Padua

I had quite a busy weekend in the Shakespearean cities of Padua and Verona.  I visited both with Meredith, Carla, and Anna six years ago, and this was my first return.  One was definitely worth the visit, but the other not so much.

After a Friday that concluded in rather desultory fashion (I discovered there is a limit of six books you can request per day at the Marciana, which is kinda ridiculous), I headed out early on Saturday to go to Padua, which is only 20 minutes away if you're on the fast train, but closer to an hour if you take the regional (which costs a third as much).  Guess which I picked?  I got into town a little before 11:30, which was fairly good timing, as it gave me time to visit both the Santo and the Scuola del Santo (to which Titian contributed three frescoes in his younger years).  I went to the Scuola first, because I had been worried it might be closed; June 2 is a national holiday celebrating the republic in Italy, and several of the sites I wanted to see weren't open.  But open it was, and I had the room to myself for maybe 15 minutes, which was really cool.  Then I went into the Santo, the formal name of which is the Basilica di Sant'Antonio, but it's such a famous pilgrimage shrine that it's known simply as the Santo.  Saint Anthony was Portuguese, if memory serves, but he died not far from Padua, and the townsfolk seized the opportunity to get his body; he was holy enough in life that everyone must have expected he'd be made a saint, which he was.  (Having the relics of an important saint meant big money from pilgrims, so this was a blend of market savvy and religious fervor, as so often happened back in the day)

Anyway the basilica itself is massive, Gothic and imposing.  Donatello left not only the statue of Gattamelata, the first Renaissance equestrian bronze, in the piazza outside, he sculpted the bronze reliefs and statues for the altar.  Unfortunately, as in almost any church that's still in use, you're never allowed to go up onto the altar to get a closer look.  In fact, both  of my visits to the Santo have been during a Mass.  Typically in Italian churches there's a sign saying that visits are suspended during services, but the Santo is a true pilgrimage church.  One of the innovations of Gothic architecture was the ambulatory, which, as the name sugests, allowed you to walk around the perimeter of the church without going into the nave; in this way you could visit the small chapels radiating behind the altar (usually filled with relics) without disturbing worshippers.  That's exactly how it still works in the Santo today; you file in and head either left toward his chapel or right toward the cloister.

The Chapel of Saint Anthony is a Renaissance marvel in white marble, with nine panels in relief by some of the greatest sculptors working in the area: Tullio Lombardo, Giulio Campagnola, and Jacopo Sansovino.  These panels were what I came to see, but the focal point for everyone else is the altar containing the saint's body. A line passes by the box where you're invited to leave your offerings of candles (you can buy them outside in the square, from tiny votives to massive 30-euro monsters), then the displays of votive offerings and thousands of photographs of loved ones left by pilgrims, and then goes behind the altar, where everyone passes their hand over the green stone of the rear slab.  Some people kiss it; the woman in front of me did so and then stood with her forehead and palms against it for several minutes.  You see people on crutches or in wheelchairs, parents bringing in sick or disabled children--they really believe that proximity to the saint will help them and their loved ones.  From the anthropological point of view these kinds of rituals are fascinating, but from the subjective standpoint of a non-believer I find them kind of sad. Do they feel disappointed, when their loved ones aren't cured?  I wavered on whether I should touch the slab, too (when in Rome) but I didn't.  If nothing else--germs.

Unfortunately for those pilgrims hoping to get up close and personal with Anthony's relics (I remember his voicebox being among the items on display in jeweled reliquaries), the ambulatory behind the altar was closed. I read later in the paper that it's because they're constructing an earthquake-proof tunnel for pilgrims.    Some pieces of fresco actually fell down during the last round of quakes. Fresco is seriously at risk during earthquakes; most famously, at the Basilica of St Francis at Assisi, the earthquake of 1995 or 1997 sent the frescoes that are usually assigned to Giotto crashing to the floor (there's actually video of it happening in a massive cloud of dust).  They've been reconstructed, but still. (More on this in a moment)

Since the relics were out, I skirted back around to visit the cloister, but before I reached it I got scolded by a rather corpulent priest, who said "Miss, cover yourself, please!"  Now, I was wearing a top with sleeves that covered my shoulders.  I've always understood that to be the rule: no bare knees or shoulders for either gender.  There were guards at the door and they didn't say anything to me, but apparently this priest found my bare arms unseemly.  It annoyed me, part of me wanted to say something sharp, but it's also his house, not mine, so whatever.  I put on my sweater.  The woman next to me, though, was wearing a sleeveless top, and he ordered her to leave the church--then complained to a nearby guard why the ones at the door weren't doing their job!  I was luckier than her anyway.

 It was warm in Padua, and kind of muggy, even though it was also overcast.  I hauled my umbrella along both days because rainstorms were predicted, but nary a drop. When the sun came out it was quite hot.  Luckily the Paduan streets are full of covered loggias, and it's striking the temperature difference when you're underneath one.  The air even seems less humid.  It's interesting to note these particular characteristics in various cities.  Neither Verona nor Florence, for example, have such a great quantity of loggias.  One of the things I recall most fondly about Florence, for example, was that they tended to build buildings with these massive projecting cornices at the top, to the effect that when it rained you stood a pretty good chance of being able to walk on the sidewalk without feeling a drop until you had to cross a street.  Venice has none of these; when it rains, it comes right down.

Padua is the setting for Taming of the Shrew, lines of which I saw etched onto a building in the center of town.  It's also home to one of the oldest universities in Europe.  The university not only boasts a famous botanical garden (they've got plants that have been alive since the 16th century!) but also the surgical theater that hosted the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius.  Both were closed, which sucked.  You definitely get the sense of it being a university town, though, namely in the graffiti on everything, much of it communism-related (including one: "communism you are everything I want, nothing more"--what do these kids think happened in the USSR, exactly?) and also against TAV, the planned high-speed rail line that clearly has people up in arms.  I didn't find Padua particularly attractive, really, and there wasn't all that much to do.  I didn't feel like paying 13 euro just to have 15 minutes in the Arena chapel (been there), and I found myself wandering aimlessly during that terrible afternoon period where everything seems to be closed except for cafes.  I was tempted to just find one and sit down for a glass of wine, but I wanted to have something to read first, so I found myself in Feltrinelli, where I bought a copy of Emma in Italian.  But then I couldn't find a cafe that was a) open, b) welcoming-looking and c) not already full of large groups of loud people.  No vino for me.

My last stop was the church of the Eremitani, next to the Arena chapel.  Inside there's a chapel frescoed by Andrea Mantegna--or rather, the remains of the frescoes, since the altar-end of the church was destroyed by an American bombing in 1944.  There are pictures on the walls of the nave, and it's pretty incredible--it's just a gaping hole.  During the 1990s, an effort began to piece Mantegna's frescoes together again from the pieces that survived.  What they've done is pretty cool; basically the walls are overlaid with a faint, black and white reproduction of the paintings as they were originally, and then the surviving fragments have been grafted onto it.  It's amazing that they were able to reconstruct this, even if there are huge portions missing but then again, that's the work my friend Agnes is doing right now somewhere in the Egyptian desert!

All in all, Padua was kind of unimpressive.  This is undoubtedly due in part to the unpleasant weather and the number of sites I couldn't visit due to the holiday, but also the city itself just isn't very appealing.  Boo to Padua!

Misc Observations

The newspaper that I purchase is the Corriere della Sera, which I consider the best only because I know Dr. Cooper gets it delivered at home in the US (how much that possibly costs I have no idea).  It costs about $1.50; I can’t recall at the moment what the NYTimes costs right now, but it might be the same. I was surprised to realize is that the newspaper is full of color: all the (very plentiful) photos are in color, and there are colored borders and titles.  That must be ridiculously expensive to print—only the front page of most of our newspapers are ever in color.  Also, their use of photographs often amuses me.  They illustrate even when no illustration is needed at all; for example, they’ll throw a picture of a Renaissance painting into an article on family relationships or something.  Any individual who is named in an article seems to get a photograph, but it doesn’t need to be one taken recently, or in any way formal.  They often choose really random photos of people, too.  Today’s paper had an article on how the premier, Monti, suggested in half-jest that maybe soccer should be abolished for 2-3 years, after the breaking of a huge corruption scandal.  The article was accompanied by not one, not two, but three successive snaps of the premier in the act of combing his hair. WTF?  More apropos was a candid photo of a banker who was just arrested for corruption—he’s near a pool, from the lounge chairs, but in a suit, and holding up his hands in a “not me” gesture!

