Recordando L'Italia
I last visited Italy 25 tears ago (I had also visited 7 years before that). Despite the years, I still remember what I experienced there like they happened yesterday. I remember the food I ate, the streets I strolled through, and the people I met along the way. Its impressions on me have proven to be indelible. When I left Italy the second time, I had become a different person. I was funnier than before, yet more distant and sophisticated. I was more confident and aggressive, yet also kinder and more generous. To put it simply, by the time I had left, I had become a better human being. During subsequent years I may, from time to time, have misplaced some of the qualities and attitudes I acquired there while dealing with false and shallow urgencies. Still, during quiet moments of thought, I was always able to rediscover them just below the surface of my conscious mind. Hopefully, this chapter, and a later one I will write about the Dolomite region of Italy, will provide you with some idea of how Italy can permanently change the way a person sees the world.
Unfortunately, I haven’t retained some facts about the Italy I visited as enduringly as I have its emotional influence. Of course, I have no problem identifying pictures of Venice, and surprisingly enough, of Verona, but the Tuscan hill towns I visited have somehow gotten mixed together in my memory. I will indicate which picture locations I am sure about, and if you can identify the others, please contact me with the correct information. Speaking of the chapter’s photographs, note that all of this chapter’s photos were taken before I moved on to digital photography. They won’t be as saturated with color or as sharp as the ones I take today. That doesn’t mean I think they are particularly bad photos; they wear the patina of old age, just as I do.
In 1989 I took a night train from Amsterdam to Milan using the old “Euro-pass as hotel” trick. The Milan station was impressively huge and ornate. I needed a place to stay in Milan, and luckily enough, there was a tourist office located in the station’s main lobby. The station clock indicated that it was five minutes to one. The tourist office’s door was locked, and a shade had been pulled down over its window. In the corner of the window sat a sign which said in English, “Gone to lunch. Will reopen at 1:00.” A well-dressed woman in her early thirties stood outside the door. When I walked up, she huffed, “These Italians are always looking for an excuse to do nothing.” She struck me as a pretty unpleasant soul. The second the station’s clock hit 1:00, she began knocking loudly on the door. I stepped back enough to ensure that no-one would mistake us for friends. I was pretty green back then, but even I surmised that she was stepping onto a dangerous path. After a few minutes, the door shade snapped upward to reveal the florid face of a furious man.
“What do you want?’
The woman pointed to her watch,
“You were supposed to open five minutes ago.”
“We’ve got no rooms.”
He made a criss-cross movement with his arms like a baseball umpire declaring a player “safe.”
“You are supposed to open at one.”
At this, he unlocked the door and moved behind the service counter.
“No rooms.”
“You don’t know that. You haven’t even looked.”
He began looking through a notebook of potential listings while muttering, “No rooms.”
I certainly wasn’t going to get in line in front of the “no rooms” guy. I saw a similar notebook on a counter on the opposite wall. I walked over and began looking through it. I found three listings within a couple of blocks from the station. I wrote the addresses and telephone numbers on some scrap paper left on the counter. I wasn’t sure what my next move should be. He wasn’t going to call up any of the places on my list after insisting that nothing was available. The unpleasant woman was standing her ground. She wasn’t leaving until he found her a room. Suddenly my luck changed. A middle-aged woman entered from a room behind the counter. She set up next to Mr. “No Rooms.” She slammed down in front of her a sign that said in Italian, “No smoking.” The man immediately pulled out a cigarette and lit it up. Aha! I saw my chance! I pulled out my Italian phrasebook, wrote down a few sentences from it, put on my most innocent looking face while acting like I didn’t have any idea about the drama unfolding in front of me, and walked up to the lady’s counter. I smiled.
“Mi scusi, signora. Ho bisogna di una stanza. Chiameresti uno di questi?”
The man next to her muttered something to her under his breath. She ignored him and picked up the phone to call the first name on my list. The first listing was indeed filled. The man sat back in his seat with a smug grin on his face. Without looking at him, she said in perfect English so that other waiting tourist could hear, “I know of another place that is only a block away from this one. Would you like me to call it?”
“Yes” (God yes!)
She called and booked me a room. She gave me a referral slip, and I rushed out of the room, not wanting to participate or even witness whatever commotion would occur next.
I didn’t spend much time in Milan. Most of it looks like any other modern industrial city, and I didn’t seek out the few historical attractions it offered. I did not walk on the walkways located on the roof of the Duomo. I think that tourist attraction cost more than I was willing to spend. I did get a haircut thinking it would make me look sophisticated, and for some reason, I spent an afternoon visiting a trade show out in the city’s suburbs. The one interesting picture I took was of Milan’s Galleria Victor Emanuele II, the oldest active shopping mall in Italy. It opened in 1877 and continued to house some of Italy’s finest fashion stores at the time I visited.
After three days in Milan, I left for Bolzano and the Italian Dolomite mountains, a part of Italy I will write about at some later date because it deserves a separate chapter of its own. I then passed out of Italy into Austria.
