Beyond Monza

Wholly Mole

2011-08-14T19:16:00.000-07:00

For a museum about the Art of Vision, - Turin's Museo del cinema, housed in the 19th century Mole Antonelliana, is a strangely difficult place to see, at least from the outside. You can see from it, but you can't really see it - or at least, it defies capturing on film; sandwiched between apartments blocks, and somehow peeping out between terracotta roofs, unless you're equipped with sky hooks the only way to get the whole thing in your shot is to distort it by foreshortening that impressive dome, or cutting off the spire, or the bottom floors, losing the sense of proportions.

Once, inside, you don't immediately get the full picture, either. There's a fair bit of queuing involved, since everyone wants to go up in the panoramic elevator. It's a bit dim, on the ground floor. The first thing you see is the plastic-swathed coffee shop, named Cabiria, like the movie. The tables are lit from within, and go from lilac to red to green; there are screens set into them so you won't be bored as you munch on your piadina.

It would be cool to check out the wooden cutaway model of the building, which still seems strangely top heavy, but we don't want to lose our place in the line. There's a big sign saying no photography. Takes a minute to realize that means no {flash} photography: we are transported out of there, in the glass box, and suddenly all is right with the world.

It's like being inside a mountain, with only a few stout wires marking where the elevator rushes up to the roof in sixty seconds. Looking down from the lift, it's all a blur of soft smoky colors, an immersive cinema experience.

But when you're done on the roof, the elevator takes you back through the dome, and returns you to the prosaic ground floor.

From there, it's all you'd expect of a museum, if a bit darker than normal.

There are lots of pieces of really early film, and it's interesting to see what people thought film-worthy - a boy laughing, a woman blowing a kiss,horse-drawn traffic on a city street, a sheep walking.

It's an impressive collection of inventions that paved the way to modern cinema, by playing with your sense of perspective, like this machine....
or this genuine Fantasmagoria.... I thought of Logan when I saw it.

Or this portable photographer's studio and dark room, complete with lockaway bottles and basins, a complete set-up, designed to be wheeled from street to street.

Walking in circles down dark corridors, looking at inventive antiques is great... but I'd rather be sitting down. Or lying down, even better...

The main area ocoudln't be less like your standard museum. No mahogany cases here! Side rooms are laid out like movie sets: the surreal one, with a fridge door and toilet seats, the erotic room with a giant red bed and the screen in the ceiling, a kitchen full of reels, and more. Hundreds of props, many of them perfectly snatchable, make you feel like you're in the movie yourself. In the main space, two giant screens show highlights from Italian cinema over the last hundred years, and you get to see this idol from Cabiria in action...

Wander up the ramp that runs around the inside of the dome to look at posters, on-set photos, and installations recalling all manner of movie moments, and when you're tired, you simply lie down again and watch thelight show on the interior of the dome. Seven hours later, and we still hadn't seen it all. It's inspired. Only one question remained... where' the popcorn?

Toby's hour

2011-08-07T16:04:00.000-07:00

It just stood there, a shadow on the pathway. As still as a sentinel, so still, and for so long, that it almost seemed unreal, as if time had stopped.

We stopped too.

It seemed impossible to just march past such watchful stillness, and the path through the woods, which had until then seemed nothing more than a track between a dozen trees, joining one stretch of river-walk to another, seemed to grow into a dark forest, where the wild things are.

Plus, it might bite.
But then some cyclists buzzed by, and it stumbled out of the way of their slicing wheels, and became a dog again, and rather sorry for himself.
Herself. I stood corrected. I wasn't convinced; it looked like a boy to me, but my assertion that it was a Belgian shepherd was conceded, so I decided to yield the point.
The dog was not scared, not thin, not particularly lost looking. We just walked by.
"It probably got out of its garden, you know, ran away. Belgian Shepherds are terrible for that," I said, remembering when Sam killed the ducks. That was twenty years ago, but I still remember what they did to Sam afterwards. "Or maybe it's been abandoned. Poor thing."
We just kept walking. None of our business, after all. Stray dogs might bite, their fleas would definitely do so. Much better to stay away, and just enjoy our walk down the river.
But the conversation inevitably turned to pets in general and dogs in particular; how much fun they can be, and what a great way to meet new people when you take them for walks; and then on to how much they eat, and what happens when they're left alone, and how hard hearted you have to be to make a puppy sleep outside in winter.
"He's all wet!" I said, looking back discreetly. "He must have been swimming!"
"She was probably just rooting around on the bank, looking for something to eat."
"I bet he - she - was swimming. She looks like a swimmer."
"Just hungry, probably."
We both stopped, giving the dog the chance to approach; perhaps its owner was nearby, and we could help reunite them. We put out our hands towards it in gestures of friendship, and made little noises of encouragement. The dog seemed unimpressed. Well, we gave it a chance. No point in hanging around, we thought, and headed off again upriver. Sad to see a dog like that, but it wasn't our problem.
The path twisted and turned among hazel and robinias.
"I think he's following us," I said presently.

And soon there was no doubt.
"It's funny how much better a walk is, when you're with a dog," I said. "Hey! There's a business idea! Dog rentals! I could set up a stall at the beginning of this trail, for all those people who are too busy to keep a pet at home, but who want to enjoy a nice country walk with a dog by their side. The random walker comes to me, rents the dog for an hour or so, then drops it off and goes back to their nice, tidy, smell-free home, having had their canine fix. All the joy of doggy companionship, without the whiff of dog food to go with it. I could clean up!"
"That would be mandatory, I imagine," came the practical reply. "Maybe she's lost. I wonder if there's a dog pound anywhere nearby. Or someone we can ask."
We came back to the water's edge. There were some fishermen. Yes, they'd seen the dog hanging around in the woods ever since early that morning. No, they didn't know who she belonged to, or where the nearest pound was. We could ask at the village, just ahead, upstream. They shrugged. It was the old summer story, in Italy. Dogs are a lot of work, and they don't do vacations.

"There are marks on her back, like she's been beaten or bitten."
The dog consented to be petted, but not by me. Her collar was a nice wide leather one, but there was no medaglietta hanging from it to show where she belonged.
"She's only half-grown. Look at that face. Probably got to be too much of a handful. Poor thing," I said. "I''m going to call it Toby."
"Toby? It's a girl dog."

I didn't care. I was going home in three days. For the next mile or two, this was going to be Toby, and whatever had bitten or beaten Toby was in the past, and we were all walking with a spring in our step towards a Good Lunch, somewhere near the water.
Short fur is better than long, and girls more docile than boys, and medium size dogs are the only way to go. In your head, when you walk, you can go many miles, all the way to the dog pound, to the grooming parlor, to the vets, and back. Now and again our separate mental journeys came together in some shared comment or other, on the subject of commitment, and Dobermans, and The Dog Whisperer; but honestly, on the whole, the verdict was that dogs are great, but No.
Toby kept up.
The path turned out of the woods, and cut up into farmland, on the edges of a village.

Fields gave way to farmhouses, and farmhouses to mills, and walls and waterwheels. We stopped on the banks of the river, tempted to take our shoes off right then and there.
Toby jumped in.
"She's thirsty, look at her drink!"
Toby lapped a bit, and started splashing around happily.
"I told you she was swimming before," I said. "Look at her go!"
She was completely at home in the water, swimming and floating and splashing in great circles, out into the heart of the rushing water, then back to the slack pool under the trees, and then out into the middle again.

"Toby!" I called. "Come back, boy!" I called, and we both whistled and yelled.
Toby paid no attention. She made one more great splashing circle over the pebbly shallows, and then set her face downstream. She looked back once, and then turned with confidence into the strong, broad current.
We just stood there, suddenly alone. We watched until she became a shadow on the water; then she reached the bend in the river, and was gone.

Fruit Flies: Cavour

2011-08-06T15:50:00.000-07:00

Cavour is a baby Alp that has strayed from the pack, it sticks out of the muddy, field-rich plain like a stone fallen from heaven. No, 'that' Cavour wasn't born here, you know, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour one of the Fathers of the unification of Italy (150 years ago this year) came into the world in Turin, under French rule at the time, and just took the title out of the family collection; his country house isn't here either, that's over somewhere near Cuneo.

But the village celebrates him handsomely anyway, at the Town Hall, with lots of flags and flowers, and some ant-foul-fowl netting that's suggestive of some pigeon-related drama in the past.
ooo - Nice bust, even if it's all a bit tenuous.

There's nothing vague about the Rocca, though. The pretty village nestles under it, on the plain, like a kitten curled up next to the mother cat.

From the main piazza, full of flowers and pinky-yellow houses, you can walk right up the mountain, before long you're looking down on the church tower if you've got the stamina.

Or just drive up. Much better.

There used to be a castle at the top, and before that, I don't know, some sort of Celtic settlement.

There are ruins, the usual religious statue in a pergola. The pergola has an inscription along the lines of 'delle alpi inviolabili delle ridenti pianure, le ossa ed i ricordi di sua sabauda fierezza". Sabauda fierezza is a fancy name for Savoy pride. There's also a restaurant tucked into the cliffside, and on the grassy knoll, benches - and the view.

Every country is a patchwork of ways of life, but you're never more so aware of it, than up here. The wild and the tamed, stone and soil, peak and pasture pushing against each other, like two tides.

It's all about apples, Cavour. There's a festival in November, the Tuttomele, in which they celebrate ... everything apple, and make a fuss of their twin city in Argentina, Las Varillas. Lots of Piemontesi went to Argentina, mostly just before and after WWII. Hardly any came back.

Apples! Apart from the obvious cakes and pasties, they make liqueur from it, and bars of apple chocolate, and, from September to July, little cakes and round chocs with rum and almonds, called Cavours. We bought the absolutely last ones made before the shop closed for the summer holidays.

The other thing to do, on Cavour's rock, is to watch the flying. There's so much to see, from the submarine clouds,

to the butterflies basking on the rocks,

and silver planes sliding across the silhouetted mountains,,

... and daredevil deltas, racing around the peak with a cheery wave, so close that it feels like you could hand them a sandwich, as they splutter past the hilltop, and off into the blue. Cheese and apple, maybe.

The point

2011-08-05T13:55:00.000-07:00

Punta della dogana is the tip of the city. Well, one of many tips, maybe, but it feels like an especially pointy bit of Venice, a little blank triangle of solid ground in a world where sky and lagoon manage to squash the city into a fat squiggle at most, a man-made crack between them.

This triangle belongs to the city's Accademia delle Belle Arti, ensconced in the rooms and courtyards of the old Hospital for the Incurables (let's hope it's nothing catching). Full of goodies is understatement of the year, but this here is the one piece that everyone, all our fellow canal-and calle wandering gawpers, too cheap to pay entry fees, like best.
It is a sudden rush of perfection, a delight of white at the end of a long walk, the pristine figure, curved, young and alert, Boy with Frog, by LA artist, Charles Ray .
This is the point of art, surely. Refreshment perfected.

Another young man is standing around. He is twenty years old; about as pale as the boy, but wearing more clothes. Shiny shoes, the classic black pants and pale blue shirt of Security Guards everywhere. Meeting his gaze, those chilly eyes, the colour of the horizon, and the word Kapo springs to mind.
Two ladies sidle up to the statue; they are saying things to each other in Spanish about cheeks. You can just tell.
The Kapo hustles them away roughly, harsh. Don't touch, he growls. There's no sign saying you can't handle the trim gluteus, if anything, it seems to invite a palm and a giggle. Nobody seems that interested in the boy's face, or the frog he holds. The Kapo is stern. The women walk away, a little crushed.
Seconds later another pair of ladies arrive. They are tourists from somewhere more exotic, but their hands also can't help reaching for the bum. Touching butts is lucky everywhere, it seems.
I suddenly wonder if it's shame that makes his eyes so hard. Perhaps he feels shooing tourists away from an acrylic posterior is beneath him.
A girl comes out of the Academy; his boss, it seems. She asks him what he's doing out there, she says something about not being paid to just watch one piece of art, that he's needed inside. He looks at her like she's soap and lampshades already.
We move off down the quay towards the lounging gondoliers, as the other tourists do. There's no luck to be had here.
The boy with the frog stands with his face pointed out to sea, but his gaze is fixed on his prisoner, helpless, upside-down. And the guard looks on.

Roof of the world

2011-07-29T03:25:00.000-07:00

There are lessons to be learnt, on your way to the top.

Firstly, that patience is its own reward.
From the balcony on the Mole Antonelliana (built 1863-89 yada yada yada), you can see the whole of Turin. You can see how it's made, and what it's made of.

Roads along Roman lines, for one thing. Elegant porticoes and squares, for another.

Lots of red, white, and green.

For a five-year-old, it's the chance to talk about the nature of fear, and civic pride, and how sometimes people cut in line, and you just have to let them do it, but you don't have to be pleased about it.

It's a chance to see the point of mathematics, and think about speed and capacity, when figuring out how long we're all going to have to wait until it's our turn to go up in the lift.

It'a a chance to discover, with an air of disappointment that may stay with him for the rest of his life, that what grown-ups call 'the top' of a building doesn't actually mean the top. The teeny tiny pointy bit, his uncle reasons, would snap off if we all went up there.
It's a chance for me to eavesdrop, and to share an unspoken thought: huh, to hell with 'all', I want to go to the top.

Not really. I hold my breath, and look over the side, but only for a moment.
High is high enough.
This is of course Turin's tallest building, a squared dome, a grey island sitting in a sea of terracotta roofs.
Up here, you have a sense of place, whether you're looking off towards the misty Alps,

... or at Superga, that solid, white reminder of Il Grande Torino, a tragedy played out close to home in every sense.
This is the roof of their world, and the torinesi are rightly proud of it.
Everyone should get high in Turin.

The river road

2011-07-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

And it seems like it goes on this way forever...

James Taylor

It is not all like this, by any means, so don't get too romantic about it.

The Lambro Valley Trail starts out perfectly, with optimism and clear signeage, in a dreamy tunnel of leaf and light. It's all so simple, with a hopeful vanishing point to look forward to, if we just keep carrying on the same way.

But life is never quite like that.

This is the Lambro, from which you get Lambrusco, and Lambrettas. It is one of the threads that powered Milan's industrial heritage. The river is shallow and fast, suspected of a lot of dirty secrets; some would say, much like the locals. Here's one, who did not appreciate us walking by, and went to sit in a pine tree.

Like just about everything in Italy, the state of the river is the subject of much head shaking.

'Things' should be ... more this, less that. It's the classic talk of those who make against those who take, the shared reasoning of thsoe who who look at the valley and see a resource that could be better managed in a dozen different ways. The conversation's too deep for me. Once in a while, 'il nostro amico qui' gets a mention, and then you remember that Arcore is just around the corner.

The river gets a 'limpidissima' mention in Petrarch, back in the thriteenhundreds, and there's a saying in Milan, ciar com'el Làmber, it's as clear as the Lambro. Somehow though - and despite the fishermen along the banks - there's bad feeling about the quality of the water. A general sensation that scary things are trickling into it from what's left of the manufacturing trade along its banks, in the hands of Italians most enduring Urban myth, the Evil Entrepreneur.

