Jet Lag

We're back home, but I still have a week of our trip to blog about (Florence, Verona, Haarlem, Amsterdam). I've been busy catching up at work and at home, and have been dead tired in the evenings, but the long holiday weekend should allow me to do some writing.

Ravenna

On Monday, August 20th, we went up to breakfast, and after saying goodbye to the Canadian mother and daughter, went down with the Signora to the office.  She was a friend of Marco, and was operating Al Campaniel while he was away.  While we were paying the bill, something she said in French made it clear that she wasn't Signora, but Madame, and soon she and Mary Joy, who had been laboring somewhat to converse in Italian, were chatting away much more comfortably in French.  She was originally from Paris, but after retirement she was now living in Venice: the Italians were much nicer people than the French, who were only interested in themselves.  However she did go back to France for medical care.  The French medical system was much better.

We left our luggage in our room and quickly went to the shop where Mary Joy had noticed the sweaters, and soon Mary Joy had a very nice new wool and silk sweater, after I chose the color (otherwise, we'd still be there).

Then we picked up our luggage, said goodbye to Madame and went to the train station.    I got our ticket from the ticket machine, and after stamping it in one of the yellow boxes, we boarded the high-speed train for Bologna.  We had considered going to Ravenna via Ferrara, which sounds like an interesting town to look around in, but after our Vicenza experience, we checked to see if there was a left luggage deposit at the Ferrara station.  None that I could find online.  So that was out.  Bologna, as one of the larger cities in Italy, definitely had one.  In addition, Bologna "the fat" has the reputation of being the food capital of Italy, so we figured it might be a good place to find lunch, between trains.

We arrived in Bologna and paid our five euros (a bit pricy) to deposit our luggage.  I remembered that the last time we had been in Bologna (in 2001, also between trains, but for a number of hours, instead of for a little more than an hour), the walk from the train station to the center of town had been rather lengthy, so we asked the man at the left luggage where we could catch a bus downtown.  He replied that we could walk it in ten minutes.  Okay.  So we asked a young woman for directions and started walking, aiming for what sounded like an interesting (and fast) deli-cafeteria called Tamburini.  We walked, and walked, and walked.  Again, either Italians run everywhere instead of walking (for which I had seen no evidence) or they have a tendency to be optimistic about how long it takes to walk somewhere.

But eventually we got to Tamburini, picked up some local specialties in the cafeteria line, shared a table with an Italian lady who was busily reading some book, gobbled down our food, and hurried back to the station in time to pick up our luggage and catch the regional train to Ravenna.  Ravenna isn't exactly a backwater, but apparently there are no high-speed trains running from Bologna down the Adriatic coast.

We eventually got to Ravenna, walked the half mile to our hotel, the Centrale Byron (which Lord Byron had never stayed at), a nice hotel in the center of everything.  I half suspected that the writer for Lonely Planet Italy had stayed there and not strayed very far away, since all the recommended restaurants were within two blocks.

Ravenna has eight Unesco World Heritage sites.  It is unique in Italy because when the Roman Empire was collapsing in the fifth century, it was the capital of what was left.  It then became the capital of the Ostrogothic kingdom that came into being in Italy in the late fifth and early sixth centuries.  And when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian reconquered Italy in the middle of the sixth century, it was his administrative capital for this territory.  Ravenna was a naval base (since then, I think, the harbor has silted in and moved farther away, as was the case with Ephesus and Bruges), easily defended from the land and easily supplied by water.

We had two hours until most of these sites closed, so we went to the most important first: the church of San Vitale and the adjoining Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.  There we bought one ticket (I think it was nine euros per person) that covered five sites.  We went into the church and were completely blown away.  While the upper part and interior of the dome were painted in baroque style in the eighteenth century, what really matters is the mosaics around the sanctuary.  Nearly fifteen centuries old, they show a naturalness and insight into character and emotion that completely surprised Mary Joy, who had low expectations of art from the "Dark Ages," long before Giotto and the Renaissance.  Unfaded over all these years, these mosaics gleam as if they were made yesterday.  Along with portraits of saints and biblical figures, the artists memorialized the Emperor and his court.  Around the same time that Hagia Sophia was being built in Constantinople, with similar mosaics, little bits of glass were used to portray, on the left side of the sanctuary, Justinian and certain priests and military men.  On the right side are his empress, the former dancer Theodosia, along with an entourage of her own.  Above the altar is a clean-shaven Jesus, accompanied by angels, St. Vitalis (the church's patron saint) and (holding a model of the church) the already-deceased bishop who had begun to build the church (his then-current successor is pictured among Justinian's entourage).

Simply glorious.

We then walked across to the Mausoleum.  Besides being the sister and wife of Roman emperors, Galla Placidia was also at one point married to the king of the Gothic invaders.  Her tomb, too has wonderful mosaics: a starry ceiling; a beardless Christ as the Good Shepherd.  Early Christian portraits didn't generally show Jesus with a beard.  Most Romans at that time were clean-shaven.

On our way out of the grounds, we heard organ music coming from the church.  We went back in to check this out, and discovered that the organ was high up on the upper level, off to the right of the church, at the level of the baroque murals.  It seemed oddly inappropriate to the mosaics, especially considering what the organist was playing: a transcription of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Before 8 o'clock we also saw two baptisteries covered with mosaics, one of them orthodox, the other related to the cathedral of the Arian heresy.  The Ostrogoths were Arians, who didn't believe in the humanity of Jesus.  According to them, his human body was just a disguise put on to hide his true, divine nature.
Heretics or not, they could do mosaic work as glorious as that of Justinian's later artists.  The church of San Apollinare Nuovo began around 500 as the chapel to the palace of Theodoric the Great, King of the Ostrogoths.  High on the side walls of the church, mosaics show the palace, as well as two long lines of saints dressed in white: male on the right, female on the left.  Each of them is wonderfully individualized.  In addition, toward the left front, in what I think is Gothic garb, are the Magi, labeled "Balthasar, Melchior, Caspar," approaching the mother and child with their gifts.  Across from them is Christ in judgment.

Finally, we went back to the hotel and got ready for dinner.  We went to La Gardela, a recommended trattoria.  Again, I'm sorry, but I don't remember what we ate, except that it was good.  Sitting alone at the next table was a woman who turned out to be an American, a retired operatic soprano who had lived in Europe for 29 years and was married to a well-known concert pianist (at least, Mary Joy had heard of him, though I hadn't).  They now lived in Brussels, and she had some stories about a fellow Brussels expat, Mary Joy's idol, the eccentric Argentine pianist Marta Argerich.  She didn't know Argerich, but their paths had crossed in odd ways.  Once she had had to get a new formal dress for performance, and when she explained this to the dressmakers for tax purposes, they replied that someone else had just gotten the same dress for the same purpose.  They looked up the name, and it was Marta Argerich.  Another time, since Argerich is known for canceling concerts with little or no notice, the soprano's husband was engaged as her backup, and, indeed, he had to play in her stead.

She said that the only time she had ever been in Minnesota was to sing for the Schubert Club in St. Paul, in the early nineties.  She had a number of stories, such as the problems involved in doing a production of Wozzeck (very dark, depressing and atonal) in a newly-restored opera house in Sicily in a cold January, with no heat.

We ended up closing the restaurant, around midnight, and pointed her on her way to her hotel.  We offered to accompany her, but she said that the area wasn't dangerous, especially compared to the neighborhood in Spanish Harlem where she had lived as a student.  On getting there at night, she would walk down the middle of the street, singing operatic arias at the top of her voice, and no one ever bothered her.  I suggested that it might be that any potential muggers were afraid of catching whatever it was that she had, and she agreed that even muggers stayed away from crazy people.

