Vat Lat Adventures

I went back to the Vatican Library last week for the first time since the fall.  It really is a great place to work, but it's hard for me to schedule time to be there more than once a week.  Just getting there, getting in and getting set up is a lengthy process.  I have to admit that it is pretty awesome to be saluted by a Swiss guard as you show them your reader card at the Porta Sant'Anna; then, once you enter the massive interior courtyard formed between the papal palace on your left (you look up and see tourists on their way to visit the Raphael rooms, walking along the outdoor corridor) and the New Wing of the library, built in the 1580s by Sixtus V, on your right.  Before its construction, the courtyard stretched far and away, down to the Belvedere at the other end of the Vatican complex, but now you enter a massive box of brick and stone, the center of which is a parking lot (naturally).

There are two entrances to the New Wing; one goes to the Archivio Segreto and one to the Library.  In the library everything is state of the art.  The guard scans your card on the way in; scanning it in the cloakroom pops open your locker.  There is a gate and card scanner on the staircase, and upon entering and exiting the reading rooms your card gets scanned there too.  The gate downstairs won't let you out unless you've checked out upstairs, one way to ensure readers have returned all their materials (without, you know, pocketing anything, which used to be a serious problem!).  Once you've scanned in, you sign the register with your locker number, then choose a desk in the cavernous main reading room, or the small Manuscript room, and then indicate that number on the ledger as well.  Only after all of that can you pick up whatever printed volumes you've reserved, or put in a request for manuscripts.  Like I said, it's quite a lot of start-up just to get to the point of looking at something!

So far nothing I've been looking at has been revelatory; mostly it's just following up on published or otherwise referenced archival sources.  Last week and today I was looking at a series, Vat.Lat.14827-35, that contain Giovanni della Casa's papers.  One of the volumes contained something interesting at the back, correspondence written in numerical cipher, separate from the otherwise detailed letters going back and forth between della Casa in Venice and his patron, Cardinal Alessandro, down in Rome.  Prefacing the collection of ciphered material was the key to the cipher itself:

ab ec id of ul ng mp rt sz&

9 4 7 3 5 2 8 6 0

nulli’ 1

qua que’ qui

02 28 52

che chi non

.7 .3 .8

Scrivasi congiunto senza servar’ l’ortografia nelle aspirate’ & nelle doppie et la nulla si ponga al fine delle parole 3/o/4 volte per verso abbreviando tra la nulla li nomi consueti, exempli gratia v.s. rxma, s. sta [ri]?

I wonder how quickly you could break this code without the cipher?  I think it helps that each of the single numbers has an optional corresponding letter, multiplying the potential false answers.  The "special" sets also throw a wrench in, and allow you to do 'combos', which I wasn't expecting.  I decided to try a bit on my own!  I started with the first ciphered text and decided to try to work backward from the end. So the last line and a half of folio 615 reads:  179879896648320721832554846.72574240984697964025.743263

 I was able to break it down thusly:

1 79  879   89664

   da mia   parte

8320721

monsig

832554

monluc

846.7     257 424 098469

perche   gliene   sapera

7964 025 .7 43263

dare   qua l che conto

This is really just one a part of a longer sentence: "...for my part Monsign[ore] Monluca because he will know to give some account of it."   I had actually been working on this for a little while when I realized the folio that came next, which was written in a terribly messy haphazard hand (meaning probably della Casa himself and not his secretary), was a transcription of what I was looking at!  Which meant I could check my work and realize that I did it right, and I had--even the bit that doesn't make sense, which is Monluca: not a recognizable name to me from the Roman or Venetian milieu (and if it's so important that they're talking about it in cipher, they're probably going to be relying on only the most trusted, and therefore most well-mentioned, of go-betweens).  The 'combo' part is in the last line.  "02" gives you "qua", 5 is "l", and ".7" is che, which produces one word, qualche (some), with a kind of shortcut instead of spelling each letter out. 

This felt like a lot of fun, but of course it didn't actually produce anything useful to my work, so I had to give up on the ciphered texts.  Oh well!

ETA: Monsignor Monluca turns out to have been the French ambassador to Venice.  Mystery solved!

