PERUGIA. An earlier chapter, the 2006 Beethoven Music Tour, included nine days in which we revisited Perugia. The photo shows the ornate ceiling in our mini-apartment at Piazza Minicucci 7, also known as Perugia Chocolate, owned by the family that makes Bacchi chocolates. But this chapter relates to an earlier stay of two months, when we studied Italian in Perugia. Luckily I carried my sketchpad both times. Why Perugia? Because it is perhaps the best-preserved ancient hill town in Italy, sitting in the middle of Umbria, one of its most ancient regions. I make no apology for the size of this chapter. September and October 1993 in ”the little city of the infinite views” were amongst the most magical months in my life. As is often the case, we started from Cocklehurds.
IN 1993 We drew a diagonal across France, from Cherbourg south-east into Italy. The problems with French grammar began on the ferry where “the toilet does not flush” must be re-assembled into “the chase of water does not march”. We are following in the wake of the largest armada in history that disgorged several armies onto beaches that still bear American names like Utah. Our own invasion disgorges a mere one hundred tourist cars and soon our little Fiat has “found itself” (another French idiom) at a hotel and is now waiting patiently in the courtyard while the hotel manager asks us forbiddingly “Do you have a reservation?” The place is empty and rather gloomy so, instead of fetching our luggage, we sneak out and drive off to find a more congenial hostelry.
At breakfast, sugar, butter and jam went surreptitiously into the doggy bag and then, across the Loire River, there is a bank for Francs, a boulangerie for bread, and a charcuterie for ham and tomatoes. At Le Pont du Raffiny a gourmet dinner, each course of which Joan remembers to this day. At the abbey of La Chaise Dieu the monks had been temporarily banished to chant in a chapel while a swarm of Radio-diffusion Francaise techos festooned the abbey with cables, cameras and spotlights for an opera that night. At Le Puy we climbed hundreds of cobbled steps to its 12th century cathedral, perched on the top of a volcano from which its blackened stones came.
THE CHURCH CLOCKS OF PROVENCE. Van Gogh country at last, and we dined under the wisteria at the inn at Rosieres. But the little beds were as hard as they look in that famous painting and, during the night, the nearby church clock struck each hour loudly and, for some reason, twice. Our travelling clothes line is an ingenious twisted pair of elastic cords (no clothes pegs) with suction caps that sometimes stick to the walls. Our clothes have been silhouetted across the window, first against the starry, starry night of these rural regions, later against the dawn, and now socks and undies frame a magnificent view over fields of grape vines and down to the Ardeche, meandering through the gorge it has cut through the mountains. Later, trying to avoid Avignon, some wrong turnings took us right in, round the city walls and “sous” nor “sur” le Pont d’Avignon of the nursery rhyme.
INTO ITALY BY MISTAKE. Heavy rains had forced us down out of the mountains and, blundering through a series of incoherent traffic signs, onto the millionaire’s beach at Nice, where we sat on the stony shingle and ate our baguette and cheese. Distracted later by a series of spectacular views of Monaco, a further series of wrong turnings took us into Italy, a day early and after the banks had closed. But the family had thoughtfully provided us with various currencies when we left Sydney, so we are now enjoying minestrone, pasta, birra grande and vino bianca in a tiny village high up in the Alpi Maritimi.
A BIG SURF ON THE WAY TO LUCCA. It is not supposed to happen on the Mediterranean, even in 1993, but it has been a stormy summer in Europe. The beach at Camione was closed and deserted with an extraordinary surf breaking 300 metres out. In Sydney the surfies would all be phoning in sick and out there on their boards instead of at work. We did see a battered VW Combi advertising Rip Curl wetsuits, but the elderly driver, who showed us how to use the auto-pay petrol pump, didn’t know what a wetsuit was. Altogether, this has been a most confusing day. The ancient walled city of Lucca has had some modernisation, the cathedral being entirely rebuilt in the 12th century. Getting lost in its narrow alleys was the best thing we did as we had to stay in the Centro which was very Storico. Woke to hear the a clock strike 5 at round about 5:00, 5:15, 5:30 and again 5:45. Truly.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO. The quote, representing blissful contentment, is a chapter heading of Evelyn Waugh’s, lifted from a Latin author. Perugia is a massively fortified and walled Etruscan town with medieval modernisation which, at 2,600 feet, can peep into most of the corners of Umbria. Someone called it “The Little City of the Infinite Views” and they do seem to go on forever.
