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Ravenna

8/28/2017

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This is the third blog post describing my July trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy. My last post  recounted our two days in Venice. Next stop was Ravenna.
Ravenna, on the Adriatic seacoast, has a complex and fascinating ancient history. In the year 402 C.E., when the city of Mediolanum (today Milan), the capital of the Western Roman Empire, was overrun by a Alaric's Visigothic army, the Roman Emperor Honorius fled eastward to Ravenna. Ravenna then became the final capital of the Roman Empire in the west—and later the capital of the Visigothic and Ostrogothic kingdoms in Italy until the annexation of Ravenna to the Byzantine Empire in 553 C.E. 

​In those days, Ravenna was on a lagoon in the Po River delta, separated from terra firma by miles of undrained swampland and small malarial islets. It was a port city with an important harbor. To this natural refuge, Honorius added a massive encircling brick wall, a state-of-the-art city fortification. Inside this fortification, Honorius raised chickens as a hobby and “ruled” helplessly as Alaric’s army sacked Rome, and then civil war broke out within the Roman mercenary military establishment.


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The Favorites of Honorius, by William Waterhouse. (Wikipedia.)
Alex and I were halfway from Venice to Ravenna by Autostrada when we realized we were missing two important opportunities --  lunch (we found a Famila grocery store) and the back roads. That is to say, the ancient main roads. In mere minutes we discovered secondary and tertiary roads, including a maze of farm lanes connecting the dykes of the modern drainage system. Roads turned to tractor lanes, barely wider than our car, with spindly bridges over deep drainage creeks. Abandoned swaybacked farmhouses of rosy brick sprawled dusty and golden-green under the sun. The roadway swarmed with dragonflies of all sizes. We gradually wandered onto sections of former highway nearly deserted by traffic and reached Ravenna by the back way.
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The wall of Honorius still stands in various guises all around Ravenna, frequently attached to later structures. 
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A large section of Ravenna’s Roman wall was updated by the Venetian Empire into a Renaissance-era fortress, today a city park.
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The wall of Honorius was repaired and enlarged by Theodoric, and repaired again in medieval and Renaissance times, when frequent wall repair was the price of survival. In places the overlapping wall repairs are still visible.
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The lagoon long ago silted in. That, and the rise of Venice, turned Ravenna into a backwater. The old harbor is now a canal, opposite the railway station.

In most of the cities and towns we saw in Italy, the churches and monuments are from what we could call the Catholic Era, which is still ongoing. Ravenna is different; its classical-era core is dominated by the churches and monuments of the Arian period and the kingdom of the Ostrogoths.
 
While the great churches of Ravenna have been Catholicized, the chief glory of these churches has always been their Arian/Byzantine architecture, and above all their glass mosaics. These structures survived intact, as a cluster of some of the oldest Christian churches anywhere, because Ravenna became unimportant, lost its wealth, and became harder than ever to get to through the swamps after the Roman drainage systems broke down and the Roman roads were swallowed in the mire. Malaria took hold. All this was certainly very fortunate. For these structures, at least, if not necessarily for the inhabitants.


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Ravenna’s Old Gates Are Still Landmarks. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Caffe Teodora, Ravenna. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Late in the Day. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
Professional photographers have labored for years to capture the jewel-like quality of the Ravenna mosaics, and failed. Alex and I did the best we could. For a superb job, see the Italy video lectures in the Great Courses lecture series (which my wife and I enjoy via subscription to their streaming service.)
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                                      Basilica of San Vitale. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The Gothic Kingdom in Italy was not particularly barbarous. San Vitale is in many ways a monument to the relative peace and prosperity of Theodoric's reign as King of the Ostrogoths. Construction of San Vitale began in 526, the year of Theodoric's death and six years before the beginning of construction of Hagia Sophia in Constantiople.  San Vitale was completed in 547 C.E.,  as the principal religious monument of the Ostrogothic Kingdom. Its Byzantine glass mosaics are the largest and finest outside Constantinople, or possibly anywhere. The church was the work of Julius Argentarius, a Roman banker and architect who donated 26,000 gold solidi for its construction.