Murano and San Giorgio Maggiore

On Sunday, August 19th, we slept a little later than we had the day before.  When we went up to breakfast, Marco wasn't there.  Instead, we were served by an older woman.  We later learned that Marco was away, visiting his in-laws, and this lady would be in complete charge of the B&B for the next few days.

Among the other guests at breakfast we met a mother and daughter from Vancouver.  The mother had been born in China.  The daughter would be spending a year studying in Lyon, and they were touring around beforehand.  They would be in Venice for two nights, and asked us for any recommendations as to what to do while they were there.

We knew exactly what we were going to do.  After breakfast, Marika checked out and left her bag inour room.  Then we walked over the Rialto Bridge and up to the north shore of the island, to the vaporetto stop at Fondamente Nove.  There we took the vaporetto that, stopping first at the cemetery island of San Michele, took us to Murano.

Venice has been known for designing and manufacturing high-quality glass for many centuries.  During medieval times, the city moved all glass production to the island of Murano, in order to avoid the possibility that the fire-using activity might burn the city down.  An additional reason was security.  Glass was such an important source of income to the city that the industry's secrets were a matter of state security.  Glass workers were not allowed to leave Venice.  Disclosing the secret procedures was a capital offense, and any glass worker who escaped to some other country was liable to be murdered there by Venetian agents.

Murano is still the center of Venetian glass manufacture, and is very much a tourist attraction, where people watch glassblowing demonstrations and stroll up and down the streets, looking in the windows of the many glass shops and going in to look more closely or to buy.  Some of these shops were artsy.  Some sold mostly schlock.  But one thing that made them very attractive on this particular day was that they all had air conditioning.  Outside, the sun was blinding and the heat and humidity made it uncomfortable.

We wandered around, looking at glass, buying a little.  We looked into one of the churches.  It turned out that none of the factories were working on Saturdays or Sundays, so there was only one glassblowing demonstration to be found.  When we tracked this down, we were told that the blowers were on lunch break.  So we decided to do the same.

There were no recommended restaurants on Murano, so we looked around, until we finally settled on one in a square near the Faro (lighthouse).  The food here turned out to be not great but decent (again, I forget what we had--after three weeks on the road, the meals all tend to run together).

Then we went to the demonstration--we paid the five euro "family" fee and were allowed to watch and take pictures as much as we wanted.  It was interesting, though not exciting.
Then we took the vaporetto directly to San Marco, a twenty-five-minute trip.  There we bought Mary Joy a sunhat (cute, but made of 100% paper, according to the tag).  Wel took the number 2 vaporetto from there to San Giorgio Maggiore, a small island with a large Palladio church, directly across from San Marco.  This church has a tall tower.  For a fee (three euros?), you can take the elevator up to the top and have spectacular views, showing you just how small a place Venice is.  We spent quite a bit of time there, then came down and went around the corner to a cafe by the marina.  This, it turned out, had a very limited menu, so we stuck with coffee.

Then we went back to San Marco.  By this time, it was getting close to five o'clock.  Our vaporetto pass would run out at a quarter after.  So we took the number 1 for as long as we could, getting off at the Accademia just before we turned into mice or pumpkins.  On our way to Al Campaniel, we stopped at the Grom gelateria (remember them from Milan?) and each had a coppetta (little cup).

Now we picked up Marika's luggage at our room and headed for Piazzale Roma, where we caught the airport bus, arriving an hour and fifty minutes before her plane was due to leave.  The lines for check-in were very long, and they kept shifting the signs on the check-in desks, from All Flights to Berlin to Paris Charles de Gaulle to Paris Orly.  It was a little nerve-wracking, as the clock continued to tick and the few lines moved very slowly.  Would Marika miss her plane and have to stay in Venice?

There were a couple of young Australian women in line with us.  They had been in Ravenna, our next stop.  What had they liked about it?  The shoes and sunglasses had been very inexpensive.  Purses, however, hadn't been such a great deal.

EasyJet finally opened more desks and expedited processing.  It didn't matter what was on the sign above the desk said, they would take any EasyJet passenger and send them on their way.  So when Marika got to the desk, got her boarding pass and went to security, there was now no danger of her missing her flight.  We said goodbye, watched her through security and waved to and fro as she went on her way.

By now, it was after eight o'clock and poor Mary Joy was starving to death.  After getting back to Venice and Al Campaniel, we hurried to Campo San Barnaba, where we entered the sister restaurant to the now where we had eaten the night before.  This Casin dei Nobili was more of a trattoria-pizzeria than its classy waterfront sister.  They had an air-conditioned inner room, but that was full, so we ended up on the garden terrace: pleasant, but still very warm, even after 9 p.m.

Again, I forget what we had to eat, but it was good.  We had white wine with it, which led to a mishap.  Late in the meal, my sweaty arm stuck to the thin paper mat at my place, lifting it up.  Since my light, empty wineglass was sitting on this mat, it tipped over, fell and smashed on the floor.  We apologized to the Spanish couple at the next table and got to meet them.  They were from Cadiz, and she was a cooking instructor.  She said that while Italy has wonderful art and culture, the food, wine and olive oil are all better in Spain.  I said that on a trip to Spain many years ago, I had heard that most Italian olive oil comes from Spanish olives.  She said that that is absolutely true.  If you go into a grocery store in Italy, much more shelf space is devoted to butter than to olive oil, while in Spain you can find much more oil than butter.  People there go through a liter of oil in a few days.  It was fun talking with them in a mixture of English and Spanish, but after so much time devoted to Italian, we had trouble shifting into Spanish--sometimes I simply blanked out as to the right word.

On the way back to Al Campaniel, we passed by a shop window with nice sweaters for only 39 euros.  Of course, the store wasn't open this late.  But it would be tomorrow.

Doge's Palace, Vaporetto Cruise, Mass at San Marco and Dinner by the Water

LOn Saturday, August 18, we got up early to go to breakfast as soon as it was available (theoretically, 8 a.m., but actually more like 8:15.  We had different people at breakfast every day we were there.  The first day, there was a Swiss couple.  The next day, among others, there was different Swiss couple.

After breakfast we followed the not-yet-big crowds over the Rialto Bridge, toward San Marco, coming out under the clock tower on the north side of the Piazza.  We went into the Doge's Palace ticket office and I exchanged our voucher for three tickets and three red stickers with the winged lion of Venice and the words "Palazzo Ducale Itinerari Segreti."  We were here a little early for the English-language "Secret Itineraries" tour of the Palace, so we did a little passeggiata of the Piazza and the adjoining Piazzetta ("Little Piazza").

The Piazza San Marco is a large, rectangular square, bordered on three sides by arcades buildings and on the third by the Basilica of St. Mark.  The original patron saint of Venice had been St. Theodore, but as, in the ninth century, the city became became richer and more powerful due to its position as Europe's principal entry port for goods from the East, the Venetians decided that they needed a more prestigious patron in heaven.  What they did was steal one.  Apparently, the custodians of the tomb of the evangelist St. Mark in Alexandria, where he had been martyred, were unhappy that the saint was under the jurisdiction of the Muslim rulers of Egypt, or else, more likely, they were bribed.  As a result, Venetian merchants in Alexandria were able to take the saint's remains, getting them past the customs inspectors by hiding them in a barrel of pork.  The mosaics on the Basilica, setting out this story, show turbaned inspectors, turning up their noses at this "unclean" meat.  The medieval mosaics also show St. Mark saving the merchants from a storm at sea on their way back.

The Venetians demoted poor Theodore and took to Mark in a big way, building him the Basilica and adopting his winged lion as their emblem.  Venice became a religious pilgrimage site in its own right, as well as being the principal transit port for pilgrims to the Holy Land.  There are two tall columns in the Piazzetta, which is the much smaller square connecting the Piazza to the Grand Canal, between the Doge's Palace and the Campanile (bell tower).  On one of the columns is the winged lion of St. Mark.  On the other is St. Theodore, carrying a spear and standing on what looks like a crocodile.

