Reading

Between the Cape trip and just generally avoiding what I should be doing since I got back, I've done a lot of reading.  I finished up Anna Karenina shortly after I got home, and afterward decided to go all the way with Tolstoy and read War and Peace. (Never fear, to counter this level of erudition I also re-read the vulgar and hilarious Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove).  Anna Karenina was a re-read, too; I couldn't remember when, but thanks to the helpful search function on this blog, it turns out I've had a number of past associations with it that I've mostly forgotten.

To start with, in July of 2002 I mentioned it in an entry about re-organizing my books; it and Dostoyevsky fell into the category of  books that "I started and gave up on because the foreign names got annoying."  Clearly I didn't have much of an idea of the book's plot, since I made this brief entry in June of 2003: "Did anyone else know that Anna Karenina throws herself in front of a train at end end? I didn't, but today alone I have seen no less than three references to that, in the newspaper, in The Hours, which I am currently reading, and in Maxim of all places. I have two copies of that book and I've never made it past page one hundred. Someday." (I was reading The Hours?  I must either have not finished it or forgotten it.)  I did have two copies of the book until recently.  One I acquired, like so many of my books, at some tag sale, and the other from the bookshelf of odds and ends that was in the little landing on the basement steps in my grandfather's house.  At some point I forced myself to shed one copy (other doubles included Voltaire's Candide, who had to go; Pride and Prejudice, both of which got to stay; and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, of which I bought a softcover copy in the Shelton library booksale as a reserve, to lend out to friends, and of which I also now own an Italian-language version), and kept the one from Norwood because the cover art was prettier.  When I got home from Venice (where I'd been reading on my computer) and unearthed the paper version from the basement bookshelf here, where it had been relegated as not deserving of sufficient interest to go in the hallway bookcase upstairs that I commandeered for my books, I discovered that the copy had belonged to my aunt Janice.  I think I meant to mention it to her at the Cape and forgot; I wonder if she'd remember it all all?  She's not the literary type. 

It turns out that I only managed to read the book all the way through in my freshman year--February 2004 to be exact.  Although I was on the whole impressed with the book, I got hung up on my distaste for the title character: "it's an awful thing to say, but by the end of the book i really hated anna. i knew beforehand what her fate was to be and by the last fifty pages i was just thinking "oh my god, stop being a tearful whiny bitch and throw yourself under the train already!"     You know what else is awful?  Seven and a half years later and my opinion didn't change at all--I was still ready for her to commit suicide way before she actually does.  I also found myself bored, once again, by Tolstoy's philosophizing about the nature of workers to the land, the function of religion, etc. etc., but I think what I did recognize on this second reading is that despite the title, Anna and her tormented relationships with Karenin and Vronsky only make up 1/3 of the book's narrative, and arguably not even the most central part; that distinction goes, I think, to Kitty and Levin, while the other third is filled in by Anna's brother, the philandering Oblonsky, and his silly wife Dolly.  (I'm not sure why Tolstoy give Anna's name as the title, when it seems obvious that the thrust of his effort, and his approbation, lies behind Kitty and Levin).  Oblonsky and Dolly appear as a sort of mirror to Anna/Karenin/Vronsky--brother and sister are both adulterers, he repeatedly and shallowly, she once and out of passion, but where undeservedly good things come to Oblonsky at the end, there's only suffering for Anna. 

War and Peace had nothing so concrete a narrative structure. Lumpy is an adjective I would apply to it.  There's a vast array of interconnected characters, and the point-of-view jumps around between them.  I was impressed by his ability, particularly in the beginning, to portray how  Russian society worked in the drawing-room and--more surprisingly--how women behave when there aren't any men around, as when two lovely women help their dumpy but rich friend pretty herself up after the arrival of a suitor: "Both women exerted themselves with perfect sincerity to make her look well. She was so plain that the idea of rivalry with her could never have entered their heads. Consequently it was with perfect sincerity, in the naïve and unhesitating conviction women have that dress can make a face handsome, that they set to work to attire her."  When I read that, I understood and recognized that sense of girl-on-girl competition instinctively, I could imagine it happening today as long as you substituted "crush" for the idea of a suitor.

Unfortunately not all of the novel is so interesting.  Huge, dull portions of the book depict life at the front during the Napoleonic wars, and toward the end of the book I just started skipping those entirely. There was one perceptive description of group psychology, the adoration that the officers feel for the figure of the Emperor, particularly young Rostov, who has only glimpsed him: "And Rostov got up and went wandering among the campfires, dreaming of what happiness it would be to die- not in saving the Emperor's life (he did not even dare to dream of that), but simply to die before his eyes. He really was in love with the Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms and the hope of future triumph. And he was not the only man to experience that feeling during those memorable days preceding the battle of Austerlitz: nine tenths of the men in the Russian army were then in love, though less ecstatically, with their Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms."  Sean just told me the other day that when the US first went to war in Afghanistan, for a brief moment he did think of war in glorious terms, and even hoped that this would prove to be "our" World War II.  It was amazing to me because that never occurred to me even though I supported the invasion, and he pointed out that, duh, it's probably because I'm a girl and less conditioned to think in those terms. 

Overall, the problem I had with War and Peace is the same one I had with Anna Karenina, but even more pronounced.  For me the best kind of novel is one in which you feel the author has created real people--even if it's not set in your own time and place, and you need a lot of contextualizing to understand the constraints under which the characters operate (for example, the rules of propriety in Jane Austen's England), you should still be able to understand them, recognize them, as people, instead of two-dimensional mouths into which unconnected and unfelt words are placed by the author. Sometimes this can be the fault of the 'telling, not showing' fallacy. Anna, for example, is constantly referred to, by both men and women, as beautiful, entrancing, amazing, (insert more superlatives), and yet I never really understand why others are so drawn to her. She only becomes real to me, in her motivations, her actions, her speech, at the end, when she's terribly jealous of Vronsky's imagined lover--she acts out these passive-aggressive scenes that you could see in a contemporary novel or film. And is it a Russian thing, how everyone in his books is either ecstatically happy or terribly depressed? People are always bursting into tears, or running off in a fury, or being thrown into despair on account of a look intercepted across a busy drawing room.

I have a similar issue with Virginia Woolf, whose To the Lighthouse I attempted to re-read today. Her stream-of-consciousness writing aside, I couldn't handle the merry-go-round of super-intense emotions that her characters enter and exit so rapidly--one minute, Mrs. Ramsay is looking at her husband and thinking ecstatically (and for no reason) that she's not even fit to tie his sandal (my high-school self put indignant exclamation points next to this statement), and then a few pages later is thinking, again for basically no reason, that she absolutely can't stand him at all. Adoration and irritation, good humor and bad, the characters flip flop with shocking speed. It drove me nuts. That re-read did not end well.

Cape Cod

Last week, for the first time, the women of the DiMarzo family assembled at my aunt’s house in Cape Cod for a few days of family bonding, an adventure that was a lot of fun despite my sister being, well, my sister.  To start things off, she had taken offense to my suggestion, a few days prior to the trip, that we bring some books on tape to listen to--and I mean serious offense, snarling at me about how fucking rude that was even to suggest when I picked her up at her apartment.  I was just trying to engineer a situation in which we stayed in a car together for four hours without fighting, but hey, apparently, I’m really rude.  *eye roll*  

To be fair, we did make it up to the Cape in good spirits (it was the ride home that was the killer).  When we got there on Sunday afternoon, my uncle Dana and cousin Tyler had just enough time to say hi before they headed back to Westwood to leave the womenfolks alone.  This was my first time seeing my Aunt Janice since she moved to Phoenix last year.  Janice has always been a yo-yoer, but in recent years had managed to stay in good shape by an absolutely stringent diet that included no wheat or sugar and measured portions.  She’d told me over the phone that she hadn’t been able to maintain it with the stress of the move, but I didn’t guess that she’d gained thirty or so pounds, which was quite a surprise. She’s always loved dressing stylishly, too, and has been an Anthropologie groupie for the last few years, so to see her in really basic Old Navy clothes was a surprise too.

