Days 28-29 and 38-40: Bologna, Verona, Rimini, Ferrara, and Ravenna

I am going to have a million things to say about Bologna and the Dolomites, and I have no partciular order in which to say them (or time to try to think of one), so they will all come out in a rush.

First off, I forgot to compare Siena to Paris. I probably mentioned (I am afraid), in an earlier post, that large parts of Paris’ medieval center were cleared to make newer, broader streets in the 18th or 19th century—I cannot remember exactly when. Siena, with its preserved medieval center, contrasts directly with this; it is curious that the city’s having ceased to grow—i.e., its have ceased to be as relevant as it had formerly been—it what helped to preserve it. Had it continued to grow with each passing century, it also would probably have been altered to suit larger numbers of pedestrians, carriages, and people who wanted to look at broad, new boulevards and wedding cake facades.

For Verona I had, naturally, too little time, just as for Lucca, Pisa, and basically every other city that I visited after Rome. I started my day by missing the train that I had booked in Vancouver, which came to be a growing trend on this trip. While it makes little sense to complain when one is given a unique opportunity to travel and has a travel agent to help organize one’s trip—while it feels petulant to be complaining at all given that some people have to get up even earlier than I to go to work—I have noted, several times, that, high-mindedness aside, I have been tired and miserable, as my travel agent is very fond of early morning trains, and I let myself be talked into taking a lot of them. While this worked out tolerably early in my trip, as I grew progressively tired, I ended up missing increasingly more of them and resenting the ones that I made, as getting up early is, to me, tantamount to throwing away the day, since it leaves me too tired to appreciate anything that I see in whatever city I am visiting. My missing the trains both to and from Verona did not lead me to waste that much money (as frustrating as it was—one hates to throw money down the train), but it did mean that I had slept little and was nonetheless left with little time to explore the city.

To my good fortune, I already had a city map when I got to Verona thanks to someone whom I had met the previous evening—of this I will write more presently. Verona is a city of awesome beauty. Its historical center, like Siena’s, is very well-preserved, and, like Florence, it shows signs of having continued to develop right through the medieval ages and Rennaisance, with buildings from those eras that are of independent merit, and not mere spin-offs or plunderings of ancient structures. It has, if I remember correctly, a few central plazas, which may have contributed to its ancient amphitheatre’s having been left almost untouched: instead of repurposing its stones or building all around it, obstructing one’s view and approach to it, the Veronans (as I have yclept them) built an attractive ring of houses and other buildings near it and developed separate plazas for their medival center (I have a somewhat faint memory of these). What I remember most of the largest medieval plaza, besides the beauty of the buildings surronding it (again, in a sort of quadrangle; they all had flat facades of something like stucco and were painted in various shades of yellow, orange, and red), is the tower in the middle of it. I chose to climb this tower, forgoing, for want of time, the chance to see the Roman bridge and theatre just outside of the city center and the hill behind them, which would have given me a good view of the city; instead, I got a panoramic view of different parts of the city, the frustration of city towers being that they rarely give one a view of the whole city center at once, from one angle, as they are usually in the center of it. My ticket for the tower gave me free entrance to an adjoining art gallery (which had formerly been, I believe, some sort of castle, then a prison), where I saw fantastic paintings from several centuries by artists of whom I had never heard and learned that Verona had long been a center of learning and the arts, drawing scholars and artists from all over Italy (and beyond, I think).

Alas, I had to run once I had seen the art gallery, as I was already on my way to missing the train back to my hostel, and I had arranged to meet someone that evening. On my way back to the train station, a different way from that by which I had come to the old town, I passed a couple of massive Roman arches, a medieval castle and bridge, and, if my memory holds (for this might have been in a different, nearby city that I visited), an organization for the asylum of people fleeing from Ukraine. I spent the evening with the acquaintance mentioned earlier, a man named Dima whom I had met through his wife, Olga, who worked at the hostel where I was staying. Dima was interested in my impressions of Italy and tried to convince me that the country was more civilized than I was giving it credit for. He had an interesting theory, when I marvelled at people’s gathering in public squares, walking, and having drinks in outdoor cafes until late at night, that, besides having a shared history of gathering for church, town hall meetings, &c. (i.e., hundreds of years of shared history), people spend more time outdoors in the evenings in hot climates. (I had mentioned that people in Vancouver lead very private lives—the climate is cold, and we have no such shared history.) Dima pointed out that when it is hot in your room at 10:00 or 11:00 PM, you might step outside for fresh air, and, since people are outdoors anyway, cafes, bars, &c. arise to satisfy their needs for food, drink, and, most importantly, a place to sit at leisure. Students gather in one particular plaza to drink, play the guitar, and chat through the night; people in their late twenties and early thirties, in stylish dreshes and tailored jeans and shirts, go to fancier bars; and people all through the night can be seen walking at ease. Dima showed me parts of the town that I would not otherwise have noticed: the city’s canals, an art gallery that was running a good exhibition (he said), the massive town gate near the road to a church on a hill where people go running, little side lanes, and, later, a university building connected with Spanish studies that was technically part of Spain. He would point out interesting architectural features of the buildings that we passed, such as each house’s having an even number of windows due to some law and the variance in facades’ colors. We parted ways sometime after midnight. (I had been hoping to go running but figured that I would get other chances to do so; it was interesting to me how one expects one thing and gets another when travelling, and how that unpredictability is probably the most worthwhile thing of all.)

