The first leg of our wide-ranging cosmopolitan international tour began in ordinary mode with an American flight to Chicago. We emerged in the Admiral’s Club to find ourselves inside the first of many provincialisms to come, the Bears-Lions game on TV, with about a hundred enthusiasts spellbound in hope and admiration. E-mail updating and a Bloody Mary later, we embarked for Madrid on Iberia Airlines and found that the entire trip had placed us in business class from San Francisco to Venice. The meal was so-so, but the seats were ample.
Changing planes in Madrid is always a challenge because of the vastness of the place and the paucity of message boards. It was now Monday, November 11. We had no idea where to go next for the flight to Venice, but the immigration officer told us in authoritative tones to go to Gates J. Just take the elevator straight ahead down one floor; it’s less than 35 minutes to your gate. We took his word for it and went down the elevator and then up two long escalators to board a fast underground train. Another escalator and we were in an enormous departure lounge with head-turning luxury shopping, coffee bars and rest rooms. Spain may have financial difficulties, but it is broadly affluent.
We breezed over the ancient western Mediterranean and in about two and a half hours landed at the Venice airport, bearing in mind of course that you’re not in Venice. We decided to take the public water “bus” to town, which wasn’t exactly cheap, about 20 euro each, but we remembered that Europeans have this nasty habit of paying for public transportation what it costs, a practice unknown in American cities. The embarkation point is always remembered as being around the corner, but it’s actually a twelve-minute walk from the terminal. An hour or so later to disembarked at San Zaccaria, just east of San Marco, whereupon we acted upon a wild, and as it turned out seriously inaccurate, guess as to which opening in the facades of the buildings facing the water we should take to end up at the Liassidi Palace, our hotel in the Greek section, which is to say what had been the Greek merchants’ section three or four hundred years ago.
I dimly remembered from our visit in November of 2011 that the hotel was a short distance northeast of San Marco. The treachery of old Venice overtook us, however. We should have taken the narrow lane that opens to the interior from the quay next to the venerable Hotel Danieli (forever in my memory as the place where Proust stayed during his visits to Venice), but alas we veered too far east, and the short walk to the hotel became a laborious loop requiring over half an hour, including a stop to seek out the aged desk clerk at an ancient Hotel Residenzia to ask for directions, all while dragging collectively about 120 pounds in baggage. We had to pull the bags up and down over five or six of those infernal bridges over canals – structures of beauty and grace if one is unencumbered – until we finally arrived at the hotel. There we found a comfortable room in a concerted, very old palazzo at a reasonable price.
With ample daylight remaining, we walked to the Piazza San Marco along the waterfront. We estimated that the number of tourists on this November day was about 40 percent of the number in the square on a summer’s day. We realized that everything looked different when the area was relatively less crowded. We saw details in and colors of the stones of the buildings that could not remember having seen before. The spaces were larger. The Cathedral was scaffolded on the outside, but the four horses over the entrance were in place, and the overall effect was grand. We walked around the interior for half an hour, with almost no one inside. The mosaics were brilliant, even in the dimming light.
We returned to the hotel for a short rest and had our dinner in a pizzeria across the canal from the hotel entrance.
Venice, November 12, Tuesday
Today was
devoted to a summary tour of the Biennale.
I have lost track of how many Biennales we have attended over the years,
but the number is between eight and ten.
The Liassidi
Palace, being easterly of San Marco Square, was a good place to start our walk
to the exhibition areas, the Arsenale and the Giardini. The sunshine was brilliant, and the
temperature about 70 degrees. It was a fifteen-minute
walk to the Arsenale, formerly a rope factory for the Venetian navy, a rambling
structure perhaps 500 yards in length with numerous large rooms and twenty-five
foot ceilings. We arrived before 10 a.m.
and had to stand in line at the ticket booths, but at least the exhibition
authorities allowed a senior discount, and so we entered for about fifteen euro
each, perhaps twenty. While standing in
line we met a young friend we had known in Berlin, Valerie Chartrain,
formerly an assistant director of the Neugerriemschneider Gallery. We continued to meet up with Valerie, who is
very knowledgeable about the current art scene, during the day, and that proved
to be a good opportunity to exchange remarks about the artworks and the tenor
of the show.
Past Biennales were informative and
enjoyable for the most part, but our appreciation has declined over the last
three or four as we have perceived that the objectives of the chief curators selected
for each Biennale have changed.
The
principal changes had to do with worldwide inclusion. If in our perception this trend coincides
with a diminution of the influence of a rigorous, Western, intellectual
perspective, so be it. The curatorial aim
of the immediately preceding exhibitions appeared to us to be to include as many artists
with unpronounceable names from as many countries with unpronounceable names as
possible. This is difficult for simple
minds like my own. I draw a line from
Egypt/Mesopotamia through Crete, Greece, Rome, Western Europe and New York to
California and call that the canon. I
have grudgingly learned that there have been some pretty good artists from
Japan, Korea and China, and I have seen some fine rugs from Persia, India and
Central Asia, but apart from that, forget it.
The art theoretician
Rosalind Krauss several years ago penned an essay entitled “The Death of the
Avant Garde.” Since for me art must have
a conceptual as well as esthetic basis, I resisted the notion of this extinction,
but this year’s Biennale, entitled “Il
Palazzo Enciclopedico/The Encyclopedic Palace,”
appeared to us to have been staged as a proof of concept. It dawned on us slowly that the very title of
the Biennale was the clue that all manner of stuff, up to and including
figurative kitchen sinks, had been installed on the floors and walls of what
had for years been known as the Italian Pavilion.
As we walked through the galleries,
we saw that feeling and mysticism utterly had crowded out what for several
decades had been the purpose of thoughtful Western art, namely, a rational and
analytical depiction in esthetic terms of the changing world about us. The chief Curator, Massimiliano
Gioni, who is a staff curator at the New Museum in New York, chose most of the
work displayed in the central locations.