My sister and Janice have long had a slightly tempestuous relationship.  They don’t really openly snark at each other, but my sister says that Janice is constantly making needling, judging, or mildly mocking comments--most of which I haven’t heard or don’t think anything of--which either leads to Jen exploding in a fit of nastiness or a lot of complaining and brooding about it.  Jen is a natural grudge-carrier, and things that seem relatively innocuous to me, and which wouldn’t bother Jen if Donna said them instead of her sister, turn her into the Hulk of bitchiness. I knew it was bound to happen at some point, since this would be the longest we’d all spent in each other’s company, especially without the guys like Dana and Sean to take the heat off by making jokes.  The surprising thing, I guess, is that there was only one blow-up; Jen started talking about her OCD, Janice started giving her know-it-all advice, then Jen fired back with a nasty joke about Janice having learned that in her psychiatry degree, which in turn infuriated Janice due to Jen’s lack of respect (and also, as Jen told me later, it might have been a raw nerve since Janice apparently never finished her undergrad, with only four credits left).  We were saved from a full meltdown by a judicious separation of the parties, followed by me smoothing Janice’s feathers and Donna talking Jen down in the kitchen, followed by a quiet reconciliation.  Whew.

Donna is the one to whom I feel most analogous to in my family; our personalities are relatively similar, and we often seem to play the same role of eye-rolling peacekeepers.  I appreciate the way she never wants anyone to stand on ceremony.  Every year when she emails us about family get-togethers, she always reminds us there is absolutely no guilt-tripping involved in whether we can make it, and at the Cape we were there five minutes before she informed us that everything in the house was get-it-yourself, and showed us where the snacks and soda were. She just has a good way of setting people at their ease.  Her relationship with her mother-in-law was also similar to mine with Linda; she credits her with basically all the social graces-stuff that her own mother, who had a 9th-grade education as well as anxiety-OCD problems, couldn’t teach her. I often say the same about Linda--not that I’ve learned enough to entertain successfully on my own or anything, but I’d know I could call her for advice on that kind of thing, where my mom would have been no help at all.

The first couple of hours after our arrival was, as I call, The Jen Show, when my sister has the floor and makes everyone laugh with her non-stop stories and crass jokes. Then we went to the beach briefly, where she pursued horseshoe crabs and looked for sea-shells in the sole company of toddlers and small children while we watched her with a mix of amusement (family) and embarassment (me).  I realize that I tend to be super-sarcastic when Jen is around, and while it’s partially my sense of humor, it’s also partially to set myself apart from her, to indicate, even to family, that I am not like her please don’t judge me by her behavior.  A familiar feeling for most of my life. At dinner that night (my aunt makes a mean steak, and she made hushwei, which she makes way better than I ever have), however, I noticed that since The Jen Show had run out of material, she had become taciturn, barely participating in the conversation.  Jen is either the star of the show, or watching it sullenly. She recovered in time to play Scrabble, which we did in teams--her and Janice, me and Lisa, and Donna and her daughter Sara.  My sister is a class-A trash talker in any kind of game or sport (something that would be repeated in Apples to Apples, Uno, and mini-golf), and she crowed endlessly about winning what proved to be a close game.  I was proud that I managed to convince Donna that “toady” was really spelled “toadie,” which is what I’d put down.  Her outraged cry of “I trusted you!!” after the next round was pretty hysterical.

The next day we played our epic game of mini-golf at Pirates Cove.  Donna, Sara and I all managed holes-in-one, and I actually won (my golf-playing Uncle Chuck registered his shock at me beating his wife and daughter over the phone later)!  But you would not know, from the way Jen acted, that she came out 6 out of 6.  She plays mini-golf like it’s hockey, shouts insults, and does disturbing, hip-jiggling victory dances. As with all things Jen it’s a mix of hilarious and ridiculous, and as with all things Jen, you get tired of it waaay before it’s over.  Afterward we browsed some Cape-y shops on the main drag, where Jen was insistent on finding appropriate gifts for Vinny and his parents, which I thought was ridiculous--we were there for three days, plus they have their own house on the Cape, plus...I don’t do vacation gifts.  Sean’s dad is in perfect accord: “you’re telling me, I go on vacation, and I gotta bring YOU back something? The hell with this!” On our way back to the house one of the two-car convoy had to stop at a pool-float store so that my cousin Lisa, who has a ridiculous obsession with penguins, could inquire about a penguin pool float.  Thankfully, I was riding with Sara in her (way too tiny) Mini-Cooper, so we were spared, but my thoughts were expressed perfectly by Donna, who murmured to me in the souvenir shop “can you believe we have to stop so a 24-year-old woman can buy a freaking inflatable penguin?” Lisa is weirdly immature for her age, really.  She spent more time than I can say on her iphone texting either her brother or father for updates, photos, and videos of every little thing about their dog, Franklin, a little Pekingese-like thing, and squealing at high pitch every time she was informed that Franklin had bitten a rug, or was in his crate doing “humpies” to his blanket.  The morning she left there were so many shrieks and cries coming up from the living room I had to ask her if she was trying to establish sonic communication with an animal in Phoenix.  It was ridiculous.

I don’t really know either of my cousins all that well, really, and I’d always rather chat with my aunts than with them.  Sara and I can usually fall back on some topic related to Italy (she studied abroad in Florence, too), at least.  She’s moved in with her boyfriend, Steve, who is the son of a developer and involved in some kind of real estate work himself. They live in Boston in some expensive place right on the water that has a concierge, and she pays $150 a month to garage the mini-cooper. It’s always interesting when you get a new perspective on the life of someone that you’ve always known, even if not intimately, and realize how different it is from your own.  I mean, I always knew my aunt and uncle were well-off, but I never really got it until I saw this immaculate and roomy three-bedroom place--the size of the house Sean and I hope to one day own--and realized it was just their weekend getaway. Other revelations included the identity of Mitt Romney as one of my uncle’s big clients, and my uncle as a financial supporter. Oh, Dana. Sigh.           

Another interesting subject that came up was family history, about which I know relatively little.  It turns out that Sara joined Ancestry.com, and thus I learned that my great-grandmother’s full name was Josephine Marinaro, who married Andrea DiMarzo and gave her name to two generations of Joes.  On my grandmother’s side, her father Toufik/Thomas Matook married Elizabeth/Skiye Samra.  It was funny to watch my aunts trying to name off all the 12 siblings, and stalling at 11 until “wait! There were two Georges! One died and they had another!”  My great-grandparents must have been trying for solid American names (hence Janet, Mary, Louise) but they went a little off-course a couple of times (Olga, Leon).  I asked about Olga, who my father had once mentioned as having died of MS--my aunts too had heard the story, but I can’t imagine it was even diagnosed back then.  Janice sent us copies of research that ‘Cousin John Matook’ (as he signed himself) had sent around, including a photograph of the Samra family, showing my great-grandmother, Skiye (and what a cool name is that?), as a young woman with her siblings and my great-great grandparents, all dressed in fancy Victorian garb (a shock to Donna, who confessed she always imagined them all running around Damascus in potato sacks).  Apparently they emigrated via Bosnia to Boston in 1907. One of Skiye’s sisters looked at lot like my cousin Sara, I thought.  For the Matook side, the story remains that Toufik’s family dressed him up as a girl, long hair and all, to cross the border without being conscripted into the Turkish army.  No one quite seemed to know how all these Syrians wound up in Pawtucket, RI, though, which is where the Matooks are all buried (and where my dad’s gazillion first cousins mostly live).   

I also just got a lot of interesting tidbits about the personalities of family members from stories my aunts told. Donna told us about her wedding day, which was incredibly hot and in an un-air-conditioned church, so she spent the morning of her wedding renting two industrial fans with my grandfather and lugging them to the church, only to have the priest force them to remove them because he was afraid he wouldn’t be heard.  Janice made mention of how strict my grandparents were with them (though I bet my father got treated a bit differently), and confirmed that my dad and grandma fought a lot but pointed out that he was the most broken-up when she died.  Donna mentioned my grandma’s indignation over being advised to seek therapy by her cardiologist because of stress, and how her mother-in-law advised her, sanguinely, to consider it merely another doctor, this one for the head. Unsurprising that my dad retained the sense of stigma surrounding mental health.  Unsurprising, too, that it’s in the family--my cousin Lisa has trichillotomania, like my grandma, and Jen has OCD issues and is a ‘picker’, resulting in unpleasant scars on her skin. I discovered, too, that my cousin Tyler wasn’t born a diabetic as I always thought, but became one as a small child after an illness. Donna told me he is very close-lipped about the disease, and only his good friends are aware.  It’s hard to imagine concealing something like that in a college setting, especially as a guy who might be expected to drink beer.  I didn’t ask, but I wondered, what is he drinking?  Bringing his own O’Doul’s everywhere?  He also just got diagnosed with the genetic kind of high cholesterol, poor guy.       

