Italy in 5 Days: Venice

Venice is magic. To get into the city of canals we crossed a bridge on an old train half-limping along. Thousands of tourists disembarked with us and headed towards San Marco square, so we headed in the opposite direction. Over canals with singing gondola drivers and between buildings fighting over alley space we walked, desperate to get lost. After three dead ends and two empty canals we found it utterly impossible to find ourselves and stopped for a sandwich. We shared a bench with an old woman feeding pigeons and admired a community garden next to a fountain pumping water into the square. In Rome I understand the fountains, but in Venice? There was no aquaduct next to the train. Are there clean springs that flow hidden in the muddy water?

Hungry only for adventure we decided it was time to become found again. And it’s not hard to find the famous square in Venice. Simply follow the shops. If you start out in the area, as we did, with plumbing stores and children’s dental clinics, you are far, far away from the action. Follow the sound of the accordion. You’ll come to a square with postcards and bottle openers. You are getting closer. Look for masks and marionettes. If you see the shops with men laying papier-mâché you are getting closer to the madness. They will not notice you, nor beckon you to enter, but you should step inside to masquerade as someone else. Step out of the shop and back into yourself and go further, towards the din of the people, the smell of lousy coffee. You’ll come to a bridge filled with more masks and blown glass. This isn’t the handmade stuff you saw just a few twists and turns ago, this is mass-produced bullshit made to sell to the masses  who don’t want to spend the extra ten bucks it costs to get something handmade instead of a stolen forgery made of plastic.

You are close. Follow the hordes, don’t stop for the overpriced pizza or pasta, go on to San Marco square. You won’t miss it. After the twists and turns of Venice back alleys it is sprawling and wide and open. To be sure, compared to getting lost in the streets it’s not as fun, but its worth waiting in the line to go into the cathedral for thirty minutes. While you wait you can watch the first digital clock in existence. It has a twenty-four hour hand that spins through the zodiac while every five minutes the minutes roll over to mark time’s passage. You must watch, for the line moves fast and you wont have many chances to see it move.

Once inside the church, we paid the three euros to see the treasure. Inside we found: St Pete’s leg discovered in 971 (begging the question, where was it kicking around?), a shrunken hand, various ribs, teeth and fingerbones encased in rock crystal or glass and locked away with golden hinges and jeweled locks, and the piece de resistance, a rock. At least, that’s all it appeared to be to me at first inspection. Rather than being encased in rock glass it was mounted in the center of a crucifix. Raquel deduced this could mean only mean it wasn’t any rock, but the rock, that is the most famous rock in Christian history. That’s right. We saw the rock that some dude through at Jesus’s head. Upon closer inspection, I reckon I saw some blood still on it. Chilling.

Legs seen and rocks admired we set back out into Venice to get lost again. We managed to do so quite well, only this time in conversation with an English literature professor and his main squeeze from Denmark near a shimmering pool of beer. We talked of past injuries, my inevitable fame, and the importance of travelling to famous places and keeping the hell away from famous places.  The conversation flowed quite easily we stayed late enough to nearly miss our train, but thankfully we piled upon it with nary a hitch, and were off to Lugano.  

Thus my tale is completed. Italy: 5 cities in 5 days. I do not advise travelling like this, it is a tiring and smelly but then again, when every day’s an adventure of fresh horizons, with new people to meet and great places to snub its certainly better than a week at the office. Your turn.

Italy in 5 Days: Margherra

After a brief wait in Florence when Raquel offended the locals, we boarded our train and made it to Margherra, a town just outside Venice. We marched thirty minutes, much further than our AirBnB host had promised past buildings with overgrown lawns that had fresh laundry drying on the line. Exhausted and annoyed we arrived to find the cutest AirBnB host the world has ever seen.

She showed us around her place, explained how the busses worked and asked if we were hungry. When we told her we were going to try to go into Venice that night, she gasped.

“But it is 9:30, the busses stop running at midnight, and you look so very tired and hungry.”

Well, maybe we should just eat instead.

“Yes, that is good. Come with me I will take you to a restaurant. It is good.”

So, dressed only in her pajamas and slippers, so led us around a corner, past a prostitute skillfully jiggling her wares and to the best meal we’ve eaten in Italy. But of course we didn’t know that yet. All we knew about Italian food was that it is overpriced and designed to look good on a menu. Taste is unimportant because most people will never return. We had decided days before to eat only while standing up. They may ruin a plate of pasta, but it seems against the Italian nature to serve lousy bread or salami. Yet here we were, about to sit down at a restaurant, throw our money away because we were hungry and tired and out of options.

