Emilia Romagnage

I'll likely put together a photo post or two in the coming days, though short stops in Padua and Venice leave me less likely to tap out blog posts... those may have to wait for a long-haul train ride from Venice up to Munich. But in the meantime, here's a cobbled-together video capturing fragments of my week in Emilia Romagna! It's been a good week, if punishingly hot, and a nice break from the overwhelm of Florence and Rome. I'm about to step out for one last night of gelato and possibly a Tom Waits cover band if I can find the venue... but in the meantime, here's this... thing? This video thing? ENJOY OR WHATEVER?

In Firenze

(On the title: I cannot say Firenze, Florence's Italian name, without thinking of this song. THAT IS AN EXCELLENT THING. Go listen to that musical, then get back here)

It's fine I guess it's whatever.

As I made plans for this trip, my excellent sister Kathryn told me that of all the towns she visited in Italy during a semester in Orvieto, Florence was the one she most wanted to spend time in. “I could stay there for months,” she said. I mostly knew of Florence as a city with a heavy-duty collection of Renaissance art collections, and as that’s not an area I’m especially invested in, I shrugged, gave it a little under a week, and moved on.

Well, I get it now. I think I do. Thoughts, pictures, video after the jump!

Music here is a recording of a tune that was GORGEOUSLY and wildly performed at Teatro del Sale, a kind of dinner theater/concert venue that my friends Kate J and Stuart had sent me to. An incredible feast and a superb concert. As usual, the studio version doesn't catch the wild energy or the driving percussion of the live rendition, but it gives a flavor of the soundtrack I had in my head for the week!

I was briefly joined in Florence by my friend Jenna. Though we’d overlapped at Northwestern briefly, we didn’t know each other well, and our twenty-four hours together were full of thick discussions of life, relationships, our relationships with food, performing, travel, and points beyond. I bring Jenna up because late at night, as we walked the cobbled streets back to our AirBnB, she asked me what my favorite city in Italy had been thus far. I gave a typically meandering response, doubling back and revising and re-interrogating until I found what I think was true: I think I felt I'd gotten the most out of Rome, but I liked Florence the best. It was elusive, hard to get a handle on, and it was – and thus far remains – the city I most want to return to in order to refract it anew. 

Jenna and me, suffering through ANOTHER cup of gelato. Wah life is hard etc

 Culturally the city is a fascinating hodgepodge. In early June, a horde of students taking a semester abroad cohabitate with backpackers and middle-aged tourists, most filling the historic center (the Duomo, the Uffizi gallery). And pushed out to the sides, Oltrarno to the south and Sant’Ambrogio to the east, not to mention the outer suburbs, Florentines still live day-to-day. People like Patrizia, my host for a dinner party in the near suburbs. She cooked a delicious meal for me and a family of international teachers - a great night to meet fellow travelers and get to share the table with people from an array of cultural backgrounds. If you get a chance to dine in somebody's home in Italy, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Just a li'l ol' duomo hiding behind a wacky facade from the 19th century! This piazza is gorgeous at dawn, and chaotic and stupid midday.

Finding ways to connect with people who just live and work in Florence - that’s the bit that I found intriguing, a little elusive, and  a lot addictive. It’s a city of workshops, of artisans at work restoring furniture, painting, sculpting, creating gorgeous leather and paper goods. Most are open to the public, and by far my happiest moments were just exploring the fringes, finding small shops and workshops and seeing people devoting case and attention to their craft.

Scuola del Cuoio, the leatherworking school of Florence. Started as an apprenticeship program for orphans, it's now just a straight up training center, but it's cool to stop in and see people stitching and embossing and generally makin' with the leather goods. Craftsmanship times!

 On a return visit, I’d probably do a bit more museum-ing (a mixed-bag Uffizi visit was my only real stop on that front). The Bargello sounds like my jam, and the Strozi had a great-looking exhibit (“From Kandinsky to Pollock”) that’s right up my alley. But really, I’d love to take a full week in the off season (to the degree that there is such a thing in Florence) to keep poking my head in and seeing how the world works here.

One last thought – I did take a Tuscan tour (along with an upcoming tour in Emilia-Romagna, my major splurge of the trip) exploring Siena and San Gimignano, visiting a winery and an agriturismo, and as much as I loved Umbria, I gotta admit: the countryside here is gorgeous. I could spend a week on one of these estates, easily, driving and exploring and breathing easy as I relax outside of the frenzy of the city.

