The Whirlwind Adventure

Bologna (nicknames include ‘la grossa’ for its heavy fare, ‘la dotta’ because of its ancient university, and ‘la rossa’ for its terracotta roofs and orange/umber/yellow walls) was less impressive than we were expecting. Lakshmi and Daniel had really enjoyed it, and there was certainly more of a youthful vibe than in Rome, thanks to the university, but it just didn’t capture our interest. The Pinacoteca Nazionale was pretty interesting, since I’m not as familiar with Emilian painting has Tuscan/Venetian. There was a 14th century painter, the Pseudo-Jacopino, who I quite liked. The highlight is Raphael’s Saint Cecilia, positioned across from a painting by his probable teacher, Perugino.

Our “apartment” was really a glorified hotel room; I didn’t read the AirBnb listing closely enough to realize it had no kitchen, just a fridge and a microwave. It was cute, though, and had great air conditioning and its own little rooftop patio. We were also near one of the largest Coop grocery stores I’ve seen in Italy, which had not only a bar for breakfast but a full cafeteria for lunch. We were outside the historic center, but buildings throughout the city seemed to be on a much bigger scale than elsewhere; even downtown the streets were wide and still had huge porticos on either side (a real plus the first couple of days when it was still hot in the sun). I read that Bologna was heavily damaged in WWII, so it’s possible that they just had more leeway in the rebuilding than did other cities (Florence, for example, was largely spared, and thus maintains its medieval character in the streets, much like Venice).

The real point of being in Bologna was our three-day car trip, which was by turns exhausting and exhilarating. It covered three regions (Emilia-Romagna, Le Marche, and Lombardy) and two countries, technically, since we went to San Marino. On our first day, in our surprisingly large (and long) Opel wagon, we headed for Urbino, home to Federigo da Montelfeltro. Urbino is a little city perched on a hilltop, with lovely views of the lush countryside; not too bad for a mercenary-cum-humanist. The Ducal Palace was huge and sprawling. On the piano nobile, most of the wooden doors featured intarsia, and the duke’s initials were everywhere. The entrance to his famous studiolo was in an odd corner of a large room which contained the portrait of his and his son. The studiolo was small, so small that the size of the portraits in the wise men series seemed rather oversized! The intarsia was incredible; I wish they would open one of the cabinets so you can get an idea of the space. Also cool: a set of Raphael tapestries with the best-surviving color I’ve yet seen, and a Titian Resurrection, smaller than I would have expected.

From Urbino we went to nearby Pesaro, the seaside town that was one of Titian’s stops on his road to Rome. I was there for the civic museum, which boasts Bellini’s 1475 altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin, with Jesus and his mother mounted on an incredible throne with a pierced back that provides a “picture-in-picture” view of landscape. It was HUGE, much larger than I expect from a Bellini, especially that early, and in an elaborate free-standing wooden frame. Jesus’ white brocade gown and pale purple robe were exquisitely lovely. We walked down to the water (discovering along the way that some vending machines in Italy, particularly those in beach towns, offer both Barilla pasta and sauce as well as condoms and vibrators), where it was really windy, and then decided to drive to San Marino for dinner. Getting to the city of San Marino itself requires a trip in a funicular, and there was an incredible sunset that we were just in time for. We’ve seen lots of beautiful landscapes this week, and the varying shades of blue of the mountain peaks ranging across the low horizon that we could see from the top were among the best (my other favorite, the line of similarly low, blue peaks beyond the green countryside off to the west as we drove between Bologna and Parma/Cremona).

The next day we set off for an overnight trip. Our first stop was Mantua, home to Virgil and Isabella d’Este. We arrived during the Thursday market hours, so things were kind of crazy crowded in the center. I was disappointed that Sant’Andrea’s facade was completely under scaffolding, but the interior was pretty impressive--even if we didn’t stay long, since I had neglected to bring my scarf and felt self-conscious about flouting the no-shoulders rule. We went to the Ducal Palace, which was drainingly spread out. If I knew anyone else who was going I would tell them: see the Camera Picta first, it’s just as cool as you’re expecting and you’re only allowed in for 5 minutes anyway, but then go to Isabella’s rooms first in the main part of the palace. Otherwise you will be dragging yourself through rooms like one through forty, some of which are most interesting than others, but it’s still a lot of real estate to cover and you’ll be flagging by the end. I wish I hadn’t already been kind of tired at this point, because her studiolo was great! Larger and more regular than Federigo’s, with her name, titles, and mottos (including the musical symbol for silence) adorning the spaces. I do wish that the empty spaces on the walls had reproductions of all of the paintings that hung there (now dispersed).

From there we walked the considerable distance (made more so by me misreading the map) to Palazzo Te, Federigo Gonzaga’s pleasure palace, where he hosted Charles V in 1530. Giulio Romano decorated it with a dizzying array of paintings and frescos, including the disorienting room of the Fall of the Giants. Unfortunately, I have to admit that by this point I was too exhausted to really be able to take it in, and to make matters worse, I started randomly bleeding from a cut on my knee (which I later figured out had probably been a spot I shaved too closely which then rubbed against my capris)! Cue bad mood, and we left and walked the looong way back to the car. Mantua was pretty cool though, and since you approach it across a land-bridge you get a really lovely prospect of the skyline. There was a particularly dramatic gathering of clouds as we departed, heading northwest to Cremona.

In Cremona we stayed in a cute B&B which basically offered what might have been the grandparent’s apartment, which shared a courtyard and an entrance with the parents’ and son’s apartments. It had the heavy antique furniture, the grandma china, the whole deal! The owners were really friendly, they gave us a great dinner recommendation (Palio dell’Oca!), and the towels in the enormous bathroom were the hugest, fluffiest towels I’ve seen in this country. They even had screens on the window, like civilized people! Amazing. We walked around the town after dinner, and admired the huge Romanesque cathedral. I went back the next morning to look at Pordenone’s frescos, which, while impressive, were a bit swallowed up by the general decorative splendor of the interior, which was basically frescoed everywhere there was a bit of wall (I think I’ve gotten too used to Palladian restraint!). I also visited the violin museum, as I learned that Cremona was famously for its ‘luthiers’, boasting Stradivarius and other famous makers like the Amati. The museum was brand-new and packed full of multimedia, interactive exhibits, but even after paying 10 euro I wasn’t that interested in learning each step in how a violin is made, I have to admit. I wish for that price you could have taken pictures, because the “treasure room”, which you entered through a red velvet curtain, was a dark chamber with the most precious violins (including nine by Stradivarius) were displayed in lit cases. There was even an armed guard in the room, if you were under any illusions about the value of the instruments! At least a few of these, according to the labels, are still regularly played, including one which you can come and listen to each Sunday. It would be a shame, if these are truly incomparable instruments, for them to be locked up forever.

By this point I had learned my lesson a bit about over-packing the schedule, we decided to discard Piacenza and just focus on Parma. I had a delicious panzerotto from a vendor near the parking lot (who engaged me in conversation when we stopped by again for fries on our way out; my Italian has definitely improved, but I’m looking forward to some lessons this fall!). The surprisingly-ugly Palazzo Pilotta contains the rebuilt 17th century Farnese theater, the Pinacoteca, and the archaeological museum. The Pinacoteca had a number of great pieces, including Leonardo’s head of a young girl (which I always thought was a drawing, and which Seaned IDed as ‘ah, that painting from Ever After’) and Correggio’s Giorno. We had to wait an hour and a half for the churches to reopen before we could go to the Duomo (Romanesque, less impressive facade than Cremona’s, similarly amply-decorated interior, duomo fresco by Correggio) and the Steccata (Parmigianino but we barely saw it, as there was a drunk/high guy harassing people coming out for money as we arrived, screaming at them for not listening to him; he also came into the church and was yelling at people inside, which freaked us out enough that we left).

Back in Bologna, we dropped off the car early, but having to navigate an incredibly narrow entrance to the parking garage (with a wagon) meant some light scratches near the right wheel well *gulp*. We’ll see how much they charge us for that. Speaking of, I’ve been consistently surprised how expensive it is to have a car here--not even the rental cost, but the tolls (you might pay 7 euro for driving 40 minutes), the gas (70 euro) and parking, since all of the cities have ZTLs. I mean a car gives you independence, which is great, pls the chance to go to an Autogrille like the one we visited with a full restaurant inside serving really good food (Italians must be horrified by things like Roy Rogers…), but damn.

Saturday was sort of a recovery day; we used Sunday to go to Modena, which was probably the most charming of all of the cities we visited. Its cathedral was begun in 1099 (on our wedding anniversary, no less) and had lots of interesting carving, both on the portals and inside, especially the column capitals in the crypt. More carvings could be seen in the museum, including the ‘monster’ metopes from the roofline, which included a hermaphrodite and a girl with three arms. There was also a delightful traveling altar, probably 12th century, the piece of serpentinata stone around which it was made traditionally having belonged to Modena’s patron saint, Gemignano. We also went to the Galleria Estense, which had a set of Tintoretto ceiling paintings and Veronese organ shutters from San Gemignano in Venice. Finally we had some aperitivi in the main square, as people lined up for two hours in the setting sun for a tribute concert for one of the town’s most famous sons--Pavarotti.

The food we had was delicious overall! San Carlino, near our apartment in Bologna, was where we had true Parma prosciutto. Sean finally got to try horse at Palio dell’Oca in Cremona. Our meal last night in Modena featured the best tortelli with butter and sage that I’ve ever had, plus delicious Modenese Lambrusco.

I'm really enjoying the fact that we've been able to experience different regions of Italy, especially with regards to the landscape and the food! I realized that I've now been in almost all of the regions; the exceptions being the northwest (Val D'Aosta, Liguria, and Piedmonte), Sicily and Calabria in the south, and Abruzzo and Molise on the eastern edge. I doubt we'll be getting to the northwest, but we're definitely going to Sicily, and when Linda comes in November we're going to rent a car and drive around Abruzzo and maybe even Molise (where my great-grandparents' town, Bonefro, is!).

Others, on Venice

In the Rosand library today I came across Charles Dickens' reflections on a year spent living in Italy in 1844-5, mostly in Genoa but with travels throughout the peninsula.  Nearby was Henry James' Italian Hours, which I idly read in Carla's apartment while I was visiting her in Florence in 2008, so I picked up both.