Italian Christmas

So that was fun, exhausting, aaaaaand exactly nothing like Christmas, really.  Despite the lights in the streets, the tree in the Salone, and Sean's month-long warbling of Christmas carols, it has never felt less like the holiday to me.  Then again, I've never spent Christmas outside the States before.

We celebrated the (rather warm) day here with a massive potluck, the belated centerpiece of which was Ji Hye's fried chicken.  Sean made a huge pot of pasta fagioli, so at least there was something traditional going on, haha.  After the food, there was bocce and soccer in the backyard, Sean winning a few games of the former; later that night there was pool, with Sean "Sleeper Cell" Gleason losing a few games. I even played with Rick against Helena and Steven, two of the kitchen interns, and managed to do pretty well, even if we lost in the end.  I went to bed before the Christmas sing-along started around midnight, but sitting in bed chatting with Lakshmi I could hear the rousing strains of "Dominic the Donkey" and other classics being belted out by a mildly intoxicated crowd on the floor below.

Although there were no wrapped presents this year, we still got each other gifts!  Mine was writing to the restaurant in Belluno where we had dinner in August to see if I could order a bottle of their specially-made amaro that Sean had been so fond of.  They never replied, but I found the pharmacist who makes it for them, who was not only willing to send two bottles COD to Rome, but threw in all sorts of cosmetic samples with it!  Sean, for his part, visited the antique booths in Piazza Borghese and found a matted print of an engraving after Titian (of a painting I'd never seen before, which is in the Louvre).  This was dismembered from a 19th-century book, and when I looked up the identifying marks of the engraver the first result was a matching leaf in the British Museum, which is cool!  He also bought me a bottle of Refosco, which we shared last night around the pool table.  I still dream of the Sancin Refosco on the menu at il Refolo in Venice, but that doesn't seem to be available anywhere south.

Our Christmas Eve was awesome too, I should say; after the Academy lunch a big group of us went to see Star Wars (in my and Sean's case, for the second time!),  got extraordinarily overpriced drinks at the bar on top of Hotel Bernini and wandered around before settling in for dinner and very serious Star Wars discussion at Insalata Ricca.  Some folks stayed downtown to go to midnight Mass, but Mass in the Pantheon was cancelled, strangely enough, with almost no warning and no explanation.  It was a full moon and a beautiful night, made slightly less so when walking over the Tiber--the smell of starling guano is seriously gross!!

Assorted

This morning I walked to Testaccio to visit the Christmas "car boot" sale, which is basically a holiday flea market.  On my way down the hill from the Academy, I saw that the flames were lit at the Garibaldini. Virtually everything on the Gianicolo memorializes Garibaldi and his ill-fated attempt to conquer Rome from this very hill in 1849.  This is a Fascist-era monument to members of his army (their names are inscribed in the crypt below).

After a stroll through the flea market, and then again through the massive Porta Portese flea market in Trastevere (where I had a delicious porchetta sandwich), I picked up some wine at a shop in Trastevere and took the bus up the hill.  The driver was on his cell phone and blew past my stop, despite the blinking "stop requested" sign, and was about the go past the next one, too, until I barked "FERMA QUI!"  He had the nerve to give me an offended look in the mirror, too.  This stop is in the middle of Passeggiata di Garibaldi, where there is a massive equestrian statue of him overlooking the city of room (nearby there is another of his wife Anna, also on horseback, holding her baby in one hand and a pistol in the other).  Since it's Sunday, the little puppet booth was open and a performance was going on, with Pulcinella (who becomes Punch, of Punch-and-Judy fame, in British puppetry) being threatened with a beating by a doctor (I think?) for playing the mandolin underneath his window.

Speaking of monuments, yesterday Sean and I went to the Vittoriano, aka L'Altare della Patria, aka Mussolin's Typewriter.  We were there to visit the national museum of Italian emigration, which was very interesting.  It was also sad, because you realize how much of the harrowing descriptions of how miserable life had to be for these people to flee, and how hard they had it in the US or Argentina or Brazil, could easily be used to describe the situation of modern-day refugees.

A 7-euro ticket takes you up to the very top of the monument, which has an unparalleled view over the city of Rome (better than the Dome of St. Peter's, I'd say, since that is well outside the center).

