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Exiled from Elba

10/25/2017

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts describing a trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy this past July. At the end of my last post, we were about to leave Rome for Elba.

That morning, I woke up in Rome honestly wondering if I would be able to hobble out to the car. It was time to celebrate the wonders of Leukoplast (moleskin bandage.) We had bought a roll of Leukoplast back when we were in the Alps, and initially had thought that the fact that it came in a roll was inconvenient, as it had to be cut into band-aid shapes for normal use, which meant borrowing scissors at hotel desks. But now the point of the roll made itself plain—one could swathe the whole forefoot, or rather forefeet in the case of bipeds. So the people that make Leukoplast know what they are doing after all. Tourism is akin to airplane rides—if you can walk away, things probably went as well as they needed to.

Such is the crazy tourist impulse to “see enough” to justify the trip, when combined with the time constraints imposed by costs and careers. Not that I have a career; being retired, I no longer do. Alex has a career though. But it costs money to travel, so I do have costs. Nice as it would have been to stay a week or a month everywhere we went, we were on the hop: a see-and-flee itinerary.

Thus our lightning run on Elba. We went to Elba out of curiosity. Elba, we found, merited more than a day, a week or a month. A year would not have been too much. Napoleon spent less than a year on Elba before hopping a frigate for the Hundred Days. He must have been full-on deranged. Elba is enchanted.

Joseph Beaume, Napoleon leaving Elba (Wikipedia).

It’s a modest easy drive up the coast on the Autostrada from Rome to Piombino, where ferries depart for the Tuscan Archipelago, Corsica and Sardinia. There are four ferry companies and a schedule crowded with departures and arrivals, and English and French are spoken, so connection to the islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea is easy. These are not the cheapest of ferries, but there is no reason why they should be.

Ferry port at Piombino.

In due course, Elba appears on the horizon.

Elba has more than one port, but the principal port is Portoferraio.

Portoferraio is guarded by an ancient fortress.

The town climbs up from its seawalks.

Portoferraio is charming

Elba has a deep history and an even deeper prehistory. Geologically Elba could be described as a miniature mountain range lifted off the sea bed by two orogenies and an acute volcanic intrusion that seamed parts of the island with iron and copper ore. Elba’s landscape is dramatic. At the dawn of history the island was important for its ores, but people lived on Elba even before history began.

There are precipitous beaches on Elba, with villages located on high promontories, connected by winding roads—exceptionally narrow involuted roads hanging on hillsides above stunning precipices.

Elba’s villages are at altitude. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Part of the explanation for promontory villages on Elba has to do with piracy and slave-raiding. The islands and the Italian coast were hounded by slave raiders from archaic times well into the modern era. The final extirpation of the Barbary Corsairs, for instance, was not accomplished until early in the 19th century. Harbors like Portoferraio on Elba required major fortification and the presence of a warship or two for safety. More far-flung coastal communities had to rely on watchtowers and flight. The hilltop town was a more absolute solution.

Terrace agriculture still persists on Elba, though not on the scale of olden times. We saw numerous abandoned or semi-abandoned terraces. As a practical matter, this kind of agriculture requires specialized knowledge which, once abandoned, would need to be relearned from scratch for terrace farming to resume. One reads that Elba has a long dry season with rains concentrated in the autumn, but also that Elba is very nearly semitropical except at the higher elevations. Island agriculture is within Alex's knowledge base, not mine. I was intrigued by Alex’s speculations that Elba has been and could again be agriculturally rich terroir.

Elba’s roads are nothing short of an adventure. Twenty km or so after we began to drive them, we arrived at Hotel Sant’Andrea. The hotel was brilliantly located. It was love at first site.

Hotel grounds. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Balcony terraces with native cat. The cat had the run of all the rooms.

Our itinerary on Elba was not very demanding. We schemed to enjoy the hotel balcony, drink some of the very best wine I have ever had, and have a nice meal at the hotel (which turned out to be gastronomically ineffable—Chef Sauro is a culinary genius and the wait staff was more like a band of new friends than a wait staff).

Octopus gnocchi: I recommend it. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Room with a view. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

While staring at the horizon, we saw a subtle but unmistakable reminder—well, example really—of the tectonic violence underlying Italy: a perfect crescent of tsunami racing across the calm sea from horizon to horizon, as geometrical as if scribed by a compass. It was just a ripple comparatively speaking, and the undersea earthquake that set it off was not strong enough to feel, but as I say, it was a reminder.