Assisi shines in the afternoon sun, across the broad valley of the Upper Tiber whose landscapes, like those in London’s National Gallery, are unbelievable to anyone who has had to live in London. The University for Foreigners has found us student accommodation, a mini-appartimento, in a stately old building that had been a convent nearly a thousand years ago, now equipped with showers, cookers and fridges. Each day we walk to classes through ancient arched tunnels, down though narrow canyons between six-storey medieval buildings, and through a huge Etruscan arch. Nobody knows much about the Etruscans except that they came before the Romans, who banned the Etrruscan language.
UNIVERSITY PER STRANIERI. Set up by Mussolini as a publicity stunt, the tuition is excellent, the administration appalling and the enrolment procedure gruelling. You need a good grasp of Italian to fill out the forms, apparently designed by a medieval lawyer, and to get screened by the Police Computer System. But the poor little computer must have read these thoughts as it suffered a nervous breakdown for 20 minutes when my details were entered. All this took most of day one, day two involved queuing for timetables, and on day three it took two hours before the last bewildered students found the School of Chemistry in which we will learn Italian. As always, it is the students who find their way round the impenetrable barriers of bureaucracy and we have exchanged much useful information in French and English with students from Morocco and Australia. Yes, to our surprise there are two Australians, more surprisingly Robin was a year behind John at North Sydney Boys High and Sylvia was in Madeleine’s class at the Demonstration School (photo). The lessons are entirely in Italian so it is no good asking for help in English, French, Spanish or whatever.
PARKING PROBLEMS. The city police strongly discourage cars and try to ban them completely during working hours. Our solution has been to move the car from one tow-away zone to another during the morning, pretending we are just checking into a hotel and, in the afternoons, cutting tutorials and going for a drive. Assisi is only half an hour across a soft dreamy landscape. The Basilica contains a wealth of art and the upper church is filled with enormous frescoes on the life of Saint Francis. Ironically, the glorious wealth of art treasures inside and the huge tawdry tourist industry outside appear in some conflict with the messages preached by one of the Church’s most ardent advocate of poverty. But at least he was canonised. The other church reformer, Savonarola, was burned alive.
JOAN GOES MOON-LIGHTING. Sansepulchro is a small monastery 70 kms north of Perugia. Joan’s course there in renaissance and early baroque music starts at 2:30. Our Italian class finishes at 1:00. After 32 years of marriage I really should know by now that the time warp Joan inhabits is not governed by Newton’s laws of motion or even by GMT. But the Autostrada is fast and we are not very late. To our surprise Rosemary Parle greets us and I leave the dedicated little group to their week of music-making. After all, someone has to do the Italian grammar homework. A week’s batching has been made easy for me by Joan’s cooking which just leaves room in the fridge for a few cans of German and Danish beer. Most people politely ignore me, hunched over my sketchpad in a back alley, except for a French family who are lost. They ask the way in bad Italian, I reply in bad French, confer with a passer-by, and we all lapse into English and laugh. English is a marvellous language, so many people seem to know it, so easy, so logical.
SAN SEPULCHRO. While I listened to the university choir on Friday night (Monteverdi and Mozart to Porgy and Bess) Joan’s little group followed the Tiber down to Citta di Castello (photo)to hear Emma Kirkby and the English Consort of Musiche who were in town. The town hall has two clocks, one for the hour, one for minutes. Next day I drove up to San Sepulchro, past steep hills capped with quaint churches and turreted castles, to check out the monastery accommodation. The cells are tiny, whitewashed and with green shuttered windows looking down on the monastery’s own vineyard and a neat procession of lettuces marching down the hill. Joan has been given a cell with a double bunk, in anticipation of my overnight visit. Last night jovial Padre Pietro-Maria looking, with a white beard and brown habit, like Friar Tuck, had placed several half-gallon bottles of his own home-made wine along the refectory tables to go with the pork, pasta and salads from the garden. Early Sunday morning and the cultivated plains and terraced hills have a sparkle in the sunshine. Joan, unfortunately, has a tickle in the throat.
