Travel – Page 4

Italian Folktales ~ Day 3 (June 27, 2011), Verona

Verona wasn’t originally in our minds when we started tossing around possible itineraries for the trip. As we cast around for likely landing places within a reasonable striking distance of the Dolomites, though, the idea of Verona arose. When we remembered the Shakespearean plays set in Verona, we got a bit excited. And when we read about the Roman arena and the open air opera performances, we really started to think about it seriously.

But it was H. V. Morton’s description of the city in his wonderful book, A Traveller in Italy, that clinched it for me. His delight upon first seeing the pink marble of Verona was infectious. When I read this paragraph, I couldn’t imagine a trip to Italy without a stop in Verona:

Arriving in the early afternoon, I saw the city flushed with warm light; I saw the Adige flowing swiftly beneath the bridges, enfolding, in its reminiscent Venetian curve, squares, towers, and palaces; I saw the red campanili of many churches and, praise God, a main street closed to traffic. Think of it: a street from which the motor is banished; a street with no sounds but the delightful chatter of the Veronese, the echo of their feet upon the marble pavement, and the music of an aria floating pleasantly from a shop that sells gramophone records. In my first flush of pleasure I felt like echoing John Evelyn when he saw Verona three hundred years ago, ‘here of all places I have seen in Italy would I fix a residence’.

— H.V. Morton, A Traveller in Italy

On our first full day in Verona, we walked and walked and walked. We ate gelato, stopped for cold drinks, and walked the streets of pink marble.

We visited Juliet’s house, knowing full well it wasn’t her house. It was well worth seeing anyway, if only to see the graffiti-covered walls, painted every inch with notes from modern lovers, star-crossed and otherwise.

In the busy Piazza delle Erbe, we watched as Hyla took a cooling break in the waters of the piazza’s central fountain. Days later, after we had left Verona, we learned that the statue of a woman that graces the fountain is a Roman sculpture dating from 380 AD.

There was hardly a street or a corner where we didn’t see something that made us smile, even when our feet were aching, and we were sweaty and parched and hungry, and a bit bewildered by the time change and not knowing how to ask for stamps in Italian or where to find a public restroom. No matter. We were already falling in love with Italy.

Thank you, Mr. Morton.

Italian Folktales ~ Day 2 (June 26, 2011), Verona

From the airplane window, we saw the Alps.

We’d flown all night from Canada to Paris, then had 45 minutes to run from one end of Charles De Gaulle to the other, through customs, through security, onto a shuttle bus, and then onto our little plane. We were out of breath, a bit disoriented from the overnight flight, and distracted, wondering if our luggage had successfully made the same journey we just did (it didn’t).

But the Alps startled us out of all mundane thoughts. We pressed our faces to the windows and gaped. This is how vacation starts.

Verona is lovely. The 2000-year-old Verona Arena is the city’s centerpiece. You can tell yourself how ancient it is, that Romans built it and filled its stone seats, but it’s hard to comprehend how old it really is.

Verona’s people are friendly and helpful in ways that only non-Italian-speaking visitors who are new to town and have been separated from their luggage can fully appreciate.

If you’re new to the country, Verona will instruct you in the color schemes of Italy: rich brown, ruddy terracotta, delicate pink, subtle yellow. You’ll see flowers everywhere.

If it’s hot, you might just have to eat gelato four times that first day because, well, it’s really hot, and the gelato is a revelation of flavors: bacio, gianduja, fior di latte, stracciatella, melone, fragola, limone, frutti di bosco, cannella. The servings are piccolo, Italian-sized. Go on, have another.

And then, just before dusk falls, when the later afternoon air is still steamy, but you have an inkling of what cool might begin to feel like, you line up at your gate at the arena, because the opera is getting underway in just a few hours and you want to enjoy every leisurely second of it.

June 26 trip diary
M ~ Thomas Mann evidently knew something about human nature, which worked out very well for Leiber & Stoller when they turned a near-verbatim ripoff* of Mann’s 1896 short story “Disillusionment” into the song “Is That All There Is…?” which was about, well, disillusionment, and which became a big hit for Peggy Lee in 1969.