I explored Italy more thoroughly in 1996. I photographed four Tuscan and Umbrian hill towns along with Venice, Florence, Verona, Urbino, and Mantova. Verona provided the key crossroad for my travels. When I first arrived, its opera festival was winding down. I managed to obtain a ticket for “The Barber of Seville” that, like all the other operas in the festival, was held in a Roman-built coliseum. I found the stone seats to be very uncomfortable and wondered why nobody was complaining about them. On closer inspection, I found that most families brought their own cushions to sit on. Yes, the audience was filled with families. There were some tuxedos and evening gowns in the seats down near the orchestra, but 90% of the audience were typical Italian families taking a night out. Many brought picnic baskets full of food and wine. Unlike here in the United States, where opera is patronized primarily by elites, its support is much broader and deeper in Italy. Serious culture is much more ingrained in the average Italian soul, whether it be music, art, architecture, or fashion.
Besides the opera festival, Verona had a lot to offer. There were the ruins of a Roman theater across the river, several ancient bridges crossing that river, many museums, and many busy market squares. Verona also contained scores of restaurants offering fine dining.
One unexpected tourist attraction was the statue of Juliette Capulet. Juliette never lived in Verona. She didn’t live anywhere. She was a character in a Shakespeare play. Still, her statue was one of the bigger tourist draws in Verona. A legend that I’m sure was manufactured by Verona’s city fathers declares that if you rub Juliette’s bare boob, your luck with love will change for the better (which is ironic given Juliette’s luck with love).
So many tourists have tried to improve their luck over the years that by 2014 they had damaged the statue to the point where it had to be removed for repair. I don’t know if the repairs ever took place. When it was taken down, the city estimated their cost would be about $27,000, and they didn’t have the money at the time.
From Verona, I took day trips to Venice. It was a short train ride between the two cities, and the Venice train station opened out directly onto the Grand Canal, the city’s main watery thorofare.
I never saw the inside of the Doge’s palace nor the interior of any of the city’s magnificent churches. Instead, I was more interested in observing and photographing Venice’s wonderful street life. I now regret this choice after reading about Vittore Carpaccio’s paintings in John Ruskin’s “Saint Mark’s Rest.” These paintings are hung in the out-of-the-way Scuola di San Georgio degli Schiavoni and include his famous “Saint George and the Dragon.” I’d like to return to Venice someday to soak up some of these more cultured pleasures. Still, I don’t regret the time I spent in Venice nor the photos I took of daily life in modern-day Venice.
Beautiful as it is, Venice carries an air of sadness about it. It is slowly sinking into the lagoon while global warming is raising sea levels. Floods have become a recurring event. Also, fewer and fewer people actually live in Venice full time. Currently, only 55,000 people make their homes there.
Those who remain in Venice are essentially living in an open-air museum. Its few youthful inhabitants have difficulty entertaining themselves in the evening when the city becomes a ghost town save for a few high-end restaurants. They have to travel about 50 miles up the coast on winding two-lane roads to find any active nightlife. Unfortunately, driving home from the bars and discos has ended up in many car accidents. Still, while Venice may be a difficult place to live, it is a fantastic place to visit and a beautiful place to photograph!
After visiting Venice for a couple of days, I headed south from Verona to Mantova. I hadn’t done much research on Mantova and only stopped because it was on my way to Tuscany. I was glad I did. There I encountered the Palazzo Te, a summer pleasure palace for the Dukes of Mantova, which the artist Giulio Romano designed and decorated with Frescos of nude picnicking and some highly realistic Trompe l’oeil scenes.
While I had never heard of Giulio Romano before arriving in Mantova, I learned that he was a pupil of Raphael and was well-known as an accomplished artist during his lifetime.
While in Mantova, I was told that the Duke spent so much on his pleasure palace that he raised the tithes on his tenants to the point where they went hungry. One night the villagers broke into his castle and threw him off the roof to his death. I was unable to confirm this story on Wikipedia. It indicates that he died of syphilis. The later Gonzaga men seem to have followed his example of concupiscence. One even died during a bout of vigorous sex. They did leave behind a lot of beautiful art and architecture, though.
After Mantova, I headed further south to Florence, where I spent four days. Despite its amazing architecture and statuary, Florence, unlike Venice, is a working city. Its economy doesn’t rely strictly on the kindness of tourists.
Florence became an industrial city in the middle ages when it developed into a center for wool processing, dyeing, and weaving. The river Arno that runs through the city was critical in creating this industry since it was used during the dyeing process and to wash the finished cloth. The city became wealthy through the sale of its woolens. These profits led to the establishment of several banking families, most notably the De Medicis and the Pittis, who supported much of the city’s art and culture.
