thehostelwitness

Photos from Italy

Italy photoset

Italy days 6,7,8

There's lost and then there is lost in Venice. Streets narrow into alleys, stairs dissapear into water, bridges lead to dead ends, an Escher painting come to life. With the moon out, you navigate through shadows, convinced that just around a corner the street is going to end. Maps become unreadable and you follow figures flowing from one dark corridor into another, hoping to come across some recognizable landmark. I had lost Sally and in the process of trying to find her, had become lost myself.

Venice is the home of Vivaldi, the master of violin concertos, and our original plan was to spend our last night in Venice at a performance of some of his greatest works. By the time we had reached the church where the concert was to take place however, we realized too late that the concert would be taking place elsewhere. Into action came plan "b": get a drink and some food. 

We found a nice bar and settled in, taking in the patrons as they entered. One girl, an attractive brunette with olive skin, and four breasts - she was dressed in a cow costume, dancing in the middle of the bar. "What about that one?" Sally asked. "Oh yeah. I'd milk that. I'd milk that until the cows came home," I replied. Badum-dum Ching

One drink became two, two became three, and a bad joke - I think it involved a stack of business cards flung into the air - sent us back out into the street to call it a night. Following Sally, who has an unnerving ability to navigate these streets, I looked one way, looked back, and just like that she was gone.

Venice is a beautiful city that becomes dead quiet at night, the columned buildings that line the canals more a postcard of a past Venice that belies its current status as a pure tourist town. Venicians live on the mainland, leaving only the elderley and the rich to occupy half empty buildings riddled with graffiti. There are no cars here and public transportation consists of small ferry boats that for 3 Euro will take you nearly anywhere on the grand canal. The previous night, we sat at the bow of the ferry, spending 2 hours in the freezing night air, silently taking the great city in. The famous gondolas run from anywhere between 40 - 80 Euros per hour. Not by coincidence, "Gondola" roughly translates into the act of being ripped off by a man in a striped shirt and bad hat (see: Hamburgler)

The city is unlike anything you or I have seen before. There are floating cities and towns elsewhere of course, and Amsterdam also has its canals, but never have you seen such amazing buildings built right up to the water, with a mix of styles befitting a city that served as a gateway between the east and the west. In the light, its amazing, but at night it has the feel of an empty playground.

And so I played Marco Polo, looking for Sally and feeling a bit guilty that I had lost her, one thing to lose yourself, but another to lose a smallish (she would say average) aussie past midnight in the middle of the world's largest maze. I finally found a phone booth and called her, and we chatted while she zigged and zagged back to the plaza where we had become seperated.

And then I did something that I don't remember doing - I made another phone call. As it was related to me this morning, that phone call was made to my parents, where I engaged in a lively discussion with my mother, trying to get my sister's phone number to wish her a happy birthday. I don't remember making this call, but my mother assured me when I called her this morning to get my sisters phone number to wish her a happy birthday that I had already done so just 8 hours prior. I looked in my notebook and sure enough, there it was, scribbled in the corner.

So Venice - amazing architecture, crap food, strong wine. Walk the streets, ride the ferries, laugh at the absurdity of a road leading to a wall, skip the Gondolas as well as (sadly), Harry's Bar, the famed bar of Hemingway during his stay in Venice (I doubt he paid 15 Euros for a bloody mary).

Tonight its an overnight train and tomorrow, Budhapest.

Italy days 3,4,5

Day 3

Today I left Rome for Vatican city. A country in its own right, the Vatican occupies a large swath of land in the northwest corner of Rome. I had stopped by the previous day to look at the Dome, but today's itinerary had me going into the city proper to look into the church as well as the Vatican museum, where the Sistine Chapel waited.