Samuel Johnson knew human nature too, and he knew that because the world is what it is we often spend more time anticipating an event than actually experiencing it, and the experience itself can end up as a coda, nothing but a springboard to “ok what’s next?”. Johnson pointed this out many times but perhaps best when he wrote “The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”**

And yet life doesn’t always have to work out that way, and for me, for each of us I think, the Opera in Verona ended up easily better, and more satisfactory, than our long anticipation of it might have led us to think possible – but not, for me at least, in the way i would have expected.

“Aida outdoors in a Roman ampitheatre, huge production, spectacle, a bigger performance maybe than we’d ever seen before!!” was where I was at. Given the venue, i was expecting I suppose, literally, a circus. And it was big, and it was over the top and yes there were even real live horses. But its effect was something very else.

The vast performance merged with, rather than overpowered, the Veronese night– so much so that at one point well into the second half of that big Verdi opera all that big Verdi music and those big Verdi voices slipped away almost entirely into the background — actually it was me slipping away, as two days of travel and no sleep and 80 degree heat and sitting still and wine and cheese and salami and bread and H and R and me on those rented cushions high up the hot stone bleachers all came together to reduce the noise and spectacle and drama to a lambent part of a greater whole as my mind and eye wandered from the deep blue night in the east to the barest ember-orange in the west, all along the busy line of campanile bell towers, terracotta rooflines and cable dish/antennas pricking the horizon just above eye-height beyond the stagelights necklaced around the vast rim of that old marble bowl. Even with my eyes closed the music would not take over. I may have slept, or nearly slept, at least for a few minutes at some point. Or maybe not– it was that hard to tell.

Great handfuls of swallows had come out as soon as the sun had dipped, and though it was quite dark by the time I’m talking about many of them still darned the air over the city, and even months later sitting at a desk it doesn’t feel particularly silly to say that with the sky so low and clear it seemed like the swallows were dipping and banking for the early stars rather than competing for bugs, invisible to us but not to them, floating in the cooling air.

People who’ve taken LSD often say that they’re different, or see things differently, long after the trip is over. That they’ve been changed or realigned for good. It may be too much to ascribe that same level of alteration to having attended a late outdoor opera jetlagged on the first night in a new country right after your lost luggage has been all but found, but then again it may not. I have to say that that feeling, the realization that a gigantic mannered art form had suddenly bowed like a practiced and smiling courtier and stepped back into the crowd without seeming ever to have moved, was new then and is with me still. But then again what am i talking about but something fitting in, Belonging– and it was Italy and it was opera, after all.

ps – Peggy Lee has two signature songs. The early one is “Fever” and the later one is “Is That All There Is…?”. You could make a good argument that taken together and in that order those songs sum up the arc from anticipation to experience better than Mann or Johnson ever did.
—————-
* i didn’t know this until today, either.
** So far as I know, no one has ever incorporated this sentence into a pop standard.

Italian Folktales ~ Day 1 (June 25, 2011), Vermont to Somewhere Over the Atlantic Ocean

Michael and I first saw the Dolomites when we were backpacking through northern Italy, on our way to getting married in Norway. “Let’s come back and hike those mountains someday,” we said to each other.

My, how 20 years can flash by.

Four months after we returned from that long dreamed-of trip, I find I haven’t written much about it. It’s now or never. I have sixteen days of NaBloPoMo left; just enough time to write a little something about each day of the trip. A mini challenge within a challenge.

I don’t really have a plan. All I know is that I’ll post something each day that represents one day of the trip. I’ll also try to include a thought or memory from each of us, so that we can look back on this in another 20 years (via our embedded blog viewer contact lenses) as a sort of trip diary, written after the fact.

Oh, and here’s a handy travel tip: If you’re produce shopping in Montréal, you can find GIANT carrots at Trudeau Airport.