Italy has an aging population, as is well known, but the Lido, especially, is full of the olds.  It’s like Venice’s retirement community or something. What amazes me about them is how active they are—you always see old people walking (slowly) around; they might be using canes and walking at a glacial pace, but they’re out there and doing their grocery shopping.  You do of course see some people in wheelchairs (I saw some nurses wheeling a whole fleet of them down a promenade by the water, three wheelchairs abreast), but I still marvel when I think of Sean’s grandmother, sitting in front of her TV all day, in comparison with these people.  Obviously there are many factors of difference—there’s somewhere within walking distance here, for one thing, which is not really the case in New Haven, but on a larger scale I think there’s just a different cultural expectation of what it means to be old here.  The Italians, while nurturing a healthy respect for their elders, seem to continue to expect them to function in ways that I think we simply don’t.  Elevators? Handicapped ramps?  Grocery home delivery and take-out food?  In your dreams.  Venice is one of the least-accessible cities I’ve ever seen, what with its ten thousand tiny bridges (not that it stops the hordes of people with baby carriages, brave souls), and yet there are old people everywhere.  I’ve read that the way your body ages is a reflection of how you conceptualize getting old—if you think old age means decline and weakness, you will be weaker even if there’s nothing wrong with you.  I think we infantilize old people and they react accordingly.  I wonder if there’s any way to make our society more like theirs, without of course ripping out all the accessibility features and telling the handicapped ‘too bad, learn to walk’?

Finally, a word on tourists. Yes, I am one myself, but I don’t stop abruptly in the middle of a very crowded, very small bridge to take a photo of me and my five friends while everyone else tries not to crash into me.  That is so annoying, and it seems to happen every five steps!  Argh.  It really is a pleasure to come back to the Lido every afternoon.  It may be less ancient but it’s certainly got room to breathe.

Primo Passo

Today was my first day using the Marciana.  It is a complex process trying to get a book in this place.  First of all you can’t bring a bag in (theft), so you lock your bag in a locker and take the key.  Then you’re supposed to swipe your card with the portiere in a glass both—except I didn’t know this part, and even though I’d marched in and out all day without a problem, once in the afternoon she yelled at me for not having swiped.  See, this is where the lady who gives you your card should probably have given me this info, but no.  Once inside the huge reading room, which is basically a courtyard in the center of the Zecca or mint (the glassed roof is three stories up), you find a spot at one of the huge wooden tables and attempt to discreetly plug in your netbook with the giant white converter plug attached (see, even my laptop marks me as an outsider!).  To request a book, you have to fill out a slip that includes the Marciana’s private call number system. You can submit two slips at a time, with your card, to the correct office (I was looking for ‘modern books’), and then check back to pick them up within a half an hour. Some of these books, the most general ones, are in the reading room in large stacks, but I didn’t know that till I tried to turn in a request; luckily the lady in this office was nice to me (even though she complained about my handwriting at first because I wrote too small, and I don’t put a slash through my 7s--my 7s don’t look like 1s, but theirs seem to) and explained it.  

It’s not really quiet in there, despite it being a library—it’s so big, there are so many people, and the sounds of doors closing, books being dropped, chairs being scraped, etc made me happy for my earplugs.  Lots of university students go there to do work, and they seemed to be filling half of the seats.  Dr. Cooper suggested another smaller library as student-friendly, and I might check that out next week, but I feel like I shouldn’t abandon the Marciana after only one day.

The biggest problem for me seems to be food, especially lunch. My breakfast is a crusty roll with jam and some blood orange juice, but I always get hungry mid-morning.  I’ve been making these little sandwiches to bring with me for lunch with pesto, mozzarella and prosciutto but while delicious, they are both tiny and unhealthy (though to be fair my entire diet here, despite plentiful consumption of fruit and veggies, is pretty high in saturated fat; there’s a block of feta in the fridge I was nibbling before dinner.  It’s just so good!!).  Today I went out to my locker midmorning, ate a handful of almonds (they don’t salt them here, alas), and then came back out to eat my little sandwich like an hour later, sitting on the steps.  I should mention that the Marciana is in  St. Mark’s square, so when you come out of the entrance you’re under the very crowded loggia with all the over-priced cafes.  I think Harry’s Bar, a favorite haunt of Hemingway’s, is the one directly adjacent to the Marciana entrance; the sounds of their four-piece orchestra playing that “buonasera signorina, kiss me goodnight” song accompanied my lunch!  The problem was that I both got restless and peckish around 2:30 in the afternoon.  I stuck my laptop in a locker and took the key (which I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to do) and went for an hour-long jaunt, during which time I ate a slice of pizza—and that was only because the French bakery I found yesterday had put away their croissants already, it being unfashionably late in the day to eat one (I actually heard—and understood—a barista making fun of someone who had ordered a cappuccino in the afternoon the other day!)

So clearly I need to work on my lunch-bringing skills.  At home I would bring a jam sandwich (no peanut butter for me), a banana, and some granola bars.  There are some granola bars in the grocery store, but they’re not cheap, and don’t look particularly tasty, not like my delicious oatmeal raisin ones at home.  Sandwich bread does exist here, but it’s in these tiny, square loaves that contain the whitest and most processed-looking bread you’ve ever seen; I used it in Florence, but only to toast in a frying pan in the mornings.  You can certainly buy big loaves and cut your own, but the downside of zero preservatives means their bread goes hard super-fast, and I doubt I’d be able to finish a loaf quickly enough. I did finally buy some bananas today, at least.  I hadn’t before because they just seem so prosaic to eat here, when there are such delicious oranges and other fruits; alas, the banana not only travels well in the purse, but makes much less mess than an orange.  What I really need to do is acquire some Tupperware so I can bring pasta, like I saw a woman doing today, sitting in the Marciana foyer on the base of one of the 16^th century statues, calmly eating her lunch. Where does one buy the Tupperware?  Not in the grocery store.  Possibly Schlecker, which is kind of like a giant (German) CVS, though it also sells some food (and wine, of course).  Anyway, the food odyssey will continue. 

Step One

Today I made the first step toward being scholarly, by registering at the national library, the Museo Correr, and the state archives.  It’s pretty intimidating, these grandiose reading rooms full of serious-looking university students and grey-headed researchers poring over these massive books, and me feeling like I have a neon sign over my head that says AMERICAN.  I went to the Marciana library first, and luckily Dr. Cooper had told me the name of a friend who works in the manuscript room, because the woman who gave me my library card told me nada and was quite unfriendly looking.  This woman, Betty, chatted with me for 20 or 30 minutes and explained how everything worked; like at the NY public library, you can’t go in the stacks, you have to submit a request for the books you want.  They still have card catalogs, though a lot of material is online.  There are separate offices for modern books (1850-onward), old books, and a separate wing for manuscripts.  I’m sure I’m going to make a thousand mistakes!  My goal for the week is 30 hours.  It’s going to rain for five days, so I feel like this will not be a super difficult goal to achieve!!

Roman Holiday

So I’m back from my Roman holiday!  My train was somewhat delayed in Rome, the cause of which, it turned out, was another earthquake near Ferrara, 5.8, which was followed later by another only slightly weaker one.  All the trains had to be shut down in the north to make sure that everything was stable.  I heard on the radio about one small village where something like 70 percent of the buildings had been destroyed.  The woman next to me on the train in Rome had a tablet and pulled up a video of the quake; it was only a moment, but how violent it seemed!  Obviously in Rome we didn’t feel anything, but when I got home Elsa said it set the chandelier to shaking.