We entered the courtyard of the Palace, showing our tickets an wearing our red stickers.  Our guide gathered together her little group, gave us some preliminary information and some do's and don'ts (mostly the latter: no photos past the golden staircase; no leaning on any of the 16th-century walls, etc.), and we headed across the courtyard and up to the loggia or porch.  On the wall there were three openings where Venetians could slip in pieces of paper denouncing others for crimes or violations of state security.  Originally, these denunciations could be anonymous, but later three signatures were required, and if the accusation proved unfounded, the accusers would be subject to the same penalties that the accused would have received if convicted.  Until Napoleon ended the Republic in 1797, there were 72 of these denunciation boxes around the city.
 From the loggia we climbed the golden staircase (the gold leaf is on the ceiling, not on the steps), where visiting ambassadors and heads of state would ascend, like us, to the state rooms above.

The Doges or Dukes of the Most Serene Republic of Venice were elected for life, by a very complicated process, from the list of nobles inscribed in the Golden Book.  After an attempted coup by one Doge in the early fourteenth century, their powers were strictly circumscribed and the office became more like that of the current Queen of England (head of state) than that of the current Prime Minister of Great Britain (head of government).  Venice was the first European state to develop a full-scale bureaucracy, permanent embassies in other countries, and a network of spies.  Venice was the wealthiest city in Europe until the late fifteenth century, when its decline began, due to Ottoman Turkish military might encroaching on their colonies in the eastern Mediterranean, and, even more, due to the end of their monopoly on trade in spices and silks from the Orient, when the Portuguese found the route around the southern tip of Africa.  The Doge's Palace was not only the home of the Doge, but the place where all the other arms of the Republic's government met and worked: the Great Council, the Senate, the Council of Forty, the Council of Ten.

Our guide, instead of following the usual itinerary through the public state rooms, at the top of the stairs she opened an unassuming door opposite the one everyone else was going through, and we began our journey through the more hidden domains of Venetian justice and bureacracy.  We saw the tiny office of one of the most powerful men in Venice (I forget his title), a commoner who was appointed for life (the only life office besides that of Doge) to make sure that no officer overstepped the limits of his office.
He was in charge of the office, which we also saw, where official documents were copied in triplicate.  We saw where judges held secret trials and even the torture chamber.  The only torture allowed was hanging people by their arms from ropes, and only to elicit confessions.  The chamber was designed so that the cells of future torturers surrounded it, so that they could make a more informed decision as to whether they should confess or not.

But the centerpiece of the tour was the infamous prison, i Piombi, the Leads, called that because it was under the lead roof of the Palace.  This made the cells very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.  This was still better than the other prison, called the Wells, in the basement of the Palace: Venice has a high water table.

In all the history of the Leads, there was only one escape.  The famous womanizer and con man, Giacomo Casanova, was arrested, apparently at the complaint of an angry husband, for having a forbidden book on magic (which he used to swindle people by pretending to have occult powers).  He was sentenced to five years in the Leads, but after less than two years, he and a fellow prisoner, a priest, managed to cut some holes through ceilings and floors with the use of a piece of iron Casanova had found while allowed to take walks in the attic.  They then simply walked out of the Palace when no one else was around.  We were shown where these events happened.

At the end of our tour, we were left in the Room of Four Doors, where we had begun and where ambassadors and dignitaries were received.  From there, Mary Joy, Marika and I were on our own, to follow the Not-At-All-Secret Itinerary that all the other tourists were doing, through the state rooms of the Palace.

There had been a fire in the building in the 1570s, not doing much structural damage, but destroying much of the decoration.  As a result, the great Venetian painters of the time, particularly Tintoretto and Veronese, were commissioned to do dozens of paintings, glorifying Venice and past Doges.  The latter were shown, generally, being presented by their heavenly friend and patron, St. Mark, to the Blessed Virgin or Christ, while other saints looked on approvingly.  Barack Obama or Mitt Romney could take some campaign ideas from this.  Instead of having celebrities endorse their candidacies, why not have God himself do it?

After taking us back and forth to the New Prison (not as climatically challenging as the Leads, or as waterlogged as the Wells, but designed to cram a number of prisoners into a small cell), across the famous Bridge of Sighs (so named by the Romantics, who pictured prisoners emotionally affected by their last view of Venice), we finally came to the Hall of the Great Council, at one time, I think I read, the largest room in Europe.  Across one side stretches Paradise, as envisioned by the elderly Tintoretto, though mostly painted by his son.  It is the longest canvas painting in the world.  Tintoretto also painted, around the top of the chamber, the portraits of the early Doges.  The traitor who  tried to turn the Republic into a monarchy is conspicuously un-commemorated by a black veil painted where his face and name should be.

When we finished, we had been in the Palace for more than three hours, so we decided to look for a lunch place, on our way back to Al Campaniel.  We had coffee at a place on the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, then worked our way over the Rialto Bridge to the Pescheria, the fish market, but the restaurant suggested by the guidebook was closed for August, so we retraced our steps, looking for a pizza shop that we had seen somewhere along the way.  This turned out to have been all the way back, just across the bridge from Santa Maria Formosa.  Mary Joy and I got pizza slices and Marika got a piece of a spinach and ricotta tart.  We ate while sitting on the step of a boat landing along the canal, across from the church.

Then we went back over the Rialto Bridge and on to our B&B.

Not long afterwards, refreshed and cleaned up, we walked the few blocks to the Frari Church.  This huge, fifteenth-century gothic church is best known for its altarpiece, a large painting of the Assumption of Mary, by Titian.  This is beautiful and impressive, but we would have done better to visit the church in the morning, rather than in late afternoon: the light coming in through the western apse windows, behind the altar, made it more difficult to see the painting as well as it could be seen.

Then, we went to the railroad station.  In retrospect, it would have made more sense to go to Piazzale Roma to start our cruise, since that is where the number 1 vaporetto starts its trip.  In any event, we bought three twenty-four-hour vaporetto passes, at twenty euros apiece.  We had previously avoided vaporetto travel on this trip, because the tickets, at seven euros apiece, are sufficiently pricy to make it worth one's while either to walk (Venice is small enough that you can walk everywhere, if you're in fairly good shape) or to buy a pass and cumulate your vaporetto trips during the validity period of that pass.

We boarded the number 1 vaporetto, which runs from Piazzale Roma to San Marco, and on to the Lido.  This is recommended as a way to tour the complete length of the Grand Canal.  Venice is a water city, but you don't get much of a feeling for that unless you go out onto the water.  The neighborhoods are closed in on their campos, with only occasional glimpses of water as you go up and down the steps over the little bridges, or walk along a fondamenta (a street alongside one of the small canals).  To cruise down the Grand Canal, stopping at all the vaporetto stops along the way, shows you how water ties the city together.

The whole ride took about forty-five minutes, letting us off at San Marco in time for the 6:45 mass.  In a number of places, we've been to mass where the music was provided by a visiting foreign choir (perhaps the local choir, off for the summer as to their own church, is spending a few weeks touring somewhere else!).  In this case, we were lucky to hear a very good English choir called Chorale Gaudeamus.  They sang music by Bruckner and Brahms, among others.

After mass, we had five or ten minutes to look around the Basilica before they shooed us all out.  The interior is covered with medieval mosaics, on a golden background.

Then we took the vaporetto to the Accademia, and walked from there to the Zattere, hoping to get a table on the over-water terrace of the restaurant Casin dei Nobili.  They were full, however, and said we would have to wait if we wanted a table.  We dithered some as to what to do, and another party was turned away and left, but after a few minutes, the host called us over and took us to a table right on the water.  I forget exactly what we had to eat, but it was very good, and along with it we had a bottle of white Soave wine, in a bucket of ice water.  It was very pleasant to spend our last evening with Marika in looking out at the lights along the Giudecca Canal, as a multitude of various watercraft passed by.