June 25 trip diary

H ~ Welcome to your gate, ladies and gentlemen. Please enjoy sitting in the filthy seat at least 200 other people have sat in, with no cleaning, while you wait for an equally dirty plane to arrive so you can get on it and sit uncomfortably all night! Our airline is the best; we have MINIMAL LEGROOM! Personally, I can’t stand planes. Uncomfortable, crampy, bad food and (worst of all) my ears really really really hurt when we descend. The only thing that livens up the trip for me is having a personal TV. At our house, we don’t actually have TV (gasp!) so the only way I can watch something I’ve never seen before is through a DVD or we can stream it instantly. But that doesn’t really fill the empty gap of TV-lack, so the little screens on airplanes are the only things that can lure me on the flying monstrosities. Unfortunately, on this particular trip, out of 350-odd seats on a massive airplane, very nice TVs, guess who got the only–I repeat, only–TVs that do not work? Wrong guess: it was us!

What a pretty little message. All-night flight (rhyme!) with no TV for poor little me (another rhyme!) . Whee. Luckily, the flight back was better, since–oops. You’ll hear about that in TWO WEEKS! Mwahahahaha (cliffhanger).

M ~ Having planned, replanned and over-planned the whole trip — over years — and having pointedly picked Montreal over 5 other possible airports to fly out of, we subsequently learned that Montreal has, or had, a huge stolen car industry — the airport is on the St. Lawrence itself and multiple rings of thieves work the city, particularly the hotels near the airport and at least in the old days, the airport itself; the stolen cars are often freightered and headed for out of the way corners of the world within hours of having been parked and locked by their owners, never to be seen again. Is this something to worry about the whole time we’re gone? No. The first step in letting go after so much planning is to say “we’ve done the best we could, now what happens happens”. And really in all likelihood our car would not be stolen (nor was it) and even if it had been, what can you say? Give it up and let it go. Fine. Only to have the smiling and friendly Canadian customs officer at the border ask us not only where we were going and how long were we staying abroad, but… what parking lot were we using at the airport. Wait– what? Which lot? Who’s ever been asked anything beyond “Where you from, where you headed”? Why would she possibly ask such a question unless she was part of one of the gangs — what clever thieves, getting one of their own right in the customs booth — thought we — well, thought I, as she waved us through (no doubt looking after us just long enough before texting her confederales up ahead– “grn hnda elmnt, gone 2 wks, vt plates number xxx xxx, lot b”). Argh! The car would be halfway to Kurdistan (you can get a lot of rolled up rugs into an Element, if you really mean to) before we even reported it stolen– why else would she possibly ask such a question? Is it going to be THAT kind of trip? Stolen car, Lost Luggage? Missed Connections? Lost in the mountains? Stomach begins to churn as I (perhaps for the last time) accelerate the Element to highway speed and point it toward Montreal. I can be absolutely no fun to travel with, at the start of a long-planned trip.

R ~ This is my favorite part of any trip. Everything that we can plan in advance is planned. The pets are in the care of others. The house is as clean (or dirty) as it will be. The mail is stopped. The chores are done. From the time I sit down in the car until the moment we arrive in Italy, I’m in limbo and nothing much is expected of me aside from moving from gate to gate, selecting my entree from the uninspiring Air France menu, and figuring out how to sleep while sitting upright. I can handle that.

Salem, MA has what every town ought to

A quirky, independent bookstore

with leaning stacks of books

of every genre, from new novels to classics to history, occult, children’s books, mysteries, cookbooks, drama, psychology, science fiction, photography—in piles stacked from the floor up to the ceiling,

on the verge of bursting out the windows.

Only wimpy bookstores need shelves.

or desk space for employees.

The only thing that counts is books, books, and more books. You can bet that the one you want will be somewhere about two-thirds of the way down the stack, but that’s part of the fun. The owners know how to extract books buried at the bottom, with a deft, quick flick. Sort of like a magician pulling the table cloth off a fully set table. Just another example of Salem magic.

Expedition ready

Tomorrow we leave on a two-week vacation. Two. Weeks.

Unheard of in this family.

What’s even stranger is that those bags you see above were packed nearly a week ago. That just goes to show how big a deal this trip is to us, a trip we first started talking about nearly 20 years ago.