It was a lot of fun and a lot of interesting info packed into just a few days, in other words.  Jen suggested we do it every year, and I countered it could be like the Olympics, every four!  Honestly, if Jen hadn’t been there, I could have stayed a week, but I couldn’t put up with her, and also I wouldn’t want to have to have my family put up with her that long either.  That’s a sad thing to say, isn’t it?  And they didn’t even have to live through that car ride home.  It started badly, since Jen had thrown out my directions, and her stupid GPS wanted to take us on the Pike, which I didn’t want.  Then the side of Jen’s personality that I hate the most, her completely irrational bitch-child side emerged.  First she wouldn’t let me turn on the radio.  Then she insisted on picking the station.  Then she forced me to listen to Mexican pop music for twenty minutes and cursed me out when I asked her repeatedly to change it.  It may have been her car, but I was driving, and generally driver gets privileges, but nope, not if you’re with my sister.  Once she’s past the time when she’s making a serious effort to be accomodating, she’s in total “my way is the only way” mode. Never a middle ground with her.

Still, things didn’t come to a head still we started having Serious Talk about our family, and I started pressing her on why she always starts shit with Janice.  She wound up screaming at me about how I always take Janice’s side, because I was a) asking for examples of the comments that she claims Janice always makes (to be fair, I now recognize that Janice does do that sometimes) and b) pointing out that Jen isn’t innocent, and has in the past been randomly insulting to her.  Jen is really incapable of arguing like a normal person, which in turn makes me angry, but again, things were not yet a head.  That happened when we started talking about my dad and why Jen considers him to have been an awful father.  She says he always made her feel bad about herself, always.   I remember my father constantly criticizing her, I do; her clothes, her hygiene, the way she walked, her grades, all of it. I was never the target of it, and I acknowledge that it’s possible that merely having been the object of his anger problems and his tantrums, which we all were, may have been easier for me to shake off in favor of good memories than having also been the victim of his criticism and negativity.  I can acknowledge that, even if I’m not going to stop believing that my dad was a good dad, who had his problems and made mistakes, but truly loved us both.  Still, when I pointed out that again Jen had constantly provoked him into fights, she got angry and claimed that it was his responsibility to be the adult, she was a child, she was a product of her circumstances, blah blah blah it wasn’t her fault that sometimes she chose to be a monstrous bitch for no reason.  That annoyed me.  I’m not sure at exactly what poin this happened, but at some point she did her patented announcement of “we’re not talking about this anymore. move on,” which she ALWAYS does, and which drives me up a fucking wall, because it’s like she’s the master of the universe, and everything has to happen only in the way that makes her comfortable, fuck everyone else.  And if you attempt to keep on the subject, in a rational voice, she’ll start screaming at you “WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT IT! WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT IT! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”  I kid you not, 30 years old, lawyer, covering her ears and shrieking at me.  I have rolled my eyes and changed topic when she has done this many, many times, but this time I finally found the one thing I could say to get through that skull of hers: “you know why we’ll never be friends the way you want us to be? THIS IS FUCKING WHY. Because you act like a fucking spoiled child.”  Shockingly, that worked, and we wound up talking about it, she apologized, and we managed a friendly rest of the ride back to CT.  

Unsurprisingly, I’m good with seeing my sister for a while.  Unfortunately, I forgot my sunglasses at her apartment.  Dammit!!   

Aimless Torcello Day

It’s a sign of how ready I am to return home that this morning I actually stayed in bed bed surfing the internet rather than immediately getting up.  Never before has that tiny, lumpy mess enticed me to stay in it after I’ve woken up properly!  Then I puttered around, cleaned my room, and organized all my postcards, brochures, notes, and other paper what-have-yous. I restrained myself from packing just yet, only because I don’t have that much space and it’ll just make everything (more) chaotic.  Seriously, Sean would have  some kind of attack if he saw how I’ve been living these past two months.  Crap everywhere…

Once I finally left home, at around 1pm, I decided to go to Torcello, one of the outlying islands in the lagoon that was the original center of Venice in the early medieval period.  Less than a few dozen people actually live on it now, though there are two small, expensive hotels.  Getting there, especially from the Lido, takes quite a bit of time: maybe 20 minutes to Fondamente Nuova, then switching to another boat to take you 45 minutes out to the cute fisherman’s island of Burano, where you switch to another boat to take you the ten-minute ride to Torcello proper.  This route is made even longer if you stupidly forget that you need to switch at Burano, and have to ride another 20 minutes to the next stop, get off, and take the next boat (which happily came in three minutes) another 20 minutes back to Burano. *facepalm*  For all this effort, I can’t say I was over-impressed by the payoff. The only sights on the island, which is tiny, is the cathedral with its belltower and the adjacent central-plan church of Santa Fosca.  Usually you can climb the belltower, which would have been something, even if Venice is pretty far distant, but it’s under construction.  The cathedral is known for its 11^th century mosaic decoration, a Madonna and Christ with apostles in the apse and a whole bunch of scenes, including a last judgment with blue devils and some creative depictions of hell, on the counter-façade. But honestly, if you’re looking for mosaics in Venice, you’ve got the far superior example of Saint Mark’s, and in general once you’ve been to Ravenna, other mosaics have a hard time cutting the mustard. I did enjoy a tasty strawberry push-up popsicle on the hot walk back to the boat stop, though, so not a total loss.

Going home, I asked one of the sailors if I should go back around to Fondamente Nuova or continue going around in a circle through Punta Sabbioni; he told me the latter would be a little faster, so off I went to complete a full circumnavigation of the lagoon!  It was a beautiful day for It, really, maybe 82 degrees, and of course when the boat is moving at a good clip, like it can out in the lagoon (vs the crawl up the Grand Canal), the wind for anyone standing on deck is pretty strong.  All around the vaporetto raced the speedboats and small yachts of Italians enjoying a fine Saturday afternoon; nearly every boat had a pot-bellied, speedo-clad man at the wheel, while two or three bikini-clad women splayed themselves out fore and aft.  One group had the stroke of inspiration to put a full-size air mattress on the prow of the boat on which two women (always in bikinis; no one, and I mean no one, no matter age or shape, wears one-pieces here) were reclining and chatting animatedly.  I can’t really imagine a life where that’s your weekend, and I mean that in an “I’m jealous” kind of way.  Sigh. 

On the larger ferry from Punta Sabbioni back to the Lido, a trip that took maybe 30, 40 minutes, some American girls, high school age, sat down next to me on the boat.  It quickly transpired that one of them realized she’d left her bag on another boat, and went tearing off to the officers.  (For all the agitation they were in I assumed this involved the girl’s purse, but no, it was her bag of Murano glass *eyeroll*  The sailors radioed the other boat, which sent the bag to central lost and found; all would be well).  The girl who lost her bag was quite lovely, red-headed, willowy, and in the most incredible dark blue full-length summer dress with a back that was almost entirely ivory lace, all the way down her back.  The other two, who stayed sitting near me, were plainer, and they discussed whether the sailors would have been so eager to help an unattractive girl who’d lost her bag.  They ultimately decided that anyone freaked out enough would elicit a positive response, but they both acknowledged the power of attractiveness—a sadly astute observation for girls their age.  In fact, I had just observed a small instance of this phenomenon when I went to ask one of the sailors for advice on my route.  He was in the cabin of the boat with his back to me when I asked if I could ask him a question; he sort of grumpily turned around to see what this person wanted, and then very obviously broke into a charming smile when he saw I was young and attractive.  I’m sure he would have given the same response to an unattractive person, of course, but in this case it was the attitude that changed markedly.

