Tag Archives: art

Rome: Pope Days Edition

Rome was hot and sunny. We have baked under the sun, trod through her streets, and walked underground beneath her buildings. We have watched many of her sunsets, but only one of her sunrises (it is usually too early for that). This was certainly the most anticipated city, but even a whole eight nights, the longest we’re staying in any one city, wasn’t enough to see everything we wanted to see. To sum up our Rome trip, we alternated Pope Days, which require a bit more modest clothing with long pants and t-shirts or shoulder-covering shirts, with Ancient Days, which generally require more sunscreen and hats since we’re out there walking from “hot ruin to hot ruin”. Steve was also slightly more enthusiastic about Pope Days, his bailiwick being more the history of early Christianity, and I of course wanted to come to Rome mainly to see the classics sites from 2,500 or so years ago, but we have a good overlap of interest in those respective topics.

I’ll get right to our favorite, the Vatican Scavi tour, which is actually a nice combination of our two interests. I think few people know that under the world-famous St. Peter’s Basilica (level one) is a church originally dedicated by Constantine in the 300s AD, and that church itself (level two) was raised above St. Peter’s tomb, which is among a hillside of Roman mausoleums (level three). This was certainly all news to me, but we learned about it during a 90-minute tour that was probably the best bang for buck we’ve spent on the trip.

The visit itself was a re-do for Steve from the last time he was in Rome, which was roughly 15 years ago. The process has not really changed, either. We wrote an email with our availability, and were sent a few dates in response. Then we had to follow another link and pay so that we would be able to go. Days were selling out even months ago! So we were really glad this was all planned in April and May. We had a little trouble figuring out where to go, but after some confusion, we followed the correct police checkpoint on the left side of St. Peter’s Basilica and presented our credentials to the Swiss Guard. The Swiss Guard, by the way, had some fabulous summer costumes on – floofy velvet hats, yellow, red, and blue ribboned pants and shirts, not to mention a very sharp pike in hand. We almost wanted a picture with one!

Inside the Scavi, we and thirteen other guests were greeted by an effusive lady named Daniela who gave us very long explanations of everything as well as some very dry jokes. After some introductions about the history of the building, we directly descended from the level just under St. Peter’s Basilica to the underground scavi. Here, it was damp, cool, and musty. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves walking through what was obviously some narrow paths beside small cottages that were Roman mausoleums. Entire families were buried there, and clear marble inscriptions said that they were for particular families, children, their freedmen and freedwomen as well. We had to duck to pass the doorways in some to look at the mosaics or the wall niches inside which held room for urns of ashes and bone. Outside, we could clearly see some beautiful fresco decorations on the wall, and one that looked like a delicate bird held my attention for a full five minutes. What’s amazing to me is that nobody knew anything about these mausoleums until after World War II. They were only initially excavated in the 1940s to locate the exact remains of St. Peter, and it took a long time to figure out which bones were his, exactly. It turns out that there was a wall built on top of the marble box that was his grave, initially constructed as a part of the wall for the church dedicated by Constantine in the 300s AD. The box itself was empty, but the wall had a cavity which contained a human skeleton, which the church now believes to be the remains of St. Peter.

When the tour ended, we were inside St. Peter’s Basilica proper, which we then walked into. First, we saw the Vatican Grottoes, which is on the second level. We saw plenty of sarcophagi of former popes, which varied from the very Baroque and flowery bronze and gold cover to very worn marble effigies which looked simple and austere. Then we emerged to the upper level,  into the church itself. St. Peter’s is vast. We have seen plenty of churches, and most of them could fit inside St. Peter’s Basilica. There were many statues, especially of marble carved to resemble fabric, like an angel or a saint with flowing robes carved of red marble. Around the frieze just under the ceiling, the immortal words of Jesus to St. Peter were carved: “Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam,” meaning “You are Peter, and on this stone (which is what Peter means) I will build my church.” There were also areas roped off for worshippers rather than idle tourists like ourselves. I even saw several confessional booths which were labeled with the different languages to which they catered – you could make your confession to a priest at St. Peter’s in English, Italian, French, and more. It’s neat things like that that make you appreciate being in a place of such international importance.

The other main draw was the Vatican Museums, which was the first thing we saw in Rome on our first full day here. It was a five-hour haul through these museums, the most impressive and large but also exhausting museum that we saw on our entire trip. Steve happened upon the right tickets online, so we jumped on it, and hustled off to the Vatican, evading touts and ticket scalpers all along the perimeter of Vatican City itself. Inside, the museums were an amazing array of everything that every pope has ever commissioned, acquired, or received as a present from various dignitaries and artists throughout the centuries. There were ancient statues like the original of Laocoön and His Sons, which you can tell is the original, because the hands of the children are lost. There are entire rooms of red and black Etruscan pottery from the 400s and 500s BC, amazing in their exquisite detail, of mythological figures or just merrymakers. It would probably take a lifetime to even just walk through every single room and look at each thing that was made more than two thousand years before you were born. One of my favorites was the Gallery of Maps, which was a very long room with exquisite maps painted on the walls of various parts in Italy, in gold and blue. The Vatican Museums was arranged in one long guided route which went one direction and ended up in the Sistine Chapel, and for most of the time, we were swept along by a tide of international tourists. Families from every country on earth it seemed like fanned themselves and chattered to each other or silently followed a tour guide with an upheld flag, listening to the guide through their Bluetooth headphones in different languages. We stepped out of that river of humanity several times to closely examine maps of Sicily or of ancient ports like Brundisium and Ostia.

