Blog Posts

Three Consecutive Days in the Garden

6/7/2019

May 28, 2019 -- Day 1
It’s been nine months since I've composed a blog. Right now, the topic on my mind is the amount of hard physical labor requisite for summer gardening in Virginia.

Elizabeth Lawrence once wrote, about gardening in North Carolina, that after spring anything requiring summer tending or watering had best be left to die. I don’t know what this says about weeds, which riot in the heat.

It’s still May, just barely, but we are getting into the 90s daily, which is breeding cycles of thunderstorms. One of last year’s iris beds, which drowned last year with the loss of most of the irises, sprang back with a dense crop of ragweed—a plant so soil-invasive I effectively lost the bed. I mean the soil in the bed. The soil can still be used as a dirt supplement for the lawn, but wherever I put this dirt, the ragweed will try to come back with it.

Actually lost the dirt.

Remains of the Bed's Stone Walls

I've now dismantled the stone walls, and I'm shaving the soil down to original ground level. This can only be done in the morning. I don’t necessarily feel that energetic in the AM, so I’m lucky if I get started by 9 AM. Somewhere around noon it becomes hard—and questionable—to keep going. Maybe the shovel will work itself, if I hang onto it. When an empty wheelbarrow feels as heavy as a full wheelbarrow, it’s time to quit.

At least one verdict is in. One can actually lose the garden soil itself, not just the plants. Weeds have been defined as “flowers nobody wants.” Weeds could also be defined as “most plants,” or every natural plant in the area. Gardening is about establishing a remarkably unnatural plant situation, often behind walls or fences, and then pitting it against the natural world in a life-and-death struggle. It comes as no surprise that even the Romans practiced gardening, as Vergil described in the Bucolics — selecting an imperial elite of plants, and marching them out to dominate the Italian world. But really everybody does it. It’s how we eat.

We have two gardeners here. Karen works in the vegetable garden. With two of us there is some economy of scale; we can garden more than twice the area either of us could conceivably manage alone. Karen’s vegetable garden is the back angle facing south. A portion of it is seen in the photo below, where the lens is starting to fog up in the noon humidity.

Part of Karen’s vegetable garden

The humidity on the camera lens renders this snapdragon somewhat mythological

A garden is meant to be in harmony with the universe. It is not usually meant to be a criticism of the universe, or an attempt by the gardener to show the world that he can do better than the universe. A garden is half appreciation, half offering, and half thanks — among many other things — as much as an act of naked aggression designed to enforce plantation colonialism.

Anyone trying the plant game will soon water the ground with her/his sweat as God ordained. Whatever one's garden dream is, it will not be achieved. Instead there are opportunities to notice what happens. There has to be time to sit and watch events unfold.

So in the way, jars

Roses

May 29, 2019 -- Day Two
It is now a day later than it was in the preceding paragraphs, and the dirt is gone from the salvaged garden space.

Raised bed removed

It is time to sit, as I mentioned above, and see what we see.

Warm seat, iced tea

There’s no telling what we might feel in the chair. We might experience “monkey mind,” an Anglicization of the Zen expression for ungoverned thoughts that leap from branch to branch chattering like monkeys. We might wish we actually had real monkeys in the trees, to entertain us. We might realize that real monkeys would tear everything up. We might realize how rich nature is in destructive things and Darwinian wastage. We might be just as happy reconsidering the fate-weaving, intermittently purposeful gods of western classical times and search for oracles. I certainly don’t know. I might not actually have any recommendations at all.

But I will say this is not necessarily the most comfortable chair.

Deep mahogany-red Asiatic lilies

May 30, 2019 -- Day Three
While I fantasize about nature, I know that every being in nature is implacably hunting for protein, minerals and water so it can express itself, generally at a cost to other beings. The plant/animal divide is stark, but there is a bridge between the two in fungi and mildew. One of the masks nature wears is the appearance of countless forms of life; another, that the forms are quantifiable by scientific observation and not countless at all; and yet another mask, the illusion that it just happened by itself.

The ragweed ravaged raised bed has been replaced. A miniature blue star spruce, a creeping cryptomeria, and a dwarf black dragon cryptomeria have been riskily rescued and transplanted from the raspberry grove that overtook them two years ago. Here is how it looks today.

Redone bed in the midday sun

Black raspberries rapidly ripening

I hope the miniature evergreens understand that their transplantation was kindly meant, and view it as an opportunity and live and flourish. Since they are plants attached to soil and water and air, it would be silly to credit them with beliefs like destiny, or emotions like irritation at being transplanted. But plants have an understanding, each to its kind; we might even say they constitute an understanding expressed in their forms. We humans actually have no idea what their understandings are like.

