Edward Gibbon's "The Decline + Fall of the Roman Empire": Kindle Book Review

As editions jumble and formats collide on Amazon for such classics, I'll explain Kindle versions. The public-domain ones for free or a buck or two are the Anglican reverend H.H. Milman's 1838/45 version, interspersing his commentary--which about Gibbon's anti-religious musings, was defensive. J.B. Bury's 1897 ed. can be downloaded elsewhere than Amazon. Bury kept his comments appended after Gibbon's famous footnotes. These older eds. online differ somewhat in presentation; some relegate footnotes and some place them within the main text after every relevant page.

David Womersly's abridgment of his 3 vol. 1990s ed. in Penguin provides eleven complete chapters and footnotes. Hans-Friedrich Mueller's 2003 abridges the Modern Library 1987 ed. Mueller assures us in his preface that the whole work still should be read and consulted. He admits in his task a different emphasis than, say, Milman. Keeping in the religious, political and institutional concentrations, he excises 2/3: battle details, genealogies, ethnologies, and footnotes. Mueller avers this fits contemporary concerns and aligns with relevant issues. On the Kindle, it's elegantly legible.

Daniel Boorstin's original introduction remains, preceding a critical essay by Mueller and Gibbon's preface. The maps are small, as they were copied from the paperback ed. What remains are parts of every chapter. Mueller indicates where cuts or excisions occur so one may consult the full text. He does provide parts of all 72 chapters for a "continuous narrative." The complete Womersly set sits on my shelf. But I chose this condensed ed. for the ability to take notes and highlight passages, which I wouldn't do in my tomes. And for road trips. ( Amazon US 9/10/17)

Franco Mormando's "The Preacher's Demons": Book Review

Bernardino of Siena was an extraordinarily popular preacher during the first half of the thirteenth century. His fame exploded suddenly, and his sermons drew in many all over Italy. In spirited, earthy, conversational language, he urged his listeners to reform their lives in fidelity to the Catholic faith.

So far, nothing unsurprising. But Harvard historian Franco Mormando delves into the archives to go beyond hagiography. In this well-researched and accessibly narrated 1999 study, he presents a Franciscan friar who sought to suppress the freethinkers, whom he condemned as heretics and as witches--a latter category that his contemporaries in the crowds seemed less worried about than him.

Also, he combated the "sodomites," a blanket term that seems to call into scrutiny and damnation any who violated the strictly procreative and marital relations permitted the faithful. As with heretics, Mormando demonstrates how these relatively small elements threatened the social framework and religious power which orthodox teaching inculcated. He studies the sermons within their context and rather than selecting portions out of context, as many scholars do, he seeks a total understanding of the circumstances, despite a sketchy record of much of the saint's life and career, to relate this to us.

Finally, Mormando looks at the anti-semitic depictions Bernardino promoted. He finds a more varied picture. Some portions call on Catholics to love (in a general way) their Jewish neighbors and to help them; other sections castigate them in the all-too-familiar fashion. But the historical portrait is more nuanced here than Mormando's predecessors and indeed some of Bernardino's confreres in the mendicant orders have perpetrated. The saint wavered, thus. in how he advised regarding the Jews.

In closing, the historian finds the anxiety Bernardino conveyed emanated from his own heart. Left orphaned at a young age, raised among four domineering women, left to the care of the Franciscans, these factors may have marked him deeply. "Undisguised animal fear" drove the men and women of early Renaissance Italy, despite its many achievements, in ways that all of us also know all too well.
(Amazon US 12-9-15)

Mauro Civai + Enrico Toti's "Siena: the Gothic Dream": Book Review

This "new guide to the city" that dramatically occupies a Tuscan hilltop is neither a coffee-table heirloom nor a conventional guidebook. While small in size, its scope ranges over the highlights. In Christopher McConnell's extremely faithful (I reckon as it repeats the sometimes awkward diction of what I suppose is the Italian) translation, this 1992 authorized and city-sponsored guide encourages us to regard the fortified vista as pilgrims. We seek the monuments, rather than restaurants or lodging.

For this aims at erudition and elegance. It opens with a survey of the town and its medieval planning. Three sections, one for the City, one for Camollia, one for San Martino, divide the center into its thirds. Each can be studied and itineraries followed by hand drawn maps on the pages. Illustrated richly, a glimpse of the paintings, architecture, history, and panoramas of Siena open up for a viewer.

Despite the slightly stilted tone that Civai and Toti take, it conveys therefore the Italian insider's style, rather than a tourist's perspective. This can seem disorienting, for much still evades translation. But for an armchair or a real traveler, this remains an intelligent if eccentric introduction to Siena, when few such books going deeper than a few photos and text are available to English-language readers.
(Amazon US 12-9-15)

Jhumpa Lahiri agus teanga ag fhoghlaim

Léigh mé aiste le Jhumpa Lahiri ina h-iris An Nua-Eabhracha faoi deireanach. Tá sé dar teideal "Múin do féin Iodáilis." Tuigim sé go hiomlán.

Mar sin é, ní thuigim i bhfad an teanga Iodáile fós. Ach, tá fhíos agam féin an streachailt os sí féin. Níl easca é a fhoghlaim teanga éagsúil ina cathair ar leith.

Scríobh sí faoi radharc ar an eolas domsa. D'fhoglaim sí ar dtus ó an teanga iasachta ina SAM. Ansin, chuaigh sí go a talamh dhúchais.

Ní raibh sí ábalta iarraidh le haghaidh treorachaí ar an tsráid ann. Ní fheadfadh sí ag insint go fhreastalaí h-ordú. D'fheadfaidh sí labhairt ar éigean ar chor ar bith.

Mar sin féin, bhí sí ar cíos árasán i Roimh. D'fhan sí ar an gceanna Via Giulia go shiúl mé níos lú an mhí ó shin. Thosaigh sí ar scríobh ina teanga difriúil.

Jhumpa Lahiri and language learning.

I read an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri in the magazine The New Yorker recently. It is titled "Teach Yourself Italian". I understand it totally.

That is, I do not understand a lot of the Italian language yet. But, I know myself her own struggle. It is not easy to study a different language in a separate city.

She writes about a view familiar to me. She learned the start of a foreign language in the USA. Then, she went to its native land.

She was not able to ask for directions in the street. She could not tell a waiter her order. She was barely able to speak at all.

Nevertheless, she rented an apartment in Rome. She stayed on the same Via Giulia that I walked less than a month ago. She started to write in a different tongue. (Photo/Grianghraf)

Mary McCarthy's "Venice Observed": Book Review

While this seems less known than its 1959 predecessor The Stones of Florence, I liked it more. McCarthy reveals in framing vignettes more about where she stays, and the irascible, over-familiar family she resides with. Also, the book is set up thematically in chapters that don't just roam over the abundant art, but focus on characters and topics that let this erudite author convey information better.

I am reviewing a large-format illustrated edition of this 1963 book. With end-notes on the art photographed, and short essay by an art professor, it better meets the needs of readers who are not as familiar with the considerable context necessary for appreciating the displays written about and shown. She starts by noting that no corner of Venice can be kept from the tourist, and that residents must share its passageways with all, for all must walk its labyrinth. She then tells of how the ideally placed port gained its "loot" and why it prospered and then declined. The fate of its Jews in the ghetto and the rise of the Most Serene Republic's "only thinker" the friar Paolo Sarpi enliven the tales told.

Its glory years with Giorgione and Carpaccio, Titian and Tiepolo follow. A trip to the islands of Murano and Burano conjures up their appeal, or the limits of such. McCarthy regales us from a time fifty-plus years ago when Burano's fisherfolk looked different than Venetians, and when beggar children still could be found in the ghetto. Her Venice already feels very distant to a traveler today.

This is dated, of course, but for the way it conjures up some of the theme-park ambiance of Venice, recommended. It's an elegant but accessible introduction, and with the notes, one can learn about the artists and architects responsible for forging this island kingdom out of marble against the salty sea.
(Amazon US 12-9-15)

Mary McCarthy's "The Stones of Florence": Book Review

Like John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Mary McCarthy focuses on art in a civic Italian treasure trove. In this 1959 book, she complains of hardly any air-conditioning, the wasp-named Vespas, the crowds of Germans and Swedes, the food, and the noise. How she would complain now? But at least today's Ponte Vecchio is closed to today's traffic. Looking at the photos in the original large-format edition, there are only two or three people around Il Duomo or the David replica, where there'd be easily a hundred in the shot most days today. Still, McCarthy's laments ring true, from a lively writer.

She spends most of this narrative roaming among this art. Naturally, the Uffizi is featured and the palaces, but surprisingly less time at Giotto's San Marco, for instance. As this takes place a few years before the devastating floods, one wonders if some sites were altered or their works moved for good, or lost to the Arno. She remains an erudite guide to the wonders of the city, and a commentator on a people whom the native son Dante (before or after his exile?) found stingy, envious, and proud.