One of the largest crowds was in the rooms of frescos by Raphael, including the famous School of Athens. It depicts many philosophers known to the Renaissance all arrayed in a marble courtyard, at its center Plato with one finger pointed at the sky and Aristotle with his hand facing down, five fingers splayed. I know the painting well, since I completed a 1,000 piece puzzle of the painting several years ago (not the conventional way of getting to know a piece of art, I know). In person, it’s very satisfying, being the entire width and height of a wall. It also depicts many other philosophers including Diogenes, Epicurus, Pythagoras, and more. I enjoyed that almost more than the final room that most people come to the Vatican to see: the Sistine Chapel. With its immense ceiling by Michaelangelo and surrounding frescos, the Sistine Chapel is more often known as an art gallery, but the truth is that it’s first and foremost a chapel for the Pope. In the Vatican, this is also the place that the cardinals gather to select the pope. However, most days, it is filled with hundreds of tourists (being a rather large room), who are all ushered to the center of the room so as not to impede traffic around the edges of the room. Everyone is gazing at the ceiling, trying to make sense of paintings besides the obvious one that everyone knows (Adam limply brushing the finger of God as an old man). And there’s an amazing amount to see. Possibly more because you’re not actually allowed to take photos in the Chapel. Every five minutes, there’s some guard yelling “No photo!” at some poor lady, which kind of makes it difficult to enjoy the sacred space, but anyway, some people get selfies in anyway. Either way, I appreciate the chance to just look at things. All around the chapel are larger frescos, and the frescos that run lengthwise depict the corresponding events in the lives of Jesus and Moses. There are also paintings of Old Testament prophets like Ezekiel next to paintings of the Delphic Sybil and other Sybils who are also regarded as having predicted the coming of Jesus. All in all, it’s quite a dizzying room, and you can only hold your neck at an angle for so long. At the end of an entire afternoon filled with dazzling art and beautiful examples, it’s in fact difficult not to fall asleep on your feet.

Of course, we enjoyed our time seeing these glittering examples of antiquity and the Renaissance, but it’s a word of warning to the wise: ration your time in museums, and give yourself plenty of time to recover just by sitting around and enjoying the gorgeous light and people-watching in this city. When it comes to museums, there is more than enough to keep you occupied for a whole day, but you only have so much attention and time, so keep your eye on the time.

More to come: Ancient Days in Rome and all the amazing food we ate!

Florence: Not-So-Famous Sights Edition

When we began to plan our trip, Steve spent about four hours browsing the Internet (especially sites like Atlas Obscura) and unearthing a wealth of strange museums and odd gift shops in Florence. We didn’t even get to all of them, leaving behind things like the museum full of medieval armor and fully-dressed warhorse figurines (the legacy of another Medici heir who had more money than he knew what to do with), but we saw a tantalizing few which showcases the history and culture of Florence in a different way. I’m glad to report we enjoyed pretty much all of them!

First off the bat was the Museo Galileo, our first stop in Florence. It sits on a building adjoining the Galleria delgi Uffizi. Once you get past the crowds in line to see that august museum, you find only a few people lingering in the entrance hall of the Museo Galileo, which costs 10 euro to see. This used to be named the Museum of History of Science, but deciding to abandon such a prosaic name, the museum chose to double-down on its collection of actual instruments by Galileo. Like most museums in Florence, it is another Medici legacy, with hundreds of instruments and scientific tools over hundreds of years. Through those tools like astrolabes, quadrants, and distillers, you can clearly trace the development of the disciplines of astronomy, navigation, military arts, chemistry, and more. We saw clever sundials made of thread instead of a wedge, allowing it to be closed like a pocket mirror. The biggest piece in there was a model of the solar system (constructed according to the Aristotelian model of the universe, with Earth at its center). It was gilded all over, with little clever touches such as the face of God painted under the very top of the dome. The entire thing was at least two meters tall. The actual collection of instruments of Galileo included three of his actual telescopes, which did look very old and leathery. Through them, he made discoveries like the fact that Jupiter was surrounded by its own moons (which he called “Asterae Mediciae” or Medici Stars after his patrons), a contrary claim that shook the very foundations of the Aristotelian model. After all, everything was supposed to revolve around the earth. We also saw an interesting scientific paradox machine, which showed that a cylinder does not roll down a slope if there is no friction (I really learned something there), and curiosity machines that demonstrate the effects of static electricity. These were the ways that the European middle class began to explore an interest in the popular science of the day, like electricity and physics. The Museo Galileo probably had the most well-developed English captions and guides of the lesser-known museums we were visiting, but it lacked explanation when it came to the operation and use of these instruments. For example, the thing that I understood best in that museum was a golden protractor, like the kind used in math class. When it came to how these instruments were used to determine the time of day, year, and even location on earth (especially longitude), it would have been useful to have diagrams or examples with simple calculations. In that, it was less of a science museum and more of an art museum, because the scientific instruments of the time were mostly for institutions and upper-class households, who used them to showcase their own learning and leisure through precious metals and decoration.

