Italy (June-July 2015)

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Rome

To begin our mental voyage into Italy, we rented an apartment near the Coliseum. Quite near, actually. That's our building on the left.
Like all tourists with such an opportunity we spent a lot of time taking pictures of the way the monument looked in the morning...
And the way it looked at night, with people and without people, vertical and horizontal, as if we could squeeze something out of it that wasn't already in the guidebooks.
Meanwhile we also settled in to what we took to be the normal daily life of Rome.
We sat at the dinner table, with books, bread from the market and cheap wine, fanning ourselves and opening the windows to take off the heat.
We basked in the glow and shadow of old family memorabilia, no less moving for not being our family's. That's a painting of the owner's great uncle, who died at age four.
We ate at a restaurant up the street, where the owner nursed his grappa from a chair by the door.
But we were here to see sights. We started our first full morning at the Pantheon, non-descript from the outside, the only complete monument left from ancient Rome.
Its dome was the largest in the world for 1300 years, the Roman recipe for concrete having been lost in the Dark Ages.
It's still a luminous and entrancing building, thanks in no small part to the simple play of light from the opening in the dome.
We began our informal search for the perfect Italian caffe that same morning. This was a tourist place, where they shoveled you in and out. Good food, all the same.
We were in high spirits (and checkered patterns), ready for a long walk. And we got one, hiking from church to church in a city of 900 churches.
Many of them, like the Pantheon, looked like nothing worth bothering over from the outside...
...only to open up into dazzling interiors. Restraint was foreign vocabulary. More was more.
This particular church topped things off with the famous statue of Moses by Michelangelo, part of Pope Julius II's tomb. A high benchmark for later architects.
Still, every church managed to have something, some special draw in the ecclesiastical steeplechase. It might be paintings by Caravaggio...
Or a ceiling with a greater population of figures (all looking down) than it had parishioners looking up...
Or a legendary sculpture like Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Bernini didn't stop with the sculpture, either, but added a golden sunburst, a columned temple...
And even two sets of approving marble onlookers. Hey Bernini, you made some statue!
My favorite was probably this model, inside quite a grand church, of an even grander church, composed of the greatest churches in the world.
A few of the monuments were harder to warm up to, for a modern sensibility.
Along our route we lingered for a while in grand public squares...
Took in the quotidian beauties of glass and peeling plaster and window shutters...
Appreciated the eye for detail of civil engineers long gone. This actually works, but more things were beautiful here in Rome than useful.
I started snapping pictures of caffes because they seemed a key to a Roman inner life.
As did the graffiti, which was everywhere - after all, Italy is the linguistic home of graffiti. Rome looked at times like New York City in the Serpico and French Connection years.
Old and new, commercial and sacred, everything mashes up here in the Eternal City. Catch it the right way and it feels like insight.
This just happens to be a nice picture of Neeta's and my daughter, Jen. You can see both the tonic and the relaxing effects of travel on her face.
The day was 90 degrees; we bought bottle after bottle from trucks like this one, always asking for one straight from the freezer.
By the end of our first day we were pleasantly tired, physically fit, well fed, very well watered.
We took two formal tours in Rome, the first of the Coliseum and Forum. Our guide was an archaeologist who moonlighted leading private tours.
She didn't see us posing with these quasi-Roman soldiers, who were appropriately loutish. Thank god.
She took us first to the ruins of the emperor's palace on the Palatine Hill above the forum, a sprawling place that must have rivalled Versailles.
It was built over a partricians' quarter from Republican days, which was built over the supposed site where a she-wolf raised Romulus and Remus, the city's founders.
Below it was the forum, the public square of ancient Rome, where the Senate met during the Republic and emperors later built monuments to their own inflated glory.
It must have been garish in its prime. Today it is pleasantly broken and partial and evocative.
Over here, there's a taste of history - Titus's conquest of Jerusalem after the first Jewish War.
Over there, an exotic splash of a long-gone culture - the ruined building where the Vestal Virgins, scions of Rome's wealthiest families, tended the city's eternal flame.
Nearby are the Baths of Caracalla, which inspired later architects including Charles Follen McKim, who used them as a model for New York's Pennsylvania Station.
The fragments of mosaic floors and statues and the grand brick walls give at least a dim sense of what it must have been like to spend a languid day here.
Our second formal tour was of the Vatican Museums. Our guide this time was unfortunately of the old school, all blarney, no information, and hands-on in the wrong way.
He tried to march us across the sculpture courtyard without stopping, as if he were late for a more pressing appointment...
Even though here was Laocoon, the long-lost Roman sculpture, found and excavated in Michelangelo's time, which inspired him to be bolder in his own work.
Admittedly some of the other sculpture was more Fellini than Michelangelo.
And a few pieces seemed to be watching us more than we were watching them.
The museums have few masterpieces but many excellent samples of ancient arts.
A long hallway, for instance, is decorated with nothing but tapestries.
Another with nothing but maps. And a fabulously overwrought ceiling - there's always one of those.
This trompe l'oeil wall painting was designed to draw you in to a mythical religious ceremony, in progress.
Of course there are a few masterpieces, most of them concentrated here in the Sistine Chapel. That's the Last Judgment by Michelangelo, over there.
And you can see the Creation of Adam there in the center of the ceiling, which is more crowded than you come here expecting: a storybook rather than a slap in the face.
Next door, the Pope's grandest church manages to outdo all that's come before it. It's both over-the-top and soaringly beautiful.
And it possesses the most sublime of all sculptures in Rome, the Pieta. A fitting coda for a city of arts and monuments.