I'd have liked more about the people, as so much about the stones, marble, statues, frescoes, and artworks can overwhelm. It's expected that this work would treat these heirlooms, but I found the glimpses of the Florentine temperament even more engaging. For visitors past or future, still a must.
(Amazon US 12-9-15)

From Venice

In Venice, we saw a striking image. The near distance in the haze looked entirely drained of depth, and we thought it for a moment a matte painting or overlay. The Rialto, unfortunately, under repair, featured such a fake archway, with a gender-bending Asian fellow posing in a full-frontal (if clothed) stance, under a Diesel slogan "This is a guy sitting on a bridge." For me, that lost a helluva lot in translation. None of the thousand (!) photos I searched demonstrates this flattened perspective, but I tried to mimic it if slightly at the left, via this photographic view.

At Santa Croce in Florence, Stendhal had a similarly unsettling sensation. Overcome by the art, he fell into dizzy disorientation, called since then the Stendhal Syndrome. If you ever want to earn credit for this malady on an insurance form check off the box "hyperkulteremia." When reading his account, earlier this year, however, his psychosomatic reaction in his narration for me so muted that I had to check when in his tale it happened. A modest endnote referred to it offhandedly. Our encounter was probably less bewildering, but still, gazing out in the open on a vast sight you are not sure is real or contrived remains memorable. Venice, for many, appears a mirage, a place conjured up from magic.

Certainly, this city, built on sticks and marshes after refugees fled Attila, has no roots of its own from ancient times. No ruins, no Roman forum, no archaeological treasures. Instead, a true creation of the collision between Byzantine and Romanesque, the blur between Renaissance and Baroque, these islands separated from the normal cause of events cause its residents as well as its tourists to mingle. As Mary McCarthy's 1963 Venice Observed remarks, cohorts must jostle, and there's no place that is undiscovered and left only to the locals. I would pass the shop girl who with a British accent sold me a shirt, and the man who ran the gallery where we'd find our souvenir mask, both later walking along from work, to a meal, or to their home. With no cars, all are pedestrians, for once, reduced as equal.

Well, to a point. She also loosely links the flight of the founders of Venice to that of the Exodus, to another people who seek to start over, to another group involved in trade and mercantile enterprise. But, in the Old Foundry where the word ghetto originated, as we visited there our first full day, the situation of the Jews confined there nightly, as the gates and bridges closed them up on their island, attests to the other legacy of this realm. While the theme-park air draws all, permanent or transient, to jostle its dank passageways and navigate its funnelled paths over the Rialto magnetically, the isolated ghetto represents the hidden Venice. Not one only the locals know, but one the Most Serene Republic for centuries contended with, the raspy underside, the irritant beneath carnival masks or gilt mosaics.

This raspiness hit me on arrival. A loud woman materialized out of the Piazza S. Bartolomeo, the first stop in our video pilgrimage (see the paragraph after the next). She zeroed in on pale blue-eyed me, tugging two suitcases and hoisting a backpack, bent over like Simon of Cyrene helping Christ carry his cross. Somehow I was selected out of the crowd to sign her petition against drugs. A second day, she accosted me, this time mocking my disdain in Italian "insegnate" and then in broken English, "teacher" (how did she know?) and "No terrorist" post-Paris. A third time, she singled me out. By now, I let loose, telling her this was the third time (as in Jesus falls, although by now I bore no burden on my trudge through streets recalling those of old Jerusalem I imagined), and that I was not interested. She apologized slightly, and then Layne chirped "We like drugs." Believe it or not, on our departure that same day (we get around the same places, this being Venice), a man now accosted me, this time with a British accent. I speculated silently if this was not part of a certain "church" founded in Hollywood and part of a tax-avoidance scheme filling its coffers in ways that made Peter's Pence look angelic by comparison. The "faith communities" may change, but a pilgrim's still an easy mark.

Back to the other center of a far older faith, we saw scowling rabbis on a Chabad poster, a windowed guard kiosk, a few shops selling Judaica or kosher snacks, and plaques to those murdered. A series on a stone wall, faded in bronze to verdigris, depicted the torment of the Shoah. One portrayed two figures crucified. We traversed the center square where schoolchildren ran to visit, and we went the whole half-circle into and out of the district barely speaking. It seemed, as we'd seen in Siena and Florence in miniature, a testament to European Jewry today. And after the recent Paris murders, it felt stained. (When I got home, I learned on the radio that the Bataclan was targeted as its Jewish owners had hosted pro-Zionist gatherings. Why this was absent from any press, BBC or CNN coverage we'd been inundated with for a week was somehow telling. I add that snippet here, to an funereal litany. Even as I revise this, headlines of more innocents targeted by fanatics, perpetrated an hour's drive away, near the college my wife and older son attended, fills airwaves, papers, and the Oval Office.)

Our stay had begun with a video we'd watched over and over, downloaded to the Kindle. The hotel warned one had to learn the way to it, and we did. So much that over three days, we could traverse it on our own. But one false turn and you end up at St. Mark's Square. Instead, after a train from Florence and hauling our luggage a ways, we made it at nightfall to the Ca' Bragadin Carabba, where none other than Casanova lived from 1746 to 1755. Strangely, only a plastic sign in the bare lobby on the first floor told of this connection, and there was no other context. Talk about underselling a place.

Curious, on arriving home, I sought to find out more. My Penguin Classics abridgement of Casanova's voluminous memoirs lacks an index or timeline, but a visit to Wikipedia reveals that the young libertine saved the life and came under the patronage of the household of a scion of the noble Bragadin family. Perhaps he used their quarters largely as a base, for in this decade he roamed Paris, Dresden, and Parma among other locales. 1755 marks of his arrest as a Mason and freethinker by the tribunal and his incarceration in the Leads atop the Doge's palace, from whence he escaped to Paris.

The Ca' overlooks the small square of Santa Marina, nearer the Rialto than San Marco. As with the nearby Santa Maria Formosa church and square, these appeared neglected (even if the restaurant on the former was overpriced yet full) much of the day and night, and bereft of allure. A logical novelty of Venice is that it often lacks visible landmarks. You wind around alleys, under tunnelled passages and suddenly it's a tiny piazza or a vast square, a dead end at a canal with no railing, or a memorable vista of gondolas, water taxis, and motorcraft under clouds or gray skies, full of churches and fading facades. While many illustrations, painted or photographed, display Venice as very colorful, we encountered chillier weather, so I was glad for the change in temperature, although the humidity as I expected persisted. We even had to bundle up for the first time since Ireland. Around us, whether sporting man-buns or scarves, mini-skirts and leggings or wool overcoats, chic pedestrians strutted.

We ate at Mani, a little pizzeria that turned out once we got our bearings on the same route we came in on. Full of tourists as anywhere, but the food was fine. Lots of British, lots of noise. By the time we ate, and left, the lines were out the door and we were glad that the stereotype held for early birds.

I tried finding other news, but except for a BBC segment that kept covering Africa, no matter the language, news seemed all about Paris. Instead, I peered at the two maps I had, as they did not match in the streets covered, as they changed every twist and turn across the city's labyrinth, and tried to get a spatial sense. Once I imprint this, as elsewhere on my thousand miles driven in Ireland and the thousands of steps in Italy, I can function better. Not that I don't make a first-timer's mistakes, still.

But these were fewer. After the ghetto, we crossed a bridge and went into the flow. Look around you and see where the others walk. Out of a square, therefore, you get the hang of the main direction, even if it is a three-foot-wide cranny, it will expand into a street lined with shops and restaurants. The fish market offered a lot I'd have loved to try, and the vegetable vendors enticed Layne's eye too.

The stickiness of the climate persisted even in cooler times, so we headed back to our room. Later, we sought out the Basilica of San Marco and marvelled in the dim twilight at every inch covered in gold tile. The present structure is over a thousand years old and claims to have the body of the evangelist, stolen back from Alexandrian infidels. As in Florence and Siena, the darkness inside made the church more rather than less appealing, although to the finicky smartphone snapper, probably not. We sat in the side chapel awhile, taking it in, among worshippers. No craned neck or diligent archivist could do it justice. Plastered and fussed over, it symbolized the enviable position the city occupied, a portal for the plunder from the failing Greek empires and Ottoman successors, combined with the crusading avarice and the financial acumen under the Doges, and their uneasy terms of rule.

Somewhere along our walks, we'd seen on the Calle Guerre a cat mask that reminded us of Gary. That proved too big and too pricy, but the owners ran a studio making such for carnivals and movies. Ron Wood had shopped there, a small cutout of a newspaper on the front door noted. We were able to give a photo of our black-and-white feline to the painter, and she a day later produced a small papier-mache replica, sans green eyes, of our companion. Layne had to protect it, so she bought an owl-patterned bag to do so, and with the room left over, found an orange leather purse to suit her. I completed my magnet collection; Venice was by far the best and the cheapest of vendors for souvenirs. Even if I supposed all else was much ore, as all had to be brought in by dolly carts and porters. We made the same check-out mistake at another CONAD, forgetting to weigh the onions and tangerines, but a stop at the grocery stand across the lane on St. Lio near our hotel made up for that.