The Romans have a curious sense of presentation, where lines are set up so you could promptly be put in another line. I had read previously that Italians are notorious for not understanding how to get in a que, but as the years have gone by it seems that they've not only discovered lines, but fell in love with them. And so I got in my first line of the day, leading into the Vatican. No passport was needed, but nonetheless I had to deposit my camera into a scanner and then I was put through a metal detector. I beeped loudly - I neglected to take out my Ipod - but I was ignored, apparently not fitting the terrorist profile, only the American tourist one. Once you pass the entry line, you have your choice of lines leading to countless museums, bathrooms, tombs, etc, where inevitably, they all ended in a gift shop. If all roads (or in my case, Rhoades) lead to Rome, then all lines in Rome lead to a gift shop.

Still, if you are going to be in line, I would rather it be in the Vatican than say, oh, a Disney land parking lot. It was quite impressive, but I do admit that with the newly appointed German pope, I was hoping for maybe some home-like decoration - gilded beer steins or Ave Maria being played on a glockenspiel. Nothing like that, but on the otherhand, the German national team was in town for soccer, bringing busloads of Green shirted Germans to the Vatican, so at least the Pope's inlaws were in town.

A couple hours of wandering finally brought me to the Vatican museum, where inside I would find the Sistine Chapel. Again, the lines. The Romans aren't dumb - they know exactly why you are at the Vatican Museum - and they also know that there are thousands and thousands of works of art that most people would just as soon skip to get to Michelangelo's work. So the solution is that they make you go through almost every single gallery to get to the chapel. Think of standing in line behind 100 elderly women with canes and cameras, shuffling through stiffling, claustrophobic hallways for hours. While it was well intentioned, by the time you reached the Chapel all you wanted to do was get outside. You enter into the Chapel into a sea of people, necks craned upwards, while guards intone loudly "keep moving!" and "no cameras!". Its not exactly the way to enjoy a work of art. In truth, I felt a little cheated and dissapointed, like spending weeks pursuing a date with someone only to find yourself at dinner, looking at the clock.

Still, the work is impressive, especially if you think about how long it took "The Master" (as they call him in Italy) to create it. I raced out of the Chapel, grabbed a cab, and was off to the train station. Cabbies in Rome are notorious for ripping tourists off. It was so bad that at one point earlier in the year, the chief of police himself dressed up as a tourist to see how bad it had become. He was ripped off nearly every time. The ride back to the train station only cost me about 7 Euro - the ride to Vatican City however, cost me 21.

Its bad enough that I get ripped off - you expect a bit of it as a tourist - but with the food and all of the museums, Italy is quickly becoming my most expensive stop on this trip so far. Even with my Eurail pass, I still have to pay 15 Euro to reserve a seat - a ticket without the pass costs 30.

The train only took an hour and a half, but it was nightfall by the time I arrived in Florence. If Rome merely succeeds in nickle and diming for nearly everything, I would soon find that Florence excels in it.

Days 4,5

The problem with Florence is that it is too beautiful. The roads are all cobblestoned, the buildings a muave yellow with red tiled roofs that turn into gold and fire at sunset, with windows open to the sunshine and bright blue sky, huge marbled churches rising in nearly every city square. This is the city that at one time was home to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, as well as Botticelli, Caravaggio, Giambologna and countless others. These four were all contemporaries and well known to each other and the public and it seems like every corner reveals yet another gallery featuring a classic work of art. You become conflicted, on the one hand just wanting to sit and lounge outside in such a pretty city, but on the otherhand feeling guilty for not being inside and experiencing all of this history.

Fortunately, if one is on a budget the decision becomes easy - you walk. Florentines charge for everything - at the Duomo, I paid 3 Euro to go into the catacombs, 6 Euro to climb the tower (463 steps up), passed a suggestion box asking for a couple more Euro to enter the cathedral, and skipped entirely the museum requiring 10 Euros to view. Its a weird, weird feeling to think, well I've already seen 6 Michaelangelos today, its not worth paying 10 Euros to see another. And so you walk. Its not surprising, Florence being founded by the Medici family, one of the most powerful banking families in known human history. For 300 years they ran the city, attracting artists and musicians from the world over. On the one hand, its great that such a place exists, but on the other I'm confident that they would have charged for the views if they knew how.

