On to Porto Ercole [9-26-09]

The next morning, I had a quick breakfast at my hotel and caught the shuttle back to the airport to rent a car. Upgraded to a nice new Alfa Romeo, I tossed in my luggage, made sure I remembered how to put a manual transmission into reverse, snapped my GPS into position on the windshield, and headed north, away from Rome. This, itself, was an achievement. Rome is my favorite city in the world, and to be so close and not to drop in was killing me, but I had promises to keep.

In a little more than an hour, I was turning off the highway to head west to the shore, where I crossed a causeway onto the island of Monte Argentario. My GPS took me straight to my hotel, the “Filippo II” on the north side of the island.

The Filippo II sits alone on a beautiful promontory looking out over the bay of Porto Santo Stefano. It is an impressive hotel in every way, and not terribly expensive. My room was a living room, kitchenette, and bedroom, all having floor to ceiling sliding glass windows that opened onto a large private balcony that looks out over the gulf.

But hotel resorting was not my objective for stopping over on this island for my first “true” day in Italy. When I was settled into my room, and after a quick shower and change of clothes, I jumped into my car and began driving clockwise around the island to the south side and Porto Ercole.

The “port of Hercules” is definitely a magnet for yachters, with clear blue water, hundreds of boats moored or anchored in the bay, protective castles from past ages guarding the port from high positions above the bay. I was here, however, because of something that happened here 400 years earlier.

Michelangelo Merisi (known now as “Caravaggio”) was a scoundrel, a drinker, and a reckless brawler who had killed a man in Rome in the late 1500s. He was also one of the greatest artistic geniuses of all time. He had painted great masterworks for the Church in Rome, and for rich patrons like Ciriaco Mattei, but after a drunken duel and charges of manslaughter, he had to flee Rome and find refuge in other countries across the Mediterranean which were not directly controlled by the angry Pope.

As his fame grew in exile, the Pope in 1610 finally forgave all and asked Caravaggio to return to Rome and produce even greater masterpieces than before. He was only too happy to accept the church’s invitation. He packed his bags and recent artworks, and headed from Sicily back to his beloved Rome.

All we know from history is that his ship, for reasons that are not clear, steered off course and landed north of the mouth of the Tiber, in a small port called Porto Ercole. There, the great artist, with the next phase of his life lying gloriously ahead of him, died of what was described as a fever.

In October 2005, I was visiting Rome with Lou and Kay Strubeck. They wanted to see the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. I decided to spend that time seeing some of the Caravaggio paintings located in Rome – a kind of Easter egg hunt. My first stop was the great cathedral of Santa Maria Del Popolo in upper Rome. As I climbed the steps to this great church, a priest was welcoming visitors at the door. I greeted him saying, “Excuse me, but does this church have works of Caravaggio inside?”

“Yes, signore, it does,” seeming almost to roll his eyes to the sky as if having to indulge a child.

“Where can I find them,” I asked.

“Signore,” he replied, “Whenever you want to see a Caravaggio, just go into the church and go to wherever all the people are.” The clear indication was that this great church, with hundreds of masterpieces – any one of which would be a major tourist attraction in a “regular city” like Dallas, Texas, was constantly being flooded by throngs who only wanted to see the works of one artist.

Sure enough, I walked into this grand cathedral. Two people stood over on the left side of the sanctuary, one person on the right, and about forty people were down at the far end of the church, in the left corner. I walked to where “all the people” were and saw the magnificent Crucifixion of Peter, and the Conversion of Saul. After that, Caravaggio would always be my favorite Italian painter.

Now, in the place of his untimely death, I stood before a sculpture in the center of the port town showing, in bronze, several elements found in Caravaggio’s paintings. His body was never recovered, since the Pope did not learn of Caravaggio’s death for a number of months. This sculpture, then, serves as his monument … for the one who, in time, might have even eclipsed his great predecessor Michelangelo Bonarotti. Instead, his works served as instruction to great painters who followed, like Rembrandt.

Arrival in Rome [9-25-09]

After a long trans-Atlantic flight (where I enjoyed a much-coveted empty seat next to mine, and where I where the flight attendants were particularly generous to me on account of my having a brother in that profession who had informed them of my seat assignment moments before I took off), a five-hour layover at London Heathrow, and another two hour flight to Italy, I landed at Rome’s Fiumicino airport at 9:30 PM Friday evening. After collecting my luggage, I called my hotel (about one mile from the airport in the town of Fiumicino) to see if a shuttle was available to pick me up.
“No, signore … the shuttle does not run after 9:00 PM, so you must take a taxi. Remember, pay no more than 15 Euros.”