“It is good, sit down,” our host said, and was gone.

We briefly debated setting out for somewhere else, but seeing as the only other human activity was prostitutes, we decided to go ahead and eat there. We sat down and the waitress began to chatter away in Italian. She obviously recognized me look of bewilderment for she focused her verbiage on Raquel.

“Yadda-yadda-yadda antipasti?”

“Uh…” Raquel replied.

 “Yadda-yadda-yadda primeri spaghetti?”

“Si?”

“Vino?”

"Si!"

Even I know that one.

The waitress vanished and Raquel turned pale.

“I have no idea what we just ordered.”

I shrugged. I was hungry enough to eat a horse. How bad could it be?

Twenty minutes later the waitress set before us an enormous silver platter piled high with crawfish, shrimp, mussels, clams, scallops, fish and ricotta cheese, all smothered in tomato sauce on top of spaghetti. it looked amazing, like something Poseidon would have for dinner. It was the most surprising and exciting dish she could have possibly brought us. I was already excited we had this visual feast instead of something like lasagna, where the flavor hides beneath the noodles.

We dug in. The Crawfish were brain-slurpingly good, the shrimp and scallops the perfect texture but the mussels… my gods the mussels. They were succulent and tender and went amazingly well with the tomato sauce. The clams became repositiroes for the ricotta. Each bite was half shellfish have tomato infused cheese. We washed it all down with half a liter of white wine and followed it with tiramisu.

It was utterly divine, or to quote the babe, “That meal was stupid good. Do you think she just saw that we didn’t understand anything and decided to blow our minds?”

I think so, and I think that’s the advantage of escaping the tourist destinations, with their monuments and overpriced everything. To go to Margherra was to see a piece of Italy not in the guidebooks, and to eat at a restaurant that needs people to eat there more than once. If you visit Italy I highly advise seeking out a small town that no one's ever heard of just to eat, and while in the big cities, stick to the street food and cheap bottles of wine from the cold drinks shops.

If you liked this story come visit Florence with us!

Italy in 5 days: Pisa

 

 

We arrived in Pisa at night and explored the city armed only with a bottle of wine. We found droves of youth buying booze in tiny alcoves labeled ‘cold drinks.’ We found street performers and falafel shops and a square overflowing with people. We found Italian protestors, their words and their cause indecipherable, their music though, was easily understood and compelled even the homeless to dance. There was an energy in the air that was infectious.

There was still energy the next day, but it had morphed into something far stranger. We found the famous monument and its brethren in a grassy field so large it dwarfed the marble structures. The  tower and the church it accompanies seem like children’s toys, dollhouses built of stone long ago in the time of giants. Maybe its just the lean of the tower, but something about Pisa during the day is terribly whimsical, and compels even the most stone-faced of tourists to shuck away any remaining self-respect and try their best to immortalize themselves holding up the tower, kicking it over, or whatever other perspective-defying hijinks have been done there since the photograph was invented. 

We, of course, tried our hand at this most venerated of tourist pictures, and proceeded to fail miserably. But we still had a great time. I tried to take photos of as many people as possible attempting to hold up the tower in one frame and Raquel searched for Japanese tour groups to parade me through with Kumamon on my back. After a month in Europe, the bear has lost a lot of his charm (A man in Greece asked us, “and this is the best thing to come out of Japan?), yet the Japanese still love him. A Japanese woman who was taking leaning pictures of Pisa, when confronted with the cabbage-loving ball of cuteness could do nothing but gasp, “Kumamon? Kumamon kawaii!” the equivalent of “SpongeBob? I love SpongeBob!”

Pictures taken we boarded a train for Florence to make a transfer to Venice. But that transfer never happened. I spent my time on the train scribbling away while Raquel helped every person aboard get off at the right stop except for us. We disembarked only to find we’d gotten off at the second Florence stop, when we should have gotten off at the first.

Our brains melted into puddles of self-loathing and incompetence while we waited in line to see if we could change our tickets. Italilain train engineers are amazing, for when we showed the woman at the counter our now useless tickets she was able to get us on the next train and even refund us a couple euros.

Chao bella! Te amo!

If you liked this story come to Rome or try out Vienna!

Italy in 5 days: Florence

 

In Florence, even a simple bridge seems a triumph of the Renaissance. Instead of simply crossing a river, the Medici and the artisans they employed built a structure strong enough to support gold, the shops to house it and the people who flock to buy it.

