Despite my love of all the places I've seen, I must admit that Italy has the best art anywhere. Lucky Italians; their people gave rise to two of the greatest civilizations that ever existed, ancient Rome and the Renaissance, admittedly related since the second was a rediscovery of the first; and I gotta give the goths credit for busting up their empire, but still Wow they did some great things, all ready for viewing by the interested tourist.
I met mom and my stepfather, Tim, in the Roma airport. In classic Italian style they sent his baggage to Frankfurt, so he ended up traveling lighter even than me for the first leg of the journey until on the same day he bought new clothes and got his old ones back; over the next weeks we constantly struggled to stuff everything in our limited luggage and popped a few hernias and zippers to some diversion. USAir is lucky they didn't lose mom's shoes, and that's all I'll say about that.
We hopped north to Firenze immediately where we gaped at the masterpieces bulging out of the museums and into the omnipresent piazzas. I remember booting Adobe Illustrator and seeing the face of Venus hundreds of times, but to see her Birth right there in front of me was breathtaking. The same face appeared other times in Botticelli's other works-who was that love of his?
I found myself being critical of little details. The mastery of technique must've forced my critical nature down away from the incredibly rendered realism and into the insignificant. For example, in the Birth of Venus I wondered why the perspective on the ripply waves was so inaccurate, when the rest was so well done. I wondered also why that might possibly be important to my mind, and speculated roughly that they were focussing on realism such that deviations from that goal were notable failings. That realism appealled to me greatly, much more so than the attempts of the pre-Renaissance artists. I hesitate to think that the later stuff is "better" but the thought more than once popped into my head. An explanation might be that in this age of photography, realism is built deeply into my context and so other realisms ring true. But I think it also has something to do with the fact that we are biologically hard-wired to recognize faces (try flipping a magazine upside-down and open to a random page: can you tell who you see?): the more realistic the face, the more our innate capacities are excited into thought, the more we can read in the expression, and the more the artist can convey. That still applies tho to a lesser degree to other forms of realism, in bodies and lighting and scenery for examples. But what about the more modern techniques which move away from realism: does this argument claim they're inferior? Well, the argument does but let me and a caviat. Nonrealism might excite "broader" thoughts, less "tuned" thoughts, which might appear somehow blurrier, more ephemeral, and less describable but no less real or powerful, and might even inspire more creative thoughts that extend beyond normal boundaries... I fear I've dug myself into a hole so let me talk about holes.
The Etruscans liked to dig them. At least, the ones who lived in Orvietto liked to. Orvietto is the sight of incredibly well-preserved cities from the past, built on a crag of volcanic rock (tufa, which has a texture not terribly unlike tofu but you're not really supposed to eat it) for better defense. Course, if somebody decided to be nasty and lay siege to your crag then you'd better have water, so to this end the pre-Christ Etruscans dug wells about 80cm by 120cm and down about a football field. It is thought that some person had to stand up top and use bellows to puff fresh air thru terracotta tubes to the poor soul digging at the bottom. Mom thought that if the bellower decided to take an early lunchbreak the guy at the bottom was "shafted." Later villagers figured out that they could did little cisterns instead of tunnelling to Hawaii and started using the wells as trash dumps. The archaeologists were pretty psyched to find a chronologically ordered set of artifacts. Is that what a Balinese stray dog feels when it finds a banana peel in a pile of garbage, or is that an unfair comparison? Certainly it's better than pouring waste into canals as in Bangkok.
Yet I must say the canals of Venezia were none too clean. Let this not diminish the beauty and impact of the first emergence from the train station, blinking as pupils adjust to the light gleaming from the houses across the Grand Canal, and hopping a boat-bus down to the enormous Piazza di San Marco. Cars are banned in Venice, which suits me just fine as I get to explore gorgeosity of the teeny winding side streets along the back canals sporting shops of Carnival masks and deservedly famous glasswork intricacies without fear of being run over around a blind corner. It used to be a major center of power, with a senate floor so large that they decorated it with the largest painting in the world, a depiction of the Crusades that seems to include every last participant. The nuts actually succeeded in building a city right on the water! It turned out beautifully, and today others evidently concur: so many that the rich retirees from Europe and America have driven out the locals with escalating domicile prices; the demographics are severly skewed towards antiquity, altho there is a fair student population that works for the booming tourism industry.
