If you think Venice is a labyrinth, you should try driving in downtown Milan. It is Venice on wheels, right down to the approach to signage. We spent a couple of hours circling in on the railway station, which you think would be mentioned somewhere relatively prominent, but the city is large enough and we are illiterate enough that we weren’t able to figure it out. Piotr finally adopted the strategy of asking a series of random strangers, who helped us find our way, beginning with an elegant young woman whose answer was, as near as we could make it out, “it’s nowhere near here—I hope you aren’t walking.”
L’Eko Café and Cucina
Having eventually located our hotel, we decided to take a short walk to find dinner. There were some restaurants near the train station, but we hoped for something better and cheaper, so we headed away from the lights. After an hour and a half spent wandering in a desert of office buildings and closed retail outlets, we finally spotted a café. There were half a dozen people standing at the bar, and about three tables in total. We went in and said “Do you have food?” “Yes, we do!” was the enthusiastic response, so we sat ourselves down. More people kept appearing at the door, where they were greeted and introduced to the others. Eventually, the whole mob of about 25 people disappeared down the back stairs, and Piotr and I were left at our table. About half an hour had passed. “Can we order some food?” we asked. “We only have toast.” “Nothing else?” A reluctant pause. “One pasta.” “Just one?” “Yes.” “Okay,” I said. “We are interested in that.” It turned out that we had stumbled on a culinary night, where a guest chef from Rome was in town, and everyone had come for a private set meal. They kindly agreed to include us in, and since we didn’t speak Italian, we stayed upstairs at what was for all intents and purposes the chef’s table, since he was working in the open kitchen just a few feet away. We ended up staying and eating the best Italian food I could imagine for two and a half hours.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Padua
Piotr and I decided to take a few hours to explore Padua, since it is on the highway from Milan to Venice and is also home to our pals Jorge and Guille. They were unfortunately away at the time to give a talk in Edmonton, so we didn’t get a chance to visit, but we were able to enjoy the older area of the city, which features a small university where the architecture includes marble floors, ancient wooden arches, and interior surfaces of some of the entranceways and courtyards that are covered with commemorative plaques.
Not so fresh frescoes
Another thing worth spotting in Padua are the frescoes on the faces of some of the buildings. Worn with time, these frescoes may currently consist of just a few ghostly faces, in the palest colours imaginable, but one can readily imagine when they were bright colours freshly added to the wet plaster. Since these were so indescribably beautiful even centuries later, I began to wonder why all buildings don’t include frescoes by default, until I remembered that they require specialized artists to produce them.
Italian risotto
Speaking of specialized artists, those of you familiar with the apparently simple but in fact absurdly difficult things to cook on this planet will know all about risotto, which is a species of rice with a short grain and a tendency to absorb water and release starch. The result, if you add stock to it while stirring constantly, can be deliciously creamy, while if you do anything else, it can be an inedible crunchy or in some cases gluey mess. Piotr and I stopped for lunch at a restaurant that seemed to have the right attitude, so we risked a risotto with mushrooms. One of the indications was that they wouldn’t make it as a single portion but only if two people ordered it. So we took a calculated chance that if ever a place would have a decent risotto, it would be here. Our bet paid off.
Not so fresh frescoes
Another thing worth spotting in Padua are the frescoes on the faces of some of the buildings. Worn with time, these frescoes may currently consist of just a few ghostly faces, in the palest colours imaginable, but one can readily imagine when they were bright colours freshly added to the wet plaster. Since these were so indescribably beautiful even centuries later, I began to wonder why all buildings don’t include frescoes by default, until I remembered that they require specialized artists to produce them.
Italian risotto
Speaking of specialized artists, those of you familiar with the apparently simple but in fact absurdly difficult things to cook on this planet will know all about risotto, which is a species of rice with a short grain and a tendency to absorb water and release starch. The result, if you add stock to it while stirring constantly, can be deliciously creamy, while if you do anything else, it can be an inedible crunchy or in some cases gluey mess. Piotr and I stopped for lunch at a restaurant that seemed to have the right attitude, so we risked a risotto with mushrooms. One of the indications was that they wouldn’t make it as a single portion but only if two people ordered it. So we took a calculated chance that if ever a place would have a decent risotto, it would be here. Our bet paid off.