The hotel was a few hundred meters above sea level and we at first thought the walk down and back was perhaps not an advantage; but in truth this was a walk not to be missed, past fascinating little villas, volcanic stone walls, wonderful succulents and other interesting plants.

Example of a wonderful succulent.

Anchorage at Sant’Andrea. Umbrellas and lounge chairs are for rent on the sand beach.

The pebble and sand beach was very popular but I far preferred the stony cape around the corner, where one could lay down on wave-smoothed sandstone and enjoy the warm, sparkling crystal sea.

Cape at Sant’Andrea.

A natural bathing spot.

Wonderful rock formations.

Tempted to invent a myth!

Ruminating on the history of the place, we could almost have fantasized that our iphones would rattle with news from Brussels and Washington of our necessary exile, in the name of all humanity and the best interests of world peace. We too could have been Napoleons, but not make the mistake Buonaparte made in leaving Elba.

But in the upshot, no government or other public body came to our rescue. In almost no time, we were exiled from, rather than to, the island of Elba. It was time to head on to Volterra, a major city of the ancient Etruscans.

Elba receding.

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Sic Transit Roma

10/6/2017

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Alex’s common sense is one of the advantages of traveling with him. Our scheme, once we arrived in Rome, was to walk from our hotel to the Appian Gate, which was not far, and then follow the Via Appia on foot into the city, past the Baths of Caracalla to the Colosseum and Forum, and then continue on to the Tomb of Augustus and the banks of the Tiber as the endpoint of our walk. Then we would take a more looping route back to the Via Appia by way of the Pantheon and the Circus Maximus, and return to our hotel. It was no great distance, though in July with temperatures well over 90 F and no clouds, the walk was not as easy as it would have been in a cooler season.

The walls of Rome.

Porta Appia.

The history of the walls of Rome is a complex subject. The Appian Gate or Porta Appia contains a museum making the subject as clear as it can be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_delle_Mura

Totila, King of the Goths during the last phase of the Byzantine-Ostrogothic War, is credited with pulling down much of the Aurelian Walls in 546 C.E. But leveling the walls of Rome was a massive project that could not be carried to completion. Totila’s reasoning was that Rome without walls would lose its military significance. To further Totila’s plan of rendering Rome irrelevant, the Gothic troops rounded up the last few hundred inhabitants of Rome and resettled them north of Naples. Rome was briefly a ghost town like Carsulae, with no one in it. But in fact Rome remained a vital road junction as the war continued, and armies and people trickled back, the city began to regrow, wall repairs followed and Rome remained a largely walled city into the 17th Century.

Behind the Aurelian-era gate are the ruins of an older gate on the Via Appia.

The Aurelian Walls, built between 271 and 275 CE, enclosed over 400 square miles of classical Rome south of the Tiber River. There were passages on more than one level inside the wall as well as on top of the wall. Each tower was itself a large and substantial building. The top of the wall was broad enough to accommodate a roadway, or to divide into quarter-acre lots for that matter.

Top of the Aurelian Wall: It’s a Very Wide Wall.

We were visiting on a Sunday so there was almost no traffic on the Via Appia until we neared the Baths of Caracalla, where there was light traffic. Sadly, one can no longer find baths at these Baths. Surely there are only a few other brick ruins of this size in the world, if any. The photo below shows a mere corner of this gargantuan complex, which in its entirety is the size of a small town. Built early in the 3rd Century C.E. and completed during the reign of Emperor Caracalla, these were the second-largest public baths in Imperial Rome.

The Baths of Caracalla.

Not long after, we walked past the tour bus entrance to the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. Truly this was a scene from Dante. Though not yet 10:00 a.m., the sidewalk was already a roasting grill. Several hundred people were being sorted out into their appropriate tour lines and given tickets so they could go through the metal detectors and other security one at a time. It wasn’t going to be quick. Honestly, it looked hellish. I didn’t have the heart to photograph it.

Around the corner we found the Colosseum, which has its own ticket complex, as well as another set of double lines for the Forum. The lines at the Colosseum were merely borderline terrible. Near Trajan’s Column we found some uncrowded ticket/security queues, but by then we’d decided that not being fenced in was worth more to us than tickets. We might not have been wild beasts to start with, but we would have turned into wild beasts by the time we got through the lines. It did not seem necessary to line up to stand at some particular spot.

Rome endures.

Hammered to within an inch of its life.

A wreck of time--The Forum of Nerva.