Theodoric achieved a certain fusion of western Roman and eastern Byzantine culture, within the context of the Arian religious tradition of the militaristic and proto-feudal Gothic culture of Central Europe--including protection for Ravenna's Jews. In Theodoric's kingdom, religious harmony prevailed--arguably for the first time in the Christian west and certainly for the last time over the next dozen centuries of on-and-off religious strife.

Very little monumental architecture survives from this period, which alone would make San Vitale a building of immense interest. Argentarius may have based the design on the audience chamber of the Imperial Palace in Constantinople, which no longer exists.
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Architecturally, San Vitale Is Not a Basilica at All. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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            The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, with Sarcophagi of the Last Roman Emperors.

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, across the courtyard from San Vitale, is an older Roman structure. It is a somewhat mysterious building, originally attached to the Church of Santa Croce built in 417 CE as part of the Imperial Palace complex. Santa Croce and the last Roman imperial palace fell to ruins except for this structure, which may have originally been the oratorio of the church before being adapted as Galla Placidia's family mausoleum. Without going into the extreme complexities of the last western emperors and their Visigothic family connections, it is clear enough that the mausoleum contains three sarcophagi. These are traditionally believed to be those of Emperor Constantius III, Galla Placidia's husband; Empress Galla Placidia herself; Emperor Valentinius III, Galla Placidia's son; and her brother, the Emperor Honorius. That is one more emperor than there are sarcophagi and both Galla Placidia and Honorius are also said to have had mausolea in Rome under the current site of St. Peter's. On the other hand, tradition holds that Placidia, or more accurately her embalmed body, was wrapped in her imperial regalia and seated on a throne above the central sarcophagus for more than a millennium. That would account for why four emperors had three sarcophagi. It is safe to say no one is entirely sure.

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Galla Placidia's sarcophagus, by tradition, barely visible in this photograph behind the people of today.

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                         Almost inconceivable elegance: mosaics of the mausoleum.

526 C.E. was a fateful year in Ravenna architecture, when one considers the monumental Roman/Gothic mausoleum of King Theodoric. Outwardly it is not so different in form from a traditional Roman mausoleum but its single-stone domed roof, the somewhat brutalist buttresses around the dome, and the interlocking of the stones of the arches are all unique as far as I know. Theodoric's mausoleum was outside the walls, next to the harbor, and may have been a lighthouse as well as a mausoleum. Considering the achievements of Theodoric's kingdom and the rather darker age that followed it, this could almost be called the mausoleum of what might have been, if Arian Christianity had survived as a third path between Greek and Roman Christianity.

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A Walk to the Old Port Leads to the Mausoleum of Theodoric, and to a Bee.
Back inside the city walls, we found ourselves at the tomb of Dante.  Dante Alighieri finished Paradiso in exile in Ravenna, and died there; his tomb is adjacent to the Church of San Pier Maggiore.

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“Whoso laments, that we must doff this garb
Of frail mortality, thenceforth to live
Immortally above, he hath not seen
The sweet refreshing, of that heav’nly shower.” 
Dante Alighieri, Il P
aradiso. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

​Ravenna has long been a city of poets. Writers as diverse as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oscar Wilde and Marguerite Yourcenar have loved Ravenna. George Gordon Lord Byron lived in Ravenna for two years, pursuing his love affair with Teresa Gamba. He wrote Cain, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and parts of Don Juan, The Prophecy of Dante  and The Lament of Tasso in Ravenna, while accumulating an arsenal on the Via Cavour and plotting with Teresa's brother Pietra Gamba and the Carbonari to overthrow the Pope of Rome. When the Carbonari scheme of revolt failed, the Gambas fled to Pisa and Lord Byron to Greece.
We found Ravenna rife with comfort and delicious food and wine. Munich, Belluno, Venice, things had been getting almost a little hectic. This was a chance to relax. 
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Ca' de Ven: A Tasty Spot for Wine Lovers. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