I’ve recalled a better definition of what constitutes a weed. I don’t recall whose definition this is, but it’s a very good one. Weeds are plants that thrive invasively (in effect, reproduce well) in disturbed ground. “Disturbed ground” could be used as a more pessimistic definition of what a garden is. Gardening disturbs the ground profoundly and keeps it disturbed, giving wild plants that like that sort of thing a real chance to flourish explosively.

Returning to yesterday’s chair talk, one of the things I sometimes experience as soon as I sit down is desperation. For example, I feel some real satisfaction at replacing the old iris bed. But my satisfaction is haunted by the other tasks that need doing in this garden. For instance, a large bed expansion I started last year was sidelined last fall and remains to be completed. Some very nice plants were planted in it, including purple-black hollyhocks from a nearby local farm, and an amazing dragon arum (dracunculus) that I ordered from a plant catalog. But this year, at least so far, this incomplete project has turned half jungle and can only be saved by removing the invading weeds. The time to do it is now. Summer gardening can be absurd.

Is it possible we have monkey mind when sitting in the garden because we actually are… nah, couldn’t be. Laugh if we must!

May 30. Black hollyhocks

A dragon aurum in the weeds

1 Comment

Why There Is a Macaque, or How "The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I." Came to Be

9/5/2018

1 Comment

When I was around eleven or twelve, I used some of my lawn mowing money to join the Science Fiction Book Club. I still have the bonus volume that came with my first order. I subscribed for years. There’s no telling what impact Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination had on my social imagination. When The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere were published as twin novelettes by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1965, I fell under the spell of J.G. Ballard and never escaped.

The most generous offer ever made (Wikipedia).

Captain Edward Ruppelt’s long-lived UFO classic was up front in 1956, bookended with Asimov’s 1955 The End of Eternity. (Wikipedia)

Sci Fi covers were terrific (photo Gary Mawyer)

Science fiction is a way of exploring the future without going there, but science fiction is not all about futuristic machinery; it is a genre of social writing and often takes the nature and future prospects of Civilization as its topic. A capitalized Civilization, because in Sci Fi, civilization is frequently the main subject. Building, maintaining, losing, and if necessary rebuilding civilization is the huge theme taken in hand by countless science fiction works, short and long. Another great theme is an outrageous protagonist surviving in a dysfunctional civilization.

Or not surviving… (Wikipedia)

It’s a daunting tradition and I never imagined I would trespass in the haunted grove myself. But about fifteen years ago my son Edward thrust into my hands an untitled manuscript 30 pages long, framing the mad adventures of Reese Macaque. More than a few people saw Ted’s work and thought it was either deadly funny or too disturbing to be funny. It was a manuscript ambitious past the dreams of English majors, told from inside a startlingly real world, a world disturbingly like ours, and yet backlit with unjustified flashes of hope and aspiration.

For a time Ted and I worked on a short story version of the original manuscript, and Ted produced several more short passages that would most naturally go to other stories. The main artistic question about Rhesus A. Macaque was not simple. How is it that Macaque is a human? Or is he a monkey? As you can see, the main artistic question promptly split in half on us, but both halves pointed in the same direction: is there just one Macaque or are they a kind of thing?

That was how I found myself writing a science fiction detective novel, The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. Detective novels are generally novels of manners. A science fiction detective novel of manners is (I suppose) about social interactions in a future world—and an obvious way to dissect social behaviors in our world. In the case of this book, the society in question is ours, in the year 2296. In this world Yeats was obviously quite correct: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”

That being said, iit was years before I realized that Macaque was science fiction. For a good while I assumed it was a fantasy, specifically a nonsense fantasy in the same genre as Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World or John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, first published in 1930 and still very much in print. Of course nonsense is a very serious business.

Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World.
(Photo by Gary Mawyer)

But over the last few years, I began to believe that the little tales of mystery and detection that Ted and I have laid out in The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. are set in a more-than-probable future world—a world we will in fact be hard pressed to avoid. Though the world of P.I. Macaque didn’t seem likely to be an accurate or literal description of the future at first, I have come to think the present social moment is already close to it. Macaque seems to be on the road to actuality after all. So thanks, Ted. In an act of imagination, or maybe prescience, you created the world of Reese Macaque. We’re its first citizens but I have a notion that in the years to come just about everybody is probably going to have to live in it, whether they read this book or not.