BACK IN PERUGIA. It is a week since Joan folded up with sinusitis and I drove her home to bed. Pamela, the very aristocratic English lady in our class, was a code breaker during the war. “German codes were efficient but the Italians were all over the place!” So I am not surprised that she is advising Joan most strongly against all Italian doctors. The information desk is closed for their two-hour lunch break, only open when we are supposed to be in class. Fortunately, Pamela has recommended a chemist that has the right kind of antibiotics, so yesterday Joan managed the markets with me and today actually visited nine churches (In Mikonos there seemed to be a church in every field, in Perugia on every street corner). I’ve since located the doctors surgery but you’d have to be very healthy and fit to climb up and down all the steps to get there.
The date on the door of our apartment is 1081AD. Round the corner is a huge Etruscan and Roman arch leading into a small underground city superseded by medieval buildings perched on top. Further down Corso Cavour, San Dominico is a cavernous and rather empty church. The guide book likens it to an EEC warehouse waiting for the surplus mountains of food that European agricultural protection creates each year. But don’t get me on to that subject! Further down, just outside the city walls, tucked away in the corner of a 14th century agricultural college, San Pietro is an exquisitely beautiful church, every inch of its walls, ceilings and even the columns covered with paintings, frescoes, and elaborate decoration.
IT’S A SMALL WORLD. “How did you all enter Italy? How did you get to Perugia?” asks our teacher, in Italian of course. For most it was plane, train, bus or car. For the two little girls from Slovenia it was “a piedi”, on foot. The canteen serves a big two-course lunch (with fruit and yogurt which go into our doggy bag for breakfast) for three dollars, or eight for outsiders. At our table Joppe is a retired history professor from Holland, Victor is a school teacher from Jakarta, Robin was in North Sydney Boys High, and Mustapha is from Morocco. The rest of the class comes from Argentina, Brazil, Trinidad, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany, England and Scotland, and they have all been on excursions over the first weekend to Rome, Assisi, Florence and Venice, “per treno, l’autobus, Pullman, l’automobile or a piedi.” I had made friends instantly with Mustapha on our first day of classes. We were both watching two grumpy peasant women sweeping the ancient Roman mosaics, to them just another chore, another dusty floor covering the entrance to the School of Chemistry. Clearly we both found this a little bizarre so, as yet without a common language, I said “Australie” and he said “Maroc”. I then said “Ah, Couscous!” which delighted him and later he was to call us “my family in Perugia”. Here are Silvia, Victor, a girl, and Mustapha who doesn’t take a good photo.
DELLE BELLE LETTERE DALLE NOSTRA FAMIGLIA from Nana, Gran, Kate, John and Madeleine. Kate has got new glasses and taken up tennis. Sophie had a great fourth birthday. John’s trip diary reached page seven before he even reached America. Madeleine’s composition For Yugoslavia has been performed in Denmark.
MANNA FROM HEAVEN AND BONES FOR SOUP. It fell on me while hunched over my sketch pad (see picture) in one of those dark medieval canyons where dust and grit always swirl, then more and more bread from a fourth floor window, then hundreds of pigeons. Time to go to the markets and get some soup bones. I was wearing clothes suitable for painting and probably I hadn’t shaved. So the butcher looked at me sadly and wouldn’t take any money. But now Joan is fit again and we have been more often to the canteen. For the equivalent of 20 cents you get a token for a wine vending machine which dispenses a tumbler of vino bianco. We are seriously thinking of enrolling for another month here. The grammar class is not too bad but the conversation tutorials get the adrenalin, but very few words, pumping.
HOT TODI AND WANDERING JEW. German efficiency and Italian panache had assembled a triumphal exhibition of 50 years of BMW’s finest saloons and racing cars on Gubbio’s immense piazza. The huge palazzo behind had taken 200 years to build, starting 600 years ago. As John Henshaw had predicted, Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale took our breath away. To the north, the little castellated principality of San Marino peered down its precipice to the Adriatic it once dominated. We drove back past the huge mansion in Urbania where Joan Bryant studied Italian, over the giant folds and cracks of the Appenines, taking in Citta di Castello with its strange twin town clocks. After our first icy afternoons Todi is hot. The seasons seem “out of joint”, I thought we were north of the equator, but then I never did trust Mercator’s projections. For some strange reason the interior of San Fortunato is profusely decorated with Wandering Jew. Coffee in the sprawling piazza then mass in the Duomo flanked by three palaces with massive arches and a huge stone staircase. The guidebook says it looks like the scene for a thousand B-grade movie sword fights. Probably a fair number of real ones too.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF GLI STUDENTI (that’s us). The narrow cobbled streets below our window are woken at six a.m. by motor tricycles, apparently not fitted with silencers, collecting the rubbish. Sometimes a street-washing machine swishes up the alleys, but the pigeons soon retaliate re-establishing their technicolour designs over the municipal council’s grey preferences. Sometimes there is a crashing and banging as a street market assembles itself. At seven a.m. the massive bells dangling over the town hall strike, for some reason buried in bizarre history, three, four and five, then pause, then strike one more for good measure. The bread stall in the markets hiding behind Via Bonazzi is always open at 7:30. General produce is on the top floor that commands million-dollar vistas across Umbria, fruit and veg on the lower floor down the hill. The stalls are small and untidy and delightfully inefficient because the buyers are particular and like poking around for quality, and because the vendors like exchanging views with no-one in particular. “Per favour, quattro Panini, grazie.” We understand “Prego” but very little else in the incomprehensible torrent in reply.