Here is a mill chimney, lost in thr trees. once,. dozens of people came down here to work - and soil - the river. but surely that's all been washed away, long since. The water looks fine to me, I'd happily take a swim, but under the surface -well, who knows.

Before long, we are at the Grottoes of Realdino, ready to stop for a drink.
Now here's a pretty contradiction. Everyone turns their nose up at the river water, and points at the mills for the reason why, but the water spouting from the rocks under the factories, that instead is speciale...

There are fish in the flooded miniature caves, shy carp, and busy tiddlers. At night, when it's all lit up, it must be quite a sight....

But we have much road in front of us, no time to tarry. And ducks ahead, too...

And elderberries, and blackberries, and hawthorn, lilac, maples and plane trees. And lasagne in a working men's restaurant. And a lot of stinging nettles. I learn about Robinia. It is supposed to rain at eleven, but it has not. We have no idea of the time, and anyway, the sky has enough blue in it to make a pair of cat's pyjamas, so we will be okay.

Rocks and ferns and rising ground. And bends in the river, whenever the path allows us to come back to it.

Eventually, after some meadows, roads, and a steep hill, we come down to an abandoned factory. Inside is like the set of a zombie film, the end of a world.

More river and woods, and then we are at a point where the path, so solid and real on the map, peters out in the face of reality.
A helpful vigile comes to our aid, once he gets over the shock of meeting walkers on his patch. There is some concrete consulting. At least, I think so. It is time to think about the road of return.

Make that the railroad of return.

Simple Lines

2011-07-22T03:01:00.000-07:00

Terminus anxiety, what subway system doesn't bring it on. It's all very well knowing what stop you want to get off at, it's the ends of the lines that matter when you're havering like an idiot between Villejuif and Clignancourt or Upminster and Ealing Broadway at the head of an escalator in the middle of a busy crowd that knows exactly where it's going.

Milan is more dork-friendly, because there are only three lines, and (because metro lines everywhere like to divvy up when they get out into the suburbs) only half a dozen names to remember. No confusing line names and numbers to remember, either. It's Red Green and Yellow, and the stations are color coordinated to the extreme.

As you can see, it's reasonably obvious when you're going out of Green Line territory into the realm of the Red; light fittings, handrails, and pipework all change colour, as do the trains themselves.

This is the red line. There's a man who plays the violin, to an orchestration coming out of his back-pack.

Italians like to think their trains are dirty; some of them are, but not the ones on the Yellow line.
It's all very open-plan.
Sitting here, thinking of the grubby Bart trains running around San Francisco, you can't help but reflect on
Italy's distorted lack of confidence in their own place in the world. It doesn't help when gullible twits like Renzi spend three seconds in Google's ping-pong playpen in Mountain View, and then whinge about how backwards the Italian workplace is, as if everyone in the US simply lurves their boss and their space-age office. Yeah right.

In the clouds

2011-07-12T22:43:00.000-07:00

Mostly, it's like this.
Mostly.
Today, tomorrow; a predictable future, at least as far as the weekend, perhaps a little more.

I live in the clouds.

The small certainties standing up like towers in the foreground, and the soft green routine fading into a mistier distance.

Sometimes, though, I can see further.

It won't last; the clouds will be back before dawn, and despite myself, I will forget what's inside them.

The end of the world

2011-07-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

It was vintage car day, up in the mountains. Bit worrying, the thought of all those elderly brake disks wobbling up and down the hairpin bends. Hopefully they update the safety features as often as they update their bumper stickers: I'm pretty sure 'Io non sono su Feisbuk' was not on the back window when these vehicles rolled off the production line. Zuckerberg probably wan't even born. This is the valley called Chisone, and the castle is Fenestrelle, no, nothing to do with windows, it's Finis Terra - the end of the world, or at least the ancient mountain kingdom of the Cozii, loyal allies of the Roman Empire.
There are always two sides to every edge, of course.
Living on the edge, of the mountain, and of both French and Italian bureaucracy, is the natural condition of the people of the tiny village of the same name, in the valley on the 'French' side of the castle, a tight, inhospitable no-man's-land between Savoia and Savoie.

There is a sign in the main square / communal parking lot (only residents can get beyond the traffic barrier that closes the village off to mere motorized visitors) it's one of those finger posts, pointing to Antarctica and LA; it also reminds you that here we're only a few hundred km from Paris and Rome.
Even on this warm and busy weekend, with brightly coloured Tour-de-France types, and mad motorbikes, and no end of car-bound daytrippers like us, it feels like a world of its own, a place where you walk and stoop and climb, even before you start up to the fort, clinging to the hillside above. Like landlubbers on a sliding sea, we don't belong.
It's a place of watchful eyes and whispering. Small balconies and glazed doors doubling as living room windows stand cheek to jowl like kissing cousins. You can just imagine small barrels and bales of dutiable goods being slyly passed from hand to silent hand, down these alleyways.
How much do you think that the physical shape of a place influences the mentality of its inhabitants, and how much does the mentality shape the building of the place? How much does time operate on our minds? The tension was palpable as the vigile urbano went about giving tickets to every vehicle out of place in this tiny, one-street village. Even to this 2CV, parked here to publicize the vintage car event.
*ut oh, somebody didn't get a permit*

The fortress of Fenestrelle is both daunting and picturesque.
Here's a model, located in what were the Officer's Quarters, then a prison...
The model and the fanciest, aerial photos show Fenestrelle as a white streak against a hard, grey background, as if it's separate from the mountain. Crazy, that. It's a part of the mountain, it's the mountain manipulated, pushed into shape.
I think it was always a prison, in one sense or another, to every man of imagination who came here. In the final days of its military occupation, they let first the officers, and then the ordinary soldiers bring their wives into the fort, and raise families here, and that must have softened even these walls a bit. But for the most part it was not that way.
Bourbons, communists, crooks, and priests alike came here to wither and die, and if you didn't actually croak from the cold and the rheumatism, the time spent here must have felt like stolen years, for the most part. It took like 70 years to build; a lifetime, a living death.

It's the Great Wall of the Alps; severe, organized, regimented. Not visible from space, not even visible from the end of the valley.

It's really three castles; this one, at the bottom, spanned the main road. The partisans it blew up to prevent the Germans using the valley to ship guns and goodies out of Italy. It's in the process of being rebuilt, but, what with modern traffic and so forth, will never be the low arched affair it was before. The middle castle is the main visitor center, and a third crowns the mountain. They are joined by an amazing covered staircase, covered to keep out the snow and marauders.
Weird, how something can be so big, so enduring and important, and here, we've driven past it, lived within a few dozen miles of it, and wandered of times in the mountains on either side of this valley, without it ever so much as registering on our radar.

Bit like taking a ferry, and sailing in utter ignorance, right over the head of a Blue Whale, or something.
This place is no fun any time when the sky is not clear, I'm guessing.
All those drawbridges... cozy? or claustrophic?
The garrison was here to keep an eye on the French, and on the inhabitants up-stream, who used to be French, and then were Italian, and probably never felt much like either. The geraniums are a 21st century thing; the cast'es slowly being restored thanks to a volunteer group and grants from worthy bodies.

There are 3-4000 steps to climb; the guided tour takes a full day, to go up and see the whole fort. The view from the top was not going to be clear, and the grim, empty garrison rooms was haunting enough, just looking at them from the outside.
We preferred to sit in the sun with our eyes shut and our faces turned up to the sky, and think about the passing of years, and the stones, and the people who lived in them both.

Nefertiti's Knees

2011-07-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

Turin is a tight little brunette of a town, where they make cars. Not that you'd know that from the city center, which is all about porticoes. And the Risorgimento. But mostly porticoes, where you can comfortably consume your bicerin, and shop, and show off, all at the same time, whatever the weather.
Unlike Paris or London, Turin's river (the broad, still-mountain-fresh Po) runs beside the city center, not through it, a line dividing town and country. Plump green hills spring up on the far bank, adorned with plump white villas. The rich merchants and nobility of Turin can literally look out of their windows, and keep an eye on their investments and employees in the smart downtown shops.

Just a provincial gem then?
No. At every turn, Turin politely reminds you in a small, elegant way, that it was a royal city a tutti gli effetti, the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and then Italy's first capital, when they finally got their act together in 1861. But then Rome took took over, and sigh, things went downhill from there - for the country, not for Turin, which carried on making stuff, like, hello, cars.

... so totally want one!!! but pink, and with a soft top, please.

So how come they have an Egyptian Museum here, second only to Cairo? A voice inside whispers Hey, does the word Bloomsbury mean nothing to you? But apparently Turin trumps the Bristish Museum, Louvre and the Met, making it a must-see. The building is an old Jesuit college with ironic crux ansatas under every window. It's all mahogany and grand staircases and three discrete sections, firstly your standard overwhelming interpretative bit, glass shelves full of alabaster and bone that make you think of Indiana Jones. The Italian equivalent is Ernesto Schiapparelli. Don't let the old guy photo fool you. His (rather boring) Big Find is part three of the tour; some tomb or other, can't remember, I was pretty a-nile-ated by then.

The second section is pure stone magic, a vast, mirrored hall, lit with refreshing restraint.

It's like a conference of cartoon idols. There are tubby ones and lion ones. The lion ones look like the Pink Panther.

But the first section.... Yuck and yay. They've got a lot of disgusting mummified black things that were once baboons and dogs and ibises too, but who's going to take a photo of all that. There are dead people with tissue paper skin, horribly torn, horribly wrong for us to look in on them, but the cats are fun, although come to think of it they probably held something barf-making back in the day. The museum covers a huge time range, going right back to the prehistoric Scorpion King period, and up to Cleopatra and all that Greek stuff. They have an amazing map showing all the mines of Egypt, there are enough fragments to get your imagination soaring, if only the thing had been before the endless sarcophageal babushkas of the first rooms.

Positioning the map, at the end of this part of the exhibition is surely deliberate. Not just saving best till last, but it's also the Egyptologist's way of pointing out how much stamina you need to go a-ventuing into the desert. I've only been staring at bits of rock for an hour, and I already feel the need of a sit down. Plus liquid sustenance. Looks like someone's been there before me...

Now that's limber.

This by contrast is gross. Nefertiti's knees. The card says these bits of leg were found in her sarcophagus. Someone has sawn through her legs, or maybe neatened them up, there's a gruesomw thought. They are black and the ends have a sort of tree-ring effect, bone in the middle, bandages outermost. I don't even know why I looked.

Why would anyone steal a body, but leave her knees? Why would anyone want to pick them up and bring them to Turin? Why am I staring at them right now? The mysteries of the ancients...

Wall photos

2011-06-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

It's one of Europe's biggest walled parks. More than 13 kilometers of wall encircle about 1700 acres of wood and meadow, not to mention the golf course, the Royal palaces, and the Grand Prix circuit.

Walled, with gatekeepers in gatekeeper's cottages, who lock up at 8.30 at night. Promptly, and with no mercy.

Walls like trees; dappled, layered, and barked.

Wet walls around the motor circuit, soft and green, hosting races of their own.

Some of the beasts are a little more permanent.

All those miles of plain white plaster, it's hard to resist the temptation to make a statement.

Something private, from the heart,

or a public invitation to spread the loving...

But there are two sides to every wall. graffiti on the inside has a different character.

Even the Ultras have to contend with ivy and saplings. It's pretty clear who's winning.

Drawing the Heat

2011-06-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

Back to the park, paper, brushes, pencils, and that damn little water pot, that has a passion for falling on marble floors and making an obscene amount of noise, without even having the decency either to smash into a million pieces, which would justify the explosion of sound, or - I don't know - use its superpower to make the earth open up and swallow me?
But out here, it's demure and silent. You can just make it out, to the right of the paper. Bastard.

The park is gently steaming. Let's not go there about the bike today, but that saddle owes me dinner and a movie. I have come back to my place, looking towards Mirabellino. It's not got the structure and the interest of Mirabellino, the other summer palace that faces it across the great field of the Hippodrome. But Mirabello is busy with people and cars, and offers no shade, no perch for passers by. This is a photo op, not a painting place.

And anyway, it's almost too easy to draw a place with so many shapes and edges. Mirabellino hides in the woods, only bits of it are visible, even less when you drop down three feet, and sit under a tree. I put on my hat and paint it again, draw it, paint it, on curious uncomfortable half sheets of Bristol weight paper. there are ants. I move, and paint some more. none of it is right, but I don't care.

A horse strolls by. It's too hot to do anything but be.
That's the curious thing about this park. I expect to be the mad dog, the englishwoman out in the midday sun quite alone. But there seems to be no hour of the day when it's considered weird to be in the park; walking, riding, even jogging. I'm sorry, jogging is weird. Hot or not, if you are over 30 you look like a dork and when it is like 90 out there, running is just uncalled for.

But they have avenues for it. Lines and lines of limes.

Up at the cascina fontana, someone got up early and cut the hay, but they're all asleep now. I wish I was, but it's a long walk home still, in the hazy early afternoon heat, sigh. Kind of comforting to see that I'm not the only one.

French Maze

2011-06-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

I bet you've never been to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
Why would you. It's just South of the Seine, like the Eiffel Tower, and the two green spaces are like opposite bookends, framing the historic city center. But while the Tower is unique, tall, sexy, and instantly recognizable, the Jardin des Plantes is not. It's big, sure, and not unfrequented - by students, escaping from the hustle of the Quartier Latin, and by families, letting steam off in the gravel walks and in the unremarkable and overpriced zoo - but it's one of those places that doesn't scream Paris. It could be anywhere.
The people walking here are locals. Not a tour bus or a phrase book in sight, for a kilometre or more. grandparents pushing strollers and holding small hands, triptychs of women, showing the three ages of one face. Dads with grubby nails taking a professional interest in a herbaceous border.
There isn't a lot of what you might call real gloire to the Histoire of the botanical garden, and a small museum spreads a paltry range of exhibits through three or four showrooms. There's a painted giraffe that's rather fetching, and one of those big models in a glaring glass case. You pay to go in, really just so's you can use their clean and spacious loo, which in Paris is always a big deal.

Every city worth its salt was getting a Jardin des Plantes by the 1600's; Paris was a bit of a latecomer. This is a working garden, not a place of pomp and circumstance, that's why. University cities like Pisa, Padua and Leiden had led the way in the previous century. A botanical garden was a classroom, sample store, and examination paper all rolled into one. This was where students wishing to become medical men, herbalists, or even canny merchants, came to learn what the leaves and flowers of medicinal plants looked like in different states: seedlings growing in the ground, flowering, overblown, wilted, and dried.
They learnt to discriminate between similar looking plants with different medical properties, or none at all.
No more passing off powdered parsley as some exotic Asian miracle cure; these guys could tell a coriander seed from a mandrake particle at fifty yards. This systemic approach to the study of plants would in time lead long-latin-word-lover Karl Linnaus to develop his taxonomy of the plant world, still a part of botany today.
But nobody comes to Paris to stare at a patch of Rudbeckia Fulgida. You could do that at home. Or at somewhere hard-core, like Wisley.