As we left Ravenna--something no reasonable person would want to do--we stopped at the Basilica of Sant' Apollinaris in Classe, consecrated in 549 CE and illuminated with yet more of the astonishing Byzantine glass mosaics. Classe was a strategically important part of the Roman port of Ravenna and is now a silted up archeological site.  ​

Sant'Apollinaris in Classe was yet another architectural donation of the Roman banker and architect mentioned above, Julius Argentarius. It is a true early Romanesque basilica in form, with side arcades and the classic timbered roof. Unlike San Vitale, which is rather dark, Sant'Apollinaris in Classe is brilliantly lit by the sun.
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Sant'Apollinaris in Classe: A Noble Basilica. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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         Byzantine glass mosaic showing St. Apollinaris and his sheep. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

St. Apollinaris was legendarily made the first bishop of Ravenna by St. Peter himself, and performed many miracles prior to his seemingly unnecessary martyrdom. His relics are no longer in his home church. In 856 C.E. the relics were removed from this undefended church to the former Church of Christ Redeemer Inside the Walls, a smaller church dating to 504 C.E. which had been the Arian palace chapel of Theodoric. The former palace basilica still stands and is known today as the Basilica of Sant' Apollinare Nuovo.
Having left Ravenna, and its ancient sights, we drove on to the Mediterranean seaside at Mare Vista. This stretch of the Adriatic coast boasts mile after mile after mile of the most inviting beach resorts.
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Alex examining seashells.

And there we found Cnidarians, expiring on the sand!
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A putative Cnidarian of some sort, wafted ashore on the gentle tides of the Adriatic Sea.

A morning spent wrestling our way through coastal traffic brought us to Rimini, an important city and the original terminus of the Via Flaminia, or Flaminian Way. ​  
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Augustan Gate of classical Rimini, known as Ariminum in Roman times. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Much can be said about this road, a sine qua non of Roman history. Little did we know that the Via Flaminia would come to haunt our imaginations, as we drove over and under it, pulling off occasionally to drive on it, or to look at broken up scraps from it, on the way from Rimini to Gubbio.

Somewhere on that route, the fate of the Ostrogothic Kingdom was finally settled by the death of Totila, mortally wounded in the Battle of Tagenae as a Byzantine army led by Narses temporarily reconquered northern Italy for the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. The exact location of the battle and the burial place of Totila are both unknown.
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Totila,  by Francesco de' Rossi - Musei Civici di Como, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23063927
Late in the day we reached Gubbio and parked next to the ruins of the Roman theater, said to have been the second-largest theater in the Roman Empire. In the 1st Century, it was as large as a football stadium and could seat 15,000 people. Later the theater was creatively deconstructed to help build medieval Gubbio.
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Gubbio’s Roman theater  (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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We had reached the heart of Umbria. My next post will describe our experiences in the fortified truffle city of Gubbio, and the food of Gubbio.
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Venice

8/14/2017

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My 8/3/17 blog post described the beginning of my July trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy. This post recounts the sights and scenes of our all too brief two days in Venice.
A tremendous amount has been written about Venice: about the complex past of the city, Venice’s legacy of independence, democracy, and multi-chambered government, the social instinct for legalism and the accountability of power. Venice’s great maritime empire ruled the Mediterranean for centuries. The Venetian Republic, unsurpassed in the arts and sciences, independent of Rome as well as Byzantium and the Western Empire, became arguably the first capitalist nation. Venetian inventions include matters as diverse as insurance and stock trading, the world’s first secret state police, and the world’s first foreign intelligence system. All this was accomplished while holding back the devouring sea. The Venetians styled themselves the Most Serene Republic, but the Venice of history was a place of strenuous activity and ceaseless progress. Her trading network was arguably the life blood of Europe for nearly eight hundred years.

From Belluno the Alps drop rapidly to the coastal plain of northeast Italy. After an hour's drive on the Autostrada we reached Venice. We parked on the Tronchetto, a modern parking island with an exit off the Autostrada. We then took the public water bus, or vaporetto, to San Marco.