I was kind of grumpy about taking the slow inter-city train back instead of the fast, new, but very expensive train I’d taken down, but I actually enjoyed the return voyage much more.  I’d mixed up the IC and Regional trains in my head; the Regionals are the most busted and rather unpleasant to travel on, if memory serves, while the IC trains are the ones I remember best, with individual compartments of six seats each.  Of course, you used to be able to choose your seat, where now it was assigned, and my ticket was also just a text message on my phone--so the times, they are definitely a-changing.  The fast train was more annoying because everyone was so noisy; it’s an open carriage, and I seemed to be sitting in the car marked ALL-AMERICAN TOURIST CARRIAGE because there seriously seemed to be maybe a handful of Italians in the whole place.  The people I was sitting with were quite nice adults, but just behind us were a passel of Florida college girls who carried out conversations at super high volume for most of the way, including one girl who took it upon herself to read Rick Steeves aloud to the assembled company “Ok, so, he says the Colosseum was built by the Roman emperors as an amphitheater—we DEF have to go there, guys—and there were gladiatorial fights and….”  Obviously you’d be even more screwed if you got stuck with the lot of them on the IC train in your compartment, but I was lucky.  Everyone was chatty about the earthquake, though, of course. 

As the train made its way north there were fewer passengers; after Bologna just me, a guy, and a woman who had had so much plastic surgery on her face, she looked like a milder version of Jocelyn Wildenstein from Dlisted.  I had to try so hard not to stare at first—she had the massive implanted cheeks, and the tightened, upturned eyes, and she even had the surgical tape or whatever around her eyes, indicating a recent procedure!!  It was pretty hideous, but she turned out to be extremely friendly and chatty, and not an Italian by origin but a Russian who moved here 12 years ago to forget an old flame (this is the kind of conversation you can get into on public transit; with very little prompting you get the story of nights spent weeping over lost love, or, as on the bus in Rome yesterday, with absolutely NO prompting you get a diatribe from an old lady about how times have changed since she was young—pizza everywhere!!), which undoubtedly explains why I had an easier time understanding her than the Italian guy, who got off at Padua, so it was just the two of us until Mestre.  She complimented my Italian, but I have been humbled enough to know that it is not great.  Carla says the accent will take you further than knowing the proper pronunciation of the words, but that’s not something they just teach you, you know?  Anyway, the ride was pleasant.  I had been assigned the window seat, which was perfect, and brought along a bag of snacks plus my recent acquisition of il Grande Gatsby, which I would have finished if I hadn’t started talking to the woman (who, in another display of how these conversations go, wished me a florid farewell before getting off the train, telling me I was beautiful and to have luck in everything)

My time in Rome with Carla was really great.  I feel like I did both a great deal and nothing at all!  I haven’t been there in three years, so I really enjoyed re-familiarizing myself with the city, and I had a wonderful time revisiting certain key places I loved.  There was a certain lack of planning; I didn’t remember to look into booking a Borghese ticket until it was too late and they were sold out, which was probably my biggest regret.  Also I did not expect 60-degree freezing rain in Rome, like yesterday; had I brought my single pair of jeans?  Nope!  Carla and I went to the Protestant cemetery, although the place didn’t strike her with the same kind of evocative melancholy that it does me (she enjoyed making friends, or attempting to do so, with the cats who live in the sanctuary there).  We had a theological discussion underneath S. Niccolo in Carcere, checking out the Roman road and ruins that underlie part of the church structure.  We also visited Sant’Ivo on Sunday, the only day it’s open; took the bus yesterday in the rain to the distant mausoleum of Santa Costanza; and saw the Tintoretto show, where she patiently listened to all of my hard-won knowledge from exams.  There was also just a goddamn ton of walking, which is wonderful in the Roman sun!

Things have changed; things have stayed the same.  The Euro-cent Paradise was still there on Via Ripetta, for example (always a good place to grab a bottle of water), and so is the gelato place on Largo Argentina, where the vanilla has figs in it, apparently, which might explain why it tastes deliciously different than others.  The cost of the metro has gone up to 1.50; construction is in evidence on Line C, but Carla, with all the cynicism of a native, swears it’ll never happen.  The guided tour I once got at S. Niccolo in Carcere is now self-guided with a pamphlet and some wall panels, which was a bit less exciting.  The Pan di Stelle cookies of which Sara was always such a fan didn’t taste the same as I remembered (I bought a bag for the train, ate two, and blech!), and neither did…drumroll…Diet Coke, of which I had my first sips in going on two and a half years, when Carla and I had lunch at, of all places, yes, a McDonalds.  It was cold, rainy, and we were both starving when we got back from Santa Costanza, and the bus dropped you off right in front.  Sue me.  Hamburger and fries (this being Europe you have to pay .20 per ketchup packet, though).  I can’t even remember the last time I ate in a McDonalds (I’d like to say it might be as far back as when I was in Florence, because I went in there from time to time for a soft serve, for which I got weird cravings for some reason).  Anyway, I didn’t get a drink, but Carla got a diet coke, and I had two sips.  It was so gross!  It tasted like Pepsi, it was so sweet.  Granted, this was the fountain version of what is already, according to Carla, a hyper-sweetened variant of our acidic Diet Coke, but still.  If I was expecting any emotional reunion between myself and the once-beloved nectar, I was sorely mistaken.

The other part of our time together involved food and alcohol, both in large quantities.  Carla and I are both prodigious snackers and a terrible influence on each other.  We watched the Avengers, and not only had I eaten a bag of chips earlier, we managed to split an entire block of feta plus a box of tomatoes between us!  Granted that was dinner (instead of the chicken and potatoes we’d bought; Carla made that last night), but still.  Bad influences.  One of us gets up to get something to nibble on, and the other says oh hey, you can just bring that over here. We also drank a lot of wine—I took it upon myself to revisit the Trionfale market, where we shopped when I was here three years ago, and brought back a huge bottle of the vat wine (3 euro and it was delicious); we drank that plus at least two other bottles, plus whatever we drank out at dinner.  It was a lot. 

Other activities included me using her wonderfully fast real internet (sniff!), watching Sense and Sensibility, having dinner with Jasmine and Nick in Testaccio, and going to an boat party on the Tiber—which was not as fun as it sounds. Carla is still quite broken-hearted about Justin.  I didn’t realize just how sad she’s been until I was there, since apparently she feels the need to be much more stiff-upper-lip when we’re on the phone or emailing, so I’m glad we got to spend so much time together and she could talk it out.  I miss Carla already!  And Rome!  Sigh. 

Now I'm listening to a big thunderstorm that is quite literally rattling the windows--those wooden slats that Europeans draw down over the windows to ward off the sun?  Also have a high propensity to rattle with the wind and thunder, I'm learning.  I was watching what I could see of the sky for a bit, and it looked amazing when the lightning lit up the sky (it's not even raining); I so wish I could dash around the corner to see what the lagoon looks like when it's lit up by lightning, but I'm not stupid.  Once the neighborhood was filled with the creaking sounds of other residents lowering the slats, I decided to put mine down too.  Holy crap, there was just a big boom of thunder and that RESOUNDED in my room.  The slats and the window rattled.  First earthquakes now this!  

Auguri!

            Yesterday was our three year wedding anniversary!  Not our finest showing, considering I’m on the other side of the Atlantic from my husband, but he was sweet enough to write me a poem (not sweet enough to do it without jokes, though, hmph)!  As always, it both feels like yesterday and like a lifetime ago. Then again, we've been together for almost seven and a half years--even if, as Sean notes, we've had to be apart for a lot of that time.  Doesn't matter--I'm still the luckiest woman in the world.  :-)

Yesterday morning was not auspicious here; since the forecast promised an afternoon in the upper 70s with perhaps a morning shower, I took my umbrella but wore only a tank top and light sweater (my only shirts with sleeves were still on the drying rack anyway).  It was fine when I left, but an hour or so later the temperature dropped and it started to rain.  Adding insult to injury, I couldn't seem to find the church I was looking for, and wound up having to waste a vaporetto ride going back down the Grand Canal to Rialto so I could cross to the other side (all the guidebooks tell you you can cross on the traghetto, the standing gondolas, and they're marked on the maps and you see the signs at the waterfront, but I've never seen one in action, and waited fruitlessly hoping one would appear at S. Marcuola).  On the plus side, in some back street in S. Polo that I will never find again, I bought a couple of calzonini for lunch, which, as they sound, are mini calzones! Mine were stuffed with cooked peppers and were delicious.  Luckily, the sun came out and it warmed up shortly thereafter, otherwise my day would have been quite depressing indeed.  I found a couple of used bookstores, visited SS. Giovanni e Paolo, and discovered (somehow I had not known this) that the Scuola di S. Marco, attached to the church, is now Venice's hospital. 