Again, I didn’t visit many of the city’s museums, enter the Duomo, or any of the smaller churches. In this instance, the problem wasn’t any lack of interest to do so, but the crowds and long lines of tourists at the major sights. Florence may be a working city, but it is also a major tourist mecca. Lines usually began forming outside the Uffizi Gallery several hours before it opened. I hate waiting in line, and though I really wanted to see the art inside (I’ve heard that it rivals the Louvre), I never did. I did attend a harpsichord concert at a small church one evening and did rise early one morning to photograph Florence from the Piazzale Angelo on the other side of the Arno.
There is a home for retired priests there, and I arrived so early that I caught several of them wandering around in their bathrobes looking through the trash baskets for the previous day’s newspapers. I didn’t have the heart to take photographs of them, however. Florence introduced me to a practice found elsewhere in Italy’s better restaurants. When I walked in the door, I found a table loaded with all the ingredients that would be used for that evening’s menu. I was told to select the ingredients I wanted, and the chef cooked them up according to my clumsy instructions. Luckily the chef could see I was a novice and cooked up a fantastic meal despite my instructions. It was the type of meal that one wants to linger over, which is no problem in Italy. You are expected to take time to enjoy your meal.
After leaving Florence, I headed up the Apennine mountains toward the center of Tuscany.
I’m afraid I’ve forgotten where I took the two pictures below, but they do provide you with an accurate idea of what the Tuscon countryside looks like at these higher elevations.
After Siena, I took the train further south out of Tuscany and into Umbria to the old Etruscan hill town of Perugia. The Etruscans built their city atop a high hill so they could better defend it from their enemies. The hill is indeed a steep one. The train station is at the foot of the hill, and there are a series of escalators which take you up to the original city. The city’s location ended up having the opposite result from its intended purpose. It formed such a strong position that everyone wanted to control it. First, the Romans took it from the Etruscans, and then it was attacked, bombarded, and laid waste over the centuries by numerous enemies. The original Etruscan gate remains. It was simply too thick and strong to be destroyed even by renaissance artillery.
Today Perugia is a much more peaceful city. It is a center of learning, housing the University of Perugia, The University for Foreigners, the Conservatorio di Musica di Perugia, 2 language schools, and a top-notch art school.
My most memorable experience in Perugia occurred while I was eating dinner in the walled courtyard restaurant of an old and high-priced hotel. A rider on a new Ducati motorcycle purred up to the courtyard’s gate, got off, and began to walk between the tables toward the hotel’s front door, where the doorman smiled, opened the front door, and greeted the rider, who then removed her helmet, allowing a torrent of golden-brown hair to tumble out of it. She was a beautiful young woman, who, on closer inspection, was wearing fitted cashmere slacks and sparkling earrings in the shape of little leaping dolphins. I had finally caught a glimpse of the La Dulce Vita I had expected and had come to see.
After Perugia, I headed further into Umbria and landed in Gubbio, a rather small town packed with lots of history. It was here that the Iguvine Tablets were discovered. These tablets contain the largest surviving text of the ancient Umbrian language. The Umbri originally settled this town, not the Romans or even the Etruscans. The Romans did change the town substantially when they built a theater whose surviving ruins are now the second-largest Roman theater in existence. The town also contains many well preserved medieval and renaissance buildings. While it is not as well known as many other hill towns in Tuscany and Umbria, it is well worth visiting.
I hadn’t realized how high up in the Apennines the Umbri had built Gubbio until I left for Urbino in Italy’s Marche region. MY bus spiraled around sharp curves and down steep canyons for almost an hour before arriving at my destination.
Urbino was another town about which I knew nothing before arriving. I ended up liking it better than most of the better know locations I had already visited. It contained a Ducal Palace and the Galleria Nazionale Delle Marche, which housed one of the largest collections of Renaissance art in the world, but didn’t host the tourist crowds I found in Florence or Siena. Also, I was able to stay in an expensive hotel there for half price. It was August, and the chefs were all on vacation, and the hotel felt it needed to cut prices to make up for the lack of an operating kitchen.
I also was able to experience here the more laid back atmosphere of a small Italian town. I visited a small farmers market and the house where the Artist Raphael was born. Both were uncrowded and free. A lady near the market was selling small framed frescoes in a Renaissance style near the market. They were beautiful, and I desperately wanted to buy one, but they were expensive and heavy (they were painted on plaster or some sort of stone), and I didn’t want to lug one around for the rest of my trip. This may be my biggest regret of all the time I spent in Italy.
After spending several wonderful days in Urbino, I took a bus to Fano on the Adriatic, where I caught a slow train northward. The train ran next to the ocean all along the coast until just before Ravenna. I was considering getting off the train at Bimini, a summer resort city popular with Italians. Even though I wanted to see what its famous nightlife was like, I stayed on the train after seeing thousands of beach umbrellas and cloth cabanas sheltering tens of thousands of beach-goers slowly pass by my window. It was August, and I doubted I would have any chance to find a place to stay. I changed trains in Ravenna and found lodging in Verona one more time. The next day I headed for Bolzano in the beautiful Dolomite mountains. That part of the trip was so special that I will cover it in a subsequent chapter.