I only looked briefly through Dickens, once it was apparent that he didn't have too much to offer in the way of interesting or amusing commentary.  Besides Venice and Genoa, the only city he spared kind words for was Verona; everywhere else he decried the misery, the filth, and general degradation.  Granted this was during the years of the Austrian occupation and things probably were in a pretty bad state, but he doesn't even seem to give most places a chance.  And hey, I don't think London was any great prize in 1844.  He was also particularly repulsed by Mannerism (singling out Palazzo Te in Mantua and Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome), but that's no great surprise considering that Mannerism wouldn't be again "in vogue" until the 20th century was well under way.  

I admit to holding Dickens to Twain's later standard as someone who could combine intelligent observation with humor; in my opinion he falls short.  I'm also always sort of disappointed when someone writing about, or from, Italy at the end of the 19th century doesn't mention Twain.  I wouldn't expect high-minded Henry James, whose Italian Hours covers forty years' worth of travel in Italy, from 1869, a year before Unification, through 1907, to mention the "mere humorist" that was Twain at the time of Innocents Abroad in the 1860s, but not even in the introductory essay?  C'mon, people!  James and Twain are really fascinating complements, one the representative of the cultural and economic elite, the latter representative of middlebrow America in both taste and education.  

I am of course definitely partial to Twain, while James, outside of this book, I haven't been able to get into (most recent effort: the Europeans.  The density of the prose, ughhhh).  In fact if something contemporary is described as "Jamesian" I kind of shudder.  But he's perfectly adapted to the travel essays, and managed to make me smile where Dickens couldn't.  For example, on the difficulties of trying to see artworks in churches:

The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many a noble work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a scantily-visited altar; some of them indeed, hidden behind the altar, suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your irritated wish. You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the custode. You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure it's beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree against a mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery.


For all my complaints (why is S. Maria Mater Domini never open? Why aren't there any labels in San Giorgio? Why isn't there better lighting everywhere? The list goes on), we have it so much easier than art-lovers of time past.  Dr. Cooper, for example, emailed me last night for pictures of the Barbaro chapel in S. Zaccaria because hers were too low-resolution.  I went there this morning, popped 30 cents in the box, turned on the lights, and snapped the pictures.  She wrote back to say "the light is amazing, what time were you there?"  Edison time, Dr. Cooper...

On the loud voices of the gondoliers in the otherwise quiet atmosphere of Venice: "If you happen to have a traghetto under your window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race."  Of course, today the traghetti are all but gone, though I did see one poling a gentleman with a briefcase across to the Rialto market the other day.  What is still true is how sound carries in Venice: "Good Venetians exchange confidences at a distance of half a mile."  It's been nice enough to have the windows open all day here, and it is LOUD.  Our windows face a small courtyard on one side, and the alleyway-like street off Ruga Giuffa, a major thoroughfare, on the other.  You can hear the conversations of anyone in the other apartments with their windows open, and when the old woman across the street has a coughing fit it sounds like it's in here.  And that's nothing to the sounds of people talking and laughing on the street three floors below; I understand they think they're "outside" and thus are using their outside voices, but here they might as well be INside!  How people ever managed to have private domestic disagreements or hatch plots here here in good weather, I'll never know.

Finally, I was amused to read that after an uproar over an 1879 partial restoration of the facade of S. Marco, some in Europe and the States suggested that Venice be removed from Italian control and put under the protection of a "European Commission"!  It's hard today to think of a time when a) Venice meant that much to Americans and b) when it was still possible to think about rejiggering the map of Europe without an outright war.  Also, early thoughts of the EU, or at least UNESCO?

Other Veneto Voyages

In addition to our Dolomites road trip, we've made a few other excursions into the Veneto (and Friuli/Venezia Giulia, today, but in Titian's time all of these were Venetian property).  Speaking of regions, I was looking at a regional map of Italy the other day and realized after our time in Bologna/Emilia Romagna next week, I'll I only have a half-dozen or so regions left that I haven't yet visited: Val D'Aosta, Liguria, and Piedmonte in the northwest, Abruzzo and Molise in the southeast (the latter region being the DiMarzo point of origin) and Calabria and Sicily in the far south.

Udine:  This was our farthest-flung train trip, over two hours; it wasn't a terribly impressive place and the weather was cold and gloomy, so I was annoyed at having spent 50 euros on the tickets, and more annoyed that even though the train passes through all but Castelfranco of the cities below, we couldn't combine the visits because all museums and churches like to be open for the same 2 or 3-hour scraps of time in the morning and afternoon! The civic museums in Udine are at the top of a tall hill, where the woman selling tickets complimented me first on my Italian and then on my skin when she found out I was almost thirty (I got a discount for being a 'youth' and then for being an art historian!)  The collection wasn't terribly impressive, but included some stuccos from Giovanni da Udine's house (he also designed the clocktower in the main piazza after the Venetian one), some paintings by Pomonio Amalteo, brother-in-law to Pordenone, and a "Caravaggio" St. Francis in Ecstasy that is a duplicate of the one in the Wadsworth.  The Duomo wasn't open (Sean says the word that grates on me most is chiuso and he is RIGHT).

Castelfranco:  Castelfranco is a quaint tiny town whose center still survives with its square walls intact.  We walked into the main square just in time to realize a wedding was starting up in the cathedral, which houses Giorgione's altarpiece.  We tarried as long as we could in the nearby Casa di Giorgione, not his natal home but rather a house in which he's believed to have painted the incredible frieze depicting books, philosophers, arms, scientific instruments, astrological signs, et. al.  Then we hung out in a nearby bar stalking the wedding party until they finally emerged (and it was one of those 100-degree days, I don't know how they weren't all melting!)  Finally we were able to get in, and the painting was worth the wait, as were the Veronese fragments from Villa Soranzo kept in the sacristy.

Pordenone:  Home to the eponymous painter, Titian's great rival before his untimely death in 1539 (some sources even suggested T poisoned him!)  The civic museum, holding a lot of great work, was chiuso for the entire month of August, but it turned out to be for the best, because we could make the most of our limited time in town in the Duomo, which had undergone some 19th or early 20th century remodeling but which proudly displayed its surviving Renaissance and medieval frescos on walls and piers.  Pordenone's Madonna della Misericordia adorns the first altar on the left; he also painted the high altarpiece, the baptismal font, and three separate frescos on one of the large piers, including a rather sensual S. Rocco who's considered a self-portrait.  There was a jewel of a chapel, the Monreale-Mantica, which had an altarpiece by Amalteo and floor-to-ceiling frescoes by one of his students from the 1550s, depicting the entire life story of Christ and his Mother. I particularly enjoyed how the Risen Christ appears to pop up from the sarcophagus on the wall.  Below, covered in centuries of etched graffiti, were roundels containing phrases in support of Mary's purity (the dead woman for whom the chapel was created was evidently a supporter).

Conegliano: We stopped here largely on a whim, having seen the tall hilltop tower from the train, but it was worth it! The Duomo holds Cima da Conegliano's altarpiece painted for his hometown as a bargain, and after a steep uphill climb to the hill, and then seven or eight stories of tower, we had an incredible view over the countryside looking north to the mountains.  Photos can never capture the effects of the setting sun on a verdant landscape, with the hazy blue in the distance (or least not a camera like mine). Sean was particularly enraptured!

Treviso:  I went there yesterday.  The Duomo, once I found it, hosts the Malchiostro chapel, where Pordenone's frescos outshine Titian's later Annunciation altarpiece.  I also visited the church of S. Nicolo, with an interesting altarpiece perhaps by Lotto, with the Doubting Thomas on top and some portraits, including the recognizable face of Bishop De Rossi, on the bottom.  The civic museum had Titian's painting of Sperone Speroni and a very bloody Bassano crucifixion, but I was forced to actually go through every room (including the archaeological sections on the Neolithic period...) because I was the only person there and the very friendly girl literally walked me through each gallery (partially so she could turn on the lights).  When I arrived it was managing to be cold and muggy, by the time I left it was warm and muggy.  Treviso is sometimes called the 'little Venice' because it has some canals, but at this point all of these cute, well-to-do northern towns are starting to blend together!

 I do enjoy the train rides, though, especially when they're air-conditioned.  Coming back over the lagoon, sweeping low over the water on the railroad bridge Henry James called the "back door of Venice" (not in a good way, but probably not in the totally obscene way either) is lovely.  However I did note, when we drove in, that one thing you can never see on the train is the campanile of S. Marco, since the body of the train sort of blocks it out.  From any other form of approach, though, it's the most dominant part of the skyline.

Alpine Road Trip

Our rental car on this voyage was not, alas, the nice Audi we had for our jaunt through Lazio, but a humble Lancia that struggled gamely through the uphill passages.  We quickly realized that not only are the mountains the natural preserve of the manual transmission, there's also a reason why so many of the cars you see up there are German performance cars like Audi and BMW: it ain't just for show, folks!  The Dolomites are steep. 

From Venice, our first destination was a little north of Treviso, Castel Roganzuolo, a promontory which no longer has a castle but rather a church, where an altarpiece by Titian's workshop once hung.  The promontory looks toward Col di Manzo, where the artist had purchased land and started building a house in 1545.  Nearby was the abbey of S. Pietro in Colle, a benefice which he was hoping to obtain from the Farnese in order to unite the abbey's lands with his own.  It's pretty territory, with the foothills rising in the distance, and plenty of rolling farmland down below.

It was only another 30 minutes or so to Serravalle, now part of Vittorio Veneto, a picturesque intersection of 15th and 16th century streets, a few municipal buildings, and the Duomo, which holds a Titian altarpiece. His daughter Lavinia married a man from Serravalle, and their house is on one of the main streets; supposedly the ruins of a fresco of a nude woman survives in a niche inside somewhere.  Lots of the houses had frescoes still surviving from the late 15th and early 16th century, including some by the school of Pordenone; away from the salt air of the lagoon it's clearly easier for them to last.  Unfortunately, I got screwed out of my chance to see the painting, since the Duomo was closed when we arrived around 3.  After an unprepossessing sandwich at one of the few open bars, I asked the owner when it would reopen, and he just shrugged and suggested maybe early evening.  We didn't have the time to stick around for that, and there was nothing to do there, so we headed out.  Grr!

From Serravalle we headed west along the 'prosecco road' leading through Valbiaddene toward Bassano del Grappa. It was a beautiful country road, passing by, among other sights, the Canova museum in Possagno, housed in an all-white imitation of the Pantheon.  When we reached Bassano, we went right to our hotel, where it would have been nice to just enjoy some air conditioning after the warmth of the day, but nay, this was never to be. We changed rooms three times, and the air conditioning was shitty in all of them!  The third and final room got as cool as 78 degrees and could go no farther.  The hotel staff were very apologetic (which is a damn sight better than just being typically Italian and not understanding why we'd even WANT air conditioning, which is the usual approach) but that still didn't make for a terrible comfortable stay.  