The front of the monument, overlooking Piazza Venezia, allows you to see along Via del Corso all the way to Piazza del Popolo and its obelisk.

From the rear, it overlooks the Forum and the Colosseum.  Note that these pictures were taken minutes after we were joined by approximately one BAJILLION starlings, wheeling and darting through the sky like so many bats, or bees.  I find it pretty unsettling, actually (and the city has tried many methods to discourage them, since they leave metric tons of shit).  You'd never expect to be finding sea gulls a noble or calming presence, but compared to the starlings they're practically bald eagles.  I found myself hoping the gulls would eat a few of those little fuckers, but maybe they taste as bad as they sound!

Linda

Sean's mom got here on Sunday!  She's staying at the same Airbnb that Phyllis stayed at last year, with this really wonderful older woman named Simona who has an incredible apartment full of antiques. It's only a 15 minute walk from the Academy in Monteverde, which is a fairly well-to-do Roman neighborhood, but it was so amusing to see how utterly disconcerted she was by the amount of graffiti everywhere; a child of the 70s, she associates graffiti with poverty, crime, and general unpleasantness. The graffiti IS everywhere, that's true, and it's something you don't really see in major US cities any longer, thanks to "broken window"-style crackdowns, but once you've been here for a while you really don't notice it much.  And the graffiti here is often more meaningful than what you see in the States.  There's definitely the regular tagging going on, but there's also tons politically-oriented graffiti and various forms of protest.  Poetry also shows up pretty often.  So while on the one hand, yes, it's a defacement, particularly when it's on historic structures, but on the other hand there's a conversation going on there that doesn't seem to be present in graffiti in the States (or if it is, perhaps it's not one an outsider can immediately understand).

!!

I'm an auntie!  Charlie Tranquillo, born last night sometime after 9pm...

Berlin and Dresden

Germany definitely didn't win us over.  At least not Berlin, where we spent five days, with one day trip south to Dresden. Sean points out that we should withhold judgment until we've been to Munich, which everyone raves about. There are some positives, like the fact that most people speak English and aren't annoyed to do so, or that things are relatively clean and orderly, and that the transit system is excellent.  It was also nice for us New Englanders to actually get a sense of autumn! The sound of huge brown oak leaves crunching underfoot on the paths through the Tiergarten was quite delicious.  The landscape we saw from the train headed south also seemed incredibly familiar, like Massachusetts or the more wooded parts of Connecticut.

That said, what I didn't like about Berlin was also tied to its familiarity.  Due to the WWII destruction, the city's architecture is mostly post-war modern and contemporary glass-steel structures, which gave it a certain sense of interchangeable-ness with other cities, like New York.  I couldn't get a sense of a central point (which I'm realizing is very much a thing I look for in urban environments).  It didn't help that seemingly every inch of Berlin is under active construction: lots of buildings were covered with scaffolding and cranes and lots of streets were blocked off.

The consumer culture is also much more like ours than it is like the Italians, which is not really a positive thing, in my opinion.  There aren't many cafes where you can grab breakfast, so when we spotted a Dunkin Donuts from the bus on the way to the painting gallery on our first morning, we shrugged and figured "why not?"  We were promptly reminded exactly why not: blech.  There were also Starbucks all around, but Sean opposes those even more strenuously than Dunkin Donuts, so we never tried.  Since they don't have a cafe culture, they also don't have a concept of just getting a quick coffee to drink at the bar; I tried this in a museum cafe and they had us sit down and look at a menu just so I could order an espresso (which cost 2.50, the unfortunate side effect of the strong German economy!)

The worst of all, though, is the food.  German traditional food is heavy, salty, and meat-based.  Fuck arteries, who needs them?  But even the wide availability of ethnic food, which is what everyone here raves about in Berlin was disappointing: we went to one lackluster, well-reviewed Thai restaurant, and a tiny ramen restaurant which was recommended by a friend and which had a line out the door at 6pm (oh, another positive of German culture: continous restaurant hours! People eating dinner before 9pm!) but which proved ultimately underwhelming.  Sean did point out that since he had begun to feel a certain ennui about the food in Rome, going to Germany was useful as a shock to the system, making him eager to return to the land of pasta and vegetables.