Venice
My friend Piotr and I arrived in the vicinity of Venice after nightfall by car, having navigated in pure paramecium fashion a comically arcane set of highway switchbacks and roundabouts. Feeling a bit anxious after this experience about finding our way further at night in a strange city, we ended up ignoring Jan’s sage advice to park the car on the mainland, and instead drove over the lengthy bridge into Venice, then paid an exorbitant price to take it on the half-hour ferry ride over to the Lido district, which resides on an island shaped a bit, Piotr says, like a leg bone. I can’t remember ever having taken a car on a ferry before, so this was a tonne of fun for me. We were sure that the parking rates would be punitive, but were fortunate enough instead to find rockstar parking, right on the street across from our little hotel.
Water Buses
Taxis and buses exist as usual in Venice, only of course they are all in the form of boats. We climbed aboard the waterbus from Lido to downtown Venice on Saturday morning, then elected to simply not leave for an hour and a half, until it reached the end of the line and they threw us off. By this method, we managed a tour without narration of the main thoroughfare, which weaves along between some very impressive architecture. Imagine Rome or Florence or some other awe-inspiring Italian city made of marble, then put it up to its knees in the ocean. You can watch the water lapping at wooden doors as you grind by on your bus.
Frog Strangling
We eventually overstayed our welcome on the water bus, and climbed off to find an alternate route back, circumnavigating the archipelago instead of traversing it. We arrived at noon at a stop of interest, near one of the major squares, just in time for a monumentally torrential downpour, which turned into a good, steady, heavy rain for the remainder of the day. Tourists with an ounce of sense immediately purchased and donned colourful translucent raincoats and rainboots, which fit right over their shoes. Enterprising umbrella salesmen also made the rounds, taking advantage, as Piotr put it, of the harvest season. We of course had just arrived from Poland, where people pull down their hats and pull up their collars, shaking their heads in sadness at the weak folly of their fellow mortals.
The Absence of Paperwork
We sat out the first 45 diluvian minutes by taking refuge in a restaurant run by a couple of energetic men, one of whom was a Marcel Mastrionni lookalike contest winner in a somewhat shabby white linen jacket. This wasn’t the kind of restaurant that stood on ceremony. Instead of providing a menu, the waiter came up and said: “What do you eat: pizza or pasta?” We said “pasta.” He began naming sauces until we chose one. “What to drink?” We said. “Tea, with lemon.” “Limon, certa,” he said, and in due course, things arrived. Similarly with the bill, which consisted of him naming a number and us conjuring some Euros from about our persons.
The Labyrinth
Venice, the brochures tell us, is actually a micro-archipelago, with more than 100 islands joined by something like 350 bridges. I can attest to this because I crossed most of those bridges in the course of repeatedly, some might say obdurately, violating my principle of “don’t go up that alley.” In Venice, if it isn’t a Square, or rather a Piazza, it is probably an alley, situated between stone walls that rise several storeys on either side. In many of them, two umbrellas can’t pass each other, and in some, a single umbrella is too wide. They are all streaming with people going both directions or sometimes just standing in everyone’s way and having an Italian conversation. You have the option every few metres of plunging into a canal, but usually the preferred method is to cross it on a little rounded stone bridge about as big as a minute. I had to admire a country where those aren’t just flat paths with railings, but instead there has been individual attention to their nature as bridges.
Bridges
As you sail under the larger ones, you can see that the designs are varied and impressive. There are many stone arches, of course, but also some ancient wooden ones that are simply amazing. Down by the ferry to Lido, there is a modern footbridge, made of metal and enameled white, so that it looks like the extended spinal cord of some prehistoric beast.
Signage--now you see it; now you don’t
They have quite good signage in Venice, if by good you mean a clearly legible sign with an arrow pointing some direction. If, on the other hand, you mean a series of signs of that kind, intended to get you somewhere, then maybe you want another city. As far as I was able to judge, signs in Venice are produced as individual works of art, never to be corrupted in their essential purity by subjecting them to the mundane methods of mechanical reproduction. As Piotr said, staring at yet another list of ten arrows, each pointing different directions: “Rome, Cairo, and Peru.”
San Marco Square
One of the places we had hoped to see was this historical location of Church and State, where the paintings on the marble fronts of the buildings are rivaled only by the sculptures and other carvings that flank them. They are sufficiently overwhelming that it is hard to give them the credit they are due. Perhaps it will help to say they are like the Cathedrals I’ve seen all over the world, only moreso.
Random Bell Ringing
If there is one thing that has been a consistent theme of my first sabbatical, it is the bells, bells, bells. Like the hunchback of Notre Dame, I love them but sometimes I think it may have been a case of too much of a good thing. I heard Big Ben when he wasn’t ringing in London, and only stopped hearing him in my dreams when I got to Krakow and he was replaced, not only by a different set of bells but also by the mad trumpeter--a civil servant who climbs the tower in the square every hour, 24/7, to play a song that breaks off in mid-note. He does it to commemorate the brave watchman who was shot in the throat in 1241 while warning the city of invading Mongols. In Venice, it was the churches, completely removed from this postlapsarian world, joyously ringing out the 2:37 or 7:19 or whatever it happened to be. Piotr explained that they were likely doing it in memory of the moment of someone’s death.