I felt kind of disposed to like these girls, because for once they actually reminded me of our group of friends in high school.  They seemed normal, for lack of a better word; not blatantly rich, like so many tourist kids you see in Europe, for one thing, and also relatively intelligent.  Then another girl in their group, even a little bit plainer than they were, came over and was updating them about the Affair of the Bag.  They pointed out the empty seat next to me and urged her to sit down, which was nice, but they then proceeded to ignore her completely, which I didn’t like.  It was clear that these two girls were close friends, and the third was maybe just an acquaintance or a classmate, so the ignoring took the form of them giggling to each other about their own in-jokes, and then sharing headphones to rock out to dance music and loudly compare notes on the music.  I mean, I know this is how teenage girls are, I have no doubt that I engaged in that behavior once myself, and I’m sure there’s a sociological model that explains the cementing of a bond between two individuals by subtly but firmly excluding a third, but from an adult perspective one recognizes that the polite thing to do, the kinder thing to do, would have been to include the third girl in the conversation, even if only peripherally, instead of leaving her staring at her hands the rest of the way. It made me sad for her, and I wanted to talk to her, but it felt weird to have been sitting with them for 30 minutes without making it clear I spoke English (I might not fool Europeans but I feel like American teenagers would have no idea) only to suddenly initiate conversation. I know the process of becoming mature adults will probably cure those girls of what they were doing (they seemed perfectly decent otherwise), but as for the girl they were leaving out, well, I hope she’s not someone that happens to often. God, I’m happy to be an adult now, even if it means occasionally having to make conversation with people I don’t like or don’t have any interest in.  There really is something in politeness, I think.  The English aren’t always wrong.  

The Dolomites and Verona

On Thursday morning I set off for the Dolomites, the mountain range between Venice and the Swiss Alps (and which, as I learned, are sometimes called the Venetian Alps).  It was a fairly long train ride on the oldest and slowest regional train, which was unairconditioned, or so I thought--ten minutes before we rolled into Calalzo, the last stop on the Belluno train line, an old man started closing the windows in the train car.  I thought he was just another Italian being crazy about the infamous colpo d'aria until he pointed to the ceiling and told me the AC had come on.  Oh, this country.

The Dolomites are, in a worth, breathtaking.  Although they're enormous mountains, they're still not quite high enough to have snow on them in the summertime, but the tops are pure gray rock (the mineral dolomite that gives them their name), and that provides a similar kind of color contrast to the trees blanketing the slopes.  The sight of pine trees and evergreen gave me the first sensation of the region being quite different from the parts of Italy I've been familiar with. Then as we neared Calalzo, from the train you could glimpse the green hillsides racing downward to a peaceful blue lake, which was really spectacular.  Walking up the hill from the train station, I was pretty awestruck by the scenery, by the sheer size of the mountains, which surround Calalzo on every side.  The feeling was only heightened when I got into our hotel room and opened the door to the balcony, which gave a lovely vista of the hills.

The hotel room was lovely, but when I first arrived, tired and sweaty from the train ride and then from hauling my suitcase uphill, I was pissed to discover the lack of air conditioning.  However, I quickly discovered that the reason the otherwise-nice hotel didn't have it is because you really just don't need it in the mountains, even in July.  The temperature was easily ten degrees lower than Venice, and there was zero humidity.  In fact, the following morning the weather was completely opposed to what I've been used to recently--an ominous storm front swept in, bringing with it not only a chilled rain, but even sleet!  And yet a couple of hours later it was brilliantly sunny and 75 degrees.  I can hardly imagine what it's like there in the winter, though.

Ostensibly I came to Calalzo because of its proximity to Pieve di Cadore, hometown of Titian and location of the Centro di Studi, housed in a building belonging to a related Tiziano, called L'Oratore.  My visit there, however, was less than successful.  I had scribbled down a handful of call numbers before going, only to discover that the library is split in two parts, with one part accessible only by appointment what was basically the regional president's office.  Thankfully, the very nice woman at the Centro, Letizia, called over and made sure that I could go without an appointment.  But this wasn't really a library, per se, just a collection of books donated by a deceased Titian scholar.  There was no reading room (I read at a table in the secretary's office, while she made phone calls behind me saying, rather loudly, "I'm spekaing quietly because there is a scholar here working!"), there was no catalog, so basically the few book I'd looked up that morning were the only ones I was going to get.  Also, Lionello Puppi was not at the Centro.  There too there was no reading room, and I sat at the desk next to Letizia to read the article she procured for me.  In other words, it really didn't seem like they were at all prepared to have people come and actually consult the books, which is a little ridiculous.

Pieve, like all the other little towns in Cadore, is adorable and really freaking small.  Ten minutes about suffices to get the lay of the land.  Friday afternoon Carla and I went to the Casa di Tiziano, notable for its small collection of drawings by the master; I also stopped in at Santa Maria Nascente, where Titian contributed an altarpiece for a family chapel in which his self portrait (and maybe his children's) appears (which, side note to myself, interesting that this of all altarpieces lacks any landscape references).  For some ungodly reason they'd put the damned thing behind what looked like Plexiglass, giving it a horrible glare. One of the real attractions of being in the north, beyond the natural scenery, is how different the man-made scenery is than the rest of Italy.  The houses are mostly made with wood from the plentiful forests, not plaster-covered brick, against the green hills it really felt like we were in Switzerland.  Even the church architecture was frequently different--we even saw what looked like an onion dome at one point.  (Also, the people are so much friendlier than in the rest of Italy--they say hi to you on the street!)


I really couldn't get enough of the scenery.  Carla, with her typically Protestant practicality, laughed at the way I kept having to stop and just say "wow, this amazing!!"  Friday afternoon we hiked around the lake, disappointed to discover there was no beach whatsoever, although the vistas were incredible.  Then on Saturday we rented mountain bikes and rode about 15 miles, which was incredible.  There's a piste ciclabili running from Calalzo (796m above sea level) to Cortina d'Ampezzo (1221m); a smooth asphalt bike path that follows, at least for the first few towns, the path of old train tracks.  That means you're winding around the mountains and going through the train tunnels (which were freezing) or over bridges.  At one point, you're sailing downhill so fast the wind is literally roaring in your ears; at the base of the hill a bridge carries you over a little waterfall.  All in the shadow of the mountains.  It was fucking awesome.  (However, as the sea levels indicate, we were effectively going uphill the whole way; the place where we stopped, San Vito, is 1103m above sea level.  Had we planned this better, we should have taken the bus to San Vito, rented bikes, and rode down to Calalzo, but, oh well.)


This represented the first time I've been on a bike since easily 15 years of age (and that was a three-speed road bike with a very comfy seat). When we got on the bikes at the rental place, I had a few moments of "oh shit, what if I DON'T remember how to do this?? I'm going to dieeeeee!"  Helmets were not available (and I was kind of leery once we got on the trail and realized that everybody else was definitely wearing them), which was not helping my fears of imminent doom.  Also, I was not used to the whole switching gears business (see three-speed bike, above); there was a different gearshift on each handle, and the two controls to move them up and down worked on opposite ways on each one, so I kept accidentally throwing myself into high gear right at the base of a hill, completely squandering any and all momentum. My lack of confidence also prevented me from doing the standing-up pedaling that I remember was once second nature when bike riding; I tried it, wobbled precipitously, and thought "oh hell no, I will walk this bike if I have to."  And I did have to walk it a couple of times, as Carla can attest.  Still, I made pretty good progress; in the morning I was scared to even take a hand off one handlebar to scratch my nose, and in the afternoon I was riding with one hand so I could sit up a little straighter (my back was killing me by then).  Still, I was nowhere near the level of comfort I remember having--I used to ride my back downhill on the street next to ours without hands.  Oh, those were the days.

I really kicked myself for forgetting two things in Venice, my sports bra and my light backpack, which would have allowed me to bring my camera on the ride.  Carla thus had to step in to record our journey on her cell phone, which she was carrying along with money and my credit card in the tiny pocket on her running shorts.  The scenery was so damned incredible.  Here too I kept stopping to marvel and demand she take pictures, which required her to fish her phone out of her shorts (she was a very good sport about this).  Finally she was hungry, so we stopped in what was basically a hamlet and asked a man if there was somewhere we could eat.  First he said "no," in a surprised tone (we were surprised too-really? no food?), then called to someone in his house, asking, in dialect, "Eh, Natalia fa mangi' ogg'?"  It turned out that yes, Natalie was cooking today, so we proceeded to her restaurant and had a quick, very basic lunch--bread, sliced prosciutto, a cheese plate, and some spinach.