The actual purpose of my trip, however, was the art, and in that I'm happy to say Germany didn't disappoint!  In fact, as students, we were able to get three-day entrance cards to all the state-owned museums in Berlin for 12 euro apiece.  Even at the regular price, 24 euro, that's an incredible deal.  At the Gemaldegalerie, we had the museum virtually to ourselves for an hour, since everyone else was lining up to see the Botticelli exhibition (pace Dr. Hall, we skipped it).  Titian's self-portrait was really awesome, and Sean pointed out a very interesting observation about the white sleeve and whether he might have ultimately intended to glaze it red to match the other--which would diminish competition for the viewer between the light-colored sleeve and the face, the typical focal point in his portraits.

On our final morning, we checked out the German Historical Museum, which had a very powerful temporary exhibit on the direct aftermath of the war in 12 European countries.  The rest of the museum was less interesting (I admit it: I'm not that interested in German history) except for the portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder, here shown alongside the pendant of his wife (which it never is in art history books--patriarchy!) and described in the accompanying label as a "plea for the right for priests to marry."

Florence and Naples

My birthday trip was a mini-road trip from Rome to Florence and back again.  This time our car was a little VW Up! (exclamation included), which turned out to be one of the worst cars we've ever driven in terms of its stellar inability to pick up on an incline.  Part of my present was that I and I alone got to drive, and it was awesome.  Except for moments when it was terribly stressful, like driving through the tiny, tourist-crowded streets of Assisi, struggling to parallel park on an incline with a car that seemed to leap forward with each press of the gas, while Sean barked instructions from the street and a nearby shopkeeper openly stared at us as she watched from her doorway, smoking.  Oh, and then the hotel owner, who had just told me to park then, announced that after we unloaded we'd have to move the car to one of the many underground lots on the other side of the city.  I had already had Sean take the bags out of the car when we pulled up to the hotel, so I suffered that parking experience for nothing--and then had to inch the car through the medieval streets again to the parking lot!

Assisi, though, was exquisitely lovely.  Our hotel was just a few minutes walk from the basilica and had been recommended by an adviser at the Academy, though we couldn't secure her top-floor room with the awesome view I'd seen on FB.  The guy at the front desk mentioned the Bosco di S. Francesco, a recently-opened path that leads from just adjacent the basilica, downhill for about a mile to a former convent that has an incredible view of the monastic complex atop the hill.  We decided to go right then, at sunset, and though we were a little chilled in the woods (which were still carpeted with these beautiful purple flowers!) it was really beautiful.

From Assisi we drove north to Florence, deciding to skip my original plan of stopping in Perugia or Arezzo for the more scenic route, which would also help us avoid the expensive highway tolls.  Scenic yes, and bumpy too!  But it brought us into Florence through less familiar landscape, with densely wooded hills, than the wheat-and-cypress view you typically think of with Tuscany, so that was nice.

Alas, the weather in Florence was not cooperative.  On my birthday it was 58 degrees and blowing hard!  Luckily, I had bought another winter coat in the same vintage shop where I bought my red leather and green wool coats (almost ten years ago, now!), and I wore it even though it hadn't been dry-cleaned yet, which grossed Sean out.  Hey, given the choice between freezing to death in a light jacket or wearing a slightly musty-smelling coat, I've got no problems.  Ironically, we have since had the coat dry-cleaned, and the smell has not actually improved that much.  Oh well!

We did manage to visit the Pitti Palace (where it cost 50 euro for the two of us to visit all of the museums, which is ludicrous! ), where Sean discovered that looking at the 19th-century allegorical ceiling paintings was much more interesting than the Renaissance art on the walls.  There was a lapis lazuli show on in the Argento museum, but I actually wasn't as impressed by it as I'd expected.  What we did NOT get to see: the Uffizi and the Accademia.  Foolish me, I'd figured we didn't need reservations on an October weekday.  LIES.  Especially because of the rain.  The lines were insanely long even in the late afternoon, so we gave up.