Today I'm off to Rome to spend five days with Carla!  This may be the longest stretch we've spent together since I visited her in Florence, and that was four years ago.  Wow. 

I Feel Like Titles Are Going to Become a Problem

So the house is a little more full at present than before, since Joanne, the historian through whom I found the place, is here for a few days before she and Elsa go on a cruise.  I came out of the bathroom after drying my hair to find not only her, but also another woman, Rebecca, who works in18th century literature, in the kitchen with her son--she's another "graduate of Elsa's" as they said, having lived with her a couple times over the years.  They're leaving for a two-week cruise on May 30, so it kinda works out neatly that I'm going to Rome for five days on Thursday--it's not a big place.

This morning I decided to actually try following one of the itineraries in Lorenzetti, the guide suggested by Dr. Cooper that encompasses not only only history and the artistic contents of churches and museums but facades, bridges, points of interest, etc. The book was originally written in the 1930s and updated in the 1960s, so there are occasionally things that have changed, but on the whole it's accurate.  Mostly I did church-hopping, although at one point both my map and his directions were so unclear that I wound up in the city library's courtyard and not the Scuola di S. Giorgio like I'd intended.  I also went to Murano, the island of the glassmakers, briefly in the afternoon, before calling it an early day in favor of trying to go jogging, emphasis on "try."  Ugh.  How unpleasant.  Sean tells me it gets less awful, but I don't know if I'll have any willpower to keep doing it once it gets warm--today was another cool day.

I finally managed to do my scarf Italian-style this morning!  I was kind of proud of myself for that.  One less way I look out of place, which is something I've been weirdly obsessed with on this trip, and I think it's because I'm by myself; when you're with someone else, speaking English, not only is there no hiding your identity, but there's also a sense of safety in numbers that the solo traveler lacks.  Of course, my lack of skinny jeans (preferably with rolled cuffs that are stuffed behind tongues of poofy Nikes), and inability to wear a leather jacket on a warm afternoon in direct sunlight, will never stop marking me as an outsider.  Or, you know, I could just open my mouth and attempt to speak!

I did have brief conversations with two people today.  One was a fruit vendor who was selling, like most other fruit vendors, cherries as ciligie.  I asked him why the first cherries I'd bought here were badoere instead.  At first he had no idea what I was talking about, but when I insisted I'd seen this in Venice, he said it might have something to do with where they're from.  Treviso, the first vendor had said.  Ah!  Badoere is a place near Treviso.  Voila.  Not a Venetian nickname at all like I'd thought.  The other person I talked with was the guy monitoring the scuola of S. Giorgio.  I learned that the scuola still exists today and that you can only join if you're of Dalmatian descent (the scuola was S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, or St. George of the Slavs).  Kind of like the Masons in doing charity, except they only meet once a year (and no word on elaborate dress-up costumes).

Not Even the Rain

Today was a very wet day.  I really wasn’t prepared for this much cold, rainy weather; I mean, Venice at this time of year is usually already in the upper 70s, but the whole region is having the same weird weather we were having earlier, I guess.  So out I go, wearing no fewer than four layers (tank top, cardigan, hoodie, raincoat, plus a scarf in the morning when it is most chilly—I only brought one of those, too!).  Actually, it wouldn’t be bad at all except for the wind, which really buffets you when you exit into a campo (Venetians call their squares ‘fields’ and not piazzas because they were once grassy) or along a fondamenta (a broad street running along a canal or the open water).  Also, once it began to really rain in earnest in the afternoon, the streets began to become rather waterlogged.  Venice has flagstones and not the cobblestones of many other cities, a fact for which I’m grateful, but there are still plenty of uneven places for water to build up.  Ironically, my feet remained dry (even though my pants were damp) until I was back on the Lido and—I thought—safe, until I accidentally stepped in a big dirty puddle on the sidewalk and kicked muddy water over the tops of my shoes.  Blech.

I realized one reason I’ve probably been so tired lately—I can’t sleep for crap on this tiny mattress.  Not only did I continually wake up, I remembered it later.  Things make more sense now.  I don’t know why I have trouble, though, since, as Sean is always quick to note, I can typically sleep anywhere (napping I cannot manage, but real sleeping, not a problem—as long as it’s not a plane).  I mean, it’s not the least comfortable mattress I’ve ever slept on (that honor might go to the one in Rome) even though it’s certainly the smallest—twin doesn’t even cover it, it’s like a twin junior!

Anyway, I still managed to get up at 7 so I could get to the Accademia shortly after it opened at 8:15.  It was really a pleasure to be alone in the galleries, especially in front of Giorgione’s Tempest and La Vecchia, and later Titian’s Pieta, not least because I could snap photos unobserved!   The museum is composed out of the shell of what was once the church of the Carita and its attached confraternity, or scuola, as well as some new buildings.  One of the rooms of the scuola, the Albergo, has basically been maintained with its same decoration since the 16^th century, a cycle of paintings including Titian’s awesome Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.  I was really looking forward to seeing it, but I walked into the Albergo to discover it was completely bare—quite literally; you could see the exposed brick behind the support structures for the paintings!  I knew the Presentation was being conserved by Save Venice because Rosand told us, but I thought it was being conserved in situ.  Nope.  They stripped all the paintings out of the room.  The sign encouraged you to appreciate the carved wooden ceiling, instead.  Sigh. There were a  couple of other disappointments; I was annoyed to find some Tintorettos missing, till I realized they’re in the show I’ll be seeing in Rome, but it was  a real blow to walk into the room with Veronese’s ginormous feast picture and see it covered by scaffolding (no laboratory conservation for this monster picture). 

I got a really cool picture of a detail of an early 16^th-century Mansueti painting of a miracle that took place in Venice, where on the side of a church there’s a scrap of paper reading “House for Rent, 5 ducats.” (I would never have noticed it, much less been able to decipher it, except for the label!) I don’t know exactly how much 5 ducats was worth in 1503, but it sure as hell wouldn’t go far in the expensive Venice of today.  I paid 5 euros today for the pleasure of two cups of tea—more than eight dollars!  I’ll admit it: I miss Starbucks here, or at least small quiet cafes where you can sit and read the paper and drink inexpensive tea and no one looks at you funny.  Café-going is a social activity here; even at 10am the atmosphere is loud and jocular, and anyone alone is just grabbing a quick stand-up cappuccino at the bar.  Plunking myself down and spreading out the Corriere della Sera, I’m afraid, already made me look kind of weird, and then my struggle to order tea (I learned that te’ is different from tisana, even if the waiter’s explanation of the actual difference went by too fast for me to get) because god forbid you not want a simple caffe. 

This was my first time in a café on this voyage, and I remembered why I don’t like them; I always feel intensely out of place, like there’s some subtle code of behavior that I’m not enacting properly.  I couldn’t remember if I should wait to catch a waiter’s eye before sitting down, how to get another cup (bring it up? Signal him to come to me?), or what to do with my cup when I was done (leave it on the table?  Bring it up to the bar?).  The waiter was nice (for an Italian waiter) but I still sensed the pity for this poor girl who can read the newspaper but can’t order tea! (I’ll have to have Carla give me a tutorial in Rome). My finances will not permit more cups of tea in a café, but no big loss.  I did stop by the store and pick up tea bags on the way home; however, since Elsa lacks a tea kettle (how many Italians have those, I wonder) I made tea in a saucepan! Now I wish I’d brought more packets of Truvia, if the rainy weather is to continue.   Of course, I’d probably not drink tea before leaving home unless I was sure I was headed somewhere where I could use a bathroom for free (at least got that much out the café!).

