Many are called...

Many are called to poetic martyrdom and few are chosen so don’t get carried away.That’s what I think this sign has to say to young neurasthenic Rilke wannabes who tread the Rilke path along the cliffs of Duino.

Adriatic content

Walking the Rilke path north of the Duino castle rendered me almost ecstatically happy. I spat plum-stones and mandarin-pips into the Adriatic from this lofty vantage point as I ate my lunch.

I haven’t been surrounded by so many birds since I left Australia; I could not dignify them with proper names – Wee Yellow-throated Warbler, Sparrow von Rilke, Bluestreaked Chappie of Duino, Adriatic Gleeskipper? – but the presence of so many chirping featherlings left me nevertheless twitchingly content after a marked insufficiency of ornithological companionship. On my right, Duino Castle beckoned.
Given the height of the cliffs and the luminosity of the midday sun, all injunctions to leap towards the light in the Duino Elegies have been complicated.

On the other side of the bridge

The Venetian Grand Canal is ubiquitous but this one is not.

This is the Grand Canal of Trieste and look who is walking over the via Roma bridge!

Joyce lived in Trieste during WWI and wrote a fair chunk of Ulysses here. Indeed, Ulysses ends with a gesture towards the compositional itinerary of the book which includes Trieste: 'Trieste-Zurich Paris, 1914-1921.' This final epigram doesn’t accurately describe or even condense the compositional history of Ulysses; in spite of this, I’ve been determined to visit Trieste for almost a decade. Researching Joyce for my thesis, I read enough about his stint here in Trieste to motivate me finally to drag myself here on the way to Istanbul. Italo Svevo, author of the incomparable Zeno’s Conscience also lived in Trieste and if that were not a sufficient literary draw, Duino Castle is situated about fifteen kilometres around the Gulf of Trieste. Il Castello di Duino is where Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies, poems which I love more than I can possibly express on a blog.

The first article published by a young Virginia Woolf concerned her visit to Bramley Parsonage, home of the Bronte sisters. She uneasily considered the uneasy matter of literary pilgrimage and the utility of visiting places in which great works were written, in which great authors lived. The question of whether it is necessary or not to visit Bramley Parsonage in order to understand Wuthering Heights (or, indeed, Trieste to understand Ulysses and Duino to understand the Duino Elegies) abridges Anglo-American literary theory in the twentieth century. How should we use biographical material and compositional history to understand a literary text? How does the empirical, the subjective, the historical, the geographical, bear upon the literary and the intellectual? OK. Do you want to break into small groups to work through the question or deal with it as a large group? Anyone? Any thoughts?

My PhD argued that Modernist texts, like Ulysses, which ally themselves with the mechanical innovations of the twentieth century should be read as printed books, as textual objects which come into being only when they have been published. Following this logic, Trieste represents a moment in the pre-history of Ulysses, just before disparate sheets of manuscript and typescript turned into a sheaf of galley proofs and obscenity suits. Accordingly, such a pilgrimage should not officially contribute to a reading of the book.

What am I doing in Trieste then, apart from taking the less than obvious route to Istanbul? Despite being a little dubious about the scholarly utility of too much bio-geo-psychographical information about authors, I didn’t work on Joyce for years without developing some curiosity about his homes and haunts. I shudder at the kind of literary tourism which takes large gawping groups on tour through an author’s house in quest of an exact locus of inspiration. Part of that shudder is plain old elitism but most of it is scepticism about the accessibility and even definition of such moments. The Trieste that Joyce lived in was part of a different Europe; the late nineteenth century civic and mercantile buildings which now look Old would have been flashy and new before WWI.