Our dinner that night definitely helped, though.  We took a recommendation from Tripadvisor and drove about 20 minutes into the hills outside Bassano, up a road with hairpin turns and hardly enough room for one car, let alone the two that it was clearly intended for.  Luckily we didn't encounter anyone coming the other way before we arrived at Mirasole, a little restaurant basically occupying the ground floor of a house in a tiny mountainside hamlet.  We sat outside and watched the light fade over the mountaintop, and it was so quiet.  It was lovely, and the food matched--simple dishes, most of them local, beautifully made with fresh ingredients.  The hostess (this was definitely a family affair, so the nonna) was very friendly; when she found out that I was interested in art and architecture, she had to tout Palladio, who I assured her I knew; then she went inside and returned with a gorgeous calendar, several years old, in which the months alternated with images of Palladio's own constructions in various provinces, and other image sets of his influence on architecture in other countries.  She particularly wanted to make sure we were aware of the Palladian influence in the 'Casa Bianca'!  At another point, showing the fierce pride that is quite typical of Italians, particularly outside the cities, she told us that she had visited Brazil once, with an eye to buying property and moving there; however, although it was beautiful, she couldn't do it.  "Where's the history, I asked myself?"  Lol.  I'm sure the peoples of Brazil would object to being considered 'sans history', but I'm also not sure they can quite boast at least 2500 years on the same scrap of land (honestly who knows, I know jack about ancient South American civilizations!)

The next day we went into Bassano, which I had visited once before during my time in Venice--but by visit, I mean 'arrive, get rained on, turn around and leave'.  This time we went to the Museo Civico, where I particularly admired a small Veronese depicting Christ among the doctors, where one of the learned man is leaning his head on his hand and staring at Jesus with the look of "he's soooo dreamy!"  We climbed the Torre Civico, Sean's duly demanded recompense for time spent looking at Madonnas in a museum, walked across the famous wooden Alpine bridge, which was designed by Palladio and has been rebuilt on the same plan ever since, and then hit the road.

From Bassano we neaded north and west, through Trent, where we stopped for lunch (and where I once again got screwed out of an artistic site, since the guided tours at the Castel del Buonconsiglio for the medieval cycle of months was full up until the last tour of the evening!), to the little town of Cles, halfway between Trent and Bolzano.  The hotel was awesome; we had a little suite, with a separate room with a daybed, desk, and wardrobe connected to the bedroom by a bathroom, all recently renovated.  The shower, in particular, was pretty great, with a lovely pebbled floor.  And, best of all, perfect air conditioning!  This was our first experience of the "half pension" way of traveling, meaning you not only take breakfast in the hotel, you eat one meal there too, usually dinner.  It was a bit of a surprise to be handed a menu at check-in and asked for our choices, but we had read online that the food was great, and we were not disappointed!  We had dinner there both nights of our stay, first in the little garden, and the second night, when it had rained, in the dining room.

The next day was our Austrian adventure!  Which turned out to be much more time in the car, and much less time IN Austria, that we had anticipated. The joys of a holiday weekend: we actually got stuck in traffic, including near the Brenner Pass through the Alps!  Which, I discovered to my disappointment, is a) really boring and flat and b) not even the pass Hannibal used.  Boo!  It basically looks like every other toll plaza on the Mass Pike, except for the "Osterreich" side on the other side, of course.  By this point we'd already been far enough north that not only the landscape, but the architecture was markedly different and "northern", but it took crossing the border to really see alpine meadows of the kind you think of with "The Sound of Music".  They exist, they are very lovely, and they are very, very green!  Innsbruck was also quite adorable, with the mountains rising majestically against its back.  The world's most alpine zoo is apparently here, and I definitely regret not having the chance to ride the funicular. 

Alas, by the time we got to Innsbruck, we calculated we only had a few hours if we were to be back at our hotel for the latest possible dinner hour at 8pm (another sign of moving north, the dinnertime moves forward--at 8pm you'd be alone or with tourists in Rome, but you're a latecomer in the Sudtirol!).  We grabbed a quick and delightfully Germanic lunch (beef goulash, washed down with Riesling for me and beer for Sean) before we split up; I went to the Volkskunstmuseum, on Vince's recommendation, and Sean went for the imperial gardens nearby.  I liked the museum, particularly the installation rooms feature 16th-century enameled stoves, of a type I immediately recognized from the Durer print "The Dream of the Doctor."  Most of them were glazed in a gorgeous emerald green, too!  Alas for Sean, by the time were scheduled to meet there was a huge downpour, and I had our own (flimsy) umbrella!  He made it, jogging through the park, one hand on his hat, completely drenched! 

After one more night at Hotel Cles (Sean insisted he never wanted to leave his 'secret lover', aka the air conditioning unit, plus the most comfortable bed we've yet encountered in Italy...nay, all of Europe), we headed out the next morning toward Belluno.  Taking the low southern road would have had us there in two hours, but that would have meant retracing our steps past Bassano.  We opted instead for the high road through the mountains, and I'm so glad we did!  We climbed slowly, and kept seeing signs for various lookout points.  Finally I told Sean to turn at a random one, Mt. Penegal, which turned out to require another fifteen or twenty minutes of the Lancia struggling up steeply-inclined hairpin roads, until we finally reached a completely incongrous hotel, after the completely blankness of the woods, besides the lookout.  The clouds were, quite literally, beneath our feet up there, over 1700 meters above sea level (that's an entire mile!!); we had a whole valley spread out before us.  To our right, we could watch a cloud breaking apart against the mountainside, sending waves of fog up into the pine trees clinging to the slope.  It was beautiful.  Here, and many other times on our drive, I was reminded of Lizzy's line from Pride and Prejudice: "what are men to rocks and mountains?"

We also fed a goat, who I nicknamed Satan for his diabolical appearance (and he also kept preventing us from feeding the younger male goat in the paddock with him, bc he was as asshole).  By the time we were done making friends, the fog I had seen lazily climbing the side of the mountain was all around us, making it a little bit eerie!  We hopped in the car and sped off down the mountain (and by sped I mean "rode the brakes like fuck").  Turns out getting down off Mt. Penegal was nothing compared to getting down off whatever big-ass formation we were on on the road below...at one point there was a sign "dangerous balcony ahead" and before I knew it we were on an honest-to-god JAMES BOND ROAD, with cliff face to the left, a low rock wall to the right, and beyond that,  the pure white of the fog-covered valley, the road twisting and turning and seeming barely big enough for two cars.  It was wild!  I saved pics of this to show Linda only after we had safely arrived back in Venice, haha. 

We ended up basically driving all day through the mountains in what became a steady rain, passing through Cortina and finally Pieve di Cadore, Titian's hometown.  By the time we reached Belluno I was interested in hot shower, hot beverages, anything, and our AirBnb did not disappoint.  It came equipped with a double spa shower and not one, but TWO saunas--one classic, "Finnish" style, and one Turkish.  Our meal that night, recommended by our host Mirko, was the best of the trip, hands down; Ristorante Borgo, a 15-min drive out of town, in a 17th-century villa (whose lovely grounds we could only admire in a slideshow, since it was dark when we arrived).  We wound up seated next to an older man who we were surprised to recognize from the photos on the wall as the owner; we subsequently realized that our waiter was one of the sons, and the chef was the other.  The food was exquisite.  Our appetizer: burata, not too runny, with the sweetest cherry tomatoes I can remember tasting, and thinly-sliced beef served ice cold over lettuce.  I had homemade tortelli with mushrooms and truffle oil, delicate and divine (I wish there had been more!) and Sean had a veal-and-tuna dish dressed with balsamic dinner, which he loved.  The house wine was great; they even had a house amaro, of which Sean bought a bottle after we ended our meal.  We were already strategizing on how to make a return while we were eating--they have three rooms available for B&B, but the issue would be not having a car to get around...future ideas, anyway. 

The contrast between mountains and lagoon was never so marked as the next morning.  We woke to 54-degree rain in Belluno, and enjoyed a stint in the saunas (pre-arranged to be ready for 9am by Mirko, who can turn them on and off with his phone) and some hot tea.  By the time we were in Venice a few hours later, it was to brilliant sun and 75 degrees--downright cool by normal Italian August weather, but a wonderful feeling to us, not too hot and not too cold.  

Our next driving adventure will be based out of Bologna: we're hoping to hit Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, and Urbino the first week of September!  I'm glad I invested in that TomTom...

Disneyland Venice

The last few days of the Academy were a grind: not only was the weather awful and sticky with no chance of respite, even at night, there was the stress of moving all of our stuff into our new spaces, and the sadness of saying goodbye to all of our friends.  A lot of people will be back through for one reason or another; Stefania has a couple of conferences, Danny and Kim will be in town all of September, Sarah is hoping to come back in the spring, Lakshmi said she'll try to visit.  It was especially sad to say goodbye to her, of course, as my closest friend at the Academy.  Le sigh.

Anyway, we got to Venice and discovered they were enjoying a rare cool snap, so we were able to savor a few days of cool temperatures before the heat and humidity picked up again, especially since we were celebrating Sean's 30th birthday!  We had a lovely meal at Refolo (they have a fantastic Refosco there which I'm sure I'll never be able to find again) and strolled under the "blue moon."  Our hotel for the night, before we could move into the apartment, was best described as 'bordello chic', haha.

So Venice is Disneyland: I never really realized before exactly to what extent that's true.  It's not a 'real' living city anymore, and Sean noted it's as though people can sense that and accordingly abandon all pretense of the norms of city life, like keeping to the right in crowded, tiny alleyways, or *not* stopping in a massed group on a tiny bridge, or *not* zig-zagging carelessly all over the place like a line of drunken ducklings.  It's amazingly frustrating, and I don't know how anyone who actually lives here long-term manages!  Granted, we're living near Santa Maria Formosa, a fairly high-traffic zone near San Marco, so if we were living somewhere quiet out in Dorsoduro I'm sure it'd be a little less noticeable, but...it's a lot.

Still, Venice is really awesome, and it's great to finally be able to be here for a decent period. The Rosand library is awesome, too, except for the fact that my m%&#%ing Chromebook can't connect to the wifi there!  It already sucked not having Zotero access, and now I'm reduced to just poking at my tablet if I need to look something up online.  Not ideal.  It's also a little intimidating that there are pictures of Rosand *everywhere*, a never-ending slideshow on the catalog computer screensaver, his signature in the ex-libris in all the books, and even his annotations in a lot of places!  Talk about the anxiety of influence!