All of Venice’s six sestieri or districts can be reached on foot, though not the outlying islands. 
Venice in 2017 appeared at first glance to risk being trampled. The summer crowd pouring in and out was phenomenal. One might speculate that Venice needs fewer tourists, and when considering the great achievements of this city in the past, one might conclude that the world needs more Venetians. We outsiders don’t have the realism for Venice—but when your streets are canals that connect with the open sea, and jellyfish can swim up the canal past your door, realism may become second nature.
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View from the Public Vaporetto, entering the Grand Canal. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Entrance to St. Mark’s Square, Venice. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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In and Out the Human Tides Flow. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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The Grand Canal.
As we quickly found, Venice in summer is quite hot, heat-stroke-quality hot, and Venice is an absolute labyrinth. We also fairly quickly found that the tourists and to some extent the tourist services themselves could be minimized somewhat, just by walking off into the maze. A few twists and turns later, crowding ceased to be a problem. There is nothing to see in Venice as marvelous as the city itself. 
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Venice street scene. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Streets of Venice
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Twilight and night indeed suit Venice well.  (Photo by Alex Mawyer.) 
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Venice at night. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.) 
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Battered reminders of power.
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Byzantine emperors in porphyry, looted from Constantinople.
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 One of the anonymous mailboxes for inserting denunciations to the Doge’s secret police for examination. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Noble graffiti in the Doge’s marble dungeons.
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The lion on the Arsenale gate. 

The lion above, on the Arsenale gate, is the only Venetian lion sculpted holding a closed book, representing the Gospel according to Mark. All other Venetian lion sculptures hold an open book with the words Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus -- a reference to the legend that an angel appeared to St. Mark as his boat was passing the sandspit that later became Venice, en route from Aquileia to Ravenna. The Arsenale is the source of the modern word arsenal, and this building was the headquarters of Venice's formidable navy. Hence the phrase Pax Tibi was considered inappropriate for this gate. 
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The home of the Venetian galleys that won the Battle of Lepanto. 
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The Doge's Private Courtyard and side door into St. Mark's cathedral. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.) 
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Ceiling panel in the Doge’s Palace. In the endless power struggles of the palace, and with the dungeons ever ready to swallow the losers in the name of Serenity, the nobles of Venice undoubtedly knew first hand what it meant to twist in the wind. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Ceiling panel in the Doge’s Palace: Mercury bringing the news of the world to Venice. In return, Venice is offering Peace. Part of the “Gifts of the Gods to Venice” series. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Venice: unlike any other.
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Though neither of us thought to photograph it, one of the great pleasures of our brief stay was our hotel room. Venice offers luxury if luxury is what you want, but we opted instead for old-fashioned. Our room was the sixth-floor garret of a late medieval building, with no air conditioning and no hot water. Instead we had a corner location with windows and a balcony looking out over the rooftops of Venice. At night we opened our unscreened windows and the balcony doors, and let the fresh sea air blow through. So beautiful under the moon that it was hard to go to sleep. The moon on the rooftops behind St. Mark's Square may turn out to be my most vivid and enduring Venetian memory, from our all too short visit.

The best modern history of Venice I know of is John Julius Norwich's History of Venice, and those unfamiliar with the rise, long triumph, and ultimate decline of the Venetian Empire may wish to read it. Venice, though not physically large, is one of the world's great cities and a lifetime studying Venice would not be ill spent.

We left Venice on foot. For 1,200 years or more that would have been impossible, except by wading and swimming the lagoon. But the Tronchetto parking island off the Autostrada is connected to Venice by a causeway. Rail and vehicular access to Venice only became possible late in the 20th Century, and changed the nature of the city. It's a long walk, if you chose to enter or leave Venice by foot. The winding mazes of lanes and squares were never intended as thoroughfares; quite the opposite. But walking out gave us a last couple of hours to meander through the seemingly enchanted city of Venice.