Armed with this advice, I walked toward the exit doors where three Italian gentlemen, all with the same style name badges were waiting to offer “private car” transportation to my hotel for the same price a taxi would charge. “I’m staying in Fiumicino, very nearby. I’m not going into Rome tonight.” One of them took the pull handle of my luggage saying “No problem, I will take you to your hotel in Fiumicino.”

As we walked toward his car, I remembered the “no more than 15 Euros” tip from the hotel desk clerk and asked how much the charge would be. “To your hotel, 30 Euros.”

“That’s about $45 to go one mile. No thank you …. I’m sorry, but I prefer a regular taxi.”

I retrieved my suitcase from his control and began walking away from him as he continued to assure me that the price would be the same with a regular taxi.

I saw that the taxi line was full of taxis, even at this late hour of the night, and with very few customers. Believe it or not, that’s a bad thing. The rule is: many taxies and few customers = no rides to local hotels. I know that sounds odd. If there is a surplus of taxis just sitting there waiting for a customer, why would getting one to take you somewhere be difficult? It’s not only difficult; it’s practically impossible. The reason is that large numbers of available cabs makes for long, slow moving lines of taxies waiting for their turn, finally, at the head of the line. Idle taxies as far as the eye can see. That taxi now at the head of the line may have been in line for an hour or two. That, unfortunately, means that, after being out of operation for such a long time, the last thing he wants is to take a passenger to a hotel one mile away, getting 15 Euros (if that), and then finding himself in the back of the line again. Economically, they must have a paying passenger going all the way into Rome - - who will pay 80 to 100 Euros for the ride. So, when all the cabbies need big bucks to compensate them for their long downtime wait, and the passengers only want to go across the highway to a Fiumicino hotel to get some badly needed rest, the result is that cabbies have no passengers, and the passengers have no taxies.

Then my luck turned. Along came a shuttle driver in what was almost a uniform, leading two weary Americans in the same position as my own. “Would you like to join these two passengers and share the fare? I will take them to their hotel in Fiumicino, and then take you to your hotel, each paying 20 Euros.” I had no further fight in me, so I accepted his generous offer. Thirty dollars U.S. to go one mile. Tomorrow would be a better day.

Tomorrow is departure day. [9/23/09]

Arivederci Dallas ... almost! It’s late at night, and my packing is still not done. Nowhere close. At least half of the difficulty in packing for a three-week trip overseas is cutting down what you’re tempted to take in favor of having a suitcase you can actually pick up, if you have to, and carry it across a cobblestone street. I am hoping to pack lighter this trip than ever before, and that’s why I’m still up trying to decide, as Susie Orman says: “Do I need it? Or do I just want it?”

The photos in this initial part of the blog are ones I have taken in past trips to Italy. You can left-click on any of them to enlarge them. This particular one, for some reason, is one of my favorites. It is neither unusual, panoramic nor beautiful in the artistic sense, but it’s one of those images that is clearly fixed in my memory to remind me of a unique moment in time … a place holder, at once dated and timeless. It was taken on July 4, 1982. I had arrived in Rome for the first time to meet up with a friend from Dallas, Rauhman Browning, who was working in Italy at the time. We were both thrilled to be seeing Rome. It was like walking in a dream. I had traveled the world in the navy, but never had I experienced this kind of immediate infatuation with a city. Here, in the middle of St. Peters Square, a kindly old Italian gentleman was feeding the pigeons. They seemed to know him. I remember thinking as I took the picture, “I wonder if that’s me, way on down the line, coming back, again and again, over the years of my life, to the “Eternal City" of Rome. Who knows; maybe it was. Maybe this old guy was actually me as a time traveler from the future (ha ha). To find out, I'll have to live a few more years, and eventually find me a hat and cane. I already have a selection of frumpy old sports coats that would do nicely.