That second night, we had intended to find a more Venetian place to eat. But the "oldest" such restaurant near the cat artists did not appeal as much as the Osteria Antica ai Tre Leoni. The fish there was outstanding, and the gnocchi the tastiest we'd had. Layne watched through a gap at a Chinese couple. They never looked up from their phones, they slurped their noodles, they never conversed.

We talked, and she asked me if I'd live in Venice. The waiter at that moment came with our food, but if you want to know, I'd say, yes, if I had a lot of cash for upkeep. I'd also "divide my time" with Siena. Or maybe Lucca and Ravenna but they must wait for a return ticket and a cheap exchange rate. I'd read in Tim Parks about his adopted Verona, and Layne wants to visit the fashion and design mecca of Milan. For me in my romantic daydreams, the seaside of one location and the hilltop of the other balance well. As for Ireland, I keep responding that I have not as yet seen enough to call it, but somewhere in na Gaeltachtaí entices me. I'd take classes there to bring my Gaeilge up to fluency--even if my Californian accent would likely never vanish. So I imagine an ideal retirement.

Layne remarked from the moment we saw the Campo dei Fiori in Rome how the country instantly resonated with her. She warmed to its food and its ambiance, and indeed the weather did her well. She looked radiant, walked until she could no more, and loved window-shopping and dining (well, sometimes, but far more often than in Ireland). For me, I guess it's as atavistic as it is Layne as she surmised to her "swarthy" complexion ("olive" may be more anodyne) and her Levantine attraction. My skin enlivens and my nose sniffs out the turf. My older son, as I entered the house back home the other night, marvelling how it smelled outside of fires and chill like Ireland, sniffed, "you mean, like shit and sheep"? Deadpan. Perfect timing. He inherits my mordant wit and his mother's culinary joy.

Our final full day in Venezia, although we were "churched out" as Layne accurately diagnosed our affliction, we walked to the Scuola de San Rocco with its splendid fifty-plus Tintorettos. Too much for me, but Layne admired their contrasting colors and imposing angles. The wood carvings in the choir stalls intrigued me more, each contorted and realistic. The church across the lane, where we'd later reward the fiddler who'd been playing all day into the night, featured more of the same, as well as the Basilica dei Frati. Since about 1230, Franciscans have preached there, and the mish-mash of tombs, plaques, paintings, and ornament proved engaging if confusing, as again, the efforts of centuries combined into a jumble. Consider the reliquary, with so many tiny labels affixed to so many little bits of bone and skull that they were illegible. Some lacked any identification. Oblivion is their fate, perhaps, as holy relics and pious crafts, unless scholars better skilled than I summon miracles.

For the quotidian demands, pizza and pasta satisfy me. At our second pizzeria, Pommodoro, as avoiding beasties and birds means carbs abroad, we sat next to an Antipodean couple with a very well-behaved and articulate two-year-old, Rowan. They told us they'd been holed up in a Paris hotel for days, and were glad to have gotten out. In retrospect, I am glad Layne and I made it out of Istanbul before the subsequent tensions between Turkey and Russia. But I might see Turkey one day. U.S. security currently advises travellers now to avoid "crowds": how a tourist does this is a mystery.

Our departure, this time with a porter, and the train proved smooth. Again I contended with an Italian newspaper on political parties and Parisian terror, and we stayed in Rome at an Hilton airport hotel. Its plugs had been bashed into the wall by countless chargers, its staff seemed indifferent, and its ambiance was undistinguished. But unlike in Dublin, we could walk to the terminals. I watched a channel from the Middle East. Women in hijabs praising Tide. Pampers. Pert. KFC. "Pearl Harbor" played, as I tuned in on a scene of American sailors drowning under CGI Japanese bombardments. It seemed ill-timed and ominous, given the global jitters. Layne and I found a Cuban station. A young woman with a lovely voice even as an opera-phobe I liked sang as cats (again) or kids in masks (again) as such cavorted without reason. A video followed, an elderly folksinger with "Amigos" as his pals kissed the camera lens to show off their certificates from school or work, not sure which. B/w photos of them as younger comrades on labor details or at parties contrasted with them now. This was followed by a documentary on native plants. I wondered how long such fare will fare in today's Cuba.

Up early, we left on Turkish Airlines. Layne had calculated that one-way fares saved us a lot, so we flew counter-intuitively from Rome to Istanbul, and then back from Istanbul over the polar route to LAX. Our layover plunged us into a maelstrom, complete with a vast bazaar as chaotic as that outside the terminal, I feared. I later read that a Detroit woman on a layover here in 2013 had vanished, found dead in time, or not in time. (She "scuffled" with passport officials there, never a wise idea in this Midnight Express realm.) For my needs in time, there was one unisex toilet open in the whole wing. It had the standard functions and it was clean enough. Around me, half the world trundled past, until the near El-Al-level of a security triple check slowed us to board. I stared out a window by the gate, the strait not far away, trying to find which of the minarets and domes signalled Hagia Sophia.

On the flight, I learned from a documentary that there are at least eight grand mosques in the city. So, I had no idea which I surmised. I needed to stay awake to fight jet lag, so much of the marathon fourteen hours were spent gazing at the screen. A documentary about invisible Rome, another on Istanbul, another on owls. I chose rather than Skyfall to watch Goldfinger. Layne called up Boyhood for the fourth viewing, but I opted for the one Irish film, Jimmy's Hall, Ken Loach's biopic about leftist James Gralton's attempt to import jazz and modern mores into 1935 Leitrim. It tried, but could not rise above its conventional showdown of scandalized parish priest and indignant activist. To its credit, it did feature Jimmy back from Depression NYC to lecture his flock on the dangers of what we could relate to as avaricious bankers and precarious labor, and it attempted to complicate a simple story of good rebel vs. evil clerics with finally a little nuance. But I realize the love scene, that had been rapidly terminated with "the other woman" lamenting in gauzy dusk, cut to the next day without transition. Turkish censors made sure everything we watched was "formatted." I wondered what the well-upholstered, glaring old women under scarves watched on their little screens under hawk eyes.

We came home to find a dead bonsai (Nestor could not handle SoCal drought) and a dying cat. Gary had held out but three days before our arrival, he lost his appetite and retreated away from humans. We spent the equivalent of a flight and took him three times to the vet, but the fourth time was his last. I held him until the end. His green eyes gazed out, and his fur remained soft and sleek. One of the best memories of my Venetian promenade was seeing a cat-and-dog chess set, all hand-painted.

Window displays in Venice's small lanes prove magnificent. Paper, pens, fashion, glass, leather, crafts. I kept lingering over the faces on the little porcelain pets. They almost made me cry. They conjure up innocence and play, childhood and dreams. Impractical as a chess set nobody even would play with against me, expensive as it was, it represented a loving attention to art and beauty--even dignity. So, our mask in Gary's honor proved prescient. It will hang in the room where we loved him. 

To Florence

Florence boasts the most beautiful women I've ever seen. Sure, a subjective affirmation. But you walk the sidewalks, shoved aside by imperious girls who step out of Renaissance paintings.And Layne's the one who pointed out their ubiquity. Not that I had not noticed already. A pale shoulder draped in blue lace at the Pitti, a green-eyed, pale, auburn woman whose eyes looked through and past mine as we passed by the Arno, a blonde clad in white lounging in front of her jewelers' portal on Ponte Vecchio.

In some cities, it's odd. Prague and as I'd see at Istanbul (at least its airport and on the sixteen hours of flight home would reveal), feature statuesque model types. I reckon until menopause. Then females shrink to gnomes. But in Italy, elegant women resist gravity, nowadays in tight jean-leggings that in the quaint parlance of my youth, as Latina mothers clucked, "would lead to a yeast infection." They strut alongside salt and pepper husbands, fit and cossetted, scarved against the slightest breeze.

Not that a breeze may grace this city, its straight (relatively) grid from Roman times as a military outpost, in more crowded months. I looked at Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Venice in its 1959 large-format edition, and its b/w photos revealed Il Duomo and the nearby Piazza Vecchio in front of the David replica both with about three people, a hundredth of those present even off-season when I waded into the crowds there. Still, McCarthy complains about the heat, the tourists, the poor food, the triple stinginess, envy, and pride that native son and exile Dante characterized of this defiant city.

I found it loud, graffitied, dirty, and brown. Certainly, the contrasting black and white stripes of the Duomo, the Santa Croce, and San Miniano all resembled the Senese cathedral, but they possessed less of its charm. Instead, they all sat among the affluent avenues and the poorer sections, so close that the roofs nearly met, where Vespas roared and trucks thundered. As McCarthy notes, that scooter is named after a wasp, and that sound and that of police sirens filled every restless night for me there. I felt lucky that I could close the windows of our flat on the V. del Colonnia, and that it was not summer, which at least when McCarthy wrote, apparently hosted three places with air conditioning.

