Day 22: Monday, May 12, Venice

A back canal in Venice.

After waking up to a view of the sewer barge doing its thing from house to house on the canal, we had breakfast at our hostel. It was the standard mixed-country cheap breakfast here: corn flakes, bread with butter/jam, yogurt, coffee and tea.

First stop today was the Correr Museum. The art wasn’t up to par after three weeks in Europe, but the history and insight into Venetian life was good. The descriptions made the Doge sound like a virtual prisoner in his palace. The Doge was elected, and the other aristocrats wanted to be sure that he didn’t become too powerful in a “cult of personality” – he couldn’t put his face on coins, for example.

Lunch was a huge pizza. We didn’t want to pay cover charge, so we wandered a few blocks and found a residential dead-end street that we could have to ourselves. It was a really nice break from the tourist bustle everywhere else. (FYI: here “peperoni” means bell peppers; our pepperoni is their spicy salami.) After more gelato at the same place we headed for the north side of the island to catch a vaporetto to Murano.

Living in Venice would be hard on a lot of levels, but one is that people would constantly ask for directions. (I will be the first to admit that “people” includes me.) Venice is like one of those hedge mazes, but very crowded. Signs point you to the Rialto or St. Mark’s, but not too many other places. You end up half following your nose and half asking for directions. When you do ask for directions, you only get directions for the next two or three turns. After that it’s assumed that you’ll have to ask directions again because getting them all at once would be too complicated. We made it to the north side of the island via a residential neighborhood that was a nice walk.

Signs in Venice say that bare chests are not allowed. Bare backs are apparently not a problem.

We wanted to see some glass blowing at Murano, but apparently that all shut down by 4pm and we arrived after. We did wander through the shops and look at the beautiful (or kitschy) works until they closed. Some things are really pretty, some things are cheap trinkets, and some things seem like they would never sell but are there to “anchor” the store and draw customers. (Case in point: a 4-ft tall statue of an eagle landing on a branch. I didn’t want to know the price. I would be interested to see if it is still there in a year.) While on Murano, we ran into a couple that had stayed at the Soggiorno Magliani (Florence) with us a few days prior. I must confess that I didn’t recognized them at all, and when I joined my brother’s conversation I said, “I take it you are Americans?” That stopped the conversation until the wife said, “Yeah… we stayed with you in Florence.” Unfortunately I am terrible with names/faces and that happens more often than I would like to admit.

A shot down the Grand Canal.

After Murano and a snack dinner we hopped on a vaporetto for a cheap Grand Canal cruise. It was during the throes of sunset, so it was a pretty ride. The trip back was almost better since all the day-trippers had gotten off at the train station and the Venetian nightlife was starting up. (A lot of dogs ride the vaporetto – with muzzles.) When we returned we made a quick trip to St. Mark’s Square to listen to the dueling orchestras. There are a lot of restaurants, and at night each has a band/orchestra that generally take turns playing. The cheapskates like me don’t sit down and pay the exorbitant cover charge but simply float from music to music.

Our Venetian night was no longer young, so we picked up our luggage from the hostel and took a final vaporetto ride to the train station to catch our 0005 train (midnight plus 5). Vaporetto tickets are sort of a scam. It’s E6.50 for one ticket on most lines, which is really expensive. A 12-hour pass is E14. Almost everyone springs for the pass, of course.

UPS in Venice.

Venice is a place where you can see daily life and never see how life goes on. All of the sewage boats, etc. are on the small canals that run behind buildings and don’t have a sidewalk, so you could walk all over Venice and never see them. You occasionally see people walking through the streets pulling trolleys with goods and you feel sorry for anyone who has a shop that doesn’t back up to a canal.

Shirt for the day: “Set, Ready, Be.” (No, I didn’t get the order wrong.)

Day 21: Sunday, May 11, Venice

Italians like to people-watch, too.

Today we struck out for Venice. We had a 0735 train from Ravenna that added people along the way and was full by the time we came to Venice. The Grand Canal was closed for a boat race that day, so we had to take a vaporetto (think bus system, but replace the buses with boats) the long way around, get off at St. Mark’s, and walk to our hostel. That wouldn’t be a problem except that if we didn’t arrive by 1pm the office was going to close and we wouldn’t be able to do anything with our bags until 4pm. We arrived at 1pm straight up. People don’t really hurry here, so I’m sure we were even more American as we hustled down the narrow alleys.

An American family was waiting with us to get on the vaporetto. Even if they hadn’t spoken I would have known they were Americans because they were all overweight, they were stressed out, and the dad was wearing socks and sandals. The mom was trying to ask a worker if this vaporetto went to St. Mark’s Square and wouldn’t listen long enough to hear him out before trying her question again (assuming that he didn’t understand). The worker was clearly annoyed. Later I heard the dad talking to the kid (probably 5yo). I didn’t hear the initial question from the kid, but I heard the dad respond with, “No, you cannot have any Slim Fast. I’m not giving you any Slim Fast, and if you ask me one more time I’ll throw you in the canal.” I had to laugh (or should I cry?) at a kid who grew up thinking of Slim Fast as a treat. Only in America.

The ceiling of our hostel. The bed was even cheaper if you consider part of it dmission to a museum.

Our hostel turned out to be an old Venetian palace run by the Waldesians. Part of it is a hostel, and I guess the rest is meeting rooms and whatnot. I had never heard of the Waldesians, but they were a break-off from the Catholic church before the Reformation that are now associated in some way with the Methodists. The place was great – we had an 11 bunk room to ourselves. (The place could be problematic if it were full, because there were only two bathrooms and one shower for our room and two others. It also had a lockout from 10-2:30.) The place had 20 ft ceilings everywhere, and ours had a (badly peeling) fresco on the ceiling and parts of the walls and a balcony view down a quiet canal. The electrical wiring was obviously not original. Other residents included a 37-person tour group from a South Carolina Bible college and a group of five Germans who were there to play during a mass at St. Mark’s. (I found it humorous that they were staying at a place run by a group deemed heretical by the Catholic Church.)