I had another “learning experience” in the post office at the Lido, where I stood like an idiot for a few seconds before realizing you have to take a number from the machine like you’re at the deli counter.  I waited till my number showed up on the electric screen, but for some reason two numbers showed up concurrently for the same service window, and this old woman dashed in front of me, presumably holding the other number, and proceeded to carry out a long transaction.  (Post offices here do more than mail; credit cards, loans, getting your pension payment, etc all happens at the post office).  I waited patiently, but when she left, the woman behind the counter hit the button and—presto!—a new, third number appeared, and a guy swiftly materialized in front of her.  I lost my turn and I have no idea how.  Was I supposed to go before the little nonna?  No clue.  I was both annoyed and embarrassed, and left rather than go through the process again—all for the sake of some damned stamps for postcards I haven’t even bought yet.  However, Carla told me that you definitely can still buy the foreign stamps at the tabaccherie, as I remembered; no idea why that other lady told me different.  Carla suggested “because she’s Italian??”

Elsa is not exactly proving a helpful companion in the language department.  We did have a conversation when I came home today about the earthquake and the Brindisi attack, but when I was asking her to show me how to use the washing machine, I couldn’t remember the idiomatic expression for doing laundry, so I asked (in several ways) if there was an Italian phrase for washing your clothes.  She didn’t seem to get what I was asking, and then said no, no such phrase—but I knew there was, because I learned it at Middlebury from Anna Clara, the fierce Neopolitan teacher who lived in Meeker with us.  Later I checked my dictionary—fare il bucato!  Also useful: lavare i piatti, for washing the dishes.

Quiet Sunday

Today I decided to take the day ‘off’ and not go into Venice at all.  I’ve been really tired a lot of mornings—last night I slept almost 12 hours, and it wasn’t the first time.  Maybe that’s because I’ve been on the go so much—yesterday I was in Venice from before 9am until after 5, most of that time spent on my feet—but I do that every time I travel and I never sleep this much.  Of course typically, I don’t let myself sleep this much because there’s so much to do, so it may be the result of knowing, subconsciously, that I’m here for a while.

Last night I dreamed about the house shaking around me.  In New Haven this would not be so surprising, since the house tends to shudder if a big truck races past (in fact when we had that small earthquake last year, that’s what Sean thought it was).  It was apparently a real earthquake, though, in Emilia Romagna.  I just felt a brief aftershock a few minutes ago.  I remember the first time I felt any kind of tremor was three years ago in Rome, when I noticed a glass of water on the table vibrating and thought for a minute it was the people in the apartment beneath us—nope, it was basically a long-after aftershock of the huge L’Aquila terremoto that devastated the city.  It’s a little freaky to think about the sheer size of the tectonic plates, about the way they move against one another to create earthquakes.  It’s like the surface of the world is on the back of something living that could shake us off, if it wanted to.

The other big news of the day was a bomb placed outside of a school in Brindisi yesterday morning that went off right as the girls were arriving on a bus from the towns in the countryside.  (I actually heard someone talking about this in a bookstore I was in yesterday morning; I heard “bomba nella scuola” and thought, wait, did that happen here?  Wouldn’t people be more freaked out? Since it wasn’t in either of the newspapers I read yesterday afternoon, I forgot about it) One girl is dead, so far.  People have immediately suspected the mafia (the name of the local mafia is Sacra Corona Unita, which sounds like a soccer team);  mafia activity is pretty high there, and the school is named after the wife of Falcone, one of the two anti-mafia judges assassinated in 1992 (the wife died too).  The families of some of the students have links, too, apparently.  Yet there are clear indications that it might be garden variety terrorism instead, since the mafia don’t use the kind of bomb employed in this attack, and they’ve never attacked a school (as someone pointed out in the paper, they’re not stupid, they know killing schoolchildren is bad for business).  As someone else wrote, it’s one thing to hear of this kind of thing happening in the Middle East—as terrible as that sounds—and another to hear about it in your own country.  I can only imagine if that happened at an American school.

This morning I went downtown to get groceries.  At home we’re used to doing shopping once a week, maybe, but in Italy, due to the tiny size of the fridges and also the lack of preservatives in things like bread, you have to shop every couple of days.  Today my goal was ingredients for the no-cook pasta that Sean and I love in the summer time, with cherry tomatoes, arugula, basil and garlic.  Before I could prepare it, though, I cleaned the kitchen and did Elsa’s sinkful of dishes, for my own sanity.  She’s one of those old people that just really doesn’t give a damn anymore—four coffee cups on the table, crumbs everywhere, trash can full. I swept the floor and I do not even want to guess the last time she’d done that.  But hey, she’s over 90, and god knows my grandpa wasn’t much better.  Now the mixture is in the fridge waiting for me to make pasta later.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find ricotta salata in the grocery store.  There were a thousand kinds of cheeses, many of which I’ve never heard of because they’re probably just local variants or something (there was also something called table cheese, which I decided against trying today), but no ricotta that I could find.  Finally I turned to an older woman, told her I was American, and asked her if the ricotta was lurking there under some other name unknown to me.  Nope, she said it should be there and to look for it, or ask someone.  However, I managed to find a small container of parmesan, which is the other cheese the recipe suggests, so I left it at that.  Another time, I suppose.  Another challenge was estimating amounts—Elsa has a food scale, but when you’ve got a 500 gram box of tomatoes, how much of that is 1 pint?  More to my chagrin, I discovered that although she has a garlic press, she seems to have no chopping knife.  Luckily I was only roughly chopping the greens. 

You know what else is surprising?  The number of stores open here on a Sunday.  In Florence everything shut down on Sundays, except the big grocery store that was by Piazza dei Ciompi, and Rome was the same, at least in the neighborhood where we stayed.  Here there are bars, tabaccherie, even little produce shops on the sidewalks, all open.  I don’t know if that’s just a peculiarity of the Lido, or Venice in general?   Certainly there seem to be many more supermarkets around than I remember.  I’ve spotted 5 or 6 in Venice itself, most of them In-Coop; here on the Lido there’s an In-Coop just a few blocks from a Billa. Italian supermarkets also have their own store brands now, too; Billa’s is called Clever.  I have Clever mozzarella in my fridge and balsamic vinegar in my cabinet.  Another thing that’s changed is that you can’t buy foreign stamps at a tabaccheria anymore, which I used to do in Florence; when I asked for stamps with my newspaper today she said they only did Italian stamps.  For foreign I’ll have to actually go to the post office.  I haven’t even bought post-cards yet, of course!

More Notes

 Internet access at last!  It’s temperamental and way too weak to do anything like upload photos, and I had to go to way too much trouble to get it, including bringing my laptop to a computer shop and paying them $50 to install some missing software, but c’est la vie.

A couple of days ago I saw a water taxi go past the vaporetto I was in with a coffin strapped to the back and the widow sitting next to it; today I saw a bride being helped into a taxi, train and all, on the Grand Canal, and further down saw the groom waiting on the landing where the ceremony was evidently going to take place (fixing his hair in a window; he must have been Italian)!  Now all I need to see is someone giving birth and I’ll really believe everything here happens on the water.  It’s still a little surprising to see someone go zipping past in a crappy little skiff, talking on their cell phone while zig-zagging between bigger boats.  I mean, if you mentally shift the vehicles to cars it’s nothing strange at all, just city traffic, but when you see a vaporetto gliding confidently through the water with just a tiny distance between it and one of the biggest ocean liners you’ve ever seen, it’s impossible to make a comparison to our way of life.  I mean, cars aren’t moving within a medium that can buffet them about at will like a boat.  I keep waiting to see a gondola that has just cut precipitously in front of  a vaporetto get overturned, but those gondoliers are quite skilled at keeping the boat afloat.

On Thursday I was exploring the quietest district of Venice, Cannareggio, where you can walk for minutes at a time with no sound but your own footfalls and the slap of the boats bumping the sides of the canals. I went to a bunch of churches as well as the Jewish Ghetto.  All of Venice is made up of tiny islands, but this one had only one way in or out, back in the 15^th century.  It was the iron foundry, and gettare is the verb they use for ironwork, so its name was the ghetto, which it then passed to other neighborhoods where Jews lived, like Warsaw.  Medieval Venice was in one way more accommodating to the Jews than other European cities, since they let them in when they were being expelled elsewhere, but they also forced them to live in the ghetto and to pay for Christian guards who guarded the bridge after nightfall, in addition to having to wear special clothing and other restrictions typically placed on them.  The result of this crowding is that the Ghetto has some of the first high-rise apartment buildings in the world—some are eight stories tall.  A plaque on one of the walls commemorates the two hundred Venetian Jews who were handed over to the Nazis during WWII.  Most of the shops and restaurants there now cater to Jewish tourists; there was even a Jewish hotel.