The Museo Galilieo is partnered with La Specola, and we got reduced admission to the latter museum a few days later, because both are among the natural history museums of Florence. While Museo Galileo focuses more on the history of science that pertains to physics, La Specola is about specimens and models that focus on biology. The crown jewel of their collection is a set of anatomical waxworks, probably hundreds (maybe even a thousand), which were produced between the 1700s and 1900s. They are incredibly life-like, and were created by wax-modelers in conjunction with doctors and medical personnel of the nearby universities. These were used for medical students to understand the inner workings of the human body, because otherwise, the only other way was to see a live dissection of a cadaver. They range from rather simple waxworks like that of a shoulder or arm with a few muscles attached to entire bodies where the circulatory or lymphatic systems are displayed in all their glory. We paid an extra 3 euro each to take the guided tour, which is the only way that one can see these waxworks. They are after all, so fragile and in need of preservation that you’re not allowed to even touch the glass and wood cases that these are enclosed in. Our guide spoke English with an extraordinarily thick Italian accent, but fortunately, she spoke slowly for our purposes. She showed us that the wax modelers began by creating a clay model of a heart or bone, and used that to create a plaster mold, which they filled with the wax of the color and consistency they needed. Then we moved on to the actual rooms, five or six in all, which were arranged by the systems they showed (circulatory, digestive, lymphatic, nervous, etc.). Each waxwork also had a correspondingly detailed picture which hung on the walls above them, which the wax-modelers also used to help them create the work. The strangest and most interesting them about them is that they look very vibrant and alive, like real people whose muscles and organs are on display. Body Worlds before there were Body Worlds, basically. And they are arranged in various poses, very much like the marble statues that we saw in the art museums. Several have a hand loosely held in front of them, as though they were about to start speaking. All of them have real human hair. One model of a woman has luxurious curls and even a string of pearls around her neck. One model showcasing human muscles is depicted stretched out on his belly and his head turned to the side, one arm flung-out as though sleeping. These wax-modelers were truly artists of their time, who saw no contradiction or even separation between the sciences and the arts. They created beautiful, lively, unsettling works that are scientifically accurate but not sterile. I loved the chance to see this different approach that was much more prevalent before the technological revolution.

Finally, the religious: we were recommended by a friend to visit the Abbey of San Miniato al Monte, high on the south side of the Arno. We went for the views, but also for the services. San Miniato is an active Olivetian Benedictine abbey, and holds masses on weekdays and Sundays in both Italian and Latin with Gregorian chant. Behind the abbey is also the Cimitero della Porte Sante, which is a quiet and lovely place to be laid to rest. To our surprise, the service was conducted with only three brothers – two white-robed brothers and one abbot who wore a gold vest over his white robes. All three sang beautifully, chanting and singing the Latin mass. Predictably, I was a few beats behind everyone else as to when to stand, when to sit down, when to join in and say, “Et cum tuum spiritum” (“and with your spirit,” in English!). There was actually about twenty to thirty people there, some tourists like us who had come to see the service, but some who lived nearby, certainly. After the early evening mass, we also saw the beginning of Vespers, which featured even more brothers. When we left, we purchased a candle and also some delicious gelato made by the abbey. The view was even more spectacular when we left near sunset. From this perspective on the hill, nearly as high as the Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, we were able to see the entire city of Florence, spread out. Through the center of the city flows the Arno, crossed in several parts, by bridges new and at least one old (the Ponte Vecchio). Most were destroyed in World War II, but the Ponte Vecchio was preserved. It is so old that it has many stores and buildings constructed on the bridge. To our right was the Duomo, and to our left were smaller churches. Everything was in a golden haze at sunset.

For our last day in Florence, we did some gift shopping. First, we made a beeline for Il Papiro, a handmade paper store. Italy is full of these types of boutiques, selling hand-bound leather books and journals, stationery, sealing wax, stamps, and the list goes on. We were welcomed by an older paper-maker in the back who demonstrated to us the art of making marbled paper. It was a beautiful demonstration: he started by lightly scattering drops of acrylic and oil paints on a gel surface, then swirled and dipped various tools to shape the paints into different patterns, and finally slowly settling a piece of paper on the entire surface. What was astonishing was how the paint was instantly sucked onto the paper, with almost none left behind on the gel. The laborious part was apparently the preparation of the paints, with the right colors, and different proportions of solvents like turpentine and distilled water. We went away with several purchases of the marbled paper products and with a strong appreciation of the art and patience it takes to make this unique product.