Drawing Credit: Helen E.F.M. Finlinson

Florence and Siena

Our next stop, Florence, wellspring of the Renaissance, was a different kind of place, more sober and subdued. We came to like the manner and style of the city quite a lot.
Our apartment here was more stylish than the one we had in Rome but less revealing of a person's character. Monica, the manager, proved a great source of ideas.
As soon as we were settled we headed straight out to the Piazza della Signoria, near the Uffizi Gallery, to see what was going on.
The city's most symbolic statuary is gathered here, and it's a pretty bloody, violent collection.
The Palazzo Vecchio was the city's political vortex; the people overthrew tyrants from here.
Less politically, the sculptors seem to have been fascinated by sexual assault as well.
In any event, it was a beautiful evening - perhaps a hundred people in the balmy air, among some of the world's greatest artwork.
We strolled far enough to see the famous Ponte Vecchio. (Notice the nighttime diners, with white tablecloths, down on the riverbank.)
I insisted Neeta snap this picture of one of the caffes we walked past as part of my search for the Italian inner life.
Monica, however, turned us on to our favorite restaurant, a boisterous place of excellent food and good company, where the owner sang as he delivered our meals.
Early one morning, we went to see David before the crowds. The crowds quickly caught up to us.
Then it was back onto the dense streets to visit St. Mary of the Flowers, the Duomo.
The streets were so dense, you could practically make it inside the doors of the Duomo - the great cathedral of Florence - before you saw the grandeur of it.
The 19th-Century facade promised an elaborate, overwrought interior on a Roman scale.
But it delivered something sparer, more dignified, more reserved - and, to me, more appealing.
The architect Filippo Brunelleschi engineered the dome, which finally surpassed the Pantheon's, in 1436 - by a mere seven feet.
The Florentines themselves found the church clock nearly as impressive.
Later on we went to visit the slightly more modest neighborhood church where the ruling Medici family used to attend mass.
It's most famous today for the Michelangelo sculptures in the new sacristy, honoring two callow, inept, undeserving Medici.
These two figures represent dawn and dusk, both struggling between wakefulness and sleep. They're my favorites of the bunch.
Not as beautiful, but more disturbing, was this meditation on the fleeting nature of human life.
Elsewhere in the church, Donatello and Brunelleschi are the artists who truly shine. The bronze carvings on the pulpit are intricate and gorgeous.
And they are definitely not Michelangelo's. These two, bold and innovative, became my favorite Florentine artists, save only for the dreamer Botticelli.
And despite Michelangelo, I found Brunelleschi's old sacristy more beautiful than the new one.
Walking the streets we found a softer beauty than the formal one of the churches.
It had its share of whimsy as well as Bicycle Thief neo-realism.
And you could stumble across the surreal now and then if you weren't careful, as we did, walking down from the Piazzale Michelangelo one evening.
Our best discovery in Spain two years ago had been the great food halls, where, among crowds, you could buy a little of this, a little of that until late in the night.
Florence has converted an old factory building into the same sort of thing - a place were you can buy a glass of beer or, oh, a white truffle priced at $330,000.
We bought a few shavings of truffle for much, much less. We sat down to a great feast around our small plate of wonders, along with Tuscan bread salad and prosecco...