In Florence, they even charge a cover just to sit down in a restaurant. The problem is, the food is so good - the best I've ever had - that you gladly pay it. Each restaurant features a unique menu that changes regularly, myself at various times having salmon stuffed with porcini, roasted ham flank, and steak filets with artichoke, all of which melts in your mouth. You hardly even chew. It isn't until the end of the night that you realize you've spent nearly 50 Euros on a meal and, remembering nights in bathrooms munching on spoiled salads, you gladly hand it over.

Even with the cost, Italy has been such a great stop on this trip. In the space of 24 hours, I saw the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, the Statue of David, the Birth of Venus, and walked through the Ufizzi, one of the greatest art museums ever constructed. The Florentines know how to properly present a work of art - you pay 10 Euro to see the Statue of David and within 50 yards of paying, there he is in all of his naked glory. They built the museum just to house this, the most famous sculpture in history, created by Michelangelo when he was only 29 - what were you doing when you were 29? Its not like it was downhill from here, as he would go on to do the Sistine Chapel, Pieta, etc etc etc. Its weird, you have seen millions of pictures of David, but until you are actually there, looking up - a sense of serenity and peace drifts down through you and you become calm, much more calm than anyone standing within 3 feet of a giant, naked man has the right to be. You can sense the majesty and there is no doubt left in you that this is probably the greatest work of art ever produced. You still feel this way walking into the gift shop, where for a price you can get your Statue of David pen, t-shirt, and temporary tattoo.

The Ufizzi is almost as awe inspring. You walk through its corridors, packed with so much art it becomes overwhelming, art tucked into almost any available space that they could find. I had wanted to see Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" ever since seeing Uma Thurman in "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" play the same role. Its an amazing painting and you realize in astonishment that this was painted around the same time artists in Norway were carving crosses out of driftwood.

Any flaws with Florence are brought on from the outside. Its a small city that overflows with visitors, so you end up hearing more English than Italian, most with American voices. The shops that line the small streets are the same shops you see on Madison Ave - Beneton, Gucci, Prada, with prices to match. With tourists year round, that drives up rent in the old city, making even local restaurants very expensive. Still, the history makes it all worth it - I even saw my first payoff, a woman walking past a man in the doorway, folded newspaper in hand. As she passed, without a word or a look, she passed the paper to him as he turned back into the store.

Art, history, food, and payoffs - I think Florence was done right. One more city in Italy - its off to Venice.

Italy Days 1,2,3

Day 1

Snow began falling in earnest on the morning of my flight to Rome from Riga. I was standing in the bus stand, huddled coldy with 7 other Latvians, like Emperor Penguins, watching in cold detachment as rain turned to sleet and shortly after, snow. The timing couldn't have been any better, as my stated goal of avoiding winter entirely this year was being threatened as early as November 3rd.

The Riga airport recently underwent a huge renovation, making it one of the nicer airports I've been in. Still, there is some evidence of the old - from the bus I could see a parking lot of decomissioned Soviet jet fighters and helicopters, faded CCCP lettering aging regretfully, like a lower back tattoo on a 50 year old. On the plane, two young Baltic Air stewardesses ran the plane through the emergency drill, but with such uniformed precision that I thought these two must have practiced it as a dance - there were even a couple of spins thrown in.

The flight was just under 3 hours and a steal at about 70 Euros. Walking into the airport, I noticed immediately that I was both overdressed for the heat and underdressed as far as the style - for a month I've been making it with three changes of shirt and the same pair of pants and naturally the first time I feel shabby and well, ugly, is in the Rome airport. Men in Prada sunglasses, hair oiled to a practiced sheen, strutted down the gate like they owned the place. A thought rose unbidden to my mind, "they remind me of roosters."