For our second stop, we walked nearly to the main train station in Florence. The Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella has a very long history. Since the 1200s, the Dominican monks who established Santa Maria Novella grew herbs and plants for medicinal purposes. They even produced rose water which was supposed to purify, and was in hot demand to ward off the Black Death. Catherine de Medici commissioned them to make her a perfume before she left Florence for Rome, and you can still buy the original formula, which is now called Acqua de Santa Maria Novella. Just walking into the pharmacy is an experience – inside, the air is thickly perfumed with every single scent you can think of. You can buy soaps of excellent quality, perfumes made from scratch, scented soaps or papers, lotions, and much more. The entire pharmacy is also housed in a space that looks very much like all the other museums in Florence – originally, it was most likely a palazzo that is still sumptuously decorated with gold molding near the ceilings.

Overall, Florence was just a perfectly lovely time. We had such great places to visit, and stayed in our favorite Airbnb which was well-located and full of amenities. I wish we hadn’t had to spend almost 100 euros on tickets to these sorts of locations, but one does pay to support the preservation of art and history. Onto Rome!

Florence: Famous Sights Edition

There are some things you feel obliged to see in Florence, as in any world famous city. And being that it’s Florence, which has an absurdly high density of museums per square meter, there are a lot of things you feel you are obliged to see. We made time in our schedule for just a handful, and some of them were very highly rated, while some were slightly more lower rated on the list. Let’s start with the stars:

Galleria delgi Uffizi is one of the most famous museums in the world, and it took us nearly five full hours to complete from beginning to end. In the last few rooms, we were just asleep on our feet! The museum mostly has artwork and icons (anytime between the 1200s to the 1800s) and sculptures, mostly copies from the Renaissance period, of original Greek and Roman sculptures. It won major points for having very lovely paintings like the ones that have made Botticelli famous: Birth of Venus and Spring. Those live up to the reputation, being very large and fairly vibrant in person. There was also an astonishing amount of Caravaggio paintings. We saw the Bacchus which Steve enjoyed as well as the Medusa shield that is so often depicted in textbooks.

There were countless religious paintings, giving Steve ample time to let me know about each variety of religious painting. One of the most popular scenes is the Annunciation, where the archangel Michael appears to the Virgin to announce that she is to bear the Son of God, and there’s usually a depiction of the Holy Spirit flying to her in the shape of a white dove (sometimes carried on gold beams); there was actually one novel one where a pair of hands (the hands of God the Father) descends from Heaven to release the dove. Another popular scene is the Deposition, where Jesus is taken down from the cross after his crucifixion. He is usually surrounded by the Virgin Mary and Saint Mary Magdalene, the latter of whom can be recognized by her very long hair as well as a reliquary which she is holding where they collected the blood of Christ as he was wounded on the cross. There was just also an endless number of Madonnas with an Infant Jesus, done in the tonde style which is a round canvas and frame. Those were very common because many middle-class folks would want those for their houses or places of business, so we have a lot that have been passed down, many of them by famous artists.

One of the things that woke me up near the end was seeing Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes. I saw it when we rounded the corner to one of the last rooms, and far from being horrified by all the arterial blood spurting out of Holofernes’s head, I exclaimed, “Fantastic!” which caused Steve to burst into laughter. But really, it’s an exceptional painting that is very large, very vivid, and fierce. Judith’s face resembles that of Gentileschi herself, and Holofernes’s face resembles that of Agostino Tazzi, a former mentor who was convicted of raping her. While many have depicted the scene, most artists draw the Biblical heroine with the head in a basket and a clean sword, but this one is drawn in a very naturalist style and captures her mid-action.

We saw the Galleria dell’Accademia on our second day in Florence. It’s a much smaller gallery than the Uffizi, and only took us about two and a half hours to make it through. It’s remarkable for several huge statues. The first is the one and only Michelangelo’s David. It has its own space at the junction of a T-shaped exhibition hall, lit by a circular skylight above. It is a remarkable statue that is larger than you would think. As Steve quipped, “If that’s how tall David is, you gotta wonder about Goliath.” The statue is well over 5 meters tall, and the nonchalant pose with the curly, tousled hair that David affects is very much at odds with his gaze. If you position yourself to look directly into his eyes, you see a direct, even fierce resolve. All the muscles, the veins in his arms and fingers, are so well-articulated and delicate that it is possible to imagine he’s going to breathe or move. When you’ve seen images of the David as much as most people have, you think that all sculpture is going to be like that, but it’s an utterly original, detailed, and striking sculpture of immense size. Michelangelo well-deserves his reputation.