San Gimignano in the background, agriturismo loveliness in the fore. It was supposed to rain this entire day but it did NOT! Miraculous happenings are everywhere if you know where to look for them!

VINES WITHIN WHEELS!

Me and this guy made friends. I have a pen pal in Tuscany now!!!

It was, in short, a great break.

OK. Last photos below, and then eventually on to Emilia Romagna! SPOILER: it’s been nice, but temperatures in the 90s virtually guaranteed that I would not enjoy this leg as much as the earlier, perfectly-temperate weeks of Italy. (Staying in a home with no fans and noisy neighbors has not made this a perfect situation.) Still, a fascinating new cultural context (several, even!) and lots of adventures to stitch together into something vaguely coherent! Stay tuned, or whatever! 

Oh man the charcuterie in Italy, and the people who are passionate about it, and the way they just hang this stuff like oh yeah this is just a thing I have in the shop, why, do you want some

Street art is the best. This is my favorite of the (MANY) great pieces in Florence. Many many more in the video above.

A night in Reggio

Post on Florence will be coming in the next few days, once I get my wifi connection under control - Reggio Emilia isn't quite internationalized enough to have the kind of cafes where young people hunker down and get work done online (that I've found yet, anyways) and my AirBnB's internet is spotty. But a few scattered fragments here to fill the time... as usual, after a photo and the jump.

Reggio Emilia lookin' pretty tonight

Saw a production of Sam Shepard's True West here tonight. Surreal to see a play I know reasonably well (never done it, but have coached scene work from it and seen it multiple times) in a language I only minimally speak. You really haven't seen theatre as it's meant to be until you've spent most of a play going "Oh, he just said sandwich! Hey I know the word sandwich! Is this what it's like when babies go to the theatre."

After the show, I pulled out my phone to text a friend I hadn't pinged in a while, having been reminded of his own work in an unrelated play, and scrolling back to find where last I'd left him in my messaging, I overshot and ended up in last summer, which was - to put it mildly - another time.

Rattled, I went walking toward the main piazza, where I'd earlier seen workers setting up for a street festival. It was in full swing now, with a hard-rock band playing covers of Backstreet Boys while kids danced in a fountain now lit by colored lights. As the band switched over to "Tubthumping" (a little on-the-nose, but true!) I began to walk again, feeling better as I always do by being in the swirl of a community and watching people argue, flirt, joke, and stroll quietly. On my way back home, I came across the finish of a second street festival - an citywide dinner party potluck with an all-white theme. Picnic tables draped in white cloths, Italian people being excruciatingly fashionable in white linen and sleek dresses, and more than a couple of tables with an Alice in Wonderland theme.

There's so much life and connection in this town. Being off the beaten path (in relative terms) means that you have a much stronger sense of the community, and that you stand out a bit more as an outsider. (I've been fielding queries as to whether I'm British all weekend, and more than a couple of people have expressed astonishment that I've come all the way from Chicago.) That's been lovely and challenging all at once. As is becoming the theme of the trip writ large - a balance of great joy and discovery, connection and newness, against the occasional moments of loneliness and sadness. Discovery and joy continue to win the day, but I keep thinking it's important to honor the full spectrum, keeping myself honest and remembering to keep all things in balance as I keep swimming toward the shore of The Future!

OK, that's it for now. Stay tuned for FLORENCE, and another round of friendship!

Rome: Y'all Forgot About the Vatican

Oops! Forgot to mention the Vatican. Well, it's not even technically Italy, so whatever.

The shadow of the cupola! YES I climbed it and YES I am very brave and THANK YOU FOR ASKING.

More photos/thoughts/what-have-you after the jump!

Ahhhhh the Vatican. This place is… mind-boggling.

The art and architecture on its own terms is stunning and incredibly complicated to think about. So much effort and money poured into these collections, these buildings, these grounds, rather than to, I dunno, serving the poor or whatever, but the flip side is… I’m not sure exactly what our current billionaire/trillionaire overlords are doing with their money, but I haven’t seen many glorious works of art coming out of our current age of excess, so let’s call this one a tie. If you gotta have a massive empire with some seriously flawed human moral failings, at least you could leave some nice buildings and paintings behind.

