5-9-2010 - Train to the Midi

Later…Guido drove me to Milano Centrale to catch the train to Marseilles. We arrived early and said good-bye, and now I await the posting of the rail for the train to Ventimiglia, where I will transfer to Nice and from there to Marseilles, where I have (hopefully) a reservation at The Holiday. This will begin the “organized,” or commercial part of my trip.

From Milano to Ventimiglia… I showed my ticket to the conductor and this seems to be the correct train.  I’m in a compartment with (so far) five other people.  The train is underway and the surroundings of Milano are passing by quickly.  Wild poppies grow in patches along the side of the tracks.

I believe we just passed over the River Po beyond Pavia, going towards Genova.

We are now traveling along the Mediterranean Sea, still in Italy, approaching, I suppose, what can be considered the Cote d’Azure.  I hadn’t realized that the land here dropped so precipitously toward the sea.  The train has traveled through many tunnels and I have been wearing a mask after I started having breathing troubles in one of the earlier ones, before Genoa.  The sea is on the left, and mountains and hillsides rise steeply on the right.

In the train compartment with me are two American couples; now the whole compartment speaks English and is riding Eurail since two Italians left at Genoa.  Two of my compartment companions are American soldiers from Iraq on R & R.  They spent the past week in Rome and have another week before they must return to Iraq.  The other two, from Alaska, are celebrating their 25-year anniversary with a two-week trip to Europe.

Later, I’m on the train in the station, about to depart from Nice to Marseilles.  I hope I’m sitting in the correct seat and car. 

The trek from Ventemiglia to here was dreadful.  There was no lift (elevator) or even escalator in the station at Ventemiglia; there was no information on trains in the station; and the loungers in the station seemed deliberately ignorant.  Perhaps it is local sport to watch the tourists trying to navigate the obscure and difficult passageways in this out-of-the-way - but essential - transfer stop between Italy and France.  I had to bump my bags down the stairs from our arrival track, one at a time.  Then I carried the smaller one to the top of the stairs (uscita & vaggia), and was hauling the larger bag up one step at a time when a policeman (caribinieri) came down the stairs and carried it the rest of the way up.  The policemen also didn’t know anything about when or where the train to Nice departed from the station. 

There was also a claque of 10 – 15 sports fans, half full of booze: yelling, and singing, and beating on metallic drums, and blowing noisemakers.  It was almost impossible to ask questions or to understand answers in the station’s echo-chamber.  The ticket teller directed me to information; the lady there said that the train to Nice departed at 15:37, on Track 1, thankfully right next to the atrium of the station.  Indeed, there was a sign along the track indicating that a train left at 15:37 for somewhere like Crassa (no indication of Nice).  However, several others hanging out by the track seemed also to think that the train was going to Nice, and some of them spoke English.

We are now passing along the Cote d’Azure of southern France.  I don’t think I’d want to live here.  It’s too crowded with houses and apartments and hotels - rather like Miami.  The big difference is that the houses crop out of steep hillsides rather than rising from marsh and tidal flats.  Here’s an amazing patch of countryside, now – crumbling sandstone hills and mountains rising like dolomites or western badlands, a few houses collected in a valley.  Now here, again, the hills are tamer and houses grow out of them everywhere, like mushrooms in rainy season.

Roman arch in Marseilles

Milano, Part 4

5/09/10, continued

On Saturday morning, I went over to Guido’s after breakfast. Patrizia was at work (half day), and Guido was taking care of the children. I played race cars with Ricardo and watched Veronica do her cute little three-year-old show-off routine – dancing, playing piano, etc. Then Guido made pasta (pesto) for us for lunch and Veronica had a bit of a tantrum toward the end of it, but she had been quite good and sociable all morning. Patrizia came home and Veronica had a nap and I got online. It was a good thing, too, because I had a message from a person in the closing section of Community First Bank asking for more information with my signature. This relates to the house I'm trying to buy this summer. Briana has power-of-attorney, and will sign for me at the closing, but it has all been much more complicated than I'd hoped it would be. I was able to print out the e-mail at Guido’s and later (Monday, in Marseilles) faxed it to the person with signatures.