The hall leading up to the David is a wonderful contrast. It houses five other statues by Michelangelo, collectively called the Prisoners. They were meant for a papal tomb, but were not finished before Michelangelo passed away. So not only do they depict bearded and shackled prisoners, but they are roughly-rendered marble statues only partially liberated from the block of stone from which they are carved. Also remarkable was the Rape of the Sabines, which is by Giambologna, a Flemish sculptor (yeah, there’s a lot of classical art out there that uses the theme of sexual assault). It’s a group sculpture of three people carved from a single piece of marble. An older man cowers below a younger one who grasps a young woman in his arms, she herself reaching out for help. It’s a very striking scene that rewards close observation from all angles, so you can look at the detail slowly while walking around the statue, and the various limbs and the position of the bodies invite your gaze to trace an upward spiral.

There were a lot of religious icons, and walking from room to room, you can see the change that came to differentiate medieval art from the Renaissance. Whereas medieval religious art tended to depict some divine scenes, more were of simply an array of saints who were easily identifiable (St. Peter with his keys, St. John the Baptist with his robe of hair, St. Catherine with her wheel), mostly for use in churches or on altars. When it did depict the Christ, they usually used size to show importance, making the face and figure of Christ larger than those of his apostles, who were in turn larger than mortals or lesser saints. Later on, with the advent of the Renaissance, we started seeing use of perspective, for example, at the Coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven where saints and angels are recognizable but arranged in semi-circles as though in an amphitheater, with all the same sized faces. Others still gave them more naturalistic faces with recognizable wrinkles, flowing hair, and other features.

One of the last things I wanted to mention was that the Accademia had a music space, which featured several gorgeous violins and violas by Stradivarius. We even saw some now-extinct musical instruments which were very popular in its time, like the hurdy-gurdy (a pianoforte variation) and the serpent (something that looks like a very curvy bassoon). They even had several examples that gave us a good idea of how we progressed from having plucked string instruments to the invention of the piano, where hammers were used to strike the strings and then diminished. Though our visit to the Accademia was shorter, I liked being able to see everything and leave by 12 pm so that we had the afternoon to ourselves!

Also well-known are the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens, but as there’s literally historical, centuries-old art everywhere you look in Florence, and you don’t have time to see this, it’s totally fine. Both are complexes of the Medici family, which ruled Tuscany and thus Florence as Dukes for centuries. The Pitti Palace is very interesting because it features apartments of those dukes and duchesses and their family, and feels very much like walking through Versailles or something similar. There are so many incredible paintings on all the walls, many paintings in a single room grouped together on a mythological theme (i.e. “Room of Ulysses”, “Room of Hercules”), that it doesn’t look like art to be admired on its own, but just art grouped together to impress by its sheer scale. What surfaces are not covered in gold leaf are instead upholstered in deep red velvet or satin. While impressive to see and certainly awe-striking, we were pretty bored quickly because there isn’t the same amount of detail paid to the individual paintings, and also, there’s not enough time to look at everything. We also saw the Boboli Gardens beforehand. As for the gardens, though there are many lovely statues that had been arranged there for the pleasure of the Medici family, it was a very hot summer afternoon in Florence. Our favorite part of the afternoon was probably sitting on a shady hill and enjoying a nap.

Lastly, it was slightly disappointing to see Santa Maria del Fiore, which is the Florence Duomo or Cathedral. It is gorgeous on the outside, all creamy white marble, decorated with pale green marble and pink marble and other colors. It has an immense front façade with statues of pretty much all the main people in Florentine history. However, the line that we had to stand in sapped our patience and overhyped the interior. While you can buy 18 euro tickets that allow you entrance to the cathedral, the famous Dome of Brunelleschi, the crypt, the bell tower, and the baptistery, we were a bit cathedraled-out by Siena. (Not to mention that we’ll have to go see St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican next week!) So we simply stood in line for about an hour to get in for free. Being that we were able to hang out with Steve’s cousin Morgan and her husband Cameron while doing so, it wasn’t as trying as it could have been. When we finally went inside, it was a little bit off-putting to find that it was practically empty. That was thanks to the influence of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar from the late 1400s who went around Florence preaching against the decadence of the church. He succeeded in swaying many influential painters and artists of the time to paint more austerely, to depict scenes of sorrow, repentance, and remorse. He also succeeded in getting people to basically empty out their churches of “overly decadent” artwork, resulting in the largely bare church we saw in Florence. However, he did not succeed in erasing the frescoes and paintings around the cathedral, which included one painting of Dante and depicts his Divine Comedy, which is a painting I’ve definitely seen in textbooks before. The cathedral does also have a lovely dome, which is made of brick masonry, and is considered the largest masonry dome in the world. Steve and I briefly debated this, and we think that though there’s now the technology to build larger domes of masonry or of different material, the sheer world of possibilities for architecture has moved us away from things like domes which are pretty predictable even though they seemed ground-breaking for their time.

There are most definitely other worthy and commonly-known sights in Florence, but we’re happy to have seen this. Next time, I’ll introduce the lesser-known but even more entertaining sights that we were able to find!