1 Comment

Second edition of Rockfish just published

8/3/2018

0 Comments

I started Rockfish in 1995, substantially finished it in 2002 and published it in 2009. An entire American generation has grown up since I started this book and another generation will shortly follow. Nonetheless, the racial issues portrayed in Rockfish are still thriving in Central Virginia. As recently as the summer of 2017, Ku Klux Klan members and American Nazis violently invaded Charlottesville, causing many injuries and loss of life. Clearly, Americans and certainly Virginians still remain genealogically fraught with themselves, literally on a local level.

Reflecting on local and national events over the past year, this summer I decided to revise and re-issue Rockfish. To a considerable degree, Rockfish is a book exploring how racial identities were formed and originally came into tension in Central Virginia, starting with the British settlement period. The basis of the book is merely history. I wanted to go back and make sure nothing obstructed its original purpose, which is as important now as it ever has been.

Race has meant different things at different times over the last several centuries. Race has never been a fixed concept. Definitions of race have varied from generation to generation for many reasons and we can assume that race, as a concept, will continue to evolve and vary in years to come. Ironically, the characters in Rockfish do not always care very much about race themselves; they are naturally more concerned with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—as most people are. But no Virginia community could escape the scars of slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, eugenics and segregation. Race was forced to matter; and people adapted.

For more on this new release, see my Rockfish page, which includes some added photos of Rockfish, then and now.

The new edition of Rockfish is available on amazon in kindle and print.

0 Comments

Volterra and Siena

12/9/2017

0 Comments

This is the final post 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 leaving Elba for Volterra, in Tuscany.

Tuscany was hot, hotter than Virginia, hot like Hawaii—and seemed dryer than either. Coming past Riparbella we saw a marker for the Fonte di Lepre and almost simultaneously, a good-sized hare, a big stringy one. This sort of thing happens when you travel.

Smouldering Tuscan Landscape Outside Volterra

It was just the same several years ago in Japan, hiking downhill toward the Kumano Hongū Taisha, where Yatagarasu led the boar hunter when the Kumano Deities appeared. To all purposes the same ravens were there today. And here at the Fonte di Lepre was a lepre.

When the boars, eagles, stags, griffins, dragons, buzzards and other animals that form the heraldry of North Italy get tired of blundering into each other and require intelligent advice and a moment of sense, they come round and ask the lepre. We don’t have to wonder about that.

Volterra is not very large. As soon as we arrived we ran around the wall three times like so many Hectors, not so much pursued by Achilles or acting out the Iliad as pursuing our hotel, cleverly secreted away in the narrow winding lanes.

The walls of Volterra

The town remains fortified. It is very much a fortress town.

Long climb up to the middle gate… Alex barely visible… and there is another flight of stairs below this one.

The ancientness of Volterra is right on the surface. The Etruscan acropolis at the summit of the town is a public park as well as an archeological site today—the orange fencing in the photo below marks the dig.

View of the Etruscan acropolis of Volterra from a nearby cathedral tower: the Renaissance Medici fortress is just visible on the left.

The Etruscan gate of Volterra—said to be the only Etruscan arch still standing.

Most of the facing stones of the Etruscan gate are more recent, some of them much more recent, but the core stones of the gate are almost megalithic.

Huge Etruscan wall blocks in this gate.

The upper hallway outside the door of our hotel room had once been part of the Etruscan city wall, so we had a good chance to look at the older stonework quite closely. The oldest stonework generally seemed to be the largest. This may only be a sampling error. The largest stonework should rationally last the longest. But the “oldest is biggest” bias is so persistent that one wonders if there could be potent but unclear cultural reasons why early civilizations found megalithic or near-megalithic stonework reasonable, if not actually convenient, while later civilizations scaled down the blocks in their structures even when the structures were enormous. No answer here.

Newer walls.

We hadn’t really considered what Roman ruins we might find in Volterra, but the Romanized city of the Volterrans was an important place. The old Roman theater and athletic training grounds are outside the walls.

Roman amphitheater and athletic facilities, still in community theater use.

The Etruscan necropolis of ancient Volterra, outside the walls, went largely unmolested for all the long years of Rome and the baronial ages that followed. Just as the Romans built over or through the Etruscan city, the Italians built over and through the Roman city. The Medici fortress dominating the acropolis marked the end of both independence and growth, and Volterra rusticated in situ. The Etruscan necropolis remained irrelevant to all this and not locally interesting until the eve of the modern age, when extraordinarily well timed efforts were made to salvage and preserve the items in the surviving tombs, including the alabaster sarcophagi or box urns in the tumuli.

Etruscan tomb (Wikimedia Commons).

