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!
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| Ravenna has lots of old churches like this one. |
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| This is Rimini's Roman arch. |
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| The Romans make this bridge (in Rimini). |
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