'Course after living in a Tuscan farm for n years I can see the appeal in giving up the hard life of tending the vineyards. Still I can't imagine giving up the rolling hills and endless green fields. The Barons of Broglie agreed and built an excellent castle that few tourists seem to find; people still live there, and the thing was built well before the first recorded sale date of 1067. With all of the wine they drink in Italy I can see how it might be possible to build an empire from a few fields of grapes: "water is only good for cleaning." We went into some secularized abby, now a private home, and learned about Chianti Classico, the main wine of Tuscany. Wine appreciation has caught my interest; it's yet another expensive hobby I hope not to acquire. Maybe I could work it into my degree program; I think it possible: correlate the "structure" of the taste as it flowers over time and chemically excites various tastebud populations variously situated around the tongue. You can go to school for winemaking, it's a sophisticated science/art.
We needed the relaxation of the Tuscan wine to prepare for the Big city: Roma. My lord, walking ten hours a day for four days isn't nearly sufficient for even a cursory glance at its offerings. I reminisce of learning about the Rise of Western Civilization in high school, hearing of the Roman art and architecture, and there I was, standing on the very steps on which poor Caesar took it in the gut. Oh, yeah, there are some ancient Roman columns; they're a lot newer than the shards of pottery that date permanent settlement on the Paletine hill of Rome to seven and a half centuries before the Big Man, and much Much newer than the 35000 year old knives from the Stone Age. If you're not sure whether that dating is real since it predates Creation, sure, go have an audience with the Pope. He knows what's going on and what's important, take for example the Pantheon, an intact 43 meter dome whose gilded ceiling was melted down by some Pope or other for the glory of the Vatican. Which, by the way, is just here over the Tiber River, monstrous and opulently ornate bursting with the blood, sweat and tears of masterful sculptors polishing and perfecting the figures of their adored saints. Below lie the bones of the Rock, Saint Pietro, Peter, that very first Pope. You can follow his tracks down the Appian Way treading on the very same stones and stopping at the church of Quo Vadis? where he saw a vision of Christ who convinced him to go back to Rome to be crucified; you can see the footprints that Jesus left in the rock after the vision vanished, in the Basilica of Saint Sebastian right next to the alter housing the arrows that pierced Seb's body, which was itself once interred in the catacombes below but now distributed as relics in ornate reliquaria all over the earth. The chains that bound Peter upon his return from the Appian necropolis you can see right next to Michaelangelo's provacative statue of Moses. And if you fancy that work, I recommend waiting in the line for the one and only Ceiling, but do take a neck brace. Note that Mikey gave Jesus a shave in his painting of the Last Judgment. All of these things as tangible as the gnocchi alla ragu or the melanzane alla parmigiana or the gelati. Ah, the gelati: Ben and Jerry's move over! I recommend the Vaniglia, unlike anything you've tasted, a subtle symphony of nuance ranging from the cream (of course) to an egg-noggy liquor. This differs from the recommendation of gelatina pollo, or chicken jello, which is also unlike anything you've tasted before, or the Pane ca' meusa, a Sicilian specialty sandwich of lung and spleen which have not yet tried.
Better, the odor of pomodoro (tomato) wafts in from to meritorious kitchen of my Palermo hosts. A train ride past Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius and an overnight ferry from Napoli to Sicily deposited me here in the good hands of Marco Natoli,half-zeroeth-cousin-once-removed of Emiliano, my apartmentmate of last year who has the dubious honor of having inspired me to take this trip with which's copiously-xaq-thought-inducing descriptions you are now burdened. Marco's family has been treating me with the utmost in Sicilian hospitality, making me so comfortable that I hesitate to even leave the building's 11th-story panorama to see the rich sights of this coastal city; they afford me the leisure of contorting the language of my email to this extent: I think I need it as an outlet since immersion in the Italian language is total here. Thank my teachers for my French, without which I'd be utterly lost: by speaking french with an italian accent, inflecting a lot, and adding "ay" to the end of every word, I can pretty much make myself understood. Understanding what others say, that's a bit tougher. But I do know "mangiamo": I am being beckoned to the table for eating.
Ciao, e bon appetito.
-xaq