I have mercifully few notes at this point. I noticed a fair bit of Arab writing in Verona, as I had started to do generally in the north of Italy, and saw a lot of people wearing funny tee-shirts with writing in English (I have noted a small number of them, and only, I hope, the very best). These included a man with a shirt that read, “I’m an enthusiastic, intellectual, motivated person;” a young woman with a shirt that read, “Everything begins with responsibility;” a woman with a child with a shirt that read, “Reckless woman,” though I am implying the initial ‘r,’ as I could not quite see it—the shirt could just have easily have read “Feckless woman;” I saw a woman talking animatedly with a young man, and her shirt read, “No boyfriend/No problem;” I saw shirts that read, “Don’t have a bad attitude,” “Do all things with love,” and, “Thank you;” and I saw an overweight woman with a shirt that had three words, one above the other, with boxes next to them and a checkmark in the last box: “Boyfriend, parties, fries.” While one might thus posit that Italians speak poor English and do not understand what is written on their shirts, an alternate explanation is that people really do not care one way or another what their shirts say—I have a shirt with a giant Nike swoosh and “Nike” written across it, and I have another one promoting Lance Armstrong, both of which I wear because they fit well, regardless of how they look.

I noted that a man smiled at me, for almost the first time since I had entered Italy, at a restaurant in Florence and that the line-ups for information and tickets at the Bologna railway station were gigantic, like those in Naples and Rome. I noted the excellent fruit in Tuscany and people’s honesty there: if one asks for, say, a hundred grams of meat or half of a kilogram of grapes, one will be given just that amount, while in the rest of Italy that I have seen, vendors will always throw in an extra few hundred grams to make more money. (I believe that I have already noted the necessity of baseline honesty for a society to function; e.g., if you pay $20 for something that costs $15, the vendor will give you your change.) I noted that Bologna’s having been bombed in World War II was a disaster for the city’s heritage but was, logistically speaking, better for people today, as the large, arcaded streets are much more conveninent for travel than narrow, cobblestoned ones. (Bologna’s arcades are themselves worth mention—there are miles and miles of them, like a perpetual awning over storefronts and people’s front steps.) Many of the gates of Bologna’s town walls are still standing as a testament to what was: while very few cities, such as Lucca, have an intact set of original town walls, it appears that essentially all important cities used to have them and that they were torn down to enable expansion in many of those cities when they were no longer useful as a means of defence. (Rimini, for example, also had them.) I have noted Bologna’s historical wealth—its main library is built on the foundations of Roman ruins that one can see through a transparent part of the floor; it was historically a center of learning and a crossroads between Rome and the north—and I have noted that I was trying, as usual, to see too much.

The food in Bologna was bad. The only dish that I tried in a restaurant was spaghetti a la bolognese, which was pasta with a sauce of cream and meatballs that just barely qualified as food. I am going to break with tradition, at this point, and intentionally interrupt the chronology of my travel journal, skipping over the Dolomites and saving them for later, as my notes of that part of my trip are copious, and I do not want to get held up by them. There are beggars all over Bologna, as there appear to be all over Italy and Europe (and the world) in general; it struck me, as I looked at one of them, just how different my ideas of a normal life were from theirs. I have little to say about Ferrara except that it was quiet, a shopkeeper smiled and me and took an interest in my description of my summer trip, and it had two major centers, a medieval one and a Renaissance one, which were in slightly different parts of town. (The building that I remember most of all there is the castle, which had squarish crenellation that probably has an architectural name that I could look up.) People drive almost like human beings in Bologna and Ferrara: they stop at red lights, drive when the light is green, and allow one to cross the street when the law demands it. A man asked, when he saw me looking at my map in Bologna, if I was lost (this had not happened anywhere else in Italy; it happens constantly in Germany and Sweden); there were no stray dogs or trash heaps (that I could see) in Florence; the roads in Florence are only broad enough to allow the passage of, at best, one car (in the old town); I spent way too much money in Florence; and the trains, even the high-speed intercity trains, were always late.

