jere7my | Entries tagged with italy

It seems to have taken me six months to finish my Honeymoon Photo Project. (What will I do now?) All of the 1500-odd photos are arranged into tidy sets here:

www.flickr.com/photos/jere7my/collections/72157621208654448/

I didn't expect to be so moved by Italy, to leave bits of my soul scattered over the countryside. Certainly it was overwhelming and beautiful and sacred, knowing everything that had sprouted from what we were seeing. But I wasn't just seeing the foundations of Western civilization — I was seeing the foundations of my sweetie, my wife, the love of my life. This is what she chose to devote her life to; this is what she came to Swarthmore to study (and thus why we met); this is why we moved together to Ann Arbor, and why we're here in Boston now. It was a privilege touring Italy with her, and while I recommend Rome and Florence and Ravenna to all of you, I selfishly feel your experience could never live up to mine: walking through the Forum Romanum with my giddy wife, her Blue Guide tucked under her arm and her brain bubbling over with True Facts of Antiquity.

Each night, when we got back to the hotel, I jotted down notes for the day. I've been using them to write the last six months of posts, but not everything got in. Below the cut are the out-of-context trimmings, because I thought it might be amusing to see just how much gelato we ate. ( Enjoy! )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Old Maid (Southern California Brings Me Down) by National Lampoon

June 26 to July 5 - Rome, Florence, and Ravenna

A few words about our hotel choices, for those who might some day follow in our footsteps. We started out very well, and ended badly:

The Hotel Domus Tiberina in Trastevere (above) was our favorite hotel in Italy: tiny, homey, friendly, charming. Everything about it was small (see below for a photo of our shower), but not in a bad way. The concierges were welcoming and outgoing, and let us check in three hours early. The view when I threw open our windows was full of bustle and swallows and terrace gardens and terra-cotta tiles. The remote for the A/C beeped cheerfully at us. Breakfast (delivered to our bed) was simple but tasty: cappuccino, yogurt, juice, croissant, cheese. Crossing the river from Rome to Trastevere was like leaving behind the tourism and coming home for the night. I'd stay there again tonight if I could.
The Hotel Globus in Florence offered a great breakfast buffet in a cozy, conversation-encouraging lounge, and that heartlifting view of the dome and bells of San Lorenzo from our window. Beverages in the self-serve fridge were free for those of us with a "superior" room. I was thrilled to have wireless for the first time in five days. On the down side, we wrestled with the A/C when we got in (I never quite got it to work), and there were a lot of stairs involved — check-in was on the second floor.
The Jolly Hotel in Ravenna was the most American of our hotels: big, bright, glitzy, mirrored, charmless. The breakfast buffet was enormous. (Let me insert here that I love blood orange juice, which is bright red. Like blood. Only citrusy.) Good cappuccino, mirtillo yogurt, cold cuts, eggs, pastry. We both prefer charm to glitz, but at that point it was a bit of a relief to be encased in the familiar for a couple of days. The triangular mirror in our room confused us. Internet access was ridiculously expensive.
Finally, the Hotel Dolomiti is not a place we will be revisiting. We chose it for our last night because it was near Termini — our first mistake. (Everything near the train station in Rome is seedy and unpleasant.) We waited for an elevator that never came, then climbed four flights of stairs through ongoing construction and naked brick to our tiny room. There was a dongle on our hotel key that had to be inserted into an orifice in the wall to turn on the lights. Breakfast was fine, but "the girl" was late, so breakfast was late, so we missed the train, so we almost missed our flight. (To be fair: their website does say they've just renovated, so maybe things have improved.)

I have a few photos of travel and hotels that didn't fit anywhere else, so they will fit here. ( Cut for vacation snaps! )

The travel-'n'-hotel set is here

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Plain Gold Ring by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

The Empress Theodora (corrected perspective)

Saturday, July 4 - Ravenna

San Vitale was begun by Ostrogoths in 527, and finished twenty years later by Byzantines. It's the only major Justinian church to have survived intact, and on its walls are some of the most beautiful mosaics in the world. The elegant, wise-eyed woman looking back at you through your monitor is the Empress Theodora, who was a dancer and a courtesan before she became the wife of the most powerful man in the world. I'm constantly amazed by the character and majesty the mosaicist was able to convey with little irregular chunks of glass — stepping back, the image dissolves from cartoon to humanity. 1500 years! It's humbling.

We stayed a long time in San Vitale. It was quiet — full of tourists, but respectful ones, thoughtful ones. Part of me is still there, I think, in the color and the peace.