When we got off the train from Siena, we noticed people praying at a little chapel. Florence features the same enormous edifices as any old European center, but it feels less intense than Rome or Siena. Perhaps the medieval Guelph-Ghibelline factions, the power of pope vs. emperor, was to blame. The dome of Il Duomo rises, and the Palazzo Vecchio's tower, the same balance as in Siena, but for the Florentine vision, they lack the natural prominence on a hilltop promontory. Instead, in a vista that McCarthy compared to stolid Boston, the clerical and the secular contend in a dispersed panorama.

Our first afternoon, after settling into our second-floor (or is it first) rented flat, we scoped out the local area. Away from the touristed center, we walked past the 1870s synagogue in grand Middle Eastern style. Surrounded by a fence, its gardens looked inviting, but the price of admission seemed steep. The armed guards and airport-security level anti-explosive doors (also seen in Italian banks) attested to the eternal animosity against the community, as did bullet scars from the fascists. The Nazis plotted to blow up the compound when retreating, but partisans foiled the plot. Florence's blackshirts held out against the resistance even after the Allies occupied the city, sniping at victors.

A modest kosher restaurant and a Chabad appeared the only visible evidence of a Jewish quarter. We decided to keep looking for lunch, winding up at a modern place without any distinction, served by an indifferent immigrant waitress. The television kept playing a political meeting and a sports update. We passed near Santa Croce the university for "foreigners" where Amanda Knox attended, and around there, boisterous packs on study abroad shouted in American or whispered in British accents.

Shopping at CONAD, we forgot that produce had to be weighed and tagged beforehand, so we held up the checkout line. In broken Italian and English, I tried to explain to the cashier that back in L.A. (she asked with a trace of condescension where we were from), the scales were embedded on the belt. Still, Layne was happy to prowl the aisles, and the beer and wine were amazingly cheap, even if other items weren't. We decided to concentrate on eating in rather than out after an underwhelming fish dinner where we were relegated to the "foreigners" room alongside a trio of transatlantic academics, a student and his uncle, and a black tourist asking insistently for a variety of house wine that "rossi" did not match. We tried as was my wont to use our Italian, but Layne and I differ. She reasons that service staff have jobs to do and little time for a foreigner's stumbling baby talk in their native language. Give in to English and move along. I, despite my dire attempts to try Gaeilge and learn Italian on Duolingo, figure it's both good manners and good practice to attempt the native language at first. I am not sure which seems right, as efficiency and etiquette appear to clash, but it's a valuable discussion.

After I wrote this, I learned that one more renowned that either Layne or I suffered similarly. "In reality, in Venice I’m barely able to ask for directions on the street, a wakeup call at the hotel. I manage to order in a restaurant and exchange a few words with a saleswoman. Nothing else. Even though I’ve returned to Italy, I still feel exiled from the language." So confesses Jhumpa Lahiri in the new New Yorker, on her attempts to "Teach Yourself Italian." But she persisted, n.b. Layne et alia.

Around us, nonetheless, wherever we went, we saw English on every menu. I wondered, in the land of the tiramusu (literally pick-me-up), why the phrase "pick-up" was in Italian at the airport, and why so much of our language crept into advertising, and I suppose if my hearing was more acute, speaking. I champion local languages even if I lack fluency, but as a bearer of the global lingo now, I also note how, if one meets a throng of Chinese, Germans, Africans, Indians, and British daily, one serving them will likely have to default to the same basic survival English that my Italian imitates.

Our first full day, after skimming Rick Steves' guidebook left in our flat, I concurred with Layne that after so many masterworks, so many museums, we'd be best to settle on a handful of less frequented sites. Our first was a few blocks away, but in such an unprepossessing front that we missed it. The Dominican convent of San Marco hosts the longtime home of Fra Giotto, and we loved its upstairs dormitory. He painted cells for each resident, and there are subtle differences even if the same sacred scene was depicted. I tried to step back as the wings on the angel of the Annunciation glittered, but with suddenly ten minutes to closing (at barely past mid-day), I failed to situate myself precisely.

Dashing into the library full of manuscripts, pitying the fate of frenzied friar Savonarola (he had two cells rather than one there, before he was burnt in the Piazza della Signorina nearby, an ironic bonfire of his vanity after all he fulminated against), and wondering how cold the cells got and how they eased summer's searing for friars clad in heavy white habits and black mantles, we enjoyed our hurry.

I include this painting, even if it is displayed at the Pinacoteca in Siena, as an example of Giotto I admired. I saw this in a textbook of Renaissance art. The strange image reminded me of an attentive student of the Pre-Raphaelites and Giotto, Stanley Spencer. Baffled by the scene, I looked it up.

William Caxton's early English version of the Golden Legend lists a nameless servant of Pope Felix, who ruled eighth after Gregory the Great. The man suffered a "cankered thigh." An Ethiopian was buried in St. Peter ad Vincula, and his "fresh" corpse enabled a transplant by the two saints, patrons of the church where he served. See The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian

Next, we headed south into an old neighborhood even by local standards. Casa di Dante was for me a must, even if I remained skeptical that this site was the real deal. Nearby at least, the Alighieri family lived and he was born. The exhibits were straightforward, about the herbal expertise this encyclopedic poet-scholar demonstrated, about the battle of Campaldino in which he fought, and about the impact of his famous writings. The displays tried their best with few primary sources extant. The small scale was welcome, even if sparse, compared to the vast exhibitions we'd viewed.

We ended our triple effort after an invigorating snack at an enoteca-artisan (yes) niche behind the Uffizi, where we'd spend a chunk of the next day. Over the Ponte Vecchio, into the Oltrarno, the other side of the river reminded me of Rome's Trastavare. Artisans (for real) worked in little shops on leather, furniture, and crafts. Gradually, we climbed up the slope to the vista at Piazza Michelangelo. There we paused for breath, and a few hundred yards north, we crossed a busy street to trudge up more steps to San Miniato. This abbey occupies the oldest outpost of Christianity in Florence. On a place where the city's first believers were buried in what is a shadowed, redolent terrace, legend tells us that the namesake martyr took his head from the arena, crossed the Arno, and marched up there.

It was twilight. Lights popped on down over the city that spread out below. Inside, it was very dark. A side chapel had been illuminated, but by the time we headed to it, it too was devoid of light. Founded in 1018, the Olivetan Benedictines still lived here; I caught a glimpse of a tonsured monk picking up prayerbooks in the choir stalls. I thought we made it for the chanted Office, but again as often in Italy, my timetable was not that of the hidden reality around me. So, we made the rounds of what felt a venerable sanctuary, and the shrouded nature of it made it feel antiquated, and formidable.
Marble, stone, gilt: the ingredients of so many edifices. Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad grumbled why the beggars outside so many did not turn their efforts towards the keepers within the holy precincts. As often, my soft heart for such Catholic splendor jostled with my hard head about wealth.

We dined at our flat, happy to eat pasta, to drink Tuscan red. I found RAI's classical station and let it play the same familiar songs the station back home did, never with much originality. The first news of the latest Paris murders filtered in, but solid reports were lacking at least in English, from our limited perspective. Our internet was iffy as usual and so we settled for resting our tired feet at last.

Draped at its base by a French tricolor, his right arm banded in black, the replica David stood. The Uffizi required us to undergo security, but the lines went smoothly and the exhibits flowed along. As I teach the Botticelli "Primavera," I took a chance to shove past the selfie-stick tour guide mob. Up close, it did not reveal anything I had not noticed before, so I peered at the manner in which the artist created the toenails of his characters. Rick Steves' guide had pointed out an insight I did not catch, that the joined fingers of the dancers represented another level of the nuptial message, the obvious.

Steves estimated two hours for the place, and he was right. By the time you make the whole horseshoe upstairs, in a well-designed layout, you are weary. Below, the "foreign" painters jostle against blue backgrounds in what feels a basement, so the Flemish and Spanish and French masterpieces lose clout among a lot of lesser Baroques. As with the featured Italians here and at the Pitti Palace, as Steves cautions, picking out the hits from the misses is difficult for the unaided eye. But Rubens' "Portrait of Isabella Brant" stood out, emanating radiance, as if no spotlight was needed.

So, we walked rather than strolled past many on the lower floor, and so did many fellow gazers. The later centuries, frankly, don't wow me as much. After the major works dazzle, it's all aftermath.

The rest of the day, we shouldered aside those same visitors as we tried to move forward under the arches next to the Arno. A wonderful promenade, but you risk your life being pushed off the walk into traffic. McCarthy bemoaned that the Via Romana took traffic across the Ponte Vecchio, hard to believe, into the area where thousands crowded. At least, like Siena, some stretches were clearer.

Night found us back to stroll near the arch of the Republic. McCarthy dismisses this as awful, and the district as poor. The first may be debatable, but the second is now untrue. The Via dei Servi runs as straight as a Roman road, where high-end stores flaunt shoes, dresses, and purses. While my Italian stay failed to uncover any of Berlusconi's "velines" who "reported" evening news, or the at least R-rated ads that Tim Parks claimed festooned major city merchants, the Calzadonia models certainly looked fetching in a store that had many branches, or else each one kept luring my male gaze thither.