In terms of travel outside Venice, so far we've been to Castelfranco Veneto and up to Urbino.  This week we're renting a car for four days, and the plan is to hit Asolo (Queen Caterina Cornaro!) and Bassano del Grappa on the way to Trent where we're staying one night.  From there we'll go a little further north to another hotel, which will be our base for the exploring Italian alps and Innsbruck, just 2 hours north; then we'll be driving to Belluno and staying the night there, with a stop in Titian's hometown; and finally we might be able to stop in Treviso and see his Annunciation in the Duomo before we return the car to Venice.

Lazio Adventure

Who's got two thumbs and has driven in downtown Rome twice?  This guy!

I'm seriously proud of myself for this, especially since I had been fairly anxious about having rented the car for pickup from Termini, as opposed to the airport outside the city (which would have cost $150 more, plus taxis to get there and back).  I was worried not only about getting into a fender-bender in what turned out to be a lovely Audi A3 (which Sean declared too small and not as comfortable as the Buick, which is "fit for a king") but about hitting someone.
 It's really not even other cars you have to worry about, it's the people on Vespas (who obey no traffic laws whatsoever and pass you on the left as you're turning--even on the highway, we saw one pass between the car in the left lane and the concrete barrier; one twitch of that driver's wheel and he'd have been smushed like a bug!), as well as the pedestrians, both tourist and native, who walk right out in front of you.  Anyway, it turned out to be fine, particularly since we had Daniel and Lakshmi as our iPhone navigators in the backseat.  It felt so good to drive again!  Lakshmi and Daniel were a little nervous about doing it, so Sean and I happily shared chaffeur duties (and by happily shared, I mean squabbled over who got the keys every time).  Air conditioning, God's gift to humanity!  As we are three weeks into the 'ondata di caldo' that has not dropped below 90, it was incredible to be able to ice ourselves out in the car.

Our first destination was Bagnoregio a few hours north of Rome, a little town which is linked by a long, steep bridge to Civita, the "dying town" on a hilltop made of soft tufa, which is slowly eroding and falling into the valley below.  Only seven people live full-time in Civita now (we never spotted one of The Seven but they could have been around us at any time, who knows) so it's mainly a tourist stop-over.  You pay a ticket of 1.50 and start the long, steep climb to the city gate.  Sean and I had decided to stay in a B&B in Bagnoregio, while Daniel and Lakshmi wanted the romantic experience of staying in an AirBnb room up in Civita (let's be honest, the prospect of hauling a bag up a mountain did not appeal).  By total chance, the proprietor of their place was the son of the proprietor of ours, a bustling, sweet woman named Sandra.  After we dropped our stuff off, we drove behind her to the parking lot at the base of the bridge and then walked up into Civita.  It was blazing, blazing hot, and I couldn't believe it when she told us she makes the climb two or three times a day!  There are no cars in Civita, but apparently if you or your hotel makes arrangements in advance there is a tiny diesel-powered truck that will transport your bags up and down; otherwise all deliveries seem to be made by motorino.

Civita itself is an adorable little medieval spot, and the AirBnb was right on the main square.  We checked out the church, an underground museum of Etruscan and medieval ruins, peeped out over some belvederi to see the beautiful views over the valley, and then...that was basically the whole place!  We had an aperitivo and then separated, Sean and I to go back downhill to our place to rest before dinner.  It turned out that the bridge freaked Sean out, the sense of being suspended in air by something manmade; even though I'm totally afraid of heights even on something like a stepladder, I'm never afraid on a solid structure (we had the same realization when the Eiffel Tower bothered him last year).  Anyway that meant Sean wanted to hoof it across the bridge ASAP instead of admiring the view!

The return climb later in the evening was lovely, with the sun lighting up the medieval stone.  There was an art project lining the bridge, upturned brooms covered in bells, which jingled in the strong breeze.  We dined at a place called Alma di Civita, which was exceptionally delicious, particularly the local cheese and homemade jam platter, and foccaccia that was quite simply the best any of us had ever had, anywhere.  Later, Lakshmi showed us the group of young kittens she'd found, although these were uninterested in the humans!  There were stray cats everywhere in Civita, actually, and it was sad because so many of them were clearly not well.  The walk down from the city, maybe around midnight, was exceptionally lovely.  With the darkness concealing the drop of the valley around us, Sean wasn't bothered by the height, so we could stroll and look at the stars overhead.  With limited light pollution it was exceptional how many more stars we could see!  Finally we laid down on the bridge, which was totally deserted, and just star-gazed for a bit.  It was beautiful.

Each couple got different benefits, for if we got the night sky on our way back, Lakshmi and Daniel got the sunrise!  They woke up at like 5am to go see it; I saw their pictures and it was really awesome.  I drove over from our place to pick them up at the base of the bridge, and then we went back to Sandra's for breakfast, which included a homemade lavender cake and a carrot cake, plus pastries that included black croissants--activated charcoal, apparently.  I didn't have one, but Sean said they were great. Sandra was really one of the sweetest people I've met in Italy, so warm and motherly and so talkative!  She spoke no English, so poor Daniel was pretty much left out, but Sean was holding his own, telling her about his family and asking her questions about the town.  She adored both men, telling Daniel he was 'bello come il sole' and giving Sean big smacking kisses (and a swat on the butt as we were walking up to the city, for the crime of being of Italian origin without being a fluent speaker! or maybe, just to be able to touch his butt, who knows, it's a nice butt!)

From Bagnoregio we stopped at the lake of Bolsena, one of the clearest, cleanest lakes in all of Europe.  I declined to wade in, since I didn't want to have gritty feet all afternoon, but Sean did, while I sat on a bench and watched a duck seize and eat a small live fish.  Until that moment I had no idea that ducks were carnivores! I thought they ate seaweed and bread, basically.  From there we drove to Viterbo, where we were staying in the atmospheric medieval quarter in an actual medieval house dating from the 13th century.  Walking around the city, we wound up paying to take a guided tour of both the Duomo and the papal palace, because who knew there were popes who lived in Viterbo in the 13th century?  Ah, but there were, and our guides, god love them, were determined to tell us every single historical fact about each one of them.  Or tell me, I should say, since the tour was only in Italian!  A fun translation exercise perhaps but also, we don't careeeeeee.  The coolest thing though was a larger-than-life-size statue of MAry in the papal palace, 15th or 16th century, carved from a single piece of wood!  The guide told us to look behind it so you could see the tree trunk inside; I looked and found a tiny lizard looking back at me!

By this time the troops were tired, but I wanted to hit the civic museum, which contained the reason I came to Viterbo--two paintings by Sebastiano del Piombo.  The others went back to the apartment, which turned out to be their loss, because the museum was incredible! It was outside the city walls in the cloister of a church. Etruscan sarcophagi from Norchi were displayed all around the ground level of the cloister, which was perfectly quiet and peaceful (I was the only person in the whole place).  Admittedly, by the time I saw the paintings I was there to see I was a bit exhausted, but they were still impressive.

The next morning (after shorting out the electricity trying to use my hairdryer...I'd forgotten you often need to turn the AC off for that) we headed out to Bomarzo and the Parco dei Mostri, a weird 16th-century garden filled with massive statues carved out of the pre-existing stone.  Some were cool, but it was hot, the cicadas were deafening, and the place was full of people--we did not believe it was worth our 10-euro entry fee.  After we left it was off to Tarquinia, the Etruscan necropolis, which is less atmospheric than Cerveteri but has exquisitely preserved painted tombs, which Cerveteri lacks.  Going underground provided some relief from the heat (even with the smell of mold) but eventually the effort of re-emerging into 100-degree weather proved too much for me and Sean and we withdrew to the bar, which turned out to be air-conditioned and to have granitas!  We all had them and it literally turned our frowns upside down. A little sugary ice goes a loooong way on a hot summer afternoon!

From there we headed back to Rome.  Sean had wanted his turn at city driving, but eventually forewent it in favor of a car nap, so I drove us back in on the west side of the city, which is much calmer.  In a stroke of genius, we stopped at the grocery store in our neighborhood and briefly experienced the wonder of being able to buy anything we wanted, anything at all, in multiples--because we had a car to put it in!  Joy of joys!  Pulling out of the parking garage we saw Zwi and Abinadi and honked at them, and Abinadi looked around like 'well, I don't know anyone who has a car' until he saw us waving.  It felt like being in high school when you were first driving and you saw someone you knew and you had to make sure they saw you driving, hahaha.

Just like every other time I've gone away, we were only gone a few days but it felt like longer!  It was so hot when we got back we joked about sleeping in the car with the AC on.  This trip filled me with excitement to do more driving; Sean and I are renting a car in mid-August to go to the Dolomites (and Austria, since Innsbruck is an hour from Bolzano), and then again in the first week of September while we're in Bologna, so we can go to Urbino and Mantua and other Renaissance sites that are hard to reach.

Back to Bergamo

A week or so ago I spent a few days in Venice, where I got to spend some time with Dr. Cooper, which was awesome.  She recommended that I go to the Palma il Vecchio show in Bergamo, which had recently been extended, calling it 'transformational' in her idea of the artist.  Dr. Cooper is not particularly given to hyperbole, so I figured I would check it out--and discovered the show was ending on July 12, so we had very little time to get up there.  The tickets bought last-minute were not cheap, but such a good decision.  The show, the city, the weekend--all awesome.

Sean and I were in Bergamo together in 2010 when I was doing research for my master's thesis, and he went again a couple of years ago for a linguistics conference.  Both of us really like the city, and this visit confirmed it.  The difference in being in a relatively wealthy northern city, one not consumed by foreign tourists, was palpable compared to Rome or Florence. The city is clean, well-maintained, and full of interesting shops and restaurants.  One of the main drags has no fewer than three separate bookstores--how many American cities can claim the same?

Our B&B was delightful, and the owner, Alessandra, was so excited that we were actually there to see the Palma show.  We were just off a piazza that had a few wine bars, an excellent coffee and pastry shop, and a burger restaurant called Biif, where we had dinner twice (so great was our hunger for a truly good burger and fries, which this place delivered in spades).  After the first gut-busting dinner Sean dragged me up to the citta' alta, where we relived the moment of five years ago: a steep slope, Sean charging ahead, shouting back something about how he can't slow down or he'll lose his momentum...ah, memories.