The Casanova Tour
Venice was Casanova’s home town, where he worked as an 18th century alchemist and quack doctor, and where many of his adventures occurred, including a dramatic escape from the Leads--a prison notorious for its solitary confinement cells up in the ceiling, where the hot sun would beat on the lead tiles and make life an intolerable oven for anyone within. Hence the nickname for the prison. Today’s Venice honours young Giacomo by offering tours in his name. We wondered how his amorous adventures fit in to the tours. “Perhaps,” Piotr dryly observed, “they contain special opportunities.”
A Domino for the Masque
Casanova enjoyed a lot of things in his long and eventful life, and one of them was dressing up and going to a ball. The labyrinth contains many places overflowing with absolutely gorgeous masks, each one calling out to the impractical, improbable heart of the Frahnkenshteens. I was particularly drawn to the ones that featured coronas consisting of about a yard of feathers. Luckily, I had Piotr there to help me keep a steady head, or I’d have been drawn in like a moth to the flame and ended up shipping bits of colourful shattered enamel to my family and friends.
The Doge’s Palace
The name of the place is a bit of 18th-century humour, since it is actually the seat of government, a bit like the parliament buildings, and not a palace at all. Venice was a republic. But the Doge apparently did sometimes reside there. Casanova’s prison is connected to it by way of a bridge called “The Bridge of Tears.” That seems somehow more romantic when you aren’t aware that every ten metres there is another bridge connecting something to somewhere.
Ants of Glass
There is evidence of glass craftsmanship everywhere, from the many shops selling glass sculptures and ornaments down to the railings in our hotel, which were metal bars with coloured glass dumbbells, or maybe they were thighbones, strapped vertically on their middles. One store had a display with thousands of tiny glass creatures, each one no bigger than the fiery end of your elegant Italian cigarette. Among them was a whole platoon of glass ants.
Architectural Festival 2010
Piotr was eager to see the last day of this month-long event, and he had a map to the many locations scattered around the city. We settled on one of the two main venues, the Arsenale, which is a building about a mile long, originally used I think as a dock warehouse. Despite the appeal of architectural models, I was too wet and cold to enjoy myself, so I suggested to Piotr that he go ahead while I rested and dried out a bit at the rather extensive bookstore and coffee shop. It also gave me an opportunity to dry my hat under the hand dryer, while I waited in the half-hour bathroom lineup. I saved the exhibit's 20 Euro entrance fee, but what I missed were some amazing projects, including an indoor cloud that some lunatics had engineered, a giant art installation/sprinkler system consisting of running garden hoses suspended from the ceiling, and an audio installation where they had miked each member of a choir separately, then reproduced them on individual speakers, arranged in the shape of the original choir, but manipulated so that the songs could be deconstructed into their components. What I did get to see were several displays about architecture in Hong Kong, including the history of the astonishing Walled City of Kowloon, where our pal Rosan Chow grew up. Take the apartment block in Stephen Chow’s movie Kung Fu Hustle, and imagine the same design packed wall to wall inside a single square mile.
Peggy Guggenheim
We also had dreams of getting to see the collection at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery, but alas we arrived after it had closed. So we contented ourselves with hanging for a few minutes on the elaborate metal gates, which look like tangled bramble bushes where some fist-sized chunks of glass have gotten caught. I say contented ourselves, but really we were washed up against them by a surge of umbrellas turning the tight corner of the alley.
Santa Maria della Salute
To console ourselves on the way back to the water bus, we joined the eisodus of pilgrims heading into the cathedral of Santa Maria. I saw Piotr eyeing the three-foot-long white candles that you could buy outside for the choirboys to light, but we managed to sidestep that particular rite. We also narrowly escaped the lineup to go behind the altar, but only because I baulked and Piotr realized that none of the people who went back there ever came out again. Make of that what you will. We ended up instead watching one of the many large-screen TVs. Each screen showed a live video feed of the same closeup of the face of the icon of Mary above the main altar. Piotr said they were perhaps waiting for it to do something miraculous, like weeping. The TVs were mounted above head height, apparently at random on the walls between pillars, which were draped in decorative red tapestry. We conjectured that all the festive appearance must have been put there in commemoration of whatever was signified by the random bell ringing.
