions, and passionate intrigue. This is probably as far as possible from the truth, but the ruse is worth the reward, and if the next great Italian art historian is born of Anna Cavina's influence I won't be at all surprised.

IX.vi. Of Barrels, Batteries, and Balsamico

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 15 May 2005 19:47:00 +0000

"Culture is Italy's oil, and it must be exploited."
- Gianni de Michelis

Deep in the dusty countryside south of Modena is the agrarian crossroads of Spilamberto, a settlement of a few thousand ageing inhabitants unremarkable with the exception of a small museum dedicated to balsamic vinegar. Early on a Sunday morning, after briefly stopping in a noiseless Modena to see Willigelmus' stone carvings on the Duomo, we traveled by bus to the town, which was fortunately rendered less sleepy than usual by a sprawling, not very serious antique fair, doubtless timed to coincide with the weekly tasting that was to be offered, we thought. Simon, blessed with a palate beyond his years, had the idea to visit this haut lieu of culinary rarity, with Mila and I obviously consenting. The balsamic museum requires a special reason to visit; it is as difficult to locate on a map as it is to reach by public transportation.
    A temple to the most rarified liquid in the world, we entered the place and were asked to sit and watch a short film relating to the production of Balsamico Tradizionale, the unique product the small museum works to elevate above all others. Cinematographically, this introduction seemed worthy of the sacred balm, employing all the most sophisticated production techniques: time-lapse photography of the stormy local countryside, rough-grained focus shifts between laden vines and aged harvesters, and a subtly panning interview with the suit-sporting director of the museum, grave as Gorbachev or Kissinger in describing the superiority of the local vinegar.
    Finally, we made our way up several flights of stairs to a small room in which a group of sexagenarian men had us taste the fruits of their labour in the form of tiny spoonfuls of vinegar older than any of us youngsters. Clearly among the few visitors that day, we seemed to receive extra attention from the masters who regarded the small attic as a sort of after work club. We were shown the particular qualities of their quarter century old production; it's clear, red colour, lack of impurities, particular odour and, lastly, exquisite taste. The process for scoring each variety at the annual competition was described in detail, and we were shown a huge table laden with half a thousand samples awaiting judgment. The entire daftly complex procedure for cooking, pouring, and curing the grape resin was expatiated with the utmost earnestness, as though we were the heirs of the mage-like knowledge accumulated within these men.
    The museum's workshop is not unique. It so happens that in countless unassuming attics across the small area that lies between the alluvial banks of the Reno and the outskirts of Modena men and women tirelessly tend to their own eight barreled batteries of balsamic vinegar, for profit, pleasure, or pride. Only once a year, fifteen percent from each barrel is moved down the chain to the next, constraining production to a mere litre or two per battery, the entire region's aggregate totaling no more than sixty thousand tiny vials of the ruddy-black liquid per annum.
    No one can plausibly make a living from producing Balsamico Tradizionale; its magic lies in its extreme frivolity, its absurd level of refinement. Enjoying the acid in anything less than its purest form becomes an exercise, mostly in vain, of finding ingredients to match. The masters in the attic are akin to DaVinci or Joyce in their deliberate lengthiness of process, their refusal to compromise, and the unassailable quality of their final product. All this for a few drops of elixir, tasted and gone.

IX.v. Venice Absurd

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 12 May 2005 21:45:00 +0000

"Among the many strange things that have befallen Venice, she has had the good fortune to become the object of passion to a man of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has made her the world's."
- Henry James

my visits to Venice, Florence, and other major cities, that these places will only become increasingly crowded until my departure from Italy. I had been too spoiled during the winter months when even Venice was largely empty of tourists, turned over instead to meeker, more sensitive travelers. Still, despite the masses of heedless individuals in Saint Mark's square, the scaffolding, the hawkers, the pigeons, we still found the space and time necessary to admire something set apart from the crowd. Dizzy and enthralled by their imagery, we spent a good half hour admiring the intricately carved capitals of Istrian stone that support the first level of the Ducal palace, the pages of a petrified encyclopedia ignored by nearly all and drowned out by the crass outdoor orchestra in front of one of the cafes in the square. It seemed as though we were the only ones to have taken notice of the glorious sculptures ever since Ruskin lavished a good ten pages on them in The Stones of Venice. Still, we had fallen victim to Mary McCarthy's now famous assertion that nothing in the floating city can ever be looked on with any degree of originality. Well aware of this irony, I had taken Venice Observed along with me, and read out loud a humorous passage while we ate our lunch on the steps of Campo San Beneto:
One thing is certain. Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin.
What could one do but concur and give up the childish protests against other tourists that necessarily reflect back upon any foreigner here, however sensitive? I surrendered and found it difficult as ever to conceal the passion that grips me when talking about the mirrored marble sheets, the distant spolia, the holy relics, the gold that adorns Saint Mark's. I went through all the glorious catalogue of thievery and pride; the columns from Tyre, the porphyry tetrarchs from Alexandria, the Chinese bronze chimera that somehow made its way here in the twelfth century, the Constantinopolitan horses briefly in Paris, the granite, the alabaster, the stone, as if I had captured it all myself and it belonged to me.