That afternoon we went to St. Mark’s. St. Mark’s is covered in mosaics and was one of my favorite churches during my first trip to Europe. We broke up the afternoon with a trip to a recommended gelateria. The shop itself could hold a maximum of four people at a time, and the line out the door attracted even more people. They served monstrous scoops for the cheapest prices we had found, and it was really good.

Next stop: Ponte di Rialto (Rialto Bridge). While looking down the Grand Canal we offered to take a picture for some people standing next to us, got in a conversation, and found out that they are home schoolers from Ireland.

Half of the tourist souvenirs seem to be masquerade masks. I guess it’s a Venetian specialty, but they would be extremely hard to take home – large, odd-shaped, and fragile.

The church of Santa Maria del Formosa.

There are a lot fewer backpacker types here in Venice. I’m not sure if it’s because Venice is a more expensive city or if they were just diluted by the throngs of organized tours and people from docked cruise ships.

I’ve seen several toilets over here that are Ideal Standard brand. The script is the same as American Standard toilets in the States, so I’m sure that American Standard branched out and decided that having American in their name wasn’t a selling point.

Shirt for the day: “Food Tech Citizen.”

Day 20: Saturday, May 10, Florence to Ravenna

Today we traveled to Ravenna in the morning and saw the town in the afternoon. On the train to Ravenna there was a guy or girl (I’m not sure which) who was the most goth person I have ever seen: black trench coat ala The Matrix, black lipstick and eyeliner over a lightly powdered white face, black hair pulled up and back so it is narrow and tall, and enough metal in random places to make it look like he had been hit by shrapnel.

We rode the bus to a stop near our hostel. Here in Italy people hold up their thumb for “one” and add successive fingers, unlike in the U.S. where the thumb comes last. That means that if you hold up an index finger instead of a thumb you get two tickets instead of one… When we got off the bus we turned a corner and this old guy who was standing outside a shop immediately pointed down the street and said something in Italian before I said anything. I confirmed that he was pointing toward the hostel, and then we were off. It’s a residential neighborhood, so he has obviously figured out that anyone looking like a tourist with bags must be headed to the hostel.

Abel and Melchizedek appear in a Ravenna fresco.

Back in Ravenna we checked out the local churches as well as a mausoleum. Ravenna is on the map because of its many beautiful mosaics, to which I am particularly partial. It had a strong Byzantine influence, and thus its art is different from much of Italy’s. We passed a place where a wedding was either starting or ending. We later went by again and saw two guys in tuxes going through some grass and a flowerbed with their hands. It looked like someone had lost a ring. We later went by again and they had deployed the kids, one of whom was happily stomping around methodically; he would have to have “princess and the pea” senses to detect a ring through the soles of his shoes. We also saw lots of dressed-up older ladies biking around town, but many had potted flowers in the handlebar basket. I’m not sure if that’s just popular or if there had been a flower market, but it sure added to the atmosphere.

The holes in this wall were probably attachment points for a marble facade that once coated this building.

After hitting the sights we headed for dinner. I had expected to cook at the hostel, but this hostel didn’t have a kitchen for guests to use. It was a great hostel otherwise – decent beds, free internet, great common room with pool/foosball tables, etc. – but no kitchen is a big downside. It’s a great gathering place for one thing, and cooking dinner for yourself is worth at least E15/night. Anyway, we hit a pizza and kebab place since we hadn’t done that yet in Europe. The other motivation was that this place advertised “cone pizzas.” Yes, we were curious. The guy serving us was really nice and spoke pretty good English. The conversation with him was as good as the cheap food. He said he had spent two years in Brighton as a waiter, though he said his English wasn’t as good as he would like it to be because he spoke mostly with Italians in his off time. He was really down on Ravenna and sort of ranted that it was a slow backwater town. He also said he didn’t think Italians were friendly unless you had money or wore cool clothes. I asked him where he would go if he were vacationing in Italy and he immediately picked Rome, I guess because it is the most cosmopolitan Italian city. He said English isn’t required in schools, and even if you take it voluntarily you have trouble because the teachers have poor English pronunciation – he said he thought he knew English but didn’t understand nearly as much as he expected when he went to England. He said kebabs weren’t very popular in Italy, which wasn’t surprising given the few kebab places we had seen. It was an interesting and different perspective, but from some other things I picked up on I have some reservations about taking everything he said as absolute truth.

Now the moment you’ve all been waiting for: a cone pizza is… just like its description. They take a crust shaped like an ice cream cone and add a scoop of sauce, then a scoop of cheese, then a dose of your topping, then another scoop of sauce/cheese, and run the thing through a toaster. I’m surprised that kebabs aren’t popular in Italy, but after experiencing them I’m not surprised that cone pizzas haven’t caught on.

If you hark back to our time in Rome I talked about Romans and validating bus tickets. Today Ravenna must have had a sting operation going on, because both of the buses we took today got checked. The first time we pulled up to a stop and a guy immediately hopped on and ordered the bus driver not to open the back doors, so everyone who got off had to go past the checker and show that they had a validated bus ticket. Everyone passed the test. The second time we were on the last bus home out of the old town center. A guy got on the bus at one of the stops along with some other people. As soon as he got on he turned around and started checking others who were getting on for a bus ticket. There were two black guys who got on, one just before the checker and one just after. The second one had a talk with the checker and obviously didn’t have a ticket, so the checker required him to buy one from the bus driver then and there. That was easy. After the bus started moving the checker moved down the bus. He came to a group of three Italians in front of me just as we pulled up to a stop; the checker kicked them off the bus and they went with embarrassed grins and no problem. We got our tickets checked and he moved on to the back of the bus. The two black guys were sitting on the last row, and when the checker got to them there was a quick talk and the checker shouted up to the bus driver to stop the bus. It turns out that both black guys had tried to ride without a ticket, and one had the mishap/fortune to be caught before even riding. Now the second guy was caught and a big argument ensued, and guy #1 joined in; after a bit the checker trying to physically toss guy #2 off the bus. After three minutes or so of yelling at each other guy #2 finally got off in a huff. I don’t speak Italian, but I sure know the words for “ticket” and “police,” both of which were sprinkled throughout the conversation. I’m sure I could have learned a few choice Italian phrases if I had been trying.