( Cut for the art of the mosaic. )

The full San Vitale set is here. This is my last big photo post (alas!), but I will post a thing or two about hotels before I shut up for good.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Adrift by Barenaked Ladies

Thursday and Friday, July 2-3 - Florence

We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, on our second day in Florence, to take a day trip to see Il Palio in Siena. Il Palio is a medieval horse race, ridden bareback and breakneck, with jockeys being thrown from their saddles and banners flying and tens of thousands of spectators whooping and elbowing and drinking. Hemingway would've loved it.

We did not go.

I'm still not sure it was the right decision, but at that point in our travels we didn't think we wanted to tie ourselves to the train tracks of sensory overload for a day. We'd just scratched the surface of Florence, so we decided to stick around and visit Santa Croce, the dome and interior of Il Duomo, and the Museum of the History of Science (all described previously), and eat amazing tuna/salmon carpaccio for dinner at Lobs.

Before dinner, we visited the "Interactive Museum of Medieval Florence" (Museo Interattivo sulla Firenze Medievale), at my insistence, because I expected it to be a cheesy, exploitative museum of TORTURE. Perhaps it had been, at one time — I suspect the proprietor of retaining half a dozen wax figures of torture victims from a more successful iteration of the museum, and trying to incorporate them into his gritty, bookish, dilapidated, painfully depressing vision of medieval Florence. We were given a headset to share, and were held hostage by the droning voice of the narrator at each station, staring at a leprous head or a severed hand for upwards of ten minutes while he read paragraph after encyclopedic paragraph about hygiene and markets. It was a relief when we were allowed into the authentic medieval hovel (replicated on the site of an actual medieval hovel), where the male narrator was exchanged for a perky female voice that explained all the details of the dank, dark, windowless room we were sitting in: the stale loaf of bread on the table, the dirt, the family of creepy-ass mannequins sleeping on the floor that we had to pick our way through to leave. It was altogether bleak. (There is another torture museum in Florence, at the Porta San Giovanni, which I hear is much more successful.)

Happily,

adfamiliares is cleverer than me, and insisted we visit Oltrarno — the district across the Arno from most of Florence — in the evening. Crossing the river on the Ponte alla Carraia, we were stopped dead by an astonishing sunset, sinking down into the hills to the west and painting the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Santa Trinità to the east (see above). We watched the sun disappear for about fifteen minutes, feeling quite terribly honeymoony, before entering the quiet streets of Oltrarno, where we found the Palazzo Pitti, the curiously blank façade of Santo Spirito, and the most compellingly odd dirty graffito I saw in Italy (see below). Coming home, we passed an outdoor orchestra concert at the foot of the Palazzo Vecchio, and milled with the crowd for a while, while masterpieces of Renaissance art looked over our shoulders from the Loggia dei Lanzi and light-up spinners spun into the sky from hawkers' ripcords.

( Cut for Florence! )

All ~100 pictures, including many more similar sunset pix, are here.

Current Mood: wistful
Current Music: One by Aimee Mann

Kendra waits for Enzo to wrap our purchases

Sunday, July 5 - Rome

On our last day, Italy began informing us that it was time to go.

The train from Ravenna to Bologna was nightmarish, the worst public transportation experience of my life. We were wedged with all our luggage among hundreds of locals returning from the Vent'anni di Ravenna festival — imagine the most crowded subway car you've ever been on, add twenty people, and make the ride last for two hours. For two hours I stood completely immobile, a Tetris block locked into a row of other blocks — one of the S-shaped ones, since my feet were displaced a foot to the right of my hips by my suitcase and my head was immobilized by a cage of armpits. My muscles started to scream after an hour; my toes were wedged beneath my suitcase. I was desperately trying to keep an eye on

adfamiliares as more people climbed aboard at every stop and she was forced farther and farther away. The time it took to pack more people in at every station made the train run late, and I grew frantic about missing our connection.

All the while, six feet away from me, the prototypical Italian princess was holding court amongst her luggage, spread out on the floor with room for her and her teenage friends to sit, refusing to comprehend, with elaborate shrugs, that she could take up less space. Eventually I resorted to tapping them on the shoulders and pointing, with acid glarings, at the empty spaces they could move to. When she got off the train, I yelled, "Ciao, principessa!" That was the rudest thing I did in Italy. ( Click for a picture of Trenitalia brand sardines! )

We did make the connection in Bologna (since it, too, was delayed), which ensured we'd step out of the station in Rome in time to see a heavyset man in a red T-shirt pelting across the street with a briefcase and a purse. Around the corner, a lanky, pallid, Wonka-esque Canadian with a comically oversized map was lurching from side to side, crying, "Where is it? Where is it?" He was jet-lagged and panicked and nearly incomprehensible, but eventually we got him to tell us that someone had stopped him to ask for directions, and while the map was blocking his view his briefcase (with his passport, his camera, his books) had disappeared. I had to tell him that I'd seen it go. He seemed so lost, so heartbroken, and there was so little we could do. It unsettled me — I was one big exposed nerve for a while afterward.