Our final morning, we made it to the Pitti, across the river. It occupies a garden only of gravel. But its contents rival its more famous counterpart. Cluttered more than the Uffizi, I found for once the lower level more intriguing. We had less time to linger, as our train time pressed us, but the romanticized Arts and Crafts tinged paintings of domesticity, love, and rural life from a century ago pleased me, although there were too many patriotic murals of the battles for independence against the Austrians.

At the Florence train station, we had a little time. Layne and I alternated watching our bags. Next to them, Italian children cavorted brattily. I suppose the low birth rate means, as in China, that offspring are spoiled more by elders and parents alike. There's a massive Feltrinelli bookstore there, and I browsed its English-language shelf but failed to find any enticing titles. So, I walked up and down each terminal, but failed to find the chapel. Perhaps I confused it with Siena's station? Still, feeling as if I was a little watched given the edgy mood of security, I found a week-old newspaper abandoned, to practice my Italian. Thus prepared, we left the Arno for the never-before-seen prospects of Venice. 

At Siena

The train was jammed on Sunday afternoon. Upon arriving at the central Rome station. Layne found out our packet of reserved tickets procured online were partially invalid. One had needed to be printed out, no cellphone image, but the others had not. It did not matter much, as she had to stand in two lines for nearly an hour while I stood stolidly. I watched the hustle. Immigrant men, mostly younger but one very grizzled, tried to chat up travelers who looked foreign like me or simply bewildered like more. I expected they wrangled tips, but I could not see cash exchanged. Some of them "helped" at the ticket machines, others pointed to the right platforms in the distance, and both yelled at an Italian pair, as if an older man and his son, who appeared to commandeer them. I leaned against the back of a chrome rail, tried to meditate on the transience of transit, and watched the numbers slowly climb on the electronic readout until Layne's was called. Two nuns had been before her, but she was seen first. But the nuns left, I noticed, having been served, while she still lingered.

On the stifling train, we settled into the first seats we could. Layne's suitcase being too heavy to hoist, we set it in the doorway nearby for the moment. An old woman glared at us from her pink iPad across from us. Then, we had to move. We learned in halting English that all seats were reserved. We tucked our bags as best as we could by the diner car and went a few cars' length down, to find our seats. I tried reading my Italian lessons on my Kindle, determined while in linguistic boundaries to struggle along. I made it through a short piece on the Balthus exhibit we'd just seen in the in-train magazine.

Past Bologna, with its post-war housing towers, until we changed for Siena and headed into the sunset on a much less congested train. Soon we got our taxi and landed at the Camporeggio, the steep steps that faced the Alma Domus. A converted convent next to the house of St Catherine of Siena, this austere hotel nonetheless was set out well enough (if a no-nonsense booklet prohibited food brought in, not that it had a microwave or mini-fridge let alone mini-bar anyway) A fantastic view. A vantage point many stopped at to look uphill at the greenish black-and-white Duomo cathedral's nave and steeple to the right, the peak of the Palazzo Publicca in the center, and what must have been a square block tower of the Salimbeni fortress edging over the brown, earth-colored houses with green shutters that made up the intact medieval core of this former republic, and still a "commune."

Siena occupies a slanted city center, as no ground (as the Duomo's builders found) is that flat for long. Il Campo itself tips in as if a modest ampitheater, while the slopes of the city core rise so steep above the miniature "valley" of Fontebranda, lower down the steps of the Camporeggio, that it's quite a hike, although a short climb, up to the ancient arched ways of the Via della Galluza or Via Fontebranda. Around there, as I learned later from Siena: The Gothic Dream, Catherine was born to a dyer and a washerwoman. Until recently, the arches below the Alma brought water to Siena. and from these humble beginnings, the girl who at sixteen vowed to join the Dominicans became a correspondent and counselor of the mighty, named in 1970 the first female Doctor of the Church.

For such a compact city, Siena boasts nearly twenty "condada," or local guilds who compete in the famous horse race at the Palazzo, the Palio. Our first night there, strolling the streets that can be confounding in their similarity and curvaceousness to the newcomer, we decided to eat at the first place that looked appealing. I never had risotto as delicious as I did at Il Taverno di Cecco. On the dark lane named after Cecco Angiolieri, haunt of a local poet who never made it into the Tuscan pantheon, I later learned from the book above that this was the lair of La Civetta, the Owl's guild.

The next day, fortified by the hotel's muesli and yogurt if not much more, I found while staring at my shoes awaiting Layne's emergence from a gourmet shop that my stalwart Croatian walking shoes were fraying on the other foot as well as the one that a kind redhead glued to hold back the danger back in Drogheda for free. I despaired, but we found a Bata store, and I purchased grey suede desert boots. I'd have liked the Italian green ones we saw in another window, but these were about 40% less. Although I learned after the fact they were made not even in the EU but Bangladesh, unlike others at Bata I'd peeked into, they held me up. A shoemaker the clerks directed us to glued my other shoe's crumbling rubber sides back for two euro, but I figured this attempt was as doomed as its sole mate.

But the panforte Layne bought on the Piazza Independenzia proved a true boost to my spirits. We saw the baptistry of St John the, uh, Baptist at the Duomo. We looked at a majestic painting of an ascendant Jesus, while angels' baby faces twisted under his weight below his feet, peeking up from the orange clouds. A crypt revealed fragments of frescoes, and the sanctuary itself took me in by the individual busts of hundreds of popes high over the nave. Like R. Crumb's many progenitors of the patriarchs in his illustrated Book of Genesis, the artist took pains to make each a real, distinctive face.

The ambitions of the artists commissioned to make the Duomo the cathedral without equal in the late Middle Ages nearly succeeded. But, only ten out of the fifty thousand inhabitants survived the Black Plague, so they had to scale back their plans to extend the nave in another direction. We climbed up, after touring the museum. inadvertently having entered the stairwell, the Facciamente. This is the remnant of what would have connected this retaining wall to the extant sanctuary in the distance. From it, we looked down on our Alma Domus' window and much more. Although not as tall as the Palazzo's soaring tower, given my feet were developing blisters, we concurred that this was enough.

Our dinner that night at a little place just around the corner from that domicile, named after the Il Compaccio for which the passageway was known, was more nouvelle cuisine, but we liked it. Our friendly server and we talked about our cats and dogs, and the meal was tasty and elegant, if far more affordable than at home. Our wine, a red Il Paggio from a Castelnuovo Berardenga vineyard nearby, tasted far more expensive than ten euro. For an hour, a night at least, we pretended we lived here.

The next day, we needed to do laundry. Having passed a place while we visited the Pinacotecha Nazionale, we returned. After the bargain price of a four euros brought us a surfeit of the most complete collection of gold-tinged altarpieces, frescoes, paintings, and sculpture from Siena ever, we needed a break from so many breastfed babies, pierced virgins, upside-down crucified, and grumpy saviors. By the way, one of the easiest jobs ever must be an Italian museum guard. Grab a plastic seat, pick up your paperback (those Einaudi editions are elegant) or cradle your tablet or smartphone. You're set, sitting for the next few hours, and barely casting a glance up. For the automatic video whirs and sense detectors emit klaxons any time you accidentally lean in (sorry Sheryl Sandberg).

Tasty pairs of panini and potato pizza by the slice accompanied us as we sat later on metal chairs ourselves a few yards away. We kept our eyes on the laundromat, as a decidedly sketchy character seemed its purported attendant. I needed to stretch, so I sauntered up a steep incline off V. S. Pietro.

It took me sharply up to the Via San Quirico, into a neighborhood nearly empty. Many dwellings seem deserted, for no windows allow evidence of life, but the heavy doors do open or are left so now and then to afford glances into dark interior passages. Behind them, immigrants lived, families played, and children, by their toys sometimes resting in entrances, thrived. What was it like to live in such an old place? The prices in a tellingly titled German-named real estate window selling it seemed retirement or second (third?) homes to European gentry were very steep, but these were for villas. I supposed the upkeep on such as these flats in the city, like the ones we stayed in at Rome and would in Florence next, was considerable. How did the Moroccans make it, selling selfie sticks to us?

After resting, we took another walk, this time to the Camollia district. We looked at the mummifed head of St. Catherine at the massive church of St. Dominic which looked down on the Alma Domus, another monument to that Order's might, we passed the Piazza Antonio Gramsci, and we entered the auto zone, for the heart of Siena is blocked off--although taxis, trucks, and a suspiciously high number of cars that are neither still shove you aside on its cobbled thoroughfares nonetheless. After I had to dash into a thousand-year-old church that was once home to Templars and still now the Knights of Malta's sway, I imagined the pilgrims who wore out their shoes on these same steps. We found a dusty place, a cozy relic of the 1970s hippie trail, but its pasta and house wine satisfied us.