The show itself was awesome.  I admit to never having given Palma his due before.  This was the first monographic exhibition devoted to him, and it was a knockout.   Even Sean found himself captivated, which is a rare thing, given he is typically uninterested in Renaissance art.  The presence of wealthy corporate sponsors was evident in the "extras": the custom-made wooden floors in the galleries that mimicked the floors depicted in some of the large paintings as you stood in front of them; the specially-built (and gilded) period frame for the reconstituted Serina Altarpiece; the restoration room, which showed every step in the creation, decay, and restoration of a single piece, in this case Saint Apollonia from the aforementioned altarpiece (who Sean found to be a stunner, haha).  A case featured decadent piles of ground pigment, letting you see the difference between rich aquamarine and the cheaper azurite, or the bodies of the cochineal insects before they're ground to produce carmine red.  An ancient wood saw and huge chunks of poplar stood to one side, demonstrating the steps in building the wooden support; then the application of gesso and white lead, the quick sketching of the figure's contours (demonstrated alongside with an infrared picture of the actual painting), the blocking in of the figure, the landscape, and the finishing glazes. The the slow decay of time, the buckling when a restorer forced the curving wood flat again, and the slow process to press down errant paint flakes with a heated spatula, then finally the in-painting of losses and addition of a protective varnish.  How I wish we had been allowed to take photos!  I bought the catalog, but there are no exhibition photos in it.  Luckily I found a photo from a news article:

So good!  Anyway, after lunch, and a restorative blueberry popsicle from the awesome museum cafe, we moved on to check out the Accademia Carrara across the street, which had only reopened in April after five years' closure (including when we came in 2010).  It has a really lovely collection, though it was interesting to see how quickly Sean lost interest.  He pointed out that a monographic exhibition allowed him to focus and really engage with one single artist, and learn why his style was unique; surrounded by dozens of works of early modern art, though, his natural aversion reasserted itself. 

It was a shame we only had a couple of days for Bergamo, but who knows, we might find a time to come back next year! 

Sermoneta

ETA: Oops, let this languish in my draft pile since the beginning of July!

Last weekend I had agreed to be Lakshmi's roadie for a show she was performing in Latina, one of the Fascist-built towns in the Agro Pontino.  The venue had offered to pay for her to stay overnight and shuttle her between the train station, venue, and hostel--an offer made necessary, we discovered, by Mussolini's town planning.  Wanting the populations of his new farming towns to stay on the land and not go to the city or to their original homes (mostly in the Veneto), he positioned Latina's train station miles north of the town itself.  We were picked up by Vito, one of the co-owners of Circolo H, and the heavily overweight Massimo, who was driving a nice Audi wagon and whose role in this whole venture we never really established.

The other owner of the venue, Gian Luca, is easily one of the sweetest and most generous people I have met in this country.  He didn't really speak English, so it was a mix of translation between me and Vito along with Lakshmi's Italian.  He was the kind of guy who is always bustling about, making sure everyone is comfortable; we later learned he's the father of two little girls, which totally made sense.  Circle H has a really wonderful set-up--the bar was attractive, it had a huge stage, and even its own sound-proofed practice room. We got there around 7 and did the sound check, and then were planning to go find some food since the show didn't start till 10:30 or so, but he insisted on cooking us a full dinner! He explained to us how difficult it was to run the venue, which he and Vito took over four years earlier after he lost his factory job; in Latina it's very hard to get people to come out to see live music, particularly younger people who only want to go to clubs and bars.   He was telling us this apologetically, to explain why probably not that many people would be there that night (though it actually turned out to be quite a crowd), and added that he wasn't sure how much longer he could keep the place going.

After the show, which went really well, it was maybe 1am, and Gian Luca drove us to where we were staying, which was not, thankfully, in the featureless town of Latina itself, but in the medieval hill town of Sermoneta perched some 10 miles away.  Rracing across a darkened countryside at night, the stars blazing above and perfectly cold, clear air whipping through the car, was awesome, particularly since I'm living now in a city with no car.  Gian Luca dropped us off at the hostel, which was a decommissioned medieval church and convent.  I haven't stayed at a hostel since college, and it's not something I was super interested in repeating, but he did get us our own room and it was free, so hey.  Since the bathroom was a shared one we both decided we would simply forgo showering till getting back to the Academy!

After saying goodbye to Gian Luca, we decided to go out and explore Sermoneta.  First we had to actually get our room door open--it had a skeleton key and we could not get it to work for easily five minutes, during which I was starting to panic a little bit--it was 2am, the people who ran the hostel didn't live there, and our only contact was currently speeding away in the countryside! Thankfully we got it open and escaped into the cool night air of a completely silent and deserted medieval town.  Deserted, I should say, except for the many cats who were roaming the streets, and the one woman who was smoking silently on a darkened balcony, watching us as we passed by her house.  It was really magical; Sermoneta is one of those old medieval towns with narrow, steeply pitched stone streets punctuated by plenty of stairs. Even with the cool night air we felt like we were getting a workout.  It was so peaceful, too.  At one point we stood by the city wall, overlooking the dark plain and the lights of Latina seven or eight miles off, near the water, and spent minutes in pure silence, the only sounds a couple of dogs barking down in the plain, and now and then the distant roar of a car.  Only one other time this year have I experienced that sense of utter stillness, on our trip to Puglia and Basilicata in the fall, at Castel del Monte. At this point it was after 2am, so we returned to the hostel to go to sleep, although as I learned the next morning, it was good for me that I had earplugs, since the silent calm of the valley was punctuated throughout the night by the braying of someone's donkey!

The next morning we explored Sermoneta in daylight.  It was still charming, though we definitely stood out as perhaps some of the only non-Italian tourists. We went up to the castle and arrived as a large tour group of elderly Italians was making its way in.  Stopping to listen to the guide, we wound up tagging along on their entire tour, and only realized on our way out that this wasn't a free service--whoops!  I would gladly have paid, not so much for the information about the castle (which includes the Casa del Cardinale, once briefly home to Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia) but for the amusement provided by the tour-goers, who were some of the funniest old Italians I've ever met. They were actually having fun with each other, in the middle of all the complaining about having to continually ascend and descend levels of the castle (at which some of the old men cheered each other on).  The castle also included the Camere Dipinte, a set of rooms frescoed with mythological allegories and then allegories of the Virtues, which each Virtue depicted with her 'opposite'.  The opposite of Charity is apparently naked children pulling a cat's tail!

Speaking of cats, a little cat named Kiko was responsible for another great experience!  We were looking for a vegan restaurant that Lakshmi had heard about down a quiet street, when we saw Kiko sitting in a opened doorway; he ran over to us and hopped up into the window of the house opposite so that we could pet him more easily.  A couple of older men came out of the opened door and jovially asked us if we wanted to adopt him; we talked with them briefly, and the guy mentioned he had a restaurant back in the center of town.  We declined in favor of our vegan place, but when that turned out to be closed we decided to go check out il Giardino del Simposio.  Kiko hadn't led us astray; the food was some of the best we'd had in Italy, and Fabio, the owner (who turned out not to even own Kiko himself, despite his offer to us!) was very charming and clearly proud of what he had built.  We had accidentally ordered an entire bottle of wine, so we had ample time to sit back and enjoy our surroundings as we sipped.
One of their claims to fame is their trombolotto sauce, made from the unique species of lemon that grows in Sermoneta.  I had it with bottarga, dressed over the pasta tableside by Fabio, and it was awesome.  Fabio was very proud that he sells his sauce to lots of high-end chefs, and indeed I also found it at Roscioli's online store, with a small jar going for 50 euro!  He also offered us some of his sour cherry preserves, popping a few in our wine glasses, and it was delicious.

After lunch we were picked up by Vito, and since we still had some time before our train, he whisked us to see the gardens of Ninfa, or at least what you could see standing on the road looking over the pond and castle!  This is one of the most famous gardens in Italy, and only open a handful of days each year.  I decided I'd like to come back for my birthday, as it happens to be open on Oct 3 and 4 this fall.  A day in the gardens and dinner at Fabio's.

I was really, really impressed by how kind and friendly everyone we met in Sermoneta and Latina was.  A number of them expressed their feelings on Rome in a manner similar to mine living in Connecticut--nice to visit, not to live. Indeed, by the time we got back to Rome it felt like we'd been away a week, when it fact it was basically 24 hours...how we wished it could have been longer!

At Last

Sean is here!  He arrived on Tuesday, which was, naturally, a national holiday.  He arrived at the Academy gates at 8am, just as I was coming out to wait for him, and we had everything pretty much squared away by 11am!  Our winter stuff is all in our suitcases, and the extra rack I acquired from an outgoing fellow is carrying Sean's (many) sports coats and his suit in my office, but otherwise we seem to have fitted everything in fairly neatly.  That is not to say that there will not be endless squabbles over organization, etc (cf the 'affair of the drenched bathmat'), but it's so good to finally have him here with me at last.

This is a pretty crazy week here, actually; it's Trustees Week, when fifty or so trustees (some intellectuals/artists, some wealthy donors) and their families come to the Academy to meet the fellows, soak up some sun, and enjoy the general splendor.  Last night there was a huge gala at the Villa Aurelia down the street, at the tune of $1200 a plate, to support the Italian affiliated fellows (the gala that helps fund us, which is held in NYC, is even more expensive).  Obviously we were not invited, but we feasted on some of the best meatballs I've ever had while the kitchen focused most of their efforts on executing Alice Waters' menu for 475 people.  The head chef said he finished up in the kitchen at 3am, slept upstairs in the common room, and was back down in the kitchen by 8am to start today's lunch.

Although the crowds have been kind of intense, on the plus side almost all of the six-month fellows have come back for the week!  It was such a pleasure to walk into the kitchen and see Adam making breakfast, and to have Carin staying once again in the same hallway.  Tonight we have readings by the novelists and open studios for the artists; tomorrow the musicians will give a concert, followed by the 'rosette ceremony', in which everyone but me and Nathan will be officially inducted into the Society of Fellows of the AAR.  We have to wait until we're super-seniors to get our pins, haha.  Last night Stefania told us she refuses to have a pin put on her clothes (most of which are weird-yet-insanely-expensive Commes des Garcons), so we'll have to see whether she tries to doge.

I also went to Lakshmi's show at a bar/club in Pigneto, being very surprised with myself for heading out to a 10:30 show on the other side of the city.  A big group of us went, actually--me, Corin, Cynthia, Liz, Mack, Adam, and even Anna--who went straight to the venue from the airport, flying in from Sicily!  I can't remember the last time I was at an actual club.  Live music there has been aplenty, in the concert series Paula has held in her studio in Casa Rustica for musicians, mostly experimental/electronic who are passing through, and the more traditional performances John and Denise have done with a rotating cast of accompaniment.  Apparently we aren't that musical compared to last year, though.