Then we set out again--and discovered something horrible.  Giving your butt a break from the uncomfortable bike seat long enough to eat is apparently just enough time for your butt to decide "fuck no" when you try to get back on.  It hurt like a bitch!  We were hoping we'd sort of warm back up to it as we went, but not really--anytime we had to go over bumpy ground there was a lot of "owww oh shit owww" (mostly me, Carla toughed it out).  That, more than anything, began to spell the end of my original determination to make it all the way to Cortina (and who'd have thought that I'd be the one exhorting Carla that we could totally make it the whole way?).  Ultimately we found ourselves in San Vito, where there was a rental return point, and gave up the ghost, just 9km from Cortina.  I'm still pretty damned proud of myself for making it that far. Shockingly enough, my leg muscles barely protested that night, but oh dear god, my ass. Sitting down was a ginger business, to say the least.

Yesterday morning we headed to the train station to catch the 10am train to Venice, and thence onward to Verona, only to discover that there was a train strike. The 10am train was cancelled, the 12:30 might run, or it might not, no one could say.  Suddenly we realized the downsides of being in a remote part of Italy with limited transportation options.  We could take a bus to Cortina and try to catch a bus to Venice from there, but we had no idea about the schedule or anything (worse still, it was a Sunday).  A couple of non-Italian guys with whom we'd been discussing the situation offered us a ride to Mestre, where they were headed, and said they'd come back to the station shortly to pick us up.  I was feeling kind of panicky and almost ready to take them up on it, but we decided to first run our options by Joanne Maddox, Carla's old boss at the Fairfield program.  She told us, sagely, not to take the ride, even though it would probably be OK. Instead we hopped on a bus for the hour-long ride to Cortina, where we secured tickets on the 'Cortina Express' to Mestre.  Of course it didn't leave for three hours, and there was no left-luggage on Sunday, so we had to park it at a restaurant. I went down to the town briefly to look around, and bought some deliciously tart wild blueberries from a vendor.  In the end, we discovered that the express we'd gone all the way to Cortina to take would have picked us up two towns over from Calalzo anyway *facepalm*.  Oh well.  


Once we made it to Mestre, however, we faced another problem--were the trains to Verona actually running?  We'd been assured by Italians that the main routes, like Venice-Verona, had connections, and that it was just the out of the way places with only regional service, like Calalzo, that were totally SOL.  We spent a very hot, very stressful 45 minutes waiting for an incredibly crowded and un-air conditioned train, but  at least one came!  In the end we got to our hotel in Verona at 7--nine hours of travel!  Here we had a stroke of luck, though, since our hotel ran a free shuttle into and out of town for those attending the opera.  The shuttle left at 7:30, so we had just enough time to freshen up.  In Verona, we grabbed a quick bite to eat, bought a libretto and inflatable cushions, on the sage advice of someone who'd done this before, and went into the Arena to find seats.  


It was basically like being at a baseball game, sitting in the cheap seats, complete with wandering drink and souvenir vendors (with prices comparable to Yankee Stadium, too).  The opera itself was good (there was some pretty spectacular staging, including ballet scenes and four live horses onstage during a procession, plus a cast of at least a hundred) but despite the powerful acoustics of Roman engineering, it was difficult to make out some of the singers, particular the alto (who, according to Carla, wasn't projecting her voice in the right way).   Hearing an opera in an enclosed theater vs a 20k-person amphitheater is just going to be a different experience. Also, it was LONG.  Four hours long, in fact.  I would have been happy to follow the example of the German family next to us and hit the road after the second act, but of course Carla wanted to stay through the end (at 1am).  I was able to convince her to leave as soon as the last note sounded, however, so we could make it back to the hotel shuttle before it filled, so we woundn't have to wait another 45 minutes for the next one.


 I learned that in opera, you clap for the performers every five minutes.  Every aria, every scene, every act got applause.  The conductor was applauded when he walked in at the opening of each act.  The girl who rang the gong letting you know the pauses were about to be over got applauded, every time she came out!!  It was too much for me, this diva culture.  Yes, what they're doing takes intense training, but hey, that's why you applaud at the end.  As fitting my longstanding preference for male voices, I recognized that the lead soprano had a lovely voice, but I much preferred the guy singing Ramades, the male lead.  By the end, I was so tired I just wanted them all to shut up and stop singing the same two lines over and over, more and more slowly.  Die already, Aida.

Florence

I haven’t blogged in quite a long time!  Things have kept on being busy in Venice during Dr. Cooper’s stay.  She gave me an introduction to using the Archivio di Stato, which was ridiculous, and truly brought home to me why people come to study on 1 or 2 year fellowships, because it takes an incredibly long time just to locate and request the right boxes of documents, let alone trying to decipher them! I set myself the task of transcribing Jacopo Tintoretto’s will, which came in a box full of other wills by the same notary, Antonio Brinis.  Luckily, Antonio had pretty good handwriting.  Still, there was plenty of places I had to leave blank because I couldn’t figure out either what the handwriting actually said, or if it was some kind of shorthand, what it stood for.  Then after I did that I started reading some of the other wills (which were organized not by date but by first name of the testator, which I only cottoned on to after wondering “was every woman named Elena and Elisabetta in the late 16^th century??); I quickly realized how formulaic they were.  The name of the testator, the name of their father and, if a woman, their husband, the place where they met with the notary, some expressions of religious sentiment, then any specific bequests plus the division of estates among heirs (often with second-, third- and even fourth-string heirs in case people have died, more of a concern then than now), and then the closing with witnesses.  The formulaic nature is actually extremely helpful because then you know what to expect of a particular will, even if you’re having trouble making out some words; for example, in Tintoretto’s I couldn’t make out this word that came after “being of good health and,” but realized after looking at another that the word was “intellect.”

The content of these wills was in general uninteresting.  Tintoretto’s of course was fascinating, since he left all of his property to his beloved wife Faustina--with admonitions to his children to obey her, and giving her authority to cut them out of her own will if they didn’t—except for all the things of his profession, which he left to his son Domenico, who would carry on the family workshop into the 17^th century. There was also a clause stating that Domenico would finish all of Jacopo’s unfinished commissions in the manner of his father, just as he had long been accustomed to doing during his father’s life to great honor—very interesting from the perspective of thinking about workshop practice and a painter’s personal ‘brand’.  Meanwhile, in a woman’s will, she left various pieces of jewelry to female relatives, only to add a later codicil retracting the gift of a pearl necklace—I had hoped there would be a gossipy reason, like ‘Madonna Elisabetta is a ho, she’s not getting my jewelry’ but it just said ‘the pearls are no longer in the house.’ Another aspect I was having trouble understanding at first was the closing; there aren’t really paragraph breaks or anything, so one minute they’ll be talking about executors and the next something about hospitals and pious places, and it took me a while to figure out that the notary was required (it’s stated in the will) to ask the testator if he or she wanted to leave money to religious institutions or the poor (even if they had already specified such earlier).  The responses are generally formulaic but one woman just wrote (I’d like to think, snarkily) “I have already left what I wanted to leave.”  In other words, quit hounding me, asshole.