After that, we managed to have a good last day, recapitulating some of our greatest hits — the Largo Argentina, the Piazza Navona, the Imperial Fora, shakerati at Caffè Sant'Eustachio, mozzarella at Ōbikā. We bought some of Enzo's artwork at Santa Caterina dei Funari, and Enzo (who spoke not a word of English) was clownish and grateful and a little sad. Even the unsettling experiences of the morning had their upsides — the kind and patient Lebanese tourist, more useful than us, who stopped to help the panicked Canadian; the rowdy boys on the train who looked like they were going to be trouble but instead made the trip more bearable by leading us all in cheers when the conductor successfully squeezed a few more people in. (They also inflated a condom and batted it around the cabin for a rousing game of condom-ball. One of them ran out at a stop, stripped off his shirt, and dunked his upper body in a fountain before running back on. Lively, cheerful, civic-minded hooligans!)

( Cut for the last pictures of Rome. )

This should really have been my final Italy post, but I didn't want to end on a downer, so I'll be following it with pretty pictures of Florence and San Vitale in Ravenna. This full set is here.

Current Mood: stressed
Current Music: Stain Yer Blood by Paul Westerberg

Saturday, June 27 - Rome

Only three more of these photo-posts to go. Whatever your response to that news, I've drawn a lot of satisfaction from recapitulating our travels, researching the things we saw, sort of rolling them around in my brain for a while. I'll be sad when the pictures run out. Guess we'll have to go back, huh?

The Forum was presented in the way I'd naïvely expected all of the antiquities in Rome to be — neatly contained, fenced off, collected in one convenient historical park. I didn't expect it to be so far below street level, though I should have: it was built on a drained swamp, and for a very long time it was buried beneath the returned soil, with monuments and temples poking up out of the ground like rock outcroppings. (There is evidence of this raised ground level all over the Forum — see the photos for details.) As of the 19th century, it's all been excavated, and we can walk among the ruined buildings just as the ancient Romans did when they were new. It's a humbling, evocative experience.

adfamiliares caught fire as soon as we entered, impressing me mightily with her deep knowledge of everyone who ever sat on every paving stone we passed (or so it seemed to me).

The experience was marred by an art installation by Jimenez Deredia — vaguely Eskimodal sculptures with modern curves and bright blue-white surfaces. They might have been nice elsewhere, but against the weight of history they looked like disposable plastic. I did my best to pretend they didn't exist, but if you peer long enough at some of the wide shots you'll find them.

Above is the portico of the Temple of Saturn, the oldest building still standing in the Forum — about 2500 years old.

( Cut for a moderated Forum! )

The whole set is here.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Visions Of Johanna by Bob Dylan

Procession of 26 Martyrs in Sant'Apollinare Nuovo

Saturday, July 4 - Ravenna

[Edit: Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, pictured above, is where the traveling choir of seniors suddenly burst out with the Ave Maria — one of the most magical moments of the trip. I felt so privileged to be there. I've uploaded an mp3 of the last 45 seconds of their performance, if you'd like to listen to it while looking at the purty pictures. I don't own the rights to their performance, obviously, but I don't think they'd mind. If they do, I'll take it down.]

One of the things I like about Ravenna is its small-town approach to historical preservation. It's not really a small town — about 150,000 people live there — but it feels that way, and they seem to have a pragmatic attitude toward the treasures they steward, as though the local politics of some arts board are the only concerns they need to satisfy. Given a crumbling 16th-century fortress (the Rocca Brancaleone), they turned the interior (rather brilliantly) into a public park for watching movies and riding merry-go-rounds. Their city museum* is a maze of echoing galleries: priceless, minutely detailed ivory carvings next to a room filled with empty, dusty glass cases, then Bronze Age potsherds beside racks of medieval weapons beside a wall display of children's crayon drawings. In Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, home of some of the most stunning ancient mosaics in the world — important enough that the UN named it a World Heritage Site — they installed a light-up neon halo and cross on a statue of St. ~~Francis~~ Anthony, presumably because somebody thought it would be pretty (unless there was a horrible misunderstanding about the Baptistry of Neon). I think that's how Ravenna has always been, apart from the one or two moments in history when it was important — an out-of-the-way corner of the world that happened to be the capital of the western world for a few years, with all the remnants of sudden grandeur that that implies. Since then, they've just been going about their business.