I was happy to make the jump back to Euros and found the train that would be taking me into the city center. Rome is famous for its poor public transportation system, but even they have regular train service to and from their airports. The trip took about 20 minutes and I soon found myself sweating, deposited in the center of Rome. I stowed away my coat - the same coat that only this morning kept snow off of me - and began to wander around aimlessly looking for the tourist center.

The trip to Italy had been planned for some time now, actually first germinating as a quick weekend visit back when I was a working man. My friend Sally, an Aussie living in the UK, decided to spend her birthday in Italy and passed the invitation down to me, where I'd be travelling with her friends Christy and Uncle Brian, as well as her boyfriend Dan AKA the Giant Nemish. I'm a big fan of people who are introduced to me by their nicknames, so when we finally met up that night, we got along famously.

I took the subway over to meet them and was assaulted by the cacophony of noise that is the Italian rush hour. Crowds of people pushed through the tunnel, with chains of girls holding hands, running and winding their way through to catch up with a group of boys ahead. The subways are loud in New York, but that's more of a function of the trains than the people - people in Italy talk and talk loudly, as if they want the whole world to be a part of the conversation that is their life. After a month spent in the self-imposed silence that is the Nordic and Baltic languages, I was thankful for the voices.

The five of us made our way to dinner and after I placed my order for pasta, the waiter eyed me expectantly.
"uh, " I venture, "I'm done."

Uncle Brian raises an eyebrow and asks, "what, no second course?"

The second course. Whereas back home, pasta *is* the meal, here its just the first course (the starter being antipasta, of course). The problem is that the pasta isn't priced any cheaper than the main course - its just that you are supposed to have two meals for dinner. I love that idea and haven't made the same mistake since. A couple of bottles of wine and a few hours later, it was time to go. I tried to make my way back home, walking back past the Spanish Steps and into the subway station. Since this is my first night in a new city, of course I got completely lost.

Not that it was really my fault. The tunnel was open, but halfway through I saw that the gate to the trains were closed. A Caribiniere pointed me to another tunnel leading me to the left. (A second about Italian police - I'm not sure what its about, but they just love their police here. And they love uniforms, so its as if they create extra branches of the police just to design new uniforms. The Caribinieres are the Military police, then you have your Policia which so far I've seen four different kinds of police. The main difference I've learned are that Caribinieres drive reinforced jeeps and carry Uzi's. I'd much rather be a Caribiniere.)

Back to the tunnel - the tunnel led to a parking garage with no exit. I saw a small stairway leading up, so followed it and was deposited in the middle of a soccer field in a park. The moon gave me the benefit of seeing where I was, but unfortunately put a shadow to everything, so in my mind I was picking out all the corners where my muggers waited for me. I walked to a road only to find that I was fenced in. I spent some time exploring, pee'd in a corner (another benefit of the shadows), and finally decided to jump the fence.

Only one other time this trip have I had to jump a fence. It was in Berlin. I was crossing a road to a grass median, only to see that the median was divided by fence only 3 feet in height. As I puzzled at this, I also saw that the grass median was actually a train track, on which I noticed, a train was quickly approaching my location. So I stepped back a few feet, ran, and hurdled the fence. I would have cleared it too, if it weren't for my shin which caught the top of the fence (good enough to give me three brag worthy cuts on the leg). It was with this thought in mind that I took a few steps back, ran, and lifted myself over the fence. I'm happy to report that I made it in one piece, though I didn't quite nail the landing, earning only a 7.4 from the homeless Italian judge.

It only took me about an hour and a half to find my hostel.

Day 2

The next day's goal was to do whatever Sally, the birthday girl, wanted to do. Turns out, what she wanted to do was cover as much of the city as humanly possible. Rome wasn't built in a day, but I found that it is possible to see the whole thing, provided you have a pair of sturdy shoes and a determined Aussie to crack the whip. I didn't mind, I wasn't here to sit around, and frankly was happy to be walking in 70 degree temps instead of 30.