Idle wandering around Trieste or Duino or Bramley Parsonage makes for an unofficial, unscholarly, speculative kind of criticism: I climb the hill behind Trieste to look into the San Guisto Cathedral and the majestic sweep of the Gulf of Trieste captures my attention, interrupting my efforts to remember whether San Guisto or San Apollinaire figure in Ulysses. Hellas surges in via the Adriatic and the tide washes away just as fast as I walk past the nineteenth century silliness that is the Trieste Lapidario, a walled garden in which large stones of antiquity are displayed. The Joyce and Svevo museums were both shut for refurbishment so there was no chance to examine the official relics. Oh look, there’s a bar. And how about these pigeons desecrating the angels in the middle of the Piazza D’Unità D’Italia? Plotting random points on fantastical theoretical trajectories on the ‘Blue Book of Eccles’ only to abandon the journey over a drink and start another one is terrifically exciting. Doing so with no compunction to transform the musings into an integrated theory, a learned article, a witty anecdote and a grant application is a liberty and a joy I could have barely imagined a year ago.

In the last week I’ve swooned past the house where Byron lived in Venice, I’ve sat on Rilke’s balcony at Duino Castle and I’ve sauntered and sashayed right on through Joyce’s Trieste and I’m still not quite sure what to do with these sites of literary apart from enjoy them and the weird process of reflection they provoke. Rest assured, mavens of Modernism, there will be no official ficto-critical recapitulation of this journey to Trieste. Of greater concern to the general populace should be the future stream of anecdote, wind, and creaky memory which will undoubtedly overcome my best defences. To this unpleasant scenario, I can only offer as remedy the oft-cited aphorism which is also the title to the novel of which the title of this blog is the first line.

Post scriptum: If this seems like an impossibly long post, please bear in mind just how much longer it could have been.

Cultural conflict

Two statements I’m prepared to stand by:

1. French bread is superior to Italian bread.

Abundance of salt and crust are the key factors underwriting this decree.

2. Italian coffee is superior to French coffee.

Every single espresso I’ve drunk in Italy has proudly borne a thick, golden crema. Waiters don’t look at you like you’ve made a major cultural faux pas if you order a coffee with milk, be it a cappuccino or a macchiato. I hadn’t encountered any cappuccino froth art since I left Sydney and coffeetops like this one, quaffed in the Campo San Stefano in Venice, with a copy of the Guardian on hand, made me a little homesick.

I can’t, however, come to a definitive position on the important question of Ice-Cream. Without a shadow of a doubt, the ice-cream I ate in Paris (ah, Berthillon) and in Corsica (made of strawberries picked by mine own fair hands) aced the gelati I’ve eaten in Italia. I don’t think that I can fairly appraise Italian ice-cream having tasted only a random sample. The strawberry and grape sorbet served as part of Peter and Allegra’s wedding feast was superlative but as far as I know, no photographs are available. This cone – tiramisu and frutti di bosco in Venice – wasn’t bad either.

Look though, at some of the things that you can’t do at Duino Castle.

No smoking, no spitting, fair enough. No ice-cream?? This seems a bit tough, given there is a café which sells ice-cream about twenty metres away from this sign.

And no talking! No talking seems absolutely reprehensible in view of the long, loudly trumpeted relationship between the rulers of the Duino Castle and the poets. Middle echelon aristocracy – don’t get me started.

Canal-side, or, Gondolas the Second

There isn’t a helluva lot to say about these gondolas save that they are in focus and they are in Venice and the firmament beyond them is dazzling and hell, that’s more than can be said for the rest of the world. I took this photo next to the Palazzo Ducale looking out to the point of Dorsoduro on Friday night. I walked past these gondolas on the following night, that of Peter and Allegra’s wedding; the sky delivered less in terms of pyrotechnics and I wasn’t on my way to the vaporetto stop but to trays laden with bellinis. The Aussie tourists who serenaded the newlyweds as they left San Marco and made their way to the wedding gondola were almost as marvellous as the previous evening’s twilit sky.

Gondola guidance

Good looking city, Venice, even when the weather is overcast.
Here’s the view down the Grand Canal from the Rialto Bridge. Every single person who has been to Venice has taken exactly this photograph. Tourists have been marauding through the city for at least a couple of centuries getting their portraits painted and taking photographs of each other so a blog mini-tour featuring me and me seems not wholly inappropriate.

This photo is a little blurry but I include it because it is taken in the Piazza San Marco and so is a necessary counterpoint to the canal view. It might also be the only time I am snapped betwixt a wedding in San Marco cathedral and cocktails in a palazzo in which Casanova worked his magic.