This was our second of two days in Ravenna. We saw San Vitale (photos in a forthcoming post), the museum, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, the Mausoleum of Theodoric (after a long hike along the railroad tracks), and the Rocca Brancaleone. Pictures behind the cut. ( Cut for magi in awesomepants! )

Here's all 60 photos, on Flickr.

* No photography allowed, alas.

Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: An American in Paris by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic

Friday, June 26 and Sunday, July 5 - Rome

In my honeymoon photo posting schedule, I seem to have broken the Piazza Navona out into its own photoset. I'm not sure why, but if I had to guess I'd say it was because of the photo above, a detail from Antonio Della Bitta's Neptune Teabagging an Octopus. It's really quite an excellent octopus.

I'm finding it hard to think of a place in Rome more crass and crowded and touristy than the Piazza Navona, to say nothing of the Angels & Demons connection, but I can't hold that against it. It's a permanent art fair and performance space, filled with street artists selling luggage-packable art, living statues, puppeteers, musicians. (All expertly mercenary — Michael Jackson died the day we left home, and by the time we reached the Piazza Navona the next day one puppeteer had incorporated a Michael Jackson finger-puppet into his act.) I can and do blame it for being difficult to photograph — the western side of the plaza is dominated by the Palazzo Pamphilj and Sant'Agnese, which cut it off from the sun beginning in midafternoon. Next time, morning light.

We visited the Piazza Navona on our first day and our last day, so it serves me as memory bookends — from masterpiece overload to harried souvenir-shopping, from homebody uncertainty to globetrotter confidence, from being ready to devour all of Italy to being ready to go home.

( Cut for further nudity! )

More Navonaness here.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Nashville by Indigo Girls

Thursday, July 2 - Florence

It's taking me longer and longer to upload photos. On the one hand, I keep learning new things to do in Photoshop to spruce them up, and each new technique adds time. On the other, once they're prettified, I'm compelled to research each photo, so I can accurately tag them — Who painted it? Where was it? When was it built? So, for instance, I know that the funeral monument above was Félicie de Fauveau's last and greatest work, sculpted in 1858, and that the ascending soul is that of Louise Favreau. This takes time, enough time that I could probably be called self-indulgent, but it also deepens my appreciation of the places we visited on our vacation. I see connections I wasn't aware of before (Brunelleschi is everywhere!), and I feel I'm adding to the sum total of knowledge on the internet.

Louise Favreau's funeral monument is in Santa Croce, which is all about tombs and cenotaphs: Michelangelo's tomb, Galileo's tombs (the secret one and the public one), Dante's cenotaph (he's buried in Ravenna, as you may recall), Machiavelli's cenotaph. Dozens of heraldically splendid floor tombs. Monuments to Marconi and Florence Nightingale, and the monument to Niccolini that was the basis for the Statue of Liberty. It's not as opulent as St. John Lateran, but it's not for nothing that it's called the Temple of the Italian Glories. There are also two perfect cloisters, hatfuls of grand frescoes, and quite a nice museum, to boot.

( Cut for Italian Glories! )

85 more photos available on Flickr.

Current Music: Drunken Whistler by Luna

Monday, June 29 - Rome

Saint John Lateran is the highest church in Roman Catholicism. #1. El guapo. Most people expect that to be Saint Peter's in the Vatican (at least I did), but the papal cathedra (throne) is here, and that makes it the mother church for all Catholics. Within its ridiculously opulent walls are (ostensibly) the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul, the table at which Jesus ate the Last Supper, and St. Peter's altar, which is built into the high altar, which only the Pope may use (and then only if he's been very good).

The cathedral abuts the city walls of Rome — if you could look over your shoulder, you'd see the Aurelian Wall and the Porta Asinaria ("gate of the donkeys"). (You can see a bit of wall in the lower left, below the umbrella pines.) The orange building is the Lateran Palace, where the popes lived for a thousand years before moving to the Palace of the Vatican. It was a gift to the Bishop of Rome from the emperor Constantine, who aquired it when he married his second wife, Fausta; the palace hosted the bishops when they convened to declare Donatism a heresy in 313. Constantine also built the cathedral, as well as the baptistry next door. The obelisk in front (see below) was built by Thutmose III in the 15th century BC, moved to the Circus Maximus by Constantine's son Constantius II in 357 AD, and erected in front of St. John Lateran by Sixtus V in 1587. (Sixtus V never saw an obelisk he didn't want to move somewhere.)