There is a hill in the Southern part of the jardin des Plantes, close to the gate that takes you neatly out into the neighbourhood of rue Monge and the edges of the Sorbonne. Perhaps it's a natural feature, or originally a Parnassus, which is an artificial hill, a standard feature of Renaissance and Baroque gardens. More about that some other time.

The fingerpost pointing up the hill is labelled Labyrinthe. What labyrinth? you'll say. There's a single path, leading up to the top, with no dead ends, and no doubling back.

Gallic cheating. Definitely not cricket. Also, that's a very narrow bench.

Oh, it's a hedge all right, some sort of evergreen concoction. There is an iron pergola in the middle, at the top of the hill, but hold on. The French have got the wrong end of the stick, apparently. Do they not get how a maze works?

Plus, the hedge is full of holes, which give it a moth-eaten appearance. You can see the dark underbelly of the hedge, as dry and sterile as bones. Some go right through, some burrow into a particularly wide section of hedge, and are lost to the darkness.
It seems a worse rip-off than the horrid little zoo, with its depressed wallabies and motionless monkeys. You can't get lost in here, you can't even cut through - unless...
A man in his 70's approaches slowly. Behind him is a little boy, walking gravely by himself. He is about four or five. I would take a photo, but the grandfather's bland, patient, reserved eyes are watching every move in the surrounding quarter mile, while giving the child the impression that he is completely inattentive. It is an impressive performance. You can sense it being absorbed into the future, in the impressions of childhood of a man, the man this boy will become, when he remembers his long-dead papy and their trips to the Jardin.
I would take a photo, and then you would see the miracle of the labyrinth.
You have to be about five for it to work; any older, and you's be too tall for this underworld, any smaller, and you'd be too scared. The holes in the hedge lead to another world, a frightening, thrilling world on independence. Inside the hedge the child sets his pace, his direction, all the time knowing that the grownups are just outside, following the spiral path to the top.
Heart beating choices in the twilight of the evergreen.
Life as a labyrinth.

Dawn

2011-06-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

Jet lagged.
I can't seem to beat it. It is four am and I am awake as if it were noon. That makes no sense, it should be ten pm for my brain, but it isn't. A few more days, I think to myself, stalking around the attic rooms. Few more days before I finally click into European mode. For now, everything is fine at four, and I am ready to die by lunch time. This is for the birds, this half-life.
On the upside, there is this.

Half an hour from the Paris, and it's like being immersed in England. The birds own the streets at this time of morning, between the trucks and the trains. They sit on the fat power lines and pour noise into the cool blue air. Among others, I hear blackbirds. I had missed their sound. Not that there's anything wrong with Cardinals and warblers, but this is different, older, like a remembered heartsong.
It's beautiful.

A piece of the Poe

2011-05-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

It's hard to know where to begin with Poe. On the face of it, he was a small man who lived a financially cramped life and who came to a mysterious, painful death. Over 150 yers after his death, his stories still raise not only the hairs on the back of your neck, but questions like - is this supposed to be frightening or funny? More than that, it remains unclear even where Poe belongs, in biographical terms he is hard to pin down. He was born in Boston, lived in New York, London, and Baltimore, but he styled himself a 'Southern gentleman' rather than a New Englander or even a 19th century cosmopolitan, like Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Maybe it is that ambiguity, and nebulousness that makes his so open to appropriation by artists as diverse as Sylvester Stallone,whose movie of Poe's life comes out in 2012; Maya Angelou, who as a girl thought of him as her 'own personal EAP', and Baudelaire, who translated him into French.

The city of Richmond gets in on the act with its Poe House. It's on a dusty, neglected street in the industrial part of town, nothing like the clustered houses clinging to shuttered, faded glory along the lines of the rue Morgue. It's not a sinister mansion, either, although St John's, on the hill above it, is a bit creepy.
Perhaps Poe got some inspiration from the chateau-like railway station about 5 minutes walk from the house - it certainly seems a likely place to hear strange banging and ticking - all those attic windows could host an army of mad women.

The Richmond museum was never Poe's residence; he stayed here with his mother's relatives from time to time, he slept, we're told, in this tiny bed.

Indeed, several of the display rooms weren't part of the original house at all, but have been co-opted into the structure in the name of historical interpretation. We forget to ask if they are at least of the dsame vintage as the 'original' bit.
The Museum is set around a neat, melancholy courtyard, closed off but a sad little portico of a temple. Inside, in melodramatically draped in black, a bust of the author. We visited on a Sunday, and the courtyard was decked out in black, for a wedding; a rather grim seeming affair, the bride was putting the final touches to her outfit up in the room where Poe's last days on earth are speculated over in ghoulish detail. She looked a little pale, but that might have been the TB, it's the kind of place that makes you want to go for a check-up, or at least grab some hand sanitizer.

In Charlottesville, you can see the room Poe used when he was a student. It's simply one in a row of rooms, the rest still occupied by undergrads.

The presence of so many barbecues under the portico makes you wonder if they are roughing it or just very into burnt meat. it may simply be indicative of the quality of food services on grounds, and the prices at the Corner.
Today, the rooms are just across the road from the Alderman Library, and not far from the gloomy gothic chapel, neither of which were around in Poe's day, though the chapel looks like it would have been his cup of tea. peering through the plexiglass at the tableau inside the room, there's a strange light around the window

Ectoplasm?

Savannah

2010-12-26T01:22:00.000-08:00

Savannah is faking it, but that's OK. It's what you'd expect; a generous, kindly, hospitable sort of fakery. You only have to look at the drooping trees to know this place swelters, in normal times. Everywhere is built for shade, but right now, it is deep midwinter, and we need no shade.

We have come from the grim grey of the northern Southern winter in search of a bit of sun, and here it is. no lattes, though; they don't know how to make lattes. But thinking of the heat, that sort of makes sense.

You cannot see all Savannah's charms in a day. The Historical District, glorying first in the riverbank, and then expanding to a surprisingly large area around Forsyth Park, makes even Charleston feel like a small, hard, lumpish town, exposed to the unmannerly bay. It's not like that here. The water is always on your mind, sure. But it is different.

One block from the waterfront, and you're in a world of foot bridges spanning the paved canyon of Factor's Walk, designed for cut-purses, costume dramas, and delivery vans. There is something sly and sliding here, something I'm missing, walking in the cool dawn shadows. These stones are English, you know; ballast from ships heading back to Britain laden with tobacco, and tar, and I don't know what else. Although it's probably written on the sign I'm standing under. I think I'd fit right in, here.

Savannah is a grid full of squares, brown and green and red, full of comfortable gentle people selling things you can't resist. It's hard to imagine anyone would get mad enough to kill. But maybe killing here is done in a sliding kind of a way. Life and death, in the heat of a summer's night, aren't that far apart.

Kevin Spacey should have played Savannah's own Johnny Mercer, not Jim Williams. Look at this and tell me I'm wrong. He has the body for it. But perhaps Johnny's life is too smooth and pleasant to warrant a film? It's not easy to get excited about the house from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil beyond noting that it is a beautiful place. I don't think the city can be captured on screen. Or I haven't seen it done yet. Anyway, murder, so what. Every house here is old, and so necessarily has its own tales of death and deceit, and there's a nightly tour to prove it, in an open-top hearse.

But Savannah is at her very best first thing in the morning, with the sun silhouetting rooftops against clean red brick

and kissing the shiny faces of the riverboats, in no hurry to go anywhere, but exquisitely made up, anyway.

And in case you really begin to believe they're all too comfy to go anywhere, there is the Waving Girl, giving all the ships a send-off, and welcoming them back again. What economy of movement, she manages to say good luck and welcome back all in one wave of her scarf. And oh, for that blessed breeze. Even on a coat-wearing day like today, it's clear that breeze is the breath of life.

Her more famous sister is stuck in a museum, no longer in her proper place, watching over the city graveyard. The Bird Girl presides over the staircase in the old Telfair Art Museum, jealously guarded from photographers and touchers by her very own security guard. It's not the same. She is like Spanish moss, lost without the twilight vapours of the damp outdoors. In my mind, this is how she should be. This is her reality. The actual is just a dream.

Savannah remembers the past, but in a quiet way, not anguishing like other places. North Carolina, for example, a crotchety old lady of a state, always touching the scars of her misfortunes and making it hurt again. This map, painted on the wall at Vic's on the River, shows the South all the way back to Tennessee, a topography taken from the mind's eye of the Civil War soldiers who had marched here with Sherman.

Savannah is cool. It's cool about drinking beer in the street, and shopping, everso slightly drunk, for earrings. OK maybe not all that slightly. But on foot, so no harm done. But even when they're warning you about the perils of driving drunk, they manage to be stylish. But don't be fooled, even in this dreaming place, you must watch your step.

Three roses

2010-07-25T05:36:00.000-07:00

Don't waste time.

Say yes.

The space between bloom and gone is less than you think.

Life on Mars

2010-07-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

A visit to Williamsburg is like going to Mars, or Hell.

It looks a bit familiar, in a Christopher Wren, Tom Sawyery kind of a way, but overall, the atmosphere is alien. OK, cowboy-and-alien. Don't let the Union Jacks fool you for a moment. This is Americana; restrained, elegant, v ancient, even - but definitely New World.

Wide, aspirational streets lined with quiet clapboard houses that are discreet, not modest. Some of them are still private residences, the line between the two is traced very faintly.

Williamsburg is Old money, shedloads of money and academic gravitas (William and Mary is a stone's throw from the Capitol building) of the sort that makes the presentation of US history feel as serious as a heart attack at the Mayo Clinic. Everything is under control.

A city, but not a huddle-together town, as you'd find in Europe; despite the potentially hostile hinterland, everything's very open plan, partly because your Sunday-afternoon transport can't be left to sit in the garage all week.

Heat. It must have shocked those first pioneers, used to the lukewarm English summers. For us, used to air conditioning, it's equally shocking, out of the world. It's hot like a long, wet, reptilian throat, swallowing every bit of initiative.

How could they be so precise, in this weather? How can you get anything done, in fact... how can you even care. the heat gets inside your bones and between your synapses. I can't believe that the prospect of getting rich, or nation-building would make you do it. Suddenly the concept of forced labour makes a lot more sense - cruel to say so, maybe, but if it weren't for threats and torture I don't see how anything would have gotten done. You'd have to be pretty afraid for your personal safety to dig up stumps and make bricks here.

In the evolutionary tree of Americana, Williamsburg is an early mammal, right next door to notional remains of the amoeba-like Jamestown. The streets are very wide and the houses have a field instead of a garage, but it's the recognizable ancestor of Anyville USA.

The shops and stores might be a bit staged, perhaps; they're pricey, but this is no collection of back-lot facades. Like a buffer between 'modern' Williamsburg and the hallowed historical ground, here's a slightly more modern shopping district that looks like it has been transplanted from Oxfordshire. They sell peanuts and ham and the kind of women's clothes that people who eat peanut and ham can't get into.
Back in the Living Museum bit, this is the cobbler's establishment, full of leather, awls, and glue. And ghost-like inhabitants, everywhere, dressed for comfort.
There's always a bit of a comprehension gap, between the English and American usage of the word 'shop'. in England, we mean a small place where you buy things. A store is something bigger, or else a place where things are stored, not sold. At least in my head. Looking at these shops - place of manufacture, and point of sale all rolled into one, the meaning suddenly lurches into the realms of reasonableness. Maybe I have been here too long.
People who've never been here often imply that there's fakery going on in Williamsburg, that it's all been reconstructed in Lego, as if it were Six Flags without the rides. It isn't. It's been tweaked, sure. You'll find fifes, shoes, soap, mead, wigs, hats, herbs, clocks, and books ... basically lots of single-syllable, historically accurate items for sale. Supposedly, these are the extras that self-sufficient yeoman farmers splurged on after a successful harvest, on something they couldn't make themselves. Can't help suspecting they came here mostly to litigate, but I can't see how you could turn that into a marketable souvenir.
There's a huge, very tasteful hotel right on the edge of the historical district, and plenty of pubs, sorry 'Inns'.

Aaah icy drinks. Anachronistic, but a life saver.

A Capital 4th

2010-07-04T16:07:00.000-07:00

Washington in July - who can say no to that? A clear blue sky, the sun sparkling on the Potomac, all those glorious museums on the Mall, and then in the evening, the redbrick delights of Georgetown.
Sarah rocks.

The first time I came here was for a strained November afternoon, and we took a tram tour to all the sights. The second time was in the depths of a bitter December, and we saw Colbert's portrait and C3PO, and the chilling Holocaust museum. And Dan from the Amazing Race. YAY.
It's hot now, though. Begin with Lincoln, it's the only way.

The best bit of Washington is the Mall. The museums up and down it are all different, all wonderful in their own way. It's neat. They don't try to out-do the Met, they explore the past, and the arts from a different perspective. The Air and Space Museum is perhaps the busiest, the American Indian Museum the oddest, with some really funky food served in their waterside restaurant. I'm talking sauteed cucumber. This is the subway. Looks like Trump meets the Pantheon.

But away from the Mall there's other stuff to see, still part of the Smithsonian - like the Renwick, which is somebody's house converted into an art gallery, but stil retaining that rich party-just about to start atmosphere. Here and in New York in the past months, I've seen so many nudes reclining, resting and generally hanging out, which makes this piece by Karen Lamonte all the more exceptional.

I'm no patriot, but we watched the parade snake by for an hour or so in the oven of the mall, appropriately enough just outside the American History Museum

After a bit, we had enough, and went to the Freer. Cool, silent. Whistlers, and other masterpieces, with the promise of fireworks to come in the night.
Bliss.

Canaletto

2010-06-20T16:03:00.001-07:00

When Max and me went to see the P&O.
Caution: this video contains information of an educational nature.

Big Bambu

2010-05-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

At the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the roof has become a rain forest, overlooking the soft green woods of Central Park. Nestling on among the concrete and brick of the fourth floor courtyard, bamboo poles crowd and cluster, forming a sort of stilted cocktail party, alive with anticipation.

This is Big Bambu. At floor level, it's a labyrinth of slim pillars, but look up a little, and Big Bambu becomes a bird's nest, full of complicated, chaotic intersections. There is no symmetry in the tangle of poles, but somehow the eye finds patterns, geometric harmonies in 3D. Doug and Mike, the Starn twins, support and direct the overall look of the sculpture, which started as an idea some 13 years ago. Previous to getting permmission to nestify the Met, they built an incredible indoor bamboo arch at their studio at Beacon, just to show the possibilities of both the materials and the techniques they had in mind. The interior pathway made and reminded me of the voliera in Parco di Monza, but while that structure from 2006 is showing signs of decay, Big Bambu is the Voliera taken flight; bright, busy and still growing: how apt Big Bambu's tagline You Can't, You Won't You Don't Stop.

But with typically light touch, Doug and Mike have not micromanaged their builders, who are mountain climbers, not professional scaffolders or artists. The brothers set goals to reach, marked on the ground, and then the guys branch out, knot by knot, pole by pole, to reach them.

This is performance art: every move has to be calculated, small engineering quandaries must be overcome, either in private moments of calculation, or with the help of the rest of the team. The result is a unique knitting together of individual solutions to the shared problem of how to get there from here... Big Bambu is an allegory of the city that surrounds it, already complete but never finished, worked out in flows and currents that you have to be inside to really appreciate.