After Veronica awakened from her nap that afternoon, the whole family went for a walk in a nearby park. Riccardo used his gun with plastic pellets to shoot at ducks and posts and imaginary beasts. Veronica ran around and played on a swing set and slides, accompanied always by her mother. And Guido and I walked slowly along the pathways or sat on a bench, and he talked about his situation at work, with which he is dissatisfied, but which he doesn’t see a way to improve without changing companies, maybe moving to another city or even to another country, which he also doesn’t want to do, in order to feel creative and valued. I understand that situation, having been there myself. His solution will probably have to be different from mine, partly because he’s a man, partly because he’s younger than I was when I went through that apparent impasse. It’s tough.

In the evening on Saturday was a big birthday party for Marco, Guido’s brother. I stayed a day longer in Milano than I had originally intended so that I could spend some time with Guido and his family on Saturday. Thus, I was there for the family event, feeling a bit like a party crasher. The whole family was there, and Rosanna cooked a large dinner of lamb shanks and pasta and multiple hors d’oeuvres and appetizers. Her food is always very tasty. Gianni and Rosanna and their two boys, Guido and Marco, now themselves, paterfamilias, altogether created an experience of the intensity and importance of Italian family life, both in its best sense of support, and pleasure, and meaning found in one-another’s company, and in its rather stressful aspect of dissonance and chaos.

This morning (Sunday) I take the train for Marseilles. I’m packed and ready to go, but Gianni and Rosanna are still in bed after a long day yesterday and the big party last evening. Marco, Guido’s brother is now 41 and Guido is now 44 years old, I believe. So it has been nearly 27 years since he came to Charleston as a foreign-exchange student. He’s now married and has two children – Riccardo and Veronica – and a pretty good job, but one he doesn’t like so well because he has poor rapport with his boss. It was good to have another long talk yesterday, as we used to do all those many years ago. That probably won’t be repeated, though.

Milano, Part 3

5/09/10, continued

Villa Reale at Monza

On Friday, Rosanna decided that we needed to go to Monza in the morning.  It is a village, not far away from Brugherio, where Patrizia works (teaches school).  It is also the location of a summer palace (Villa Reale or Royal Villa) of the Austrian nobility that controlled the region of Milan for a couple of centuries.  The following day was to be the opening of a Rose Exhibit in a part of the formal gardens, but the weather has been so cold that very few of the roses were blooming.  There is also a very large park nearby (Monza Park) which is apparently one of the largest public parks in the country.  Then we had an elegant “snack” (small puff pastries with meat and cheese fillings, olives, nuts, crispy, seasoned breads) and tea. 

Friday afternoon, Rosanna, Gianni, Guido, Patrizia and I all drove into Milano in Guido’s car, in order to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, for which Gianni had made reservations. It is in a modest church, Santa Maria delle Grazie, with a lovely cloister area where we waited for our time to enter.

Santa Maria delle Grazie

I had seen the Last Supper once before (during the sabbatical year in Switzerland) and we didn’t need a reservation then. I remembered the space being smaller and darker with the cloister more accessible.  This time, about 20 people were herded into a spacious, softly lit room, with DaVinci’s mural on one end and a mural by Giovanni Donatto da Montorfano on the other.  The DaVinci mural has been “restored,” which is to say that it does not seem to be flaking from the wall. However, the colors seem more muted than I expected or remembered them to be. It was fairly easy to pick out Judas among the disciples.  The others were not so clear.  One looked like a woman, but it turned out to be John (the gospel writer). It was good to see the da Vinci again, and this time restored.



The painting by Donatto, was an elaborate, skilled, and richly colored rendering of the Crucifixion, and I actually spent more time viewing that than I did the Last Supper; there were fewer people crowded around it. Of course, photos were forbidden.

Milano, Part 2

5/09/10, continued.

Galleria Victor Emmanuel

In the afternoon of that first day in Milano (Wednesday), we had a nice lunch of onion soup in a restaurant in the Galeria Victor Emmanuel (the world’s first shopping mall, I believe), and then went to La Scala, where I had a glimpse of the fully lit loges facing a horseshoe, the stage in front and the flat parterre beneath. Then they closed the viewing loges and darkened the theater for a rehearsal (something Wagnerian, it seemed). We then visited the museum there, an intriguing collection of portraits and statues and mementos, and even plaster hand casts and death masks of famous composers and musicians and performers of La Scala’s illustrious past. One almost feels the passions and intrigue of the artists and managers in their portraits and in the artifacts they left behind in this powerfully iconic building.