Afterwards, we returned to Al Campaniel, by way of Campo San Barnaba, a much more direct route than that we had taken from Nico the day before.

Campo Santa Margherita (Twice) and a Lot Else

Internet access at our hotel in Holland has been very intermittent, much worse than at any place in Italy. So I'm up before seven to get this post off.

On Friday, August 17th, we went up to the pleasant, sunny breakfast room on the third (second, European style) floor, where Marco served us cereal, croissants, bread and jam (or Nutella) and coffee. We could also have had cheese if we'd wanted it.

Then we went out to do a little shopping. Across the street from Al Campaniel are two shops. A chocolatier that, whenever it was open, ran the film Chocolat, with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, continuously on a TV facing the door. Our friend Marika said that it is recommended in her German guidebook, but we never went in. It was open a couple of times when we passed, and we still had a substantial remnant of the six chocolate tablets that we had received for free in Switzerland (two from the railroad and four left for us on the table of our apartment in Unterseen).

The other shop was a clothing store, and it had a half-off sale, so we went in to remedy my clothing malfunction by buying a new pair of pants. Given the heat (it was in the high eighties Fahrenheit, and humid--Florence would be much worse), I wanted a pair of shorts. We tried several pairs--size 60, too big; size 58, still too big; size 56, just right. I ended up with a pair of knee-length, dark navy blue, pinstriped shorts. Mary Joy tried on a white blouse, but it was too sheer.

We then went to Piazzale Roma to take an ATVO bus to Venice Marco Polo Airport. We just missed one while buying the eleven-euro-per-person round trip tickets, and had to wait half an hour in a little park bordering the giant Piazzale. There are two buses an hour for the twenty-minute trip.

Our German friend Marika's plane from Berlin was a little early, so, since she only had a carry-on bag, we met her just inside the terminal, and were able to quickly buy her round trip ticket and jump onto the bus on which we had arrived, before it left ten minutes after arriving.

Marika had never been to Venice before, and when we offered to meet her there for that weekend or in Amsterdam for the following one, she chose Venice.

Marco had given us her keys already, but he was there when we got back, and checked her into her room, which was directly above ours.

Then we went out to look for lunch. Marco had made some restaurant suggestions, mostly around the Campos Santa Margherita and San Barnaba, in Dorsoduro, to our south. We wandered down in that direction, running into a dead end or two and visiting the Church of San Pantalon on the way. Saint Pantalon is the namesake of the Commedia del'Arte character Pantalone, the old miser, after whose garb pantaloons, i.e., pants, are named.

We entered the very large, very lively Campo Santa Margherita, where we found Pier Dickens, one of Marco's recommendations. There we had salads that were substantially better than those of the previous evening.

Also, we filled our water bottles at the fountain in the campo. On our first day, someone had pointed out to us one of these great urban amenities. In the old days, Venetians had gotten all their water from rainwater cisterns in the center of practically every campo. The fountains are generally simple pipes with water continually flowing into a drain.

Then we rushed to catch the 3:00 organ vespers at Santa Maria della Salute, the very large church near the tip of the Dorsoduro, almost opposite San Marco. But vespers was at 3:30, immediately before the 4:00 daily mass, so we wandered around, going out to the very end of the Dorsoduro island, where the Customs House welcomed foreign merchants (and their money) in the days of the Venetian Republic.

Then we went up to the front of the church and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, we decided that the signs saying that the daily 4:00 mass was cancelled for the month of August also must apply to the organ vespers service.

Then, we decided to go to San Marco, so we walked back to the Accademia Bridge, by way of the Zattere, to get more of a glimpse of water. For a city full of water, Venice has amazingly few places to take a stroll along the waterfront. Except by San Marco, by Santa Maria della Salute and by the Pescheria (fish market), the Grand Canal is generally crowded with buildings down to the water. On the south side of Dorsoduro, however, stretches the Zattere, providing a promenade along much of the north shore of the broad Giudecca Canal. That day the Zattere was almost unbearably hot, with its open sunshine, as opposed to the darkish, narrow channels of inland Venice. We escaped at the Gesuati church, turning up the broad, shady way to the Accademia Bridge. We crossed to the Campo San Stefano, where we visited its namesake church. At that point, we decided that San Marco was too far, in the heat and crowds. Marika's guidebook and its associated map recommended a gelateria named Nico, on the Zattere, so we turned, recrossed the bridge and went down along the Rio di San Trovaso canal back to the Zattere, where we immediately found Nico. We went out on the deck over the water, found a table shaded by a large umbrella, and ordered. Marika and I had ice cream concoctions, while Mary Joy had a bowl of fruit. Mary Joy noted that immediately next to Nico was one of our recommended restaurants, Casin dei Nobili.

We headed for home, westward along the Zattere, but I miscalculated where to turn inland, so we ended up going all the way to the end, by San Basilio. Then we wandered streets where we had never been before. Somewhere near the Carmini church we came across a shop where an older man was selling wine that he had, as he explained proudly, produced himself. We decided to buy a bottle for a picnic dinner, but that meant we would have to choose between the Soave (white) and the Lambrusco (sparkling red). We decided to go with the Lambrusco, in part because we wouldn't need a corkscrew because it had a champagne cork in a metal cage.

We bought some bread, salami and cheese for our picnic and went back to Al Campaniel.

It may have been at this point, or maybe the next day, that we realized that a) our air conditioning didn't work; b) the electric outlet over the desk didn't work; c) the room phone was dead. Otherwise the electricity in the room was working. We discovered that Marika, whose room was directly above ours, had the same problems. In addition, the Internet access wasn't working.

Marco doesn't live on the premises, but you can call him from your room phone by dialing 300. If your room phone works. The card on the back of the door said that if your phone didn't work you should go upstairs and use the phone on the wall. There was a phone on the wall of the breakfast room, but it had no number pad. When I picked up the handset, there was no dial tone, just a distant sound of children, like the French family down in the room by the front door.

If we had gotten a SIM card for our cell phone, we could use it now, but we at first hadn't managed to do that, because of holidays, siestas, etc., and then we had decided that with less time it wouldn't be worthwhile. Now, Marika came to the rescue, after some failed attempts due to our difficulty in figuring out the difference between calling from Germany and calling from Italy. I used her cell phone to call the full telephone number on the office door, and reached Marco, who said that I didn't need to call that way, but could have called directly from the room phone. I explained how that wasn't possible and what exactly our problem was. He said tat he lived in the neighborhood, and would be over in five minutes.

He was, and as I had thought, a circuit breaker had been tripped. After fixing it, he asked if we had used an American hair dryer. Yes, Mary Joy had, with a 240 volt switch. He said that that didn't matter. It wasn't quite the same as a European hair dryer, even though she had used it without problem in Switzerland. So, for the next day, Mary Joy borrowed Marika's hair dryer.

Marika went to her room to rest awhile (she had gotten up very early that morning). Mary Joy and I went to a recommended deli, not far from the Rialto, to pick up more provisions. She asked what sort of salami was typical of Venice and the shop owner chose some and gave it to her. Then Mary Joy had trouble figuring out which cheese was which and what to choose, and the lady finally said "This is what you want," and cut her off a hunk.

Then we gathered Marika and went looking for a picnic site. This was a little problematic. It was around 8 p.m. and would soon be dark. We headed south, looking for benches or possibly steps. Some people were sitting on the steps of the little humpbacked bridges over the little side canals, but we didn't find any place suitable.

We got to Campo Santa Margherita, where we had had lunch. The long square was full of life, families with children and other apparently local people eating, drinking, doing the passeggiata (evening stroll) and, most relevant to our situation, sitting on the many park benches.