That edifice from the Crusading era, and the fervor it represented, lingers in Siena's shadows. These may entice those of us who visit, but closer attention reveals a haunted and disturbing resonance. When I got back home, I checked out from the library a 1999 scholarly study of the preacher whose sermons were celebrated in his hometown. Inside, The Preacher's Demons includes one of the two pieces paired by an artist whom I admired for his odd geometry at the Pinacotecha, Sano di Pietro.

Although most of what he painted seemed conventional (more Madonnas), I admire the angles and composition of two depictions of St Bernardine of Siena, one at the Il Campo, the other in front of the Church of St. Francis. (Gloomy when I visited, brown stripes barely visible in the murk, paintings indiscernible, its vast convent now the economics and law part of the municipal university, a plaque commemorating a Midwestern professor who lectured there for years, after a thesis critiquing Marx. I passed a begging student on the way down the V. del Rossi, but he was gone on my return, so I gave my change to a shawled woman playing the accordion on the Banco de Sopra from whose tables, broken if the lenders proved unfaithful, our term bankruptcy originated. The world's oldest bank survives here despite scandal, and has always been a formidable patron of the arts in Siena, too.)

Off the Via Salicotto, a sign points to Sinogoga Ebraica. On a sign nearer Il Campo, the latter word was erased. Plaques outside the door commemorate two events. The first, those murdered in 1944. The second, the burning of the ghetto in 1799 by an "Ave Maria" riot. Franco Mormando of Harvard recounts the terror that Franciscan friar levelled upon his triple threat. His axis of evil revolved around the Jew, the witch, and the sodomite. We marvel today at the splendid sights at which he summoned the faithful, but who is there to notice the beggar, the busker, the alley to the little shul?

In Rome

Our Rome landing found us at the revolving baggage terminal. Electronic ads for a luxury Swiss watch kept changing. A happy family in Manhattan in some elevated townhouse. A happy father showing his son the skyscraped skies from a similarly elevated corner office suite in Singapore. A happy father in London leaving a black cab to show off to his son his brand-name watch. These all symbolized and commodified the bonds that cement us, apparently, in this age of global consumption. We share in that guilt.

Adding our widow's mite to that sum, thanks to a cheaper euro-dollar exchange rate. we waited to spend our euros in Italy. I got to watch those ads so often since I waited in vain for our second suitcase to join mine. But, Layne's luggage had been left behind with that of a few other of our Aer Lingus passengers back in Dublin. So, we left the terminal later than expected, dealing with red-tape and claim forms. We were driven into the city by the friendly couple of women who ran the b+b we stayed in there also ran a few others, and we figured they made a handsome living off what seemed an unending stream of travelers. They offered a welcoming flat, charmingly laid out, and admirably located. To get there, we passed the Synagogue and congestion north of the Tiber. It looked as if London with beige concrete and similar graffito.

Rome does not reveal its iconic views easily. As we would find in Siena, Florence, and Venice too, you can round a corner or come out an alley to find the horizon suddenly filled with a postcard image. We found our walk-up off the Piazza Farnese, where soldiers guarded the French Embassy. In front, big concrete tubs designed by Michelangelo, but to me still looking like tubs or planters, sprouted fountains. As I peered in, I saw the back of six heads in the distinctive habit of the order founded by St Bridget of Sweden in her church occupying one side. Restaurants sprawled. The flag of the Cypriot consulate filled a window over a hair salon, a tiny druggist where three clerks all glowered at Layne when she went in to buy some cosmetics, and the inevitable pizza stand. Near the Campo dei Fiori, where poor immolated Giordano Bruno's statue sulked over Moroccan vendors tossing up rubber lights and slammed down squishy toys emitting a squeak onto the pavement, we could hear the commotion in our room from a restaurant's kitchen from a site we never placed on the ground floor. It kept me up every night, the dishes clatter and the glasses crashing, inescapably Rome.

For the Eternal City never slept either. Adding to my collection of souvenir magnets, I found one with a Vespa and over its little motor, the Colosseum. This combination epitomized the past and present. Both contributed to noise, and both stood for the commotion which, perhaps as in Manhattan or London, Paris or Tokyo, may entice the hardy and reward the intrepid, but which wearies the rest of us. For the constant huckstering for every other (if we were lucky and avoided eye contact or walked a little away) restaurant got to us quickly. Yet we trudged on and although it was only 23 C, I felt the sun burn my scalp. It was humid, and I was thankful that it was not summer here. For the Chinese with their selfie sticks thronged, and despite very off-season, the easy proximity of Europe by rail, car, and plane to millions of us meant that such centers must never now have a truly quiet season.

We nudged the throngs into the Pantheon first. I mistook this marvelously preserved sanctuary for a tribute to the ancients rather than a Roman original,, so intact was it. I learned on the way back home via an in-flight choice of an engrossing BBC documentary with Michael Scott about the invisible Rome that the concrete layers of the roof allowing a larger space to be encompassed under its grand circle of light let in above than even that of St Peter's came from the innovation of lighter mixtures as the dome rose. I looked up and saw the sky, as if no glass. The god's eye perspective, we were told.

Even the Catholic intrusions and the two tombs to Italy's first two kings could not detract from its might. The buttresses outside illustrate that the discovery the Gothic cathedrals made to let in their own filtered beauty were engineered over a thousand years before. It remains a monument, surely.

The days in recollection from a month ago jumble, but we ate at a place recommended on Yelp as  locals' favorite. Tired after circling around the streets in hopes of finding a nightgown for suitcase-less Layne--and a few minutes from our flat nonetheless having done so at a Jewish-run store that had sold "intimates" since the 1860s--we were discouraged as our server, and all who worked there, pushed aside our attempts to speak Italian to inquire "where are you from?" in English. She angled the Belgian couple next to us, telling her name, Raffaela, and obviously seeking a mention in whatever online review they'd post. My anchovy pizza was fine, but Layne's pasta needed more finese, a fact even my Irish culinary palate could discern instantly. I don't think any of the clientele spoke the native language. Still, we needed to eat, right? After, she sought out gelato and we walked.

There was no television, and the net itself was dicey (as often on our journey), so I read up in a fine guidebook there, The Companion Guide to Rome by Georgina Masson and updated by John Fort.  Its density enticed rather than discouraged me, and I wish I'd have known of it sooner to plan the trip. But, as I reasoned to Layne, I'd rather have less of a forced march through the throngs and more of a happenstance approach, and for her as to eating and me as to sights, this worked out better for both.

The next day, we struck out past the Pantheon. But the St Maria Minerva church and gallery of the Dominicans nearby was for no reason we could figure out closed. As elsewhere on our trip. We headed past the Vittoriana's "wedding cake" palatial grandeur, and a old man in gladiator costume, up the hill to another Dominican outpost, their Angelicum seminary. On the way up, we passed the stark facade of the only proto-Protestant sect to survive the medieval times, the Waldensian church. Now its acoustics hosted not a dissident preacher, but performances of La Traviata. Next to it was a hotel named Pace Helvetica, and this appeared not a coincidence. At the hill's height, we took a turn into the imperial fort of Trajan's ruins, and without warning descended into the Forum. I suppose I thought of Gibbon, inspired there to write his history, after his own Swiss stay and Roman holiday. But the roads now rise over the structures' remains, so you look down into them as they creep up or lay flat. I always figured I'd be like one on a Grand Tour, staring up into the sky to see those fluted columns.

The sun beat down, so my peering at them was brief. The Colosseum loomed soon above, and so did a subway under construction across the street from it. I imagined what archaeological discoveries awaited the diggers. More touts urged us in "the last tour of the day," but despite our shared desire to peek at the cats, we opted for the cheaper view. We peered through the bars at the inside arena, and after all, that BBC documentary above gave me a fine perspective of the inside, and the interior below. The hydraulics involved, the flooding of the floor, the capstans and pulleys: truly a marvel.

But that came at a price. Half a million animals killed. Men and women mauled to death for the dim amusement of fans. Slaves laboring beneath the bread and circuses. Those who, Scott tells, were too late in opening the trap doors from which beasts popped out to fight were themselves summarily compelled to replace the lions as their instant bait. This cruelty tempered the awe I felt for this site.

We kept going, towards St John Lateran. We reckoned that basilica might host some fine art. But after going quite a stretch up a long incline, and at last entering a street where for a few minutes no other pedestrian, car, or Vespa thundered us aside. we ate late lunch at a cafe where, truly, the locals did eat. So much so it took us a while to get our own meal, a basic and hearty pasta. Revived, we found the basilica closed (why?), but the slight decline down the street past remnants of imperial walls on the left and a hospital on the right led, eventually, to San Gregorio al Celio, as the name indicates, on one of the capital's seven hills. You can even, as I later found out, stay here as a guest of the Camaldolese monks. Not the most peaceful location for a retreat, but a few might welcome a chance to do so in a five-hundred year old setting where the Church has had a presence for a millennium before.

We then threaded down a shady path, into tunnels, with the Baths of Caracella between us and the river, into the park around the Palatine. Passages cut into stone and hills felt much more antiquated than they might have been. The Circus Maximus lived up to its name, as we crunched the gravel and I mused at the horses and chariots that once rushed past. It was good to be away from the urban hustle.