Enfin, a bog standard corner of Venice. No crowds, no churches, no spots or stars on the map and still pretty scenic.

Noteworthy

Harry’s Bar, Venice, is credited with the invention of two good things. Prosecco and white peach puree were first shaken into a bellini at Harry’s. Harry’s was also allegedly the first bar to serve beef carpaccio, so named for the Venetian artist. Rest assured, dear friends, I drank many bellinis during my Venetian sojourn and ate my share of carpaccio.
This excellent carpaccio was served with parmesan, rocket and olives. I was weathering the consequences of having been served many excellent bellinis.

Access restriction

Verona is the only city in Italy in which I’ve seen these marvellously stylish no-go signs.
I passed through Verona for a night on my way from Milan to Venice. My thinking was more cathedrals and ruins than Shakespeare. There is an enormous amphitheatre right in the middle of Verona and more medieval churches than I’ve ever seen in such a small perimeter. If only I retained statistics more readily. Byzantine ruins, Romanesque churches, Renaissance churches, it’s all there in fair Verona. Fair Verona, sound familiar? Yes, young lovers, Verona is the city of Romeo and Juliet. Take it from the woman who stayed in Hotel Capuleti, the ill-fated, star-crossed two lure more starry-eyed tourists to Verona than all the churches.

Check out Juliet’s balcony.Romantic, huh? Thousands of notes to Juliet were also pasted to the walls of the corridor leading to the courtyard. Touching.

Let it not be said that I am too hard-hearted to appreciate the romantic spirit. I just went to a very romantic wedding in Venice at which my eyes welled. The romance of Romeo and Juliet, however, escapes me. The young lovers, gormless, scheming, and perhaps a little witless, both die prematurely and unnecessarily. The immortality of their love seems like a feeble recompense for the fact that they didn’t actually get to live that love. Perhaps a few more no-go signs need to be erected around the Shakespearean sites of Verona.

Venice Beach

Fans of Thomas Mann, Eurotrashers, beachcombers, coast-lovers, leopard-print bikini aficionados: here's your Lido.

Hirsute appendages

I am not brave enough to take guerrilla photos of moustaches in Italian cafes but I have been pushing the boundaries of discretion in my admiring observation of the variety of mustachios on show since my arrival in the land of Verdi; bristling, razor-sharp, toothbrush, curlicue, drooperino, dashing, suave, waxed, prinked or uplifted, the moustaches of Italy are pleasing me no end.

It is now, however, clear to me that I have been checking out the B-listers: the 9th World Beard and Moustache Championships took place in Brighton last weekend. This event was organised by the Handlebar Club of Great Britain whose members must display ‘a hirsute appendage of the upper lip, with graspable extremities.’ It’s phrasing like that, particularly the locution ‘graspable extremities,’ that makes me grateful to providence for having deposited my protopersonage on the narrow land at the hour of my birth.

Hit and miss

Paninoteca = Sandwich shop

Pinacoteca = Painting gallery

One minor example of the linguistic obstacles which thwart my ability to communicate efficiently and elegantly in Italian. Somehow, the resemblence between Spanish, a language I can speak in a slipshod slapdash almost shipshape fashion, and Italian, a language I really cannot speak has lodged into my brain the idea that it is a better idea to speak to Italians in Spanish than to tell them that I can't speak Italian (no parlo italiano - that I can say) and ask, like every other tourist in the country does, whether they speak English. Anglophone shame: strange phenomenon, and one that I suspect may be both widespread and, as yet, inadequately documented.

Anyway.

There are few obstacles left to thwart the marriage of my friends Pete and Allegra this weekend. The occasion of their nuptials delights me. That the ceremony is taking place in Venice, indeed, in the great gilded marble confection that is San Marco thrills me further. That all of this excitement is occuring simultaneous to the swing of the Venice Film Festival and the end of the Biennale is almost too fabulous. The sun is shining brightly. In order to offset the risk of bedazzlement and to attempt to look the part, I have purchased a new pair of sunglasses. People are asking me for directions. I feel like a total local. Even genuine Italians are asking me for directions. Everybody gets confused when I answer them in Spanish.