However, all those benches were currently full. We decided to split up along the lengthy campo and watch for a bench to empty, then pounce on it and call the others. Marika was the successful bench hunter. She saw a bench open at the far southern end of the square. She ran over and sat on it, but immediately an Italian woman sat at the other end. Marika asked if she could bring two friends over to sit there, too, and the Italian woman said yes. So Marika got Mary Joy, who was in the middle of the campo, and Mary Joy waved to me, at the north end.

We sat, and while Mary Joy opened the salami, cheese and bread, I carefully popped the cork on the Lambrusco. So we had a very nice picnic dinner, in the dark, with some musicians playing (guitar and something else, I don't remember what) on a nearby bench and people' voices coming from the restaurants around the campo, the park benches, the playing children and the passeggiata.

Vicenza and Venice

I forgot to mention that on the ferry from Sirmione to Desenzano Mary Joy noticed a big hole in my pants leg. How it happened, I don't know. What it meant was that I was down to one pair of trousers. Mary Joy said that I would have to buy another. I replied that we were near the halfway point of our trip, when I would change from pants pair 1 to pants pair 2. This is not how Mary Joy thinks I should handle trip clothing. If I had time, I'd write a Digression on Clothing Oneself on a Trip, but since I'm now a week behind here, I'd better not.

On Thursday, August 16th we decided that we should get on with our journeying and leave Desenzano on a morning train. The breakfast buffet at Hotel Astoria was one of the biggest and best I've ever seen, with various meats, cheeses, fruits, breads and pastries, thought the coffee comes out of a push-button machine.

We said goodbye to the friendly staff, then caught the train to Vicenza. On the way, we received some unpleasant news from reading Rick Steves' Venice guidebook, which includes Vicenza: there is no luggage storage at the railroad station there. If we had to lug our baggage around with us wherever we went, we wouldn't be able to See much there. Steves did say that in a pinch, the tourist information office might watch your luggage for you, but he specifically recommended against doing what we were about to do: stopping off in Vicenza to look around, on our way from one place to another, with luggage.

At least the center of Vicenza is much closer to the train station than is the case in Desenzano, and we had a map in the Steves book that showed where the two tourist offices are. So I hefted Mary Joy's bag and took the handle of my roller bag, while she carried both our daypacks. Although I knew pretty much where we were going, I stopped at a map on a board outside the station, in order to orient myself. An Italian man, seeing that we were in need of information, and without our asking, told us to go straight down to the tower and turn right on the Corso Palladio, and we'd arrive at the Piazza dei Signori. I thanked him and didn't bother taking my book out to follow the map. This turned out to be a mistake. Which leads us to two digressions.

Corso Palladio is Vicenza's main street. It is named such because Andrea Palladio is, by far, Vicenza's most famous son, and the creator of its principal tourist attractions. Sirmione has "Catullo this" and "Catullo that" because its most famous son is the greatest Roman love poet, Catullus. Unfortunately for Sirmione, Catullus didn't leave any tourist-visitable sights, other than some Roman ruins that have been named after him but with which he in actuality never had anything to do.

Vicenza, on the other hand, is lucky enough to have an architect as its favorite son, and not just any architect, but perhaps the most influential architect who ever lived. (Peace, Frank Lloyd Wright). If, like Thomas Jefferson and many other important people from the 16th to the early 20th centuries, you love neoclassical architecture, Vicenza is a place of pilgrimage.

Second digression. Italian people will go out of their way to help you, without even being asked, much more so than the French or the Swiss. They are wonderful, genuinely friendly people. Sometimes, however, the good intentions behind their helpfulness exceed its efficacy. This may be mostly a matter of misunderstanding on our part, due to the language barrier.

In any case, after walking quite a while, I checked my map and found that the Corso Palladio passes a block or two to the north of the Piazza dei Signori. So we might well have passed it already. From the map, I couldn't tell how far we'd come, so Mary Joy asked a woman how to get to the Piazza dei Signori, and she replied with a great deal of detail, making sure that we knew exactly where to turn to get back to that point. We thanked her, followed her directions and arrived there straightaway, and found the Tourist Information office. Unfortunately, it was closed until further notice (budget problems?).

We walked the several blocks to the other TI, next door to Palladio's Teatro Olimpico. This, fortunately, was not only open, but staffed by a very helpful young woman who not only would store our luggage while we did our Palladio walking tour of the city (set out in a brochure she gave us)--though Mary Joy had to sign a form and give her her passport to be xeroxed--but even though the office would be closed from 1:00 to 2:00, and we would have to leave around 1:30, she said that it would be no problem, since she would be in the office and we could just knock.

So we started following the itinerary in the brochure. That didn't last long. We've taken several architecture walking tours in Chicago, but the architecture there is varied, interesting and sometimes even exciting. Vicenza has some interesting Venetian Gothic buildings, but unless you love attempts to emulate the architecture of the Greeks and Romans, it will leave you cold. I don't expect ever to go there again.

So we went looking for lunch. After consulting our food guru, Lonely Planet Italy, we settled on putting together a picnic from foodbought at a recommended deli, Gastronomia Il Ceppo. "Al Ceppo" for dinner one night and "Il Ceppo" for lunch the next day. I later googled "ceppo" and found no enlightenment as to what the word means. I'll have to wait and consult the big Italian dictionary at home. We got two salads (shrimp with two types of rice and melon, and shrimp with zucchini and rice) and an interesting sort of wrap involving a light pancake, maybe with egg in the batter, and tuna. I got a Coca-Cola Light (i.e., Diet Coke), Mary Joy got a small bottle of mineral water, and we went over to the garden by the Teatro Olimpico and ate our lunch. Very nice.

We caught the 14:05 train to Venice, arriving there about an hour later. We hefted our luggage and walked to our B&B, Al Campaniel, taking maybe twenty minutes. For once a map in a Rick Steves book proved useful.

Al Campaniel's owner, Marco, let us in, checked us in and showed us our room, on the ground floor, with its own bathroom, not ensuite but down the hall. It was pleasant and, most important of all, had both air conditioning and WiFi. The building is on a narrow side street just off of Campo San Toma. Venice is full of little (and not so little) squares, called campi ("campo" means "field") instead of the standard Italian piazze. In Venice, I think, there is one piazza (San Marco, by the cathedral), one piazzetta (between the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal) and one piazzale (Piazzale Roma, where the highway bridge across the lagoon from the mainland arrives--this is where the automobile age ends, with parking ramps and bus depots, and the medieval and renaissance reliance on foot transportation resumes its sway. One thing that differentiates Venice from many other pedestrianized zones (such as Mackinac Island or Hydra), is that the footgoers are all human (aside from some canines) and therefore not the sort of pedestrians who leave large hunks of manure in the streets.

Campo San Toma is close to and between the Frari Church and the San Toma vaporetto stop. Vaporetti are the buses of Venice, large boats following set routes, with set prices. The most important vaporetto route is route 1, which goes from Piazzale Roma all the way down the Grand Canal to Saint Mark's, then across to the Lido, the beach resort island, where cars are allowed.

After freshening up, we hurried off to visit the Madonna del Orto church before it closed at 5:00. Getting there took longer than expected. Walking in Venice involves following mostly narrow streets either along or between canals, then up and down the steps over little humpbacked bridges into alleys opening onto little campos, with their little (or big) churches, shops and restaurants (often with outdoor seating). Every so often you get lost and wind up in a cul-de-sac and have to retrace your steps until you see one of the rectangular yellow signs posted high on the walls, with long arrows pointing "Per Rialto" or "Per San Marco" or wherever it is that you're going or is in the same general direction as where you're going. Then, if you're on one of the main tourist routes, say, near San Marco or the Rialto Bridge, you become part of a horde of people speaking English and German and French and Spanish and Japanese, plus the occasional Slavic language. No Italian, except in the shops, stalls, bars, osterias, trattorias, ristorantes, etc., crammed into these streets. The tour buses and cruise ships have emptied themselves like a blood transfusion poured into the main arteries of Venice.