A city on the water

When we stepped out of the Venezia Santa Lucia train station, I was floored by the view in front of us. The Grand Canal lay before us, its waters translucent green in the sun, and marble, brick, and stucco facades of buildings side by side rising above it. I don’t know how else to say it – tears literally came to my eyes because it was so beautiful, and yes, a bit unexpected. We’ve traveled to many cities, and some places, you’ve really got to dig for the sights that you expected to see, whether it’s a trek up a mountain or building, driving for an hour outside the city, or walking all the way downtown to find yourself surrounded by neon billboards. Venice doesn’t make you work for it. Everywhere, it is completely unapologetically what it is: a very, very old city that is crumbling at some corners, with waves lapping at its feet, but bright and beautiful under the Mediterranean sun. Each corner is an Instagrammable combination of colored houses, shadows on water, and gondoliers plying their gracefully curving boats up and down. In this respect, Venice does not disappoint at all.  

In other respects, Venice is very unreal, and that’s because it’s been hollowed out by tourism. When we checked in, our landlady told us this house had been owned by her parents, and that she and her sister now rent it out. She asked if we’d been here before, and Steve responded that he’d visited more than 15 years ago. She shook her head sadly, and told him it had changed very much because of the tourists. And it’s true – while we have seen villages and towns completely occupied by tourists in Grindelwald and Zermatt, Venice is the largest city I’ve seen which has very few traces of its actual inhabitants. It’s possible to hear every single language on the streets, from Russian to Chinese to French to Gujarati, not to mention the very flat American accented English, and little wonder at that: the city has about 58,000 inhabitants, but 20 million tourists come through every year. That means every single restaurant you can see has sprung up to serve the tourist trade. Every other store seems to be a compilation of tourist kitsch, selling you Venetian “masks” with feathers and checker patterns, marbled paper, leather or fake leather handbags, pashmina scarves, straw boaters (the preferred hat for men here) or white lace dresses (the preferred dress for women here), tiny “Murano glass” animal figurines, and endless nonsense along those lines.

The city is not gigantic, but it will take you some time to cross. Possibly the only pedestrian city of its size in the world, Venice is shaped like a flat oval, and the curve of the Grand Canal cuts a winding backwards-S through the oval from the northwest to the southeast. There are only a handful of bridges over the very large Grand Canal, like the Ponte Rialto, a graceful, white structure that has covered shops on top. Another one is the Ponte dell’Acaddemia, next to the Academy of Fine Arts, which is in red-hued wood. The train station sits to the northwest of the city, where the bridge to the mainland begins, and at the very southeast corner where the mouth of the Grand Canal spills into the Adriatic is the world-renowned San Marco Piazza, which is home to the Basilica of Saint Mark and the Dogal Palace of Venice. The smaller bridges are everywhere, because the smaller canals are everywhere. To get from our apartment to San Marco Piazza, we cross approximately four canals, so four little bridges which are all picturesque and provide a glimpse of a gorgeous little canal with houses, flower boxes, and reflections on the water. And yes, the obligatory gondola. The gondolieri are a proud, conservative bunch of men, whose licenses are restricted artificially by the city to around 400 or so, so that’s why each ride on the gondola is prohibitively expensive (80 euro). (Uber, here’s the market you should be disrupting!) Nonetheless, you see plenty of folks who are enjoying their time on the gondola with each other and their selfie sticks.

For our first full day, we made a trip out to the Doge’s Palace which is next to San Marco Piazza. We thought this might take about an hour, but it turns out sampling the cream of Venetian culture and political domination takes a while. The palace itself is where the doges of Venice (not related to the actual canine meme) ruled the Serene Republic for more than a thousand years (early 700 AD to 1797). One of the first fascinating things that we did was to wander through a small museum within that featured the original columns and capitals on the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica of San Marco (Saint Mark’s Cathedral). These were carved in the 1300s and 1500s and replaced in the 1800s, so on one hand it’s amazing that it’s been preserved since then, but it’s also that they are made from marble so it’s not a surprise that they’re around. The history of these capitals were also well-preserved – we learned about the artists who were commissioned to carve them, and what I loved to do was poring over the capital and the figures or the animals which were carved between the acanthus leaves to figure out what they actually were. One had the letters URSUS carved above what definitely did look like a bear, actually biting a piece of honeycomb (shaped like honeycomb and also sprinkled with large bees on top). Sometimes the words were missing, and it was hard to figure out who or what was being depicted, but we enjoyed using the combination of allusions and Latin and signs to puzzle out that original art. Between my collection of Latin vocabulary and Roman history and Steve’s knowledge of religious history and Biblical stories, it’s usually a fun game.