Shades of Gibbon: The Capitoline Hill. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The Column of Trajan. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Wandering around the various Forums and the Capitoline and Palatine Hills, we went into a number of churches. They seemed oddly out of place. The ceremonial center of Rome spent many centuries after the collapse of Roman power as a quarry and landfill. Ringing a quarry with Baroque churches was not something inevitable. It did not have to happen, but it did. It is a feature of the baroque to shoot for the majestic and achieve only excess.

Deep thoughts, these.

The immense Victor Emmanuel Monument, or Altare della Patria, erected between 1911 and 1925, however, didn’t seem excessive at all. Here was unabashed decorative enthusiasm on the correct Augustan scale.

Altare della Patria, Rome.

Rome is a great walking town. You can hardly avoid iconic spots like the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain.

Skyline of Rome from the Spanish Steps.

Trevi Fountain. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

As the day wore on, we encountered more and more people—as we had expected. But when we veered off toward the Mausoleum of Augustus, we found the vicinity of the mausoleum almost deserted. Sadly, the mausoleum itself was under construction. We stumbled into its museum instead. The Ara Pacis Museum houses the remains of the Augustan Altar of Peace from 9 BCE, built into a full-sized reconstruction. The Ara Pacis Augustae is located next to the Tiber River and we surmised that as the structure was pushed over, the fragments had been rapidly buried in silt.

Ara Pacis relief. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The concept of power and the concept of the modern state are fused in the Western mind with the notion of Rome itself. The republican and imperial power systems of Rome, prior to the coming of the Goths, have governed, guided, and fascinated the West for over two millennia. In fact, we might even define the beginning of Western "modernity" as the period when Roman systems of power re-emerged in the West. These systems have in common the ideal of a citizen-state whose members enjoy certain prerogatives not shared with those outside the state. The inside/outside tension and the assumed right of the state to grow and overtop its neighbors, like a plant, and aggrandize other cultures is quintessentially "Roman" in this sense. When the world talks about "imperialism," it is the Roman kind of imperialism that is meant.

Ingres, Napoleon on His Imperial Throne (Wikipedia).

For all their outright militarism, the ancient Romans were more peaceful than the powers and principalities that followed them. The Empire mainly projected its warfare, which was continuous, beyond its borders. Arguably the republican S.P.Q.R. yielded to the Empire only because the Republic could no longer guarantee safety from civil war to citizens living within boundaries of the Roman state. Nonetheless, the idea of the citizen-state never died in Italy. Venice was a republic from birth—Venice rose from the sea as a republic. Other Italian city-states had republican moments throughout their histories. The relationship of Rome and other city states in Tuscany and Umbria and elsewhere was not that of lord over subject.

Musing thus, we headed to the Pantheon. Stripped of its pagan gods, studded with post-ancient finery, and turned into a Catholic church it seemed to have a somewhat mutilated air, its gods stripped out, its niches empty or substituted with Baroque images of saints who had nothing to do with the purpose of the building.

The Pantheon in Rome. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

I would like to say a lot more about the Pantheon but any attempt I might make to catalog the details we saw would contribute nothing. I will confide that the Pantheon is a great deal bigger than it looks, even up close, and especially when you are in it. And a second realization, which was that the builders of the Pantheon probably did not think of themselves as classical and are unlikely to have known that concept. The avid adoption of Greek elements was all very well but the Greeks could not have built a structure like the Pantheon. They did not have concrete, for one thing. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa put the original building up during the reign of Augustus (27 BCE--14 CE). When they asked him how he would like his building signed, he obviously replied “Right in the middle, and carve it deep.” The original Pantheon caught fire and the reconstruction, during Hadrian's reign circa 126 CE, was something brash and demonstrably novel.

The Romans believed that man needed all the gods -- all the help he could get. It’s as true today as ever. Humans struggle inwardly as much as they struggle with the outside. There's a taut pressured border between inside and out. The Romans' answer was the pier, the vault, the dome, to create a massive load-bearing edge between the two, the heaviest way they could testify to the sheer weight of world.