We came to Venice because of bright predictions before the show opened
that we would see something different this year. That proved to be true all too painfully. Gioni didn’t just challenge what had
prevailed as the heritage of the avant-garde, he negated it. Gioni is highly knowledgeable, but he’s a lightweight
chasing a denominator so broad as to render discrimination almost impossible.
We saw
artworks by unknowns dealing with the ordinary problems and perceptions of
ordinary, unsophisticated people and appealing to a like audience. I found myself somewhere between the normal
fare on commercial television today and the art that was exhibited at the
Indiana State Fair in the 1940’s. There
was interesting stuff (Christopher Williams is a favorite of ours) and some
imaginative “outsider art,” but most of what was included was dumb production
by people under-educated according to today’s deplorable standards. The strong tendency toward the mystical – I
thought we had gotten that out of our systems in this era with the Pre-Raphaelites
– drove me up the walls. You can read a
theoretical summary of our reactions in an article that Benjamin Buchloh, a
Harvard professor, wrote in a review of the Biennale in “Artforum” earlier this
year. Gioni managed to refute the whole
progression of modern art from David and Delacroix through the Impressionists,
Matisse and Picasso, German expressionism, dada, Surrealism, Vito Acconci,
Serra and Naumann and replace it with Grandma Moses (nothing against Grandma
Moses, in its place). Gioni tried to say
that Dieter Roth is on the side of the amateur mystics, but I am not buying it. Gioni might have included the late Mark
Rothko in the show if he could have, but I said goodbye to Rothko long ago.
The
brilliant Jeremy Deller had a folksy show in the British pavilion, which we
deemed OK because it was smart, and we liked the presentation of Ai Wei Wei,
who for some reason was allowed to represent Germany. He did something interesting but opaque: a large
room filled and stacked with wooden chairs, hooked together chair leg to chair top
seemingly randomly, up to the ceiling.
The coveted Dare and Themis prize went to the U.S. pavilion, which
housed several installations by the brilliant and impeccable young American
artist, Sarah Sze. On first impression
the artist’s work, which consists, briefly put, of sprawling installations of
tiny, common objects held together with fine wires that give the impression of
helter-skelter confusion, seems to be about the chaos of the world around
us. It is, but it is organized and controlled
by a shrewd intelligence and an unimpeachable esthetic sense. The work is delicate and feminine. The State Department solicits professional
views on which American artist should be shown in the U.S. Pavilion every two
years. We have disapproved of many
American pavilions in the past, some because they appeared intentionally to
portray American culture as weak, insincere and insipid, but this year’s
exhibition was a home run.
We
were exhausted at the end of the day.
On the way out, we eschewed a stop at what had been a somewhat
dilapidated, comfortable and rusty coffee and pastry room covered with a grape
arbor at the exit to the Giardini near the lagoon because the place had been
remodeled into a shiny new bar and pastry shop, no doubt with prices to
match. So our traditional place of
saying farewell to the Biennale has been taken from us. Accordingly, we present you with the scorn
of older folks who are continually being priced out of formerly attainable
markets. The world belongs to the young
– or the tourists from Russia.
We
walked slowly nearly a mile back to the hotel and lay down for a short,
somewhat illicit rest (when traveling with Dare, every rest is somehow
illicit). Magically a text message from
Valerie appeared on my iPhone: would we
join her for dinner at a hot restaurant recommended by the young international
art mafia somewhere near the Rialto Bridge?
Youngsters don’t have to ask older people twice, so of course we
accepted and immediately feigned reinvigoration. We made our way on to the vaporetto at San
Zaccaria, and then the exchange of text messages began. The first restaurant proved to be a dud said
Valerie, but, not to worry, we have a new bar and restaurant on the main street
going east, or so we assumed, off the Rialto Bridge. We got off at the Rialto, but how we finally
found the place, off the street and into a small campo about 200 dark yards
from the bridge, I will never know. In
the end, we had a good drink (I drink nothing but Compari in Italy) and a very
good dinner on a crowded mezzanine floor of an ancient brick building with five
tables. The art mafia had come through.
There
was a short thought of walking back to the hotel through San Marco Square, but
sanity prevailed, and we took the Number 1 vaporetto. That hits every stop and takes about 20 or 25
minutes to get back to where we started.
For some reason the former express Grand Canal vaporetto has been
discontinued, possibly since our last visit in November of 2011, but my memory
is no longer reliable in these matters.
Venice, November 13, Wednesday
One gauges
the quality of a hotel in great measure by the appearance of the clientele at
breakfast, and the persons in the Liassidi Palace breakfast area did not
disappoint.
After
breakfast we sought out the Scuola Dalmata delli Santi Giorgio e Triffon, also
known as Scuola di San Giorgio degli
Schiavoni, which is quite near the
Liassidi Palace and the Greek Orthodox church of St. George. This marvelous Scuola, or home of a
confraternity, is much smaller, say, than San Rocco, but its ground floor in
particular is graced on all four walls by masterpiece wall paintings by Vittore
Carpaccio. Carpaccio came from the
Dalmatian coast, and his paintings show an “oriental influence.”
These illustrations from the traditional life of St. George are stunning
in every respect, and we owe the visit to the diligence of our son, George, who
saw the Scuola when we were together in Venice in November of 2011.
Afterwards we walked into Piazza
San Marco and then took a sharp turn away from the square going north at a
right angle and ended up in streets with one shop after another selling good
quality and interesting wares. As we
neared the Rialto district, Dare made two stops, the first to buy a handsome
pair of Prada sunglasses and the second to buy a pair of mid-ankle-high shoes
from Max Mara. I was just people
watching. We crossed the Rialto Bridge
and walked past the campo where we had dined the evening before, wondering anew
how we could possibly have found the place in the dark. Most Venice narrow streets off a few main
routes are hardly lit at night. We
thought about lunch at Ala Madonna, a notorious but wonderful tourist-trap
restaurant, but it was closed. We had a
quick, as usual overpriced lunch along the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge
and then took the vaporetto back to the hotel.