Bamboo is used in the Far East for scaffolding, and it's resilient, light, flexible and forgiving. The dozen or so helpers who work each week on the Starn's project were chosen for their ability with 'methodical knots' (each brightly colored, Swiss-made 'bootstrap' takes about three minutes to tie just right) and with a head for heights. Both talents are essential: the structure is currently 20 feet tall but will soon tower some 40 to 50 feet above the rooftop.

Most visitors only get the roof-level effect of the build, many don't even notice the winding paths that run up into the sky, and the gaping hole at the center, but for a lucky few, there's a chance to climb up into the structure and to do so just before sunset is the best. During the summer, on Friday and Saturday nights, the roof of the Met is open until sunset, and fills with visitors enjoying a cocktail, company, and the view.

This is Zac, one of the builders, and also a guide on the Big Bambu tour. 'You're with the elements, up here. There's a feeling of complete happiness working on this project, working steadily as a team, with the wind making the canes rustle and sway a little, you feel interconnected with all the sounds, with the feel of weather as it changes, withe the work of the people around you.Big Bambu is like a cresting wave, when you get up top, you can see the overall form the Starn brothers have in mind. It's like the jungle and the ocean coming together.'
So far, thousands of strings, and more than 4000 poles of varying sizes have been gradually hauled up onto the roof for use on the structure: 'We're rocking the domestic bamboo,' Zac said, 'All of it comes from South Carolina and Georgia.' With the exception of sensible things like making the walkway complete and safe for visitors, they try to build in such a way that it is not necessary to cut the poles down to size; they'd rather work with the dimensions and use them to invent and suggest new departures for the construction.

It's not until you climb inside the structure, however, that you really get the feel for it. Groups of 15 (the number of people who can be transported in a single elevator from the ticket office in the basement up to the 4th floor) are let in through the bamboo gates and up the narrow walkway. Like corpuscles moving through an artery inside a great beast, our feet and hands interact slightly nervously with the springy interior. 'It's not often an artwork can make you a little afraid,' Zac comments. This is New York, the whole thing has been subjected to all kinds of safety tests, but the feeling of being on the edge remains. You can't carry a camera - or anything else you might drop on the visitors below - up into the sculpture, so no pictures, sadly, but it would be impossible to capture the sensation of being a part of this build, connecting with each beam, with each builder, and in a new way with the city at out feet.

2009-12-25T18:16:00.001-08:00

ARTE DEL COMUNICARE A NAPOLI

braided

2009-07-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

Nel tardo '400, il duca Galeazzo Maria Sforza, papà della favolosa Caterina Sforza e appassionato di musica, radunò a Milano uno straordinario gruppo di musicisti e cantori, strappandoli, con la promessa di lauti guadagni, alle migliori corti italiane ed europee. Per il castello sforzesco, roccaforte e regia, fece progettare dall'architetto toscano Benedetto Ferrini la Cappella Ducale con affreschi eseguiti nel 1473 da un gruppo di artisti tra cui Bonifacio Bembo, Jacopino Vismara e Stefano de' Fedeli. Venne realizzato un ambiente con le pareti dorate, mentre sulla volta è una più complessa decorazione, con la Resurrezione e l'Ascensione di Cristo. Galeazzo ebbe poco tempo per godersela. Meno di tre anni dopo, il giorno di santo Stefano, sulla soglia della chiesa di santo Stefano, venne pugnalato a morte da un gruppo di nobili. Aveva solo trentadue anni.

Durante varie occupazioni straniere, la raffinata cappella viene adibita a stalla, subisce gravi danni alle pareti e naturalmente anche agli affreschi, è stata ripristinata e restaurata agli inizi del Novecento. Ci sono altre opere in questa stanza, ma la protagonista assoluta è la Madonna del Coazzone.

Non è certo l'unica donna 'di spicco' nella galleria. Il busto detto la Mora, una signora riccioluta vestita in una sontuosa camicia, è la fiera occupatrice della stanza dove è situata la Rondanini Pietà, è più giovane e più bella.

Ci sono le donne del gonfalone. Inoltre, questo sarcofago trecentesco sfoggia l'immagine di quattro donne splendide, simboli della giustizia, la scienza, il potere e la religione. Le donne contano.
Conta la Maddonna del Coazzone. Opera di Pietro Antonio Solari (responsabile nel 1482 per i lavori alla Certosa di Parma), fu eseguita circa un decennio dopo il termine dei lavori nella Cappella Ducale. Solari, ticinese, in seguito fu chiamato alla corte dello zar Ivan II e muore a Mosca nella primavera del 1492.
Vista controluce, lei occupa la stanza ora come una regina, ora come una semplice supplicatrice. Prende la luce lombarda che entra dal cortile attraverso una finestra enorme e la rende serena, pura. La statua in marmo (destinata in origine per la Fabbrica del Duomo) rappresenta la Vergine come una dama quattrocentesca assorta in preghiera. Tipico del periodo l'acconciatura dei capelli, annodati nella lunga treccia, detta "coazzone" in dialetto lombardo. Nella sua stanza azzura, una delle ultime che si incontra durante la visita, la statua ci parla del passaggio del tempo e le sofferenze subite, ma con una dolcissima rassegnazione che solo le pietre possono esprimere. Le manca un braccio, ma le sue mani unite sono illese, come la fiducia in una preghiera esaudita.

Ho voluto disegnarla, a modo mio, nella cappella silenziosa, in una giornata di caldo intenso, ho voluto renderla sulla carta, ma non ho saputo catturare la gioventù del volto, la misteriosa tranquillità della sua casa, la leggerezza del suo sguardo contro il peso di quella treccia. Ma cia siamo tenute compagnia per un po' e per questo non la posso dimenticare...

Navigation

2009-07-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

Venice doesn't have the monopoly on canals in Italy, you know.

This is the Naviglio Grande, by the darsena or port of Milan in the southwest corner of the city. I took a trip on the water on this nice boat, piloted by a stylish lady all in white, the other weekend.

The industrial heritage of the Navigli is protected nowadays, in classic Italian style, with lots of attention to artistic detail and but slightly confused in its more practical elements. This was the nice arty courtyard where the canal protection people have their offices and sell original watercolours too.
Milan is Venice backwards. Man-made waterways through the ocean of fertile fields and factories of Lombardy, rather than man-made islands in a lagoon: but the point is the same, to make money.
Unlike Paris or London, or even Rome and Turin, Milan's rivers are nothing to write home about; the Olona, the Lambro (which also runs through Monza) pretty but shallow, and the Seveso, which runs into Milan from the North, famous for its black water - the colour used to be due to the minerals leeching in from the soil, now it's just highly polluted - and which has been for the most part put underground, only to come to the surface every time there's a heavy downpour, as happened last month, causing chaos for commuters to the Northern hinterland.

The idea to build canals to link this land-rich but land-locked city with the sea is probably as old as boats. Two big rivers, the Adda and the Ticino, pass within a few dozen miles of the city on each side, both coming out of one of Italy's big lakes and heading South for the mighty Po which underlines Milan in a West-East direction, off to throw itself into the Adriatic. In 1177 work began in earnest on the first canal, the Naviglio Grande, from the Ticino river: the first twenty miles taking some fifty years to complete. By 1272 it was finished, navigable from Lago Maggiore (and therefore Switzerland and all points Northern European) down the Ticino all the way to Porta Ticinese on the city's western edge. Other canals followed, in particular the 15th century Martesana, from the opposite side of the city out towards the Adda, and the Pavese, going South to Pavia, also on the river Po. This modern underpass, now a hang-out for the local lads, recalls the heyday of towpaths on the Naviglio Grande.

The canals provided pretty much everything: drinking, washing, working water, as well as a handy open sewer. Artisans set up shop here next to the eating places, wharves and warehouses. Barges, called cobbi, like the one above, brought in and took away raw materials - salt, sand, cloth and cheese, milk and cream too, of course: cream in the Lombard dialect is mascherpa; a lot of cream, then, is mascarpone... also shipped in on the five feet of canal water, these days as clear as a bell, was grain, wine, animals and people. The canals were used to get the marble in to the area of the duomo in Milan, and ship it even further south via the great rivers; the stones would be marked Ad Usum Fabricae Opera - for building purposes, in this case church building and therefore exempt from paying custom taxes. Back then, any goods passing through the city had to pay duty, so the idea of the wealthy church getting in free must have seemed a bit cheeky: today to scrounge something, especially a meal, is said to be 'a ufo' - no flying saucers involved.

Until the introduction of trams in the 1800s, the canals also provided public transport around the city. This is S Cristoforo, the 'first house by the waterside' of the Naviglio Grande: when the bargees got here they knew they were almost arrived. The church is very ancient, in fact it's two medieval churches linked by a Renaissance apse, long before the Naviglio, this was a sort of spaghetti junction on the Lambro river for commercial rafts and pilgrims alike, hence the name of the church.

This is a proudly working class area. The industrial heritage is perhaps best illustrated by this poster, also at the Darsena. But celebrating history doesn't seem to translate into civic pride: under the poster celebrating the last hurrah of the canal system as a source of income for the area in the 1960's, there are gang symbols, weeds and trash that seem to contradict the idea of a town determined to treasure the memory of its serious working past. Perhaps not though. Money spent on weedkiller might simply not be available. Of course, in centuries past this is an area that would have been home to a big slice of the city's working poor. There are still plenty of poor people in Milan, as we were reminded by the sight of this homeless person's little nest under a bridge very close to the Darsena (that's from the arabic for port, the point where the cobbi coming from Pavia and from the Ticino river come together).

The boat tour takes you up and down considerable sections two of the navigli, both of historis importance, and turning around with acres of water ahead gave us all the sense we'd like to keep going, to see more of the countryside beyond the edge of the city. Well, maybe not the first turning point, which was here, at the end of the line for the boat trip down the Naviglio Grande, here begin the skyscrapers, and the country opened out into what looked like some prosaic suburbia of garages and offices.

Instead, the Pavese has a different atmosphere, smarter bridges span it, and the buildings along its banks are more gentrified. It seemed to me the same bit of canal and boat that you can see on this video by Le Vibrazioni.
The cobbi parked here are bars and restaurants and balere and flower boxes strew geraniums onto the water. The point of no progress is different too: rather than turning round in open water, as it seemed on the Naviglio Grande, here the way is barred by a lock, this lock had a torre di controllo and, wonder of wonders, a (diligent!) man in it, apparently lock keeper is still a job in Milan.

He opened the gates invitingly, and I think we all hoped the pilot would decide to take us down to Pavia, just for kicks, a 45 minute ride each way. Instead she effected a neat 7 point turn. We got a long explanation of how the lock was an invention of Leonardo da Vinci and some lute music, so it wasn't all bad.

Castello sforzesco

2009-07-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

E in tra dò fil de piant che ghe fa ombria,
El gh'è on sentirolin
Solitari, patetegh, deliziôs
Che 'l se perd a zicch zacch dent per i praa,
E ch'el par giusta faa
Per i malinconij d'on penserôs.

Carlo Porta, L'apparizion de Tass

I castelli non sono così. Sono scomodi e un pochino bruttini. Anzi molto brutti, un'ammasso di pesante muraglia forata da porte ripensate, spesso sproporzionate, e la disarmonia delle cicatrici di finestre murate. Gli ingredienti imposti dalle forze occupatrici d'un impero straniero.

Ma questo è un castello rifatto da capo.
Girare da sola non mi piace, ecco l'ho detto. Tutti mi dicono che è normale stare soli, mi raccontano come sono stati a vedere la mostra delle rose da soli, oppure al cinema, o a vedere uno spettacolo su Broadway sola soletta, o andati a fare una gita in barca a velo con altre anime solitarie. L'è normal, dicono, ma per me non è così e non credo mai mi abituerà. Non voglio. Poi in una giornata troppo calda, troppo poca aria, con una parte di me che non sta mai tranquilla al pensiero di diver tornare a casa, assurdo lo so, preoccuparsi di un trenino regionale dopo tutta la strada che ho fatto, in questi giorni. E mi gira la testa.

Milano città bollente ma non per questo tranquillo anzi brulica. Corrono, senza sudare, la faccia seria, cell in mano, all'orecchio. Borse acconciature gonne cagnolini occhiali da sole. Persone che non guardano in faccia a nessuno. E poi coppiette. E famiglie, turisti stranieri e no, nonni e nipoti. Mi sento come se avessi un cartello sopra la testa, sola. Vai bene finché ti muovi, da sola, sembra che hai con chi incontrarti. Ma nel momento che ti siedi su una panchina, tutto cambia.

Questa è via Dante. In fondo si vede il castello. Non si vede il caldo. Ma c'era.

Non so perché mi gira la testa. Io penso che è a causa del mangiare poco e male. Non male, esattamente, ma poco sicuro.

Mattoni? Un castello brownstone dunque? O come i redbrick university, qualcosa meno di prima classe. Non è castel S Angelo, ecco. Non è Windsor. Non è Caernarvon, o Angers. Se devo darlo un fratello, sarebbe forse Cardiff. Non un complimento, il paragone con Cardiff... Milano città di MacDonald's dalla stazione fino al castello ho contato 8, escluso quello nella Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, dove il solito logo giallorosso si placa in oro e nero, ma le polpette agli ingredienti misteriosi sono sempre quelle. Io alla fine mi sono fermata a prendere qualcosa, per vedere se gli ingredienti misteriosi potevano fermare il giramento.

MacDonald's e il mangiare fast food non è certo un fenomeno nuovo in Italia, eppure ordinare un pasto sembrava un'impresa difficoltosa per tutti i clienti davanti a me, ho fatto fila per un'eternità (quasi 6 minuti) prima che tocasse a me. Poco, quello che ho ordinato, perché è roba scadente, ma quanto bastava per fermare lo stomaco, o la pressione del sangue, o quel che ho che non va. Fuori al sole c'erano dei tavoli rotondi in legno con delle panchine in cimento. L'unico libero era a pieno sole, mi sono seduta perché non ce la facevo più. Accanto a me un uomo con la barba grigia stava finendo il pasto. Sembrava un senzatetto, portava i pantaloni sporchi e logori, e una camicia sfatta. Appena allontanatosi il suo posto è stato preso da una signora elegantissima con due bambine molto carine, si sono accomodate proprio dov'era il signore pochi secondi prima. Sfoggiavano gonna e camicetta firmati Amelia... Il Big Mac dunque, unisce tutto il mondo sotto l'insegna del mangiare in fretta.
Perché il tram, a Milano? Ce ne sono a Roma, tre quattro linee, come per non dimenticare gli anni '50... ma i milanesi sono davvero così attaccati all'epoca di Marcovaldo? Dovrò leggere con più attenzione quando torno a casa.
Nel 1447, i milanesi si sono autodichiarati repubblica, e hanno demolito il castello trecentesco... quindi neanche quello originale davvero antico. Qui si respira la Francia, qualcuno mi disse una volta. Penso ai castelli gallesi, come Harlech, voluti dal re inglese, ma costruito da esperti francesi. La grande repubblica milanese, privo di simboli di dominio crudele quale un castello minaccioso al cuore della città, durò ben tre anni. Il tempo, forse di radere al suolo il vecchio castello, portare via tutti i pezzi, magari come si faceva a Roma, rimodellare casa propria con delle bella pietra. O mattoni. Non lo so. Ma decidetevi, no. Buttare giù un castello e liberarsi da un signore, per riacquistare entrambi dopo meno di due anni, un soggiogarsi a forse che non hanno a cuore i tuoi interessi, uno sbaglio. Ma si sentivano forse spaesati, i milanesi, senza un despota alla guida del loro destino.