The other piece of this puzzle, of course, is: visiting the Vatican in the summer. In a Jubilee Year. With, and this is just a rough estimate, the entire population of the known universe. It was a total madhouse - hence very few photos (well, plus I'm not a huge museum-photos-dude these days). OK I took some.

Bacchus (THEATRE!) hanging out with his buddies, shoulderguy and biteycat. These are official facts.

I was CRAZY grateful to have read up on my Rick Steves before making the trip – able to make a reservation in advance to skip the line, knowing to cut upstairs to a second round of ticket windows rather than picking up my ticket at the more-crowded downstairs galleries, and generally having a sense of direction through the Vatican museums. (He’s also got a great shortcut from the Sistine Chapel to St. Peter’s, which otherwise would require a whole second security line/waiting-in-the-heat misery). So, I had it easy compared to some of the tourists I passed who were having the worst days of their lives. (Not to mention some of the vendors hawking wares in the square at the Vatican, about whom: I get that it’s a tough gig, but I’m guessing that wildly cursing out a tourist who doesn’t want to buy your selfie stick is nnnnnnot going to up your sales with the rest of the crowd?)

[Pretend this is a photo of the Map Room, which is stunning. I do not know what happened to mine.]

Anyhow. The museums were grand, though I’d recommend going at a time when there are no huge groups of frat bros sneering their way around the place. There was still a remarkable amount of glorious art on display, and some of the rooms were legitimately stunning (the map room in particular), but the sheer amount of humanity crammed into the museum even during a “low” tide made it hard to really reflect.

That was not the case with St. Peter’s.

That's just... something that sunlight does in St. Peter's. It's awe-inspiring, as is the building. Those letters, by the way? Are every word Jesus is recorded as having said to Peter. Oh, and they're all seven feet tall. This seems impossible until you climb the dome.

Also very busy (again: Jubilee Year!), but far more spacious and open, this building more than lived up to its reputation. Go with a guide – either a free audio tour (as I used) or a live tour guide in a small group who knows their stuff. Learning how massive the building is, and how brilliantly designed to seem smaller than it is, was one of the highlights of my trip.

Mosaic inside the cupola! It's bonkers being up in this thing, even if you don't (as I forgot that I did!) have a fear of heights. You are suddenly aware of how massive the bascilica is, and how incredibly thin that chicken-wire keeping you from falling into it is, and how sloped the floor is and oh no oh no can we go home now why did we come up here

Eventually, after a visit to the exterior of the Cupola (gorgeous views and more exquisite terror) you descend to a mercifully flat and large part of the roof and wander around and that's more okay. This, by the way, is where it's nice to be solo traveling, because you don't have to worry about a travel companion being grumpy with you for getting tense and phobic about plummeting to your death! You just get to quietly panic and then go take more pictures of things.

Seeing these from the ground outside the complex and then seeing them up close at their level? That's a trip, guys.

So: The Vatican. Everybody is correct. It is incredibly worth seeing. But: maybe at the crack of dawn in February in a non-Jubilee year, would be my suggestion.

Papal address POV. That is quite a piazza. Do you think it is a good job, being Pope?

OK, that is an end to Rome, so next up should be Florence unless I realize I totally forgot a month I spent in, Iunno, New Jersey.

You put a Spello on me

Now, this was exactly what I needed. After a thrilling/exhausting/slightly-overwhelming week of Rome, this felt like the polar-opposite side of Italy, at least given my inability to get out to an honest-to-god Agriturismo (working farms that host visitors) in the countryside. Two days of relaxation, reading, and hiking with virtually no fellow Americans – a small miracle in Italy in June, it seems to me – this was restorative in all the ways I needed it to be. Video below and more after the jump!

I picked the town almost at random several months ago by flipping through a Rough Guide to Italy, and Google Image searching every hill town that merited a description. When I saw the streets of Spello I decided to jump in with both feet.

To the degree that the town is on the major tourist trails, it tends to be associated with the Infiorata, a huge display of floral mosaics on Corpus Christi. I arrived almost a month after the Infiorata, but the city was still in bloom… and under construction. A few major sections of the main thoroughfare were totally torn up, sending pedestrians over noisily creaking metal walkways. Oh, but once you got off to the side streets, it was lovely, as you can see below.