But not so fast. We had purchased 24-hour vaporetto tickets
the evening before for the highway robbery price of 20 euro per ticket. On the way back to the hotel at about two in
the afternoon, the valid ticket patrol descended on our boat of all the boats
on the canal, and a young female functionary examined our tickets. Dare had seen her stop a native passenger a
few moments before, so she was not targeting tourists. She announced, regretfully, that we had
failed to have our tickets stamped at a vaporetto station entrance – the only
way to start the 24-hour validity running – and now we owed a fine totaling 59
euro, in my humble a staggering sum for such a trifling offense. But then we were tourists, and in any event there
was no appeal. We paid in cash quietly
and tried to pretend nothing had happened.
We checked out, dragged the bags
over only one bridge to Sant Zaccaria and caught the boat shuttle for another
tedious one hour ride (there is no WC aboard) to the airport. We boarded our 16:50 Alitalia flight without
incident and barely an hour later touched down in Rome.
The ride into the old City and our
hotel, the Adriano for our fourth stay, was without incident except for our being
struck with how vast Rome, a city of nearly five million, is. 95% of the City has nothing to do with the
ancient monuments and churches that we come to see. It’s huge, and it’s modern. Traffic whizzes by on broad multi-laned boulevards. After twenty minutes or so of disorientation
I recognized the dark-brick outlines of the Terma di Carracala. A few minutes later we passed the white
wedding-cake Victor Emmanuel monument, drove north on a street parallel with
the Corso and two blocks to the east of it, and finally cut west toward the
Piazza Navona to Via Pallacorda 2. We
changed clothes, had a decent pasta meal at Sugo, a restaurant just north of
the Pantheon, stopped at what we have considered for years as the world’s best
gelato dispensary and then turned in for the night.
Rome, November 14, Thursday
At last,
the moment I had been awaiting for two years arrived: the morning Cappuccino at the famed coffee
house, Tazza d’Oro. Reigning supreme
among small antique and fine goods stores a few yards from the Pantheon, Tazza
d’Oro features a large coffee grinder, gleaming vitrines filled with packaged
coffees and delicacies and a long, curved, copper bar serving the best coffee I
have ever tasted. It may be rivaled by
the Sant’Eustachio coffee shop (see the summary of Sunday, November 17, below). I think the foam topping on the cappuccino is
a bit looser and fluffier than in past years, when it seemed to be a thin layer
of solid cream that one’s spoon had to dig through, but that drink is still my
dream. If I had managed my life better,
I would have spent most of my life within walking distance of Tazza d’Oro.
We walked
east to the Corso, past a high level men’s store, Vatari, showing beautifully
knitted sweaters in the windows. The
interior of the store was all polished oak, and the salesmen were suitably arch
and uncaring. Against all sense, common
and otherwise, I had to have one of their sweaters, even though I wear a
sweater only about 20 times a year and was carrying a nice one by Yamamoto in
my luggage. O well, a sweater from a
fine Rome shop is, obvious to me at any rate, on a whole different level of
being. I’ll let you know how well it
fits and how well I like it sometime next February.
The first
stop on our Roman tour was the museum of the Villa Pamphilij, an astonishing
collection of mostly smaller paintings, many by Caravaggio, and a lot of
furniture and stuff. Look it up. The museum hosts the portrait of Pope
Innocent X by Velazquez (1650). I peered
and peered at the Pope for an aggregate of 12 minutes. In my book Velasquez is the greatest painter
who ever lived, and this portrait is the best portrait ever painted by anyone anytime. Standing awe-struck before the portrait is
highly recommended any chance you get.
Innocent is shown with the sophistication of a great statesman, banker
and leader, and as someone no one in his right mind would mess with, while at
the same time being entirely at home in his authoritative ecclesiastical robes. Before leaving the museum, I paused
reverentially at the small bronze sculpture of a muscular centaur in the last
room, a superb work embodying everything you always wanted to experience of
sexual misconduct. Nobody ever accused
Romans of abjuring sensuality.
We
continued down the Corso, crossing to the left side just before reaching the
Victor Emmanuel Monument. We found a
bank machine and crossed the complex intersection of busy, wide streets, aided
by the precise signals of the immaculately clad (navy blue, white and gold
braid) traffic policemen, surely the exemplar for the traffic controllers of
the world. We spent a lot of time
strolling leisurely through the reconstructed ruins of Trajan’s Forum. It was terrific. As a matter of fact, all of the antiquities
in Rome appeared to us recently to have been cleaned and refurbished. We had always looked at that Forum from
across the road, but had never explored the area.
By this time we had sucked it up and implemented
the Roman practice for crossing streets at marked crosswalks that had no
traffic lights. At a point determined by
instinct and a rough canvas of the velocity and density of the oncoming autos,
one simply steps resolutely into the crosswalk, holding one’s breath hoping
that others who have been waiting on the curb will join him, and presto! Oncoming traffic slows or stops to accommodate
the pedestrians. It’s not intuitive to a
San Franciscan, but it works. It beats
crossing a wide street in Cairo, where there are no marked crosswalks, and the
traffic proceeds slowly but never stops for a pedestrian. It’s every man for himself as you dodge and
weave between the cars, lane by lane.