Then, you turn off into a side street, go over another little bridge and into another little campo, and you find yourself alone. The population of Venice has decreased drastically over the decades, going from a high of around 200,000 to a current count of under 70,000. Some areas are practically deserted, giving you the feeling that you're on a film set instead of in a real, living city. We left the tourists on the Strada Nuova, part of the main route along the north side of the Grand Canal, and headed north into the settiere, or district, of Cannaregio, which is the working-class, least touristy part of Venice. We got to Madonna del Orto half an hour before it closed. We bought a couple of Chorus passes, which would get us into most of the churches of Venice for free. In the end, while Mary Joy had been hoping to visit as many Venetian churches as possible, we didn't have time and only used them to visit the Frari. The money went to a good cause: the upkeep of the most beautiful and historic of Venice's hundreds of churches.

Madonna del Orto, which houses a miraculous statue carved in the fourteenth century, was the parish church of Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto (the little dyer) because his father was a cloth dyer, and his son and successor Domenico. Tintoretto is buried there, in the chapel to the right of the sanctuary, and has several paintings in the church. The one I liked best is the Presentation of the Virgin, which shows the child Mary on the steps of the Temple, with priests waiting to receive her. This episode is nowhere mentioned in the gospels, but comes from one of the legends that filled in the gaps in our knowledge of the childhoods of Mary and Jesus. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does religion. The angle of vision is from below and to the left, so that you, along with the bystanders in the painting, are looking up the steps toward Mary, exultant in light, as she, in turn, looks up more steps to the left, toward the priests and temple towering over her. Tintoretto, in a way, is a baroque painter before there were any baroque painters, much as you can say that my other favorite painter, J.M.W. Turner, is an impressionist before there were any impressionists. Except that Turner is greater than the impressionists and Tintoretto is much greater than the baroque painters.

Before our last visit to Venice, in 2007, I happened upon an article about Tintoretto. Intrigued, we went to the Scuola di San Rocco, and I was blown away. We didn't manage to visit San Rocco this time, but unless Venice sinks below the waves in the next few years, it will still be there for the next time we are in the city.

Next, we went looking for restaurants in the neighborhood. Of the three that Mary Joy had picked out, one was too far away, one was closed for August and the third was closed on Thursdays. So we made our way back to the Strada Nuova, and there, across from San Felice church, was another recommended place, called La Cantina. There,on the recommendation of our waitress, I had the house beer, which is artisanal, brewed by someone she knows. It was very good. Mary Joy had a white wine from Soave, a town in the Veneto, the local region. Along with our drinks we had cicchetti, a sort of Venetian tapas. I don't remember exactly what we had for our little snacks, except that they involved cheese and prosciutto. At the next table was a couple from Belgium, with whom we had a nice conversation.

From there, we headed back to our B&B, looking for a place to have a salad along the way. But first, Mary Joy noticed a little pistachio cake in the window of a small pastry-shop. It didn't stay in that window for long.

We got into the crowd crossing the Rialto Bridge. Below the rail station, there are only two bridges across the Grand Canal. About halfway to San Marco is the stone Rialto Bridge. About three-quarters of the way down is the wooden Accademia Bridge. If I have time for another digression (which I won't), I'll talk about how, on our two previous trips to Venice, we stayed in five different hotels, all in the Dorsoduro district, near the Accademia (which, by the way, is Venice's preeminent art museum).

While crossing one campo along the way, Mary Joy stopped to check the menu of a bar (i.e., cafe) with tables in the square. I must have been checking the map to make sure that I knew where we were. A waiter from the bar came up, as they often do, and bantered with her, talking up the restaurant. She declined to stay, wanting to continue until she found something with a review in our books. So they bantered back and forth, and the waiter ended by hugging her and giving her the double air kiss. At this point, I arrived, pretending, for comic effect, to be the offended husband. But, being in his twenties or thirties, he immediately claimed Mary Joy as his long-lost "Mamma."

We went on to the Campo San Polo, the largest campo in Venice (remember that the Piazza San Marco is not a campo). Mary Joy had a particular restaurant in mind, but I wasn't aware of that, and when she decided that the menu had what she wanted, I, tired and hungry, said that we should sit down, then. Thinking it might be the recommended place in the guidebook, she asked the waiter what the name of the place was. When the name wasn't the one she was looking for, she hesitated, at which point I rebelled. So we sat down and ordered salads. They were not good. The tuna was low-quality, the lettuce was the stem-ends of head lettuce, the other contents were not fresh.

Mary Joy took one look at it and said "This is crap." She took one bite of it, threw down her fork and said "I'm not eating this."

I agreed with her assessment, but quickly ate my salad, anyway. While waiting to catch a waiter's eye, Mary Joy saw some Americans reading the menu. She shook her head at them and put both thumbs down, so they went on their way. Finally, a waiter came by and she demanded the bill, saying that it was the worst salad she'd ever had. She was hoping that, like the restaurant in Savannah where she'd also turned away her food after tasting it, this bar would take her meal off the bill. But they didn't, so we paid and headed back to Al Campaniel.

Busy in Ravenna, Florence and Verona

I've been too busy to write much, though I'm most of the way through the next post, "Vicenza and Venice." Today's a travel day, so I should get a lot done, and I'll definitely have one or more posts tonight from the Netherlands.

Leonardo and Lake Resorts

BOn Wednesday, August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, we went to breakfast as soon as it opened, at eight. It was the usual continental breakfast, but the waiter was singing as he was preparing it, and he brought it to us with a smile.

We checked out, left our luggage in the narrow front hall, across from the desk, and caught a Metro train for Cadorna station. From there, we walked a few blocks to Santa Maria delle Grazie and the Cenacolo Vinciano. Attached to the church was a Dominican monastery. When it was built in the second half of the fifteenth century, the friars commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a mural on the north wall of the refectory (dining hall). The subject of the painting was the moment at the Last Supper when Jesus had just told his disciples that one of them would betray him. This is, of course, Leonardo's second most famous painting, after the Mona Lisa.

After much online and telephone ado, I had finally managed, about a month before, to get a voucher for tickets to the 9:30 English-language guided tour of the Last Supper, on August 15th, the day we would be in Milan. So now I turned this voucher in for our tickets. In order to conserve the painting, which was already beginning to flake a few years after it was finished, due to the failure of Leonardo's experimental painting technique, only a few people are allowed into the room at any time, and only for fifteen minutes.

In our group, most of the people were Japanese, on a guided tour. After I got our tickets, the Japanese tour director asked us if we needed two tickets, since two of her people hadn't shown up. Having a few minutes to kill, We wandered around the neighborhood. It appeared to be a very nice, rather wealthy urban neighborhood.

Our tour guide spoke English with a heavy Italian accent, so it wasn't always easy to understand her. We entered the refectory through a series of anterooms, one after the other, sort of like decompression chambers. The idea was to control the climate in the room as absolutely as possible. Once inside, we went up to a wall before the painting. Although it has had a fairly recent restoration, the Last Supper has what on "Antiques Roadshow" would be called "major condition issues." Nevertheless, it is a powerful piece of art. The focus is on the calm face of Jesus, while the disciples, in groups of three, lean back, aghast, except for Peter,who is asking John who Jesus means, and Judas.

We then went to the other end of the room, to get a better look at how it actually first appeared, since the friars later built up the floor (and had to cut Jesus's feet out of the picture, in order to make the doorway under it higher). After fifteen minutes, the far door opened and we were all summarily commanded to leave.