I have learned a number of things from my archive experience—I love the feel of the soft paper, for one thing!  I read somewhere that paper in the early modern period wasn’t made from wood pulp but rather cloth, which may explain why it feels soft and not dry and crack-y.  That’s not to say it’s not dry and crumbly around the edges, of course.  Rae was amazed when I told her you don’t have to use ggloves to handle these 500-year old documents—it surprised me too, honestly.  I mean, you’re obviously supposed to handle it delicately and not touch the actual ink, but when you sit down with a giant busta or box and open it up (once you’ve managed to prie open all the strings tying the box together, and then the strings wrapped around the bundle inside; I actually couldn’t get the interior knot open, so I had to slide the loop of string off and hope I could reaffix it later), little bits of edges and things are cracking all over the place.  I also learned that the archives are very hot in summer.  The archive was once part of the Frari monastery complex, and the reading room was a refectory or chapel or something; one giant room, with no open windows or fans (lest the documents get the dreaded colpo d’aria, perhaps—Italians have a fanatical terror of drafts of air), so by afternoon all the hot air is just pressing down on you.  It was pretty awful.  I don’t think I could ever come here to do serious work in summer.  We went for lunch to a place across the street, Bar L’archivio, because they have a cold rice salad dish that Dr. Cooper can actually eat (celiac s have such a terrible time in Italy, it’s sad), and met a bunch of other scholars, including one, Allison Sherman, who is close to my age and just received her degree a couple of years ago.  She explained to me how she was so depressed her first six months of research that she used to buy a Twix from the vending machine every day, and eat it in the bathroom while she cried her eyes out before going back to the reading room.  Other people at the table nodded.  I was a bit apprehensive!

Jasmine and Nick came up to Venice for a couple of days this week.  We met up with a guy, Giancarlo, with whom Dr. Cooper and I had toured San Pietro in Castello, and who had been a classmate of Jasmine’s during the Venice Duke program (and the fact that I never got to participate in that because it lost funding is extra depressing after having seen all the connections Jasmine was able to make there); he’s working at a brand new institution, the Studium Marcianum, and was able to give us a tour.  It had an amazing view from the Zattere toward the Giudecca.  After lunch I ran some errands, including locating a real Italian hardware store with multiple floors (Rata, in Salizzada S. Lio, in case I forget in the future) to buy new earbuds (Carla had told me I should find a music store to buy them in, but Giancarlo disagreed and I decided to trust the native, who was right).  I also wanted to visit the single gluten-free shop in Venice, off Strada Nuova, but of course I hadn’t written down the actual address, just briefly glanced at the Google map, so I had to call Carla to look it up for me, and then of course when I find it, it’s closed for the afternoon break!  Even when I came back at 4 when it reopened, nothing! I had to camp out in what was basically an alley for 20 minutes until the shopkeeper showed up, but I was able to get her some nice amaretti cookies as a gift, so it was worth it.  She’s been so wonderful this whole time.

In the evening Jasmine had invited all of her friends in Venice to meet for a spritz, and I joined.  Four prosecchi later, we headed to meet Dr. Cooper and Tim for dinner, where of course more prosecco was waiting!  It was a fun dinner.  Jasmine observed later that my relationship with Coop has definitely reached a new level when I’m openly joking about how much I’ve had to drink, and I laughed and told her how Dr. Cooper advised that I sell my extra oxycontin pills for money!  Dr. Cooper has told me that there’s a difference in rapport just being together off campus, like in Princeton, and it’s even more different in Italy.  Needless to say, I’m loving it. 

Wednesday I went down to Florence with Jasmine to stay with our friend Suzanne.  Now, every Venetian I told that I was going to Florence had an expression of horror, “why would you do that?”  Carla has told me that Florence can be the hottest place in the peninsula in the summer, because it just bakes in the valley, and I believe her—getting off the train was like getting walloped in the face by a wall of heat.  Dry heat, to be fair, but heat all the same, 95 degrees every day. You’re basically forced to follow the shadows and avoid all but the most necessary exposure  to sun—you don’t cross the piazza, you walk around the perimeter under the loggias, in other words.  Jasmine and I took a taxi from the station to Borgo San Iacopo in Oltrarno where Suzanne’s apartment is.  This place was magnificent, first and foremost because of the air conditioning, set to a chilly 22-24 degrees, vs 36-38 outside.  Totally redone (entirely with IKEA furnishings and accoutrements, haha), with a microwave (rare in this country) and even an ice machine (which I would never have expected; I thought it was a breadmaker).  There was a comfy pullout couch for us to share, and a lofted bedroom and bathroom above that was really nice, double sinks and everything.  Of course, Suzanne paid through the nose for this luxury—2400 euro per month, and she stayed 6 weeks.  Jasmine and I were so grateful to her that we got to stay there!  Naturally the first thing we did on Wednesday was go to the grocery store for food and wine.  We ended up drinking three bottles, and time literally flew; it was 5pm and then suddenly it was 8:30, time for our skype date with our friend Cate, who showed us her baby bump—she’s having a boy!

 I was definitely feeling the effects of the wine when I woke up in the morning, no headache, just kind of dizzy before I had some tea.  I got to talk to Sean briefly, since he’s returned to his night owl ways and was going to bed when I was waking up.  The three of us went to Palazzo Pitti, which was awesome even if it was too hot to go into the Boboli Gardens.  After lunch Jasmine and I tried to go to Ognissanti, but it was inexplicably closed; we did make it to Sta Felicita before splitting up so Jasmine could go meet her undergrad advisor for a drink.  I went over to the thrift store by S. Lorenzo where I bought my coats to see if there was anything interesting, but no luck; likewise at the Paperback exchange.  That night we had dinner with Dr. Hall as well as Dr. Kline, another faculty member who we included only at Dr. Hall’s request, because he’s been weird in the past, but it turned out to be really fun (and Dr. Hall’s treat!) at Mamma Gina’s, downstairs from Suzanne’s place—this restaurant is enough of an institution that Dr. Hall said “oh, Mamma Gina’s!  My Mercedes was keyed outside of this place in 1963.”  Think about that statement. Haha. I had a delicious tagliata di manzo over arugula, and there was lots of wine, so I woke up yesterday morning with a throat like a smoker’s!  More tea cured that, too.

Yesterday was a pretty full day. Suzanne and I tried to go to SS. Annunziata to see Vasari’s painting of himself as Saint Luke, but were thwarted once again, arriving right as a Mass began.  We had lunch at a Greek place on Via San Gallo that I always looked at when I lived there but never went into; I had an insalata greca which came, as hoped, with a big ol’ block of feta on top!  Then Suzanne went off to meet Dr. Kline to take the bus to Villa I Tatti, which is Harvard’s research institute in the hills outside Florence.  It was the private villa of one of the most famous 20^th century art historian/connoisseurs, Bernard Berenson, who donated it to Harvard in his will.  Dr. Hall has been doing research there since the 60s, and is welcome as a former fellowship-holder (ex-borsista; a ‘borsa’ is a purse). The night before we floated the idea of Dr. Hall taking Suzanne and Dr. Kline to I Tatti—I did the floating, not on Kline’s behalf but on Suzanne’s.  Dr. Hall is not an involved advisor at the best of times, and Suzanne had told us she was worried Dr. Hall had written her off entirely.  Suzanne came into the master’s program in 2005, and because she has a mortgage, and a graphic design business, and usually at least two other jobs, she’s only now prepping for prelims for the fall.  There’s not a lot of appreciation among the faculty for how hard it is to do grad school without a fellowship.  I mean, I can hardly talk, since I had one, but I can imagine, and I give Suzanne credit for having to work so hard, but all Dr. Hall sees is that she’s not moving forward with the “real work.”  Anyway, Jasmine and I were trying to do for Suzanne’s exam panic what my friends did for me at RSA, and also encourage to put herself forward with Dr. Hall.  Hence the I Tatti idea, from which I excluded myself voluntarily when it became clear that Dr. Hall felt awkward about introducing even two random people into the center (it’s not like a walk-in library, more like an exclusive yacht club).  It turns out I apparently earned major brownie points with her for gracefully bowing out, though, go me!  And she promised me that the next time we’re in Florence together she’ll take me to get a card (Dr. Kline and Suzanne got registered and got reader cards, which are valid forever and hence like gold).