We later put our heads together and I’m pretty sure this is what happened: guy #1 got stopped before getting on the bus and was forced to buy a ticket. Guy #2 was later caught and the checker wanted him off the bus, just like he had forced the other Italians off. Guy #2 says, “Hey, you let my friend buy a ticket, you should do the same for me.” Checker says that it was obvious the guy was trying to ride for free and get away with it even after seeing other people on the bus get caught and that he had just been nice to guy #1, but he was going to enforce the rules. It then became a “that’s not fair” argument. Both of these guys spoke good, fluent-sounding Italian, so I’m guessing that they weren’t immigrants. (Random, but guy #1 was wearing a “Texas Junior League 8 Champions 1995” jacket. I didn’t see/hear anything to indicate they had grown up in Texas, I’m guessing he picked it up secondhand or something.)

Honestly I surprised at how light the consequences were. If you get tossed off a bus it seems that you just walk forward/backward to the nearest bus stop and hop on the next bus, perhaps validating your ticket this time if you’ve had enough trouble for the day. The only reason I could see for getting all huffy was that it was the last bus of the day and therefore you might have to take a cab after getting kicked off the bus. In Rome I was told that they give you a E50 fine, which is painful, and if you can’t pay on the spot it jumps to E200 payable within a month.

Shirt for the day: “Skydiving saves lives from mediocrity.”

Day 19: Friday, May 9, Florence

Sitting down after a long day of standing is a great feeling.

Today we started by wandering through the open-air markets. Unlike Siena, this market is devoted to tourist items, particularly leather. The stalls had “changing rooms” that consisted of curtains that could be drawn around a customer. After quickly seeing everything they had to offer, I spent about an hour playing “ID the Americans.” It was too easy, so I changed it to try to guess who was American, who was Italian, and who was non-Italian European. I have a pretty impressive success rate if I do say so myself. Some more American giveaways: American eagle jeans (particularly on girls), shorts and flip flops, sundresses with nothing underneath (I haven’t seen too many Europeans wearing sundresses and those that do wear at least black tights underneath), hairstyles and sunglasses, and those bead necklaces on guys. Americans also really do seem to laugh more.

There were a number of Africans on an empty side street branching off from the market. I immediately guessed that they were there to sell the knock-off products that the established vendors couldn’t sell; it was confirmed when one started walking behind my brother and I while asking if we were looking for Gucci, Prada, etc. In Rome the police didn’t seem to care, but here in Florence there are signs up saying not to buy fake goods, and we saw a set of sellers pack up quickly and head out when police came into view.

After quickly seeing the Duomo we headed to several smaller museums. (The Duomo is impressive architecturally – they built the building without knowing how to build a dome to span it, confident that someone would come along and solve the problem – it isn’t very interesting inside.) We saw Donatello’s David, but unfortunately it was face-down on a table for restoration. I thought the Donatello vs. Michelangelo comparison was really interesting. Donatello was earlier than Michelangelo, so perhaps he didn’t have all of the benefits of other influences that Michelangelo did, but the Davids couldn’t be more different. Go look them up if you haven’t seen them before.

That afternoon we attempted to go to the American Memorial Cemetery outside of Florence. It had been suggested to me and I have never been to an American war cemetery on foreign soil, plus it was a good change of pace. However, the cemetery is one stop on an intercity line, and we found out that the buses to and from the cemetery were all full for the afternoon. Everyone was doing their traveling because a bus strike was going to start at 5pm. The bad news is that we didn’t make it to the cemetery, and I was more disappointed than I thought I would be, but the good news was that we didn’t get stranded out at the cemetery at night.

Shirt sightings for the day: “Men is Glam” and “Lost my wife mitancare.” Unless Mitancare is a brand, that last one takes the cake.

I had “Bringing In the Sheaves” stuck in my head tonight. I haven’t sung it in at least seven years and I only remember the chorus, but that didn’t stop it from lodging in my head. That was because something at dinner reminded me of “Eating Goober Peas.”

Day 18: Thursday, May 8, Florence

oday was mostly spent in the Uffizi and Accademia. We had reservations at both but still had to wait in short lines. While waiting at the Uffizi we saw a guy who was dressed up as a Florentine statue – white powdered face, white Renaissance-type outfit, and two white pillars to frame him. It was the first good “pay money to take a picture with me” costume I have seen. 20 feet from him a guy was setting up to be an Egyptian Pharaoh/mummy, which is neither relevant nor original. It is easy, however, because you can hide behind a mask and not worry about keeping your face still. The Accademia is basically just Michelangelo’s David, his unfinished “Prisoners,” and a few lesser-known paintings. The David really is impressive, however, and is worth the trip. It was originally intended to go on top of a cathedral, so now that it is on ground level the massive statue (17 ft tall or so) is even more overwhelming. I eavesdropped on a tour guide who said that da Vinci was more of a scientist and thought that a work should mirror what is reality; Michelangelo wanted to “perfect” and expand on reality – hence his massive David whose proportions aren’t all quite right and his unfinished Prisoners. In that sense Michelangelo might be the first to foreshadow later movements – from Impressionist to Modern – that purposefully moved away from reality after art had moved toward reality for so long.

A lot of English names for Italian cities are obvious derivatives – we say Rome, they say Roma, etc. However, the Italian name for Florence is Firenze. How did we get Florence out of Firenze?

For an afternoon snack I had a sandwich that was sold by the kg. There was a big sandwich and you tell the person about how big a piece you want, then they weigh it and charge you accordingly. That night we ate at a buffet around the corner from our hostel. It was cheap and a good change. There was a cold meat plate, several cold pastas, a bread, lots of tomatoes and cheeses, and some mixed vegetables. I’ve liked Italian food, but the restaurants are all very similar in their offerings. There are very few vegetables offered – if there are sides available, one of the three or four is always French fries – and meat is expensive and comes in small servings. It’s very carb-heavy, and I couldn’t eat it for too long. On the other hand, what people eat in their homes is probably not the same as what restaurants serve, just like in the U.S. Our buffet meal was more like what I was used to from my previous Italy trip, and I suspect it is more like what is fixed in homes.