FLASHBACK :: Pompeii, July 2004

I first visited Pompeii in July 2004. As everyone knows, Pompeii is unique for the fact that Mother Nature (in the form of a volcano) both destroyed it and saved it, on the same day, for future generations to experience and study. It is now one of my favorite destinations in Italy, and I’ll return any time I’m in the Naples area. As this photo shows (click once on it to enlarge it), the “ruins” of Pompeii even today carry the ominous backdrop of Mount Vesuvius – still there, still active, still dangerous to that entire region. See it there, sleeping in the background?
If we could have visited Pompeii on August 23 in the year 79 A.D., it would have been a peaceful, almost luxurious experience. Trade and industry were thriving. People were busy and well paid. The empire was at peace, at last, with Emperor Titus having taken the throne in Rome only a month earlier to succeed his late father Vespasian. In Pompeii, hundreds of shops would have been open to business, with horse drawn carts crowding the streets, and local residents and travelers from afar mingling on the elevated sidewalks and in the markets and public parks. The biggest "issues" of the day were the upcoming city magistrate elections and the mysterious slow-down of water coming into the city from its main aqueduct. Why was that happening? Why would the water volume just drop off without any apparent cause?
In fact, no one at that time was aware that the large mountain not far from the city was a volcano. Yes, they knew what a volcano was. Mount Etna on Sicily had been active for many years to one degree or another, but everyone assumed Vesuvius was just a mountain.
Then, at lunchtime on August 24, everything changed … or ended … for the throngs in the streets, businesses and homes of this doomed city. This was an eruption like nothing modern man has ever seen. When it blew, it released the power equivalent of 100,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding at once, lifting a third of the mountain into the sky (the column of molten magma and ash reaching a height of 20 miles "straight up"). The force spewed 1.5 million tons of molten material upward every second – at a velocity of "Mach 1" (the speed of sound). This is a level of natural violence our brains simply cannot accommodate. As the falling brimstone and ash began covering Pompeii, most people simply believed that time had come to an end and the force that holds the world together had died. Many fled the city, while others gathered their families and pets in an inner room of their home to “wait it out - - whatever it was.” [The photo at left is one of he many well-preserved casts of the individual victims of Vesuvius.] Then things got much, much worse. When the energy from the eruption finally ceased after about 20 hours, the molten column of material that had been forced into the stratosphere collapsed downward, spreading laterally when it hit the earth, and creating a super-heated tidal wave (600 degrees Fahrenheit) that vaporized any living thing in its path. Many of those who had escaped the city itself were mowed down by this final pyroclastic flow of magma and gas.
For centuries thereafter the city was simply written off as lost forever to history, like Troy. Then in 1748 diggers discovered it again and the government began sponsoring professional archaeologists to conduct proper excavation. Now in 2009, they are about two-thirds finished with the task.
What can you do if you go to visit Pompeii today? Take a tour, for sure, just to get your bearings and to understand some of the visual history present. Then break away from the crowds and wander the excavated Roman city on your own. Step into people’s homes; walk back to their kitchen areas; sit down by the family hearth and conjure up the normal, everyday people who once called this little spot their home. Picture the housewife bracing herself in the front doorway, wondering why her husband, the local baker, has not yet made it home through the chaos in the streets. Where could he be? Has he been hurt by the falling fire stones? These people were as real as you or I, and they were the unwilling witnesses to history on a day in August that had begun so much like any other.

Six Days to Go . . . . . [9/18/09]

Today was spent making arrangements to have my laptop be able to ‘speak’ to the Internet while I’m in Italy. Of course, this is only the year 2009, so that’s not as easy today as it will be in ten years. I employed the good counsel of a wise twenty-something and came to understand that if you want your “solution” to be easy (meaning the use of your own cell phone company instead of shifting over to another provider) and legal (meaning not downloading a ’hack tether’ from the Internet to couple your iPhone with your laptop so it can serve as your 3G antenna), then it’s going to cost you plenty. The phone companies don’t understand the concept that you might only need this device/service for 3 weeks, and that, although you are willing to pay a fair price for having and using Internet access during that time, you don’t think it’s fair to require a 2-year contract (the time period you are expected to commit to the service if you want to avoid the $175 early termination fee). I gave in and signed up. We’ll see how well it works over there. To tell the truth, it’s fun contemplating how much easier communications will be with a laptop connecting directly to the Internet, even in remote coastal towns where the term “hot spot” pertains only to wood burning pizza ovens. My iPhone would have linked to the Internet with no special equipment or service contract; no problem. Typing on an iPhone is slow, however. Doable, but slow. And you’re having to constantly zoom and in and out of text, and sliding it from left to right to read what you need to know. It’s miraculous they have crammed so much technology into this one little device, and yes, Ben Franklin would be very impressed “if he came back today,” but there are undeniable advantages to typing at 70+ words a minute without looking at the keyboard (thank you Mrs. Kinnemer) and being able to see full lines as they sit on the page.
　
　
　
　