A little later that afternoon, I was standing on a bridge at Fondamenta Nuova (so-named because they literally added land to the city’s northern edge in the 16^th century by dredging the lagoon) looking at the cemetery island of S. Michele, and reached for my camera to take a picture.  La camera non c’e’.  I frantically tried to remember when I had last taken a picture, and realized I took a picture of myself (awkward, I know, but I don’t want to be totally without record of myself in these photos!) in front of S. Maria dell’Orto before I sat down on a secluded stoop off to one side of the piazza to have a snack, nearly thirty minutes or so earlier.  I realized I must have left my brand-new, $400 camera just sitting there like candy to a thief.  I was so fucking pissed at myself, as I literally raced through the calli and back alleys that make Venice so frustratingly picturesque—they wind, they stop, they abruptly become a gated courtyard with no exit, etc. etc.  Cute when you’re wandering, incredibly frustrating when you’re trying to get somewhere that is not that far away, as the crow flies, but which seems eternally distant.  In the end, I raced into the piazza to discover my camera sitting innocently on the stoop where I’d left it!  Thank God I’d decided to visit the least-touristed corner of Venice that morning, because probably only a handful of people had been around in my absence, and no one apparently noticed, or at least wanted to steal the camera.  Crisis averted.  I will be more careful in the future, you’d better believe it.

After that I decided to head over to S. Michele.  The church, designed by Mauro Codussi, was closed, but the cemetery itself was peaceful and full of cypress trees, making it a rarity on the skyline of the lagoon.  The cemetery goes back to the 19^th century (maybe 18^th?) and is still being used today, so no pictures were technically allowed.  While most of the monuments lacked the personality of the cimitero accatolico in Rome, still one of my favorite places, there were some I still found moving, like the tomb of a 15 year old Swiss boy who died on a trip to Venice in the 19^th century, or the monument to the mother and sister who perished in some kind of boating accident on the Lido (the slab was quite specific).  Ezra Pound and Igor Stravinsky are buried there, although I didn’t manage to find either.  I noticed a couple of things about Italian graves of more recent vintage:  they all include photographs of the deceased behind glass, and the slabs frequently record who put the stone there: “your grieving wife,” or “your inconsolable mother,” some of which seemed to be trying to out-grieve the ones around them, I swear.  Why don’t we do the photographs?  I think it would be nice.  Most people had photos of themselves in old age, but quite a few had photos of them in their prime.  I couldn’t decide which I’d choose.  Is it vanity to want to be remembered young? 

Yesterday was the day of my internet quest, so most of the day was tied up therein.  The afternoon I spent on Burano—or rather, most of my afternoon was spent getting to and from Burano, which is about an hour away, not because it’s distant but because the boats go at a snail’s pace!  I didn’t need to spend much time there because I’d forgotten, from my one previous visit with our school in 2006, that there is nothing on Burano but candy-colored fisherman’s houses and shops selling Burano lace.  I mean, it was pretty, but I probably could have just looked at my photos from then and saved myself two hours on a ferry!

This morning I left early to get to San Marco before the crowds.  Alas, they don’t open the church till 945, shockingly late considering it’s the number one tourist attraction, and I got there at 845.  People were already lined up outside to wait, but I decided to go through the Palazzo Ducale, which was pleasantly scarce of tourists at the early hour.  From there I went toward the public gardens, bought some cherries from a quayside vendor, and read the Corriere della Sera on a park bench.  Then I went to the technical cathedral of Venice, S. Pietro in Castello, banished to the fringes of the city (people think San Marco is the cathedral, but it’s really just the doge’s chapel, which gives you an idea of where the Republic saw the institution of the Church relative to their own authority), walked by the Arsenale, the great boatyard of the Venetian Republic, and then decided I might head back to the Lido to eat lunch and then return to try to slip into S. Marco after evening crowds had left.  When I made my way to a vaporetto stop, however, I found there was nothing doing; because of the America’s Cup regatta, which according to the paper brought 80,000 people to the quays to watch, all the vaporetti to the Lido were cancelled till evening.  I was rather annoyed.  I don’t know what the hell those people thought they were watching (you could see the sails in the distance, but not a whole lot else, unless you were lucky enough to be on a boat or floating stadium—there was one--in the bay), but it definitely felt like 80,000 as I fought my way from the Arsenale stop all the way past piazza S. Marco.  I was already tired by this point, and hungry, but somehow I found myself walking all the way to the top of Dorsoduro looking for a likely place to eat.  I still haven’t had a sit-down restaurant or café meal yet, mostly because I don’t really want to eat alone, surrounded by hordes of noisy tourists and noisier Italians, but I was so tired and hungry that I bought another, different paper and decided to find a place and brave it.  Ultimately I actually stopped in a pizza joint that happened to have a couple of chairs, so certainly nothing fancy, but they were actually nice to me—the guy smiled!—which is so rare that I’m going to go back if I’m in the neighborhood.

It ended up taking me two hours to get home, since the vaporetti were absolutely crowded once they started running again.  It’s only 9pm and I’m exhausted! 

Venice Notes, Somewhat Belated

            My second day in Venice is coming to a close.  So far everything is going OK; I had more trouble in Brooklyn, first with transit issues and then with getting locked out, than I had on the rest of the voyage altogether, so hopefully any bad travel karma has already been used.

 I don’t think I’ll fly Iberia again without checking to make sure it’s a big plane with the seatback entertainment sets.  That might sound silly, but I tend to have difficulty sleeping on international flights (as Sean knows only too well), so I rely on watching movie after movie to pass the time.  The few books I brought with me were in my checked luggage, so when I sat down and realized that something was missing I thought “oh, crap.”  The inflight movie, which they didn’t put on until maybe three or four hours into the flight, was about the rescue of the trapped whales in Alaska and was pretty good.  My seatmate was a junior from Sonoma College in California, headed to visit her best friends who were studying abroad.  I think I admirably contained my reaction when she replied to my inquiry about why she hadn’t joined them with a placid “oh, I’ve never really felt the need to be far from home.”  Her college is right near her hometown and I caught sight of her cell phone with the contact name “Mommy.” ‘Nuff said. 

           I also made conversation briefly with the couple who were sitting across the aisle from me.  The husband, who had the aisle seat, kept struggling to open the moist towlette packet that comes with your meal (delicious, so that’s a point to Iberia, and breakfast didn’t suck either), so finally I leaned over and tried to ask in Spanish if I could help him (after spending ten minutes trying to remember what the words were in Spanish and trying to disentangle ayudar from aiutare).  He didn’t seem to get what I was saying, so I just grabbed it and opened it for him, and then his wife laughed because he’d been fighting with it for so long.  They were Spanish (although she corrected me, Catalan, which is distinct for them like Sicilian is in Italy) but spoke Italian too, so we talked in that. They told me my Spanish was good, which had to be a lie, because the guy had clearly not understood what I’d said (although I admit I also have the bad habit of speaking in a softer-than-normal tone when speaking a foreign language, because I’m nervous about fucking up).   I seem to be able to pass as Spanish as long as I don’t speak, but it’s not the case for Italian--which is weird, because there’s such a diversity among Italians—I saw a couple of vaporetto workers today who looked Irish, red-blonde hair, fair skin and all.  Italians, y u no let me pass as one of you? (incidentally I saw t-shirts hanging in a store window with rageface comics on them! Ah, the unifying power of internet memes).

Anyone with a propensity for sea-sickness (you, Rae) would not last long in Venice, not if they planned to get around on the vaporetti, anyway.  Coming in from the airport we were moving at a snail’s pace, because the speed limit was posted at 7km, or about 3mph!  Meanwhile these private taxi boats were racing around us, kicking up huge wakes that shook the vaporetto like crazy (the driver was venting his spleen via horn at them).  I’ve read that the wakes also have a negative effect on the lagoon ecosystem, but there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort to check them.  There are police patrolling the waters but I doubt they have speed traps set up.  Using the vaporetti in the city and to and from Lido, there’s less interference from the taxis but there’s also the lovely sensation of docking—if a subway can be a bit jarring as it screeches to a halt, imagine the roar of the vaporetto engine  combined with the           *THUD *as the boat comes alongside and then whacks into the landing, sometimes gently, but more frequently not, it seems. 