La Scala

After visiting La Scala, we went to a small church with a very interesting perspective effect of inlaid marble in the apse. From the entrance, looking down the nave, the apse seemed 20 or 30 feet deep, but if one walked up toward the front, it was clear that the apse was no more than about a meter deep, and that the effect had been achieved with the clear use of perspective. I don't seem to have taken any photos of that - perhaps it was too dark inside the church.

That evening, Guido and his family came over for dinner at his parents’ home, a very pleasant evening. Ricardo came up to me and spoke a few words in English. It was clear that Patrizia and Guido love each other, that she’s a good mother, and that he loves the innocence of his children.

General Giuseppi Misouri on his tired horse

The following day, Thursday, Gianni, Rosanna and I went back to Milano, again by metro, and visited the medieval university of the city. We ate lunch (I had a large, very nice tuna salad) in an open-air café in front of a church near the Place Giuseppi Misouri. He was a general in Ghiribaldi’s army, and his commemorative statue shows him riding on a very tired horse. Afterwards, we went to a jewel of a museum housed in an old palace with a lovely little courtyard, of which the core collection was early Renaissance paintings and ancient manuscripts from throughout the civilized world of the Middle Ages.

That evening, the whole family got together at a very nice restaurant in the town of Bordigheria.  Rosanna said we would be “seeing the night life of Bordigheria,” a sleepy suburb of Milano, not far from the high-rise apartment complex where they live. Nonetheless, the meal was superb and the company (all family, including children) was lively and engaging.

Milano, Part 1

5/04/10 (cont.)

On the train from Lausanne to Milano. I had no problem catching the train, despite some anxiety ahead of time that I might not be in the right place at the right time. Also, I had a voice message from Guido (a former exchange student), asking me to call him, but it turned out he had sent it yesterday. We made contact today as I was waiting in the kiosk by the track (voie 3) for the train to Milano to arrive in the station.

5/9/10

The stay in Milano was lovely, but tinged with melancholy because I will probably not see that family again. I felt a great deal of love and acceptance – even honor – while there. The family is very strong, reflecting, I think, the general Italian culture. The two boys and their families live near Gianni and Rosanna, in the same complex of buildings. They work  in Milano, and that is one of the issues Guido has about the job. He and Patrizia have recently purchased a larger apartment in the same complex, which limits his options in terms of location for a new job.

Although I had requested a quiet stay in Milano, Gianni and Rosanna wanted to take me to as many sights as time would permit. Perhaps it was for the best, because they both have lost a good deal of hearing, and quiet conversation might have been impossible. So we visited many fascinating, historic, and beautiful sites in the four days there. When I wanted to speak, I would tap Gianni’s arm and he would turn his best ear toward me and cup his hand behind it, I would speak loudly, and most of the time he could hear and understand. If I wanted to say something to Rosanna, I would usually go through Gianni, although if she said something to me, I could often respond directly to her, in Italian. Our conversations usually began with Rosanna directing two or three words to me in English, followed by “comme se dice…” and an Italian word, which I was usually able to translate into English, then she would continue in Italian, and I would respond in Italian if I understood what she said, which was often the case.

On the first day in Milano, we went to the center of the city and saw Il Duomo (the cathedral), and we spent a good deal of time wandering around the inside. It is a huge structure, with a central nave and two large side-aisles, nearly as large as the central nave. The chiaroscuro of the interior gives a feeling of mysterious calm. I had an auditory guide, which I used primarily when looking at the three large windows in the apse. They were designed in the 1500s, I believe (the cathedral was built from the 1300s to the 1500a) and contain over 400 panels, of which some 60+ have survived intact; the rest have been repaired or replaced. One of the windows depicted stories from the New Testament, one had scenes from the crucifixion, and the third showed stories from the Old Testament, with scenes of the Garden of Eden before and after the fall near the bottom of the window.

After absorbing as much of the art and atmosphere as possible, I turned in the audio-guide and bought a booklet of postcards. Then we went into an underground passage near the entrance of the church, where the excavated remnants of several previous religious structures lie buried beneath the square in front of the Duomo. There was a paleo-Christian baptistery in a round, Romanesque structure (third century?) and fragments of earlier and later buildings, including two other churches (San ? and San Giovanni) that had preceded Il Duomo. It was very interesting to see the false-perspective checkerboard (black-and-white) that seemed to characterize much early Christian design, both in buildings and on the clothing of bishops and other church officials  I remember many such illustrations on the walls of ancient churches in Bulgaria.