We had
lunch under a shady grape arbor of a very nice outdoor trattoria at the far end
of Trajan’s Forum, Angelina ai Fori, for all of euro 21.50. We then crossed the broad Via dei Fori
Imperiale and entered the principal Roman Forum at about 1:30. The tourists were moderate in number. We were enjoying t-shirt weather and
sparkling sunlight. We couldn’t find the
entrance to the Church of Santi Cosma and Damiano to see the mosaics in the
apse of the rivers of creation, but we had been there before, we were still
slightly jet-lagged and the atmosphere was too felicitous to care. We did the circuit around the Arch of Titus,
noting that a long drought in that part of Italy had begun to ameliorate, and
the patches of grass throughout the ruins were a bright, bright green amidst
the shiny wet red clay and rocks. Our
lassitude dictated that we skip the ruins and museum on the adjacent Palatine Hill
to the south of the Forum – the guilt lasted about 30 seconds - and we walked
directly up the Capitoline Hill to the Campidoglio, where Marcus Aurelius was
at his old post on horseback and we could admire the Michelangelo buildings and
stairs. After that we rested, and might
have dozed off, for a few minutes in the marvelous rectangular yet baroque Santa
Maria d’ Aracoeli church. We stopped
again outside the entrance, which sits atop 124 steps—"the grandest loafing place of mankind,"
as Henry James put it. This is the spot
on which Gibbon was inspired to write his great history of the decline and fall
of the Roman empire while listening to vespers one winter’s eve as daylight
faded. I decided I could spend
many days loafing there, provided I could start those days at Tazza d’Oro.
The touring
day ended with a walk up the crowded Corso to the sweater shop, where I picked
up my bundle, whereupon we continued north a half mile and found the Rome
branch of Dare’s favorite ladies store, Custo of Barcelona. It’s colorful, it’s hip and it carries a
flavor of Barcelona and its singular designs.
We spent an eternity in that shop, shopping for a Christmas present for
Dare’s sister Suzanne and for Dare herself.
After that it was the Adriano for a short nap.
The nap did
it. After hitching up our belts and
pulling up our socks, we essayed that all we had to do is walk south past the
Pantheon and, with a wiggle here and a waggle there – which probably makes no
sense if you don’t know the old part of Rome – we might stumble on to the Campo
di Fiore and dine at La Carbonara, an old place we had enjoyed on prior visits. We arrived at the late evening bustle of the
large square of Largo di Torre
Argentina (where Julius Caesar was assassinated) and turned right (Google and Apple Maps on the iPhone were of virtually no help), but not far enough. Following a trail I dimly remembered we
headed further south and found ourselves in the Ghetto, exactly at the location
of the loft we had rented in November of 2011.
We knew there was a famous restaurant there and scrabbled around in the
dark in the general area of the Portico d’Ottavia, when there it was right in
front of us, the famous Giggetto Restaurant.
Unfortunately we were early for a Rome dinner. We didn’t manage to see the main dining room on
the way in and ended up in a barren, unpeopled side room. We were not dressed up, so it was just as
well. Dare braved an order of Jerusalem
style fried artichoke. I couldn’t do it
and settled instead for a fried flower.
Then came a tender boneless pork cutlet, which we ate plain with three
thin slices of sautéed potato, forgetting that in Italy nothing comes with
anything. If you want a vegetable you
have to order it. On the way out we
passed through the main dining room and at last saw what the fuss was all
about. This was a clientele delivered to
the door by limousine and taxi. The
atmosphere was gay and important. I
always find the Ghetto area a bit depressing, like a mild hangover. Apparently the middle-aged and young have no
problem partying there. More power to
them.
After
dinner, we walked into the Adriano to find a roaring party in progress. The guests, probably 150 in all in five small
interconnecting rooms of the “lobby,” which in any event is more like the
salons of a rambling home, all looked agreeably affluent and fashionable. Indeed, some of the ladies were downright
seductive and all of them might have walked off a fashion-show runway and into
the party. We had to ask what was going
on, whereupon an obliging, attractive lady of 40 or so said that this was a
party hosting judges of the central Roman courts, albeit perhaps a quarter of
the total number of courts in the Roman judicial district, the largest in
Italy. Whatever the quality of the
jurists’ deliberations and jurisprudential acumen, they certainly were a good-looking
bunch. I didn’t have the nerve, but as
the party was waning Dare presented herself at the open bar and came away with
a champagne cocktail. Dare carries herself
with a certain air to be sure, but this is probably the first time anyone has
taken her for a judge. After our binge of people watching of noble Romans, we
retired to our chambers.
Rome, November 15, Friday
Today was
St. Peter’s and Vatican day.
We took a
taxi to the main entrance of they Musei Vaticani and got in easily with no
advance tickets.
We did the long trek
through an unfamiliar route – I swear the Vatican administration must change
the route every two years just to confuse tourists – but soon we were in the
Raphael Stanze and gawking at Plato and Aristotle walking in great dignity
toward us and at the marvelous Madonnas.
Now they make you walk through the modern religious art section, a
tedious affair except for a Fontana or Matisse or so, before you can enter the
Sistine Chapel.
It was probably 11 a.m.
and the Chapel was still full of people but not crushingly so as in other
seasons.
Of course the art is uplifting,
and there is no question that the cleaning of several years ago, controversial
at the time, was extremely helpful to visitors.
Adam, the prophets and the sybils retain their majesty.
We stopped
along the long walk around the exterior walls of the Vatican City for a quick
lunch. It was raining lightly. St. Peter’s Square was not crowded. Most visitors were huddled under the Bernini
portico. We soon learned that St.
Peter’s would be closed until 3 p.m. and would then open for the consecration
of the new bishop of the surrounding diocese.
We hung around in the rain and finally saw lines forming for entrance
into the basilica.
Dare feigned
disorientation, something she does with great facility, and we were able to
join the line magically at about the 10 percent from the entrance point. We got in after a long bout of standing, only
to learn that the Michelangelo Pieta was closed off to visitors. Joining the crowd forming around the main nave, we stood for another tiring
half hour or so waiting for the service to begin. I couldn’t stand the wait, or rather my feet
couldn’t, and so we bailed before the start.
Only later did we learn to our shock and dismay that we had missed an
opportunity to stand within 60 feet or so from where Pope Francis, who a few
minutes later officiated at the consecration, would walk to the Baldacchino. This was
the first of the many things we were to commit or suffer during this trip. We were heartbroken.