Grotesques and Gargoyles
If you are a fan of making fun of The Man by carving his face in marble, whether with his cheeks blown out or with an improbably and wickedly irreverent expression on his bad face, then Venice is where you should set up shop. You can hardly light a candle without being startled by some manner of grotesque or gargoyle either leering at you or gurgling water on you.
Catwalks on the Waterfront
The water being absurdly located as it is, the locals occasionally find it expedient to produce artificially raised sidewalks, which consist of miles of gritted plywood, supported on knee-high scaffolding. They resemble nothing so much as fashion-show catwalks, only in this case they are keeping tourists a few additional inches above high tide. When we arrived, workers were just dismantling them and stowing them away.
Hotel des Bains
The hotel used for the movie Death in Venice is now closed, but it still stands, another marble monument to Italian architecture, overlooking the beach that runs the length of Lido. We were there in the off season, so the sand had been bulldozed to make a six-foot-high embankment to help protect the inhabitants from the Adriatic. There were also 530 (they were numbered) little wooden shacks facing the water, which people could presumably rent when they brought their families and friends for a day on the beach. Imagine, I said to Piotr, all of those Italians in their designer bathing suits and sunglasses. It would be something to see.
Water Buses
Taxis and buses exist as usual in Venice, only of course they are all in the form of boats. We climbed aboard the waterbus from Lido to downtown Venice on Saturday morning, then elected to simply not leave for an hour and a half, until it reached the end of the line and they threw us off. By this method, we managed a tour without narration of the main thoroughfare, which weaves along between some very impressive architecture. Imagine Rome or Florence or some other awe-inspiring Italian city made of marble, then put it up to its knees in the ocean. You can watch the water lapping at wooden doors as you grind by on your bus.
Frog Strangling
We eventually overstayed our welcome on the water bus, and climbed off to find an alternate route back, circumnavigating the archipelago instead of traversing it. We arrived at noon at a stop of interest, near one of the major squares, just in time for a monumentally torrential downpour, which turned into a good, steady, heavy rain for the remainder of the day. Tourists with an ounce of sense immediately purchased and donned colourful translucent raincoats and rainboots, which fit right over their shoes. Enterprising umbrella salesmen also made the rounds, taking advantage, as Piotr put it, of the harvest season. We of course had just arrived from Poland, where people pull down their hats and pull up their collars, shaking their heads in sadness at the weak folly of their fellow mortals.
The Absence of Paperwork
We sat out the first 45 diluvian minutes by taking refuge in a restaurant run by a couple of energetic men, one of whom was a Marcel Mastrionni lookalike contest winner in a somewhat shabby white linen jacket. This wasn’t the kind of restaurant that stood on ceremony. Instead of providing a menu, the waiter came up and said: “What do you eat: pizza or pasta?” We said “pasta.” He began naming sauces until we chose one. “What to drink?” We said. “Tea, with lemon.” “Limon, certa,” he said, and in due course, things arrived. Similarly with the bill, which consisted of him naming a number and us conjuring some Euros from about our persons.
The Labyrinth
Venice, the brochures tell us, is actually a micro-archipelago, with more than 100 islands joined by something like 350 bridges. I can attest to this because I crossed most of those bridges in the course of repeatedly, some might say obdurately, violating my principle of “don’t go up that alley.” In Venice, if it isn’t a Square, or rather a Piazza, it is probably an alley, situated between stone walls that rise several storeys on either side. In many of them, two umbrellas can’t pass each other, and in some, a single umbrella is too wide. They are all streaming with people going both directions or sometimes just standing in everyone’s way and having an Italian conversation. You have the option every few metres of plunging into a canal, but usually the preferred method is to cross it on a little rounded stone bridge about as big as a minute. I had to admire a country where those aren’t just flat paths with railings, but instead there has been individual attention to their nature as bridges.
Bridges
As you sail under the larger ones, you can see that the designs are varied and impressive. There are many stone arches, of course, but also some ancient wooden ones that are simply amazing. Down by the ferry to Lido, there is a modern footbridge, made of metal and enameled white, so that it looks like the extended spinal cord of some prehistoric beast.
Signage--now you see it; now you don’t
They have quite good signage in Venice, if by good you mean a clearly legible sign with an arrow pointing some direction. If, on the other hand, you mean a series of signs of that kind, intended to get you somewhere, then maybe you want another city. As far as I was able to judge, signs in Venice are produced as individual works of art, never to be corrupted in their essential purity by subjecting them to the mundane methods of mechanical reproduction. As Piotr said, staring at yet another list of ten arrows, each pointing different directions: “Rome, Cairo, and Peru.”