While she was off doing that, I went on a lovely tour of some sights, including San Lorenzo, the New Sacristy, Santa Croce (that Bronzino!!), and Casa Buonarroti, where I’d never been before.  Dr. Hall had emailed Suzanne in the morning about a possible dinner, and Suzanne had promised to call me when she got there, so as I’m walking home around 5 I thought it was odd I hadn’t heard.  I was hungry, so I stopped at the store, and as I’m finally walking into the blissfully cold apartment, she calls me on Dr. Hall’s cell, as hers had died.  They wanted me to come join them, but I needed to get to I Tatti by 6:15. That meant I had to catch the 5:50 bus from Piazza San Marco, clear on the other side of town, and it was 5:15, I was sweaty and gross and kinda tired.  But Suzanne didn’t want to be left to have dinner with Dr Kline and Dr. Hall’s creepy husband, so I said I’d try to make it.  I wound up taking a cab, because there was no way I could have walked in time, and caught the Settignano bus 2 minutes before it left.  So all was well, and Gerry picked us all up in the car from I Tatti and whisked us over to Maiano, where we sipped white wine on the balcony/patio of the apartment they’re renting, on this property with amazing views over the valley and an Olympic-sized pool (and dear god, how I wanted to dive in).  Then we had dinner at some restaurant up the hill where the food was delicious and the wine (and then limoncello, and then grappa for the men) flowed freely.  Dr. Hall and Gerry treated us once again, which was very nice of them, and we really had an awesome time, which more than made up for the serious hassle it was trying to get up there.  I nearly melted into a puddle of sweat on the bus, which was NOT air conditioned, and the whole way I was grumpily like “stupid dr hall, why do we have to have dinner there, argghhh.”  She even gave us a ride back to the city after dinner, since the buses had stopped running already (Suzanne and I had privately worried earlier that Gerry, who is tacitly understood as an alcoholic, was going to offer to drive us, and what we would say if he did.  Dr. Hall on the other hand, assured us she was ok to drive, but then said ‘and anyway, I’m one of those rare people who drives just beautifully when they’re intoxicated’ and we though, oh Christ…).  Then Suzanne and I strolled from Piazza San Marco, past Palazzo Vecchio, and over the Ponte Vecchio to her apartment.  It was a fabulous night.

I’ve spent so long writing this that we’re already in Padua!  We’ll be in Venice in 20 minutes.  It’s supposed to be in the 90s there too, and I doubt it’s dry like Florence.  Tonight is Dr. Cooper’s last night, and I’m having dinner with her, Tim, and Richard Schofield and his wife—and then tomorrow I’m on my own again!

Quick Update

I haven’t updated in some time!  Dr. Cooper is here now, so my social life has had a few more events in it.  Unfortunately I totally missed a book presentation that would have given me the chance to have dinner with Deborah Howard, an awesome architectural historian.  The next day, though, I attended a short conference at the Accademia on Giorgione which included the keynote speaker, Lionello Puppi, departing early in a huff because his ego hadn’t been accommodated properly.  Dr. Cooper introduced me to Piero Lucchi, head of the Correr library, who now makes slightly awkward small talk when he sees me (literally, the weather), and we had dinner with Debra Pincus and this girl Susannah who just finished her degree at Princeton.  Tuesday I had a delicious dinner at Algiubagio with Dr. Cooper and Bernard Aikema, after being embarrassed in an impromptu connoisseurship exam in his apartment.  On Wednesday, Susannah and I met up on S. Giorgio the other day so she could show me the Cini, including the fantastic replica painting of Veronese’s Feast at Cana, placed in the refectory from which Napoleon’s men stole the original and carted it off to Paris, never to return.  We also had a drink with more friends of hers, including Alison Sherman, a student of Peter Humfrey, and this expat Jill Weinreich who is very nice.  Yesterday I met Elena Svalduz, a friend of Dr. Cooper’s who works at the University of Padua; we tagged along with some students working on the Visualizing Venice project.  Later we went to IUAV where I met Donatella Calabi, along with two other women, Ludovica and Elisabetta, whose last names I need to discover, since Elisabetta has apparently worked on Titian and offered to introduce me to Augusto Gentili, but Dr. Cooper didn’t know her last name either.  Elena offered to meet with me when I go back to Padua, which I’ll be doing to scope out the Scuola del Santo again—it’s been batted around as a possible topic.  I’m not overly enthusiastic about it, mostly because I’m not sure what new directions I could take with it, but other people certainly seemed interested, so we’ll see.  I’m pretty much happy to have any kind of direction at all right now.   

I visited Vicenza last week, which so far has been my favorite place I've visited!  I'd never been there before.  Palladio's Teatro Olimpico was so awesome, monumentality packed into a pretty small space, that I just sort of sat there and stared around for a while, briefly wishing I worked on Palladio but not really.  I also walked 45 minutes out of town to see his Villa Rotonda, situated on a beautiful hillside. As usual, it would have been better if I'd had someone to share it with, but it was still good.

Carla was also here over the weekend, together with her mom on Saturday.  We actually had a drink with Dr. Cooper and her husband, which was only slightly surreal, my best friend sipping a spritz in my advisor's apartment!  We had a super-expensive drink on the terrace of Hotel Danieli with Carla's mother.  Mostly we wandered around the city, slowly, for two and a half days; it would have been more fun if we'd had distinct plans, but Carla's not that into churches and she's done most everything else there is to do.  However, it is a sincere luxury to be able to sit in a piazza with your friend, a bag of potato chips, and a bunch of mini bottles of not-even-chilled prosecco from the grocery store, with corks that pop so loudly that you frighten the little asian girl trying to take artful pictures of pigeons.  That's good stuff right there.

Villa Barbaro and Elsewhere

I left Venice early yesterday morning to avoid the naval festival that brought the Italian president to town last night (despite the promise of sailors in dress whites, even).  I took a regional train to a town north of Venice called Montebelluno, and then a bus to a very small town called Maser.  Once again there was the issue of how to figure out exactly when to push the button to request a stop.  This time I did ask the driver, who turned out to be of no help; I asked how many stops to Maser and he just said "un bel po'" which means "a good bit", and then even though there were only a handful of people on the bus definitely didn't deign to indicate when we were passing the Maser stop.  I mean I know he doesn't have to, but seriously, I just asked you ten minutes ago and am clearly not from around here!  But I hit the button and the next stop was mercifully shortly down the road.  Plus I passed a sign indicating a place selling local cherries, which I purchased a whole sack of on my  way back.

Maser is where Marcantonio and Daniele Barbaro commissioned Andrea Palladio to build first Villa Maser and later the adjacent Tempietto (which is a tiny central-plan church that's like a mini-Pantheon).  The villa was frescoed by Paolo Veronese and has stuccoes by Alessandro Vittoria, so basically it's a triumvirate of major artists working in Venice in the second half of the century.  It's still a private residence like most of Palladio's villas, so you can only go in the central frescoed rooms. (I caught sight of who I think was the current owner with her many lapdogs on the lawn of one of the side wings).  The villa is pretty stunnning and the frescoes are awesome, even if the rooms are smaller than what I'd imagined from illustrations.  I was particularly impressed by how light and airy it was, with a good breeze coming in from all the interconnected rooms and passageways.  Sadly, its being a private residence also meant you couldn't go onto the grounds, the majestic sloping entryway overlooking the landscape or the nymphaeum in the back.  Also, since the terrazzo floors are original, you have to put on these giant slippers and basically glide around, which was super weird!

There's also a carriage museum included in the ticket, in a small subsidiary building hidden up on the hill behind a villa.  My grandpa would have loved it, especially the big 16-seater mail coach that apparently traveled at 13 kph.  There were more types of carriages than I ever knew existed, from little 'lady's carriages' from France to ones specifically designed for hunting, plus a tiny Sicilian 'goat cart'.  Afterward, since there were a couple of hours to kill before another bus would come through, I went to the adjacent winery to do a wine tasting.  I learned from past mistakes and brought a book (Emma) this time, so I had something to do.  I tasted an awesome Prosecco, a white that was meh, and a good red made from the villa's grapes that was called, of course, Andrea Palladio.  I also learned that in Italy they give you chips and not crackers for a tasting, and I shamelessly ate them all.  Then I went and got my giant sack of cherries, which are pretty good, and apparently came from a mile away, but she would only sell me a kilo, not a half, so I got to carry them around the rest of the day.