Gira rigira. Il caldo e le fontane, l'acqua e la pietra, e gli occhi di chi cammina senza sostare, e chi invece si ferma a guardare.

Ma mi sbagliavo, perché anche questo castello ha molte finestre rifatte più piccole. Il giro del castello fatto in un secondo momento rivela i segni particolari d'un astio tra quelli di dentro e quelli di fuori. Il castello è grande, ha dei cortili imponenti, dietro un parco immenso dove all'epoca degli Sforza c'erano cervi, lepre, quaglie, animali per il divertimento e per la tavola. Un deserto al centro della città dove tutto era lecito, bastava varcare la soglia, nascondersi in qualche angolo, e osservare la natura, mentre dall'altra parte del muro merlato i milanesi continuavano a soffrire o a nodà en la grassa, secondo la loro sorte.

Chi commanda protegge ma non sempre protegge i commdandati. Invece armonioso l'interno della corte ducale o Rocchetta, porticata e tranquilla. Qui c'è la stanza del tesoro, il forziere di Milano. Qui si trovano le stanze più belle del castello, qui c'è Leonardo e il Bramantino, e il letto di Isabella d'Este. Ma arrivata a l'una o poco dopo, le stanze erano chiuse per la pausa pranzo. Da vedere prima dunque gli altri musei: quello egiziano assolutamente scadente, quello della storia naturale, triste e piccolo.

Da visitare sicuramente la pinacoteca, e la mostra di mobili milanesi, da partire dal '300, mobili intarsiati, intagliati, arricchiti da gioielli, animali, vetri, vernici. Schermi per una chiesa, una specie di stanza a prova di paperazzi, fatta per una famiglia nobile per permetterla di assistere alla messa senza essere osservata. Comò e tiranti, sedie così pesantemente cesellati che sembravano sculture anziche luogo per collocare vestiti o oggetti personali.

Poi quello delle pietre antiche, interessante, come ho scritto, in particolare per la pietà Rondanini... ma un museo strano, disposto in sale decoratissime, che spesso stonavano con le opere stesse e con la maniera in cui sono esposte, certo non secondo lo stile rinascimentale.

Questa stanza, le pareti sono rifiniti in legno, ma un legno che sembra più quel rivestimento di pino tanto in voga negli anni '70 che un wainscotting elizabettiana come si trova nei castelli e le residenze nobili inglesi. Invece la soffitta rappresenta una foresta intera, i tronchi partono dagli archi, le foglie sono verdi e marroni e gialli e folti come una selva oscura...

Perché spendere tanto a pitturare la soffitta? I milanesi amano forse camminare con gli occhi rivolti al cielo, per non guardare in faccia a nessuno? Questo sono disposta a credere. Sono dei vigliacchi, i milanesi. Parlo in generale, ma anche con in mente degli specifici esemplari.

Che caldo, a Milano.

Un caldo umido, come una minestra fatta di avanzi rancidi riscaldata e riproposta in tavola troppe volte. Che voglia di ciappà el fresch nei saloni silenziosi del museo. Qui tra le pietre, passeggiano romani e lombardi, soldati e santi. Mi sono trovata davanti questa coppia dallo sguardo glaciale. Madre e figlio, tanto simili che anche se non fossero fusi in pietra, non si potrebbe confondere il legame di parentela.

Sempre pià pietra grigia, una passeggiata tra le rocce. Distruggono castelli, benedicono, ricordano i cari defunti, si vantano della propria bravura. Cantano la storia della Lombardia, una storia progressista, lavoratrice, onesta, e, dissi di no, mi, ricca.

Il cielo in un'altra stanza, il sole, invece. Non uno ma tantissimi baiocchi d'oro sullo sfondo arancione, forse modo di combattere il grigio freddo dell'inverno milanese. Strano, il museo, proprio per questo disaccordo tra le pallidi pietre, eterne e esterne, che fluiscono con una certa pesante armonia e similtudine da secolo in secolo, e le colorate interne, fragili e leggere, cosi diverse tra loro. Impossibile non notare i soffitti e chiedersi chi è stato in queste stanze prima di me, e se anche loro si sentivano soli, e se faceva maledettamente caldo, e se avevano voglia di capire Milano senza capire perché una città con la quale non ho nessuna lagame, che non mi piace, verso la quale non sento né lealtà né affetto, né curiosità intelletuale mi affascina tanto.
Un'altra stanza ospita il gonfalone di Milano, alto almeno cinque metri, questo gigantesco drappo squisitamente ricamato ai colori sgargianti veniva (e forse tutto ora viene) portata per le boulevards milanesi in occasione di festa e vittoria.. ma non quando piove, scommetto. .

Mi gira la testa.

Sono a Milano e fa troppo caldo e sono sola e mi gira la testa. Nella pinacotect ci sono delle panchine, mi siedo, ascolto il discorso di due signori accanto a me, parlano della storia dell'arte, del quadro davanti a noi, l'uomo che legge. ma non posso seguire, non voglio.

Penso a Isabella d'Este, il suo letto che mi aspetta nella Rochetta, insieme agli affreschi del Bramantino e i dipinti di Leonardo. E rinuncio. Il museo, in fondo, costa poco, solo 4 euro. Ci tornerò un altro giorno, in un'altra occasione quando non mi gira più la testa. Io tornerò. Con Milano non ho ancora finito, e non so perché ma l'idea di una storia rimasta aperta al futuro mi allegerisce, mi dà refrigerio. E prendo e parto, sempre maledettemente a piedi, per la sudata stazione, e poi per i sentieri del il mio amatissimo parco, e casa.

Namedropper

2009-06-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

Il di che amor nei lacci mi prese,
Mi fe’ cangar di mia vita sembiante;
E quando Amor per forza l’arco istese
Non vale a’ colpi suoi cor di diamante:
Fugge la maraviglia a chi lo intese.
Poiché mi feci al suo signor costante
Poiché m’ebbe ferito col suo strale,
Ben par che si goda del mio male.

Gerusalemme Liberato Torquato Tasso

So just what kind of a slut was the Monaca di Monza? There that got your attention. She is Monza's 'other' claim to fame, besides the race track. Oh, Monza has other illustrious sons and daughters, The previously mentioned Theodelinda, queen of the Lombards, the terribly bourgeoise Victorian painter Mose Bianchi, (can you be Italian and yet Victorian? I think so) - he painted this picture - and Gianni Citterio, Monza's favourite home grown communist partisan (one of a very small band, I'm bound to suspect). Giacomo Puccini lived here for a year, his son was born in a small house on the road by the train station. A bit of a far cry from Torre del Lago. Then of course you've got the on-off presence of various Royal and Noble personages at the Villa Reale. Did I mention Umberto I, the only king of Italy to get himself assassinated, was shot here in Monza? Gaetano Bresci travelled all the way from New Jersey to Monza, to shoot the king, when he was waving at the crowd on his way home after a horse show. There is an ‘Expiatory Chapel' here in town, built by the people of Monza, a sort of public apology in granite. Bresci was punched to death by the guards in prison on the Island of Santo Stefano the following year.

The other worthies of Monza are all rather dusty academics, scientists, minor politicians. All of which makes the Monaca a figure of relief in the history of the city.

She was a noblewoman, Marianna de Leyva, of Spanish blood, and she wasn't born in Monza, but in Milan, in the year 1576 or thereabouts, around the time the poem above was first published. Her mother, Virginia, died when she was tiny, and she ended up in care of an aunt, pretty much forgotten by her father who went back to Spain (the dominating European power of the time)and remarried when Marianna was still a child. Left in Monza, like a lot of noblewomen of the period, she was destined for the monastery at about age 13, it's cheaper than paying a dowry, and in fact, the money promised to the convent in Monza never did get paid. Her father 'borrowed' most of the fortune she was to inherit from her mother, the rest was appropriated by her elder half-brotherand his family. Her life as a nun - she took her mother's name, and was known as Suor Virginia - was far from one of suffering and quiet resignation, though. Her father and his brother shared control on alternate years of the revenue from the levies charged on goods coming in and out oof the county of Monza. In the years when Virginia's father was the beneficiary, he put the 20something Virginia in charge basically of the whole town, making her the 'Signora' of Monza, the Lady, overseeing repairs, civic modernization, and the collection of income. Contemporary sources show she was pretty good at it, self assured and capable, and pretty popular at the convent where, naturally she was also pretty much in charge.

Next door to the convent lived the Osio family. The menfolk - the name Osio is very close to the word for laziness in Italian, ozio - all seem to have been wild. They were known or suspected in a vast number of incidents around the county of Monza, in which their rivals were killed, robbed and beaten up. The blackest sheep, however, was Giovanni Paolo. Virginia seems to have been wise to him at first, she caught him making eyes at one of the young girls entrusted to the convent, and had a stern letter written to him, and sent the girl home, as 'non-nun material'. But a couple of years after this, when Giovanni Paolo came back to Monza after being forced into hiding for various misdeeds, after a long series of letters passed over the wall on a string, addressed to Virginia. He was a looker, but not much of a writer of love letters, it seems. A certain Father Arrigone, family friend and interested in Virginia himself, wrote a lot of the letters, Pandar-style (oh, you, google it. I'll give you a heads-up, it's nothing to do with pandas.) In the end, Virginia fell for him. Osio, not the priest. Two children were born over the next couple of years; the first died, the second, a little girl, lived with her father. Virginia got to see her every now and again in the Osio house.

Nobody said anything for quite a long time. For several years, Virginia continued her work as a teacher in the small convent, and when called on, as the Lady of Monza. She seems to have had to spend a fair bit of time coping with the faction of nuns who were not her cronies, and relying heavily on the complicity of two or three who she could utterly rely on. One can imagine the atmosphere in the building - there were only about 20 nuns all told, plus young women being educated and/or groomed for the veil. Thanks to her her closest friends, Suor Virginia continued to see Giovanni Paolo in the convent and in his house, with the excuse in part that he was thinking about becoming a cappuccino... Not that she didn't try to get over him. She kept throwing away the keys - perhaps as many as 50 - he had made for the door that separated the two houses. She had the windows that overlooked the Osio house walled up, and for a time took to drinking a 'tea' made with his excrement. Not surprisingly Suor Virginia suffered some serious health problems.

So far, she seems a fairly sympathetic figure, a woman in her mid twenties falling for a handsome neighbour, having a child with him, even under the constraints of her life as a nun, which, on the whole, was one of the few ways an intelligent woman could have some sort of career. Popes and priests often had families they took only a little trouble to hide. To paint her as an evil person under those circumstances smacks of mysogeny.

But then the story changes.

About eight years after their relationship began, one of the young women in the nunnery, Caterina de Meda, unhappy at her treatment by suor Virginia and generally not looking forward to a life in the convent, decided to tell the open secret to a visiting bigwig. They tried to talk her out of it, but she was adamant, and, the night before her big tell-all moment, Giovanni Paolo killed her, and buried her body in the hen house. They cut off the head of the girl, presumably to slow down identification if the body should be found, and they made a hole in the convent wall so that is would seem she had run away. A few months went by, but stories continued to surface. The man who had,made all those keys started talking around town, and Giovanni Paolo killed him, got himself arrested for also trying to kill some other people connected with the story. It was a hushed-up affair, the arrest, you might not be able to get away with nurder in 1600, but if you come from a powerful faminly there was a good chance you'd pay a fairly light price. But the lovers made a serious mistake. Instead of staying quiet, they started a letter-writing campaign trying to get Giovanni Paolo out of jail. Soon more important clergy heard not only about the deaths but about the irregularities in the convent, and suddenly Virginia was in the middle of a scandal. The gruesone remains of Caterina di Meda showed up. Not long afterwards, Virginia's two closest friends in the nunnery began to get worried they are going to be sucked into the general disgrace, and asked Osio to help them escape. He helped them leave the convent, only to kill them that same night, with, it seems, Virginia's knowledge. Her concern for her honour, over the lives of her friends, strikes a jarring note. It's hard to know if the accounts read this way because of the anti-Spanish bias of the chroniclers, or if she, the last of the de Leyvas, really was that haughty. Perhaps a bit of both.

Eventually, after a series of trials involving torture and interrogation of all the parties involved, Giovanni Paolo got himself murdered. His house was knocked down and became a popula venue for ball games. A lot of balls ended up over the convent wall. They were not returned. Virginia was found guilty of "various crimes" not specified in court documents, and sentenced to be walled up in a cell in the worst women's prison in Milan, the 'convent' of S. Valeria. The cell was about 9 feet by 4 feet square. She was in there for 14 years. Then they decided she was sorry.

She spent the rest of her long life a sort of Mother Theresa to the Milanese prostitutes of the S. Valeria, "old and bent, emaciated and venerable" still fiercely proud of her de Leyva blood. I don't know what happened to the child, Alma Francesca Margherita.

The convent of S. Margherita is gone, too, swept away under the rug, like all things a small neat town might be expected to want to forget. But where the convent was, you will find a road known as the via della Signora, for Virginia, when she was the Lady of Monza, not just the monaca. And on the building on the corner, there is still a madonna and child.

Near Darkness

2009-06-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

Voi che pel mondo gite errando

vaghi di veder meraviglie alte e stupende

venite qua ove tutto vi parla

d'amore e d'arte

The train journey from Monza is a catalogue of flat fat prosperous towns. The railway comes out of Lombardy across the might Po river, broad and grey-green and awash with willows and poplars; the first town on the other side is Piacenza. A line of plump comfortable redbrick towns follow: Fidenza, Parma, Reggio, Modena, Bologna. The smell of pigs around Modena, turns out, not legendary. At Bologna the flatness begins to ease, the hills begin, and then it's Appenine all the way to Florence, and then the rolling waves of grain to Arezzo, and the Oh! the profile of Orvieto, high above the valley residing on its great tufa cushion, and then you are at Orte, and home. Well, I am, anyway.