The next post will cover our two days in Ravenna, just an hour or so down the coast from Venice.
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Munich to Belluno via the  Dolomite Alps: An Impressionistic Scramble

8/3/2017

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Morning Train to Munich
​Early in the morning on July 2, I landed at Munich’s airport, the Flughafen München, following an 8 hour red-eye from Dulles. I had arranged to meet up with my son Alex in the late afternoon. He had been in Munich for several days. The airport is about 40 minutes from the city center and from my immediate destination, the Hauptbahnhof, or main train station.  I took the train in from the airport. Knowing that Munich is a city of over two and a half million people, I soon wondered if I had gotten on the wrong train and was headed for some other city – maybe Nuremberg, or Berlin.  Munich steadfastly refused to appear on the horizon. Even after arrival, Munich had the appearance of a town rather than a city.
After four hours of sleep in a silvery modernist hotel room well-lit by corner windows and a nice balcony, I went out into the rain to explore the city. Days are long in Munich in July. The air was cool but not cold and the rain came in well-spaced bands of downpour with intervals of misty drizzle. 
Munich’s historic core is a roughly thirty-minute walking radius of the Frauenkirche, a postwar-restored Gothic-Baroque cathedral. It was Sunday so there was no shopping, but people came out to walk the town anyway. Munich is a beautiful city. 
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Frauenkirche steeples
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Skyline with Frauenkirche
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Pedestrian Mall
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Neue Rathaus
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St. Michael’s Church: A Baroque Response to the Reformation
St. Michael’s Church, an early Baroque masterpiece, shows the imperial past of Munich. A long list of Wittelsbach dynasts is memorialized there, starting at the end of the 16th century.

The rain squalls seemed to be spaced about one church apart. I next fled into the Peterskirche, the oldest Munich church, which was also repaired in the 20th century. The most interesting relic on display was the skeleton of Saint Munditia, inset with gold and jewels and dressed in silk netting. Munditia, martyred circa 300 AD, was originally entombed in the Cyriaca catacombs along the Via Tiburtina in Rome. She’d only been dead for 700 years when the Peterskirche was first built. She came to Munich as a Counter-Reformation gift in 1675.
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Photo byy Andrew Bossi - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2897314
Young beheaded Munditia is an odd and somehow fascinating sight which would have raised the admiration of Edgar Allen Poe — seemingly the quintessence of decadent morbidity, but the survival of her remains in this condition is a clear miracle.

The rain momentarily stopped, so I left the Peterskirche for the Odeonplatz, where I was driven into the Feldherrnhalle and then the Theatinerkirche by the rain. 
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Feldherrnhalle
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Theatinerkirche
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Lions of the Feldherrnhalle
Allied bombing devastated Munich in the last great European war. The modern city would be inexplicable without this fact. The city was to some unassessable degree rebuilt to show its losses along with its past. No outsider or tourist is very likely to understand what today’s Muencheners really think about this. The Feldherrnhalle, an altar to war which was not hit by the bombing, is a reminder in stone that history is not blind and, unlike the nearby Unknown Soldier from the 1914-18 war, does not sleep. 
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Tomb of the Unknown, Asleep Since the Great War

The rain having paused, it seemed the time had come for a dash up Ludwigstrasse toward the university. However, before I could reach the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, the plaza where I was to meet Alex, the skies opened once again, and I took refuge in yet another huge church. This one reminded me of some of the abandoned churches of Brussels, except the door wasn’t locked. The vast interior was empty, dim, and not yet completely restored from its midcentury damage. Some interior walls were still faced in naked brick. In my drenched state I failed to appreciate this structure fairly. I retreated outside to the porch, and noted a classic example of heavy blast damage on the brickwork of the building across the street. Munich has lots of secret sights and odd corners. I later learned that this was St. Ludwig’s, the architecturally influential neo-Romanesque university parish church built by King Ludwig I in the early 19th century.

I could not realistically get wetter, so I resumed tramping through the downpour to the university. Finally I waited in the atrium of the main building, a lovely and well-used space, gradually steam drying, and also wondering if a person could catch any ancient diseases wandering around European cities in the rain without a handkerchief.


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A convenient meeting place
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Stately lecture halls
This turned out to be my favorite place and my favorite moment in Munich. LMU had the somewhat musty bookish odor that inevitably accompanies serious learning. The air was thick with residual determined thought. Waiting for Alex, I must have spent the best part of an hour reminiscing on my own college and grad school days haunting the Rotunda and the Alderman.  