Don’t worry if you get to Florence without a hotel, we didn’t, and we only had to talk to walk into two hotels before we found a room that after a little bargaining was in our price range. 60 euros a night. Did we get ripped off or get a steal? You tell me.
 



There's even this painting of a delicious sandwich at the Uffizi

Once checked in we queued up to get into the Uffizi art museum. After an hour wait and three hours exploring its hallowed halls, I will admit, the Uffizi is an amazing museum. In particular Raquel and I found a painting by Botticelli of Madonna and Christ so beautiful it eclipsed Botticelli’s own Birth of Venus only a few paintings over. There’s also a quite scandalous sculpture of a woman in ecstasy, a two sided painting of a dwarf in all of his glory and the first female breast ever painted. Even a man easily bored by stuffy old art museums can spend a few hours there.

 

 

But my favorite sight to see was the Domo. Pictures certainly speak more than words, but with the Domo even those fall short. It is a massive structure of white, green and red marble that is so big one cannot ever appreciate it in its entirety, because, unlike the structures of Pisa which sprawl languidly on a wide expanse of green grass, the Domo is hemmed in by six story apartment buildings. One cannot ever get far enough away from it, so it always feels like it is constantly on the verge of swallowing up the viewer. I had to move in close, but this is no less mend boggling, for every inch of this massive marble structure is carved. The walls, the pillars, the windows, the doorframes, even the doors themselves are carved into popes and prophets, sigils and spirals, flowers and finery the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else in the world.

To leave it behind is to lower one’s expectations, but it must be done, for we had other cities to see.

Yet this did not prove to be as easy as we’d hoped. After Florence we spent a day in Pisa but had to stop back in Florence to catch a train to Venice via Milan, but alas we misread our tickets and got off a stop too late. A new ticket (at no cost to us, they must be used to incompetent tourists) and fifteen agonizing minutes later Raquel made the grave mistake of ordering a—gasp—iced coffee!

No sooner did the words leave her mouth than the cashier, an older woman undoubtedly married to the man manning the espresso machine sneered and told her husband in heavily accented English, “she wants an iced… coffee...”

The man could have prepared the milk for my cappuccino with the steam coming out of his ears. For a full minute be banged pots, smashed pans and furiously paced back and forth, stopping only to glare at this less-than-human who’d dared order a coffee at a temperature any less than scalding. Not wanting him to knock the place down or attempt to decapitate my wife with a sugar spoon I quickly changed the order to a frappe instead. He visibly relaxed, and by the time he brought us our drinks, “here is your frappe and a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, hot cappuccino,” he seemed downright pleasant.

Caffeinated and terrified we made for our train to Venice, happy to escape with our heads, and a train to put them on.

If you liked this story check out Rome Part I or Part II go visit Greece with me!

Italy in Five Days: Rome Part II

After the amazing exhaustion that is the Sistine chapel, we still had the rest of an ancient city to explore. We hopped on a train (frighteningly off-schedule and claustrophobic after living in Japan) and headed to the old town. Our first stop was to recharge outside the church of Cappucin with a cappuccino. With this dose of meta-caffeination we were ready to see Rome.

And see it we did. We walked into Basilicas to find catholic masses underway or just other tourists

marveling at their splendor. In a toy shop a magician performed a private show in which he transfigured cards back into themselves and severely tested the material limits of a silver chain. In a tiny shop no bigger than bedroom an Italian watchmaker replaced Raquel’s watch’s battery with a smile and in a bookstore behind a cathedral we perused esoteric tomes containing knowledge of everything from astral projection to the origin of the tarot.


We explored the Pantheon. Its altars for Zeus and Athena long ago replaced with effigies of Jesus and Mary. The sun from the hole in the roof cast an unusually equal light upon the saints and martyrs, lifting them to the status of the pair supposed to be their betters. Catholicism has 

Sun worship at its finest at the Pantheon

whitewashed much of the world with its version of history, but this was one place where the pagan predecessors could still be felt. 

We ate gelato and a crappy overpriced meal and explored The Coliseum. It looks like the progenitor of every arena ever built. It is marvelous, and proves mankind’s obsession with the distraction of fun and games goes back much farther than all but the most diehard sports fans would care to admit.

But the most powerful moment of the day was stepping into an empty cathedral to find a lonely priest practicing on a magnificent pipe organ. It was hauntingly beautiful. After a sitting in the pews for a few minutes it began to overwhelm my atheist sensibilities.