My most enjoyable interaction in the north of Italy—that is, the funniest—was, oddly, during a Russian lesson. When Olga, the hostel employee with whose husband I hung out, learned that I had learned the language from scratch, she invited me to join her weekly Russian class as a special guest. One of the things that we talked about, during class, was my impressions of Italy and theirs of the United States. I did not say that I hated Italy but tried to point out certain of its shortcomings in maximally netural terms, such as the utter chaos on the roads. When I mentioned that people smoked everywhere, even in train stations, one of the students there, a middle-aged man from, I believe, the north, exclaimed wide-eyed, and with complete sincerity, “But that’s illegal!” I have noted here—perhaps I have already said this—that people in Italy have not yet learned to share sidewalks: when there is enough room for two people walking in opposite directions to pass by each other by sticking to their side of the walkway, most people here will walk straight down the middle, almost with their elbows out. I learned, soon upon arriving here, that the standard protocol is to do more or less the same and walk right into them (not nose-to-nose, but shoulder-to-shoulder); Italians are frail for lack of exercise and do not present much of an obstacle. I noted how strange it was to be angry all of the time. People in Italy struck me, in the whole of my time there (except, perhaps, in Turin) as bellicose and dour, and I found that, the more time I spent there, the more I became like them. One does not smile in Italy lest one’s smile not be returned; one does not wait politely in line lest one be shoved out of it; one does not make way for people lest one not get anywhere oneself. The preferred way of living here, in contrast to that of western and northern Europe, seems to be ‘every man for himself,’ and to try to break that mould is to sink.

I have noted, yet again, that I was counting down the days until I could leave Italy, and I cancelled my side-trip from Ljubljana to Trieste, having learned, based on my experiences in Nantes and, more recently, in most of the cities that I have visited, that to swoop into a place, run through its city center, and dash away again is to gain almost nothing (perhaps I exaggerate; what I mean is that I am tired of doing it at the moment, and I am not so fussed about seeing all of Italy, as it is impossible). I wanted to cancel my side-trip from Genoa to Turin, and, if it had been possible, would have cancelled the trip to Genoa altogether, but I discovered that my train to and from Turin was already booked (get this: at a reasonable time of day), so I resigned myself to a bit more tiring travel. I noted, having seen part of Bologna with Dima, that experiencing a city was more interesting than cataloguing its monuments, and, congratulating myself on my lessening obsession with seeing everything, I resolved not to bother looking at all of Bologna’s city gates for the sake of seeing them, then went ahead and did it a few days later. I have once again noted having too little time for every city that I have visited, though, given the scope of this (and past) trips, that does not seem like such a big deal to me now.

It is 1:30 PM and sunny outside; I am hungry, in Salzburg, and eager to get outdoors. At present I am copying photos from my old computer to my new one, though, so that I can sell the new one here (it has a German keyboard; I still need to see if I can sell it). I have wanted, judging by my notes, to return to Biblical allegories, and I realized, after trashing the Catholic church, that I had not said much about the allegories themselves. One’s preconceptions of their meaning intrude upon any reading that one might give them—I am inclined to say that they encourage people to come to church and give themselves up to it for the greater good. The images of salvation and God’s (and his retinue’s) exultation make it seem like something noble, while the images of Christ’s crucifixion seem aimed at making people think that they are all guilty of someone else’s crime. Biblical imagery often strikes me as fatalistic and apocalyptic, as though all of the best were behind us already, which strikes me as strange, since one has little reason to live if the world is already ruined; while the images of spiritual peace and harmony seem to me to transcend any particular church and to be a major lure toward religion. I am sure that religious scholars would have interesting things to say about other aspects of the imagery that I have not covered—salvation, and so on—but I have probably exhausted my store of ideas about it.