We were only there by chance — it was a public transportation node, between catacombs and San Clemente. Fortunate fools we. ( Bring me the church of John the Baptist! )

More pix here.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Au Fond Du Temple Saint by David Byrne

Ruins of the Baths of Trajan, with seagull

Monday, June 29 - Rome

On Monday, between lunch and the time San Clemente opened,

adfamiliares and I wandered the Esquiline, which is now given over to a connected series of public parks. This follows a long tradition of public land use — civic-minded emperors used the space for temples, amphitheaters, and Trajan's massive bath house, which has, over the intervening centuries, decomposed into the American southwest (see above). Those emperors were sending a political message: Nero, in a wildly unpopular move, appropriated the Esquiline for his sprawling and excessive Domus Aurea (Golden House) after the Great Fire scoured the hillside clean of private residences. The palace was leveled and filled in after Nero's death, so his successors could build public buildings. Now, 1900 years later, it is being re-excavated via tunnels all through the Esquiline —

adfamiliares and I spent a happy hour tramping over the grassy hills and peering down ventilation/light shafts, trying to puzzle out what was going on underfoot.

Monday was also the day we toured the Catacombs of Domitilla — miles and miles of grim tunnels, lined with rough stone slots where bodies were stored. We descended from a lizardful garden to a sunken basilica, then down a little stair to the catacombs. They're huge (see link below) — our tour was abbreviated (after a lengthy wait in the monastery garden), and our irritatingly "spooky" guide seemed in a rush to get back aboveground for siesta, but we could've walked for hours and still not come to the end.

After dark, we played tourist and tossed coins into the Trevi Fountain, then climbed the Spanish Steps with gelati, to gaze out over the city at night. ( Cut for night photos, and frightening hot dogs! )

More photos here. They weren't permitted inside the catacombs, but there are some remarkable maps and images from a 3D mapping project on the Austrian Academy of Sciences site (scroll down, and don't miss the team portrait). I try to imagine what it would be like navigating that maze with the body of a loved one.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Comin' Back Soon (The Bereft Man's Song) by Crash Test Dummies

Sunday, June 28 - Rome

Remember Augustus's mausoleum from the last post? Good-sized tomb, sure, but a hundred years later Hadrian said "Piffle!" and built a mausoleum that was so big it went on to be used as a fortress (5th-6th centuries) and a castle (14th-19th centuries). Moreover, he built it on the opposite bank of the Tiber, within sight of Augustus's little rockpile, just because he could. Today, it's called the Castel Sant'Angelo — that winged fellow on top is the Archangel Michael, who (they say) appeared atop the fortress in 590 and sheathed his sword to signal the end of the plague.

Like every other ancient structure in Rome, Castel Sant'Angelo is home to a museum now. Unfortunately, photography was forbidden inside the museum proper, so I can't show you the flintlocks and military uniforms and opulent libraries; you're stuck with the fortress itself. Which is still pretty cool, though we spent a good third of our visit circling around and around it, following the complicated multi-layer overlay map in an ultimately fruitless effort to reach the upper levels. (They were closed for restoration.)

( Cut for angels, not demons! )

See more here.

Current Mood: fortified
Current Music: Hold Me Baby by Albert Washington

Sunday, June 28 - Rome

The Ara Pacis ("altar of peace") was erected by the senate along the Via Flaminia to celebrate the Pax Augusta, the end of civil war as brought by Augustus (aka the end of the Republic and the start of the Empire). It's a remarkably persuasive piece of architecture — decorated with portraits of the imperial family, symbols of peace and prosperity, and other pro-imperial propaganda aimed at convincing the populace that this new Empire thing was what the gods really wanted anyway. And anybody coming to Rome from the north couldn't help but see it.

It was lost in the Tiber's flood plains for centuries, but eventually chunks started turning up, and archaeologists were able to do a fair job of reassembling it in the early 20th century. Mussolini had it moved next door to the Mausoleum of Augustus in 1938, which is where it stands today, though his fascist outer building was torn down and replaced in 2006 with a big, antiseptic-white, glassed-in gift-box designed by Richard Meier — very controversial!

adfamiliares hadn't seen the Ara Pacis before, and was suffused with girlish glee the entire time we were there. "It's a very significant monument," she says when I tease her.

( Cut for peace and imperial rule! )

The rest of the set is here.

Current Mood: peaceful
Current Music: Peggy-O by Simon & Garfunkel

Sunday, June 28 - Rome

On our third day in Rome, we dragged ourselves way the hell around the city, on buses and trains and foot, from Trastevere in the southwest to the Ara Pacis and Castel Sant'Angelo in the northwest to the Trevi Fountain and Quirinal in the northeast to the Forum Holitorium in the southeast, then back to Trastevere and back up to the Quirinal for an ultimately disappointing dinner (many restaurants are closed Sundays, it turns out). We spent far too much time walking along the Via Nazionale and Via del Quirinale through the generic-big-city center of town. We were cranky and frustrated at times, betrayed by confusingly named Metro stops and buses that never came — in my notes, I wrote that this was the day we "hit the wall between being tired and doing everything we wanted." But this was also the day we had the amazing mozzarella lunch at Obikā, and saw the Crypt of the Capuchins, and stumbled across the sunken 5th-centry church of San Vitale, and saw the dome of St. Peter's silhouetted at sunset from the Ponte Palatino. Even when we were waiting interminably for the bus, with

adfamiliares nearly falling asleep in a doorway, the wall beside us was graced by the angel pictured above. (I believe she's part of a WWI memorial.) It's hard to stay cranky in Rome.