It feels right to arrive in Venice by water because that’s how travelers saw the city for the first time for centuries; you understand the magical power this “impossible city” has over the viewer when you see it emerging from the water, which seems flecked with diamonds as the sun plays over it.  It took about an hour to get to the Lido from the airport.  I was able to get my iMob Venezia pass immediately at an office there; you have to pay 50 euro for it, but it lets you purchase tickets at a much-reduced rate (1 euro for vaporetto rides instead of 6) and it’s valid for five years.  Actually, the reason I left Sara and Zach’s apartment and got locked out was because I had just noticed on the website that they required a passport sized photo with your application and I was headed to a Walgreens to get them taken.  I never made it, but it turns out I didn’t need them anyway, as the office just took a photo of my passport photo (and that ghastly image will now adorn my Venice card till 2017, two years after the passport itself will have to be replaced, joy).

One errand done, I took a cab to Elsa’s house, which is a block off one of the main streets, Via San Gallo—incidentally, the name of the street we lived on in Florence!   I was a little worried as the cabbie deposited me and my bags on the sidewalk in a silent residential neighborhood; if there had been a mix-up and she wasn’t home, I’d have to haul my bags a long way to a phone.  However, no such disaster occurred.  Elsa, it turns out, is more than 90, very nice, if a bit difficult to understand when she speaks quietly (she’s missing most of her bottom from teeth which has something to do with it I think).  I can understand her fine when she speaks a bit more slowly and directly.  She told me I’m lucky she speaks Tuscan, aka normal Italian, instead of the incomprehensible (even to other Italians) Venetian dialect, since her mother was Tuscan. 

There have inevitably been difficulties of communication; I didn’t know the word for heater (stufa) so I had trouble asking her why, in the name of god, she was running the heater on a lovely day like yesterday (answer likely being she’s really old and likes it warm; solution, I keep my room’s door closed and open the window. Hopefully when it is hot she will not want it on…).  Today I had no idea what the word for shower curtain was (la tenda) when I was trying to joke about the difficulty in showering without a shower curtain without spraying water everywhere, since we always have them in the States.  I also accidentally called my “attempt” (tentativo) an “attack” (attentato).  Whoops.  The good thing is, I can talk to Elsa in full knowledge that I will screw up with less of the anxiety I feel about when I’m out and about.  They may not actually be scorning my attempts to speak their language, but I always think they are.  This is something I will have to work on, clearly, because I’ll never improve without risks.  I did converse successfully with the Vodafone guy when buying my cheapie cell phone yesterday, but when he was setting it up and asked me if I wanted it in Italian or English I laughed to myself and said English, because we both knew that’s my real language!  (I’m sure someone who wanted to make a big show of things would have put it in Italian, but what’s the point, no one will see it but you!)

After leaving my things with Elsa yesterday around 1 I headed into the city (although in Italian you could say “andare in centro” for going downtown, I learned from saying this to Elsa that each island counts as its own place with its own downtown; “andare a Venezia” is its own phrase, even though it’s just a 10 minute ride across the water).  I got gelato (vaniglia, of course), found an internet café to let everyone know I survived, and wandered around the streets for a few hours.  I bought cherries from Trreviso and discovered that in Venetian parlance they are “badoere” and not “ciligie.” (there was a famous Venetian family named the Badoer, and I can only assume somehow cherries took on their name).  I went to bed fairly early, and woke around 6:30 to a huge storm outside and howling wind.  I turned off my alarm and went back to sleep, and woke up before 11—almost 12 hours after I went to sleep!  It wasn’t a big loss, since a cold rain was still falling even when I left the house an hour later, and boy was it windy and freezing.  I had on a shirt, thin cardigan, zip-up hoodie, and a thin rain jacket, and I was still cold.  And thank God I opted to bring a pair of jeans.   I grimaced sympathetically at all the tourists in the city with sandals, capris and even shorts on some unlucky folks.  Unfortunately, I got to the city as all the churches and many shops closed for the mid-day break, so I did more wandering in search of the Toletta bookstore where Dr. Cooper told me I could find a particular guidebook.  Venice is beyond byzantine in its warren of streets; there are no street addresses, just the name of the sestiere, or section (literally “sixth” since there are six) plus a number, which don’t seem to run in any comprehensible order.  One minute I was doggedly trailing some 350s, turn a corner, and I’m in the 5300s; the other side of the street is 3800s.  Dorsoduro 1213, which Dr. Cooper said was near the university, Ca’ Foscari, eluded me, though I did find another bookstore where I bought an Italian copy of Sense and Sensibility (they didn’t have Emma but I’m going to look elsewhere).

Today’s only cultural event was going into the Frari. (Actually, no, I went into S. Giovanni Crisostomo first, when I was hunting for another bookstore, this one used (I found it but it was closed) and looked briefly at Sebastiano del Piombo’s altarpiece, which was surprisingly dark and hard to make out, compared to the images we’re used to from books).  But anyway the Frari was the big thing; seeing Titian’s Assunta has inaugurated my time in Venice!  I also decided that I quite enjoy Canova’s 18^th c tomb memorial (if memory serves, he was designing it for Titian but it wound up being used for his own), even if it is quite out of place in the Gothic church.  It’s a massive pyramid with an iron door cut into it; a pair of female mourners are preparing to enter with offerings on one side, while on the other, Fame and the lion of Venice lie prostrate with grief.  The door itself is actually ajar and you can just see a dark space beyond, which is what makes it intriguing in my eyes.

                I’ve never really been to Venice in the high season.  We were here during Carnival the first time, it’s true, so I remember the crush of 10 million people in the piazza S. Marco, but now you get to see things like people who have not only hired a gondola, they’ve hired a musician and a singer too!  I saw this twice today, as opera came floating over the water to the vaporetto.  (I can only imagine what they paid, since a 40 minute gondola ride is 80 euro itself; I also felt bad for the singers today, since it was chilly even after the rain had gone.)  On piazza S. Marco, the super-expensive cafes like Florian’s have competing house bands  playing classical music on little stages in their respective patios (according to Rick Steeves, you’ll pay 15 euro for a simple drink if you want to pretend you’re Hemingway or Byron). 

                The downside of traveling alone is that you have no one to talk to, no one to share your excitement with and, importantly, no one to eat with—I’m not going to go for a sit-down meal at a restaurant by myself, and I doubt I’ll even go in for cicchetti (Venetian tapas) and a drink at any of the bars unless Carla or Jasmine is around.  I’m not the type to strike up random conversations, especially in Italian, and it’s never a great idea to advertise being a woman alone, even if this is a very safe city.  

Triumph and Goodbyes

One of the reasons I stopped posting was that I had little to say aside from “IhopeIpasstheseexams." Seriously, I’ve lived and breathed virtually nothing but the exams since I came back to Philadelphia in January.  (In fact, thanks to my habit of keeping track of my hours for our accountability group on Google Docs, I can say that since the last week of January I logged 430 hours on exam prep.  Jesus!)  But I passed! I did more than that, actually; I fucking rocked those exams.  Sixteen hours and 55 pages later, my adviser said my broad field answers each seemed like articles in themselves, and all of my examiners called my special field exams a pleasure to read because they were not only insightful but well-written (as I said to them, imagine what they could have been if I hadn’t been typing to save my life). Even my orals were pretty freaking awesome (which I fully attribute to my habit of practicing answers by making myself talk them out out loud).  