After an early dinner we went out about 7:30 just to wander the town. It seemed to be transition time: street vendors were packing up their wares and bantering with each other, lots of people were biking home in their suits, and the streets were relatively devoid of traffic. We headed for the Ponte Vecchio and enjoyed the beginning of sunset for a bit before crossing over. Rick Steve has a suggested route that goes east, so we headed west to get away from it all. We wandered into an area of town that obviously isn’t used to tourists. Italians were out laughing over al fresco dinner or drinks, many were sitting on the steps of monuments or churches watching everyone else in the piazzas, or walking home from work/out after changing. We headed back for the river and saw the tail end of sunset before heading home.

The Ponte Vecchio just after sundown.

Along the way we saw a lot of interesting things. There was a little railing with lots of locks locked to it or each other, and the end result looked like a cluster of grapes. It seems that someone attached a few locks just to do it, and then other people came along and slowly added more locks. We saw a McLaren SLR, a supercar that I had only previously seen in front of my Qatar hotel. We also saw a lady sitting at a table eating dinner while wearing what looked like chemistry lab goggles. No lie. We also passed a pair of Italians sitting on a Vespa and smooching away in a quiet alley, which is a very Italian thing to do. Walking back later in the night we heard someone playing the flute in the U-shaped courtyard of the Uffizi. He was playing along with a recorded soundtrack of movie scores; he was good, but we were surprised by the wild applause. We passed many deserted squares and the poorly-lit Duomo. The trash collectors were out and we saw small car-sized trash trucks that went down the narrow roads collecting garbage and then rendezvoused with normal-sized trash trucks, backing up to them and dumping their contents into the larger truck dump-truck style. It reminded me of bees buzzing around the queen.

We also passed a pair of black British ladies. That might not sound odd, but it’s a good opportunity to talk about race in Italy. Italy has been surprisingly homogenous. I have seen very few Africans here, and almost all of those that I have seen are trying to sell knock-off Prada bags from a black trash bag. That might sound bad, but it really is a safe correlation to make here. There is no ethnic food except for the Chinese restaurants I have seen that I can count on one hand. We lived on the edge of Chinatown in Rome, but other cultures seem to be on the edges of society rather than integrated. Italy has millions of tourists every year, but no other cultures seem to stick. Paris had a lot of Africans, and most of them seemed to dress like other Parisians and they came in all classes. In Paris it seemed (from my conversations) that Muslims were on the fringe, but other cultures had been integrated to a large degree. It doesn’t seem that way here in Italy. In Paris I saw a surprisingly large number of inter-racial relationships. Here in Italy if you find a mixed-race group of people, I’ll give you better than even odds that they are American. (That’s because almost all such groups I have seen have been speaking American English.) I’m not prepared to say this is a bad thing, because I don’t know if my observations are a result of 1) being in tourist areas and missing the diverse areas of town, 2) a simple fact that is the result of immigrants’ decisions to go elsewhere, or 3) an active hostility on the part of Italians.

Day 17: Wednesday, May 7, Siena

The good news about Casa di Antonella was that breakfast was provided. It consisted of omelets, bread, a hard cheese, and cold cuts. Overall it was a pretty good breakfast and was similar to what I had gotten most mornings on my previous Italy trip.

It was Wednesday, so we headed to Siena’s market. It was a bunch of street vendors set up end to end down a number of streets. Overall it was very large. Most of the aisles were packed at about 10 in the morning. The majority of the crowd seemed to be women over 45; many had husbands along, though most of the husbands were grouped at the ends of aisles talking amicably while their wives shopped. There were the requisite number of tourists, but the market goods were obviously aimed at locals. There were also some moms with kids and some young couples. I would say that about 25% of the people (or maybe 33% of the households represented if you eliminate spouses) were carrying a bag of purchases. The goods were dominated by women’s clothes. There were a few stalls of men’s clothes and couple of men’s suits, a good number of shoe stalls (including a few that sold New Balance, Nike, etc. in boxes just like a normal shoe store), and a lot of… lingerie stalls. I’m pretty sure I mentioned before that dedicated lingerie stores are everywhere, and they are just as proportionally represented in this traveling market. It’s a little disconcerting to see 45yo moms holding various pieces of lingerie up to themselves to see if they will fit.

Il Campo in Siena as seen from what would have been a wall of a huge cathedral. The Sienese wanted their cathedral to be larger than that of their rivals, so they planned to turn their entire (large) existing church into the transept of a new church. The Plague put a stop to it.

We passed a hotel that was flying a flag that said, “The Leading Hotel of the World.” I never would have guessed that a Sienese hotel would be the world leader.

There is a small store a few doors down from us that advertises “African American” products as well as Asian and other cultural items. I wasn’t surprised except that it didn’t say “African Italian” or even just “African.” Because of its location and proprietor (an older Asian lady) I don’t think it was aimed at traveling African-Americans, so it makes me wonder what the local black population calls themselves.

During the day we saw the girls from dinner the night before not once but twice. At the end of the day we took an intercity bus to Florence. It was a double-decker, and the top deck was roasting. Fortunately it was a pretty short trip. In Florence we stayed at a place that was more like what I thought Casa di Antonella would be like: a large apartment where the host family lived there and ran the “hotel” out of their home. In this case it was a mother/daughter duo, and they were as friendly as could be.

In Rome we had gotten take-away lunches from a restaurant that also had a window for take-away pizza/calzones. (Sort of like a drive-through window for pedestrians.) We found the same place in Florence, but this was just a restaurant. We ate there on a piazza and had a very entertaining/funny manager who helped talk us through some of the Italian-only menu. While we were eating, hawkers would come through the outdoors area while the wait staff was all inside and try to sell flowers or trinkets. Later in the meal three young and obviously American girls came walking down the street dressed as if they were going out and talking loudly. They cornered the manager and asked him where a tabacchi (tobacco shop) was. He could tell he was in an awkward spot and offered them cigarettes from his box, but they refused, and after attempting to explain to them where it was one of them said thanks and rubbed her hand down his cheek. Basically these college freshman-aged girls who seemed to already be drunk and were dressed to show off created a scene that everyone in the restaurant was watching and put the manager in a bad situation. Thanks for reinforcing the Ugly American.