Though the public transportation and all the walking were time-consuming and tiring, today in particular, I'm still pleased that we traveled all over three cities in Italy without driving or taking a cab once.

I'll talk about Sant'Angelo and the Ara Pacis in subsequent posts; for now, some photos of city wandering.

( Cut for far-flung photos. )

The whole set is here.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: The Wondersmith And His Sons by Astronautalis

Wednesday, July 1 - Florence

We ate a lot of big meals in Italy. On our first full day in Florence, we decided we would skip one — we'd had an excellent late lunch of fish kebabs and bruschetta at Zà Zà, and a huge amount of pizza and mozzarella the night before with Dan C. and family. A big dinner just did not appeal.

adfamiliares had been craving cannoli ever since we touched down in Rome, and every time we'd gone looking for a pasticceria it was after dinner and they were closed. So we took a pass on dinner and went directly to dessert.

We found a pasticceria with cannoli on the menu and ordered two at the counter — they seemed a little pricy, but hey, when would we be in Florence again? The fellow told us he'd bring them out to us if we'd sit down, so we did, at a table on the little cobblestone street.

After a few minutes of people-watching, we began to wonder what was taking so long. It was a sweaty evening, and all we had to drink was the thick, piping hot cioccolato

adfamiliares had ordered. "Well, they have to fill them to order, so they don't get soggy," we said, feeling knowledgeable. Five minutes after that, we began joking that maybe they had to milk the cow to make the ricotta to fill the cannoli.

So we were a little tetchy when the waiter finally emerged. With a flourish, he deposited before us two big, steaming plates of cheese-stuffed pasta, swimming in meat sauce. We started to protest, "No no no!" but then the bottoms dropped out of our stomachs as it hit us: we hadn't been saying "cannoli." We'd been saying "canneloni." The menu said "canneloni." The waiter had, quite properly, brought us due canneloni.

We'd prided ourselves on escaping the clueless tourist stereotype — made an effort to communicate in Italian, covered our shoulders and legs in the churches, didn't get huffy when restaurants charged for water. Just that morning we'd had a little laugh at the expense of the British woman at breakfast who ordered caffè americano and told us about the "hard little slices of bread with nuts in" she'd gotten at dinner the night before. (She meant biscotti.) And there we were, nine hours later, stammering over two hot plates of canneloni while the waiter tried to figure out why we were unhappy.

We explained as best we could, and told the reluctant waiter it was our mistake and we would of course pay for the meal, and unenthusiastically tucked in. We were saved by the graciousness of the waiter, who reemerged, before we'd had two bites, with takeaway boxes and plastic forks, telling us how nice the canneloni would be as a picnic tomorrow. (They did, in fact, make a perfect lunch in our hotel room the next day.) Abashed, we crept away, certain that we'd been outed as ugly Americans before every real Italian person in Florence.

The next day, we saw the graffito above. Either it was a coincidence, or the couple stifling their laughter at the next table had a can of spray paint in their bags.

Current Mood: chagrined
Current Music: He's My Thing by Babes In Toyland

Friday, July 3 - Ravenna

If you're still hanging in there through this perpetual travelogue, you might be asking yourself, "Hey, didn't they go to Ravenna, too?" Indeed we did.

In the fourth century, the Arian Controversy tore Christianity in half over theological issues like the proper date of Easter and the personhood of the Holy Spirit and, most particularly, whether Jesus was made of the same stuff as God, and thus part of a coequal Trinity, or created by God, and thus subjugate. The former view won, becoming Catholicism, and Arianism was declared a heresy, but it was touch-and-go for a while — the emperors Constantius II and Valens were Arians, as were many important bishops and other powerful people. The controversy caused more faithquakes than anything until the Protestant Reformation. People were excommunicated and exiled left and right, and it strained relations between the Eastern and Western empires.