The mythology of early Christianity, based on what I saw in Ravenna, was much simpler than what followed—it was obviously built upon over time. The interiors of the early Christian churches that I saw in Ravenna mostly showed someone—Christ—in the water with an old man to his left and some other guy to his right, and I think that a few of them had apostles with their hands in the air (they looked suitably awed). The medieval morons added a bit of artwork of their own to some of these churches (I have probably mentioned the relative newness, as I see it, of the idea of cultural preservation.)—they thought that opulent paintings of cherubs and winged chariots and other buggery would fit in naturally with the austere images of robed, featureless men that the fifth-century Christians had painted, almost like a flamingo would fit in with a flock of starlings. (The images in the early churches reminded me of Russian iconography, which seems to have captured the spirit of early Christianity pretty well—that is, the imagistic spirit.) These more austere churches were so interesting that they made me want to visit Buddhist temples for comparison, as both early Christianity and Buddhism (as far as I am acquainted with it—barely at all) seem to me to eschew prescribed forms of worship and to be honest attempts to understand the world and make peace with it.

Ravenna was interesting beyond its churches (though they were the main highlight, to be sure, and made it one of the few day-trips that I have taken that was, for all of its being rushed, unequivocally worth it). It had clean, tree-lined streets, through one of which someone was blasting Tupac’s “‘Lil Homies” through the rolled-down windows of his car. (This was so funny that I burst out laughing. There is, apparently, a heaven for a G, and it is in Ravenna. On another note—I apologize for the inside joke—I saw so many churches in Florence that I started thinking of Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones: Part II” each time I entered one (specifically, the line: “Getting closer to God in a tight situation now”).) One of the more modern churches that I visited had church music playing through speakers, while one of the older church’s giftshops included such items as cigarette lighters with its image printed on them. There were African migrants everywhere in this region. The train ride back to Bologna was sweltering.

Rimini was largely uninteresting, as it held almost no surprises for me. There was a tourist office right out front of the train station, which did surprise me, and there were an Asian food store and a lousy Russian food store (the first that I had seen since Catania, I believe). Still, the Roman bridge was where I expected it to be, the Roman arch was where I expected it to be, and there was little else to see there besides a Russian tour group and a Roman gate of whose existence I had been unaware. (There were also a castle and, perhaps, one or two other interesting buildings.) Travel is always more interesting when one is surprised by what one sees—even if one has seen thousands of images of the Egyptian pyramids and goes to Giza or Luxor with no other purpose than to visit them, one at least knows that their interiors will be surprising and that the experience of stepping into them might be in some ways otherworldly. I saw more Arabic writing in Rimini (advertisements for things), and people were reasonably friendly, leaving me to wonder if poverty makes them unfriendly, but there are surely plenty of poor places where people are friendly and plenty of rich places where they are not, dashing any direct correlation (that I can find) between the two.

I am nearing the end of these confounded notes (at least, for this part of the trip), and I have finished transferring the images from my old computer. I bumped into someone from the Russian lessons by chance after eating that awful meal in Bologna; she is an engineer planning on moving to Germany for work and was disappointed to hear how much I had disliked Italy. In fairness, one could spend weeks in Bologna wandering the city and the nearby hills. It is lively, it has free movies and music in the city’s squares, it is full of museums, and the people there are the most amenable that I met in all of Italy. At one point, when I was running back from the church on the hill, a driver saw me coming (I was running through an arcade, but he spotted me in gaps between its arches.), stopped his car in advance, and let me cross the street instead of failing to shoulder-check and trying to kill me. Bologna is chock full of plaques; every street seems to have some sort of history behind it. (This sounds clicheed, as every street has a history by dint of existing; I mean that every street seems to have been historically important beyond just conveying people—that is, the buildings lining each street were thus important, minus the part about conveyance.) Finally, the few Roman ruins there reminded me of those in York, where they are visible from a pub, and in Konstanz, where they are similarly shielded by a glass barrier that lets one see them, near the cathedral, beneath street level. There are Roman ruins everywhere in this general part of the world—even Pisa, not at all known for them, had the ruins of a bath complex—and people seem interested in preserving them at this point.

This marks the end of my notes for the parts of Italy of which I have been writing. I should be able to write about Genoa, Lake Constance, and Salzburg over the next two days, leaving me only the Dolomites to catch up on. I am now going to try to sell this computer and take a turn through Salzburg’s old town, as it is a gorgeous day, and I have been raring to get outside.

Have a good time doing whatever you are doing!