Siena got good reviews and trusty Rick Steves said that everyone loves Siena. I thought it was OK, but frankly I wouldn’t put it on my Italy Top 10 list. It didn’t have the benefits of being a big city, but it was big enough to make it on the itinerary for all of the tour companies and was totally touristy until local cafes got busy late at night. I must have missed something, because I didn’t leave love struck.

On the topic of touristy, I was thinking about tourism in America. I can’t think of many places that are so devoted to tourism or seem super touristy. I think one reason is that American places don’t usually translate their menus, etc. into other languages, whereas that is almost standard in European tourist hotspots. (When looking for a good place to eat we like to find places that don’t have English menus.) Also, America is so big that tourists are spread over more locations. Plus, unless you are doing an East or West Coast tour, there are few places with enough concentrated big tourist draws to merit a big tour company operation. There are some places that draw a lot of tourists (NYC and Niagra Falls come to mind). Some of the biggest tourist draws, however, are Disney Land/World and Las Vegas, and you can’t claim to have really “been to America” if you just hit one of those spots.

Just as in Paris, Italy really has no free toilets. The few public toilets are all pay toilets. In all of Europe I have seen very few automated toilets, which has surprised me. In New Zealand there were a lot of automated toilets, but almost all of them worked on motion sensor technology (and would thus flush an entire bank of toilets when you moved around) instead of the “per toilet” heat detection sensors used prevalently in the U.S.

Day 16: Tuesday, May 6, Assisi/Cortona/Siena

As close as I got to Cortona on this trip.

Today was a disappointing day, quite honestly. The plan was to hit Cortona as a day trip on the way to Siena for the night. I enjoyed Cortona when I was here before, and it is even more “small-town Italian” than Assisi. It only merits 3 pages in Rick Steve’s Italy, guaranteeing that it will be pretty tourist-free. However, part of the reason it isn’t a big tourist draw is that it isn’t particularly easy to get to, as we found out. I had tried to find a bus from Assisi to Cortona, but didn’t easily find one and didn’t press it too hard. The train had worked well for us before. When we arrived in Cortona, however, the train station’s baggage check was closed and the bus that runs hourly to take passengers up to the hilltop didn’t arrive at all while we were there. I talked to two locals who didn’t know of any taxi service. We ended up poking around Camucia, the “down-hill suburb” of Cortona, and eventually packing up and leaving earlier than planned for Siena. It wasn’t a total waste, however, because Camucia was the most “modern, real Italy” we will probably see. It’s built on the lowlands, doesn’t have any tourist draw (except those passing through to Cortona), and everywhere else we are staying relatively close to the places of interest to tourists.

Our train to Cortona was very different from the others we have traveled on. It was only three cars long and they were all attached, so it was a single unit. It had a futuristic-looking interior, with interesting lighting and four sets of “lounge-style” circular seating. However, it was a bumpier and choppier ride than the other trains we have ridden.

A typical Tuscan hill town street as seen in Siena.

When we arrived in Siena we went to drop our bags where we were staying. When I looked at it online I thought it was a B&B/hostel-type place with the owner living there (it was called Casa di Antonella). However, it was an empty apartment that the lady rented out by the room. There was a kitchen, but the cooking items were nasty and didn’t look like they had been cleaned in a while so we decided not to make our own dinner. My room had a small ceiling fresco and a tiny porch that was very nice. When we arrived we also found out that there had been a miscommunication between me and Antonella, and in trying to get things worked out we found out that she spoke “reservation English” and almost nothing more.

When we went out to eat we were at a table next to a couple of American girls who were studying there in Siena, one from Fordham and one from Villanova. They gave us a quick overview of the town that was helpful.

A Siena dusk.

That night we wandered around town, particularly to Il Campo (“the” campo). Siena is known for a horse race that occurs here twice a year; each neighborhood enters a horse and they race around this square. It’s roughly semicircular and slopes down toward the “town hall” building.

The other guests at our apartment were four Canadian medical students doing their residencies in Halifax. They were over for a conference in Rome and had extended their trip. Most were just in Italy for a week before their conference, but the obvious “travel leader” of the group had spent six weeks traveling in Dubai and Africa prior to joining everyone else in Italy. I found it humorous that the Africa traveler had just a small backpack (I pack light, but I was a little dubious about traveling that long on what looked like a daypack), while one of the just-Italy guys had a monster suitcase that must border on oversized luggage.

Bedouins don't have internet

Just to catch you up, I'm in Israel (as of May 21) and just got into Jerusalem. I'll continue updating, but once I leave Jerusalem I might disappear again for a while. The good news is that I've gone to some great and out-of-the-way places here in Israel. The bad news is that many don't have internet.

-Day 14: Monday, May 5, Assisi

A long-time resident of Assisi calls it a day.

Today was our “do” day in Assisi, capped off by a relaxed night. We hit the requisite churches – St. Clare, Santa Maria del Angeli, and St. Francis, as well as the church in our local piazza. Santa Maria is a “church within a church” – they literally built a basilica over a tiny old one-room church where St. Francis once taught. In general the churches here are less ornate than the big-name ones in big cities. St. Francis is an exception. It has three levels – a crypt, a lower level, and a newer basilica built on top of that. The lower church has a good amount of marble and color, though it is dark because of its almost windowless construction. The top basilica is covered in Giotto frescos (including the one you’ve probably seen of St. Francis preaching to birds). I think this church’s courtyard and its look from afar are both neat, because it is built out over the cliff face and the stacked basilicas mean it is an impressive structure. It was here that during my A&M trip our Italian tour guide (who was awesome and who I wish I could have along again) gave a very passionate Italian lecture to a church guy who tried to tell him to be quiet.

Sunset over old town Assisi.

That night we had dinner a place that was way out of the way. It was a really small place and we were the only customers I saw besides one other table of three. The food was great and at a good price, but the best part was the company. It was family-owned, and the granddad was sitting there watching the news on TV. He spoke almost no English, but he and my sister managed to get enough across the Italian/Spanish divide to have a decent conversation. At the end of the meal we left with hearty goodbyes and smiles all around, which was a lot of fun.