I’m not a big fan of museums but the Etruscan museum in Volterra is worth going to Italy to see. I should warn fellow prospective tourists that the Etruscans are in fact dead. They are bone dead, stone dead, dead as stock and stone. But Volterra is also built out of them, and we noticed in living faces the mirrors of the faces on the sarcophagi—sarcophagi often themselves decorated with mirrors. The Etruscans at Volterra left much, it seems. But there are not many Volterrans—there never had been very many. Modernity has found this town, the moderns being the vastest besieging army ever to tackle the place, overwhelming it in one generation.

We scarcely tried to photograph the sarcophagi. Somehow I felt as if they perhaps warned off photography. Reducing the alabaster or terra cotta cabinets to a 2-D image would fail even more than usual; the carving and molding is deep and tactile. There seemed to be two main stylistic urges, a volumetric style of representing the human form and its draperies that seems at first glance a little crude or disproportioned, and a Graeco-Etruscan style, sometimes carried off with extreme finesse. The boxes may have feet, and the side panels are carved, sometimes in deep relief. The lid forms the bed or couch for a figure of the person whose ashes and bones are inside. Women’s sarcophagi are often decorated with mirrors, men’s sarcophagi with drinking cups. The puffier style of human representation, seen up close, makes considerable tactile sense. The somewhat conflated forms of the ancient Etruscans on their sarcophagi are meant for handling. The faces, all too fleshy, become subtly more real the longer one gazes into them. This bulkier modeling was a fashionable style for many centuries.

In the more Grecian style, the human figures are executed in classical proportions, often with extreme fineness of detail. Both styles frequently reference the Iliad. Having the abduction of Helen carved on women’s sarcophagi was fashionable almost to ordinariness. How the scene was represented varied enormously though, from stately embarkations with no hint of violence to more overt abduction scenes or even scenes with a touch of frenzy. Hand to hand combat between the heroes of the Iliad was equally common as a decoration for men. As Alex said, it would be hard to find a better indication of a pre-Homeric pan-Mediterranean civilization that knew and valued its Iliad reaching all the way to the Outer Sea.

Etruscan sarcophagus in painted terra cotta (Wikimedia Commons).

The archaic Volterrans were doing more than just including literary references on their tombstones. They were claiming kin with the Trojans in their grave imagery. It wasn’t fashion alone that caused this; they had themselves entombed with Trojan motifs because it was the most true thing they wanted said about themselves.

Vergil made the Roman claim to be descended from Trojan refugees famous forever, but long before Rome’s Golden Age the Volterrans also took this idea with literally mortal seriousness. Perhaps it’s likely enough. We know roughly when and where Homer sang the Iliad in its climactic form. But we don’t know when or where the Iliad was first sung. The famous “catalogue of ships” looks suspiciously like the original beginning, buried behind a long and complex explanatory narrative that includes multiple side stories. Homer’s version is explicitly told more from the Greek side but there are Trojan passages. Vergil’s Aeneid is a reprised Iliad told from the Trojan perspective, but there could have been even earlier shadow-Iliads. Can we be sure what version of the Iliad the archaic Volterrans valued so much? Do we even know why the Romans, at the dawn of the Republic, did such a thorough job of forgetting the alphabets of the Etruscan Umbrians and Tuscans? Was this indifference or were there conflicting genealogical narratives that needed to be lost?

We can be fairly sure, though, that Greek refugees bringing an artistic style with them reached Volterra, and their Iliad was surely Homer’s. Somehow they obviously fitted right in.

Though the Etruscan treasures are the glory of Volterra’s museum, their collection of Renaissance painting includes some rare examples. They haven’t wandered far from where they were painted, and retain some of the hauntedness I cannot explain.

Beautiful angels.

Saint Having Beatitudes.

In Arcadia Ego.

Fresco in Volterra.

We left Volterra the next day, after a long morning walk. We were off to San Gmignano, noted for its wine, cheese, and surviving defensive towers.

The Tuscan countryside.

Some of the many towers of San Gmignano.

We were still indefatigably in the land of the tartufo, or truffle. San Gmignano was immensely charming and literally blitzed with fellow tourists.

The local ‘Boar and Truffle’ in San Gmignano.

In due course we reached Siena.

Siena’s city walls as seen from our hotel’s outdoor bar.

And the truth of Siena is that we were stopping there for the night and would do no justice to the place. We would see two of the stupendous things in Siena: the incredible cathedral, and the town square. But mainly we would just wander around reflecting that our Italian idyll was at an end.

Siena: the cathedral.

Portico.

Not the work of a moment.

Town Square: a night view.

Eureka!

It was our last night in Italy. We owed ourselves something to eat. We wandered until we saw a restaurant with a star.