This is the Tuscia, which is to say the quiet farms, unexpected open cliffs, miniature torrents, and the beech and chestnut forests to the North of Rome. The Monti Cimini rise dark out of the rolling countryside: Poggio Nibbio, Monte Fogliano, Monte Venere, la Palanzana. At their heart is Lago di Vico, a cool shadowy lake, deep as history, unforgiving of careless swimmers. This is Etruscan country; the Romans, when they were contructing the via Cassia to Florence, took one look at the Cimini, and built a detour. A strange world of strange words written in stone two thousand years previously. Vicino Orsini was clearly taken with their mastery of water and stone, of their love of life and beauty, their mysterious beliefs and their fading away, an aesthetic slightly out of key, unable or unwilling to resist the tide of Roman taste.
The Tuscia is Etruscan, but it is not all the same. on the slopes of the Monti Cimini there is Vignanello with its wines and chestnuts, celebrated from as far back as the 4th century AD; there's San Martino the 16th century model village, and of course Bagnaia, more on that place another time. But the queen of towns in the Cimini, if you pay attention to the guide books, is Soriano. I've never liked it, it looks fine on a postcard, but when you get closer you discover that its fairy-tale 13th century castle has been (ab)used as a maximum security prison up until the mid 1990's, and is still in desperate need of repair. It's something of a metaphor for all these towns, arid, crooked narrow streets clogged with cars and heavy with hard faces and over-curious eyes, and everywhere, walls, walls, walls.

Bomarzo is like that. The people of Bomarzo have a reputation for being closed, even thick as the walls of the houses here, my travelling companion commented. Perhaps it's the nature of the place, all these houses thrown up against each other, like bodies found after a fire, all trying to escape from something - the briganti on the highway, passing battallions of mercenaries, the bears in the forest. Above Bomarzo, the palace of the Orsini, one of many Orsini palaces in the Tuscia, this is their stamping ground since, well, the invention of surnames.

Under the sheltering or bullying shadow of the Orsini palace, not beautiful or particularly well proportioned, simply endlessly refashioned out of the living rock of the older houses, the family DNA , the town piles and tumbles along the ridge of the hill.

But in the valley, ah, in the valley, other forces are at work.

In a time when men finished college at 14, Vicino Orsini had to grow up faster than most. He was born into a powerful family, but his early adulthood was no walk in the park; he had to fight for Bomarzo, his own miniature kingdom; through the papal courts, at the age of 19. Cardinal Alessandro Farnese helped him.

More fighting followed. Vicino - it means near, and neighbour, in Italian. His given name was PierFrancesco, the origins of the nickname I cannot tell. He was a reader, and, even if not on the scale of Federigo di Montefeltro, a lover of books: he would have had access to the library at Caprarola, and certainly would have had his own copy of the major works like the Divina Comedia, the Roman de la Rose, the pastoral poems of Poliziano and so many others, and the Classics of Latin - things of practical interest like Caesar's Gallic Wars and Pliny's letters, describing in vivid and much-copied detail the gardens of his villas in Tuscany and in the hills of Rome. There were items of thoughtful and fantastic Greek literature which during this time was gradually coming to the surface, Ovid's Metamorphosis first and foremost, an trailing tail of transformations and transgression. Pegasus, his hoof still striking the rocks of Mount Helicon and creating a gush of poetry in the world, is one of the first statues you encounter in the garden. Everywhere inscriptions in red letters, red like the red stain on the necropoli of the Etruscans; notes and mottoes, some proudly explicit, many others veiled in the secret meaning and mythology of the Bomarzo Orsinis.

On top of these, he would have read Orlando Furioso, written just 50 years before his birth, the 'corrective' Gerusalemme Liberata, both so appropriate for Vicino's career. Like the characters in those poems, he became a soldier, which means a working man, a condottiero one of the many Italian soldiers for hire, charging around the peninsular and bits of France and Spain, from Perpignan to the Pas de Calais, in the mix in exchange for a fee or a share in the spoils. He became close to the playwright, poet and translator of Virgil, Annibale Caro, over in Montefiascone. He became a husband; in an age where marriages had everything to do with politics and little or nothing with love, he found both, at 21, with Alessandro Farnese's cousin Giulia.

He saw things. The value of friendship, the ferocity of war, the pointlessness of loss.

Somewhere in all this, he began his garden at Bomarzo.

The mid 1500's, in Lazio, is the Age of the Garden. Villa Lante and Villa d'Este, The houses of the Medici and Alessandro Farnese's own masterpiece at Caprarola, on the other side of the Cimini mountains, were all taking shape. Along lines. With emphasis on proportion, on technicalities like water spouts and perspactive. Tight formal spaces for dignified walking and showing off giving way, but only just, to areas of more abandon, hideaways for the jetset to flirt and play away from prying eyes. Everyone thinking of Pliny's villa, or rather his letters describing it, and showing off the remains they dug up as they built their new versions of the villa. In the Tuscia, Etruscan sarcophaghi, eyed with suspicion in the Middle Ages, suddenly become in vogue, as benches and ornaments and horse troughs. of At Villa d'Este and at Hadrian's Villa, which had recently been rediscovered just to the South of Rome, the souvenirs and allegories are on show like coffee-table trophies, laid out to impress and cow visitors. Well, maybe I will tell you more about that another time.

Bomarzo is not like that.

This is Bomarzo's trophy, an open mouth in a green stagnant sea, the weight of the world on its head...

There used to be a formal garden here too, you know; like Villa Lante or Villa Aldobrandini, one of those not quite knot gardens, with low hedges of box or privet, lemon trees in containers, gravel paths. None of those gaudy colonial interlopers, begonias that you see today, though. At best a spot of coloured glass on the ground among the gilly flowers and marigolds. But that was all lost hundreds of years ago, and now lies under the sweeping lawns of the picnic area.

The Sacred Wood, the carved, careless wilderness remains.
Vicino made a place in the wood, 'sol per sfogar il cuor' ... simply to let one's heart out. A forest left to itself, with figures carved out of the living rock, much as the Etruscans had done two thousand years before. The the oversight for the park 'of monsters' as it is also known, was in the hands of Pirro Ligorio. Not a plantsman, but a good eye for a valley, and an architect, really, before the age of the fancy corner office. The monsters are eveywhere, dragons and lions, dogs and deformed giants and demons, even the heroic Orlando is in full fury, ripping the Orco in two. Hard to tell, though if the monsters are snarling or laughing, as if the mood is eternally changeable, open to the interpretations of firelight and shadow and afternoon sunlight. And torchlight.

The garden's most famous element is the Orco, the giant face, mouth open wide, tw teeth bearing down on those brave enough to walk in. Which is every visitor. There's a photo from the early part of the 20th century, when the garden reached perhaps the lowest point in its fight for survival, it shows a young shepherd living in the orco. I stepped inside and discovered it's actually a pretty big space, there are benches and a large stone table (from the right angle it looks like the tongue of the monster) and the room has such a high ceiling you could easily put up a sort of shelf bed. But taking a picture inside is no easy task, here instead is the spooky mask that you get when you take a picture without a flash...

Ligorio certainly had a lot of input on this garden, taking charge of the daily operations, the practical details and the essential task of putting together a team and having his trusted workmen follow the plans laid out, instead of taking the line of least resistence as workmen always do, this certainly was an important element in the creation of the garden. But this is Vicino's garden, and Giulia's too.

The first most beautiful thing is the sound of the wood. The wind in the leaves, and the rustling river, a siverblack scar running down the rocky face of the valley. The sound took me by surprise, and the size of the statues too. They are perfectly proportioned to surprise and delight, to draw one in close enough to look carefully and think about the meaning behind each; the tortoise with a tower on its back, the war-elephant devouring a man, the open tomb, the Three Graces traced into the cliff.

A pleasure park, then, full of the souvenirs of travel - travel through books and through Europe, through the loss of friends, like Orazio Farnese, and freedom too: Vicino was locked up by the Germans for two years after a battle in Northern France. The path of a personal philosophy born among the Cimini hills, shaped by faraway places, deep and delightfully unashamed brought into existence a garden of delights and terror so closely married that it becomes impossible to tell them apart, like the woods themselves, moving from shadow to light with the changing breeze of as one's imagination.

For two years Vicino's fate lay in the balance. He was imprisoned in far-off Germany, and there was no knowing if he would return. Giulia was left to watch over her husbands interests, guarding them from the greedy eyes of his brothers and half-brothers. Her legacy she summed up in a building, an original creation, the casa pendente. It is not a natural disaster, like the tower of Pisa, the house is built on a crooked rock, symbol of the circumstances in which she found herself. Out of the questionable materia prima, she manages to bring forth a house: una casa, un casato worthy of her husband.
She died young.

Vicino went on adding to the garden after her loss, but the accent changes. From the under the canopy of trees the path among the sculptures winds uphill and out onto a sunny lawn to a monument at odds with the rough and riotous pagan rocks below. The lawn exposes the secret of Bomarzo: that the sacred wood is only a pretending to be wild. The real wilderness is aldilà over there, beyond the gate, real, banal, unmagical, plebean.

In sight of the edge of the world of magic, with cerberus in the hollow at its side, like the sleeping woman and her dog further down the hill, Vicino built the Temple to Divine Love, half Greek and half Roman in design, in memory of his wife. But when one reaches the portico, one discovers she is not here. Her bones are in the family vault, in Bomarzo, with everyone else. The temple is empty, she is gone, Divine Love is an open space, its walls are beautifully useless and cannot contain her, and love is nothing that can be put in man-made walls, nor can all the magic of the rocks nor all the wisdom and the philosophy the honour and the power of the garden, none of its glorious ambiguity is able to transform this last and greatest certainty.

for those who have had the patience to come back and read this again, I thank you, abd blame blogspot, a dreadful line and an ... interesting day job for making it such a long haul...

San marc

2009-06-08T06:28:00.000-07:00

Un mare di macchine dove un tempo passavano le barche: ecco piazza San Marco oggi, una bella e ampia piazza di Milano nel quartiere Brera, una delle più belle della città.

Mi sono trovata qui per caso, uscendo dalla pinacoteca Brera alla ricerca dell'entrata all'orto botanico. Mi sono del tutto confusa e, chiedendo aiuto al cameriere del piccolo ristoriante dove mi sono fermata a mangiare un'insalata caprese, cominciavo a temere d'averlo immaginato il giardino che cercavo. 'ma cerca i giardini pubblici?' mi ha risposto, regalandomi un'occhiata strana, come se andare al giardino pubblico (ammesso che esistesse) fosse un atto sconcio per una donna come me. Chissà, pensavo, cosa si fa nei giardini pubblici milanesi: forse è territorio di George Michael. Comunque le indicazioni che mi ha dato sembravano del tutto sbagliato. Milano davvero ha pochi spazi verdi, proprio come aveva affermata una signora svizzera incontrata sul treno quella mattina.

Ho girato un po' sotto il sole delle 15.00, tanto desiderosa di trovare se no l'orto almeno una panca o il piedistallo di qualche colonna all'ombra dove riposare un pochino. Infine ho ceduto al solito bar, ma i bar dopo pranzo sono sempre pieni di gruppetti o coppie, e ci si sente - o almeno io mi sento - quasi in colpa, sedendomi a prendere il mio espresso solitario. Una cosa bella ha Milano, in qualsiasi ora della giornata, anche sotto il sole scottante, c'è sempre movimento. Donne con sporte pesanti, dirette a casa, giovani col cell incollato all'orecchio, uomini in giacca e cravatto, con occhi cupi intenti su quel spazio che per un attimo hai occupato prima di passare. Io ho preso il caffé e mi sono di nuovo avviata. Camminare fa nascere la voglia di camminare in me, pare. Da quando sono qui non faccio altro, i piedi non mi fanno mai male, né la schiena, neanche i ginocchi, solo il cervello desidera fermarsi un po'.

Palazzi belli ma non nobili qua, sembrano quelli costruiti negli anni venti, una specie di complesso di case poplari. Chissà. Anche qui al centro la gente che lavora deve avere dove vivere, no? Non tutti possono fare il pendolare. Per il resto, alcuno bei bar e tutto pulito, rimesso a posto, bello. Caldo, certo, ma bello una piazza da vivere, anche di giorno, di notte dev'essere molto meglio.

Questa piazza era acqua cento anni fa. Il Tombon de San Marc, si chiamava in milanese. Faceva parte della rete dei canali di Milano, un'altro giorno ti racconterò i navigli, ma oggi soffermiamoci qua. Era una darsena, parola difficile per me, vuole dire dock or basin, un bacino allora, quasi si può dire un parcheggio per le barche, un punto in cui si poteva far riposare i cavalli che tiravano le chiatte. Qui si scaricava i rotoli enormi di carta per la stamperia del giornale milanese, nato durante la belle epoque, il Corriere della sera - abbastanza lontani gli uffici dei redattori, ma questa era una zona sia elegante che lavoratrice, e i canali erano un ricordo perpetuo degli operai e la manodopera necessaria a mandare avanti il bel mondo lombardo.

Si può immaginare gli odori: fieno e cavalli, carta acqua fango sudore, le barche, dette cobbie, basse nell'acquea, per poi tornare a galleggiare alto una volta liberate dal loro carico. E i rumori: saluti e gridi, notizie che arrivavanno insieme alla sabbia dalle città su Lago Maggiore. E il pianto di chi scopriva un cadavere, nella sciuma, il scumm del tumbun, questa la pronuncia milanese.

Tombone, Tombon, o tumbùn, si chiamava, per la presenza del cimitero dal quale scappava ogni tanto un cadavere, o per i poveri affogati, spariti nelle acque nere dei navigli grazie al bere o alla nebbia o a qualche disavventura, per poi riapparire in questo ristagno. Una fossa in ogni senso della parola, dunque. Ma non solo. La bella chiesa barocca di S. Marco contiene molti tesori in marmo ricordi di un patrimonio che nasce nel '200. Da bambino, Mozart fu ospitato per tre mesi nella canonica di S. Marco, e qui, per ricordare il primo anniversario della scomparsa di Manzoni, Giuseppe Verdi diresse per la prima volta la sua messa da requiem.
Ecco una poesia d'epoca: il sentimento illuminista, quasi dickensiano, inorridito e schifato dall'idea di una Milano arrettrata nei confronti di altre città europei, Parigi e Londra e Berlino forse senza capire che, come in quelle città, il 'grande Milano' - i palazzi eleganti, il giornale informativo, l'identità milanese stessa - non poteva nascere senza gli aspetti più ... mortali e puzzolenti come la darsena...

Sul gorgo viscido
chiazzato e putrido

sghignazza un cinico

raggio di sol;

quali augei profughi
fantasmi lividi

mesconsi, riddano,

levansi a vol.

Son baldi giovini

spenti, con vacue

forme, son vedove

tristi beltà;
carcami squallidi

di vecchi, macabre
parvenze, ruderi
d'umanità.

Quante speranze
cessar le danze,
quante esultanze
fransero qui!
Che mondi vividi
di luce e iliadi
d'affanno il baratro
cupo inghiottì!

Singhiozzi e rantoli,

ghigni frenetici,

empi monologhi,

beffardi suon',

ritmo satanico,

dal gorgo erompono;

il gorgo brontola

la sua canzon.

O gorgo, o luteo

gorgo magnetico,

o sciame lugubre,

che vuoi da me?

Voglio i dolori

gli spenti amori,

gli altri livori

che porti in te.

0 Scendi con essi!

Ne' miei recessi,

tra i freddi amplessi

ammaliator'della sirena

che l'incatena,

tace la pena,

cessa il dolor.

Gorgo maligno,

torvo, ulivigno,

0 gorgo sanguigno,

vaneggi tu?

Se un giorno amante

ti fui, l'istante

volge incostante

quel tempo fu.