When we finally tore ourselves away from that museum, we entered the Doge’s Palace proper, a set path which took us up and down through various stairs and hallways and down to the dungeons. We walked up the Golden Stairway, which was gilded with incredible amounts of gold leaf but also beautiful paintings, large and small. We went between different chambers and rooms, which were normally named for the council or the group who met there. In this way, we learned about people responsible for courts in Venice, military and naval powers, foreign policy and trade, and much, much more. In many cases, we were given details about the history of the artists and the commissions which led to the artworks that we were looking at. One of the things that struck me about them is that it was as much propaganda as it was decoration. Over and over again, we saw a lot of allusions to Mars and Neptune, the gods of war and the sea, in an allusion to Venice’s power and domination over land and sea. The religiously themed paintings often featured past doges of Venice paying homage to the Virgin or being welcomed into Heaven by the Son himself. The most interesting place was the Council Maggiore, which was the place where the largest council of between 1,500 to 2,000 noblemen would be able to meet. All around the top frieze were the portraits of the past doges, each circled by a banner which noted the most important achievements of his administration. One exception, though: Marino Faliero. In the place of his picture, there was instead just a black curtain painted onto the wall, noting in Latin, “This is the space reserved for Marino Faliero, beheaded for his crimes”. He was actually the 55th doge, and he was executed for a coup d’etat, which failed due to poor planning. It was neat to see this actual example of damnatio memoriae, which is the punishment of being removed from history.

Though Venice has been beautiful, it has also been incredibly tiring. I don’t know why but we have taken to the habit of very late afternoon or almost evening naps, sometime between 3 pm and 6 pm. It’s proven necessary after so much sun, wine, and aperitifs which saps the body of all energy. At the same time, the summers in Europe also extend late into the day. Even after getting up at 6 pm, we get to enjoy three more hours of sunshine in which to maybe make a leisurely dinner or walk around and enjoy the views of the city at golden hour. It does make it difficult for us to get up earlier in the day, however. We look forward next to a short stay in Siena (3 days) and a longer stay in Florence (7 days). Maybe with a bit more time under our belt, we’ll be able to adjust a bit better.

Exploring the corner of Switzerland

Basel is not a large city, but an interestingly shaped one. Basel is in the northwest of Switzerland, situated on a little triangle which borders France to the northwest and Germany to the northeast. If you think of the city as the face of a clock, you can trace the path of the Rhine River, a pale green ribbon, which flows into the city at 3 o’clock, and then after reaching the center, goes back out around 11 am or noon. The more-or-less quadrant that you have cut out with the river is Klein Basel (Little Basel), and that is the part where we are staying.

Not too far north of us (about 30 minutes walking) is the German border. The other three-quarters of the city is Gross Basel (Big Basel) which holds the Altstadt (or Old Town) and most of the inhabitants as well as the other buildings. It only takes a bus about half an hour to go clear across the entire city, but many of the roads trace smaller circles within the larger circle of the city, so it can takes considerably longer to get around. On our second afternoon in the city, we found that Tram 2, which we were counting on taking back, was suddenly out of service because the city was going to re-pave some roads in the center of town. It took an extra 15 minutes to walk all the way back to the train station where we thought we were going to be able to catch the tram before, but we were told to get ourselves on the next 30 bus which would drop us off across the river. It ended up taking nearly 90 minutes for us to get back to the apartment with all the groceries we had promised to pick up.

Construction is not an uncommon thing to see here. Cranes do dot the Basel skyline, and even smaller ones are common in the neighborhood, where folks are having work done on their houses or on the sidewalk. Steve commented that there was so much construction, it kept reminding him of China. Sam indicated that it was a Swiss way of employing people and keeping things spic-and-span. Sometimes, the roads or the buildings don’t need to be redone, but it certainly serves a purpose. To me, it sounds like Switzerland is one of the only countries in the world which is ahead of the game. Most countries are woefully behind.

Continue reading Exploring the corner of Switzerland

City Park and the Mississippi River.

Written Monday, December 28 – New Orleans, LA

On our second day around the city, we woke up bright and early, and took off to one of the large attractions of New Orleans to the north of the city: City Park. We only ended up exploring a fraction of it, but it was beautiful from what we could tell. We took the Canal Street streetcar north, which wound through Mid-City and some other neighborhoods that are more residential. While they did look a bit rundown, they seemed more real and authentic than much of the French Quarter we were walking through. We disembarked at the end of the line and walked down a wide street set with trees on either side to the New Orleans Museum of Art. It wasn’t open since it was Monday, but the white columns and classical architecture were quite pretty. We moved on to explore its Sculpture Garden which was outside and indeed available to enter. There were some very modernist and even surreal sculptures, some plaster statues and giant safety pins and disturbing sculptures of morphed, long-limbed monkeys that had human hands but also limber tails.

Afterwards, we moved on to the New Orleans Botanical Garden, which is a small gem of a garden set within City Park. It wasn’t the best day to go, since it had rained the night before, and water still permeated much of the earthen walkways within the garden. But the conservatory was small and gorgeous, with a Christmas tree of poinsettias in the center. Outside, it was painted butter yellow, and contrasted gorgeously with the stone statue of a mermaid outside in the fountain. We roamed about a bit before coming out to see more of the City Park. It had been well-restored since the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. Many of the city’s oaks still stand, gorgeous and gnarly with curtains of silver Spanish moss hanging from the branches. We saw a bit more before going back to the streetcar and taking it back down. Continue reading City Park and the Mississippi River.