This might seem like bragging until you contrast it against the completely awful, gut-wrenching fear and anxiety that I experienced before and during the exams.   I’ve never felt so much stress, angst, and general unhappiness in my entire freaking life. It was bad enough, if within relatively normal levels, going into the broad field, but most people are then much more relaxed going into the special field after they’ve passed the first.  Me? I had my first ever legitimate anxiety attack only hours after Dr. Cooper had called to glowingly compliment me on the broad field.  She was concerned that I shouldn’t get a big head about having done so well, and meanwhile hours later I’m sending her a panicked email about how I was certain that  I would fail the special!  It was my own fault: I’d only left three days between the written exams, and then had focused too much on preparing for the broad field, so when I looked at the questions that I’d proposed for the special field, I realized I could barely answer three of them.  I almost lost it.  And I was certain that they’d ask me precisely those questions, too, since on the broad field I’d gotten several questions that I didn’t want to answer and one that I actually couldn’t, because I’d mentally filed it away as “eh, they won’t ask me that, that’s stupid.”  Wrong--and good thing I prepared an answer for that one later, too, because then they asked it at the orals!  Anyway,  Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of last week were probably three of the worst days of my life so far, and this is coming from the orphan, so no joke.  I actually felt sick to my stomach with fear all the time, woke up in the middle of night with my brain trying to answer questions, and generally expected humiliating failure at every turn.  And then came the very sweetest moment of all, when the department secretary handed me the special field questions, I looked down, and I realized I can answer these, muthafucka!!   

Thus was the tale of my triumph!  Now it’s time to move out of Philadelphia: I spent all yesterday packing, with the result that everything except for clothes is basically ready to go in boxes.  Sean’s coming in on Friday and he’ll drive a truck to CT on Saturday, and then I’ll follow Monday.  My goodbye dinner with my friends is on Sunday night.  I’m going to miss them, and the life I’ve made here for myself.  Even though I’m happy to look forward to living with Sean at last, it can’t help but be bittersweet.

Spring? Feels like Summer

It's past 9pm in the middle of March, I've got my windows open, and I'm wearing shorts. I keep saying it, but really, this has been the best winter ever.

Today the temperature climbed to 70. It's cooler now, but every so often the wind pushes into the room, and there's just something about the way it smells. Melancholy, somehow. It's the kind of air that reminds me of soft, mild nights at the end of the school year in college, when I both wanted classes to be over and desperately didn't want to have to leave my friends for the summer. Bittersweet air, air that's full of things ending.

I don't think you need much psychology to guess that this is probably me reacting to the upheavals that are coming my way. Being with Sean will be awesome, yes, but it also means leaving all my friends, and the life I've made for myself here. It also means, more frighteningly, that the 'easy' part of my graduate career is over. No more fellowship to support me, no more classes to structure my life around, just me, out there trying to make some kind of mark in the academic world--still with no idea of how I'm going to be doing that, naturally. There's so much uncertainty ahead, which makes the world around me right now seem so comfortable, so warm. I can't even get excited about Venice, really; if my life were a book, Venice would be in the next chapter--or maybe in the interlude between chapters. I'm scared of what's going to come when I turn the page.

This melancholy night air isn't helping, naturally. Right now, what wouldn't I give to be back in one of those nights in college, when everything was still potential and possibility? A part of me thinks, how melodramatic! After all, it's not like my life is hopeless; it's just that there was such a sense of security back then, before we'd all made our choices and started on our paths. And there were friends around, always friends. Again, not that I'm without friends now. It's just bittersweet to look back on the time when I could turn over in my bed and talk to Carla in the dark, instead of sending her facebook messages that she won't return until the sun comes up where she is.

Maybe I should mention that when I have these thoughts about returning to Fairfield, I never imagine going back to the townhouses. It's always to our sophomore year dorm in Loyola, the last year we were all together, me and Carla, with Meredith and Popham at the end of the hall and the guys downstairs, trekking in herds to the dining hall in the evening and endlessly debating whether a group our size fit bitter at a round table or a rectangular one. I was always for the rectangles; more leg room, even if you couldn't talk to everyone as easily.

It's true what they say, of course; you can never go home again. Maybe that's a part of it, too, the idea of home. I haven't had a home, in the parental sense, for five years. Home has quite literally been where I've lain my head. In college (3/4 of it anyway) I still had that base to return to, with its own collection of bittersweet reunions with and partings from friends, and my mom, the center of gravity. I miss her, too, it goes without saying. Even though I doubt she'd have much in the way of advice to offer my on my life at this point, it would be enough just to hear her voice.

Here comes that sad wind blowing in again! Time to resist. Time to go look at funny cat pictures.

Another Glimpse

Antonio Lafrery, from Speculum Romanae magnificentiae, 1555, engraving.

This is another example of the how images from the past can be both cool and surprising! I doubt whether most non-Italian specialists would be able to immediately guess the subject of this engraving; it shows, in fact, the pope blessing the crowd from the balcony in front of St. Peter's Basilica. A little hard to recognize, isn't it, without the facade and colonnaded piazza provided by Maderno and Bernini in the 17thc? The only mildly recognizable facet is the drum of Michelangelo's dome rising in the background (his dome is actually much less visible today than he intended, thanks to alterations in the project by later architects who raised the height of the facade).

The rebuilding of St. Peter's was begun in 1506 under Julius II, the "Warrior Pope," but it wasn't finished until 1626. That is a long-ass time, but it was also the largest architectural undertaking in the world at the time (or at least in the West, as I have no idea what was going on elsewhere at this date). However, it was also a giant mess inside, as this drawing by Martin van Heemskerck from c. 1535 shows:

We're looking down toward the east end, with the colonnade of the nave of Early Christian church to either side. What's going on at the east end looks more like the ruins of an ancient Roman bath complex than a church-in-progress, but the barrel vault is supporting the as-yet-unfinished crossing of the nave and transept, where Michelangelo's dome would go later. The building there is a temporary structure built by the architect of St. Peter's, Bramante, to protect the altar (which is directly over Peter's tomb) from the elements, and, theoretically, to allow the pope to say mass in comfort. This apparently wasn't so, because I was just reading, in John Shearman's book on Raphael's tapestry cartoons for the Sistine, that Leo X was frequently forced to say Mass in the Sistine instead because it was so uncomfortable and even dangerous (!) to have to venture into St. Peter's.

Let's just finish this with Pannini's 18th-century depiction of the interior of the basilica. Say it with me: damn. The first time I walked into St. Peter's, I remember feeling just as dwarfed as those little people on the ground. Well done, Renaissance/Baroque people!

Old-Timey Goodness

Jan van Hemessen, Tavern Scene, c. 1540-5

General observation: when you look at a work of art from the past, you have to be cautious. There's a natural instinct, (bred in us, I'm sure, by decades of illustrated history textbooks), to look at art as a reflection of another period in time, a neutral window that reveals the lives and experiences of those who came before us. As Dwight Schrute would say: False. A work of art is a construction, a work in the most literal sense, mediated through any number of lenses: the artist, the patron, contemporary conventions of representation, etc. A work of art is not a photograph (which itself is a staged and constructed form of art, but that's another story), but it's extremely seductive to think of it that way. Indeed, nowhere is it more seductive, I think, than in those works of art that appear to be "realistic" or "spontaneous," like the scene above. (Someone once wrote that "realism" is a style that wants you to think it's not a style. They were referring to the mid-19thc. style of Courbet and Millet, not to the 16th c. Dutch tradition of genre (everday life) scenes, but I think the point is still good).

That art historical caveat aside, it's always interesting to see what kind of information you can glean from images of this type. No one would claim, for example, that this represents the artist's neighborhood tavern, or that it records an actual fight that took place (although I really love the vignette taking place at the right; not only the woman on the ground bitch-slapping the guy, but the woman restraining the her companion from getting involved, as if she's saying "No, she deserves it.") One bit of interesting information that the artist has given us, though, is the presence of the print, partially peeling off the upper wall in the center. It's a series of prints (probably woodcuts, the cheapest form of replication) of Landsknechts, or infantry soldiers, like this one by Hans Beham:

They were quite popular north of the Alps in the 16thc. Anyway, the subject matter isn't as interesting as their presence, because what van Hemessen's genre scene suggests, implicitly, is that it was a pretty common practice to paste prints up in a public watering hole. In other words, it suggests a way in which an entire class of visual material was actually used by people. That's the kind of information you won't find in a document or an archive, because it wouldn't have been considered worthy of being recorded. You can look at a surviving print today and talk about its context, its content, but what about its function? How was it actually touched, handled, passed around, and pasted up, until it cracked and crumbled and fell off, only to be replaced by another? That's the kind of thing you learn, instead, from an insignificant detail in a genre scene like this one.

In other words, this is why I think art history is so cool.