Since we had a little time, we walked the few blocks to the Sforza Castle, an impressive brick monstrosity, designed mainly to protect the Sforza dukes from unruly subjects. Incidentally, the Sforza coat of arms was a serpent swallowing a man.


We walked to a tram stop and caught a tram down to the Duomo. Everyone else got off at the stop just before the Duomo, and we were about to do the same (I was actually off the tram), but Mary Joy asked the driver, and he said that there was still one stop to go. Then he added that we shouldn't really be vacationing here, but in Naples! Milan is an ugly city, and all it has going for it is the Duomo, but Naples is bellissima! The food is much better there. We'd have a much better time there than here. Mary Joy agreed that Milan is ugly, and that we ,should someday go to Naples. Then we said goodbye and got off the tram. I think we can guess what part of the country the driver is from.

We were a little early for the 11:00 mass, but the cathedral chapter (the priests of the cathedral) were doing morning prayer, along with a small choir, which turned out to be the choir that would sing at mass. The cardinal-archbishop was there, I think (certainly, some bishop), and he presided at mass. The organ and organist were impressive. The mass itself was in the Ambrosian Rite, local to Milan and slightly different from the Roman Rite (I had difficulty noticing any differences, but Mary Joy pointed some out, mostly having to do with a lot more "Kyrie eleisons."

We had a very nice (if pricy: there was a cover charge--something very common in Italian restaurants--of five euros apiece, I think it was) lunch at the Bar Literaria (?) in the Galleria, then had some more gelato at Grom, then rushed back to the Hotel Stazione to pick up our luggage, and got onto our train a few minutes before it left.

This is one of two train tickets I had bought in advance on the Internet. I was afraid that on a holiday there would be crowds of Milanese heading for the beach. As a result, we had only paid nine euros apiece for reserved seats on the high-speed train to our next destination, Desenzano, a beach resort on Lake Garda.

Since we only wanted to spend four nights in Venice, we had one night available to break the journey from Milan. We had thought of Bergamo ( too far out of the way) and Vicenza, but Mary Joy thought it would be nice to have a break between city stays, so while we realized that the Lago di Garda would be overflowing with vacationing Italians, we decided to splurge a little for half a day at the lake. Since Desenzano is on the main line from Milan to Venice, it wouldn't be out of our way.

The train ride was fast and uneventful, but then we ran into a few problems. I had printed off directions to our hotel, but the night before, I realized that these directions were for Hotel Aurora, not our Hotel Astoria. I looked online for a map, and got an idea of how to get there, but we didn't have any way of printing it and I didn't write directions down. That presumably wouldn't matter. Because the hotel was two kilometers from the station, we'd get a taxi.

However, when we came out of the station to the taxi stand, there were a number of people waiting, but no taxis. As the minutes ticked by, still no taxis, and people started to give up and walk. But I wasn't sure where to walk. I went in to the station tabacchi (sort of a newsstand-tobacco shop) and asked if they had a map of the city. No. I could get one at Tourist Information, just go straight down that street for a kilometer.
So we started walking, in the hot sunshine. I carried Mary Joy's big backpack and eventually took my daypack as well, while she pulled my rolling bag and carried her own daypack. Eventually, we came to a traffic circle and had to choose from three possible directions. I decided to follow the narrowest street, because it was closest to being straight ahead. That turned out to be the wrong decision. If we had gone to the left, that would eventually have taken us right past our hotel. As it was, after some time we found ourselves in the pedestrianized center of Desenzano, on the lake next to the small port. Now what?

We saw a bar that advertised WiFi. So we sat at a terrace table with our bags, to order drinks and use Google Maps to find out where we were and where we wanted to be. But the one waitress was very busy, so we gave up and left.

Next, I went into a store and asked the clerk if she knew where Hotel Astoria was. She had never heard of it, but looked it up online. It was on Antonio Gramsci, she said. She wasn't sure where the hotel itself was, but gave me complicated instructions on how to find Via Antonio Gramsci. Once there, she said, I could ask for further directions. So I left Mary Joy with our luggage and headed off in the direction that the store clerk had indicated. Within ten minutes I was back in the central piazza, since I had found myself having to choose among various directions with no real idea what I was doing. I went into a bar and asked if they had a map. The woman at the bar thought that they did, but on consultation with a colleague, decided that they didn't, after all. However, I could get one at the Tourist Information. And where was that? In that building over there, around behind.

So I went around behind that building, and sure enough, there was the tourist information office.

"Buon giorno, Signora. Parla inglese?"

"Of course. How can I help you?"

"We have a problem. We are lost. We cannot find our hotel."

"Yes, you have a big problem."

"Do you know where we can find the Hotel Astoria?"

"Well, that's very easy. It's a five minute walk from here."

She got me a map and drew out a route along the waterfront.

I collected Mary Joy and the luggage and we crossed the little harbor and walked along the lake. Five minutes and no Hotel Astoria. Ten minutes and no Hotel Astoria. I left Mary Joy on a bench and went on ahead. Eventually, I saw the Hotel Aurora, but no Astoria. However, the store clerk's directions finally proved useful, as Via Antonio Gramsci came down to the lake. A block or so up this street there was a sign for Hotel Astoria. I went back for Mary Joy and the luggage, and we finally checked in.

This was a very nice hotel (air conditioned, of course), with a very pleasant and helpful staff.

We decided to take the ferry across the lake to Sirmione, which is a much cuter, more picturesque and expensive resort than Desenzano. We had restaurant recommendations for Sirmione, but none for Desenzano. The problem was that we would have to catch the ferry back, and the last one ran at 8:00, a little more than two hours after our arrival. After wandering around looking at the scenery and not finding any place to eat, because they were all either a) closed for the holiday, b) closed on Wednesdays, c) not open until 7 p.m. or d) too expensive, we ran back to the port to catch the 7:10 ferry back to Desenzano.

We asked the owner (?) if he knew of any good restaurants, and he replied that he knew exactly the right place: close by, inexpensive, with very good food. He gave us a card and the directions to Al Ceppo, on the waterfront not far away. It was exactly what we wanted, full of Italian families, with people waiting to be seated. After a relatively short wait, we were seated and had a very nice dinner, though after nearly a week, I don't remember exactly what it was. People were still arriving for dinner at 9:30. Italy is not quite as late-eating as Spain, where formal restaurants open around 8:30, but you're still not going to go to eat at a nice place in Italy before seven.

Then we went out on the hotel's dark roof terrace for a few minutes to look out over Lake Garda to the lights of Sirmione, and went to bed.

Iseltwald and Italy

On Tuesday, August 14th, I went over to the Coop and got some more strawberries, then we had them along with the rest of the muesli and milk. Then we checked out of our pleasant apartment and went to the West railway station, where we put our luggage in a large locker for five Swiss francs. We walked the back way (along the Aare) to the Ost station, then took a bus (gratis, thanks to our tourist pass) to the village of Iseltwald, which is beyond Boenigen on the Brienzersee.

Many years ago, we took the boat to Iseltwald, to start a walk along the lakeshore to the Giessbach Falls. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant. Noticing pictures and, I think, awards on the wall relating to accordion music, Mary Joy asked the proprietor, an elderly man, about them. He promptly pulled out his accordion and played for us!

Now, we went to the closest restaurant, the Strandhotel, and liking what we saw on the menu, went immediately to their lake terrace for lunch, since we didn't have much time. We had a smoked trout salad--very good. It was very nice to sit there on a sunny day by the Brienzersee.