We took a
cab back to the Adriano. The evening was
routine, with dinner at a pizzeria called Ciro & Ciro between the Adriano
and the Pantheon.
Rome, November 16, 2013, Saturday
Another
grand and warm morning in Rome.
Immediately as we left the Adriano my mind wandered and, almost
impossibly, we lost the street heading down to the Pantheon and Tazza d’Oro and
found ourselves walking east the few hundred yards to the Corso. We turned right and then left, or east, on to
a wide lane that leads to the Fountain of Trevi. That immediately recalled a fiasco we endured
during an April week ten years ago when we thought it would be
convenient to rent an apartment across the street from the Fountain, only to
find that hundreds of raucous students remained in the Piazza under our windows
until two or three a.m. every evening.
Once at the fountain I went into my Russ Tamblyn/Frank Sinatra act from
the movie and insisted that a skeptical Dare do the same, namely, inch our way
through the mob to the edge of the water and throw a coin into the fountain
over our shoulders. Reassured, we took a
long look at the international tourist horde and proceeded body by body to a
white and chrome, adequate espresso bar for our morning coffee.
After
coffee we climbed the Quirinal to the south and stopped at the top of the hill
at the Palace to view the smartly clad guards and a few inevitable celebrities
leaving in limousines and then crossed the street to one of my five favorite
churches, Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale by Bernini.
This is the high baroque church with the greenish and white interior,
the nave of which is an oval entered from the center of a long side of the
oval. Normally the interior I stunning,
but on this day all was covered by scaffolding, and the ceiling paintings were
invisible. The adjoining parks were also
closed for repairs, but on the corner, la Chiesa di San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, another
small baroque gem by Borromini, was open and intact.
We walked
through the Piazza Barberini, where I stopped at the Farmacia Internazionale to
buy shaving cream, and Dare stopped to buy an improbable Greta Garbo floppy
brimmed hat in purple, soft, faux-velvet from a street vendor. We walked to the top of the Spanish
steps. Never having had the privilege of
staying at the Hassler (all these names are now hyphenated with the names of
the remote hotel chains that now own them, but no matter) Dare predictably took
the opportunity to pose in her new felt hat.
Descending
the steps we were pleased to find very few tourists scattered about but
dismayed to find a large, oval shaped, walled area at the base of the steps
covered with illustrations of the wonders of Samsung products. We walked about the Piazza de Spagna and
then back to the Corso along the wondrous Via Condotti and the international
throngs of chic shoppers enjoying the window displays.
Civitavecchia and the time to board the Nautica was nearing. We settled our bill, and the desk summoned a
cab that took us through the twisting streets for about half an hour to the
Mussolini era Stazione Termini. Several
days later a store keeper near the hotel told us that this station had become a
“favella,” but we didn’t have an inkling of that until the cab had to fight its
way through triple-stacked cars to find a spot to let us off. If you’ve ever tried to emerge from a cab at
the 7th Avenue entrance to Penn Station, remember that feeling and
double it.
Once inside
we found ourselves in a jammed rabbit warren, not even a ticket counter or
travel center in sight. I left Dare with
the bags and wandered about seventy feet to a newsstand to ask where I could
buy tickets to Civitavecchia, where the Nautica had presumably docked that
morning. The biglietteria, usually lit
up with glaring neon, was nowhere to be found, so I asked at a nearby
newsstand. The guy there said he could
sell me the tickets for five euro each.
I blinked and gave him the slyest look I could muster to let him know
that I was well versed in the wiles of the Italians, but he said, “No,
really.” So I handed over the five-euro
note and came away with two official slips of green faux-engraved paper. Now to find the binario (track) from whence
the promised train would leave. The
universally used big, miniscule font, yellow timetable on the wall said the
train for Civitavecchia would leave at 3:15 from Track 27, but the overhead
electronic standard said no track was assigned.
We waited until 15 minutes before train time to see Track 27 confirmed
and shot off like thunderbolts.
What we didn’t know was that Track
27 was about a quarter of a mile away and required an obscure elevator ride for
one floor down to get there. Worse,
about 120 pounds of baggage had to be dragged at an uphill angle on ramps a
good part of the way, and Dare was pulling about 70 pounds’ worth. About four minutes from departure time, as we
were huffing and puffing, a stalwart Libyan-looking youth came to our rescue
and grabbed Dare’s heaviest bag to assist us.
Foolishly, I took him to be a passenger.
He forged ahead with us, breathless in pursuit, and there was the train,
still waiting. It dawned on me, albeit
tardily, that it was strange that our new helper was passing the first open
doors to proceed another 150 yards to another door of the train where no one
was waiting. Then began a minuet between
our new friend and Dare when they were caught between closing doors between two
cars. At last we stowed our luggage. I tipped the young man 10 euros for his kind
help, and he dashed off. Two minutes
later Dare looked down to see that her purse was gone (wallet, passport and
iPhone). The young man had reached into
the open bag Dare was carrying and swiped her iPad mini as well. Needless to saw, the shroud of gloom, doom
and foolishness descended on both of us.
We proceeded on the train to
Civitaveccia. I e-mailed George asking
him to get on the web to cancel Dare’s iPhone and the American Express from
Citibank. I called the Bank of America
emergency line, probably at a cost of $25 or so given the security rigamarole
required, and after the third hold-the-line referral, managed to cancel Dare’s
ATM card. I then had to call Citibank
with similar effect to cancel the American Express card. My Frankfurt banker would not answer her
cell phone, so the Mastercard could not be canceled. Finally, we arrived at the station and
hailed a cab that took us to the Nautica.
We boarded the ship to the most glad-handed
yet sincere greetings imaginable from our new best friend, Carlos Cortez, the
ship’s concierge, and were about to be shown to our stateroom when the news
came that we would have to leave the ship.