SABINA BICCHIONI is a born teacher, sensitive to those, like me, who are not always fully prepared for the next question, and everyone loves her. The twenty hours are fitted into four days, leaving us with a most welcome three-day weekend. During lunch we grapple with “i verbi irregolari” with students from all over the world. Two afternoons are for conversation class. Typical of academic tutorials the world over, our tutor talks for most of the three hours while we doze and look out of the window. On other afternoons, and sometimes even on conversation afternoons, we siesta, sketch, shop or drive to one of the hill towns scattered across Umbria. Beyond the boutique shops and the autostrada there are many similarities with the carefree untidiness of the third world. Add to this the feudalism of the south, the bureaucracies of the north, and the extractive powers of the Mafiosi, and Italy’s high per capita GDP is astonishing. A thriving black market keeps things going.
ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO AN END. In the evenings Joan performs minor miracles on an asthmatic two-ring gas stove in the cupboard. Last night we entertained June from Trinidad, Silvia Bembo from Robert Woodfield’s class at the Dem school, and Robin Milner, originally from South Africa and with fond memories of a librarian called Nan Manefield. June is soon off to Florence, Joppe must return to Holland on Friday and, come end of September, Silvia will visit relatives near Venice. Robin, who spent two months backpacking in India, will hit the road north, echoing the words of that Scottish song “No gi’en thought frae where I’ve come, and less to where I’m gang”. We are all exchanging addresses.
“HISTORY IS BUNK” (Henry Ford). “Italy is living history, teeming with unspeakable loveliness” (A guide book). Our new headmaster in Barbados, recently arrived from the Punic Wars, substituted Greek for Spanish classes “We must learn Greek to understand history”. At about the same time, in Trinidad, June was being taught what bad people the Germans were. Later, working in Germany, she completely changed her mind. To ease his students out of their high school pedagogy and into the real world, Joppe gives them six contradictory accounts of American history. Here in Italy “Cinque Cento” refers either to a very small Fiat with a 500 cc motor, or to the 16th century Italy. Confused? I have just started A Traveller’s History of Italy which, since it was written by an Englishman of French and Polish parents, I hope for a multicultural, balanced and unbiased clarification.
Meanwhile, most Italians live their daily lives near or on top of Roman remains. Work on a new plastic drain in our street has just uncovered the top of another Roman arch. Many conduct business in and some still live in medieval houses, as we will in second term. There is an ancient and beautiful church, doubling as an art gallery, round every corner. From windows in classrooms, markets and even the chemist stretch patterns of cultivation unchanged in a thousand years. Even now, our local super-strada, running straight as an arrow, follows an old Roman road.
END OF SEPTEMBER, END OF TERM. Accommodation in Perugia, a provincial university town, is both central and reasonable. Elsewhere on the tourist trail, which means pretty much the rest of Italy, is expensive, as we found out three years ago. But the month is up and we must move on. So we drove around Umbria and Tuscany chasing a myth called “Agriturismo, or farm house holidays. We did see the famous cathedrals of Orvieto, Arrezo and Spoletto, and we did get lost in some of the most beautiful hill country I’ve seen, but after hundreds of miles, much in low gear, we had not seen a single genuine farm house. There were tawdry dumps on the edge of towns, villas in the middle of nowhere, and a ranch run by over-friendly alcoholics. Maybe we should enrol for another month in Perugia, after all, the tuition fees are offset by the generous canteen subsidies, and Perugia is “bellissimo”. On the last evening many have already left for the four corners of the world, leaving few of us for the farewell dinner. Our tutors cram us in to two small Fiats that, on the way to Beppi’s Pizzeria (photo) , masqueraded as sports cars and, on the way back, as turbocharged Ferraris.