Dilemma

I leave Milan for Verona tomorrow and, I regret to confess, it will be the second time I have left Milan without having gratified my ardent desire to eat osso buco con risotto milanese in Milan. To catch a morning train or to stay for lunch? This is the question upon which I will sleep.

Structures of authority

Milano Centrale railway station is often cited as the ne plus ultra of fascist architecture. It's big. It imposes. Its columns are guarded by lions and eagles. It has daunting dimensions. The state that built it could clearly crush any whimsical individual like an ant. There are photos of it all over the place. The columns girding this building also warrant a mention in the annals of fascist architecture. Straight to the point, the lads from the armed rapid response unit. Grenades and an eagle in the one column! You can find this on via Brera, Milan, as you walk towards La Brera, the art school which just happens to house a spectacular collection of Renaissance paintings.

Say yes to cheese

Unless both my source and my memory are incorrect, the term ‘polentini’ is used by southern Italians to denigrate their polenta-eating northern brethren. How anyone could possibly mistake an appetite for polenta for something worth derogation is entirely beyond me.

I didn’t jump on a train from Milan to Bergamo solely to eat polenta. No, I was there in order to elevate my spirit through contact with a combination of historical architecture, views, cobblestones, ramparts, churches, frescos, local colour, citadel, and Donizetti. Lake Como isn't too far from Bergamo and Byron was certainly elevated by his trip there. I walked up a very significant hill reach the old city - cobblestones, they’re mighty hard work – and on the way, I took in enough bakeries advertising cakes called ‘polenta e ösei’ to figure out that they were a local speciality and to earmark them for consumption later in the day.

My calculation of a good time to visit Bergamo wasn’t exactly on the money. Being a Monday, all the museums were closed. Being September 2007, the cathedral and basilica were shut for refurbishment. Fortunately, the restaurants were open and a polentissimo lunch was the highlight of my very civilised daytrip to Bergamo. There were many more interesting options than the mushrooms sautéed with garlic and parsley, served with a cheese and polenta cake but I chose this one because it almost resembles something I would cook chez moi. Ah, kitchen nostalgia: polenta tart with leek and blue cheese, garlicky mushrooms in red wine, token leafy greens… Anyway, chez Donizetti, the mushrooms were thick and slippery and the polenta cake was respectably cheesy.

Eaten in dappled sunlight, under extremely tasteful arches, the dish was let down only by the wine, which in spite of being a soave classico (my future husband, perhaps), was more like an aceto classico. Nonetheless, the meal left me reasonably content and, mindful of the polenta cake I envisaged as an afternoon snack, I only accepted the cheese and dessert menu for the purposes of information glancing. The charade of restraint was over – and really, it’s hard to play an entertaining game of charades on your own – as soon as I saw a cheese plate headed by local Tallegio. I had devoted a small amount of the train ride north to Bergamo to thoughts of Tallegio, a cheese of which I am particularly fond. And so it continued: Tallegio, Vedeseta, Strachitund. The cheeses were so wonderful and so perfectly matched that they made up for the later disappointment of the polenta cakes. I post a bodgy photo of them because that is what they were: bodgy. I’d expected heavy, syrup-soaked polenta delights and what I got was sponge cake topped with chocolate cream and something that might have been chestnut paste, all covered in a too sweet sugar and polenta mixture. Had I foregone the tallegio for the polenta cakes, I would have been sorely disappointed. I’m sure there is a lesson there.

Form and function

This image offers considerable, if redundant, support to the contention that Italians are an innately suave bunch.
Here we have a sign which elegantly directs the illiterate pedestrian towards the entry to one of Genoa’s metro stations. Not only does the sign work to regulate the flow of pavement traffic, the suavity of this figure, the nonchalance of her carriage - see the insouciant tilt of her head? - and the unstudied certainty of her step suggests to me that mode and place of ingress are of equal importance. Well might my wardrobe be short on tasteful neutrals and long on wrinkles, clumsy has my gait always been, I shall nonetheless endeavour to comply.