That night I went to an internet café for a bit to look up the info on our place for the next day. A Irishman sat next to me since the place was full. He was in Assisi to teach medieval history to some monks/nuns in the area. We got to talking and he mentioned my Aggie ring and I mentioned the UK tradition of school ties. Bad idea. This was an Irishman’s Irishman, and he gave me a good-natured hard time for lumping him with the UK.

That night the medieval music and dance was back, except this time they finished off with a parade up and down some streets about 10pm, drumming and playing away. Italians are generally unconcerned about their noise level. They generally are active and go to bed later than Americans, but even really late at night you will frequently hear people laughing uproariously or talking excitedly in full voices in the echoing stone streets. We talked to a couple of the girls associated with the dancing and they were the ones who first told us it was medieval and that the group was made up of people from several local schools. It seems that medieval song/dance is alive in at least the country schools, which is pretty neat.

Day 13: Sunday, May 4, Rome/Assisi

Today started with a trip to the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Rome. It was a very small and very diverse church. About 1/3 of the church were African natives (i.e. not Italian-born Africans). Others were from all over. There were about 12 visitors including us. They had a guest pastor in from Geneva because their own was at a conference. The liturgy was surprisingly similar to that of my own church back home in some ways. They did something that was also done at the American Church in Paris – they had a “children’s sermon” in the middle of the service. It’s a 5/10-minute kids’-level talk.

After that we booked it to the train station and hopped on a train to Assisi. I should have explained this before, but I was in Italy for about two weeks with a Texas A&M trip the summer before my freshman year. The travel, etc. was all prearranged. That made this my first Italian train trip as my own guide. We had to switch trains somewhere but we realized we didn’t know for sure where. Our ticket said Orte, which from a map was about halfway between Assisi/Rome and was a train hub, but the conductor said we switched at some other town further along the way. In the end we just obeyed the conductor and it all worked out, but now I’m pretty sure that there were multiple combos of trains that would get us to Assisi and he just told us a different way to get there. After that I learned how to read the departure boards at the train stations. The trains run on the same schedule seven days a week and always arrive at the same platform. The board lists all departures in a 24 hr period by time of departure. The train is labeled by its final destination, and stops are in small type beneath it along with the time of arrival. You have to know where you change trains, and then you at the train with your departure time, figure out its final destination (because that’s how you ask for the train/what the platform label says) and find out the platform on which it arrives. Since it also gives the arrival time for each stop along the way, you can have a very accurate idea of when to be ready.

Wow, this street is wide enough for two cars!

Our arrival in Assisi marked my return to what I first think of as Italy: small towns built around ancient hilltop ruins, whether Etruscan, Roman, or medieval; a slower pace of life; steep and narrow streets that were never designed for cars; and plenty of local life once the day-trip tourists disappear. (Note that we were up in "old Assisi," and only 1 of the 29 thousand residents of Assisi live within the old walls. The rest are spread out into the valley.) Here we stayed in a hotel that was a lot nicer than I thought it was going to be. Our rooms were big by any standard and huge by European standards. We just wandered the first night there, generally avoiding the touristy central piazza. Candles at the entrance to an alley marked the presence of an open restaurant since you frequently couldn’t see around the corners or over terraces. There was a medieval festival that was happening over a couple of nonconsecutive days, and we were there in between two of those days. The first night we heard what sounded at first like bagpipe music as we returned after dark to our piazza. It turned out to be a group of people playing a medieval instrument that looked like a recorder (but had the thin timbre of the bagpipe) while girls practiced some medieval dancing. A sizeable crowd had gathered to watch.

I have seen a surprising number of shirts in English that make no sense. I expected European shirts to be better, but maybe not. Today I saw a shirt that said “Eel: Useless Trinket.”

Day 12: Saturday, May 3, Rome

What 5th Avenue looked like 2000 years ago.

Today we had a lazy morning and then headed out to Ostia Antica, the ruins of an old Roman port town just outside of Rome. We had planned to go to Pompeii, but the trains ended up being more expensive and on a different timetable than we were expecting. Ostia’s ruins were extensive and really interesting. The old forum was surrounded by shops; each shop had a mosaic describing what the shop did/sold for those who couldn’t read, and many of those are left. (One shows a guy riding on a dolphin. Maybe that was the 2^nd century B.C.’s thrill ride.) As we were walking from the train to the old city I saw a gas station. It suddenly made me realize that I had only seen one gas station in both Paris and Rome combined. I guess all of the gas stations are in the suburbs. Gas was about E1.50/liter.

Back in the city we went to Hadrian’s mausoleum, which is now a church called Santa d’Angelo if I remember correctly. The Catholic Church built upon Hadrian’s fortress-like structure and turned it into a genuine place of refuge for the Pope during crises.

One nice thing about Rome is that it still has a lot of the piping for the old Roman public water system. There are random water spigots located around the city that are perfect for filling up a water bottle or getting a quick drink.

Rome is a much more colored city than Paris. While there still isn’t the range of colors you would see in the states, clothes come in more than the starkly black and white color scheme of Paris. Weather here is also significantly warmer than Paris, so that might be a bad comparison.

We cooked dinner again tonight, and like every other night the menu centered around pasta. Pasta takes up an entire aisle at the grocery, with olive oil and tomato sauces both getting a significant chunk of an aisle. We had run out of peanut butter and hadn’t found it during our first shopping trip, but this time we found it. It was with the imported exotic foods like Mexican salsa, couscous, and soy sauce and was E3.50/small jar.

As we were headed home there was a huge commotion on a nearby street. Trash was everywhere in the street, police had blocked it off, and lots of people were watching. It looked like a colorless parade, but when I asked someone they said that it was a “strike” (I figured out it was actually a protest) against the government. I got two accounts; each said that the protesters wanted to smoke marijuana, but one added that they wanted it for free.

When I was in China I found that my Spanish improved – I was trying so hard to think of how to say something in Chinese that my other foreign language surfaced. That has occasionally happened here, but not much. I’ve found that I can get very basic stuff done in Italian, but I also found out that if I ask something in Italian (like directions) I frequently get a rapid stream of Italian back. Unfortunately that means that it is usually better to be the monolinguistic tourist and ask in English.