Invan mi affascini,

gorgo; le torpide

malie mi prodighi,

sirena, invan;

la luce adoro,

amo e lavoro,

mi canta un coro

lieto il doman.

Ah! Se mai languano

nel cuor le imagini

care che irradian

mila via fatal,

e della vigile

fede che accondemi

0 i gufi stridano

il funeral,

soavi tossici,

tremendi fascini,

a me l'oblivio

rifiorirà;

chiamami, o gora;

quella che fia l'ora;

non vano allora

l'appel sarà.

Filippo Turati 1886

Anche i gufi cita... possiamo dire non era un fan dei navigli. Ma alla fine dell'ottocento, un nuovo mondo automobilistico sta per cambiare la città per sempre. Infatti la darsena non sopravvisse molto a lungo dopo il vergare di queste righe. Rimpianto da chi vorrebbe vedere uno specchio d'acqua qui al centro della città, chi come me si sente il bisogno si un pochino di verde tra tutto questo asfalto e mattonato, chi forse immagina quanto sarebbe bello avere una terrazza, un ristorante proprio qua, a due passi dalla Brera e le botteghe d'arte, accanto ad alcune delle strade più frequentate dai turisti. Non sarebbe male.

Tunnel vision

2009-06-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

The less time you spend in a place, the easier it is to sum it up with confidence in a few lines. Milan in my head starts with this and this, both from Totò Peppino e la malafemmina my all-time favourite Totò film. Add to those two clips the arbitrary judgements of friends and acquaintances, throwaway one-liners, and you get a general sense of 'German', 'grey, cold and foggy', 'industrial and not very green' 'modern', 'full of models'. Which all turned out to be true except for the foggy bit, we are, after all, in the middle of a heatwave. German, or Austrian, not in a strudel und sahne sense, but that everything and everyone works, and seem to allow others the same priviledge without a lot of unnecessary confusion. Not very green, definitely, but not in an ugly way,... anyway I am getting ahead of myself.

They go on a lot here about how ancient Milan is, a Roman and even pre-Roman city, for a time the capital of the Empire (a pretty short period of time, but still..) and then how this a place where 'one breathes Paris'... perhaps Milan is the sidekick, the co-star, the passive aggressive sibling of Rome, a city with absolutely no problem in being its schizo-uncoordinated, messy and prodigal, self-centred self. Milan is built to work, to resolve issues, to move on: Rome is built to be visited, to be problematical, that's Rome's thing, to be admired, hated, never ignored. One has the sense that Milan is the 'sensible one' still waiting to be recognized as such. But what do I know.
The main things to be seen here, from my point of view, are a few Lombard, a lot of gothic and romanesque architecture; the renaissance castle, via Montenapoleone in the heart of the fashion district, the Last Supper, some art galleries, and the cathedral of course. The Pirelli building, and 60's architecture by the yard, not really my thing, but who knows.

Milan is 11 minutes from Monza, by train, a train filled with ugly girls who spent the entire journey exchanging stories about how they had been mistaken for 'much younger women'... I think the prize for lames story was the 20 year old girl whose neighbour had guessed her age as 18. I think there is a special hell for eavesdroppers, and it consists in being exposed, powerless, to the inane conversation of people under 25, who share at the top of their lungs the news of how they've discovered gravity and reinvented the wheel. Still they could have been talking about World Issues, so I consider myself as having been let off lightly.

The Brera was at the top of my list of places to go, also the orto botanico which is part of the same complex. I'm particularly interested in gardens and botianical ones most of all. Milan city centre is a very simple piece of topography, you just go to the most findable monument first, and that, of course, is the Duomo, visible from a large percentage of the city. Add that to the fact that everything is clearly marked, you can't really get lost. There's only a handful of metro lines, and they seem pretty idiot-proof, and on the platform, there's a nice big TV screen with news, although, this being Berluska's stamping ground, I wondered if it was a Foxy channel, ie skewed news for the masses, a sort brainwash-while-you-wait arrangement. There was no time to make a judgement, the train arrived in businesslike manner, and four stops later I was at Piazza del Duomo.

This is the big brother of Monza's duomo, also built in the 14th and 15th centuries, also but even more in International Gothic style. From far away you can see it has about a million statues on the pinkish grey marble front, almost a cross between a pup tent and a confectioner's nightmare, with pinnacles. Not to mention the madunina... and in another post there'll be space to put more pictures. If you enjoy the overly exuberant cathedral facade you'll love their website it is an exact etherial match.

Heat, like odour, works in a very specific part of the memory. The heat of the day is often the first thing you forget, you remember being uncomfortable, or the inconveniences of the hot weather, but the sun on your skin, that is only properly recalled the next time you find yourself in the same situation. Not a humid heat, like we get in the South, but as intense as a hairdryer. There was a line coming out of the cathedral at least 300 people long, so I immediately gave up on going inside. The square in front is elegant and airy, despite the rays pressing down on us. For some reason, instead of selling the usual trinkets, the African streetvendors were all giving away some sort of coloured strings to be tied into bracelets.

To the left in this picture, the Mother of all Malls - the Galleria. Italians use the word to mean Galley but also Tunnel. Named after Vittorio Emanuele II, the first King of the United Italy (and if you think Vittorio Emanuele is a mouthful, his full name was Vittorio Emanuele Maria Alberto Eugenio Ferdinando Tommaso... the number two though in terms of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which is actually the ruling house of Piemonte, no, this is getting too complicated for this blog... ) It is not, as some think, the 'first' galleria, not even in Milan, there's a much smaller, plainer, earlier one at San Babila. This Galleria, however, was the brainchild of Giuseppe Mengoni and dates from 1865... think Liszt and Yeats, Browning and Verdi and Wagner, the assassination of Lincoln and Rockefeller's first oil refinery. It's not If it makes you think of the Crystal Palace, that's no surprise (unless, of course, you don't know what the Crystal Palace is) - the two are only six years apart. Burlington Arcade in London is the copy-cat version. Ironbridge was also an inspiration, and, in turn, Mengotti's design, linking two of Milan's most fashionable streets under a canopy sufficient to protect elegant shoppers from the worst indignities of Milan's weather, is said to have been one of the places that gave Gustav Eiffel an idea for a tower. The city of Milan, booming in what has come to be known as the second wave of the industrial revolution (trains and all that jazz) set up a competition for an original building to celebrate the city's new wealth and status, Mengoni's design beat an impressive 176 other architectural proposals. The King, for whom pretty much any new construction was being named in Italy at the time, did not come to the inauguration of the Gallery; Mengotti later threw himself off the top of the building, some say out of disappointment at the royal snub. Seems a bit much, to me.

The octagon, at the point where the two tunnels cross, was the 'salon' of Milan, where the city's VIPs came to see and be seen. Of course now the VIPs are mostly Varied International Passersby. Four floors contain are all kinds very elegant restaurants and internationally famous shops prestigious offices and some residences tucked in here too, although I wonder how long it takes for the shine to rub off living in a mall, even a historic mall - this is the place to go if you want sunburnt English people to step on your foot, or large families with absolutely no peripheral awareness to walk in front of you ar 0.05 miles an hour.

Eclectic art reighns, from the lunettes high on the walls to the rich pavement which features the coats of arms of Milan Turin Rome and Florence. They're Italy's four 'capitals... Turin was already the capital and home town of Vittorio Emanuele, before the unification of Italy in 1860. During the years it took to get all the city-states on board, Florence was the provisional capital, when at last Rome was removed from Papal control, it became the definitive seat of government. So what, I hear you say, is Milan in there for? Well there were about 5 minutes when under Napoleon, Italy was a 'new Kingdom' (you guessed it, with him as Emperor) and Milan was the new capital of that...
The mosaic of the coat of arms of Turin (the King's city) has a bull on it, and it's considered lucky to put your heel on the bull's family jewels and spin three times. There was a line.

What shops? The one that ticks people off is, of course, MacDonald's, it's sort of the Al Fayed of the Galleria. Well, I gotta run, more soon...

The Rondanini Pietà

2009-06-05T22:17:00.000-07:00

O ombra del morir, per cui si ferma
ogni miseria a l'alma, al cor nemica,
ultimo delli afflitti e buon rimedio;
tu rendi sana nostra carn'inferma,
rasciughi i pianti e posi ogni fatica,
e furi a chi ben vive ogn'ira e tedio.
Rima 102 Michelangelo Buonarotti

It was his last obsession: "Il Cristo con un'altra figura di sopra" - The Christ with another figure above. Mary, it would at a guess, but the point at which the statue remains, the face and body are rough-hewn and indistinct, the second figure remains open to interpretation, in the inventory taken of the contents of Michelangel0's studio on his death at about 89 years old. The statue was valued at about 30 scudi, the yearly wage of a modest school teacher, or, to put it another way, about half the sum Daniele da Volterra spent on wood to build a scaffold for the PGing of the Sistine Chapel, that same year.

Michelangelo was never still, it seems. His final years found him back once again in Rome to work on the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican, yet found time to make three versions of the Pietà. The other two are in Florence, This was the last of the three. Even in very advanced years - especially for a period in which to live to be 60 or 70 was considered extraordinary - Michelangelo continued to accept and to squabble over commissions. Not least the news that his work in the Sistine Chapel was about to be revised; although knowing that a close collaborator was going to censor the naughty bits may have helped. Perhaps he was immune, after so many battles with patrons and Popes. Perhaps not.
Unfinished, this Pietà, because out of time. Like many of his poems, the statue seems a dialogue with death, not a glorious passing or a final judgement, but with the failing of the light, the loss of power, the melting back to dust. On the Medici tombs at S Lorenzo the detail of faces of Dawn and Twilight, Night and Day remain unfinished, slightly vague, an allegory of the fading of day escaping notice, until it is too late. Here, death and loss seem frozen in time and in the act of creation. Halfway between an emerging and a fading back into the earth, one wonders if the figures are coming towards us out of the marble, or receding back into it, losing their hold on a defined existence outside the rock.
Two figures, sharing this fate, fused at the torso. Marks on the statue show that originally the upper body of Christ was detatched. In his final version, the two come together in a single gesture of support given and taken, the smooth muscular legs of youth giving way, relying on the power of the rough hewn stone. The faces are unfinished, lined, worn, for all the centuries set in permanent pity, for telling the same story over and again, resigned to the inescapable fate of loss and of being captured in that act of losing, the slipping away of things irreplacable. Mary's left hand rests lightly on his heart, a reminder of the fusion between the hand and heart of the maestro himself: "non si possono esercitare in modi che ben vada l'arti manuali, perché la mano è lo strumento delle arti." Limbs and arts, gli arti e le arti here are inseparable as they had been throughout Michelangelo's life: limbs painted, sculpted and celebrated in poetry, the hands that brought them into being, now at the end of their great career.

The Pietà was not a commissioned piece; Michelangelo's servant Antonio del Francese got it as a keepsake, on the death of his master. Shortly afterward it disappeared for a couple of centuries, to reemerge during the 1700's in the collection of the powerful Marquis Giuseppe, the last of the Rondanini family, when his palace in via del Corso was sold in Rome. Cleaned up, the statue has remarkable power. The commissioners of the City of Milan bought it. I am not sure what that says about Milan, it seems a very acquisitively New World gesture to me, snapping up a trifle of the artist's work; or so it must have seemed at the time, covered in grease and dirt. Today the statue is hidden behind a semicircular screen in the lowest part of the Scarlioni room, the last item in a succession of Ancient stones that begins with the Romans, to end on this very Roman note. If you're curious, to see the rest of the room, you can click here .

more monza

2009-06-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

Recession? What Recession? Walk the city centre of Monza, and you'd never guess that there are places in Italy hurting for jobs, at least at first sight. The city is a rich corner of one of Italy's richest regions, with a right-wing administration to match its wealth; the neo-fascist Alleanza Nazionale with their leader Gianfranco Fini who always reminds me of Spock, usually cringing at some unfortunate remark by poor old Berlusconi, the Bush of Italy, several members of Forza Italia, the party of the aforementioned Mr. B., and the rest coming from Italy's answer to the BNP the Lega Nord. These are people (especially the Lega Nord) who take great pride in Getting Things Done, stuff like planning a Park and Ride on the edge of town, and having it finished by the weekend. Excellent. If you think you hear the distant sound of trains running on time, you may be right... Political buzzwords are always biographical, here spreco is the hate-word, waste. It is a nice wide open term, a general condemnation of waste through corruption, waste through mismanagement, waste through handouts to the undeserving. Careful people, these monzesi, cheap might be going to far, but certainly not given to the sort of chaotic and florid spiritual and material generosity the South.

At the same time, this industrious yet quietly unindustrial town is in the process of breaking away from being part of Greater Milan in favour of being a provincial capital in its own right, Monza e Brianza, I'm not sure why they feel the need to tack on the Brianza bit, it's not a 'twinned' city as in the case of Massa and Carrara, but rather the name of this little bit of countryside around here. Perhaps it speaks to a sense of pride and independence, this is, as we saw earlier, the city of the Iron Crown.

The river Lambro runs through Monza, that's the Lion Bridge you see above (built right at the end of the Austrian Period, in 1840, when a new military road was being built through town) and beside it, shown in the next photo, the Lega Nord stand. It's election season in Italy, once again another long drawn out series of smug-looking men on ugly posters, and most Italians are fascinated, mostly on a verbal level only, by politics. This booth seemed to invite fear and loathing in passers-by, which surprised me; and apparently about two hours after I took this picture, there was some open hostility that turned into a pushing match, quickly quashed by the police and 'kept out' of the local paper. Make of that what you like.
In piazza Roma, on the main pedestrian street leading away from the duomo, is the swankiest cafe in Monza, I think the double tablecloths may have been ahead of me in transmitting that piece of information. Monza is Old Money, combined with new ideas, the Comune just launched its online services. Comune is Italian for common and also means the City Hall, the local government offices, their slogan is Cosa abbiamo in comune which means 'What do we have in common?' but also 'What do we have at City Hall?' The idea that the local government might in any way be there to serve the public seems a radical departure from business as usual in Italy. Here the idea of the comune is highly valued, as it recalls the period in Italian past (ands something of a heyday in Monza's history) when autonomous mini-city states flourished and fought against the evil forces of imperialism and foreign dominance. Themes very much alive and well today.

I was a bit shocked, by all this 'what can we do for you' from local government, this is not the face of Italy I expected, but then I went to cash my traveller's cheques at the bank, where a man with a long face and a posto fisso (= he can't be fired unless he kills the Bank Manager) took one look at the 'chore' of doing his job, and, instead of smiling and just giving me my money, rolled his eyes almost out of his head and sighed like a steam engine. Aah now that I recognize.

Here in the picture is the place where people could sign up for internet access tot heir personal account in the comune making it possible to register for things like a place at school for the kids, business permits and licenses, proof of changes in residence and medical care, and of course pay taxes, taxes taxes.