An improbably tanned and long-legged lady in a white officer’s uniform
arrived to announce that Dare would not be allowed to leave Italy without a
valid passport. Crestfallen, we
disembarked as instructed and caught a ride on the ship’s shuttle bus to what
we were told would be a spot three hundred yards from the station. It turned out to be a thousand yards and
entailed considerable dragging of our bags over rough pavement in irritated,
sullen and downcast mode. It was a long
train ride back to the Stazione Termine, an interminable trek from Track 27 to
the exit and then a confrontation with surly taxi drivers, all in the midst of
the maelstrom of bodies in and outside the station, who demanded 40 euros for
what had earlier in the day been a fifteen euro ride from the Adriano to the
station. We settled for 30 and were back
at the hotel, which generously gave us a spacious, modern room at an excellent
rate.
Then came the fun.
Certain that we needed a police report (as
had been the case in Naples 22 years ago) to obtain a new passport, we twisted
and turned through the dark lanes of the Old City until we found the office of
the Carabonieri which fortuitously happened to be in the Piazza San Lorenzo.
The young but tired desk sergeant dutifully
gave us the form, later accepted it and returned it with the official
seals.
Hustling down the long staircase
from the policeman’s office we found an excellent outdoor restaurant in the
piazza, Caffe’ Vitti, and treated ourselves to an outstanding seafood
risotto.
Finally, the day ended as well
as it had begun.
Rome, November 17, 2013, Sunday
The day dawned bright and sunny, and
we put the preceding day’s misfortunes behind us rather easily. To vary the routine, we decided to go for
our morning coffee to the second but co-equal temple of the coffee gods, Sant’Eustachio,
just around the corner from the Pantheon.
The crowd had already gathered.
We were served our cappuccinos dry (you can ask the barista to have
sugar mixed with the coffee during their mysterious espresso extrusion process,
but the staff frowns on letting the customer add sugar on his own to his taste,
that taste being assumed by the staff to be non-existent), and I had to ask
three times for sugar when the barista pretended not to hear me the first two
times. Dare declared that she could
taste more coffee in her drink than in a cappuccino from Tazza d’Oro. I countered that my divine revelations on the
matter indicated the contrary, but I wisely dropped the argument.
The next stop was the exterior and
then the spacious Renaissance interior courtyard of the church of Saint Ivo
Alla Sapienza. The church is part of an
old university building and features massive, almost white stone columns that
seem to float despite their mass. We
then wandered westerly to the Piazza Navona, the highlight of every visit. This time we were rewarded by the relatively
low tourist density but were set back a bit by what appears to us to have
become the routine of the square. The
stationary “art” figures and the musicians have become pervasive, and the music
acts have become noisy. The Piazza’s act
is getting old.
Turning south we crossed the Campo
di Fiore in sight of a long-time favorite restaurant of ours, La Carbonara,
which we were not able to visit on this trip.
A few steps further south and we
were standing before my favorite example of fine architecture, the Palazzo
Farnese by Michelangelo. We stared in
silence from the entrance to the piazza and we sat under the wall of the
building for about fifteen minutes.
Rounding the building, we walked perhaps two hundred yards along the
beautiful Via Giulia and then found the Ponte Mazzini to cross the Tiber over
to Trastevere.
Trastevere has its own feeling, perhaps
something to do with the width of the streets, which are slightly wider than
the streets of Old Rome just across the river.
The sun was still bright, and we didn’t mind the concentration of
tourists as we arrived in the main square.
We found a good place for lunch on a narrow lane off the square,
Ristorante la Canonica, and then paid our respects to the mosaics of the
basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.
We walked back to the river and
walked south along the bank until we could cross into the Isola Tiberina, the
scenic island in the river, where we wanted to enter one of my favorites
(they’re all my favorites), the church of San Bartolomeo all’ Isola, which has
that three foot stump of an ancient altar fashioned from an ancient column in
the front of the nave where the steps lead to the main altar. That little relic blows me away every
time. Alas, it was about two o’clock,
and the church was closed until three.
We chose not to wait.
Crossing the second bridge to the
Old City, we passed the massive Synagogue, which still requires guards at the
entrance, and moved into the main street of the ghetto at the Giggetto al
Portico d’Ottavia restaurant. The
outdoor café area of the restaurant was overflowing with well-heeled
revelers. The entire ghetto area was
jammed with jovial folks enjoying the outdoor cafes on this warm, 70-degree
afternoon. We understand that very few
Jews now live in the ghetto, but on weekends many come into the ghetto from the
surrounding suburbs to socialize and eat the classic fried artichokes.
Leaving the ghetto to the north, we
found a shop where Dare had bought a long, knitted sweater two years before,
and this time she bought another one at a ridiculously low price. It would come in in handy in the evening
when the weather would cool substantially.
We walked for an hour through new territory for us back to the Pantheon
and once again past the San’tEustachio coffee house, which at about 4:30 p.m.
had a long line of coffee addicts waiting to enter. Dare bought a new wallet at a shop near the
gelato palace just north of the Pantheon.
Dinner was once again at the Caffe’ Vitti, which we had come to like
very much.
This had been a classic Rome
walking day. We loved it.
Rome, November 18, 2013, Monday
Just as the
morning broke, it dawned on us that Dare needed a new passport or we wouldn’t
be going anywhere. The U.S. Embassy was
scheduled to open at 8:30 a.m., so it was the required cappuccinos at Tazza d’Oro
and then a taxi ride cross town to the fabled Via Veneto and the spacious and
gracious Embassy buildings. The late 19th
century buildings stand as two palazzi, the main one being the Palazzo
Margherita (1886-1890), at the first bend of the Via, just before the Hotel
Exelsior, itself an architectural marvel.
The State Department purchased the buildings in 1931, and to me they
have always been a goodly part of the center of the Roman chessboard.
We were
politely requested to navigate fairly strict security procedures before
entering the building housing the Consulate.