The true treasures of China.

When we came up to Taipei, I asked my dad for a little bit of advice on what he thought was worth seeing. After all, my parents did visit Taiwan this March after the Lunar New Year, in part to see what in the world I had been raving about! When asked for the one touristy spot we should see if we had time, he confirmed that we should visit the National Palace Museum. To explain what the National Palace Museum is necessitates a detour into Chinese and Taiwanese history…

Us in front of the National Palace Museum.
Us in front of the National Palace Museum.

Behind Tiananmen Gate in Beijing is the entrance to the Forbidden City, where the Palace Museum of China is to be found. Housed in the old palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Palace Museum holds all sorts of precious artifacts, textiles, porcelains, and works of art and history from China’s thousands of years of history. Except that is, some of the best examples. In 1948, when the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek were about to lose to the Communists and Mao Zedong, they retreated to Taiwan and took the best selection of artifacts from the Palace Museum with them. Most of those artifacts remain in Taiwan today, housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Some say this was a good thing, because during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), many of China’s artifacts were destroyed by Chinese people themselves. The Palace Museum in Beijing barely escaped the same sort of destruction, thanks to guards specifically deployed to protect it.

Continue reading The true treasures of China.

London, Part I: Bridges across the Thames.

The last few days of our world trip were a whirlwind in London, the capital of the United Kingdom. On second thought, there’s a good chance it was always going to be a combination of desperate last-minute sightseeing and window-shopping while wondering if we could fit more presents into our luggage for family and friends. But London, like Paris, has no end of historical jewels (figurative and literal) to dazzle the common visitor, and I had never been there before! The only saving grace is that there were no must-try restaurants, because no one is going to pretend English cuisine is the height of gastronomy.

We took the National Express bus down from Cambridge, and as soon as we got into Greater London, it became obvious that the last 1/4th of the trip would take as much time as the first 3/4ths did. We managed to badger the driver into dropping us off at an earlier stop than Victoria Coach Station, and took the Tube up to Camden Town, where we were staying. After a nap and shower, we took ourselves out to visit Hyde Park and the Serpentine (a long pond). It was green and pleasant, with rowboats and some stately looking swans. And giant too — it easily took a good 45 minutes to walk diagonally from one corner to another. At one corner, opposite Royal Albert Hall, we found a monument also dedicated to Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, which looked like the British take on a Thai Buddhist temple. In other words, gold, baroque, and unappealing. After some quick dinner, we called it an early night, in preparation for two mad days of sight-seeing in London. Continue reading London, Part I: Bridges across the Thames.

The city of Gaudi.

We now resume our interrupted broadcast of our travels from Spain. It was just two weeks ago that our three brave heroes found themselves in the capital of Catalonia…

The road to Barcelona is well-trodden, and every tour of the city includes its iconic monuments to Antoni Gaudi, the well-known Spanish Catalan architect. This might as well be the city of Gaudi, we had to conclude after three days of wandering around. Our first stop was Park Guell, on a hill in the north of Barcelona that affords a picturesque view of the city. Gaudi designed and built the park in 1914, and it has come to be known for his signature touch of modernist and naturalist architecture, built of strange, organic shapes and encrusted with mosaics. The winding park terrace which is also covered with mosaics are well-known to me, and recall to me the films like L’auberge espagnole and Vicky Cristina Barcelona where I first saw them.

The famous Park Guell mosaic terrace benches.

Continue reading The city of Gaudi.

City of a thousand fountains.

On Monday, we took a train just an hour and a half south for a day trip to Aix-en-Provence, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur region of France. One of my favorite things about visiting Europe is that I get to see many of things I learned about in my six years of studying Latin in high school. I first learned about Aix, as it is nicknamed, as the Roman city of Aquae Sextiae, founded in 123 BC after a heated battle by the Romans against the Teutones and Cimbri, two prominent Germanic tribes. The city is geographically positioned practically on the Mediterranean coast, a stone’s throw from Marseille, and about 300 kilometers directly south of Lyon. We’ve been in Lyon for nearly a month now, so it was about time we got to see another part of France!

Monday morning commuters at the Aix-en-Provence TGV station.

We boarded a TGV train at Lyon Perrache that left the city at the hazy grey hour of 6 am. We couldn’t really sleep very well, as the morning sun only got brighter on our journey down to Aix.  Fortunately, I had given up on sleep and was raptly gazing out the window when we went past the Roquefavour aqueduct, which looks absolutely amazing, and managed to grab a non-blurry photo! It’s neat, though not quite as impressive as the Pont du Gard aqueduct, but we may get to see that! Next, we took a bus from the Aix-en-Provence TGV station into town, and set off on a long rambling walk around the city.

We saw the Roquefavour aqueduct, just outside of Aix, while on the TGV.

Continue reading City of a thousand fountains.