Sean leaves Sunday for a week in France for a concert, so on Saturday night we're meeting Carla for dinner.  Carla, who told me she confided in her mom her worries that she wouldn't see much of me once Sean arrived, only for Claudia to reply 'honey, that's not how marriage works.'  Ha!  Truth...

The Best of Venice

I'm trying to think of how many discrete times I've been to Venice. The first was that ill-fated Carnevale trip during study abroad, when I was so disgusted with our fellow students' drunken misbehavior; Carla likes reminding me about the rant about the "swine" that I delivered when we finally got back to our hotel room.  Overall I didn't have a great impression of the city.  It was February, and freezing; I remember standing in the piazzetta, waiting for the "flight of the angel" to kick off the carnival season, hemmed in by the biggest crowd I'd ever seen, freezing my ass off despite the thermals I was wearing under my jeans.  I remember being unimpressed by the general air of dilapidation, too, the peeling plaster and exposed brick--why couldn't they keep things in better repair?

The second time I went to Venice was again with Carla, when I visited her the fall after we graduated college.  I was working for Paul at the time, and making decent money for the first time (ah, those long-ago days of an entry-level salary!).  I don't remember too much of that trip either, besides our gondola ride, a ridiculous 80 euro split with another woman and her young daughter, and that I threw out my wine-color Converse sneakers, bought during our study abroad period, because I thought they'd done something to my feet that left me hobbling from Venice back to Florence. In fact, as I would learn in Rome in 2009 when I took that monthlong class, it wasn't the shoes so much as my feet; I don't have enough padding in my heels to handle the 8-odd hours of walking a trip to Europe typically requires while wearing only Converse.  If I put heel pads in, though, I'm fine (and in fact I have heels pads right now in the wine-colored Converse I'm wearing).

The next time after that was March of 2010, when Sean and I went to Bergamo and then to Venice for my masters thesis research.  By this point I'd decided that I was going to work on Venetian art for my dissertation, which means that a lot of that interest in Venice was fostered more from books and seminars than from direct experience of the city itself!  We traveled during spring break, and while it was cold in Bergamo, that was nothing to the sudden blizzard we encountered as soon as we got into Venice. Even the locals were surprised, because it should have already been spring.  Whichever Converse I was wearing that day soaked through with floodwater immediately upon leaving the station, which is why I purchased the rubber boots, which I still own, at a shop nearby.  Splashing around in the flooded San Marco piazza was fun, taking a picture on Rialto as snow fell around us was great, but overall it was a pretty physically miserable visit.

After that came the summer research trip of 2012, when I spent two sweaty, lonely months living on the Lido with Elsa, the ancient Venetian woman who spoke no English, and fruitlessly trying to come up with a dissertation proposal as I bounced among the various libraries and archives in the city.  Sean told me recently that he's never seen me as unhappy as I was during that period. The lack of a concerted purpose, coupled with not having many people to talk to, aside from various encounters with my adviser and the few people I knew or to whom she introduced me, was pretty hard to deal with.  The hot weather was a bitch too, honestly, especially since Elsa, despite having AC, almost never used it because of the expense.

Most recently, before this, I went up to Venice in January for David Rosand's memorial at the Accademia.  I had forgotten that it was acqua alta season, and the boots I bought in 2010 did me absolutely no good sitting in my room in Rome while I trudged through four or five inches of icy water!  Luckily my ankle boots were waterproof, but it was still distinctly unpleasant. The skies were grey, and the chill damp in Venice in the winter really manages to get into your bones somehow, in a way it doesn't seem to in other places.  I remember shivering in the Salute and asking myself, "what am I even doing here?"  To be fair, the sunset that night on the Grand Canal nearly made up for the awful day-- an exquisite, hot pink all across the horizon. I considered it an honor paid by nature to Dr. Rosand.

Finally we come to this visit, just four days, to attend a conference on the young Tintoretto at the Cini Fondazione.  The weather has been perfect, even if it rained briefly on my first evening, as I was helping Margaret haul her mom's giant suitcase over the bridges from the station to her apartment.  Low 70s, sunshine, zero humidity.  Warm enough to make you sweat a little crossing the big campi or on the open stretches by the bacino, but chilly enough in the shaded streets to require pants and a scarf--even my leather coat at night.  I have discovered the face of Venice I like the most--and it's the one that doesn't make me shiver or drip with sweat!

It really has been an awesome few days, and has helped remind me why I love this city, its history, and the art it produced.  It helped that I had avenues for socialization: a drink with Margaret on Thursday, dinner with her and Dave at Il Refolo on Friday (recommended by Stefania as a 'cheap' osteria option, it was one of the most expensive meals I've had all year, but really, really good), lunch with Sophia, the same girl I had a scholarly blind-date with in January, at the conference yesterday.  I ran into Francesca Alberti, a Villa Medici scholar who was giving a paper (and who reminds me of Delphine from Orphan Black), and met her mom, who lives in Trastevere and is an artist who works with beetles.  Even this morning, as I was enjoying three leisurely hours in the Accademia, I approached a woman to tell her how much I liked her skirt (long and dark blue with distinctive gold edging in an irregular pattern) and it turned out that she is an Assyriologist at Yale, haha.

Making those human connections, small or large, really does make a huge difference for me, which is kind of ironic given how I am often known for being antisocial (the difference, of course, is that I want to be antisocial on my terms, vs feeling isolated).  The weather is less surprising to find as a defining element, given how much time you have to spend being exposed to the elements to get around Venice.  I'm hoping the next time I visit, at the end of June, I'll be able to maintain my enthusiasm for what is sure to be a hotter and more crowded place!

The Scent of Jasmine

It was an absolutely exquisite night tonight.  The day was beautiful too, clear enough to see the Alban Hills and the peaks of the Apennines, but the sun has already gotten too strong for staying out of the shade for long.  Once the sun starts to go down, though, you really are reminded of everything that makes Italy magical and timeless.

Particularly helping that magical feeling is the scent of jasmine rolling in through the windows.  I had thought that the green plants wrapped around the piers of the courtyard were merely ivy, but when I got back from the States and walked into a warm patch of heady fragrance, I realized that they had chosen the week of my absence to burst into flower.  Jasmine is a luxurious scent, that occasionally flirts with the edge of being cloying without ever really passing over the line.  It's not a scent I had ever encountered before Italy, it being a flower more suited to warm climates than New England (the same goes for the riotous bougainvillea, which I look forward to seeing spilling over the walls around the city this month).

At any rate, it smells like summer, and feels like very early summer--it's now too hot to sleep with the blanket, but it's not so warm that you need the fan.  The 'end of the year' feeling is in the air, too.  After the Romans vs Barbarians game a couple of weeks ago, a dozen of us were sitting around in a big circle on the grass, eating pizza and gelato, and someone commented that it felt like camp, like the last night of camp.  Now it's started to remind me of the end of the spring semester, that mix of excitement for summer freedom and wistfulness for the friends and the environment that had begun to feel like home.

Wistfulness is especially true in my case, since Sean and I will be staying here another year, with a different group of people.  I've been told that it's a commonplace among former two-year fellows that you always prefer the group you came in with to the group you leave with, and I have no doubt that that will prove to be the case for me as well.  When I think about being here next year without Stefania's acid, profanity-laced commentary on everyone else's behavior, without Denise's cheerful practicality, without John's terrible jokes and Vince's gruff-but-sneaky ones...it's kind of sad.  Sean registered this too, saying it would be hard to come back for two months, just enough time to really get used to everyone (even though they all love him already!) and then to say goodbye.

It will be nice that the staff is the same, at least.  Without Gabry's smirk or Tiziana's warmth or even Alessandro's aloofness, the place would really be unrecognizable.  In the meantime, it's time to treasure what I have, and to enjoy a night like this one.  The fountain is off, the birds have gone to sleep, and so for a rare moment, in the cortile, there is silence.

Spring Is Here

Ugh, I haven't posted in more than two months! I've started and abandoned several blog posts in that time, and so much has happened in the interim that I think I was sort of overwhelmed by the energy required to write about it all.  Brief notes below!

 Of special note, of course, was Sean's wonderful two-week visit in March, during which everyone here took to him just as quickly as I had expected!  Second would be my trip to Milan to see Carin with Lakshmi.  I'd never been there before, so seeing the Ambrosiana (Napoleon's gloves!), the Brera, and the fantastic cathedral (which Mark Twain really, really loved) was great.  We spent Easter stuffing ourselves at the Academy; I made broccoli mac-n-cheese, Carla came over, we drank and ate giant chocolate Easter eggs.

I recently visited Orvieto, where I admired Signorelli's extraordinary frescoes in the Duomo and climbed down Sangallo's wonderfully geometric Pozzo di San Patrizio.  I've also been Terracina and Sabaudia, where I climbed a 10-story tower to see the town the Fascists built in only 253 days.

I've spent time with my friend Cate, who has been in town for six weeks and is leaving shortly. It was wonderful to have a Temple friend in town, someone who knows me, someone I can talk to about early modern stuff, and someone with whom I don't have to do the scholarly dance of impressiveness.  Sigh.

Other events: We had the traditional Academy soccer match, Romans (staff) vs. Barbarians (fellows), and the fellows lost terribly as expected, despite valiant sidelines cheering from non-players like myself.  Stefania was the referee, which was hilarious in and of itself.  Speaking of, she took us into the Inquisition archive this morning for her shoptalk, which was pretty cool.  Her research focuses on probabilism, a branch of theological thought that began in the late 16th century and tried to explore all the gray areas of morality, very interesting stuff.   The very private museum didn't have anything particularly shocking, though there was a 'Satanic' painting of Christ, and a creepy baby Virgin Mary doll that some 20th-century nuns had apparently been found worshipping.

The big news, of course, is that I am going home tomorrow, for a week!! This was a last-minute decision, and I was shocked to find a non-stop flight for a mere $800.  I can help Sean wrap up some house-related stuff and attend Quinn and Nicole's wedding next weekend.  We briefly toyed with the idea of making it a surprise, maybe for Jen--and then realized that there's a non-zero chance she could have a heart attack from the surprise, haha.  Oh, and on that note--my dad's 15th anniversary passed a couple of weeks ago.  I've officially now been alive without him for longer than I knew him.  :-/

Madrid

Every time I come back from a trip I find myself grumbling about how much I hate traveling, particularly on planes. I've also learned, after my sojourns in Madrid and London, that five days is just a bit too long for me to travel on my own.  Even though I could chat with Marina in London, and had dinner with Maite twice in Madrid, it's still lonely to spend days wandering around by yourself, full of observations that you have no one to tell.  So even though my economic side contends that once you've paid to travel to a place, you might as well stay a big longer, I'm going to try to keep future trips to three nights max--or find a traveling partner!