I am not alone in the collection of street signs. Rudi kindly sent me notice of Signspotting 2, the second Lonely Planet book devoted to street signs, the preview of which contains some gems.

Drowning or waving?

The shadowy cobblestoned backstreets of Genoa remind me not a little of the labyrinthine dark alleys of Barcelona. Both Genoa and Barcelona seem to have more than their fair share of resident angry students and paint-the-wall activist types spouting political slogans, creatively jamming the perception-circuits of the sallow-souled, compliant many, brightening up the place with a bit of guerilla visual rowdiness. Ah, angry students.

The cheap thrill of postmodern non-cynical directness hasn't completely taken over. How on earth did being cynical and ironic go out of fashion? Thank the Lord, there is room on Genovese walls for Modernist obscurantism, as this sequence demonstrates nicely.

I am also happy to report that the political opinions of the spraycan wielding classes are varied, as this dialogue (sorry, palimpsest) on the right to life of el Chavez reveals. Note the cute ‘lil snail and the 'Housing is a Right' slogan perched above, hopefully soliciting attention.Via Gramsci is the name of the road that runs alongside the port of Genoa; from a hill up near the castle, the view is superintended by the bearded patriarch of all modern ink-based wall disfiguration.

Q. Where might I find me a nymph in Genoa?

A. In the nymphaeum of the Palazzo di Niccolosio Lomellino, of course.

Chicken soup for the soul

It is no doubt a sign of invigorated spirits that my capacity to nominate things that I like has improved markedly over the last few years. Time was I could only cobble together compilations of things of which I heartily disapproved (white jeans, spelling errors and missing apostrophes, frozen meals, Dan Brown’s readership, people who wear silver Birkenstocks, chokos, Reece Witherspoon…) or things of which I approved only in ironic mode (Beyoncé, . Happily, things have changed and I can make non-qualified, declarations like this without a glimmer of irony: I like views of rooftops. There, I said it. I’ll say it again. I like views over rooftops and I’ve got hundreds of photos to prove it. Upbeat? Like, totally.

A friendly security guard at the Palazzo Rosso museum escorted me to the roof from whence I beheld the city of Genoa in its shabby splendour.

My, what a view! The mess of scaffolding accurately reflects the construction and renovation work that seems to be underway all over the town. And here am I, beaming and basking, surrounded on all fronts by rooftops, rooftops, rooftops.Unfortunately, my head is blocking out the most advertised of Genoa's attractions, its aquarium, which is, if you believe the hype, the best in Europe. Alas, I have not the mettle to trawl an aquarium without the moral guidance, emotional sustenance, and translation assistance of my short, dear, loud nephew, Bailey, friend of the fishes. The large white spider just to the left of my head is one of the city’s more curious attractions. Called the Bigo, it suspends and elevates what appears to be a large tuna tin full of people, presumably so that they too can have a rooftop experience. Fair enough, I say. More power to the aficionados of rooftops.

Thrice I affirm it: My name is Catriona and I like views over rooftops.

A Tale of Two Cities

Genoa and Venice have been jealous rivals since the early Renaissance, the desires of their citizens to distinguish themselves one from the other comparable perhaps to those held by Sydneysiders and Melburnians, or perhaps, more acutely, by residents of Albury and Wodonga. That is why it may not have been a great idea to order a cocktail – a Bellini – inextricably connected to one city – Venice – in the other – Genoa.

I wandered onto a terrace which just happened to contain tables and chairs and a drinks menu after an exhausting afternoon spent admiring wonders of Renaissance art and the palazzi which house them. It was definitely cocktail hour but I surprised even myself when I ordered a Bellini. The waiter stopped being charmed by my feeble attempts to speak his language and gave me a slightly disapproving, slightly chilly look. When my drink arrived, he plonked it on the table without even a perfunctory gesture towards flirtation, a very unusual occurrence. No sooner had he twirled on his heel away from me and towards someone with a little more respect, the slice of peach, yellow, I note, not white, adorning the drink tumbled onto the tabletop. Whilst my choice of drink might have been a faux pas, the drink itself, I am happy to report, was delightful and exactly comme il faut: sweet, cold, sharp, frothy.