San Marco Square
One of the places we had hoped to see was this historical location of Church and State, where the paintings on the marble fronts of the buildings are rivaled only by the sculptures and other carvings that flank them. They are sufficiently overwhelming that it is hard to give them the credit they are due. Perhaps it will help to say they are like the Cathedrals I’ve seen all over the world, only moreso.
Random Bell Ringing
If there is one thing that has been a consistent theme of my first sabbatical, it is the bells, bells, bells. Like the hunchback of Notre Dame, I love them but sometimes I think it may have been a case of too much of a good thing. I heard Big Ben when he wasn’t ringing in London, and only stopped hearing him in my dreams when I got to Krakow and he was replaced, not only by a different set of bells but also by the mad trumpeter--a civil servant who climbs the tower in the square every hour, 24/7, to play a song that breaks off in mid-note. He does it to commemorate the brave watchman who was shot in the throat in 1241 while warning the city of invading Mongols. In Venice, it was the churches, completely removed from this postlapsarian world, joyously ringing out the 2:37 or 7:19 or whatever it happened to be. Piotr explained that they were likely doing it in memory of the moment of someone’s death.
The Casanova Tour
Venice was Casanova’s home town, where he worked as an 18th century alchemist and quack doctor, and where many of his adventures occurred, including a dramatic escape from the Leads--a prison notorious for its solitary confinement cells up in the ceiling, where the hot sun would beat on the lead tiles and make life an intolerable oven for anyone within. Hence the nickname for the prison. Today’s Venice honours young Giacomo by offering tours in his name. We wondered how his amorous adventures fit in to the tours. “Perhaps,” Piotr dryly observed, “they contain special opportunities.”
A Domino for the Masque
Casanova enjoyed a lot of things in his long and eventful life, and one of them was dressing up and going to a ball. The labyrinth contains many places overflowing with absolutely gorgeous masks, each one calling out to the impractical, improbable heart of the Frahnkenshteens. I was particularly drawn to the ones that featured coronas consisting of about a yard of feathers. Luckily, I had Piotr there to help me keep a steady head, or I’d have been drawn in like a moth to the flame and ended up shipping bits of colourful shattered enamel to my family and friends.
The Doge’s Palace
The name of the place is a bit of 18th-century humour, since it is actually the seat of government, a bit like the parliament buildings, and not a palace at all. Venice was a republic. But the Doge apparently did sometimes reside there. Casanova’s prison is connected to it by way of a bridge called “The Bridge of Tears.” That seems somehow more romantic when you aren’t aware that every ten metres there is another bridge connecting something to somewhere.
Ants of Glass
There is evidence of glass craftsmanship everywhere, from the many shops selling glass sculptures and ornaments down to the railings in our hotel, which were metal bars with coloured glass dumbbells, or maybe they were thighbones, strapped vertically on their middles. One store had a display with thousands of tiny glass creatures, each one no bigger than the fiery end of your elegant Italian cigarette. Among them was a whole platoon of glass ants.
Architectural Festival 2010
Piotr was eager to see the last day of this month-long event, and he had a map to the many locations scattered around the city. We settled on one of the two main venues, the Arsenale, which is a building about a mile long, originally used I think as a dock warehouse. Despite the appeal of architectural models, I was too wet and cold to enjoy myself, so I suggested to Piotr that he go ahead while I rested and dried out a bit at the rather extensive bookstore and coffee shop. It also gave me an opportunity to dry my hat under the hand dryer, while I waited in the half-hour bathroom lineup. I saved the exhibit's 20 Euro entrance fee, but what I missed were some amazing projects, including an indoor cloud that some lunatics had engineered, a giant art installation/sprinkler system consisting of running garden hoses suspended from the ceiling, and an audio installation where they had miked each member of a choir separately, then reproduced them on individual speakers, arranged in the shape of the original choir, but manipulated so that the songs could be deconstructed into their components. What I did get to see were several displays about architecture in Hong Kong, including the history of the astonishing Walled City of Kowloon, where our pal Rosan Chow grew up. Take the apartment block in Stephen Chow’s movie Kung Fu Hustle, and imagine the same design packed wall to wall inside a single square mile.
Peggy Guggenheim
We also had dreams of getting to see the collection at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery, but alas we arrived after it had closed. So we contented ourselves with hanging for a few minutes on the elaborate metal gates, which look like tangled bramble bushes where some fist-sized chunks of glass have gotten caught. I say contented ourselves, but really we were washed up against them by a surge of umbrellas turning the tight corner of the alley.