We saw the Pantheon, the Trevi, the Forum, the Colloseum, and the whole poopoo platter of Roman architecture. It was breathtaking and at the same time, ugly. For a city with so much culture, the city seems to ignore vital civic requirements, like garbage collection. Litter can be found everywhere, tossed from cars and flying Vespa scooters. For the capital and the center of one of the most powerful human civilizations ever, I was dissapointed.

In the early evening, the group split with Dan and I on the hunt for a "proper pub". We found it in the form of the Bulldog, a Scottish bar off the Piazza Andrea. Scottish beer seems to be about making the strongest, most barely drinkable beer. In Seattle, there is the Kilt Lifter, which - well the name says it all. Here, the names of Scottish beers are a bit more reserved. Bulldog Strong "6%" and Slalom Strong weighing in at 10% (and tasting like window cleaner). The waitress, an American, warned us that it was like drinking Steel Reserve, a malt liquor usually served in a brown paper bag. It was horrible - like someone literally stuck a tap in a Donkey's butt and made a beer out of the resulting mess (aka, tapped that Ass).

Naturally, we ordered two.

Day 3

Last night I was woken to the drunken revelry of my room mates, a group of American students. David Bowie once sang "I'm Afraid of Americans", but the truth is that he should have feared American students on holiday. Loud, obnoxious, I kept my eyes closed in hopes they would just shut up, but to no avail - one girl even started talking about me, asking who the hell was that guy - surprised in her stupor to find other people actually in the room.

I kept my eyes close, knowing retribution would be mine. I know from the previous morning that the adjacent showers were very loud and decided to wake up at 6am - just 3 hours later - to get ready for my day. 3 hours later, I made a heck of a racket getting up, enough to wake up the girl who realized that she was sleeping in her underwear, ass up, with no blanket (and as predicted, she had a big butt.)

I hit the city, determined to make it to Vatican City before noon. I decided to give the two couples some "alone in Rome" time and will wait until evening to meet up with them for dinner, so I was once again alone. On the way, I stopped in the Basilica Santa Maria, just a beautiful church filled with marble sculpture and frescoes. This early in the morning it was empty save a few worshippers and I easily spent an hour in the pews, just looking around in awe. The Catholic church as an entity is something I've struggled with for years, ever since attending a Jesuit university. The Basilica I sat in represented the whole problem with the Catholic Church as well as its greatest gift - on the one hand, I was sitting in a testament to human achievement and creativity, with beauty that surely would never have been created without the Church's support. The priests I have met and made friends with are truly some of the best people I've ever had the fortune of knowing. On the other hand, how much money was spent on this place to worship, taken from the poor and distributed to similar locations all around the world?

These thoughts became a theme throughout the day and later as I sat on the steps leading to the Vatican, I again mulled the whole thing over. Surprisingly (not), I did not come up with the appropriate solution to address the dichotomy. God is predictably complex. Worshipped, so much power is wielded, and yet with the stroke of a pen can be easily tamed, or in some cases, eliminated. For example, in one case, Vatican II completely changed how God was to be worshipped, a church finally responding to Lutheranism hunreds of years later. Another example, take Japan - for centuries, the Emperor was worshipped as God, one and the same. Then one day General MacArthur asked for his signature renouncing his diety-status as well as Japan's acquiesence and poof, no more God.

Still, as I sat for an hour gazing across the Vatican and then soon a second, I felt the same kind of awe overtake me that I had felt on the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania. Whatever your take on religion, there is a universal, human need to appreciate wonder and awe. Worship is one vessel for this, art and music can be considered others. When you rebel against this need and supress it, as with Marxism, the consequences can be disasterous. So while so much evil has been done in the name of God, at the same time the creatve and intellectual outlet religion has provided Mankind easily outweighs its sins.

These are the kinds of conclusions one reaches while drinking a 10% Scottish ale in the city of Rome. Here is one more: Rome gave Man the Vatican, the Vespa, and the Vomitorium.

Caesar is dead - long live Caesar!