and then finished it all off with some pizza. It's almost all you need from life to be surrounded by wonderful food and lively people.
Oh, and art, I suppose. Florence is home to one of the world's great museums, and so of course we spent a full day there. And unlike the Vatican Museums...
it is simply overrun with masterpieces, including my favorite, Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, which I have seen adored and parodied my whole life.
But it is also home to other pieces, excellent and strange, like this comparison of three very different lives open to a woman of the Middle Ages...
and this monk's dream of the ladder to heaven that you climb up on your knees (and the door at the top, which looks like it might close promptly at five)...
and this Mary with the very modern expression of a petulant bored tween...
and this great hall, where the war painting seems to have inspired panic in the statuary.
One room taught me that museum-going is exhausting for the sculptures as well, at least when nobody's looking.
Of course every great museum has a great museum caffe, and this one was on a roof terrace that looked out over the Piazza della Signoria.
So, over another little plate of this and glass of that, we enjoyed one of the most charming views of the Duomo in the city.
There was one last church near our apartment, Santa Croce, turned over completely to death.
Every important family in Florence had an alcove here, richly frescoed, where its dead were either buried or remembered.
The most famous had their monuments in the church proper, like Galileo, Dante, Rossini, Machiavelli and Enrico Fermi, although some were actually buried elsewhere.
Being sculpture-mad, awe lingered the longest over Michelangelo's, topped by suitably sad sculpted mourners.
Before taking the train to Venice, we decided to take one day out to visit Florence's great rival for power in Tuscany, Siena. We stopped in villages along the way.
Monteriggioni was built as a walled medieval fortress, now a sleepy little tourist trap.
The distrustful noble families of San Gimignano built stone towers as refuges against one another.
But times change, and the troubled skyscraper-hamlet is a more trusting, bland, commercial and chi chi place today.
Siena, though: Siena is a real city, spreading out from a medieval public square where just two days before us the famous Palio horse race had been run for the eonth time.
The old city is divided into 17 ancient, mutually jealous districts, and the one that won the Palio now had two months to lord it over the others.
I continued my investigation into the inner life of Italians, gathered in their outdoor caffes. I would like to have spent an hour reading a good novel in this one.
There are two unavoidable buildings in old Siena, the town hall and the cathedral. We had time enough and room enough to see them both.
Both had monuments to Romulus, Remus and (graciously) the she-wolf who nursed them - this was to be a bigger theme throughout Italy than I had anticipated.
On the inside the secular palazzo was as elaborate as a cathedral, though tending more toward frescoes of war, courtroom justice and civil engineering than toward God.
That said, it still had a very nice chapel and an altar ... out of Italian habit, I suppose.
You would think after a while all cathedrals would look alike, but it really isn't so.
Nothing had quite prepared us for the unembarrassed stripeyness of Siena Cathedral.
The showpiece here was an elaborate and imaginatively inlaid floor...
replete with philosophers and mythic figures and crowds and this most feminine of sailing ships.
But for book-lovers like Jen and I, an even better discovery was the library of illuminated manuscripts, guarded by the three graces of naked truth.