During first night in town, I had noticed references to a small village up in the hills that seemed to be a good half-day hike up and back. And I do mean small: a five-minute walk from edge to edge at best, with one restaurant and one café in its sleepy streets. This turned out to be a perfect hike: I started out by guesswork, as Spello’s tourist office (which provides hiking maps) was closed until 10 and I wanted to get on the trail early. A short meander down the road and I saw a footpath branching off to the side; taking it, I found an information board laying out the trail… most of which simply followed an ancient Roman aqueduct! COOL. A good two-hour hike up, a pause to read in a park in the village, lunch at the small restaurant (whose daily ingredients I had seen arriving from the park!) and a descent to Spello… this was very much what I needed. I will likely do some more hiking next week in Emilia-Romagna, but it was a good reminder that I need to balance the interest and engagement of city life with the pastoral joys of the countryside. Very excited to continue doing so.

Photos below – and next up, Florence! 

Um, so there are lots of flowers in the streets of Spello. Like... more than you'd expect to see in a street. Here are some of them! Hooray for flowers??

MORE IMPORTANT THAN FLOWERS EVERYTHING IN THIS WINDOWSILL IS GOOD AND NICE

The famous Tiny Trucks of Umbria!

Blah blah the Italian countryside blah blah hill towns blah blah zzzzz

Dusk falls on the edge of Spello

Dusk hits the ground hard, curses under its breath, and rubs its elbows. "I think I sprained something," Dusk mutters, not that anybody cares. Not that anybody is listening. Dusk doesn't even know why it bothers any more. "Why don't you go look at some flowers, idiots," Dusk huffs.

Oh hey that's a view on the way out o' Spello, huh.

Skipping the hike itself (which is in the video above), here's a li'l view from the end of the hike! This village was: ADORABLE.

Back in Spello, at a monastery (not open to the public). I am beginning to realize that easily 50% of the photos I take are mostly to capture blue skies and/or clouds. Hm.

Rome: Out 'n' About

After the jump: photos from the Jewish ghetto, Trastevere, and Testaccio from my various wanderings over the course of my week in Rome. V. excellent neighborhood life, would visit again. Up tomorrow AT THE EARLIEST: a jump to Spello, basically the polar opposite of Rome in terms of Things We Think of as Italian!

Til then... some pictures and whatnot!

Trastevere! I think by night this hood is usually relatively glossed-over for dinner/nightlife, but if you go during the day you still get a little sense of the neighborhood as it (perhaps??) exists without (as many) tourists to look at it.

Ahhh Testaccio. My home for the week and my favorite neighborhood by far. I have so many recommendations for Testaccio you guys.

THIS CAT WAS GREAT AND SOMEBODY IN THIS MUSIC SHOP WAS PLAYING THE BASSOON!!

As I have moved on from Rome I've realized street art isn't just a Rome thing. It's kind of fantastic throughout what pieces of Italy I've seen! Hooray for THAT!

The Protestant cemetery (where Shelley and other notables are buried).

Sculpture behind bars (metal behind metal?) in the Ghetto.

Mo' street art, this on the piazza that (as you may recall from the Rome video I posted a little ways back) had a free movie series going for the summer. The night I wandered in they were showing Raging Bull! PRO TIP: Raging Bull dubbed into Italian works super well.

ANTHEM AND LOGO FOR MY LIFE.

Rome: The Dust of Ages

OK, it's pouring in Florence and it's a bit of a recovery day anyways, so between naps, another update on Rome, now about a week old!

Saturday in Rome’s center had been pretty lovely, largely due to an early start. (I’m finding it best to start these days as early as I can wake myself up, then to retreat home to nap/read/get work done while the tourist sites get insane. It works out pretty well!) But the city was overrun by the time I cut out of the center for the park and the catacombs, so I figured on a Sunday I’d try to throw myself a curveball and head out of the city proper, to Ostia Antica. This site (a more working-class town than Pompeii) is, like Pompeii, a well-preserved site giving a sense of what pre-modern Rome looked like. Unlike Pompeii, there was no natural disaster to assist in the preservation. Instead, this port city went dead when the river changed its path, the town eventually abandoned and buried in mud. It’s a pretty cool site, and a great day if the weather is nice – with virtually no crowds when I went. For me, the highlight was the theatre (see below, past the jump, for more on that.)

That afternoon and evening I explored Rome’s Jewish ghetto and Trastevere, the once-bohemian, now-increasingly-upscale neighborhood across the river from Rome proper. That’s for tomorrow’s post; today I want to skip ahead to my day in Ancient Rome. The Forum, Palatine Hill and The Colosseum. It’s a neat trinity that gives you a feel for the daily life of Roman citizens back in the late days of the Republic and early days of the Empire. I have even less of note to say about this than I have other sites, so let’s just skip past the jump to the photos, shall we?