Santa Maria della Salute
To console ourselves on the way back to the water bus, we joined the eisodus of pilgrims heading into the cathedral of Santa Maria. I saw Piotr eyeing the three-foot-long white candles that you could buy outside for the choirboys to light, but we managed to sidestep that particular rite. We also narrowly escaped the lineup to go behind the altar, but only because I baulked and Piotr realized that none of the people who went back there ever came out again. Make of that what you will. We ended up instead watching one of the many large-screen TVs. Each screen showed a live video feed of the same closeup of the face of the icon of Mary above the main altar. Piotr said they were perhaps waiting for it to do something miraculous, like weeping. The TVs were mounted above head height, apparently at random on the walls between pillars, which were draped in decorative red tapestry. We conjectured that all the festive appearance must have been put there in commemoration of whatever was signified by the random bell ringing.
Grotesques and Gargoyles
If you are a fan of making fun of The Man by carving his face in marble, whether with his cheeks blown out or with an improbably and wickedly irreverent expression on his bad face, then Venice is where you should set up shop. You can hardly light a candle without being startled by some manner of grotesque or gargoyle either leering at you or gurgling water on you.
Catwalks on the Waterfront
The water being absurdly located as it is, the locals occasionally find it expedient to produce artificially raised sidewalks, which consist of miles of gritted plywood, supported on knee-high scaffolding. They resemble nothing so much as fashion-show catwalks, only in this case they are keeping tourists a few additional inches above high tide. When we arrived, workers were just dismantling them and stowing them away.
Hotel des Bains
The hotel used for the movie Death in Venice is now closed, but it still stands, another marble monument to Italian architecture, overlooking the beach that runs the length of Lido. We were there in the off season, so the sand had been bulldozed to make a six-foot-high embankment to help protect the inhabitants from the Adriatic. There were also 530 (they were numbered) little wooden shacks facing the water, which people could presumably rent when they brought their families and friends for a day on the beach. Imagine, I said to Piotr, all of those Italians in their designer bathing suits and sunglasses. It would be something to see.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Trieste
Piotr and Monika had previously been delighted by a few hours they’d spent in Trieste, so we made a special effort to drive down to this previously thriving port city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Built on hills that are terraced down to the sea, the city is absurdly picturesque from above, although it quickly becomes a labyrinth of narrow streets lined with 8-storey buildings and jampacked with cars that are routinely doubleparked for entire blocks. There also appear to be something like two vespas for every citizen. After the second world war, the city was equally populated by partisans of Slovenia and Italy, so Trieste remained a free city, with no national affiliation, until the 1970s, when it finally became part of Italy.
James Joyce
I don’t know how familiar this story is to people, but Joyce apparently spent 12 years in Trieste, working primarily as a teacher of English as a second language for the Berlitz company. I’m not sure how I would feel about being taught English by the author of Ulysses. Privileged, I suppose, but it could very well lead to some awkward moments in polite society when I deployed my extended vernacular. In any case, there is a very nice little bronze statue of him standing just on the edge of one of the bridges over the grand canal, with his plaque embedded in the sidewalk at his feet. I am always interested to see in these cases what part of the bronze has been rubbed shiny by people interacting with the statue. In this case, it was his shoulders, since, as Piotr explained, people would stand and put their arm around him.
Illy
Trieste is also home to the Illy corporation, so we stopped off at a coffee shop for an espresso. It turns out, of course, that we were a bit gauche to ask for espresso, since the local convention is to call it a café negre, but the decorative pair of young men behind the counter, replete with sailor tattoos, seemed to laugh it off with good grace, and the coffee was delicious.
James Joyce
I don’t know how familiar this story is to people, but Joyce apparently spent 12 years in Trieste, working primarily as a teacher of English as a second language for the Berlitz company. I’m not sure how I would feel about being taught English by the author of Ulysses. Privileged, I suppose, but it could very well lead to some awkward moments in polite society when I deployed my extended vernacular. In any case, there is a very nice little bronze statue of him standing just on the edge of one of the bridges over the grand canal, with his plaque embedded in the sidewalk at his feet. I am always interested to see in these cases what part of the bronze has been rubbed shiny by people interacting with the statue. In this case, it was his shoulders, since, as Piotr explained, people would stand and put their arm around him.
Illy
Trieste is also home to the Illy corporation, so we stopped off at a coffee shop for an espresso. It turns out, of course, that we were a bit gauche to ask for espresso, since the local convention is to call it a café negre, but the decorative pair of young men behind the counter, replete with sailor tattoos, seemed to laugh it off with good grace, and the coffee was delicious.