Drawing Credit: John Douglas

Venice

We had only one day in Venice. I could have spent a week, but other preferences than mine prevailed.
Instead of an apartment, we booked a hotel room and by happenstance got a sprawling suite of marble and armchairs and (oddly) exercise equipment for our trouble.
There was a jetty for gondolas just outside our window, tempting Neeta and Jen ... but not enough. They were immune to the rinky-dink romance of it.
Myself, I find Venice a splendid place to wander, to get lost, to happen onto beautiful buildings and then lose them again in the spider's web of pathways and canals.
My companions weren't quite so interested in getting lost and saw Venice as a glorified amusement park or living-history museum...
Whereas to me it feels like a living city (on life support, perhaps) suspended between decaying foundations and the next masked ball.
The facade of St. Marks - unlike any other cathedral's - looks to me like the most delicate and fragile of wedding cakes...
whereas inside it feels like an old cave of smoke and incense and Byzantine mysteries. A mixture that doesn't make sense and so, won't let my imagination go.
We took the vaporetto (water taxi, to the non-Italians) across to the Church of Saint George to see the classic postcard view of Venice.
From the belltower we could see the fragile network of islands called lidi that protect it from the Adriatic Sea. A wildly impractical place for a city.
We had a day, as I said, so we saw the biggest sights. The fraternal hall of San Rocco is named after a phony saint, recognized only in Venice.
The paintings inside, however, are quite well recongized as Tintoretto's masterpieces. They languish in hot rooms with no air conditioning.
The 18th-Century Venetian mansion Ca Rezzonico meanwhile has accepted 20th-Century technology. It was cool and pleasant and we lingered there.
Its great ballroom of painted columns, statues and alcoves is Venice in a nutshell - a magic show of empty beauty.
The men and women who people its ceilings look like they have lives and relationships as rich as your own.
The hallways lead on to other rooms full of vases and statues, tiny portraits and grand painted scenes, strange objects depicting China and Africa...
as well as one of my favorite murals, The New World by Giandomenico Tiepolo, showing the backs of a crowd fascinated by an unseen show.
But let me put museums and art aside and wander the streets a while. In our rambling, we found (among other things) dogs to momentarily absorb our affections...
and pastas of all sorts to try and share and comment upon over glasses of wine...
and modern art that lay somewhere between brilliance and parlor trickery...
and evidence of Venice's practical side and day-to-day business.
We saw statues that appeared to be proud without being haughty.
We saw tempting gateways to gardens we would have to walk through in our minds another day. (Others might be turned off by the garbage on the left.)
Venice had once been a powerful, commercial, pragmatic and even ruthless maritime power, coldly unsentimental, but it looks like nothing of the sort.
Instead it looks like a wonderful, impractical game, invented for lovers of beauty. How it achieved this trick, I don't know but am glad for the opportunity to wonder.