The city hall itself is an imposing 18th century monster of a building, but to make the process of signing up more simpatico, the Comune opened shop in the old market building, the 13th century Arengario which recalls similar buildings in Germany and England too: it made me think of the one in Ledbury. The word Arengario comes from the German Harihrings, the ring of the army, or meeting place. Downstairs under the arcades there's room for a market, and upstairs a huge room once used for town meetings and now set aside for exhibitions and special events. It's been pulled at and primped over the centuries of course, the spiral staircase in the tower for example dates from 1903, Lord knows how they went up it previously. I particularly enjoy the pulpit-like parlera with its little flag; it was from here that the The Arengario represents in a historical sense the civic heart of the city, while the duomo is the religious heart, and it's interesting to note that while the two buildings are close to one another they are build in such a way thet neither has a direct view of the other, two worlds close and yet studiously apart.

Anyone who knows about the Lega Nord will have heard reference made to il Carroccio, which is a slightly mysterious medieval war-wagon, adopted and transformed into the political band wagon of the nationalist, and northernist party of Umberto Bossi. (another great name for a politician, don't you think? He comes off as extremely bossy).

Historical documentation on the carroccio of the medieval period is a bit sketchy, but there's no shortage of modern interpretations of the war waggon, and its purpose as a rallying point for the troops, a reference and a refuge depending on how the battle is going, the place where the commander, medical assistance, even the funds of the army, were kept. Here's an example of one of the many sites that spells out this movable feast of unification... On top of all that, it was the symbol of defiant independence, pride and general go-gettability. Here's a plaque from Monza cathedral on the subject...

iron crown

2009-05-20T11:56:00.000-07:00

The val padana, for those who don't know, is very flat. Everything looks flat from the window of a plane, even mountains are squashed and foreshortened, but the val padana doesn't leave any room for topographical speculation, it is flat and fields and swept with the swirling lines of tributaries and tractor trails and everything is in mud coloured, from a pale sandiness to a rich brown, at least in this season and from this plane.

Monza begins with Theodelinda, lombard queen on a mission: to find somewhere breezy to spend the long hot sunmmers in the val Padana. And to build, of course, a nice church, standard practice for the 8th century. She dedicated the church to John the Baptist, who of course was beheaded, or as it's usually put in Italian, decollato a word that always make me look twice as it means 'un-necked', but also, in modern parlance, 'take-off' as in a plane. Surely the patron saint of airports, then? Oh I'm not going to explain that here it is much too hot.

Above is the redoubtable Theodelinda, anachronistically holding 'her' cathedral like toy or a relic or a prayerbook. In reality the facade, and this sculpture, are products of a much later age when, eager to cash in on the impeccable credentials of a long dead pious monarch, in 1300 or thereabouts, or roughly the heyday of Canterbury as a point of pilgrimage, the time of Dante and the guelfs and ghibbelines. Originally the front was quite a bold green and white stripe, bleached by 700 years of sun to a more sedate rhythm of greys. I am not sure about the clock tower, bit brummy to me, but at least you can see what time it is. Monza in the 1300's when Italy was all about communes and city states, went guelf, then ghibbeline, falling quickly under the control of the Visconti family from nearby Milan; it lost many of its ancient Lombard monuments including the city walls and the castle, but gained this fantastic gothic facade. Much simpler and smaller than the one in Milan, but also a hundred years older.

It was the weekend when I finally got around to visiting the duomo, in a quiet island of stone away from the carneval of weekend walkers crowding the main streets, and centuries away from the mad traffic that fills the outer band of roads. I found it surprisingly full of worshippers, considering it was Saturday afternoon. Everyone else was snapping away so I went bold and took one of my own.
Then creeping down the side aisle and out into a fine square courtyard, I found my way to the museum, underneath the church, beautifully laid out. There were no less than 4 young and heavily made-up women manning the ticket desk, combined age less than 70. They asked me, in their clipped little accents, if I wanted to see the iron crown as well as the museum, I didn't know what the iron crown was. Sure why not.

They sound like they're speaking arabic here, by the way, not in the sense that it is incomprehensible, it just has the same high pitch and sharp little sounds to it, a very odd sensation to be idly eavesdropping, and have for half a second the thought that you've suddenly acquired the ability to understand arabic.

So the iron crown turns out the be The Iron Crown, the crown of the Lombards, the one Charlemagne and Napoleon were crowned with. It is quite tiny, nothing like the British Crown and one can easily see how Boney could have snatched it and stuck it on his own head with a single gesture. It is kept in a chapel right next to the main altar, naturally Theodolinda's chapel, which has amazing frescoes that were being restored (this pic is nicked from the web) with some of the nicest horses ever fresked, I think you'll agree. The Sacrestan wouldn't let me in to see the crown to start with, well. not just me, he wouldn't let anyone in, we were 'some' minutes early. He couldn't say how many. So back down to the museum, where the gaggle of girls seemed very unsurprised by his behaviour, and started telling stories about him to each other for the benefit of the entire building it seemed to me. I moved on, past case after case of spectacular medieval art, like this beautiful pair of ivory plaques showing th Poet and his Muse. Looks like the Muse is doing all the work to me, what a surprise.

One of the cathedral's most famous treasures is this set, the golden Hen and with her seven chicks, (were there originally 12 as made possibly as long ago as the 5th century, and an allegory of maternal love you'll find throughout art history. Nice imagery for the queen who managed to make peace between the Pope and her husband, the agressive King of the Lombards. In exchange for all this help, Gregory the Great gave Theodelinda (but not, preumably, hubby, do I sense some passive aggression?) the iron crown, which isn't all that iron at all. The iron bit comes from the original crosspieces that arched over the top of the golden circlet. They were made, legend has it, from one of the three nails brought back from Jerusalem by Constantine's relic-hunter mum, Helena, some 250 years before Theodelinda's time.

The crown, used by Holy Roman Emperors and Kings of Italy, has of course gone through various trials and tribulations; a book token and a round of applause to whoever is the first to tell me what actually happened to those iron bits. I got back to the chapel just in time to visit the crown in the company of a couple from Hampshire, who, like me, found the connection with Napoleon the most interesting. We were not allowed to take pictures but I took some anyway. Here they are. The crown these days is kept in a little safe as you can see, previously it was kept in what looks like a chocolate box, actually several versions of the box are in the museum. below. not at all as glam as this high tech teca...

Filed under 'other stuff'' in the museum: this striking statue of John the Baptist that I thought must be modern, but turned out to be from the 1500's, four terracotta dudes that seemed to be waiting forr the theology bus, staring at me through the centuries, some interesting stonework, originally made for the facade but discarded and lost for years, now cleaned and on show, This is a bit from one of Pope Gregory's garments, nice needlework! Not clear if tall the patching was done in his lifetime, or in the 1500 years since...

The sword of Ettore Visconti, one of the fightin' Viscontis of Milan...from the 1300's

and finally some freasky stonework. Next time, I'm off to Milan!

In Which I Whinge

2009-05-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

The moon was shining when we approached Pisa, and
for a long time we could see, behind the wall, the leaning Tower, all awry in
the uncertain light; the shadowy original of the old pictures in school-books,
setting forth 'The Wonders of the World.' Like most things connected in their
first associations with school-books and school-times, it was too small. I felt
it keenly. It was nothing like so high above the wall as I had hoped. It was
another of the many deceptions practised by Mr. Harris, Bookseller, at the
corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, London. HIS Tower was a fiction, but this was a
reality--and, by comparison, a short reality. Still, itlooked very well, and
very strange, and was quite as much out of the perpendicular as Harris had
represented it to be. The quiet air of Pisa too; the big guard-house at the
gate, with only two little soldiers in it; the streets with scarcely any show of
people in them; and the Arno, flowing quaintly through the centre of the town;
were excellent. So, I bore no malice in my heart against Mr.Harris (remembering
his good intentions), but forgave him before dinner, and went out, full of
confidence, to see the Tower next morning.

Charles Dickens, Pictures From Italy

A few hours in England and I find that my long absence has not in any way dented my ability to whilnge and enjoy the whingeing of others, Daily Telegraph style: it's still open season on MP's and their naughty expenses, which makes for humorous reading, and thank goodness for little else seems funny at this moment.
Heathrow is hard to love. Our flight made excellent time, but we were left in a holding pattern for an extra half hour before we could deplane. I took the - for me - bold decision to be last off the 747. It was a very good flight, my travelling companion was a nice, interesting and discreet lady and we had the blessing of an empty seat between us so we both got some sleep in between the amazingly good airline food. Now there's a phrase you don't hear often. Bagage claim is like a bizzarro funfair attraction, a cross between riding the ghost train and the big dipper while preparing for the How Much Can You Lift contest. Except it is the bags that ride around while I stand helplessly hoping and dreading that this is the time one of those horror stories fellow travellers tell finally catches up with me. Speaking of tales, my row companion told me of a trip across Northern Italy; she and her husband thought they had booked an overnight trip South, they found their couchette, and were told they had to leave their bags in a luggage rack just outside. They fell asleep, only to wake up in the small hours to discover that the train had only gone for two hours before stopping in a siding, and everyone including all the FS staff, had left. Their bags they found strewn all over the carriages, laptops and valuables of course long gone. Ah happy thoughts.
But it seems my bag has been forwarded, I don't have to take it through customs, which is weird because surely at Milan there won't be any customs check. That can't be right, I have to go through all the hoops, don't I? Or am I going to be penalized for this later? Well, not having to cart my suitcase an inch more than necessary is a good thing, leaves me way more time to sneer at Gordon Ramsay's Plane Food restaurant, with its dusty balls and cheap font, in Terminal 5. The dreaded new terminal, according to the press, where so much has gone wrong. My new friend was quite cheerful about it, the new decor and the modern facilities, but then she's not English and can't be expected to have her whinge on even though it is 9 am which translates as 3 am Eastern time. I hate it, the battleship grey and the bolted trusses make it look like car auction house, I half expect a rusty Montego to come coughing down the concourse. The concourse, the corridors, the halls - it's all too much walking. There are lots of shops to distract you but they are stupid shops like Dior and Harrod's. Water costs two pounds and a sandwich ten. Standard airport thievery I know, and inexcusable really when you think that on a plane ticket costing, say, 850 dollars, about 500 of those dollars goes to the airpoprts for fees and taxes. divide by half, say, since there are two airports involved, and then multiply that by all the passengers passing through Heathrow and they suddenly seem like the meanest, most rapacious and ugliest carnies in the business.
Even more annoying is the gate system in Terminal 5 which only tells you your number at the last minute. There are three sets of gates, the A set, which is the same as the general waiting area, and then B and C which involve taking a 10 -20 minute transit vehicle ride... arghh more walking/carrying. So here I sit, twisting in my seat at least once a minute to observe my flight crawling slowly up the departure board, waiting to know where I should be going next. Talk about tenterhooks. It seems people get tired of waiting in A, and head off to B or C, depending on where they predict their flight will be leaving from - so the desire to flop down in your gate well before time is not just confined to me. How one decides whether to go to B or C must, I imagine, involve the close study of other flights to similar destinations, if an earlier flight to Rome is going from C 43 then maybe your flight to Paris will be going from a nearby gate. Except that this kind of logic does not apply: it's a puzzle of planes, maintenance and baggage, not an exercise in geography. Hence the constantly repeated announcement by that girl with the high bright young echoey voice that passengers should not go to B or C until they are asdvised to do so. She also reminds us every few seconds that she will destroy our bags if we leave them unattended. In the nicest possible way.
Termninal 5 is grubbier and more worn than I expected it to be but the good news is my time there was shorter and simpler than I expected. just 30 minutes before the flight to Milan was ready to leave, they put up the gate number - A11, only 50 paces from where I had been waiting. And off we go, leaving behind the drizzle of a London morning, headed, like Dickens, to see if the pictures in my head are to scale.

Waiting for Go

2009-05-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

I should be doing stuff not sitting in a cafe writing this. Doing important stuff. Last minute things, I don't know, making sure my personal papers are in order, or that I haven't left something vital in the kitchen or the bathroom of the house I am about to leave for good. I have had this feeling so many times before when moving on permanently from a town or a country, the sinister calm before the storm, the fake spacious inertia, mucking about burning up minutes and hours whose loss I am so sorely going to regret tomorrow, or the next day, but knowing is not the same as changing something, the two stare at each other through the window of two trains pulling out of the same station.

My good friend Jessica, who took this picture, and who has put up with me for... ever, it seems is one of the knowables I will miss. Going to an unknown place is like one of those dot-to-dot pictures. In some cases, you can predict exactly what you're going to get, even though your first raggedy lines of reasoning may need smoothing out. I quite like the delicious darkness of the yet unilluminated picture in my head. New places are always less prestigious than in the imagination; like celebrities, they seem much shorter in the flesh, but in my experience they are better illuminated, and more practical. And I like filling in the empty map in my head with roads I know. But I have to get there before I can do that.

Packing

2009-04-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

To travel hopefully is better than to arrive

Robert Louis Stevenson

I think he meant in literature, really: travelling is not at all like in books.

Books, even the most picaresque and surprising ones, have a last page you can count on reaching, even if you don't want to get there. Travelling is hoping the last page meets up with your luggage and your documents. And a hot shower.
I'm going in about two weeks, and will be away for at least 3 months, which means I am just beginning to take packing seriously, clothes, books, shoes, toiletries, electronics and those little odds and ends that you take for granted and forget to pack, and end up having to buy once you arrive. I hate that! So I'm trying to pack smart, but already feel somthing essential has escaped me.
It's all a sham of course, this taking control through lists, observing the passing of necessities from one hand to another like a person swept away on the current of a great river counting the trees and the reeds as she slips helplessly by.

I am starting to be aware of what I will miss; that doesn't happen in books, either, you can always put them down and enjoy something different and familiar for a bit. Apart from dear ones, I will miss 30 Rock, Colbert, the series finale of Lost. I have watched it all from the pilot in September 2004 and have come to trust JJ Abrams to finish his story with enough threads tied to make me happy, and now I depart the night before the finale. Ouch!

I will miss my things, the ones too precious or too big to come with me, but not much, I am used to them being packed away for long periods of time. Easy parking, cheap shampoo, and the chords of Sweet Baby James.

So where and what is Monza. If you look on a map you'll see it's really part of Greater Milan, at about 1 o'clock from the city centre. It's the third largest town in Lombardy, and Lombardy is in Northern Italy. Lombardy, before it became part of the united Kingdom of Italy in about 1860, had previously been an independent Duchy under the Sforza and Visconti families. Later it was part of the Austrian Empire and dabbled in Repubblicanismo too. And MacDonald's: 2 Big Macs for 3 Euros. I have been reliably informed that 'Monza è tutta bella, una città ricca con tanta storia e un'economia molto forte' and that I am going to love it. It is an old town, with links to royalty, there's a huge park there and the Villa reale the palace that was the summer residence of various rulers. Arcore, the home of Silvio Berlusconi is nearby. Monza lies between Milan and lake Como, and the Formula One race takes place in Monza's park in September. My plan is to see it all, and visit Milan, Verona, Mantova, Venice and maybe slip down to see friends in Tuscany and Rome if I have the chance. And then come back here, and tell you about it.

I don't promise to always write in English, or that the embedded links will always work or lead to English pages, but I hope you'll be patient and keep coming back!