We’ve spent the past months plotting routes, reading guides, making lists, researching gear — and now it comes down to this: two weeks wandering around northern Italy and getting lost in a slice of Italian summer.

As part of my preparation, I’ve loaded some apps on M’s iPad so I can attempt to share some of our adventure along the way, when wifi connections allow, of course.

Tomorrow, we set off on the first leg: Vermont to Montreal, where we hop a flight to Verona, Italy, by way of Paris.

Tonight, oddly, we’re hanging out, listening to Vic Chesnutt, reading Harry Potter, and writing this post, not frantically packing, organizing, and getting ready. I guess we’ve learned we can be ready on time if we give ourselves 20 years.

Set vivid against the little soft cities

When people ask me where I’m from, I usually say I’m from nowhere.

We moved a lot. My parents weren’t in the military; they were just adventurous, or following their careers — or restless.

Along the way from my birth to junior high, there were stops in rural Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, urban Chicago, suburban Chicago, and, finally, Lexington, Massachusetts, where we stayed until my sister and I graduated high school.

Now that I’m grown up and home is where Michael and I choose to make it, I’ve had the chance to visit most of the towns of my youth, all but Chicago, the city that holds some of my firmest childhood memories.

Then, a couple months ago, my enterprising sister captured us dinner reservations at Alinea for my birthday and suddenly a long-weekend trip to Chicago was planned and booked.

The dinner — and the city — were glorious. It was a whirlwind of both familiar and new tastes, sights, and smells. We’d round a street corner and the sight of an old familiar building or sculpture would blow me back in time 30-odd years.

In the Museum of Science and Industry, somehow grown even bigger and more spectacular than I remembered it, several ancient exhibits of my childhood remained: the Coal Mine (which we decided to skip because of the long queue); Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle; the Great Train Story; the Whispering Gallery (where Hyla sang an aria); Yesterday’s Main Street (where we treated ourselves to ice cream sundaes); and, tucked into a small corner, much diminished from its previous incarnation, Farm Tech, where we discovered the best birthday surprise I could have asked for.

Those of you familiar with the Mold-A-Rama will instantly know why I actually — and without shame — ran across the room to touch it. It makes things like this:

Little toys, freshly molded out of a waxy-plastic that is still warm (really, hot enough to burn) when it comes out of the machine. It’s a plastic that gives off a unique, childhood memory-triggering smell for as long as the plastic stays warm. When we were kids, my sister and I had dozens of plastic animals molded from similar machines sprinkled throughout the Brookfield Zoo (I’m happy to read that they still have many Mold-A-Rama machines at the zoo! I’m also somehow both surprised and not surprised to learn that we’re not the only ones with fond memories of the Mold-A-Rama).

We made two tractors, and carried the warm little toys near our noses all afternoon, sniffing them and marveling in a smell that we never thought we’d come across again.

It was a day that could only be capped by an over-the-top, fabulous, 25-course birthday dinner at Alinea, culminating with a dessert that was intricately constructed on our table, before our eyes, by Chef Achatz himself. He talked to us! He also has the ability to drip melted chocolate from a spoon to form squares. The man is a force of nature.

I could go on and on about Chicago and tell you about the Greek feast we had our first night there with our friend Kelsey; the treasures we discovered and rediscovered at the Art Institute; the other feast we had at Morton’s with our nephew, Joe; the foggy days and then the dazzling sunlight of our last morning there; the perfect bowl of oatmeal we found in a little coffee shop; the view from the top of the John Hancock Observatory; and the view from the top of the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel.

It’s hard not to love a city that seems so confident and assertive and ready to shout out that it is what it is, like it or lump it. A city that boasts larger-than-life-sized urban sculpture; a Whitman’s sampler of architectural styles; union rallies on street corners; tacky gift shops and a fashionable high street; kitschy coffee shops, kicky cupcake bakeries, and Michelin-rated restaurants; and some of the friendliest strangers you’ll ever meet.

There’s too much to say.

Instead I’ll just leave you with some of my favorite images of the city “with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” I’m a country girl through and through, but Chicago, you still have a piece of my heart.