So we go back to school. I had asked Guiseppe, our new conversation tutor, whether grade 2 followed from grade 1. His reply lasted 20 minutes, essentially containing two pieces of information: yes and no. We also have to move from the old convent and have decided to move up market from one to two rooms. At student accommodation the officer raises an eyebrow at someone behind us who must have nodded. We had passed a test with our new landlady. So we carried our luggage across the town square in three trips to our new apartment, twice the rent of the old one, but cheaper than agriturismo. It is comparatively new, 12th century and expensively restored after the 1983 earthquake, with a view in the painting below of the Sciri Tower and, far beyond, distant views of Lake Trasimeno where Hannibal and his elephants pushed the Roman army into the water. Our landlady, Signora Francesca Righetti, lives in a castle in Todi and has a married daughter in Hong Kong (later I will meet them with Kate on Coloane island). We think her maiden name was Bonazzi which is also the name of our new street and of several colourful characters in Perugia’s history. And we think she said we can have an extra room for Madeleine’s and Chris’s visit, but she didn’t think so.
CLOCKS AND COINCIDENCES. Last Sunday Pamela, la Signora Inglese, was late so we went to Spoletto without her. Later we found out that every clock in Italy except ours had gone back one hour the night before. Joan said it with flowers on Monday and next Sunday we got it right and set off with Pamela, Robin and picnic basket. Pamela worked in Intelligence in the war and, aged 70, is considering a three-year degree in Italian. She teaches English in Spain in the winter and Spanish at London University in the summer. She talked all the way to Spoleto and back. Robin had to move out of his room and is staying with us until October 6 when he hoists his backpack for Russia and Africa. Oh yes, the clocks. We have new church bells and clocks round here and I am trying to crack their codes. I think one is still on summer time, but it’s not that straightforward, so I give up.
BUMPING INTO GEOF EWIN. It was in the canteen on Monday that our Brazilian architect friend agreed with us that it was far too nice an afternoon to spend on homework for tomorrow, so we drove down the mountain, across the valley, past Assisi and up to another ancient hill town. Spello had actually successfully repelled Hannibal, and he had to put his elephants out to graze over the border in Le Marche. And so it was that later when the three of us were sauntering through the evening crowds back in Perugia that a girl tapped me on the shoulder. I used to bump into Geof Ewin during economics at Macquarie, today it was on the Corso Vanucci. I knew he was on the Qantas European run and that he had a girl friend in Rome, so had sent him a postcard with Madeleine’s phone number. He and Elenor had actually got as far as the Information Desk at the university but, as no-one ever gets further than that, they were walking despondently back to their car. We had a riotous evening in a traditional Umbrian restaurant and they left next day for Milan where Elenor lived (Maybe the one in Rome was another girl friend).
THUNDERSTORMS AND MORE CHURCH BELLS. Perugians have been walking down the Via Ulisse Rocchi for several centuries before the huge Arco Etrusco arch was put up at the bottom, and it was several more centuries before the Emperor Augustus put his own arch on top. We no longer go down that way to the School of Chemistry and its dusty mosaic floors. Instead we go to the Palazzina Proscuito which I thought at first must have been an up-market delicatessen. Today we had planned to skip classes and go by train to Florence until the tropical thunderstorm started. Instead we walk down through the Arco to check the mail and find a letter from Gran describing the continuous bands of rain sweeping across her Daily Telegraph weather maps. Continuous bands of rain are certainly sweeping across our view of Umbria which means we will have to do the homework after all, and listen to the church bells. In 1291 some monks actually pulled down a nearby church because the sound of its bells was getting on their nerves. I don’t blame them. The Sala dei Notari (lawyers hangout) has a barrel vaulted ceiling ribbed with decorated arches. Tonight a German choir from Kiel sang Bruckner’s “locus Iste”, also sung at Kate’s wedding by her Chamber Choir friends.