Returning to it to cross the Palatine Bridge, we followed the east bank of the Tiber. Shouts of swallows and martens shrieked, filling the riparian dusk with clouds of black wings. We noticed and so did many. Some women walked under umbrellas. Some cars were entirely pattered in bird crap. We later found out this was not out of the ordinary, but it went on for a long while, disturbingly.

On we went, as the tall dome of St Giovanni Battista stood in for St Peter's until Castel S. Angelo signalled that Vatican City neared. As we waited to cross at the Amadeo bridge intersection, we watched tour buses shove cars into the junction so the buses could turn left. So much for piety.

Whatever slope the historical Vatican was on, we bypassed it down a darker street, named after penitents. For a short time, we had escaped the constant hum, past a church that creeped out Layne. It had a banner proclaiming Mother Teresa and under it, a beggar woman slouched. Congregants streamed out of an evening mass. Not for the first time, Layne logically wondered why Rome boasted so many churches when it boasted already the largest one in Christendom. I guessed that that same proximity to papal power attracted other affiliates, hangers on, and wannabees, much as Disneyland spawns around it more hotels, Knott's Berry Farm, a pirate restaurant, a wax museum, and fast food. Not the most elegant analogy, but from Constantine on, this pilgrimage site meant business for many.

Under the lights, the space in front of St Peter's looked handsome. As it was so familiar to my eye, seeing it up close (we did not go on the tour as it required hours in line and a security check to boot), I marvelled still when we crept up through the throngs of smokers (so it seemed, a bit sacrilegious). I tried to imagine it as a medieval pilgrim, staff and wide hat in hand, a palmer as they called them, who'd walked across Europe, head craned to take in the figures of the apostles atop the facade, and all the saints' statues high over the two arched pavilions gracing it. We had checked into tickets to teh Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel, but even off-season, they were sold out. Barriers prevented us from going in through the exit, as an endless stream of people exited the sanctuary. I caught a glimpse of Swiss Guards behind a half-plywood wall, so I felt my visit was complete. We were jostled by people of every land and shape as I found my souvenir, a magnet with Pope Francis' thumb's up.

Its message was  simple. Even my Italian grasped it. "La carita, la pazienzia e la tenerezza sono tesori bellissimi. E quando li hai, vuoi condividerli con gli altri." Fine by me to motivate. Layne mused about the trinkets that Benedict must have generated, and their mercantile fate, compared to the sales of his successor. I doubt our dour Tubingen theologian profited from bobblehead royalties.

Heading back, we stopped in the San Giovanni church before heading down the way I liked best in my short stint in Rome. Via Guilia was dark, damp, cobblestoned, lined with old walls the whole way. A few artisan shops stayed open. In one, two burly bearded men reclined, each on a divan, reading. It seemed so stereotypical, as did a elderly man I glimpsed looking exactly like Marcello Mastroianni. A younger man strutted in a lavender scarf, many men sported ascots, and when apparently the weather dipped anywhere on the peninsula below 20F, woolly scarves draped both men and women against the dire chill. People did dress better in Italy, testimony to their stylish flair.

We ate baccalao, fried fish but better than that British version with chips, at a famous cafe for it. We drank cheap beer and made a whole meal in basic Italian, for they were about the only items sold. A constant stream of customers came and went, and by the end, the line for a later dinner was out the door. Down the street, three smiling Pallottine fathers, two younger Africans, one elderly Italian, stood in their vestments, maybe after mass, maybe not, to welcome and bless--or was it to solicit alms from--passersby. Somehow this alienated rather than charmed me, and I don't know why.

In the Campo de' Fiori, North African vendors again tossed the lights high and slammed the squeaky toys down. Three of them mocked a competitor, who across from them set up a cardboard table and set out a handful of travel converters. The trio aped and gawped at him, but he gamely persisted. An African woman, in her fifties at least, in a tank top and short skirt, dishevelled, ate a meal on the steps of Giordano Bruno's statue. On the small plinth, where this Dominican friar was stripped, gagged, bound, and set afire in 1600 for many heresies, cans of Foster's Lager were quaffed by reclining couples. I was pleased to see a wine bar or 'enoteca' (the Greek word attesting to the antiquity of such stands) on the piazza named Nolanus, after his Latin name, one celebrated in its Irishness by Joyce.

In the narrow street off the square, a pretty student sold the Communist paper, its headline the perennial one of "guerra." Nearby, a small bookstore with the stenciled hammer and sickle on the stone wall hosted its cabal of bearded youths, huddled around inside. The other end of the Campo, an attractive tall girl in black hair in an American accent kept hustling passing tourists to enter the sidewalk cafe, and it bugged me that each time we went by, we were targeted. I wanted to blend in.

Our last day in Rome to wander, Layne had to eat at a well-reviewed place on the other side of the city. So, off we went. I petted a cat, we strolled up the narrowing streets of Travestere on the other side of the Tiber, and edged up the hill, despite the rush of cars and motorbikes, past monuments to Garibaldi. Great view back over Rome, but it was hot, mid-day and I was cranky. What was on the GPS a half-hour turned nearly two hours. A policeman shrugged as we showed him our destination.

We passed apartment flats, into a decidedly non-touristed working-class district. On we went, despondent, until finally we figured the way to lunch. It did not live up to my expectations, but Layne was pleased. We ate outside on a patio as a large group gathered for their meal, with younger people late and older ones scowling. Pressed for time, and tired, we agreed a taxi was a must back, as our tickets were reserved for 4 p.m. at the heavily advertised Balthus exhibition at the Quirinale. Our genial, blonde, scruffy, longhaired cabdriver practiced his English, about the trouble he had with Russian, as he tried to learn its difficult grammar from his girlfriend, and of his love for barbeque.

We found the Balthus pieces but intermittently engrossing. Each room represented a phase in the artist's career. Of Polish-Russian bohemian-Jewish origin, he excelled at the famous depictions of "The Street" and of course female pre-pubescent awakening, but after that, he settled into photography and landscapes that could have been anyone's. Oddly, the exhibit petered out after showing his brother Pierre Klossowski's and other contemporaries' work. Still the splendid vista over the city from a window was worth the admission, and we neared dusk braving the crowds at the nearby Trevi Fountain. So jammed were its tiers that I was unsure if our coins tossed for us, our sons, and for luck and health made their mark in the water, rather than falling on the heads of our fellow tourists. Our day would end with takeout pizza and the Prosecco bottle our hosts had left for us in the fridge, but first, we headed past high-end stores in the Via Tritone and Via del Corso, glad to find room on the sidewalks, full of shoppers. The Spanish Steps were scaffolded, but I recall the stop I insisted we make at the little chapel of Santa Maria in Trivio. The photo I post above is set there.

Layne and I looked at the tomb of St. Gaspar de Bufalo. She noticed his pose, different than other effigies. Look at his position. He holds his crucifix lovingly, curled up like a cat, comfortably. He seemed a fellow we could relate to, more like one of us than a stiff ecclesiastic. I learned about him later. Son of a baker who worked for a noble, he grew up humbly in Rome. He preached to "brigands," reminding me of a tale I have begun and enjoyed, the first real novel in Italian, Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), begun about the same time as the saint died. In the photo, Bro. Krzystof Surowaniec, C.PP.S., from the Polish Province of the Precious Blood Missionaries, prays at the altar of their founder. I chose this image as it sums up a lot about Rome.

We think of cassocked clergy in pious poses, but fewer walk the Roman paths today as recognizably such. They do good deeds by blending in, so we may not notice them. Perhaps this is more true to their Christ-like mission in a post-Catholic, global, challenging era, rather than standing out from us?

"The vision of blind sleepers such as I"

As readers of this blog know, William T. Vollmann, as a hunt with that search term here will verify, remains one of my favorite authors. Although I find his fiction and essays sometimes too sprawling, and as his fierce determination to remain free of editorial control or publication fends off brevity, Vollmann reveals a restless mind, a vast range, and confident erudition seasoned with moral humility and wise insight.

He begins an essay in the New York Times about the Gnostic scriptures in his typically direct voice: "Have you ever wondered whether this world is wrong for you? A death, a lover’s unabashed indifference, the sufferings of innocents and the absence of definitive answers — don’t these imply some hollowness or deficiency? For my part, the wrongness struck when I was 4 years old. I was at my grandmother’s house, and I saw a cat torture a baby bird." He also, in other accounts, has narrated his failure as he sees it to take care of his younger sister when he was a boy, and how she then drowned. As with me, death haunts him always.

As one who has roamed into Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban, who has investigated the plight of the poor in Asia and in Latin America, who has roamed the rails of America, and retraced the steps of the natives into the Arctic, the Maritimes, the Virginia estuaries, and the Western plains, Vollmann counters the cant or easy pieties of many of his writing contemporaries with observation.