Day 11, Friday, May 2, Rome

"Hail, Caesar; we who are about to die salute you!"

Today we first went inside the Coliseum, which we had seen from the outside the day before but had been closed. We went through a security line and put our bags through an x-ray machine to get in, but I could have put an AK-47 through the machine and they wouldn’t have known. The guy manning the screen was so bored that not only was he just not paying attention, but he was preoccupied with seeing if he could activate his cigarette lighter using only a pencil.

As a structure, the inside was pretty cool, but it wasn’t anything more than you have seen in pictures. The size does get you, however, and particularly the depth and intricacy of the sub-arena passageways (now exposed). The Romans really were engineering masters. I would have liked to know how they flooded the arena – i.e. did the water flood the lower chambers, or was it sealed above the chambers? The real thing about going inside the Coliseum is that you could imagine yourself as one of the 50,000 people attending. (They had several totally separated quadrants so that if there were a stampede or riot it wouldn’t turn into mass chaos. Smart.) I’m still not quite sure how to treat it. It’s an engineering marvel and a triumph of a previous civilization, but its purpose hails the barbarism that had begun to gnaw at Rome and would lead to its collapse in 476 AD. It also made me think about today. It was the “reality TV” of the 3^rd century. TV today gives us the comfort of knowing that the guy with his brains splattered on the wall didn’t actually die – in fact, he pocketed several million for his services and will die again in a another blockbuster a few years hence – but at the same time it seems that our entertainment appeals more and more to the same part of human nature that packed the Coliseum. We may not be actually killing people for public display, but at least the Coliseum crowd was watching from a distance, I can name several movies based on depicting bizarre forms of torture in all their… sadism?

Someone would be very surprised to know that I was in awe of and took a picture of the brick remains of the room where they did their boring job every day. Will someone look for traces of me some day?

After the Coliseum it was on to the neighboring Roman Forum and Palantine Hill. The Forum was the hub of Roman government for a long time, and it is dotted with various buildings built on top of each other. Among them is the Roman Senate building, a shrine to Julius Caesar marking where he was cremated (if I remember correctly), and several arches commemorating various Caesars and their accomplishments. Palantine Hill is the location of the Emperor’s palace for several hundred years. You can still see the outlines of the throne room. You can also look down several stories and see the complicated labyrinth that was the palace. Versailles had the luxury of being built from scratch with unlimited acreage; this palace had to be squeezed among existing urban structures. As such, it may well have been the more impressive building (from an engineering perspective) considering the results and the time period. You could also look out the back and see the Circus Maximus below. The best-preserved Roman buildings in Rome are all buildings that were converted into churches. This is great, but unfortunately the flip side is that in many cases the non-converted buildings were scavenged by the Catholic Church to build its own new buildings. Lots of Roman buildings have brick walls with odd square holes; those holes were hanging points for marble wall linings that were taken for use in homes or churches in the course of the years.

The old and grand in the foreground with the dome of St. Peter's -- the next great power to replace Rome -- in the background.

After lunch at a walk-up café (great and cheap margherita pizzas and calzones) we headed to the National Museum. It housed a great collection of Roman statues (mostly busts) and frescos from villas. We walked through and learned the history of various emperors while they stared back through pupil-less stone eyes. I liked the early busts better because at that time Roman artists were incorporating the lifelikeness of Greek sculpture with their own Etruscan-Roman realism and grittiness. The result is that early busts really did look like real people – no airbrushing – while later busts looked idealized. It also had a collection of Roman coins. It grouped them by emperor (because in most cases each emperor had his face printed on the coins made during his reign) and had a description of economic events during their time. One – I think it was Caligula – had to deal with high inflation rates. He decreed empire-wide price controls and set prices from Rome, and the result was that items disappeared from shelves, commerce froze up, and black markets appeared. That’s according to the National Museum in Rome. I find it darkly humorous that you can look back as far as you want in recorded history and price controls always exacerbate problems in the market – though today the public is on to the ruse, so politicians circumvent this by talking about “price floors” or “rate freezes” (in the case of mortgages) or push a certain item as being “critical” and thus worthy of special treatment.

We have used the subway quite a bit here. It is good and efficient, but very limited. There are only two lines and they only intersect at the main train station. The cars have very few seats and can pack a lot of standing people. They are completely covered in artistic graffiti, as opposed to the precise and small “tagging” graffiti we saw on French subways. On French subways, there would be a name/sign painted just above the doors, and that was usually it. These are canvasses for the type of words turned into art that is frequently seen in the U.S. Graffiti is everywhere in the city, as well.

People here really like random metal stud piercings, usually out of their cheek/mouth.

I’ve decided that any Italian who doesn’t die of lung cancer by age 50 is basically guaranteed to get skin cancer. Italians vary in shade from a healthy olive to well done, and you can see the results of this baking in some of the older people.

Day 10: Thursday, May 1, Rome

Italy has its poor, too. I doubt this one will ever get to use the Banca Populare.

On Thursday we hit the ancient ruins. We found out that just about everything was closed, however, because May 1 is a public holiday (Liberty Day). We looked at the Coliseum and Forum from the outside. We ended up targeting churches because we correctly figured they wouldn’t close for national holidays. We saw Santa Maria Maggiore, a church that is a part of the Vatican. It had a great old mosaics, a new roof, and Bernini’s tomb among its claims to fame. I thought it was both a good and bad place to lay Bernini. On one hand it was fitting that the designer of St. Peter’s and many other church works of art be laid to rest on Vatican property, but on the other hand this leader of the Baroque rests in a chapel that isn’t very Baroque.

From there it was on to San Giovanni. The subway was incredibly crowded. This wasn’t too surprising since the bus system shut down from 1-4pm due to the holiday. However, the subway also skipped two stops, one of which was our target. The subway almost emptied at the next stop, so the entire station was packed, and we got off and were planning to walk back to the church. By this time we figured there was a sporting event or something because the crowd was uniformly young. We waited for most of the crowd to pass and then merged onto the escalator. When the escalator started leveling off I was greeted by a guy about my age and a slightly older man – about 30? – shouting and trying to come at each other while others tried to hold them apart. It was right at the top of the escalator, so the crowd spilled out and moved around like a group forming a fighting circle. It looked to me like the older guy (who had a slightly smiling sneer) was baiting the younger guy, who was furious. It looked like they were going to part ways when the young guy ran over to two of his friends, reached in a messenger bag, produced a half-drunk bottle of wine, and rushed the other guy as if to brain him. Several police/station personnel had appeared by this time and held the two apart. The whole thing lasted about 15 seconds.