Florence will always for me be a little tinged with nostalgia, no matter how many times I visit.  Walking around the still-familiar streets, it was incredible to think that it had been almost a decade since Meredith, Carla, Anna, and I (and occasionally Sara too) had wandered them.  Everywhere I saw groups of four and five American study-abroad students (almost always white and female) and wondered if we, too, always moved in packs?  Certainly I remember afternoons of walking the streets by myself, just for the pleasure of looking at what was around me.  I went into the Paperback Exchange, where I had found my copy of Lake Woebegone Days in the bargain box under the front shelving (it still has its battered 0.25-euro-cent price tag on the back, even though pages are starting to fall out!), but didn't find any used treasures.  Incidentally, Sean is reading Jane Eyre right now, a book I first read in Florence because someone had left it on the shelf in the apartment, along with Our Town, which made me cry buckets.  I will always be fond of Florence, but there's a weird sense of the ghosts of the past lingering--an effect that I'm sure it doesn't have for Carla, who lived there as a real adult, much like being on Fairfield's campus lost any nostalgic pull once I was there regularly as an instructor.

On the drive back to Rome, which took about five hours, we stopped at an overlook and could see a crenellated tower in the distance.  We drove that way and found a medieval fortress that had once belonged to a local robber-bandit, Ghino di Tacco, later dubbed the Italian Robin Hood.  It was a stormy sort of day, and the wind on top of this mountain was incredible.  The far side of the fortress was like a physical hand buffeting you backwards--stronger, I think, than even what we felt at Chauteauneuf-du-Pape!  I tried to take a video on my camera of Sean laughing hysterically as he could barely move, but alas, it didn't work, and I almost dropped the damn thing on the stones.

More bad weather awaited us in Naples last weekend!  The Academy sponsored a trip to Pompeii led by a fellow who has excavated there for more than a decade.  I've only been to Pompeii once before (and Herculaneum, on a separate visit), and that was with Sarah last year, who took us through her research on the brothel as rain fell on the site, happily reducing the flow of tourists to a trickle. Sarah repeatedly commented on how empty the site was and how this never, ever happened...and boy, did we get to see how true that was!  The streets were fairly full, and since the streets of Pompeii are insanely difficult to actually walk on--with the giant basalt paving stones that are no longer really near each other, making it more of a hike than a stroll--it was pretty intense.  We managed to squeeze into the brothel, Sean and I, but most of the group gave it up since it was so crowded.

A smaller group of us stayed behind in Naples for the weekend.  We had rented an AirBnb in the center, not far from the Duomo, which was certainly, um, the full Naples experience--a dimly lit alley, a stairwell that was dirty, with peeling paint, paper-thin walls that let us hear all the wails of a nearby child, and a window looking out onto a decrepit excavation site with trash thrown into it.  The apartment itself was totally clean and remodeled in the Ikea style I look for in Airbnbs, but outside it was a different world.  It poured so hard on Saturday that Sean and I didn't even go out to the archaeological museum until 4 in the afternoon; returning soaked, I promised him that we'll go to Naples again in the spring sometime, and we'll get a hotel! S

ean was not quite as enamored of Naples as I, but he acknowledged that there was a vitality there that is very much different in character than what you find in any of the northern cities; in many places it's really not even there.  That doesn't mean I wasn't disgusted by the level of filth I saw, though, especially down some side streets, where it was ankle deep.  That shouldn't be acceptable in a first-world nation, in one of its largest cities!  I doubt that even the poorest parts of New York are THAT filled with trash and filth, even though we can't claim to be much better about ameliorating the effects of poverty on the young.

Our next trip will be at the beginning of November, to Berlin!  I've never been to Germany, so this is exciting, as well as intimidating, considering the language barrier.

Anniversary

It's been nine years today since my mom died.  It's funny: you'd think everything about that awful day would be sort of burned into my memory, as sieve-like as it is, but it really isn't.  I just went back and read my blog entries written the week afterward.  I didn't remember the knock on the door as being almost 3 o'clock, for example; if you'd asked me I might have said noon.  I almost started crying, reading them, but lunch is in ten minutes and I'd rather not have a puffy face.  I still can't believe my last entry before that, at the beginning of September, just about the reality of settling back into Fairfield for senior year.  I looked at the earlier entries, too, for mentions of her.  We're going to Florence for my birthday this week.  It's always been hard for me to conceptualize that when I came home from studying abroad, she only had a few more months to live.  I didn't know, you never know, but.