Ravenna has lots of old churches like this one.

This is Rimini's Roman arch.

The Romans make this bridge (in Rimini).

This is part of an unusual church in Bologna.

This is one of those triumphal columns (not Roman).

Houses in Bologna are red, orange, peach, and yellow.

This is one of Bologna's many old gates.

These are buildings in the centre of town.

This is Bologna's well-known observation tower.

Part of the old town from up above.

Some of the rest of the old town.

Another gate (there are something like 13 of them).

Italians are not of broad streets.

This appears to be the centre of Ferrari.

This is probably part of Bologna.

Verona's famed amphitheatre, complete with a red gate.

The house where Romeo and Juliet met, as per legend.

Verona's old town square.

Verona's roofs--sideways.

A cool look at a smaller plaza.

The Romans erected this arch in Verona.

More Bolognese houses.

The light of God lit this church at sunset. (He is everywhere in Europe.)

Venice.

A narrow Venetian street.

San Marco Square awed me.

Days 24-27: Florence, Siena, Lucca, and Pisa

I have, if the truth be told, had plenty of time to write over the past couple of weeks, and especially since arriving in Lindau yesterday, but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I am quite good at distracting myself from my blog (which will not actually be a blog until I am back, as I do not have the energy to sort through my photos and put these letters online yet), and I have allowed it to become a sort of burden to me, something that I put off for no particular reason. I am going to try to catch up on it before leaving Lindau, as I do not see any reason not to; instead of working on it, I have often browsed the Internet, worked on future travel plans, and otherwise killed time.

I am afraid that I have to start his post with a reference to the previous one. I completely forgot to mention that Saint Peter’s Basilica (forgive my previous ire) seemed to me much less substantial than the cathedrals of Worms and Speyer, which, I suppose, struck me as more successful wholes. I also forgot to mention having cancelled my side-trip from Ljubljana to Trieste (en route to Pula), both to save money and to avoid taking another meaningless, one-day side-trip. I am increasingly learning that one day is not enough time to get a sense of any large city and that one does better to spend, say, a week in a place and gradually explore it than to spend a day or two in several places and be left with no real sense of any of them.

I will, again, rush through my notes. I got something of a sense of Umbria’s charm as I travelled north by train to Florence: it seems a little quieter and more rural than Italy’s more prominent tourist attractions; its hills and the towns and cypresses sitting atop them form a very pleasing landscape. The food in Florence is amazing. I noted the city’s layout, but I do not know why, and I noted that people seemed aware, in Florence, that traffic laws existed: they sometimes stopped their cars at pedestrian crosswalks and almost waited for one to finish crossing before gunning the engine. Everything here costs a lot of money—if one were to enter every church or museum that caught one’s interest, one could easily shell out forty Euros a day, even ignoring the costs of food, transportation, lodging, &c. (I made that number up; I mean simply that things are expensive.) Florence has public water fountains, like Rome, and it was full of vestiges of recent cultural development, unlike Rome, which had been degrading for 2000 years. Beyond its museums and art galleries, Florence’s churches itself seemed to me a sign of culture, as they were, in the middle ages, bastions of learning. In one church, one had to pay $1.50 to light a candle—I like how the church is always asking for more money—while in another, when someone went up to a particular icon, a nun came up and mimed that one had to pray to approach it. This I found especially interesting, and it reminded me of how women often throw on wraps or shawls before entering churches, only to take them off again as soon as they have stepped outside: gesture, and, more broadly, symbolism, is extremely important to us. I would like to support this statement with further evidence, but I am dead tired (an apt excuse, if I say so myself), and I cannot think of one beyond the use of multilingual signs (say, in English and Welsh) when hardly anybody actually needs them. Here is a better one: Ukraine recently celebrated VE Day on May 8th instead of May 9th and used some European symbol or other rather than the Russian symbol. This cannot have had any value except as a gesture, yet it was of the utmost importance to the country. Observing religious rites when visiting sites of religious significance is also meaningless in a sense (to pray before an icon and to stand before it are identical except as gestures), yet it has great importance to people who care.