Coucous tossed with lemon juice, parsley and cheese was the perfect opener. Then came the smoked duck breast carpaccio, and our mood changed. Our mood had to change. We were taking this meal much too lightly. We had a good enough table next to the local lawyers who appeared to still be arguing a case, had settled into a fine red, had done the coucous salad with a clear conscience, and had then been presented with an apparent miracle. We were going to have to eat this dish with bite-by-bite mindfulness. The smoked duck breast carpaccio was metaphysical.

I could speak of the rest of this meal, or not. Outside, the dark medieval streets were deserted. Only the hoot of a distant owl broke the crystalline silence as the sommelier, one of the last few people left in the building, unwrapped a cold bottle of grappa from its white linen coif and explained that this bottle was from Udine, was rare, was not the usual thing, was a kind of arcane mad nectar within the known spectrum of the grappa world. I guess we had probably asked, “What is it?” or “Is there anything else you can do to us?” I don’t remember.

The Udine grappa turned out to be everything claimed for it. They say you can’t explain the taste of chocolate or hashish, because chocolate and hashish have no kindred analogous flavors. I would add a third thing to the list: whatever was in that bottle.

But we did get back to our hotel. And then out of Italy altogether. Our mistake, I guess. I had not had the slightest desire whatsoever to leave Elba. But if we had stayed on Elba forever, there’d have been no smoked duck breast carpaccio for us. That’s how things are. You have to keep hopping along if you want to meet the next duck, but you’ll inevitably regret all the things you left behind. And that’s the end of this blog series on our 2017 visit to Italy.

Not in Italy anymore!

0 Comments

Exiled from Elba

10/25/2017

0 Comments

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.

0 Comments

Sic Transit Roma

10/6/2017

2 Comments

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.

2 Comments

San Gemini, Carsulae, Narni and Nemi

9/21/2017

6 Comments

This is the fifth blog post describing a trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy this past July. My last post recounted our stay in Gubbio.

After a vastly too-short stay in Gubbio, we regretfully drove back to the Autostrada and once again loosely paralleled the classical Via Flaminia heading south to Rome.

A sign at Carsulae Archeological Park maps the ancient Via Flaminia, the main imperial road from Rome to the north. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

We were looking for Carsulae, a Roman ghost town, and we chose a route through San Gemini. San Gemini is a medieval walled hilltop town built completely over its Roman past. San Gemini is off the tourist track but on the Via Flaminia itself. The businesses were mostly closed for the afternoon heat when we arrived, but the café was open.

Gate of San Gemini. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

Alex and I spontaneously decided to shoot each other.

The arches help hold the streets up. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

San Gemini’s walls are in impressive condition.

The Autostrada seen from San Gemini. On the hillside opposite is Cesi, Roman Clusiolum, an Umbrian city with arches and walls dating to the 6th century BCE, reinforced in medieval times.

Roman roads were so well engineered that in some places they can be driven on today. The linear ideal suitable for flat terrain, however, could not be achieved in the craggy terrain of Umbria. The Via Flaminia did not cut through or tunnel under hills, nor did it cross water any more than strictly necessary. It wound along the most convenient local passage, which was likely to be along accessible ridgelines, the shoulders of hills and even the tops of hills. This seems counterintuitive until one reflects that every downhill requires an uphill. Local roads may conveniently follow streams but long-haul roads are well situated at ridgeline elevations and may follow the high ground rather than dipping up and down.

There are some mysteries. Where ancient towns of note already stood, stretches of preexisting superior local road must have existed, suitable for incorporation into the main Roman road. This seemed at first to explain why the Via Flaminia climbed the considerable hill of San Gemini. But upon closer examination, at San Gemini the Via Flaminia apparently bypassed a considerable Umbrian hill town and religious complex at Cesi, from which a fairly direct older road ran north—joining the Via Flaminia at Carsulae in fact. Meanwhile, as best I could learn, San Gemini in Roman times was a post stop on the road, not a major town.

The modern roadway from San Gemini to Carsulae—not too modern—scrambles cross-country from one farm to the next more or less along the old Via Flaminia route until it reaches a switchback a few hundred yards due south of Carsulae. There a modern farm sits athwart the ancient road. On Google Maps the route of the Via Flaminia into Carsulae is clearly visible from the air paralleling SP 22.

Map data: Google, DigitalGlobe.

Carsulae, to me, was the climax of the "Roman ruins" aspect of our trip. Rome, of course, is well furnished with Roman ruins, many of which are massive. But I was hoping for something more weedy, scattered in the Piranesi style, with goats instead of tourists. I knew this would not be the case in Rome’s beautifully manicured ruins. I only dared hope Carsulae would be the real thing. To my delight, it was.