At least Madrid wasn't as cold as London.  That's...kind of the best thing I can say about it, really?  This was my third time there, and I've never really been impressed by it.  Some of my issues are aesthetic: for example, for all of its hilliness it doesn't really have effective visual centers or vistas. I guess the north-south axis of the Paseo del Prado is a unifying element, but it's impossible to take it in, as its two halves form an angle rather than a complete straight avenue.  It's also pretty dirty, not so much with trash but with dog shit everywhere and, equally gross, public urination pretty much wherever men feel the need to go. Their coffee is terrible, too, if I want to be a real grumble-puss about it!   On the plus side, the transit system is good, particularly the suburban Cercanias rail, and the Prado has two free hours of access daily. Basta.

Unlike London, where there were more sights then I knew what to do with, and many of them free, the only thing in Madrid that really interested me was the Prado.  I went three times over the five days I was there, two of them during the free hours.  It's a bigger collection than the National Gallery, and much more overwhelming in its scope.  Being able to go back (without paying 14 euro each time) gave me time to focus on parts of the collection during each visit, rather than trying to see everything. Of course Titian and his fellow Venetians were my first focus.  They have more Titians there than any other collection in the world, even if there aren't many of my favorites among them.  Special mention for the Bacchanal of the Andrians, the two Danaes (including one that is pretty much porn), the sensual St. Margaret, and the heaving muscles and sparking fires of the Sisyphus.  I was impressed by the absolutely brilliant orange of Veronese's Venus/Adonis.  Tintoretto's massive Washing off the Feet and his dramatic Abudction of Helen, awesome (I love the detail of the face just visible behind the mast--you can just barely see the white of one of the man's eyes!)

On the ground floor, the late Raphaels and the Sebastianos were impressive, but also the sensuality of Durer's self-portrait, and the shadow-box effect of van der Weyden's Deposition.  The Mona Lisa copy was interesting, chiefly for being able to approach so close, but I think the yellowed varnish of the original has affected our visual expectations so thoroughly it's hard to accept such a brightly-colored painting, even though we know it's what the other would have looked more like!   Upstairs again to the Spanish paintings--I was surprised to see that they had changed the hanging in the rotunda with Las Meninas--Los Borrachos (home to one of my favorite details in any painting) and Pablo de Valladolid (half of my desktop background for the last four or five years) have been moved to adjacent rooms.  Velazquez' Mars reminded me of Mark Twain (and Pablo's haircut of Stefania's, haha).  Goya: the Colossus is no longer ascribed to him but to an associate.  Those Black Paintings...Jesus.  The 2nd and 3rd of May I must remind myself to teach together (survey books generally only have 3rd of May) because the chaotic violence of rebellion in the first is balanced by the orderly brutality in of the second.  The Prado doesn't allow photography, so no scale photos here, but notes to myself about teaching--for example, Sebastiano's Descent into Limbo would make a great comparison with Bronzino's (and in my notebook I wrote "Sebastiano gives great leg!")

On Friday I had two meetings, one with Miguel Falomir, the curator in charge of Italian paintings and an expert on Titian and Tintoretto (even though as he told me, when he got the job he knew nothing about Italian art!) and the other with another friend of Coop's, Fernando Marias, who works on El Greco.  It was great to meet Falomir, because he thinks that Titian's time in Rome has been definitely understudied (woo!), but I really didn't have anything to ask Marias.  I did learn some new things about El Greco, and had a drink at the bar of the fanciest hotel in Madrid, so that's something.  The next day I went off to Toledo, but found myself disappointed--the museum with the major collection is closed until the end of February.  Basically I went there, had lunch, popped in on his Burial of Count Orgaz (the reflection in the count's armor!!), admired the view over the Tagus from the park by the El Greco museum, and went back to Madrid. By this point it was also lonely to be revisiting sites we'd been to on our honeymoon without having Sean with me.

My visit to the Escorial was the final high point of the trip.  When Sean and I were there, the basilica and its chapter rooms--which house the best of its collection, including Titian's second St. Lawrence and El Greco's St. Maurice--were closed for renovations, so this was my first time seeing these paintings.  The basilica itself was both incredibly monumental and incredibly reserved, as fitting a monastic institution.  Sculptures of Charles V and his family in bronze adorn the left side of the chancel, and Phillip II and his family are on the right, all by Pompeo Leoni (whose father, Leone, was responsible for the wonderful statue of Charles in the Prado--its armor is removable, turning it into a heroic nude of the emperor).  Getting to the Escorial was nice, too, because the Cercanias train went through a huge woodland preserve (which I think was the Sierra de Guadarrama?) where I saw several herds of fallow deer, recognizable by their elk-like horns.

Now the countdown to Sean's arrival in Rome is on!  He wants to go to Naples, which will give me the chance to see the Danae (which was in DC on my last visit).  At some point I'd also like to go up to Florence--you know, other places reachable by train!  At the end of March, Lakshmi and I plan to go to Milan to see Carin.  I've never been, so the Brera museum shall finally be mine! (And the Last Supper, but honestly, meh)  From there we will take a day trip up to Turin, another place I've never been!

London

London was, in a word, amazing.  The sidewalks were wide, flat, and impeccably clean; the public transit was reliable and well-communicated; almost all of the museums were free; and the very polite inhabitants spoke English.  I never even needed an umbrella, which was something of a miracle considering Rome was getting flooded at the same time.  The chief downsides were one, the cold, which made it less enjoyable to be wandering the streets, and two, the strike at the National Gallery that left it virtually closed until Sunday.  I knew the strike was happening, but "some galleries closed" on the website didn't mentally translate to "every painting you came to London to see" until I walked in and all the gallery doors off the main hall were locked!  I actually started tearing up and had to go to the ladies' room to cry briefly, but recovered once I learned from a guard that the strike would be over on Sunday--just in time for me to visit before going to the airport.

I flew into Stansted, which required a transfer via Easybus of about an hour and a half.  It was actually quite nice, because I got to see a little bit of the English countryside.  It was interesting how immediately apparent it was that this wasn't Mediterranean farmland, nor even American; certainly the houses, with their particular silhouette, particularly when half-timbered or clustered around a town steeple, were very identifiably British.  I stayed in Notting Hill in my first true AirBnb experience with a woman named Marina, who turned out to be kind of like Phyllis' British doppelganger!  Middle-aged, and never married, well-educated and widely travelled.  She used to work for the NYTimes television division in London--who knew they even had that?--and now is a horticultural...consultant? I suppose is the term.  One got the idea that she'd have to have socked away quite a pile from past careers, considering she owned the entire building where her flat was located.  She took a shine to me, much like Phyllis, and insisted on making me bangers and mash (sausages and mashed potatoes!) the night of the National Gallery disappointment.  Knowing she was half-Irish I might have been concerned about the cooking--except I had already learned that her mother was an Italian war bride from Sorrento, so the cooking was great!

One of the wonderful things about being in an Anglophone country is the amount of confidence you feel in taking public transportation.  Buses are usually my last resort when traveling, because the maps are always confusing and you almost never know where to get off.  Not so in England!  Not only are there clear route maps and city maps at every station, the buses actually announce each and every stop.  Unbelievable.  I enjoyed riding the buses so much that I took them rather than the Tube most of the time--one metro is much like another, and it was so enjoyable to go to the upper level and sit in the front seat with the huge window, London spread out before you.  That's what I did when I arrived: dropped off my bag, chatted with Marina, and then took the bus to the Victoria and Albert Museum.  This is a museum of material culture, so every kind of object imaginable (furniture, ironwork, clocks, sculpture) from all cultures and periods.  It was really impressive (not least for its commitment to education, "please touch" exhibits were in practically every room), but overwhelming in the same way that the Met can be.  Most memorable for me was the gallery on Queen Victoria, which included film quips of the aging monarch shot in 1900.  I know that Victoria lived into the 20th century and that video was invented in the 1890s, but it just seems incredible somehow for there to be film footage of the quintessential 19th-century figure.

Thursday morning was my National Gallery shock treatment in the morning, albeit one fortified by breakfast in the Crypt Cafe at St. Martin-in-the-Fields beforehand.  Afterward I wandered out down toward Whitehall, intending to visit Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, but adding to my annoyance, I couldn't find it! (I later figured out it was completely under scaffolding).  I watched the Horse Guards briefly, passed by Churchill's War Rooms figuring I would just see them with Sean when we come back, and ended up paying the ridiculous amount of $25 to get into Westminster Abbey.  Now, I'm familiar with Italian churches filled with tomb memorials, but they have nothing on this place.  There didn't seem to be an inch of wall that wasn't covered with a classicizing bust and a Latin inscription!  The audioguide was voiced by Jeremy Irons, which was quite nice.  After Westminster Abbey (and admiring Big Ben, the gilding on which in sunlight sparkles magnificently), I took the bus over to Tate Britain, which was chiefly interesting for the Pre-Raphaelites and the Turner painting Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps.

Finally, in the afternoon, my steps turned toward the British Museum.  Like the National Gallery, this was a place for meeting old friends heretofore known only remotely!  The Rosetta stone, the Bast statuette, the Assyrian reliefs of Asurnispal-whatever killing lions.  There were some surprises (the Standard of Ur is so tiny!) and only one disappointment--namely, the Parthenon marbles left me rather cold.  I was expecting to be more impressed by them than I was.  The museum itself is exquisite, particularly in the massive courtyard, which has been roofed and transformed into a skylight space for the cafe and shops.  Shops in British museums are no joke; since the museums themselves are free, the shops and the cafes are even more important than they are in the US.  I was definitely reeling from how expensive London is.  2 pounds for a macchiato, 4 pounds for a tiny sandwich.  I spent an insane amount of money just on food, since Westminster was the only attraction I paid to see.  I skipped St. Paul's, for example, since it was another $25 ticket; I figured I can see the source material here in Rome!

Friday was another round of museums.  The Courtauld Gallery, home to friends like Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere; John Soane's unusual house-museum, stuffed with antiquities, casts of sculptures and bits of architecture; Tate Modern in Southwark, housed in a repurposed power facility.  Saturday I didn't do much but wander, eat fish-and-chips (result, not different from what's available in the US) and visit the Wallace Collection, another fabulous and free experience.  If it hadn't been so cold I would have enjoyed walking the streets more, but as it was I took buses wherever possible.  The architecture was great, and not just the 19th and early 20th century grandiosity (the temple-cum-theater of Selfridge's, for example), but the wealth of interesting contemporary architecture.  Debenhams, for example, recently received an innovative 'cladding' with small, individually hung tiles that form a shimmering, shifting veil, something that was particularly attractive at night when lit by warm, orange light.