Then Alex showed up, it stopped raining and the sun came out. We walked through a corner of the Englischer Garten, certainly one of the finest public parks in the world. 
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The Monopticon in the Englischer Garten
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We went on to revisit the downtown area, after which we indulged ourselves in beer and sausages, sauerkraut and dumplings. Alex had been in Munich for days, I for hours. Neither of us had seen enough. Munich is a bewitching city, and if we had not had immediate plans a good hypothetical argument could have been made for spending the rest of the month in the sleek metallic hotel room I had stumbled into. But we had plenty of immediate plans: for instance, to cross the Alps. It was time to look for our elephant – which turned out to be a very nice blue Opel with lots of electronics and a good engine.
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The Dolomite Alps
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Geologists divide the Alps into over two dozen distinct mountain ranges. It is heartbreaking to encounter the Alpine Massif for the first time and realize that one must just as abruptly leave it. We chose an autobahn route across Austria, past Innsbruck and into Italy over the Brenner Pass, then turning off the main highway at Sciaves to Chiens and Dobbiaco, or Toblach. The route from Dobbiaco to Cortina D’Ampezzo would take us through a big unit of the Dolomitic Alps. The Dolomites began in Mesozoic times as a series of coral islands and the undersea sedimentation around them. This lost island-scape was edged into tectonic collision 65,000,000 years ago and has since ridden up over another geological plate to reach peak elevations of over 10,000 feet above current sea level.
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The Alps rise abruptly. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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The road to Dobbiaco. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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The Alpine valleys of the Tirol, or Austrian and Italian Tirol as they currently are, have a long and complex history of independence and annexation. As landlocked islands in a sea of mountains, the valley systems have different traditions and local histories that disappear into the mists of time, different foods and specialties, and different dialects of Austrian, Ladino, or Italian. Driving through, however, one only senses that Tirolean custom is relaxed and familiar with visitors. It’s a bicyclers’ and hikers’ paradise in the summer.  

A week or a month would be well spent here, for day hikes and short drives and general amazement. The paleness of the Dolomites reacts to light almost as readily as water. The mountains and lakes change color from minute to minute under the play of the clouds. We parked at Lago di Landro, or Dürrensee, and gradually worked our way on foot for a few miles into the Parco Naturale Tre Cime.  


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Trailhead below Lago di Landro. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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We attain a certain elevation.
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Exploring an unimproved jeep trail (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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The trail threatens to get severe (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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The view improves
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This could go on indefinitely.
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​We found a natural limit to our perambulations, defined by the time needed drive to Belluno and the belief that we would want to look at Belluno when we got there. That is how we came to stand on the doorstep of Tre Cime, vow to return, and then drive away — southward through the famous resort of Cortina D’Ampezzo and the hill towns below Cortina, the road gripping the edge of one precipice after another and the hill towns gripping the road, each decaying town strung out onto its own promontory, natural fortresses most peculiar in the waning light.

Fortifications were already not scarce on our route. South European history has some resemblance to a Hobbesian war of all against all, and our route across Austria had already brought us past ancient stone forts, medieval castles, defensive Renaissance towers, walled villages, and finally World War One cement blockhouses. The road down into Italy revealed the same tendency to fortify, only more so.

Modern Belluno was a pleasant-seeming but unprepossessing stringbean-shaped town along the Piave River. Ancient Belluno, where we stayed, was built onto a promontory over the river and still retained some of its medieval and Renaissance fortifications.


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Belluno: A Fortified Basilica. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
We looked with interest at the medieval and post-medieval overbuild on Belluno, knowing that below are ruins dating to Etruscan times and even earlier.
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Belluno’s Old Gate. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Belluno’s Downtown Gate. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Belluno at Twilight (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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We See Our First Venetian Lion (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
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Former Palazzo in Good Company

We were now in the former domains of the Most Serene Republic, Venice, whose power once stretched up into the Alps. We had a pleasant dinner without a tourist in sight, excepting ourselves of course, went back to the hotel replenished, and slept very well.
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