Goats on the Via Flaminia, Carsulae. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

We take a Via Flaminia selfie with goats. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Parking lot at the Carsulae archeological park. We had it to ourselves.

Carsulae has a small but indispensable and pleasantly staffed museum. Ancient Carsulae was an elite town that sprang up for the convenience of the great road in the days of imperial peace. Its main claim to fame was its waters; a number of powerful springs well up there (and at San Gemini, noted today for its mineral waters). Carsulae had a large theater for plays and a large colosseum for gladiator and wild beast shows. There was also a big temple of Jupiter. It was the consummate Roman provincial town, with lots of marble and larger-than-life monuments to Augustus Caesar.

Ruins of the Temple of Jupiter.

Remains of the theater.

Marble-strewn ruins of the coliseum. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

The streets of Carsulae. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Vehicle ruts on the stones of the Via Flaminia, Main Street, Carsulae.

South city gate, Carsulae.

Monumental Tomb at Carsulae.

The fate of Carsulae was most curious. After the fall of Milan and the retreat of the late Emperor Honorius to Ravenna, as mentioned in my Ravenna blog, the road to Rome was open. That road was the Via Flaminia, and Carsulae was literally on the road, in a swale surrounded by higher elevations and completely indefensible. As the Visigothic armies began their marches and countermarches, starting with Alaric, followed by the Ostrogothic armies of Theodoric, Witiges and Totila and the Byzantine armies of Belisarius and Narses, Carsulae became uninhabitable. Every army needed its water. Alaric and his army first marched through in 408 C.E. Abandonment at Carsulae probably did not begin until after Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410 C.E. The archeological evidence is that first the buildings along the highway were abandoned, then the middle streets no longer afforded safety, and finally after some passage of time even the back streets became uninhabitable. By 554 C.E. the site was deserted and its villas razed. The surviving population moved into cruder quarters on the less tempting mountainsides.

Razed villas of Carsulae. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

Carsulae was a thrill. We then pushed on to Narni, the Roman Narnia.

Narni in the distance: deceptively flat-seeming, much steeper than it looks. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

Medieval-Renaissance gate of Narni. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

Narnia, or Narni, was directly on the Via Flaminia too, but did not suffer extinction like Carsulae. The site was already inhabited in the Paleolithic. In Umbrian times it was the important fortified town of Nequinum. In the third century B.C. it became known as Narnia.

C.S. Lewis borrowed the name for the fictional kingdom ruled by Aslan the lion in his famous Narnia series.

Early postclassical Narnia on its steep and massively fortified hilltops was not a place that Goths or others could simply charge up and seize. It was not vulnerable. Today, considerable Roman and medieval points of interest coexist peacefully in a living town, one of the larger if not the largest of the Umbrian hilltop towns. And once again the Via Flaminia is seen to climb a considerable small mountain, the best explanation being a well-engineered preexisting road convenient to the accommodations in a thriving city.

The only flat spot in Narnia. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

Alex finds thousand-year-old lions guarding the church.

I would love to go back and stay longer. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

The Via Flaminia in Narni.

In Narni, exhausted and dehydrated, we said goodbye to the Via Flaminia, a route trodden by countless historical personages, and many who weren’t, and now by us. Back on the Autostrada, we headed south, bypassing Rome and Lake Albano. Our next destination was Nemi, ancestral home of the Latins, the local tribe that later founded Rome, whose religious magic was the first inspiration for Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

J.M.W. Turner, The Golden Bough (Wikipedia).

“In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary.” –- Sir James George Frazer, Preface to The Golden Bough.

Nemi seemed hard to find, probably because our satellite navigator failed. My recollection of where Nemi should have been also failed us, abjectly. Alex was obliged to dust off his intuition and navigate the same way Cortez is said to have found the Pacific in Keats’ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer—by “wild surmise.” Wild surmise got us to Nemi easily. Sometimes maps and directions just get in the way.

Fabled Nemi. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

Nemi is a popular resort for contemporary Romans, famous for its crazily sweet strawberries, with many fine restaurants. At the end of the day the town on the crater rim is cool and breezy, a perfect relief from the sweltering heat and humidity of Rome in July. There are cats to look at and the ruins of a very early temple of Diana among the strawberry farms if you feel you absolutely must walk down the crater wall to the lake.