Graz
Following three weeks of pampering by Piotr and Jan in Krakow, Susan flew off home to see her kids while Piotr and I rented a car and headed cross-country to Venice. We crossed through five countries in two days: Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, and Italy.
To Confuse the Enemy
On leaving Krakow, we were anxious not to miss our exit, since we had used something of a side road to avoid construction on the main route. Fortunately, we came across a road sign that showed that we were approaching a roundabout with three exits. The only problem is that there was no text on the sign at all. “It has been removed,” Piotr joked, “in order to confuse the enemy.”
A Cup with 2 Pieces of Chalk
We stopped for dinner at a roadside chain just on the outskirts of Vienna, where they kindly arranged to feed me some pasta that combined items that were not combined on their menu. For dessert, they had a special that provided Piotr with a coffee and me with a doughnut, and as a bonus they gave us a coffee cup. What was unique about this item is that it came with couple of pieces of chalk, because the surface of the cup is a kind of slate.
Peter Cook
Our first night was spent in Austria in the delightful little city of Graz, built on the pretty Mur river. Graz is home to a fanciful art gallery, designed by Peter Cook—an architect, like several of his 60s generation, famous for buildings that were impossible to realize. He once designed, for example, a city on legs that was intended to walk slowly across country. Graz, however, actually managed to instantiate one of his designs, in the shape of a giant plexiglass loaf with a row of nipples along the roof. Each piece of the cladding is a two-inch thick slab of translucent plexi, no two alike, averaging probably five feet across, and bound to the frame with giant rivets.
Sexy Female Robots
It was in Peter Cook’s gallery that Piotr and I went to see, appropriately enough, I thought, an exhibit called “Robot Dreams.” One of the items in the display was a reconstruction of the wicked robot who impersonates the heroine in Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. Her face is currently plastered all over the city. The exhibit featured some interesting animated constructions, including a kind of complex array of cutouts and video cameras that filled a wall of video screens with constantly changing combinations. There was even a room of little spiders, about the size of your hat, who were triggered by motion detectors to begin scurrying around.
Artificial Handshake
As we were leaving the art gallery, we were stopped by two very polite information design students, who asked if they could videotape, not us, but just our hands, in the act of handshaking. They were making a collection for their web site. We tried it a few times from a couple of different angles, and they eventually cut us loose, but we really felt that we hadn’t managed to provide a satisfactory handshake that represented our actual manner of shaking hands. What they really needed, I think, for a natural-looking greeting, was to hire some actors who knew how to simulate it properly. Only later did I realize that we had missed what might have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance to carry out one of those elaborately artificial handshakes involving slapping our fingers and bumping our fists.
Open-Faced Sandwiches for Breakfast
We had breakfast in Graz at an absolutely delightful little sandwich place called the Café-Imbiss. It is a cozy spot with a very dynamic atmosphere, where tables of people are rapidly coming and going. All of them were there to enjoy oblique slices of fresh baguette that had been artistically supplemented with equally fresh delicacies. I ate, for instance, one open-faced sandwich consisting of folded prociutto that concealed at one end a small slice of melon, and I had another with a small set of smoked salmon slices, topped at one end with a tiny rosette of cream cheese and a miniature sprig of fresh dill.
The Abandoned Tollbooths of Slovenia
After leaving Graz, we drove through Slovenia, which reminded me in many ways of the Rocky Mountain foothills. It took about three hours to drive completely across the country, but every half hour or so we had to slow down to go through a tollbooth. Technology, however, has improved, so that the practice now is not to pay for each section of the highway, but instead to buy a highway pass that lets you use all the highways in the country for several days running. By the time we got to Venice, we had three of these stickers in the window, as well as a pay-as-you-exit toll pass, which is how these things are managed in Italy. Thank God I had Piotr with me, or I would have ended up in a series of confrontations with authorities over my lack of evidence that I knew enough to pay to use the highways. The guards at the final gate in Slovenia were pulling people over with submachine guns, so I was particularly pleased at that point that we had not been delinquent.
The Royal Lippizan Stallions
Who knew that Slovenia is the home of the traveling trick horses of my youth? I remember as a child that these magnificent white horses and their deft riders would make an annual appearance for three shows only in the city of Regina. Piotr tells me that they are considered somewhat of a national treasure by the people of Slovenia.
Arnold
Kim Hoyer tells me that the current governor of California (and former killer robot from the future) was born and bred in Graz, and sure enough, when I checked it out online, there he was, just as bold as brass. He actually came from a small town outside the city, although for some time he was apparently a carrier of the Honorary Ring of Graz, a gold signet given since 1954 to its most prestigious citizens. He returned it in 2005 for reasons unspecified, but one would assume political.