TRAVELLERS, SACRED AND PROFANE. Mustapha, the sad young man from Morocco, is angry. Joppe, who should know better, has insulted his faith, telling him to cheer up, have a glass of wine and find a girl friend. It takes Victor the peace-maker a week to reunite our little lunch time group. Mustapha is also homesick for his family of ten brothers and sisters, of whom he is immensely proud. Joan gives him a present of some phone-cards outside his mosque, and he introduces his friends to “his family in Perugia”. He is one of the kindest and most gentle of people and we are his friends for life. But if the canteen conversation turns to Israel, we get a glimpse of the fanaticism that one day will lie behind an AK47. Years later I will receive a parcel of a Moroccan tunic and slippers and a phone call from a tearful Mustapha studying maths somewhere in Germany.
ON THE TRAIL OF PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA. A fantastic tissue of colours has just drifted, as if out of one of those early Italian paintings whose colours one never quite believed, up from the horizon and across a pale blue early morning sky. Yesterday’s rain has washed the sky and, with my new Hong Kong spectacles, I can see every olive tree on the mountainside across the valley. A haversack for bread, cheese, olives and fruit and we set off in the Fiat up the beautiful Tiber valley for the Piero della Francesca exhibition in San Sepulchro. Two weeks ago we had seen his famous altarpiece, magnificently presented after years of high-tech restoration, in the underground medieval city. Today, more of his masterpieces and a number of “Madonna e Bambino” by a supporting cast of Tuscan artists. From there up a valley for a picnic in warm sunshine reflected off a ruined farmhouse and a view across to today’s target: Monterchi. This is the sort of peaceful panorama in which you lie in the sun, drowse and count blessings. Joan e una donna e Madonna bellissima, anche nostri quattro figli e due nipotini sono bellissimi.
MONTERCHI, clustered amongst trees on a small hill across the river, is a picture straight out of a guide book. It is also the site of Piero’s Madonna del Porto supposedly the only representation in renaissance art of the pregnant Madonna. It is also the sole exhibit in its own special museum, one end containing the air-conditioned fresco, the other a display of the elaborate stages and high technology involved in its relocation and restoration. We have seen many Madonnas in the past few weeks and all the artists strive for Madonnas of great beauty and serenity. But the bambinos are usually too large and too fat, reminding me of a comment by the presenter of a slide show at the Medici Society in Sydney: “If I ever had a baby like that one, I’d keep it in a cupboard” And the real babies and tiny children we have seen have also seemed surprisingly plain and dumpy. Come to think of it, most of the old people we have seen in the poorer back streets and in the villages seem short and bent over, as if worn down by heavy labour and malnutrition in some Feudal system. Yet many of the teenagers and young adults we have seen strutting the Corso Vanucci, taking the evening air, seem to have stepped gracefully straight off the pedestal of a statue, or out of a Botticelli painting, handsome and pretty with straight brows (Rosie), straight noses (Sophie), full pouting lips (Olympia), and rounded chins (Isabel).
DIVERSE CULTURES: INTERSECTIONS AND CONFLICTS. Ibrahim, from Palestine, is learning Italian in order to do a doctorate here in “Greenhouse Management” which, I suppose, is a lot more useful than the medieval Italian thesis “How many angels can dance upon the point of a pin”. Ibrahim, whose wife and four children have not yet joined him from Palestine, practices his Italian and his charms on the younger and more pretty studentessas in our class, a fact not un-noticed by our tutor. When Ibrahim, in a daydream sitting next to a beauty from Venezuela, mis-read Signora as Signorina, in the exercise sentence, that tutor’s earthy wit, even through Italian, left the rest of the class giggling, but Ibrahim insulted and close to the point of precipitation of another Middle-East crisis. At the intersection of diverse cultures one should tread softly, softly. Two nights earlier we had met Ibrahim when he was headed for the surgery and, without him we would never have found it, dimly lit in what used to be the lunatic asylum, hidden by pine trees down a steep slope. The Iranian doctor who prescribed for Joan is another refugee, lonely and looking for a wife in his new and strange environment, evidently not adapting as skilfully as Ibrahim.