Nemi. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

View of the crater lake at Nemi from our restaurant table. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

I easily win the 'Who Looks Like a Satyr?' competition. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

Nemi from our restaurant table. (Photo by Alex Mawyer)

It was late night when we left Nemi for Rome about twenty miles to the north. Our satellite navigator was still confused, sending us on a twisting suburban route through glaring headlights to the Appian Gate and the Via Cilicia. We pantheistically thanked all the gods that the Hotel Cilicia next to the Appian Way was easy to find, replete with parking, brilliantly staffed, and had huge refrigerated American-style rooms with tons of running water. We were ready for an American-style room, as we gingerly unwrapped the moleskin bandages swathed around our feet and surveyed our compound blisters and stone bruises with pilgrim-like gratification, as many a tramp has done before us. The next day we would see the Caput Mundi, the Head of the World, as the ancient Romans used to call their capital.

6 Comments

Gubbio in Umbria

9/8/2017

2 Comments

This is my fourth blog post describing my trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy this past July. My last post recounted our two days in Ravenna. Next stop was Gubbio, in Umbria.

Umbria is quite craggy above its little rivers. The Via Flaminia, the ancient main road from Ariminum to Rome, bypassed the important Umbrian city of Iguvium, located on a defensible slope above a well-enclosed mountain valley. The modern name of this city is Gubbio.

The Via Flaminia in Roman Times. (Wikipedia.)

Under the empire, Iguvium was safe and luxurious, a rather elite spot as evidenced by the remains of the massive classical-era theater.

Gubbio. Roman theater on the left. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Iguvium, before the Roman conquest, was Ikuvium, capital of the Umbrians. After the fall of the Etruscan League and the Roman conquest of Tuscany, the Umbrians were the next to be absorbed militarily by Rome. Like written Etruscan, the Umbrian written language remains undeciphered. The longest known texts of Umbrian writing are the bronze Eugubine tablets from Ikuvium. After the Roman victory, Ikuvium kept its population and its name.

Gubbio and environs seem to have been prosperous in medieval times. It is said that the city sponsored 1,000 knights for the First Crusade, and the knights of Gubbio legendarily recaptured the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A “knight” as a unit included at the minimum not just an armored warrior on horseback, but also a squire or dogsbody, a stable hand for the horse, and a man-at-arms. Gubbio's 1,000 knights, if an accurate number, would represent a 4,000 man expedition, which is larger than a modern American infantry brigade. That seems a lot for such a little place, but Gubbio was nearly continuously at war throughout the medieval and Renaissance era.

Some centuries after the First Crusade, Gubbio warded off incorporation by Florence, but was ultimately incorporated by the Papal States. Family alliances came and went, but through it all Gubbio remained a tough nut to crack. Medieval/Renaissance Gubbio was a walled fortress city, a stony maze of streets and towers with no weak spots. Considerable sections of the walls remain today.

In Gubbio: inside the walls, a street runs under the medieval ducal palace of the Gabriellis toward the Renaissance ducal palace of the Montefeltros.

The ducal palace and its piazza. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

View from the piazza (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Gubbio — close quarters. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

The modern steed. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Climbing to the top of Gubbio.

Gubbio from above — along the upper wall.

Olives above.

When archery wasn’t a sport. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Essential Gubbio — walled terraces.

Gubbio is a gastronomic capital of food and wine.

A free ad: drink this. Fly as far and as fast as you have to, to drink it.

We were especially smitten with the wild boar sausages.

But the prince of epicurean Gubbio is the truffle. Until Gubbio, I did not know what a truffle (tartufo in Italian) actually was. Real truffles are not a faintly flavorful dried dust, or something hinted at in a tincture of olive oil. The key to truffles is life itself — you have to eat the truffle alive. Their fragrance, the weird alien density of the fragrance, suggests some powerful esters. A single live tartufo will fill a room with wit and humor, like a great raconteur, and leave everyone within nose both amused and delighted. But a whole basket of tartufi will leave you on the outside looking in, as the funghi communicate with each other and ignore you. The effect is like a helpless drunkenness. The truffle caves where masses of tartufi are held seem drug-like in their intensity.

Basket of living truffles. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Truffles on beef carpacchio — like eating poetry!

When, after an already colorful and adventurous young life, Saint Francis was thrown out of Assisi in exile and disgrace, he fled to Gubbio. At the time, Gubbio was troubled by an abnormally huge wolf, the Wolf of Gubbio, who is said to have eaten well over a hundred persons. The local farmers lived in understandable terror of being next. But Saint Francis called this wolf to Jesus, and the wolf stopped eating people and became a pet. It might have been the first of his many miracles, as a saint.

Saint Francis redeems and pardons the Wolf of Gubbio.

Late in the afternoon we found the Chiesa di San Francesco, completed in 1256, and now refreshingly almost free of the baroque, although the edge of some such is plainly visible at the left in the photo below. There are also the scraped-at remains of some very early remarkable Francis Cult frescos.