To Confuse the Enemy
On leaving Krakow, we were anxious not to miss our exit, since we had used something of a side road to avoid construction on the main route. Fortunately, we came across a road sign that showed that we were approaching a roundabout with three exits. The only problem is that there was no text on the sign at all. “It has been removed,” Piotr joked, “in order to confuse the enemy.”
A Cup with 2 Pieces of Chalk
We stopped for dinner at a roadside chain just on the outskirts of Vienna, where they kindly arranged to feed me some pasta that combined items that were not combined on their menu. For dessert, they had a special that provided Piotr with a coffee and me with a doughnut, and as a bonus they gave us a coffee cup. What was unique about this item is that it came with couple of pieces of chalk, because the surface of the cup is a kind of slate.
Peter Cook
Our first night was spent in Austria in the delightful little city of Graz, built on the pretty Mur river. Graz is home to a fanciful art gallery, designed by Peter Cook—an architect, like several of his 60s generation, famous for buildings that were impossible to realize. He once designed, for example, a city on legs that was intended to walk slowly across country. Graz, however, actually managed to instantiate one of his designs, in the shape of a giant plexiglass loaf with a row of nipples along the roof. Each piece of the cladding is a two-inch thick slab of translucent plexi, no two alike, averaging probably five feet across, and bound to the frame with giant rivets.
Sexy Female Robots
It was in Peter Cook’s gallery that Piotr and I went to see, appropriately enough, I thought, an exhibit called “Robot Dreams.” One of the items in the display was a reconstruction of the wicked robot who impersonates the heroine in Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. Her face is currently plastered all over the city. The exhibit featured some interesting animated constructions, including a kind of complex array of cutouts and video cameras that filled a wall of video screens with constantly changing combinations. There was even a room of little spiders, about the size of your hat, who were triggered by motion detectors to begin scurrying around.
Artificial Handshake
As we were leaving the art gallery, we were stopped by two very polite information design students, who asked if they could videotape, not us, but just our hands, in the act of handshaking. They were making a collection for their web site. We tried it a few times from a couple of different angles, and they eventually cut us loose, but we really felt that we hadn’t managed to provide a satisfactory handshake that represented our actual manner of shaking hands. What they really needed, I think, for a natural-looking greeting, was to hire some actors who knew how to simulate it properly. Only later did I realize that we had missed what might have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance to carry out one of those elaborately artificial handshakes involving slapping our fingers and bumping our fists.
Open-Faced Sandwiches for Breakfast
We had breakfast in Graz at an absolutely delightful little sandwich place called the Café-Imbiss. It is a cozy spot with a very dynamic atmosphere, where tables of people are rapidly coming and going. All of them were there to enjoy oblique slices of fresh baguette that had been artistically supplemented with equally fresh delicacies. I ate, for instance, one open-faced sandwich consisting of folded prociutto that concealed at one end a small slice of melon, and I had another with a small set of smoked salmon slices, topped at one end with a tiny rosette of cream cheese and a miniature sprig of fresh dill.
The Abandoned Tollbooths of Slovenia
After leaving Graz, we drove through Slovenia, which reminded me in many ways of the Rocky Mountain foothills. It took about three hours to drive completely across the country, but every half hour or so we had to slow down to go through a tollbooth. Technology, however, has improved, so that the practice now is not to pay for each section of the highway, but instead to buy a highway pass that lets you use all the highways in the country for several days running. By the time we got to Venice, we had three of these stickers in the window, as well as a pay-as-you-exit toll pass, which is how these things are managed in Italy. Thank God I had Piotr with me, or I would have ended up in a series of confrontations with authorities over my lack of evidence that I knew enough to pay to use the highways. The guards at the final gate in Slovenia were pulling people over with submachine guns, so I was particularly pleased at that point that we had not been delinquent.
The Royal Lippizan Stallions
Who knew that Slovenia is the home of the traveling trick horses of my youth? I remember as a child that these magnificent white horses and their deft riders would make an annual appearance for three shows only in the city of Regina. Piotr tells me that they are considered somewhat of a national treasure by the people of Slovenia.
Arnold
Kim Hoyer tells me that the current governor of California (and former killer robot from the future) was born and bred in Graz, and sure enough, when I checked it out online, there he was, just as bold as brass. He actually came from a small town outside the city, although for some time he was apparently a carrier of the Honorary Ring of Graz, a gold signet given since 1954 to its most prestigious citizens. He returned it in 2005 for reasons unspecified, but one would assume political.
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