Our day in Venice had gone seamlessly. It was only upon leaving the city that disaster happened upon us. Half an hour into its voyage, our train ended its run unannounced. The redoubtable Italian sciopero had struck us a severe blow. We were stranded, more than I had ever been in this country, in front of the unwelcoming train station at Padua. It was late, and no further trains were to operate for the next twenty-four hours. We weren't quite alone, and some were public enough with their discontent to require a police escort for the departing railway employees who so promptly left the confines of the station at precisely nine o'clock.
Almost despairing, we had nearly taken the painful decision to book a room at the youth hostel located at the other end of town. Just then, a kindly man in his thirties asked us if we were trying to get back to Bologna. He informed us that he, too, had to return home tonight no matter what the cost. His car was parked in Ferrara, some one hundred kilometers away, and he had no choice but to take a taxi in order to recuperate it. If we split the cost of the taxi with him, he could then drive us on to Bologna, as he needed to go even further, on to Reggio Emilia. We consented fearing this was the only plausible option, though it was expensive, and were finally able to find a taxi less outrageously priced than all the others. We reached Ferrara, found our friend's car, and eventually returned to the security and comfort of Bologna. In the meantime, the personable though slightly absent-minded man who so altruistically assisted us, Luca by name, had even offered to chauffeur us around the Emilian countryside on Sunday when we planned to visit various outlying villages. We politely declined, saying that he had already gone far enough out of his way for us. Before parting, he insisted on giving us his number on the off chance that we would require his vehicular help once again. Tired, happy to be back in Bologna after yet another long day, we collapsed into our respective bed and did not wake up until late the next morning.

IX.iv. The Grand Tour

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Wed, 11 May 2005 18:06:00 +0000

"Travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all—certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia."
- James Morris

When they stepped off the bus, they looked a little bit worse for the wear but happy at least to have finally arrived in Bologna. Simon, is his usual dandy style, was wearing a linen blazer with a ruffled pink and white pocket square. Mila, his companion now for almost five years, looked pretty as ever, skipping along even with the heavy luggage they had brought along with them.
    It so happened that on this Tuesday afternoon these two worlds of mine collided. I had long anticipated this day, actually, when the first of my long cortege of friends would arrive in Bologna, taking advantage of my apartment and its free accommodation, tasting Emilia-Romagna for all it was worth, braving my often too earnest expatiation on the subject of unappreciated grandeur, underrated gelato, or ecclesiastical art.
    Simon and Mila, two of my greatest friends, were at the beginning of a European sojourn that would include stops in Bolzano, Paris, Antibes, and London. I had been used to spending time with them, spending inordinate amounts of time together doing nothing, since high school, when life was simpler and richer in a naïve sort of way. I hadn't seen them for eight months, but they looked roughly the same, except that Mila had finally convinced Simon to change his mop-like combed over hair for a more up to date tousle that matched his impeccable flâneur-like style.
    "How are you ever going to come back?" Mila said to me several times, first on seeing my apartment, then on setting foot in Piazza Maggiore on our initial stroll through the city centre. I answered that it would be difficult, I knew it would, but that it wasn't something I needed to face for some time, and that my long lonely months in this still foreign country had made me long for some of the most banal aspects of North American life.
    It's true that the quadrilatero, the tangle of streets that are home to Bologna's most upscale and beautifully presented food shops, opening onto the great russet-toned square are seductive to the point of disbelief. My apartment too, in its brilliant white, minimalist, and recently cleaned state, looked worthy of a stay extending far beyond ten months. My friends though, those with me along with others I wouldn't be fortunate enough to see before my return, made me long for other, plainer places. Culturally, academically, even socially, I was an honourary Bolognese, but in truth I was still a visitor, still just passing through, and still far, far away from home.