Dare sat for a photo portrait by one of those four euros in the slot
carnival camera machines, then went upstairs and took a number as in a bakery,
filled out her application and waited. I
left for greener pastures, namely, a walk up the Veneto for three blocks or so,
highlighted by a stop in the informal coffee bar of Downey’s, which since at
least the fifties, and no doubt well before then, has been a prestige café-restaurant
of Rome and a watering hole for celebrities.
It was before 10 a.m., and no celebrities were about – was I really
expecting Anita Ekberg to appear? – so I effected as much casual repose as it
is possible for this American to muster and, leaning on the bar and teasing my
second cappuccino of the morning, read my email on my iPhone while a few
regulars with briefcases got their morning gossip out of the way. I measured personal success by the fact that
I was accepted as part of the furniture.
I walked
back to the Embassy, and some minutes after eleven Dare triumphantly burst on
to the sidewalk, new passport in hand.
In another in a string of poor decisions so far on this trip, we
concluded that this would be the morning to visit the Borghese Gallery. We had a lovely walk through the park, but
found the Gallery to be closed. Of
course. It was Monday, and why hadn’t we
thought of that? We hopped on to one of
those small buses that circle the city and got back to the Via Veneto. The next decision was a bit more on the
mark. We decided it was too far to walk,
so we took a cab to Santa Maria Maggiore.
The church never disappoints, although by then a cloud cover made it
rather difficult to view the mosaics. We
decided to pass on the Bernini staircase, since that was a separate admission,
and walked across the street to a lunch spot.
For the
third consecutive visit to Rome we arrived at the praiseworthy church of Santa
Pudenziana, couple of blocks downhill from Santa Maria Maggiore, only to find it
closed.
Nothing to do but turn back to
the busy Via Cavour and headdownhill toward the Forum to the church of San Pietro in
Vincolo (requires stair-climbing to get up there) to see the great Michelangelo
sculpture of Moses. The face of the
statue has his head turned at 90 degrees, his magnificent eyes hooded and
empty, as though Moses can see the Promised Land before he has arrived
there. How Michelangelo attained that
look in Moses’ eyes in marble has to be one of the mysteries for the ages. Alas, our losing streak continued because we
arrived a full hour before the church was to open to the public at three p.m.
So. After
absorbing this setback in our by now sorry record of careless touring, by this
time having achieved virtual Tom and Daisy status, we continued to walk
downhill toward the Victor Emmanuel Monument but took a left which took us to
another heart-in-your-mouth series of crosswalks across the Via Fori Imperiale
to the area between the end of the Forum and the Coliseum, which, by the way, appears
to be undergoing extensive renovation.
We walked among the many tourists and vendors to the Arch of
Constantine, like most of the world’s serious monuments now closed off to the
public. Then commenced a vey long walk
south to the edge of the Terme de Caracalla and then took a sharp turn to the
northwest. That allowed us to discover –
we had never done this before – just how large the Circus Maximus is.
As we hit the main drag we
discovered that we were a few yards from Santa Maria in Cosmedin, site of the
huge gorgon, or whatever he or she is, with the huge, forbidding mouth that Gregory Peck stuck his
hand into while Audrey Hepburn delicately gasped in horror in the timeless
“Vacanza Romana.” Fat chance of
repeating that ritual, which my son George and I had last accomplished in 2003
(I have a miniature gorgon head on my bathroom countertop), because about 150
Japanese students were in line to photograph themselves risking their delicate
hands in what the signs proclaimed to be “the mouth of danger.”
The church was eminently
unpopulated, however, so we were able to ooh and ah at the terrazzo floor and
the 600 A.D. altar on the level below.
Then up the main drag, the Via del Teatro di Marcello, where we decided
to visit an exhibition of the archaeological marvels of Saudi Arabia in an
exhibition space under the Victor Emmanuel Monument that has an entrance at
street level. As we were later to
confirm in Oman, the Arabs are now hiring western archaeologists and art
exhibitors to polish up the image of their pre-historical sites. The exhibition was excellent and highly
informative in any event.
After that it remained to dodge the
traffic in the Piazza Venezia and walk the mile or so back to the Adriano with
a stop along the busy Corso for Dare to buy some lipstick. It was time to contact Kaz in Istanbul and
figure out how we were going to get out of Rome to where we could finally join
the Nautica for our cruise. We had
telephoned Kaz earlier that morning from the Borghese Gardens, and now we
learned that he had come through splendidly. He had found a cheap flight to Izmir via
Istanbul, and from there we could proceed to Kusadasi and begin our cruise.
At last we could enjoy dinner in our favorite
Piazza San Lorenzo.
After dinner there was time for a last stroll
along the Via Condotti. Inevitably that
meant a stop at the landmark coffee house, the Caffe’ Greco, within a stone’s
throw across the Piazza di Spagna from the bottom of the Spanish steps. This is the second oldest café in Italy,
established in 1760 and second oldest only to the Caffe’ Florian we had visited
in Venice, which was established in 1720.
Historic
figures who took their coffee and pastries in this almost mythical venue
included Stendhal, Goethe, Mariano Fortuny, Byron, Franz
Liszt, Keats, Henrik
Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, Felix
Mendelssohn, Wagner, Carlo Levi and, reputedly, Casanova.
C’est moi at the Caffe’ above. We arrived late, long after most of the day’s
clientele had left for dinner, and closed the place down with extravagant
orders of blueberry tart and rich hot chocolate. Before leaving I scoured the walls of the six
or seven rooms that make up the café looking among the pictures and engravings
of café regulars for the English Romantics who lived in the area in the early
1800’s, but all I could find were pictures of bearded poets from the later 19th
century who must have been prominent Italian literati in their time but, alas,
were unknown to me. If there had ever
been pictures of Byron and Keats on the walls, they were long since taken
down. Like the Florian, the Caffe’ Greco
is a fine spot for taking your tea while letting your imagination roam and, at
the same time, gazing with wonder at the fine ladies who are shopping on the
Via Condotti.