PICKPOCKETS AND LOVE SONGS. The wide and generous marble steps of the Duomo contain, in the old print hanging on our wall, reclining figures apparently sleeping off too much vino rosso. Today, the same steps accommodate gypsy pickpockets, buskers counting undeclared income, new age travellers, and addicts of various kinds, through which the Duomo’s congregation gingerly picks its way towards the gothic respectability of quite another world inside. In contrast to both these worlds, as we stumble the cobbles that lead past the aqueduct down to the canteen, a guitarist is singing an old Italian love song accompanied by a professional violinist, weaving his way in, out and around the lovely melody in a virtuoso performance which would have delighted Antonio Vivaldi. This stops us breathless, all four framed by the shadowy shapes of these intersecting arches of great antiquity (see photo) in one of those rare magical moments that are seared forever in your memory.
FAMILY NEWS INTERCHANGE, OCTOBER 1993. A log jam of letters has burst out of the medieval filing system behind the information desk. Kate and Kim-My working on decorative wall finishes, Sophie skips everywhere having learned last month (please show grandma and granddad), John’s excellent Canada diary takes us along at a brisk pace, Madeleine busy promoting her T-shirts, T-towels, posters and cards, and Chris keeping Cockleshurds warm with firewood from Gran’s tree. Hope the staff has forgiven us for taking it away in John’s truck. Rebecca planning to teach, or take a correspondence course next year. Nana reports that Olympics 2000 will be in Sydney and says wryly “The next generation will have to pay for it”.
IRISH MUSIC AND SUNDRY BISHOPS. Friday night’s university concert was free so we all went. The street violinist we had applauded two evenings ago turned out to be called Patrick Q, the lead violinist of a group of Spanish, German and Italian musicians that delivered a stream of pungent traditional Irish music. Continuing in our role of patron of the arts, Saturday afternoon saw us at the Galleria Nationale di Umbria, next door to the Palazzo dei Priori (town hall to you and me) on our way to the Duomo, which was surprisingly crowded. The reason became clear when a blast of organ music announced the entry of sundry bishops and lord mayors. After the third boring speech we were about to sneak out when the press, as always scruffy, unshaven, and stubbing out cigarettes, suddenly flourished video-cameras and hand-held searchlights. This was the unveiling of what had become Joan’s favourite work of art, the fully restored Piero della Francesco altarpiece, returned at last to its little chapel. Joan, tired out by all this excitement, went home to rest. At the canteen I sat next to Paulo, from Madras, en route to Zurich to study nursing. Ibrahim glided past with his tray of pork, pasta and wine (religion evidently relaxed, like his morals) heading unerringly towards a group of Spanish girls. Adrian is a Kurd. He escaped during the (first) gulf war to Sweden where he has acquired a love of Mozart. So we go to the Saturday night concert, also free and well attended, in the Sala dei Notari with frescos much older than Mozart. Joan is envious when I show her the program: Pachelbel’s Canon, an oboe concerto and Missa Brevis, Kyrie, and Ave Verum.
ETRUSCAN DEFENCE PROJECTS. Perugia is one of hundreds of towns with a wealth of art crammed behind massive defensive walls. Defence and art must have absorbed a very large slice of Italian GDP down the centuries. How was it all funded? If the next section doesn’t turn you on, skip to the following jokes section. My first attempt to understand medieval fiscal policy, defence policy and arts funding goes like this. The Greeks, Etruscans and Romans, and then the many invaders, Goths, Franks, Lombards, and Normans, without exception funded their huge defence and public works programs out of the slave labour of the peoples they conquered. As the conquerors grew rich they developed two sub-systems. After one or more generations following each conquest, the descendants of slaves were transformed into serfs and tenant farmers, contributing much, but not all of their labour to the descendants of the conquerors in the form of military service, to enlarge territory and catch more slaves, in local council projects and, increasingly, rent paid in produce or cash for the use of land they used to own but now owned by the conquerors. Today, the results can be seen in the opulence of those within the castle walls and the slaves’ stunted progeny outside the walls.
The other sub-system was Patronage, the payment to architects and artists for works ranging widely from the glorification of a town clerk to the glorification of God, and the results today have filled the museums and art galleries of the whole world.
TRAVELLERS JOKES. From Ann “You turn any corner in Rome and it looks as if you have just missed a parking competition for blind people. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid in my lap” From Robin’s Travellers Phrase Book for Tired Travellers: At the hotel “But we booked the room six months six months ago, We will sleep here in the lobby until you find us a room…Something is living in the bathroom…Is this a towel or a postage stamp?…There is no hot water, the cold water is brown”. Telephoning home: “Could I have an English speaking operator? Are you speaking English now?…How long will it take to get through? But I can only wait four days” At the doctor “When should I remove the leeches?” At the butcher “Please cut the head off….Excuse me, but which organs are these?”