Tiers, Idle Tiers. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

We were fairly exhausted when we reached the Circus Maximus, largely quarried away. I entered the course on the back turn and plodded the length of the stadium. Of course I imagined chariot races. Presumably all visitors to this place do. Roman chariot races mainly used horses, I believe, but the Romans of old would have been just as thrilled with zebras or ostriches. They loved the exotic. A dozen-goat chariot would have appealed wildly to Bacchanalians. I imagined how many cats it would take to pull a chariot around the Circus Maximus—some hundreds, in a gigantic fan-shaped harness, perhaps propelled short distances by catnip or some other lure after a couple of years of chariot conditioning. It would be a long way down the back stretch of the Circus Maximus by cat-chariot. This of course was a fantasy, but one could imagine a team of big Tiberian Stripers that could clear the length of the Circus Maximus and get into the shade of the back streets without a heat stroke. Rome is, after all, a city of cats.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/torre-argentina-roman-cat-sanctuary

After the imaginary race, we sat down across from a parked motor home decked out like a gypsy caravan. I had a plastic bottle of hot water, and I poured it over my head for the evaporation. Despoiled luggage was strewn through the bushes under the trees, alongside occasional bits of broken column. There were some pretty nice campsites for vagrants. We had wandered a street or two over from the Via Appia, in a neighborhood of gated and barred mansions and gardens where the owners probably came and went by limousine to avoid the broken needles.

The presumed vagrants seemed harmless enough and perhaps we were vagrants too in some larger sense. We propelled ourselves along the cobbles by main force, feet and legs numb. As in the morning, there was almost no traffic on the Appian Way. We were refreshed enough by the shade to detour across the park surrounding the Tomb of the Scipios, reaching the Via Latina to come out by a different gate, where we rewarded ourselves with gelato.

(Photo by Alex Mawyer)

After returning to the hotel, showering, and rewrapping our much-abused feet, we collected our laundry, put it in the trunk of our rental, and drove off to the Tomb of Caecelia Metella. This 1st century BCE tomb has been one of the principal landmarks on the Via Appia or Appian Way for more than 2000 years. Apparently, nothing but the family name is known about its occupant.

Via Appia mit dem Grabmal der Caecilia Metella – Oswald Achenbach, 1886.

As things are today.

The Tomb of Caecilia Metella was originally a wedding cake of marble decorations, and the museum inside has collected many fragments. This structure evolved from tomb to post-classical fortification, medieval castle, and lava quarry. For centuries it was a mine-head for the choice volcanic stone that forms the hill.

Details of tomb.

A landscape of tombs. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Judging from the artwork, the Appian Way seems to have been much more crowded with highly decorated tombs in Piranesi’s time. Piranesi’s 18th century visions have touches of fantasy, but there must have been fragments everywhere. A lot of marble was stripped but quite a bit simply dropped off the brickwork.

Appian Way, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, La antichità romane, 1756 (Wikipedia).

The hauntingly beautiful Appian Way is a popular twilight walk for local residents.

Café walled with Roman fragments.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Rome is not an easy place to find a laundromat on Sunday evening. Even the 24-hour laundries are mostly closed on Sunday, as it turns out. We identified a chain that was open and drove across the Tiber and into modern Rome. The laundry was open, yes, but the central control panel that took money and distributed soap was out of order. We hauled the laundry back to the car and drove away, detouring along a massive city boulevard, feeling exhausted. “I’d really like to see another open laundromat and a Burger King,” Alex said. Two blocks farther, the sign for a 24-7 laundromat gleamed pallidly in the night, with a Burger King across the street. There was a single open parking space, and it was in front of the laundromat. So the gods do live yet.

It was 10 P.M. We took turns minding the laundry. Alex minded the laundry first while I went out to get dinner. The young folks packing the Burger King plainly wondered why an American was wandering around on this side of the Tiber. I can only imagine what they thought when a second American turned up 15 minutes later.

This was my favorite part of the Rome trip, because it had real Romans in it. But we took no photos — I guess it was too real for the camera. Clinically, the last time my feet were as beat up as that was after a 30-mile stretch in West Virginia with a full backpack. These were nominally the same feet I started with, but they did not look it.

We had not seen the grave of Keats, in the old Protestant Cemetery next to the Pyramid of Cestius. We had erred sadly in not climbing the magnificent Altare della Patria. Another day, and we would have made it. But we were about to leave Rome for Elba, as the next post will discuss.

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Gary Dale Mawyer has been writing for over four decades, and to date has published four novels, Rockfish, The Southern Skylark, Exemptions, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I., as well as a biographical history, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, and a short story collection, Dark and Other Stories. Gary's writings draw on a wealth of history, lore and lived experience. He has a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Gary is a Central Virginia native with over 40 years of publishing and editing experience. His interests include American and Virginia history, military history, geology, hiking, travel, landscaping and gardening. He is the father of four grown children and has four grandchildren. He lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County.

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