The architecture of Florence is, of course, worth noting. The streets here are narrow, as in Palermo or Catania, but almost none of the buildings in the old town have balconies. Instead, they have thick wooden shutters, almost all of which are painted green, giving the old town a unity that is oddly mesmerizing. (I observed people’s leaning out of their shuttered windows and hollering down the street at times. The volume of verbiage that Italians produce is prodigious—I have seen bus drivers hold conversations with seeming strangers for over an hour straight.) Florence has public water fountains, like Rome, and yellow and ochre buildings, seemingly burnished by the sun, if I remember correctly. Every third building in Florence seems to be an ice cream shop, cafe, or delicatessen. Its sidewalks range from a meter wide, at their peak, to non-existent.

The inside of Florence’s cathedral blew me away, though I cannot, regrettably, remember why. I do remember its stained glass windows, the nicest, I believe, that I had seen in Italy at that point (and probably still the nicest, even now), and the queer green-and-white brickword that would characterize many of the cathedrals that I saw in Tuscany. While the cathedral is known principally for its dome (perhaps in part because of its being a seeming cognate with the Italian word for cathedral, “duomo”), the alternating green and white brick of its main corpus (I do not know the architectural name of it—sorry) struck me as much more distinctive.  Its bells ring beautifully, which led me to note, somewhat enigmatically—for I noted their absence in the south of Italy—that church bells were the one thing that the Italians seemed to know how to build.

I apologize, again, to those of you who do not hate Italy.

I noted that the entrance to everything—every museum, every art gallery, and even many churches—cost money and that one could quickly go broke by spending five Euros here, ten there. The food in Florence is amazing—one could easily spend a week or two exploring the hills and the nearby towns, but the trip would be, admittedly, mostly gastronomical. The area outside of the old town is also neat—specifically, the riverbank. I went running along the Arno a couple of times and quite enjoyed the parks and statues outside of the old town. Part of Florence’s former town walls is preserved on a hill, at the top of which is a church with a plaza that affords one a decent view of the city. (On the day when I explored Florence the most, the best plaza for viewing the city was closed down, as there was going to be a fireworks display in the evening in honor of some saint important to the city. There was a massive soccer game and a parade that day. People seemed excited.) I noted someone’s yelling in a train station, which harkens back to my point about people’s holleringup and down the street. Italians, unlike, say, Russians, seem perfectly fine making tons of noise in public, and, while it annoys me that Muscovites mumble all of the time, as if fearful that their interlocutors might hear what they are saying, I can understand some of the cultural appeal of trying to moderate one’s noise levels.

I wish that I had more time, and a sharper memory, to describe my bus ride to Siena. It started out pleasantly: I bought some first-rate fruit (probably, grapes, cherries, and either peaches or nectarines, all of which are excellent in Florence) from a vendor whose store I had spotted the other day… and that was really the only thing that marked the start of my day. I remember the bus as being hot with the sort of amber heat of a sunlit vehicle on a summer day; I remember being seated close enough to the man beside me to sweat, being clad in shorts, through his lower pant leg. A beautiful woman seated across from me nodded off, her head lolling in every direction. The bus started off by taking me through parts of Florence that I had not yet explored by foot, past former guard towers and more museums. If churches and Roman ruins were endless in Rome, museums and statues are endless in Florence. I suppoes that I must have liked the landscapes on the way to Siena, as, on this trip, I felt a strange emotion that I could not immediately place. Partway through the bus ride, I smiled and realized that for the first time since I had arrived in Italy, I was content.

Siena itself was awesome. As soon as I got off of the bus there, I found a first-rate deli, where I got my lunch; I do not know if I have mentioned that Italians are into smoked meats, all manner of cheeses (perhaps harder and less exotic than those of France), and thick, crusty, substantial bread. I had a city map of Siena from someone in my hostel, which was a big help, as I could not otherwise have gotten one until I had already walked through much of the old town, which is composed entirely of the sun-baked, auburn buildings that populate Florence. It has parts of its town walls, a fortress, and a monastery just outside of the city center (none of which I had time to visit), which itself is dominated by the medieval tower that gives one a commanding view of the surrounding hills. Siena appears to have preserved its medieval form almost entirely, probably because it stopped growing at some point, when, as in the case of Lindau, where I am now staying, it became less relevant and money started to flow elsewhere. (More on this later.) One of its most impressive features was that its whole city center was a pedestrian-only zone, and, while there were nonetheless cars anywhere, the fact that a pedestrian zone had at least been attempted showed admirable sapience in a country so wanting in it.