Similarly, although many of his many books find him not taking on belief directly, he acknowledges here its hold on him. "Hoping to understand the purpose of our situation, I visit possessors of maxims and scriptures. Most of them are kind to me. I love the ritualistic gorgeousness of Catholic cathedrals, the matter-of-fact sincerity with which strangers pray together at roadsides throughout the Muslim world, the studied bravery and compassion in the texts of medieval Jewish responsa, the jovial humility of the Buddhist precept that enlightenment is no reward and lack of enlightenment no loss, the nobility of atheists who do whatever good they do without expectation of celestial candy — not to mention pantheists’ glorifications of everything from elephants to oceans. All these other ways that I have glimpsed from my own lonely road allure me; I come to each as a guest, then continue on to I know not where." His writings strive for compassion, cultivating one's patience for poverty and pain.

I understand his search. "Somewhere beyond us is the true God, or Goddess, who calls us to come home. She is calling me now. As I walk my own many-curving way toward death, I can’t help wondering how awake I am. Hence certain Gnostic lines haunt me. Someone beyond this world has named herself or himself the vision of blind sleepers such as I. This voice calls itself the real voice and insists that it is crying out in all of us. I wish I could hear its cry." He, like me, continues to wonder and wander and study scriptures and listen to accounts, even as he feels distant from many.

He is mature enough to acknowledge the weakness of those before us who have insisted that they channel the divine through themselves. "As a corpus, the scriptures are nearly incoherent, like a crowd of sages, mystics and madmen all speaking at once. But always they call upon us to know ourselves." And, Vollmann is perceptive enough to recognize their appeal, no matter our rationality.

(Image: Fra Angelico, Predella of San Marco Altarpiece, The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, Museo di San Marco, Florence. I first saw this illustration in this fine book.)

Suíomh saor ina teanga na h-Iodáil

Chuir mé suíomh saor ina teanga na h-Iodáil ar an ghreasan le déanaí. B'fhéidir, mbéidh Léna agus misé ag dul go h-Iodáil go luath. Tá súim agam faoi a chúltur agus litríocht ó bhí mé ina bhuacaill; is maith liom na fuaimeannaí na teanga agus a chuid bia.

Measaim go raibh sé chomh mar rugadh mé Caitliceach. Ar ndóigh, maireann an-cumhacht ina Vaticáine, Róimh claisaiceach, Dante, agus an Athbeochan ó shin i leith. Iarraidh mé a cleachtadh ag léamh is mó, chomh maith; tá sé níos easca mar tá mé foghlaimeoir amharc ann.

Chuir mé an suíomh seo leis tri scéaltaí do pháistí. Is An Turgnamh Iodailach é. Gheobhaidh tú eolas faoi cláir foghlama ansin fós.

Tá suíomh eile leis comhráite simpli anseo. Is Iris Iodáil é. Tá ina teanga na h-Iodáil leis cúpla focal i mBéarla.

Seo chugainn, tá suíomh leis ceachtannaí go leor ar aisce ann. Is An Club Iodáilach Ar-Líne é. Breathnaínonn sé níos doimhne dom.

Ar deireadh, tá mé ag baint úsáide an ardáin seo. Is maith liom an app Duolingo don Fhrancais, ach níl ag baint úsáide é leis Iodáilach. Roghnaigh mé Mango ar bealach mo leabharlann ina ionad.

Free language sites in Italian.

I found free sites in the language of Italy on the web lately. Perhaps, Layne and myself will go to Italy soon. There's been for me an interest in its culture and literature since I was a boy; I like the sounds of the language and the food.

I think it was due to me being born Catholic. Of course, the great power of the Vatican, classical Rome, Dante, and the Renaissance live on since long ago. I sought lessons to read better, as well; it is easier for me as a visual learner.

I found this site with three stories for children. It's The Italian Experiment. You'll find information about learning programs there also.

There's another site with simple dialogues here. It's Italy Magazine. It's in the language of Italy with a few words in English.

Next, there's a site with lots of lessons for free. It's Online Italian Club . I found it more in-depth.

Finally, I am using these platforms. I like the app Duolingo in French, but I am not using it for Italian. I chose Mango by way of my library.

Ivanka DiFelice's "A Zany Slice of Italy": Book Review

Forced out of her stockbroker's job during the recession, Ivanka DiFelice and her first-generation Canadian husband, David, decide to visit his family's homeland. Their stay, and their eventual decision to resettle there, comprise the series of episodic chapters that make up "A Zany Slice of Italy." I read this, curious about the country as perceived not by visitors but by those who had dealt with relocating there, a more rarely told tale.

This, then, offers a different view than such studies as John Hooper's "The Italians" (also reviewed by me). But it shares its treatment of issues like endemic nepotism, male privilege, female vanity, bureaucratic corruption, the culture of both genuine warmth and instinctive distrust that continue to distinguish Italy. David's relatives, as t.v. broadcasts stories of "violence, racism, unemployment, drugs, and scandals," proclaim "what vastly better lives David and I would have if we stayed in Italy" as "they shake their heads in disgust and yell various saints' names at each news clip." This shows Ivanka's knack for observation. You may not get much detail on actual political situations or facts, but you get a sense of life lived in the villas, beyond the tourist sights--which are barely noticed here.

For instance, the couple's week in Rome is summed up in one sentence, as they are "in total agreement with our guidebook," boasting of the city's fascinations. So, readers anticipating a travelogue will be disappointed. Instead, lots of accounts of their run-ins with the in-laws dominate.

"We soon have to agree with the Minister of Tourism, who declared that 'Italy is like a man driving a Ferrari at sixty kilometers (thirty-seven miles) an hour." But, vowing to remain there and outlasting extended attempts to buy a car, rent a place, buy a place, and negotiate the paperwork for residency, the couple finds brief work as minding children of summer holidaymakers in their adopted Tuscany.

It's not the ex-pat idyll. One may long for more of the sense of Italy's natural beauties (despite the junk heaps nearby) that Ivanka relates late in the narrative. Parts do lag, as like many anecdotes, the telling may regale those in the know more than outsiders to her family, but she sustains a cheerful, self-deprecating tone and she keeps the chapters short to vary the pace. But the food often sounds wonderful, and recipes are added. I liked the telling conversation when David and Ivanka, trying to get out of yet another meal with one of his many uncles and aunts, beg busyness as an excuse. All the more reason to dine out with the relatives, he is assured firmly, as the couple will save time cooking...

It's a pleasant introduction to daily life as seen from a North American perspective, as the couple dares to drive faster, to hang out with the clever and conniving locals, and to offer them a change from mutually held stereotypes. Gradually, the "stranieri giusti" (the right type of foreigners) characterizes the couple, who survive. This will entertain an audience seeking to experience Italy.
(P.S. I was asked to review this in exchange for a copy of this e-book; Amazon US 2-14-15)

Ivanka DiFelice sent me this in reply to my informing her about John Hooper's Q+A in the NYT. "Had I been interviewed (I need to get famous enough!) here is what I would have written:" 

You mention Puglia in your book as a recently popular destination for tourists. What’s an area nearby that people don’t know about yet?

There are lots of lovely places throughout Italy, some with far less tourists than others. However, the most famous sites have all been discovered. Admittedly, Florence, Sienna and Rome are full of tourists but that is because they are beautiful and there is a lot to be seen that cannot be found in North America. The heavily forested Casentino area of Tuscany is lovely with few tourists but while the area is pretty I would not recommend a North American travel thousands of miles to see something he could have driven a hundred miles to see back home. So figure out what you would like to see and don't worry if there are tourists in the area - that is part of the experience and will give you something to come home and grumble about.

Pasta is such a go-to food choice for foreigners. Should it be?

If you like pasta then yes! Pasta is even better in Italy and is served in a variety of sauces which we do not find in North America (wild boar sauce, truffle and porcini) so you can still eat pasta and discover something new. It is also relatively cheap and almost always good. As a side note I have several friends that cannot eat the pasta in Canada yet are able to digest the pasta in Italy. Search the menu to see if you can try something new; even if that means pasta with a sauce you have never tried before.

Italians love to talk about food, right?

Yes, they are absolutely passionate about it - avoid any talk with farmers about their garden - unless of course you have a deep interest in prized tomatoes and several hours to spare. Italians view a "drive through" as a punishment that should be reserved for only the most hardened criminals. 

What are faux pas to avoid with how you dress?

Fashions change so you need to keep up - at the moment I would describe the latest look for men as Homeless meets Zegna (from the head up a man appears to be destitute or homeless; with terribly unruly hair and a long scruffy beard.) From the head down his financial status appears to change as he dons a prohibitively expensive and well fitted suit (except it appears the pants are too short) by Zegna. If you do this look remember to leave plenty of hem on your pants as in no time the fashion will change

For women, as long as you are wearing something remotely immodest you should fit in just fine.

The key difference between Italian and North American dressing is comfort - if you are comfortable go back and adjust something if you really want to appear Italian.

What would be your first response if someone said: “I’m going to Italy next week. What should I do?”

Figure out your interests and what you want to see - then plan accordingly. There is something for everyone in this wonderful land! And don't worry about where tourists are and where they aren't - go see what you want to see and if you don't like crowds try to go "off season!"