Because of the capricious weather and unreliable meteorology, I've spent a lot of time hauling my umbrella around when I didn't need to.  I took it to Padua and Verona and it never rained.  Naturally, the time I look at the weather report and see rain maybe in late afternoon so I can leave it at home....nope. It's amazing how one's vim and vigor for adventure can be tamed by cold rain when one a) lacks umbrella and b) sleeves (it was also supposed to be in the upper 70s, but MORE LIES).  Thus, when I made it to Bassano del Grappa, home city of the Bassano family of artists, I basically took a few photos of their famous wooden bridge, designed by Palladio, ate lunch, and took a train back to Venice.  I mean, I still got home at like 6m after leaving at 8am, so it was a longish day, but I had had a list of things to do in Bassano--the civic museum, the grappa museum, a nature walk along the river--none of which I did, because I was cold, slightly damp, and unenthused by the prospect of walking on more wet cobblestones and trying to keep underneath the side eaves of buildings.  It wasn't even raining that hard, it was just the kind of situation where you suddenly want very much to be at home in something comfortable drinking tea.  Ironically, Venice was enjoying a beautiful evening of clear skies when I returned, naturally.

Other things I did this week: spent an afternoon talking only in Italian with Marsha, a girl I met at Middlebury who is also a PhD art history student; awkwardly stalked Gino Benzoni in the Correr library while unsuccessfully hoping he'll try to talk to me again; drank prosecco in an outdoor cafe, waiting for Debra Pincus' 5:30 lecture at the Ateneo Veneto, only to discover, at 5:30, that it was actually at the Instituto Veneto, several campi away; got yelled at by a very angry Italian woman for like an entire minute on the train for having put my feet up on the seats; grumbled to myself about how America does basically everything better except for the produce.  Also, fine, cheese, but I can't even try the ten thousand kinds of cheeses for sale at the grocery store because they all come pre-cut in these massive wedges, and though I'm sure I could eat that much cheese on my own, I know I should not.  It's my good fortune that they were out of feta today because I totally looked for it, good intentions be damned!

Verona

My trip to Verona, although tiring, was much more enjoyable than Padua's the day before.  I caught an 11am train (although that makes it sound so simple, when first I have to walk over to catch the bus into town, and then take a 45-minute vaporetto ride to the train station!) which got me there a bit after 1. Things did not look immediately positive, since the train/bus station in any city is usually unpleasant and depressing looking.

Aside: it was surprising how many non-white people there were at the bus stop, both African and South-east Asian, more than I've ever seen in Italy before in one place.  From reading the newspaper I've gleaned that African immigrants, in particular, are more integrated into the communities in this area, versus Venice, for example, where you will only see them on the streets selling knock-off bags. One of the books we read at Middlebury was the memoirs of a Senegalese guy named Pap Khouma, who was part of the first wave of the so-called "vucumpras" in the 1970s-80s. "Vucumpra" is a derogatory nickname for Africans, drawn from the way they say "Vuoi comprare?" or "You want to buy?".  My teacher told us it was an incredibly offensive term, and yet I saw it in a headline of the Corriere della Sera, one of the many signs of Italy's casual racism.  Let's not even start with something I read yesterday, about a member of the Lega Nord (a racist, xenophobic, yet influential political party that wants the northern, wealthier, whiter part of Italy to secede and become "Padania") who wrote on facebook in regards to an woman (an Italian citizen but of Indian descent) who was murdered by her husband for being "too Italian" (ie, she wore jeans and had a perfect Tuscan accent) and her body thrown in the river Po; this guy wrote something about how dare they pollute the Po, and would they like it if he went to the Ganges and threw in a cow's body?  Oh boy.  Even people inside Lega Nord are calling for his expulsion--not because they disagree with his sentiments, undoubtedly, but because it looks bad for a party that tries to insist it's totes NOT racist.

Anyway, close parenthesis, as the Italians say!  After waiting 15 minutes or so, the bus I wanted, that would take me to the somewhat distant church of San Zeno, finally showed up.  My foolish mistake was not asking the bus driver exactly where I should get off.  I figured since it was on the sign, it would be a prominent enough stop that other people would be getting off or something.  Wrong.  This is what I hate about using buses; if you're not familiar with where you're going it's not easy to figure it out, since you generally only see the sign on the bus stop as you're moving past it.  Again, I should have asked, but I didn't.  I was getting a little concerned, though, because this bus was clearly not in the center anymore, and I'm thinking "uh oh, I'm going to wind up getting off in some back corner of the city where everything will be closed because it's Sunday ahhh" when I caught sight of a big church.  I decided to assume it was San Zeno, signaled for the next stop, and backtracked.  It was!  Outside there was some kind of tournament going on.  The players were all kids, and the game, well I have no idea what it was, but it involved whacking a whittled wooden peg with a longer wooden stick so that the peg flew through the air (I got this much from watching the kids on the steps of the church, but in the tournament proper they seemed to be doing this in teams).  There was a woodcarving station where some men were helping young boys whittle their own pegs, and the *crack* of the wood impacting was all around.  Not everyone plays baseball I guess!

San Zeno is a gigantic Romanesque church with some cool frescoes inside, though I was there for the altarpiece by Mantegna (once again, though, stymied by a rope preventing you from going up on the dais).  From there I followed a road back into town to Castelvecchio, a huge fortress that houses the civic museum.  This was a waste of 6 euro, both because the art was meh and because there was a guard in literally EVERY room of the museum, all of them young, in uniforms even, and since I was practically the only person there, they followed me around.  It was awful.  The rooms were large and silent except for wooden floors that creaked, so I'd be looking at something and just hear the creak that meant a guard was staring at my back.  It was super awkward, and hard to enjoy the art when I knew there was someone watching me.  Finally I gave up on the last several rooms o the museum--the Renaissance and Baroque rooms no less--and just left.  So irritating.  I also wanted to snap at these people, but this is how you know you're not fluent, when you can't come up with cutting comments to people on the spot. Sigh.

My next stop was the Torre dei Lamberti, the tallest tower in the city with 368 steps.  It really wasn't a hard climb, since the stairs were modern; in contrast, Florence's campanile has 440 steps and tiny pie-slice medieval stone steps that you think you're going to fall down at any moment, and the view from the top was pretty awesome.  Coming back down I decided to race the elevator, and wouldn't you know it actually felt like it took me longer to go down than it did to go up?  I did hit the bottom about three seconds before the elevator did, though, so that made me feel pretty good.  After that I was hungry, since it was about 4, so I finally did what I'd been dreading since I reached this country: I ate lunch alone.  In order to do this, though I had to hunt for someplace that wasn't super-dark and empty with a single waiter lurking on duty, cause that just seemed awful.  I finally found a place that had a terrace over the Adige river, looking at the Roman theater on the other side.  Of course, it turned out to be just as awkward as I'd expected, because there were just a bunch of couples eating out there, one of which was making out.  Did I mention that Italians don't eat alone?  Anna Clara told us this last summer.  They don't understand that someone people enjoy eating alone, it's totally foreign to them.  I enjoy it, but not in public, and not when you're the only one who's sitting by yourself!  I had myself a glass of prosecco and then made Carla call me to keep to me company, haha.  Definitely a benefit of having an Italian cell phone.

After lunch I climbed to Castel San Pietro, the other highest point in the city, but found that to be full of PDA-ing couples too.  Argh. I swear people in this country give you a funny look if you're by yourself.  Well, by yourself without a canine companion, anyway.  After that I walked to the Roman arena, but opted not to go in, since Carla and I might come back here to see an opera in July.  I managed to lose my second bus ticket somehow, so I walked the 2km back to the station, where I had to wait over an hour anyway for a regional train by to Venice.  I got on a vaporetto around nine, just as the sun had set and the moon was coming out; by the time I got to the Lido it was quite dark.  Venice may look dreamy by moonlight but there's nothing less relaxing that the roar of a vaporetto engine in your ears, let me tell you!

So after my two days of adventure I decided to take it easy today.  I got up, went jogging, showered (and was surprised when the cleaning lady showed up a day early--I'm glad I was already in the bathroom because I have totally walked around topless in here!!), went downtown to buy groceries, drank tea, and blogged.  Tonight I'm meeting a girl from Middlebury at 6 for an unfashionably early dinner--she's a PhD student at Johns Hopkins.  It's interesting because we've never actually spoken in English, even on the phone today we spoke Italian. She's actually doing the higher level of the Midd program this summer, so I think she's going to want to speak Italian all night, which is fine.  It's just nice to have dinner plans with someone my age!!  Plus later I can walk around and enjoy Venice at night before I head home.

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!