I learned a great deal about Siena’s history by chance, having wandered into what looked like a museum to see if it was free. As it turned out, I had entered a bank, part of which was a museum of the history of banking in Siena, and, as the woman working there spoke Russian (i.e., was from Russia), I was able to learn that Siena had largely developed as a banking town, lacking industry for want a river. Siena was, like Bologna (as I would later learn), located on a crossroads between major cities (Florence and Rome, if my geography serves me right), and some powerful families settled there, I believe. It reached its peak in something like the thirteenth century and must have retained enough power not to sink into oblivion, as its buildings are in excellent shape.

I made another note about Italian food, as Tuscan food is fabulous. I tried spaghetti a la carbonara for the first time in Florence—it is a pasta dish with a sauce thickened, apparently, by eggs. I tried a kind of thick sliced meat, a sort of cross cut of a turkey cutlet stuffed with something greenish (spinach? Pesto? I could not tell). Tuscans are fond of fatty meat, which butchers will often trim a little when they are selling it, and of a minestrone dish called rebollita, which I did not get to try. While Italian food often gets passed off as pasta and pizza, I think that people do not realize the vastness of the variety of pasta dishes that are offered here—everything is more of less in the sauce, of which there appear to be scores, if not hundreds, of varieties. I do not recall trying any pastries in Florence, as I was probably trying to hold off on them, and cannot say much of anything new about Italian pastries. The gelato here is, when one is given a recommendation for a good place, otherworldly. I had held off on ice cream for quite some time before coming to Florence and had it twice in one day (on the one day on which I had it) to such good effect that I will have a hard time transitioning back to regular ice cream in the future.

I had too little time to see either Pisa or Lucca in much depth, and I again lamented having packed so many different cities into my itinerary: it was better, I decided, to see one or two places thoroughly than to barely get a glimpse of many; and I would have liked to skip Genoa, Turin, and Cinque Terre entirely if it had been easy to cancel my hostel and train reservations. Siena was, I noted, jam-packed with art galleries and museums, like Florence. I saw two young men proposition a girl out of the blue at the bus stop. I bumped into someone whom I had seen at another hostel, with whom I discussed the rise to prominence of this or that city, and I had an interesting time buying sunglasses, which I needed because of having lost my old pair. To make a long story short, I was torn between buying more expensive ones that had a sticker on them about their UVA and UVB protection and buying cheaper ones with no sticker, and I settled on the cheaper ones when a saleswoman explained that the expensive ones were “more special,” as evident from their price. (I later did some research and discovered that the cheaper ones had perfectly adequate UV protection.)

Perhaps my most memorable interaction in Florence was with the Bangladeshi owner of the fruit and vegetable market that I came to frequent. He had a work visa through 2025 and, when I asked him if he ever planned to retire, told me, “No, not tired—I’m still young” and explained that he often worked 14-hour days. On my last day in Florence, I dropped a ten-cent coin as I was paying him for my produce. We both heard it hit the floor, and I was about to give up on it when he told me to hang on a second. He grabbed a knife from the counter, got down on his hands and knees, hunted beneath a storage crate for it, and fished it out, refusing it when I tried to offer it to him as a tip. I would love to write much more about Florence and its surroundings, but, as I have too little time for each city, I have too little time for each letter home, and my memory, in any case, leaves much to be desired.

This is a typical Florentine street.

This is the side of Florence's distinctive cathedral.

This place had, if my memory holds, fabulous ice cream.

This looks like a market, but it is probably just for tourists.

This is the fancy courtyard of a church.

These are tourists in their native habitat.

This is a broader, but architecturally similar, Florentine street.

All of us know what this is.

A staircase leading nowhere?

Siena from the cathedral's spire.

The ornate roof of some religious building.

Florence's cathedral has a leg up on Siena's.

The delicatessens here, and the food generally, are phenomenal.

This is yet another Florentine street.

I found Roman ruins in Pisa; I have got a nose for them.

This is Pisa's former defensive wall. To be honest, I urinated on it.

This is the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

People perhaps forget that it is next to a cathedral.

This is an OK view of Lucca's defensive wall, which is intact.

Lucca's streets look just like Florence's.

Lucca's cathedral toppled over in shame, as it is worse than Florence's.

This is another so-so view of the wall.

Florence once had a defensive wall, as evinced by towers like this one.

Florentines drive silly cars.

This place definitely had first-rate ice cream.

One can easily guess where this was taken.

This appears to be a repeat of an earlier photo.

Even the garbage trucks here are cute.

I did not try it.

The Arno.

Florence from up above. The best viewpoint was cordoned off.

The light of God marked the end of my stay.