Then we went to the town square to wait for the bus back. While we were there, a squad of fourteen or fifteen Swiss soldiers, carrying weapons and heavily laden backpacks, walked into the square. One of them asked Mary Joy, in German, where the castle was. She replied that she was an American tourist. Immediately, a local man stepped up and the soldier asked him. However, the local man appeared bewildered. Apparently, there isn't a Schloss in Iseltwald. One of the soldiers jogged over to the fountain, his backpack banging on his back, and filled a plastic mineral water bottle. A sergeant (?) appeared and sorted things out, and the squad headed up the hill.

The Swiss still have compulsory military service for males. Most men who have finished their service are in the reserves, and they keep their assault rifles at home. Andreas, who is German, says that the Germans find this incomprehensible. I suppose it is as if the scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control were required to take home the samples of bubonic plague they were working with and keep them in their home refrigerators.

We caught the bus back to the Interlaken Ost station. It was a normal trip except for one thing. The bus wasn't full, and toward the middle there were a couple of guys in tee shirts, shorts, sandals or sneakers. One had a baseball cap, while the other had a goatee. As we were approaching the station, they suddenly got up, showed yellow badges and asked to see tickets. Our passes were good, of course.

So we walked back along the Aare to the West station, with a few minutes to spare, took our luggage out of the locker and caught the train to Spiez, where our adventures began.

The day before, we had bought our train tickets. Our options were limited to early morning (7:52, I think) and early afternoon (1:32). We chose the latter, with a projected arrival time in Milan a little after five. We were warned that because of construction on the line, we would have to get off the train at Iselle, in Italy, and board a shuttle bus for Domodossola, where we would be put on another train. This construction had been going on two years ago when we went through this area, coming from Locarno on the Centovalli line, but they had been letting trains through, at least from the south, at certain times of day, so we had avoided the shuttle bus situation. Not this time.

Shortly after we arrived in Spiez, there was an announcent that the train from Bern to Milan would be late because of mechanical problems. Okay. Then there was another announcement: that train was cancelled and passengers would have to take the next one. While our tickets would be honored, this introduced the complication of a train change, since this new train would only be going to Brig, so we would have to transfer to the next Brig-Milan train. All this was explained over the loudspeakers and handled calmly and graciously by the railroad personnel. We would end up arriving in Milan an hour later than originally planned.

The train to Brig arrived and Mary Joy and I had an upper level of a double-decker car all to ourselves. But that was only a relatively short part of the trip. We had a 33-minute layover in Brig, which was not long enough to wander up into our old haunts of two years ago. The next train was jam-packed with people, chaotically trying to find seats and places for their luggage for the fourteen-minute run to Iselle.

We ended up with our bags on our knees, seated next to an older French woman, from Paris, who was on her way to stay with her niece in Locarno, so at Domodossola she would take the scenic Centovalli ("hundred valleys") train into the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino. We followed the same route in the other direction two years ago. Her English was very good: she had been an au pair in South Carolina. It turns out that she sings in the choir of a Protestant church near the Louvre, and recommended that we visit there to hear them the next time we're in Paris. She said that they'd had a wonderful well-known organist for many years (Mary Joy didn't recognize her name), but that she had retired and the new one wasn't nearly as good.

Soon the train came out of a tunnel and stopped at Iselle, a village in the Simplon Pass. The Simplon was a principal trade route between Lombardy and the Rhone Valley (i.e., Geneva, Lyon). We have passed under it many times through the long rail tunnels on the way between Interlaken and Italy. But now we had to come out of our train burrows, into the open air, walk fifteen minutes with our luggage (carts were provided, if necessary), and get onto one of six or seven buses lined up on the road, beneath the towering rims of the narrow valley. This was semi-chaotic, with people shoving their bags into the bays under the buses, then trying to find a place on one of the buses, which wouldn't leave until full, and also wouldn't leave if more than full (no standing!).

We got the last two seats on the second-to-last bus, and it drove off down the pass. The scenery was impressive. Eventually, we arrived in Domodossola, and there was an even more chaotic scene, with people dragging their luggage down the narrow side aisles, peeking into the six-passenger compartments as they passed, sometimes asking if a seat were available. We ended up in a compartment with four young people. There was not much room for storing bags. This was a couchette car, with four pull-down beds in their daytime folded-up positions. I got my big bag up on a rack over the window, but part of it was hanging over, so to secure it I wrapped one of the bed-support buckle straps around the end, tying it to the luggage rack.

Otherwise, the trip to Milano Centrale station was uneventful. We got in a little after six, and went to look for our hotel, the Hotel Stazione. As you might guess from the name, it was very close to the station, a few blocks away to the front, at the base of the Pirelli skyscraper.

There were several small hotels in a row, and since our hotel's glass doors didn't slide open automatically, when we stopped in front of them, I assumed that the entrance was the next door down. But when we tried to check in there, it turned out that that was the Hotel New York, instead. So we went back to the glass doors and the desk clerk buzzed us in. Our room was plain and simple, and had two extra beds folded up into the wall. Occasionally, we heard the rumble of Metro trains beneath the ground. But the most important thing was that it had air conditioning!

We had already noticed that Brig was noticeably warmer than Interlaken. Milan was noticeably warmer than Brig. I had expected this. There is a reason why most Italians quit work during August and head for the beaches and mountains. I had made absolutely certain that all our Italian hotels had air conditioning. Even so, the combination of heat and humidity in places like Venice has to be experienced to be believed. I doubt very much that we will ever again go to Italy in August.

The desk clerk was very nice. We had brought a European cellular phone with us from home, and intended to buy an Italian SIM card for it, but we hadn't had a chance to do so yet, and it was too late today. We couldn't figure out how to operate the room phone, but when we told the desk clerk that we wanted to call a particular restaurant that Mary Joy had picked out in her researches, he called for us, but got an answering machine: they were closed until the end of August. This became a recurring theme. I had warned Mary Joy that many of the better restaurants in the cities in Italy might be closed for August. In addition, today was the eve of a national holiday, Ferragosto, the feast day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Even more stores and restaurants would be closed from now through the weekend. This is very frustrating to Mary Joy, who (as we shall see in Venice) sees bad restaurant food as a personal insult, so she needs to have some indication (usually a review in a guide book) of whether it is worthwhile to eat at a particular restaurant. Therefore, if all the restaurants that she has marked down in Lonely Planet Italy or Rick Steves' Venice are closed, she is tossed into dangerous waters and has to steer her way past the treacherous rocks and icebergs while siren menus posted outside plausible but deceitful trattorias or osterias try their best to lure her inside to culinary doom!

We asked the desk clerk if he had any recommendations for restaurants. He gave us the card of a nearby pizzeria, saying that it was okay, but not terrific--the people working there were Chinese. I have some difficulty envisioning Chinese pizza. We asked if we would be more likely to find something good by the Duomo (Cathedral). He said yes, there were a lot of restaurants clustered in that area.

So we took the Metro down to the Duomo and looked around for somewhere to eat. We ended up at a bar (the Italian equivalent of a cafe) where the waitress talked us into staying--we didn't see anything better and were hungry. It wasn't too bad. It wasn't great.

We were much luckier with dessert. Lonely Planet recommends Grom, for some of the best gelato around. We found it, open, a few blocks north of the Duomo, almost across from La Scala. This gelato is made with the best ingredients and imaginative flavoring. As in most Italian shops, you go to the cash register first, tell them what you're getting (two small--two scoops) copette ("little cups"), pay, then take the receipt to the person doing the scooping--often the same person who took your money. I had two favors, coffee and the Grom special, while Mary Joy had coffee and pistachio. We enjoyed our wonderful gelato while walking the block or so to the Galleria, the grandmother of all indoor shopping malls. The Galleria is late nineteenth-century, with common areas roofed with glass. There are various pictures, including signs of the zodiac, inlaid in the floor. We, like all Milanese and tourists to Milan, could not leave the Galleria without doing a spin on our toe on the private parts of the bull, now very worn.

Then we took the Metro back to our hotel and went to bed.