Note the graffiti along the entire length of the building. A typical Roman street, unfortunately.

We emerged to see streams of young people walking in the same direction we were going. The street was littered with even more broken bottles and cigarette butts than usual. The crowd was mostly what I would call “Euro-grunge,” and a lot of kids we had seen in Rome seemed to fit in that category. There were a lot of people carrying mostly-empty wine bottles and drinking straight from them. We stopped at a McDonalds in an attempt to find a restroom and think things through and found that they had closed their restrooms and their basement and put plastic wrap over all of the seats, obviously in preparation for a crowd that might trash the place. Almost all of the shops were closed, though this could have been due to the national holiday and the fact that this was the afternoon when many things are temporarily closed. However, a good number had what looked like owners just sitting in the doorway or watching the goings-on, and it seemed like they were there to keep an eye on their place. We could hear music drifting down the street and eventually learned that there was going to be a concert at 7pm (this was about 3pm) in Piazza San Giovanni – right next to the church. The church is just inside the city walls and we were outside, so in order to reach the church we had to funnel in through the same city gate as the throngs of concert-goers. In the end we decided to chalk the afternoon up to experience and head home without fighting the crowd.

Guess who I saw that evening?

That night we ate out. Whenever we eat dinner out we are eating well before most Italians do – they begin dinner about 8 or 9. This place hadn’t fully opened up, and the waiter took our order and then got concerned and basically said that he couldn’t ask the cook to cook more than 4 different primis (first courses) or the cook would get angry. The music was an eclectic mix, including “I Will Survive” (by Aretha Franklin?) and “Gangster’s Paradise.”

Day 9: Wednesday, April 30, Rome

A good example of Roman driving: organized chaos that treats rules as suggestions.

This morning we met one of William’s friends from Hillsdale College who is taking the semester to study at John Cabot in Rome. He gave us a walking tour of part of Rome and added his commentary on Rome and everything Italian. I enjoyed the guy, though I wasn’t ready to take all of his assessments of Italians to the bank. I did learn that piazza is any meeting place of several roads, but informally a piazza has a church at the intersection whereas a largo or campo does not. He also said that people navigate by piazzas, not by streets. That makes a lot of sense because alley-like roads cut in random directions across Rome. It would be nearly impossible to memorize all of their names and orientations, and I don’t think some of them even have names. Buses also announce their ending piazza, usually with a “via ___” to mark which road it will take to get there. While we were riding the public transportation he said that Romans rarely buy and validate their bus tickets (you’re supposed to put it in a machine to read/cancel it) and that when an inspector hops on the bus there is a rush to validate tickets before the inspector gets to you and fines you. I can imagine this might be true and we saw very few people validating tickets, but I don’t think all of them are bilking the system – if you have a multi-day pass you only validate it the first time and then it expires after a certain time period.

The oculus of the Pantheon, one of my favorite structures.

We went by the Vittorio Emmanuale monument (the “Wedding Cake” to Romans), the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, and the Trevi Fountain, among other landmarks. Our student-guide said that Italians don’t like the Wedding Cake because it is plain white. This month the Spanish Steps are covered in hundreds of potted flowers, which made them much prettier than just a bunch of steps. Legend has it that if you toss a coin into the Trevi Fountain over your shoulder your wish will be granted and you will return to Rome. I can’t say anything to the contrary, because I did it once before and now I’m back.

That afternoon we hit the Vatican Museum (including the Sistine Chapel) and St. Peter’s Basilica. The Vatican Museum is an incredible hodge-podge of Greco-Roman artifacts that seem barely sorted, like someone who saved baseball cards from a house fire knowing they would be valuable but not knowing what to do with them. I had forgotten hat Raphael’s School of Athens, which I enjoy, is in the Vatican.

A mosaic lining the bottom of St. Peter's dome.

The crown jewel is, of course, the Sistine Chapel. However, I found it underwhelming the first time and had the feeling repeated. Michelangelo did a great job on the paintings and they cover an enormous space, but many other churches around here are also covered in frescos and works of art. It certainly stands out among the chapel paintings, but in my book it doesn’t match the hype. One thing I do find amazing is just how much these artists were able to do. Bernini designed a large part of the Vatican and St. Peter’s, his sculptures show up everywhere in Rome, etc. I’m sure he had a small army of assistants to help apply the finishing touches while he moved on to his next work, but I still can’t imagine the time it would take to sculpt or paint one of these works. Van Gogh produced a little more than one canvas per day for his last 90 days or so, but even then he was painting 2’x3’ canvases, not carving 3-D marble or casting bronze.

Inside St. Peter's. For perspective, the canopy over the alter is about 7 stories tall. There is a person in the picture (click to enlarge) who is about 1/2 as tall as the marble base for the columns.

After the Sistine Chapel you go through a series of rooms housing modern religious art. I only saw three people in the entire system of rooms. Granted, by this time you have been on your feet for a long time, you’ve already seen what most people come to see, and most people who go to the Vatican Museum are probably Greek, Roman, or Renaissance lovers, but I think the almost total absence of interest in the modern art is telling. Most modern art doesn’t compare with the old, in my opinion. That isn’t to say that art done today is worthless, just that the style most people refer to when they say “modern art” doesn’t seem to stand with the old masters.

A view along a finger of the Tiber.

Fake bag/sunglass vendors are everywhere. I’m sure it’s technically illegal, but the police don’t prosecute it. It seems odd to have styles come out of Milan only to be sold for pennies on the streets of Rome. Other people walk around hawking electronic bubble-blowers – you dip them in bubble solution and pull a trigger and a fan blows bubbles while making those cheap electronic space-gun noises. I never saw anyone buy one and I can’t figure out how there would be a market big enough to justify the many sellers we saw.