Oh, and I forgot to mention, there's a pyramid in Testaccio. You know: we like Egyptian stuff if we're Roman!

Overview of a slice of Ostia Antica

Close-up of some ruinage at Ostia! (Interesting tidbit: you can generally tell which buildings have been partially restored and which have the original bricks based on how terrible of shape the bricks are in. To my expert eyes, these bricks are... red, I don't know.

CHUMPY, LUMPY, AND STUMPY: THE THREE COMIC MASKS OF ROMAN THEATRE. (Cool tidbit: up close these carvings very clearly have inset holes in the eyes, connoting "mask" in a very explicit way. NICE!)

The theater at Ostia Antica! I... I think we're gonna have to consider papering the house for opening weekend you guys.

Jumping over to the Forum and a little Roman perversity! This arch was to commemorate the defeat of Israel by the Roman Empire; most conquered peoples were allowed to keep their gods and just tack on their new emperor as a new deity. Israelites refused, and so they got punished hardcore. The last step in this? They were forced to carve the arch commemorating their defeat. That is some SERIOUS SASS, Rome. Woof.

The Forum viewed from above! Probably my pick for favorite ancient site. Go there early in the morning and ignore the Colosseum! YOU WILL THANK ME FOR THIS ADVICE WHEN YOU ARE OLDER.

Skies over Palatine Hill

The Colosseum from Palatine! To my thinking, way more impressive to look at from afar than to get inside of, but you know: YOU DO YOU, GENTLE READER.

Rome: An Initial Dive

Hi. Took a minute. But I’m settled in Florence and dashing off a few posts here about Rome while I recover from a night of FAR too little sleep. Let’s dive right in, shall we?

After taking a day to bounce back from a day of travel and general sad news, during which I did a bit of neighborhood wandering but nothing too ambitious, I leapt into the heart of the city: The Pantheon, Campo de’ Fiori, Trevi Fountain, and points around and beyond. It was my favorite kind of day: a relentless and energetic wander.

This isn’t news to anybody who’s been there, but it really is stunning the way that ancient Rome coexists with modern neighborhoods. It’s not that the area around the Pantheon is working class, but it’s… just a neighborhood in a big city. Then you turn a corner and, oh, one of the most significant buildings in architectural history. Neato.

The other thing that surprised me is the depth of the city. In literal terms: you can tell when various structures were built because they are physically lower than those around them. Because when a city has existed for over two thousand years, you eventually get enough dirt built up that street level ends up being several floors up from where it used to be. There are a few places this is super apparent (an ancient arena entrance almost entirely below street level near the Pantheon is a good place to spot it) but it’s evident everywhere once you know to look for it. Again: madness.

After an orientation walk through the heart of the city, I ventured northward, eventually arriving at a huge park north of the Borghese villa and near a set of catacombs that I hoped to tour. No photos of the catacombs (they ain’t allowed!) but other bits of the day are photographed below, after the jump. Up next (later today or tomorrow, perhaps?) – going deeper on the ancient sites!

Rome is full of these obelisks because, apparently, they were obsessed with Egypt? Some of them are stolen from Egypt (like any good empire is supposed to do) and some are imitations, complete with typos.

Another obelisk, all spitty and whatnot! And there's some building behind it Iunno. (JK JK it's the Parthenon we'll get there in a minute.)

Light in the Parthenon. This space is extremely dope, to use an art history term.

Piazza Navona! I think! It's been a week or so! This is not the most impressive fountain there (sometime this month I hope to have a "fountains in Italy" video up) but it's definitely got the most dudes blowing goofy faces up.

This photo, and those that follow, all come from this one piazza north of the city center, which was deliberately designed to throw together a variety of architectural styles. It was an EXTREMELY COOL spot.

More buildings from that place! Wow isn't that exciting, buildings with cars in front of them, what a remarkable age we live in.

ANOTHER BUILDING! But seriously if anybody wants to buy me a flat in one of these houses I will take it NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

A park in Rome! This place was great. Sprawling and full - with an outdoor gym, no less! - and easy to completely forget you're in a city. In short, my favorite kinda park to stumble across on vacation. Hooray for parks!