THE MIGHTY MOUSE. The geometry of a front-wheel-drive Fiat 1400, bogged half-way up a mountain, is hard to explain. I tried visualising a parallelogram of forces. Tranquillo, Caroline’s neighbour, spun clockwise circles with his hands. We put mats under the wheels, gave up and trudged up to where Caroline’s 500cc rear-wheel-drive Fiat Topolino, “little mouse” , crouched triumphantly above us. Truly, a mighty little mouse. We sat outside Caroline’s farm cottage, above her olive trees, and watched the sun go down over Cortona.
JOAN SINGS IN THE CHOIR – BY MISTAKE. Seeing Pamela, she sat next to her just as mass started. Too late to escape, she had to sight-sing along with the rest of Pamela’s choir. She was more careful two nights later at the choral concert, and we sat in the audience amongst fellow students from our class. They were all delighted to be asked back to our place for coffee, and we managed to find 12 cups and some biscuits. The European girls we have got to know are nearly six foot, the boys well over, all have perfect manners and, for our benefit that night, broke the class rules and spoke English, perfectly.
THE ETERNAL CITY. With the help of a superstrada so new it is not on our map, we reached Rome in two hours, parked at the airport and, to kill time, took the airport train into Rome. Sunday evening has its advantages- fewer crowds, less chance of being mugged, and some disadvantages – nowhere to buy bus tickets and a $50 fine for travelling without. So we take the metro to Colosseo, floodlit and twice as large as I expected. Another metro to Saint Peters where the square, actually a perfect circle, is ten times as large as I expected. We cross the Tiber, pass Castel Sant’ Angelo, get lost but somehow get to the airport just as Chris and Madeleine emerge from flight AZ249 at 11:30 p.m. By 1:00 a.m. we are still lost in some new suburbs that go nowhere, but by 3:00 a.m. we are zig-zagging up the wooded south flank of Perugia.
HORSES, ELEPHANTS AND FACSIMILE TRANSMISSION. Like the Montagues and Capulets of old Verona, the families of old Siena used to settle their difference by sword and dagger. Today, each family district has its own flag and a horse for the annual race round the square. The jockeys come from Sardinia, no one else would be fool enough to ride. Supporters waving flags pack the rails, the gentry fill their balconies and tourists squeeze in wherever. The winner is the local hero, the losers don’t stop until they reach Sardinia. Today, as we stroll in the sun with Chris and Madeleine, the square is, of course, the colours of raw and burnt siena, speckled with the unmistakeable whiteness of some English tourists. We stop on the way back at Passignano for an ice cream (silhouetted above in Madeleine’s hand) and to watch the sun set beyond the castles and islands on Lake Trasimeno. Long ago, Hannibal gave his elephants a rest stop and a swim here, and the locals still complain about pollution.
After completing the necessary forms in triplicate at the post office they say they can send a fax to anywhere except Hong Kong. “Go to the tobacconist” they say. The tobacconist sends me to the university where they say “Go to the street of the undertakers”. And there we find a machine that transmigrates the document in 30 seconds.
BYE PERUGIA, HI FLORENCE. End of October, very cold and Madeleine and Chris catch the early morning coach to Rome. We fill our thermos, say goodbye to Perugia and head for Venice via two hours in Arezzo and two days in Florence. The famous frescos at Arezzo are covered for restoration, but we have read about them in The English Patient. Monday is a feast day and the bells of the campanile in Florence seem to be pouring sound out of the sky. By sheer luck a choral mass has just started in the Duomo, the fourth largest church in the world, with an acoustic which once held 10,000 people spellbound in a sermon by Savonarola. In the caskets along the aisles of Santa Croce lie the remains of Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante and Rossini. There is a 1436 monument to Sir John Hawkwood who got a knighthood in England, a statue in Florence, and an awful lot of money from both sides of whatever battle was happening at the time. I think he relied on the fact that there is no W in the Italian alphabet and that the H is difficult, so he made off with the loot while everyone was trying to pronounce his name. We stayed at Le Sorelle Bandini where these sisters’ three useless nephews took it in turn to sit at the office desk while one girl cooked, made the beds and cleaned, while tourists like myself tried to fix the plumbing.
BUT NOW WE ARE OFF TO LA SERENISSIMA, VENICE.