Theodoric the Goth, who ruled Italy after the fall of Rome, was an Arian, and since he made his capital in Ravenna Ravenna is dotted with Arian churches. The Arian Baptistry is a small octagonal building, splendid with mosaics on the inside, like the ceiling mosaic pictured above: naked-Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist and a dove, with the personified River Jordan looking on in a rather pagan way, surrounded by twelve apostles bearing crowns. A third of a mile away is the Catholic baptistry (the Baptistry of Neon), a small octagonal building that is entirely different:

As you can see, here we have naked-Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist and a dove, with the personified River Jordan looking on in a rather pagan way, surrounded by twelve apostles bearing crowns...but Jesus has a beard. Heretic, I cast thee out!

I admit I'm charmed by this affirmation of the everyday churchgoer's response to titanic struggles over heresy and orthodoxy: they live amongst each other, go to church less than half a mile away from each other, and decorate their separate baptistries in an almost identical way.

adfamiliares has a lot to say about this sort of thing, professionally; I'm just happy to have a picture of coexistence (possibly placid, possibly fraught) to go along with my mental images of excommunicated bishops and burning books.

More pictures, as usual, under the cut. ( Cut for Jesus' penis! )

The whole set (72 photos) is on Flickr, including more mosaics — and we haven't even gotten to San Vitale yet!

Current Mood: heretical
Current Music: Let The Bells Ring by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Various dates - Rome

Rome is filled with beautiful churches, and it seems every one is encrusted with glorious ornamentation and packed to the rafters with great works of art. We were able to give some of them the time and attention they deserve, but for many we only had time to poke our heads in and snap a few photos. This is the grab-bag post for four of the latter type: Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Sant'Alessio, San Rocco, and Sant'Agnese in Agone.

Above is Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the only Gothic church in Rome. (The pointed vaults and deep blue color scheme are dead giveaways.) It's called "sopra Minerva" because it was built on the site of a temple to Minerva — well, Isis, actually, but they didn't know that at the time. This is also the church where Galileo was forced to recant. We arrived five minutes before services started (that's what the sign in the picture is telling us), which is a shame because it's pretty spectacular.

adfamiliares visited again on our last day, since it's one of her favorite churches, but I was running around trying to find Enzo the street artist, so I only had the five minutes. I was able to take a picture of the stained glass window that proves the Dominicans are in league with Cthulhu, though! ( Cut-hulu fthagn! )

Saint Alexius, the story goes, left home as a young man to escape an arranged marriage, then returned years later after living as an ascetic. He'd changed so much that his parents didn't recognize him, but they let him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. When he died there, identification papers on his body revealed the truth. His parents' surprise was exceeded only by our own when we walked into Sant'Alessio on the Aventine and found the very stairs beneath which he'd died! Supposedly! Borne aloft by angels! ( Cut for a stairway to heaven. )

We only popped into and out of San Rocco (next to the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Ara Pacis), since we had places to go, but I found it moodily opulent, with the feel of an attic. ( Cut for chandeliers. )

On our last day, we visited Sant'Agnese in Agone, just off the Piazza Navona. ("Agone" has nothing to do with agony or martyrdom — it's the site of an athletic competition. "Piazza Navona" evolved from "Piazza [i]n'Agone".) Saint Agnes was stripped naked and dragged through the streets by a Roman magistrate who didn't like her vow of chastity, but her hair miraculously grew long and clothed her. Hooray! She was still killed, though — the church is built on the site of the brothel where she was martyred, and it is apparently possible to ask the sexton to unlock the door that leads to the 4th-century ruins below the church. (We did not know this, alas.) ( Cut for uncut hair. )

As usual, you can find the whole set on Flickr.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Ramble On by Led Zeppelin

Saturday, June 27 - Rome

The Aventine felt to me like Rome's back porch. It's quiet, and shady, and green, with birds flitting about, and in many places you can sit back and look out over the rest of Rome spread out in front of you. It used to be a city hub — for fans of HBO's Rome, it's the hill Vorenus's gang took control of — but construction and shifting traffic patterns have made it a pleasant residential backwater.

I led

adfamiliares up the Aventine on our second morning in Rome, seeking a particular keyhole. The little shaded avenue pictured above, the Clivo di Rocca Savella (Slope of the Savelli Fortress) tempted our feet to stray from the main street. Just as we passed that corner, in the shadow of the fortress wall, a plummy English voice declaimed to us from a clump of shrubbery:

When the grand horses come, we will move in circles
Not to be dancing the jig, but jumping up and down.

There was a young woman up there at the base of the wall, peering at us, crouching and crab-walking behind the bushes in a nest of unpacked camping equipment. When we passed her again on the way back, she continued:

And the young men arrive at the gates
in their beautiful suits and long cars
to meet us spinning in our summer frocks
and invite the children to go away with them.
(pause)
What are you, anyway?