Finally, finally, the National Gallery.  I was there on Sunday when the doors opened, and spent a blissful 3.5 hours inside.  It's one of the best museums I've ever visited, full of top-quality works but uncluttered.  It helps that it's painting only, unlike a museum like the Met.  I spent the first half-hour just in the first room with Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, flanked on either side by the Man with the Blue Sleeve and La Schiavona.  I noticed wonderful details, like Bacchus' long, unbound hair, and the blue flowers at the lower right.  A gallery or two over, Holbein's Ambassadors was huge!  So much larger than I expected; I thought something like the scale of the Thomas More portrait in the Frick.  (Most of my photos taken here were scale comparisons with people stopped in front of paintings, for later use in teaching).  The Diana and Callisto, Diana and Acteon, and Death of Acteon pictures were next.  I did find myself leaning toward the 'unfinished' side of the argument for the latter picture; or rather, unfinished in parts, for Diana is pretty highly finished while the plant at dead center foreground is just too rough, like it jumped out of a Van Gogh.

 Jewel-like colors in the small gallery with Pontormo and Bachiacca's Joseph paintings, and then another grand gallery full of friends.  Sebastiano's Lazarus and Raphael's Julius II have always left me cold, but the two unfinished Michelangelo paintings were wonderful. Bronzino's glowing flesh, even when it's nominally a night scene like his Holy Family (love the turquoise tint to Mary's robe), the delightfully sexy Andrea del Sarto portrait.  Next a room full of Veronese, including the marriage paintings where the "Respect" theme is illustrated by a man not  raping a sleeping woman.  Nice.  A lovely Titian Venus and Adonis, where she sits on a man's military jacket.  Lotto's Lucretia--he loved those off-kilter poses.  Then the Sainsbury wing, where Leonardo's cartoon was much larger than I had thought, and ragged around the edges--the gift of seeing a material object in the flesh, as it were!  Raphael's Knight's Dream, in contrast, was miniature.  The green sleeve of his Saint Catherine--painted with a tempera-like stroke, incidentally--was divine.

The 17th through 19th century galleries didn't fill me with quite as much admiration, of course, though there were still familiar faces to greet, like Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus (where the innkeeper is clearly thinking, 'I could care less who you are, bub, are you going to pay for this spread or not?') and welcome new ones like Mignard's delightful portrait of a lady as Thetis, or Guido Reni's Europa.  For the colors alone he deserved the word divine!

Venice

I went up to Venice on Thursday afternoon so that I could attend a gathering in honor of David Rosand on Friday. It was definitely a mixed voyage, in many respects.  My newly-purchased Ryanair luggage,  for example, got damaged somehow on the train--someone ripped the front pocket completely open!  It wasn't that expensive, but still, I hoped that it would last a bit longer than its first ride.  The weather was gloomy, and I was reminded of the annoyance of heading north from Rome, namely, all the tunnels that plunge you into darkness, rushing noise, and pressurized eardrums.  However, it was fascinating to go into a tunnel in a green if overcast countryside, and then emerge on the other side to snow covering the ground and flurrying in the air!  It was still there when I was on my way home today, just a light covering in the fields somewhere between Bologna and Florence, ending as abruptly as it began.

Venice wasn't terribly crowded, even though Carnival begins tomorrow.  My hostess told me that reservations in the city were very low because Carnival is starting very early this year are people are worried about the weather.  My first quick stop was at the cichetti bar Al Bottegon, recommended by Stefania and Tommaso.  My attempt to name-drop Tommaso's family as they told me to failed utterly, possibly because I wasn't actually talking to the grey-haired proprietress who apparently is good friends with his dad, but the cichetti were delicious!  I had one octopus one, in honor of Sean; one bacala, one ricotta, and one other cheese-related one that I can't recall, but they were delicious.  I gulped down a quick glass of wine and headed back out.

It was fairly cold, but the main pathways were still lit with their Christmas finery, which made the night seem very cheerful--and of course all the shops were still open.  I headed from Dorsoduro across the Accaedemia bridge and through to San Marco--which was completely dark!  Possibly something to do with the massive Carnival preparations going on in the square, who knows.  I headed off on the Merceria with all of the other promenading tourists, went over the Rialto, and then back through the much darker streets of San Polo and Dorsoduro to the guesthouse, having made a big circuit around the heart of the city.  I was pretty happy with the durability of my 'mental map' of the city, despite not having been there since 2012.  Of course I got lost--it's Venice, everyone gets lost eventually--but not too much.

The next morning I woke up to an iron-grey sky.  It had rained overnight.  Leaving the guesthouse, I turned left to go to Calle San Barnaba, a fairly large thoroughfare by Venetian standards (meaning you can't stretch your arms out and touch the shops on either side), but stopped short when I saw a huge mass of water at the corner.  Oh no.  Aqua alta!  113 cm of it, to be precise, and unbeknownst to me, I had gone out just at high tide, and had left my rubber boots, purchased on a similar occasion in 2010, in Rome.  Fine then, no Calle San Barnaba; I'd go the other way, through Campo Santa Margherita.  I crossed a small canal, come down the other side and saw, at the end of the narrow calle, more water, and deeper this time--maybe 6 inches.  Fuckkkk.  I turned back around to take my chances in the shallower water.  A man with a handcart was waiting in Calle San Barnaba, and had seem my to-and-fro little dance; he came sloshing over and was somehow offering to ferry me through the water, but I declined.  Maybe it's a cottage industry, like the guys selling umbrellas who come out of nowhere when it rains?

Anyway, my newly-purchased leather boots, which come up a couple of inches over the ankle, did themselves proud, as I gingerly moved through the water, trying not to kick up any froth (canal water: not awesome). Around me, much wiser Venetians were going about their daily business with the addition of knee-high boots.  I wonder what all the dogs do during acqua alta?  There are certainly enough of them, and there's dog crap smeared all over the place.   Anyway, I was congratulating myself for having survived the worst when I turned the corner near La Toletta and realized there was more. Ughhhh.  I sloshed through again, but when I got the Calle dei Contarini, where you cross a fairly big canal, and turn right at what seems like a dead end to continue on toward the Accademia, the water had to be eight inches deep, way higher than my poor boots could handle.  This time, luckily, there was an alternate route that was mostly not-flooded, and I got to my destination, the Salute, with only minor dampness on my jeans.

I should be terribly dramatic and add to that "but there was a heaviness in my heart..." because honestly, there kind of was.  I sat down in the freezing cold church and looked up and thought, "what the hell am I doing here?"  The day before, Leslie had met me at the Frari right after my arrival to show me the Pala Pesaro in restoration, in a makeshift lab in one of the spaces past the sacristy.  It was a fantastic opportunity because it's off view to the public.  I felt like I should have had a stronger response, both emotional and intellectual, to a painting I've always enjoyed and which is one of Titian's most seminal--and one which deeply occupied David Rosand--but nothing really came.  Then, in the Salute, I was looking at the St. Mark altarpiece, which had only been removed from its frame and set up in a restoration space within the Salute (albeit in this case with a plexiglass viewing spot for visitors).  David and Ellen had paid for most of this restoration themselves with a gift to Save Venice.  Looking up, still in the Salute, I could see the three huge canvases of the 1540s that I mention in my dissertation proposal that I would be 'reconsidering'.  Reconsidering what?  Nothing came to mind except the crick in my neck from staring at the ceiling.

My existential problems aside, a few better things happened.  For example, I found out I still had 10 vaporetto rides on my iMob card from July 2012...those are 7 euro a pop purchased singly, so that was great news.  I rode the very slow vaporetto up the Grand Canal to buy a hat by the train station, my first hat ever--that's how cold it was!  Then I walked to Madonna del Orto, and admired Tintoretto's Presentation of the Virgin, noticing this time how all the attention is on mothers and children--all the men are pushed off and in shadow.  His Miracle of Saint Agnes reminded me a big of the Night Watch--the golden figure in the darkness.  And Cima's Saint John altarpiece was full of pure, clear colors as always.  This was the church where I accidentally left my camera on the stoop outside two years ago, and didn't realize it until I was halfway across the city.  Lighting matters so much in these churches, by the way.  I've never seen Sebastiano's San Crisostomo altarpiece with anything like the clarity of published images, because the church is so dim; same goes for Titian's Annunciation in San Salvador.  There are lights on his Transfiguration, but not the Annunciation; I don't get it.

The event at the Academy in David's honor was low-key.  A number of people, including the former director of the museum, the head of Save Venice, the restorers he worked with, and one of his former students read brief reflections on the incredible impact he had on them and on Venice.  Ellen concluded with a brief reflection on their life together, in which Venice had always played a starring role--they came there for the first time on their honeymoon, and almost never missed a year for decades. Afterwards, Save Venice hosted a little cocktail reception in their offices, which are currently just on the other side of the Accademia bridge, but which will be moving to Palazzo Polignac this spring, in part to house the newly-donated David Rosand Library and Study Center.  He bequeathed all 4,000 of his books to Save Venice.

I met a nice Columbia grad student at the cocktail reception named Sofie, who is living in Florence and working on a dissertation on painted organ shutters with her Italian boyfriend.  We chatted for most of the reception, and wound up having dinner together afterward, after I had had a brief chance to talk to Ellen (who had perhaps had a few glasses and was more communicative than usual!) and to meet their son Jonathan.  We ate at a place called Oniga in Dorsoduro, not far from my hotel, and I ate a heaping pile of fritto misto from the lagoon, including tiny shrimps whose eyes I tried not to look at as I crunched into them...

Saturday morning turned out to be incredibly beautiful, if still chilly.  With plenty of time to spare, I rode the vaporetto up the Grand Canal again (it takes forever). The trip home was pretty great: the train was there early, so I didn't have to wait all that time in the cold, and it was only half full, so I could move to a seat facing in the right direction.  We enjoyed beautiful sunshine down through Florence, and then a deep gloom settled over the landscape with accompanying fog.  That in itself was pretty cool.  By the time we reached Rome, it was reduced to just regular stormy skies and occasional rain.  Every time I travel I'm reminded that traveling is really annoying and time consuming, but I try to remind myself that if they invented teleportation I'd miss out on beautiful sights like the countryside south of Florence, gleaming in the afternoon sun.