What would she think now?  Me, living in Italy, Jen, pregnant with a grandson.  On the phone with Jen last night I realized how terribly sad I am for her, that our mom won't be there for the birth of her child.  I wish Jen could have that, almost more than I wish I could have her back for myself.

How far we've come as sisters.  I am lucky to have her, in the end.  I was lucky to have the mom I did, too.

Year 2 Begins

I'm writing this in the new office that I hardly ever use.  It's de facto become Sean's office, while I work on the *massive* presidential-style, glass-topped desk in our new and much-larger bedroom.  I find that I much prefer the limited street noise from our bedroom's location, versus the birds, fountain and general hubbub of the courtyard.  Last year I constantly felt distracted by the people chattering and moving around the courtyard, the front gate banging open again and again.  Right now it's peaceful, though Gabry is setting the tables for lunch so there is the bang of silverware whenever he's not serving coffee in the bar.  Sean is down in his Italian class; he made it into intermediate after just that one-month intensive course in June!

After that finishes, we're making a long trek outside of the center of Rome to the immigration office for his permesso appointment.  I did it last year, and will do it again this year, but with the fellows, in a hired bus, with Pina and GP leading the way.  Fellow travelers who arrive at different times of year, unfortunately, are on their own.  I do feel so much more confident this year, both in my Italian and in my ability to understand and navigate the city.  Yesterday we all had to go to the big post office on Via Marmorata to have our identities confirmed for our permesso applications (a new rule given the current refugee crisis), and after it was done I left on my own, hung out in the Protestant cemetery for an hour, then walked through Testaccio and over the river to my appointment, which was for the medical certificate required to join a gym here. I had forgotten what it's like to answer the old "so, any serious medical conditions?  Any heart problems in your family?" and then to do it in Italian!  But my EKG and blood pressure were great, and thanks to donating blood last year I know my cholesterol and triglycerides and all that jazz are good too (Sean is planning on donating along with me soon because he wants the free blood panel too! Carla also wants to try again--as an athlete, her blood pressure was too low when we went together, even after they gave her coffee).

I definitely understand now something Jess and Ruth told me last year: you're never as close with the second group of fellows as you were with the first.  Nathan described it as sort of a pack mentality, and we're not in the pack, by choice.  They're all experiencing this for the first time, they're excited, they're bonding with each other, etc. etc., and Nathan and I are just like "meh, we don't need new friends!"  It helps that Sean is here with me from the start this year, too; I'm sure I would feel much lonelier if I were alone, and more driven to get to know people better.  As it stands the new group of fellows is totally fine, I'm just not that interested or invested like I was last year.  This is definitely beneficial work-wise; I'm skipping lunches most days, since I learned I have a hard time getting back to work after expending all the 'social energy' that lunch with 50 people requires.  I'm skipping almost all of the walk-and-talk events that I've already been on, I'm skipping shoptalks I've already seen (like our director's, last night). It's nice to know what BS or otherwise time-sucks to avoid.

It's also amusing to watch Sean experience this for the first time.  He was exasperated yesterday by how much time gets eaten up, first by the month of Italian classes every morning, and then by all the ten thousand errands and start-up tasks are required (for the permesso, etc).  He confirmed that he had thought I was exaggerating last year, just a little, when I complained how hard it was to actually focus and work with ten thousand distractions just waiting to prey on you.

I'm happy to be back.  It was good to see Carla; we went to a production of Othello in Italian together as an early bday present for me, and it was really good (if only it hadn't been 3.5 hrs and start at 9pm...)  I do miss my friends and the comfort of last year's fellows, but it's nice to already be on good terms with the staff, who are just as excited to see a familiar face.  We volunteered in the kitchen on Saturday, and it was so much fun, just us, Domenico, the British intern Sarah, and Max, who took over Ross' job.  We're looking forward to doing it again--unfortunately Linda's schedule won't leave her the opportunity to do it, since we're going to rent a car for the Saturday she'll be in Rome after Thanksgiving, and go drive around Abruzzo and Molise (the latter of which Max, a Sicilian, informed me is Italy's forgotten region, and DiMarzo home territory!)

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!