Rome, Istanbul, Izmir, Kusadasi, November 19, 2013,
Tuesday
It was our
last morning in Rome, and it was showering on and off. We decided to pass on a last hurrah at the
Tazza d’Oro and headed instead east to the Corso and then turned north for the
Piazza del Popolo, one of the great squares or open plazas of Rome. We dodged pedestrians and cars, opening and
closing our flimsy umbrellas, until we arrived at the opening of the Piazza and
the two churches flanking the entrance, Santa Maria dei Miracoli and
Santa Maria in Montesanto, one of which we were convinced on the basis of
faltering memory harbored one or two of the greatest Caravaggios in the
city. Only Santa Maria in Montesanto was
open (our luck was still bad) and, while handsomely decorated, featured no
Caravaggio. Of course not. The paintings are in the nearby Basilica Parrocchiale S. Maria del Popolo, meaning our travels by
guess, by golly and Kentucky windage and our luck were not improving. There was nothing to be done in the drizzle
but duck under the ample awnings of the Canova Café at last for the morning’s
cappuccinos. Even with the rain, the gray
skies and very few people walking about, our rest in this magnificent open
space was most pleasant.
The next task was to find the Custo Barcelona store,
which was on the way back to the hotel, because Dare had misplaced a “tax free”
certificate, and we hoped that the store could issue a new one. No luck, as Custo was closed, but as we
walked away a downpour erupted, finding both of us with very urgent post-coffee
needs and nowhere to go. Further search
would have meant a soaking, but just in time a café appeared for Dare and a
space between two parked cars with no one looking on presented itself to
me. The rain stopped, and we enjoyed our
last walk back to the Adriano through the Piazza San Lorenzo.
The hotel checkout and cab ride out to Fiumicino were
thankfully routine. We located the
Pegasus Airlines check-in counter in the farthest margin of the airport
counters and were pleased to find the counter and the airline agents to be uncluttered
and crisply efficient. We were also
pleased to note that a hushed conversation in Italian among the agents, which
was most certainly about our bulging and overweight bags, produced no demand
for additional payment. We had a quick
lunch at a typical airport snack bar. We
were soon in the air eastbound to the magic destination of Istanbul. Three hours or so later we landed at the
Sabiha Gokcen Airport on the Asian side (not the main Ataturk airport on the
European side - this one is named after the first female fighter pilot of the
Turkish Air Force) with a bit over an hour to spare before our connecting
flight was scheduled to leave for Izmir, where the friendly limo that Kaz had
arranged was to be waiting. This may be
an auxiliary airport, but it is huge. At
that point, the fun began. Blood
pressure and pulse rates were to remain well above normal for the next hour and
a half.
Obstacle one to a calm transfer was Immigration. Almost 200 passengers were in line for
admittance into Turkey. It was hard
somehow to adjust to the fact that we were entering Turkey at that point and
then transferring to a domestic Pegasus flight.
Only two or three immigration officers were on duty, and by the time
more were added more than a half hour had passed. We somehow staggered to the vicinity of
domestic gates, with no instructions from the local employees other than
pointing ahead and then indicating a right turn to be had. We thought we had a hundred yards to go but
it proved to be more than 500 yards. We
passed through security and arrived breathlessly at the gate only to find that
the Izmir flight had left five minutes ago and that the gate attendants were
supremely unconcerned with our situation.
Some soul then appeared through the haze of our panic and told us that
we would have to reverse our steps and return through the maze to the check-in
counters and somehow find the Pegasus ticket sales counter to get new
tickets. That meant stops at three more
counters, standing in line for six minutes (that seemed like 30), encountering
blank, uncomprehending looks as we tried to explain that we desperately needed
to get on to a later flight. Finally at
the third stop an angel of a lady ticket agent simply wrote out new tickets for
the next flight leaving in about 45 minutes – without any extra charges. We took the long hike back to the gate area –
we struggled to remember the way - rested a bit at the gate and finally took
off for the one hour fight south to Izmir.
The last
time I had been in the Izmir airport was June of 1955, when Izmir was barely
larger than a combination minor port and fishing village, and no one in the
airport administration thought it important to announce flights that were about
to leave. I know, because a young lady and
I barely made a flight to Athens on a DC-4 that afternoon with 90 seconds to
spare, after intuiting that the boarding was nearly finished and we had
scampered across the tarmac. The airport
today is one of those behemoths, designed to impress passengers of the
importance of the host city by making them walk over marble and granite for
half a mile to the baggage carousels.
And then it dawned on us! Our
baggage had arrived on an earlier flight.
Could we possibly find our bags?
Up went our heart-rates again, particularly when we found that the
baggage carousels where our bags logically would have been unloaded were now in
a closed-off area. Miraculously, a
baggage agent understood the situation and let us in to the carousel that had
been used for the flight we should have been on an hour before. There to our amazement were our bloated and
somewhat shabby bags, still circling on the rotating carousel in an enormous baggage
claim room. We grabbed our bags and made
a dash for an exit that we prayed led to an exit from the terminal. There within a hundred feet, to our amazed
and grateful hearts, stood our driver, stolid and firm Turk that he was, still
dutifully holding up a placard with our name on it.
We
had another distance to drag the bags into a very large parking structure, but
soon we were on the road south in a roomy, yellow, four-wheeled vehicle,
sometimes on the shore of the Aegean Sea and sometimes inland, although it was
nearly midnight and there was almost no visibility. In an hour we saw the lights of Kusadasi from
the cliffs above. The driver found our
improbably luxurious resort hotel, the Korumar, and deposited us with the
promise that he would return at 8:30 the next morning and take us to our
ship. We had almost forgotten that we
were undergoing all of this for the purpose of finally commencing our cruise.
We
settled in our room, took a brief look from our balcony at the lights of the
now-sprawling large port city below, nibbled at a couple of stale sandwiches
left on a silver tray and collapsed for a night’s sleep. We had come a long way in a day from our first
cappuccino in far away Rome.