IX.iii. A Dressing Down in a Small Chapel

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sat, 07 May 2005 15:03:00 +0000

"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."
- Michelangelo Buonarotti

"I have been reading your journal, Nicholas, and I must say I disapprove. Just last week you wrote about how saints mean nothing to you, how it is entirely the artist that counts."
    "Well, not exactly… wait, you can go online?" Saint Cecilia glared at me as I responded, with the little sacristan in the booth at the entrance joining in, visually admonishing me for mumbling at the painted wall.
    "Of course I can. What, you think I live inside this fresco? The point is, Nicholas, how can you possibly say such things. Myself for example, I was painted by grumpy old Francesco Francia, in part at least. Some assistant painted my dress, in the next scene I'm by a completely different artist, and in the following yet another. What does that mean to you? The artist is just part of the story, you know. The artist isn't God."
    "I understand. Is that all?"
    "Absolutely not. Your journal… have you taken a look at your style?"
    "My style?"
    "Yes. How convoluted it is. So many commas, improper agreements, prolonged clauses. I believe one of your friends once described it as 'verbose'."
    "Well, perhaps I'm just verbose then. I can't help it. I write that way. I suppose I can try to reform a little bit, consult Fowler or something, but in the main I can't really change how I write. English is quite awkward when it comes to expressing difficult concepts, like Italy. At least I don't take myself too seriously."
    "You're so young, Nicholas. So very young, and you have so much to learn."
    "Why does everyone tell me that?" I responded to her as she shrugged, nonplussed, and returned to her important and perpetual business of accepting her fiancé Valerian's golden ring.

IX.ii. A view through the trees

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Tue, 03 May 2005 18:18:00 +0000

"St. Francis of Assisi was hoeing his garden when someone asked what he would do if he were suddenly to learn that he would die before sunset that very day. 'I would finish hoeing my garden,' he replied."
- Louis Fischer

The pre-modern imagination considers nature antithetical to civilization. In this same spirit, Bologna remains completely urban in its character. The few square meters within the city walls that are given over to plant life are either nineteenth century incursions or the result of systematic neglect. A select few are able to afford small terraced gardens, becoming ever more Babylonian in their appearance as spring progresses. Private courtyards, too, when they can be glimpsed fleetingly from the street through an iron gate or closing door, are often alive with palms and colonies of ferns, though this can often be an illusion, propagated by one of Bologna's many trompe l'oeil murals.
    Bologna, though almost claustrophobically civilized itself, is surrounded by greenery. To the east, west and north it is ringed by the underappreciated expanses of Emilian countryside, and to the south a string of parks and, further, semi-wild hills surround it. Not as spectacularly backdropped as certain other cities, the green mass of gardened hills is still visible from most neighbourhoods, and beckons as May exacerbates the annoyances of the inner city.
    On the lawns of the Giardini Margherita, Bologna's largest public park, every sector of society comes to play. Children, so rare on the streets of the city proper, rub shoulders with seniors, fashionistas, and punks. A circle of Rastafarians join in an impromptu drum beat session, a child looses a kite to the springtime air, and an elderly couple walks noiselessly, all in this playground of green on the fringes of the red city.
    Further afield, more aloof, is the convent and park of San Michele in Bosco, Saint Michael in the woods. Here, atop a crest of towering pine trees, a terrace looks out onto the city below, but is obscured by the conifers grown too high. From this spot, in younger days, Stendhal looked out over Bologna. Now, only a few patients from the nearby Rizzoli institute pause to point out the city beyond the trees. Continuing along, the mogul-like Colli Bolognesi begin, some planted with vines, others almost completely wild. Hiking an unpaved road, the city becomes somewhat like a distant memory.
    I spent an entire afternoon walking these paths, whiling away the lull of early May, preparing for more eventful days to come.

A view from the terrace of San Michele in Bosco

IX.i. May Day

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 01 May 2005 21:16:00 +0000

"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."
- Antonio Gramsci

If there were a holiday most emblematic of Bologna, it would be the first of May. Working holiday extraordinaire, by day the city still seemed to function without any undue sense of celebration. The youth, of course, had been discouraged in their evening revelry by the new drinking laws and in order to distract them from violence a concert was organized in Piazza Maggiore. The main act consisted of an overzealous jazz troop fittingly clad in bright red uniforms. Their presence became known to me as soon as they began, as I could hear the steady thump of amplified music even from the open window of my apartment kitchen. It brought back memories of living in a place ten times as large as Bologna, where the rumbling sound of the city is ever present and goes almost unnoticed.
Safe among the thousands in the square, it was almost as if the new law had been repealed. The police kept their distance, as they often do when tensions run high, and left the square to the students, who seemed far less interested in the concert than in the prospect of drinking Moretti from glass bottles unmolested. It seemed a fittingly absurd tribute to a largely irrelevant holiday, just another occasion to band together, defy laws if possible, and unwittingly indulge in the laughable.

VIII.xv. Landscapes

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 21:01:00 +0000

"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

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:31:00 +0000

"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

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 21:41:00 +0000

"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