Drawing Credit: J.M. Canal, after Canaletto

Lake and Seacoast

We spent our next several days as visitors to the lands of the fabulously wealthy. I had always dreamed of going up to Lake Como...
of sitting on a terrace with a cocktail in my hand looking out over the blue thoughtful lake and the Italian Alps above it.
There isn't much to do in Bellagio, but then there shouldn't be. We spent a lot of time on that terrace with those cocktails in our hands.
Exactly as I had expected it to be. Over there is Cadenabbia; that's George Clooney's side of the lake.
I'm sure his cottage is much bigger than this one, but I would be happy with this. I would. In fact, I was happy without it.
We read our books, just as other people were doing: The Agony and the Ecstasy for Neeta, The Medici for Jen, City of Fortune (a history of Venice) for me.
We looked in shop windows at beautiful Italian leather shoes and ceramics and glassware, buying the rare something when the need to spend money overtook us.
When we were worn out by such exertions, we contemplated what we'd learned over gelato at our hotel. The 90-degree weather had cooled to the low eighties.
And in the evening, we simply watched the lake again. We were Christmas turkeys growing fatter and more succulent by the day.
Finally we succumbed to the need to do things and took the public ferry across to Villa Carlotta, one of the lake mansions now open to the public.
Its gardens are vast and filled with beautiful perfect flowers and manicured hillsides...
when they aren't even vaster and stretching up the slopes like an untapped jungle.
In the breezeway of the villa itself it was possible to imagine a life of langour here, with two books open and a chess game underway.
At night you felt as if you were removed from the world just far enough to contemplate it and digest it before going back down to your labors.
From the Alps we drove down to the Italian Riviera - from Clooneyland to Eltonland - and set ourselves up in an old-style grand hotel.
The town was an uneasy mix of charming and decrepit, of budget vactioners in cheap hotels and Euromoney in, well, our hotel.
The town shuts down like a drum between lunch and dinner. We ate at the only place we found open ... which happened to be excellent.
Rapallo was abuzz about a Dolce & Gabbiana event in nearby Portofino. Elton and Madonna were down with their yachts ... as, evidently, was Largo from Thunderball.
I had fallen under the spell of a photo of Portofino a few years ago; it seemed perfect like a poor man's dream and turned out instead to be perfect like a Faberge egg...
fussed over and rarified. I wasn't disappointed; it was somehow beautiful all the same. It wasn't, however, a place for people like us.
The public ferry threaded its way among the yachts on the way out to the Mediterranean, and Elton and Madonna never got their chance to meet us.
Neeta is more impressed with the scrappy than with the rich. She fell for a seagull who had figured out how to raid a boatman's stash.
That night we took the dangerous step of eating in our hotel, where the restaurants were always open, the food was great, and a salad like this one cost $25.
The next day we rented a boat and headed in the opposite direction, toward the five towns of Cinque Terre, a UNESCO heritage site.
Legend has it that hardscrabble fishermen built these little towns on vertiginous cliffs and scraped out a meagre living from the eternal sea.
They are neither hardscrabble nor meagre today. They have been discovered and overrun. The jetties are crowded with people who've just arrived or are eager to go.
You can even reach them by train (albeit nearly a toy train) and bypass the surf, the spray, the wild Mediterranean altogether.
In the age of Lonely Planet, there are no undiscovered places anymore - no towns beyond the gelato shop, the youth hostel and the guitar.

Drawing Credit: Franco Brkac

Franco Brkac

Milan and London

Well, that was the trip. The rest, as they say, was merely commuting. But we had a few hours each in Milan and London - and, still energetic, we decided to use them.
In Milan, we dropped our bags and took the Metro to the city's central cathedral, by some accounts the most beautiful in all of Italy.
At this point, it's hard to pick favorites, but the Milan cathedral is certainly grand and less garish than many of the cathedrals we'd been shuffling through.
Still, it did have its bizarre aspects, such as this anatomically impressive statue of St. Bartholomew, who was martyred by being flayed alive.
We took the elevator to the roof, where the Milanese used to picnic on their August 15 holiday. Here saints appeal to the polyglot city below them.
From this vantage you could see the other great cathedral in Milan, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele...
one of the world's first indoor malls, completed in 1877, the center of Milan's current religion: Moneyism.
Like the other cathedrals, it had its frescoes and murals of dieties, maybe the goddess of overspending.
And like them too it had the unexpected but prominent memorial to Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf.
Like Bellagio it had an expensive Italian shoe display, but here the shoes were made of chocolate. Which you could accessorize with handbags.
When we touched down in Heathrow, we took the Metro (and the handy Heathrow Express train) to Trafalgar Square in central London.
We calculated that we had exactly 50 minutes to see the National Gallery. We squandered a few of them on the square itself...
where my favorite detail was this equestrian statue, which was paired with a more conventional one of King George IV. I wondered how the king would have felt.
Armed with a floor map and a wristwatch, we raced through the galleries from highlight to highlight.
We saw everything Cezanne wanted to say, good and bad, about his bourgeois father.
We saw the masterpieces of painters who once promised to be as famous as Cezanne and then, maybe for no good reason, sank away into obscurity.
We saw paintings that I (rightly) thought absolutely gorgeous and Neeta (crazily) thought undistinguished.
We saw the painting that had inspired one of my favorite essays by Anthony Burgess.
We saw the companion piece of a painting we'd seen in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, by Paulo Uccello, but which I'd read about in the meantime.
And we saw the charming mosaics in the gallery's atrium, making whimsical use of famous 20th-Century Britons like the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
There was quite a line waiting to take off at Heathrow a few hours later, so we had plenty of time to contemplate what we'd had so little time to see.

Drawing Credit: Pete Scully

Pete Scully

Citizen of the World

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Italy (June-July 2015)