In these hallowed halls, built centuries ago, I could feel Christ suffering, because for the first time in my life, I felt I had suffered if but a fraction of what any other person on this earth has endured. There are things worse than testicular cancer, to be sure, but not in my privileged life. Confronted with the beauty of this place of worship and the music it inspired from this man, I fell to my knees and begged God for health and a family. After surviving the first battle with testicular cancer, nothing else seems as important to me. And to be there, to see Christ’s pain, and what it inspires in people, to hear what it inspired this lonely man to play, brought me to tears and moved me to beg God for mercy.




If you liked this story check out Rome Part I. 

Italy in Five Days: Rome part I

Our time in Italy was a whirlwind of trains and sightseeing. We spent two nights in Rome, a day in Florence, a day Pisa, a night in Margherra outside of Venice, a day in Venice, then caught a train to Lugano via Milan. I do not recommend travelling like this. It tends to leave beard hairs frizzled and wifeys frazzled, but we had five days to kill before we had a free place to stay with a relative (the sister of the husband of my wife’s aunt) so what else could we do but see everything there is to see? So without any further ado, I give you 5 Italian cities in five days.

Rome

We arrived late in Rome, too tired to do anything but walk beneath an aqueduct to get pizza and beer and vow to set out early the next day.

10:00 am is the hour of the tourist. It is the time most people (yours truly included) can manage to get anywhere and still feel early, so it the time with the longest lines and the most obnoxious guides trying to sell you tours to skip them.

We opted for a cappuccino and wifi instead. Our weekend booked (except for Florence, more on that later) we set out after overhearing an Italian tell three young Americans about the market across the street.

“They put a roof over it but it’s still great! You should walk in just for the smell!”

Inside I found the most delicious sandwich in Italy, slow roasted porcetta and a crispy pork product that was something between bacon and chicharon. The textures of the noble pig juxtaposed on a fresh roll. For three Euros, there is no better food in Italy. 

Marble Selfie of the Beard

 

Our bellies full and our brains caffeinated we returned to the Vatican at about 1:30 to find the lines much more agreeable. Twenty minutes later we were perusing the popes’ collection of sculptures of the Greek and Roman Gods. You gotta love the Catholics. They renounce all the other religions but they take damn good care of their idols.

Starting with the room of maps, The Vatican is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. The ceilings are painted to look like marble reliefs. Angels and cherubs bordered in gold smile down on ancient frescoes depicting the world in incredible detail. After the maps comes a hallway filled with tapestries depicting amazing events more or less related to Jesus. The ones with JC are the best. He’s got a goofy smile and is flashing the peace sign.  

The Triumph of Christianity

Next comes Raphael’s rooms. My favorite piece is “Triumph of Christianity” which shows a golden crucifix standing over a broken marble statue of Hermes. In with the new out with the old! A room over is the “School of Athens” an eternal reminder of the greatness of those long-gone idol worshippers that the painters of the Renaissance was so obsessed with reviving.

But after all that, after kilometers of paint, tons of marble, and thousands of tourists, postcards, and priests we were upon it, the Sistine chapel.

The Sistine chapel is the most beautiful thing made by one man. It is as awe-inspiring as the Sequoias, as powerful as Niagara Falls. It is worth going to Rome, waiting in line, paying 20 Euros and wearing out your feet.

It is one man’s amazing vision of his faith, hopes and dreams. I don’t know much about the bible, only the basics of Genesis through Noah’s Ark, but perhaps that’s all anyone bothers to learn anymore because that’s what is depicted by Michelangelo and to have some sense of the stories in this masterpiece so important to us as a species that we learn these stories to better appreciate its splendor.

It is beautiful, breath-taking, and a little funny. Why are God’s buttcheeks painted so prominently? Why, amidst all this splendor, is there a scene of Noah drunk off his gourd? I think Michelangelo knew the power of emotion, and for anything to have beauty it must invoke laughter or tears.

And below it, behind the altar is the Final Judgment, which is as dark and frightening as the ceiling is bright and uplifting. Michelangelo painted it as a grim reminder of the price of sin. It is beautiful, but horrifying. To have the two visions of a Master, one of hope painted early in life and another of despair painted much later, is nothing short of miraculous. Go there. Listen to Rick Steves when you do.


This is not marble, nor is it the Sistine Chapel.
I was to overwhelmed by the place to rebel enough to snap a photo of the real deal.

 If you liked this post check out Part II or check out Greece!