Chiesa di San Francesco.

Early Franciscan fresco.

During a 19th century restoration of this church, the bones of a huge wolf were found under the altar. These were reburied in the churchyard, with no marker since the wolf, although a Christian, was also still an animal. This rings true to me. The Wolf of Gubbio may have frightened more people than it ate and Saint Francis was neither the first nor the last person to tame a wolf, so I find it easier to believe this story than to disbelieve it. Some have observed, on a more intellectual plane, that this foundational Franciscan legend is a narrative inversion of the Roman legend of the wolf that parented Romulus and Remus. We may make what we can of it or let it pass. There probably aren’t any wolves left in Umbria anyway.

In my next post I'll discuss Carsulae and Nemi, and some other thoroughly untouristy spots. Here, then, is as good a place as any to say something about the curse of tourism. Yes, tourism is a sort of curse. Of course people would come to Gubbio just for the truffles and wine and boar, both to eat and to carry away and eat later. That is actually commerce, however, and not tourism. The thing spills over when people come specifically to walk around and look at the view. The resulting hotels, restaurants, stores and gift shops quickly come to dominate the local economy. This is a mixed blessing. It preserves local crafts that might not survive otherwise except as fine art, for instance the technically complex and expensive faience ware of Gubbio. It helps pay for preservation. But these visitors are strangers. If the visitors become the point of the place, the the result is commercial dilution. One can hardly describe this as a tension; it is more in the nature of a relaxation, as the polis with its generations-long centered identity succumbs to the cosmopolis and its more diffuse values, and things that are real risk becoming merely quaint.

Of course, as a tourist myself, who am I to pontificate on these matters concerning places far from home. Walking the cobbles of Gubbio, I meditated on the contradictions.

Paradise if we only knew it.

What Gubbio might be without its tourists can still be loosely imagined. The locals have been invaded but not displaced. Maybe this is also what happened when the Romans came. By comparison, Belluno seemed undiscovered in the tourism sense, a Rough Guide sort of locality, while Venice was all but inundated by its tourist tide. Ravenna was a political capital for centuries in the classical Mediterranean world, and a cultural capital ever since, but the reliquarian past does not define Ravenna. In the summer of 2017 Alex and I found only a thin scattering of tourists in the ruins, while the now of Ravenna was crowded with thoroughly modern young shoppers and diners, designers, artists, students, musicians, and more besides — in no particular order, but ganging up rather thickly around the main gelato stands.

Gubbio seemed very different from the other places we had visited — far up on its mountain, still holding on to an age-old interior self. The Great Outside has found it, but not overwhelmed it.

Twilight settles in — The tourists leave and the locals come out. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

2 Comments

Ravenna

8/28/2017

0 Comments

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.

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.

The wall of Honorius still stands in various guises all around Ravenna, frequently attached to later structures.

A large section of Ravenna’s Roman wall was updated by the Venetian Empire into a Renaissance-era fortress, today a city park.

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.

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.

Ravenna’s Old Gates Are Still Landmarks. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Caffe Teodora, Ravenna. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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.)

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.

Architecturally, San Vitale Is Not a Basilica at All. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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.

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

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.

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.

“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 Paradiso. (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.

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.

Sant'Apollinaris in Classe: A Noble Basilica. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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.

Alex examining seashells.

And there we found Cnidarians, expiring on the sand!

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.

Augustan Gate of classical Rimini, known as Ariminum in Roman times. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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.

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.

Gubbio’s Roman theater (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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.

0 Comments

Venice

8/14/2017

1 Comment

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.

View from the Public Vaporetto, entering the Grand Canal. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Entrance to St. Mark’s Square, Venice. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

In and Out the Human Tides Flow. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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.

Venice street scene. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Streets of Venice

Twilight and night indeed suit Venice well. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Venice at night. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Battered reminders of power.

Byzantine emperors in porphyry, looted from Constantinople.

One of the anonymous mailboxes for inserting denunciations to the Doge’s secret police for examination. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Noble graffiti in the Doge’s marble dungeons.

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.

The home of the Venetian galleys that won the Battle of Lepanto.

The Doge's Private Courtyard and side door into St. Mark's cathedral. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

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.)

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.)

Venice: unlike any other.

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.

1 Comment

<<Previous

Forward>>

Author

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.

Buy Gary's books now

Sites I like

afroculinaria.com/
largea.wordpress.com/livinglisteningandthingsilove
naturalpresencearts.com/
someperfectfuture.com

RSS Feed

Author

Sites I like

Archives