It was exhilarating, to be addressed so madly — in English! — on such a quiet, flowered path, beneath a sunny sky, in Rome. Does such a thing happen, outside of novels? It's one of the things from the trip that I hoarded into myself, to unpack on gray days that are soaked with normalcy and routine. We didn't respond, or answer her question; it was too suddenly weird for us to react, too hard to imagine what role she hoped we would play. I wish I had — I'm obsessed with discovering her story, while remaining half-convinced that any true thing that I learned would crack the seal of the magic.

That particular street is also home to the Priory of the Knights of Malta and two excellent churches — Santa Sabina, where preparations for a wedding were underway, and Sant'Alessio — which will be featured in the next post. We ran ourselves ragged for the rest of the day — we saw the Palatine, the Capitoline Museum, the Forum, and the Colosseum, all of which will get or have gotten their own posts. For now, here are some pictures from the Aventine and other interstitial bits of Saturday. ( Cut for Knights Hospitaller! )

Here's the whole set (41 pictures).

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Save A Secret For The Moon by The Magnetic Fields

Thursday, July 2 - Florence

You're looking at a particularly tricky armillary sphere. Everything from the circular degree markings inward is a reflection in a spherical mirror, distorting the skewed cuboid framework around it into a perfect image of circular rings. (You can see some of the backwards numbers painted on the frame.) The actual corners are smoothed into curves, and the "cubical" joins between the rings are just trompe-l'oeil paintings on flat wood. The whole thing rotates on its axis around the mirror, to permit measurements of the reflected night sky.

And that's us, in the Museum of the History of Science! Alas, it was an abbreviated experience. We knew we were going to see only part of the collection, due to ongoing renovations, but it wasn't until I started looking at the website that I saw what a wealth of treasures were denied to us. Not only the famous stuff, which we knew was on tour — Galileo's telescope, and his middle finger — but orreries and clocks and prismatic lenses and what-all. I'm glad we went (and we did get an admission discount), but I'd like to go back to see the other three-quarters of the collection.

Even so, there were plenty of goodies to capture. ( Click for SCIENCE! )

For the whole set, go here. The website (which is fabulous) has individual pages for most of the items in their collection, and I linked most of my Flickr pictrs to their official pages, if you find yourself wanting more info about anything.

Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: Everything That Happens by David Byrne and Brian Eno

Tuesday, June 30 and Wednesday, July 1 - Florence

One of the things I like about Florence is how clearly it shows the residue of political scheming. Vicious squabbles and betrayals from five hundred years ago are evident in the buildings you pass as you walk the streets — an obliterated face in a fresco here, a bold coat of arms there. It's a city laid out by cruel calculation, mostly by the Medici, and it still retains a trace of that feeling.

We were lucky enough to be there at the same time as one of

adfamiliares's colleagues from Skidmore and his family, who graciously showed us around the city on our first night, taking us past the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio and the overburdened Ponte Vecchio spanning the Arno. (You can just see it at the right side of the photo above. The buildings are in the Oltrarno, on the other side of the river from most of Florence.) What a relief it was to be able to speak English for a whole night! They also clued us in to the best gelato in Florence, which we spent the rest of our visit trying to find again.

The following day, we didn't see a lot of things that were unexpectedly closed, and did see a lot of things I wasn't allowed to take pictures of, notably:

The Uffizzi gallery. It contains room after room of splendid medieval art in gold leaf, and Botticelli's Birth of Venus carefully preserved beneath an enormous pane of glass. The wide hallway linking the galleries is lined with dozens of busts of famous Romans.

The Basilica of San Lorenzo (to which the Medici Chapel is attached). In one side chapel, a sarcophagus of silver and rose-colored glass holds the tiny skeleton of a fourth-century Roman saint, still wearing his sandals. Beside him lie a dry palm frond and an inexplicable hollow tube about the size of a Slim Jim. (adfamiliares says it was Saint Caesonius, but I can't verify that online.) The dome above another chapel shows the night sky, carefully painted to represent the positions of the stars and planets on one particular night in the 15th century. Nobody knows what happened on that date.

Happily, I was not prevented from taking pictures in the streets. ( You know the drill! )

The complete set is here. (I have 18 more of these posts to make, by my estimation, so get comfortable.)

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Eyes Without a Face by Billy Idol

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The Burgess Shale

(hallucigenia and wiwaxia)

Entries tagged with italy

Ciao

Where we lay our heads

Eternal colors

Arno sunsets

The last day: Italy turns against us

Open Forum

More from the last capital of Rome

Bookends

Church of the dead

Better Lateran than never

Hot dogs, lizards, and death

Suck on this, Augustus

Peace and death

From the Field of Mars to the Quirinal

The cannoli incident

Orthodox and heterodox Jesus penises

Four churches

The Mad Poet of the Aventine

The Museum of the History of Science

Surprisingly little spinach