FLASHBACK :: Lake Como, June 18, 2006

The Italian Lake Country in the north is an Italian experience all its own. This is Lake Como from my hotel room window in the town of Bellagio (pronounced … I’m sorry about this … it really is pronounced simply “bel-AH-jo” … not “buh-LAH-zshee-oh” like you hear it in Las Vegas). These beautiful towns are like “Italy Visits Switzerland,” given the way they nestle up to the Alps. From Bellagio one can take daily trips around the lake on various kinds of ferries and boats. I spent this trip with my best friends from college, Walt and Brenda, and another wonderful couple they were close to. At first I had thought Como should be our base of operations … made sense: Lake Como / Como. But I was gently urged to consider Bellagio by Andy Zanetti’s mother, who, a year earlier, had sponsored a day trip for the three of us (me, Andy and his mom) from their hometown of Brescia to Como and the towns along the lake shore. Sure enough she was right. Como seemed too loud and busy. Bellagio, in contrast, was a jewel of a town with only a few cars (it’s not all that easy to drive to – but that’s the only "practical" way to get there). We spent our days jumping on and off boats, hanging over white-painted railings as we cut through the clear, cold waters. My favorite stop was the Villa Balbianello – I’m pretty sure it’s the most beautiful villa I’ve ever seen. So much so, in fact, that movies like “A Month By The Lake,” “Casino Royale,” "Ocean's Twelve," and “Star Wars - Episode Two” were filmed on its grounds.

Twelve Days Before Departure [9-12-09]

Some wonderful friends ask me why I don’t “expand” my horizons and visit countries other than Italy. I have answers … sort of. In Europe, I have traveled in the U.K., France, Belgium, Spain, Germany and Switzerland - - so Italy is, in some ways, just a member of the group. Still, I have to admit I’ve become biased. One friend asked me recently how this trip to Italy would be different from my first twelve. Now that, to me, is a more interesting question.

This trip will be different in a number of ways. This is the first time I’ve ever “traveled alone” in Italy. Every other time, even on skis in 1982 (see About Me), I have been with fellow travelers. I’m not sure how that will change the feel of things. I guess that will be part of the “discovery” aspect of this particular trip.

I do like being with others when I travel. I like the “shared experience” of it all. It’s the same reason I never go to movies by myself, or even to restaurants. Just having people to share the experience enhances it in certain ways. They say that when you watch even a riotously funny movie by yourself you won’t actually laugh. I think that's interesting. Apparently spontaneous laughter happens only in groups of two or more. I wonder why.
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Anyway I depart “da solo” this time. I expect that, in certain ways, it will be great to travel this way. It reminds me of those great lines by Richard Harris on his “Slides” album of many years ago. He said: “I find that travelling alone is somehow more realistic than with others. You find yourself in a new place all alone and you deal with it as oppose to when you're with others who are familiar to you and in a sense shelter you from situations you would otherwise meet head on. You know what I mean? Besides, if your loved ones are with you, you have no one to go home to.”

So, we’ll see how it goes. I have to admit, however, that I probably won’t have all that much time to myself while I’m there. After a one-day stopover in Porto Santo Stefano (to see the site of the mysterious death, on July 18, 1610, of my favorite Italian painter, Caravaggio), I will be driving into the mountains of southern Tuscany, to the little mountain town of Arcidosso. There I am enrolled in a one-week class of Tuscan cooking taught by the noted Italian chef, now retired, Carlo Innocenti. (http://www.tuscanway.com/tuscany/cooking_courses/cheese-connoseur-wine-week.php)

Carlo (right) takes about 8 students at a time, each of whom lives, for that week, in his large stone house next to the town castle. In the mornings we will meet up with Carlo and his wife for a light breakfast in the downstairs kitchen and then stroll down the hill to the town’s market where we will participate with Carlo in selecting and purchasing the foods that will be that evening’s cooking class and (with any luck) dinner. When the morning shopping is done, Carlo’s son Romeo will pick us up in the family van and take us to various destinations in range of Arcidosso – “day trips” to broaden our understanding of Tuscan cuisine. Cheese towns, wine towns, olive oil towns, photographic towns (my favorites), etc. After a week in Arcidosso, I will drive north to Lucca for a short stay, then on to Portovenere, Vernazza, and finally Lake Varese near the northern border. In that “phase two” of the trip, I hope to visit the Zanetti’s and the Piccini’s, two families I love to spend time with in Italy (long story).

So, that’s the plan. Now back to checking things off the pre-trip list.

FLASHBACK :: Positano, May 30, 2007

Here's one from the 'vault.'

My family and I took the Eurostar from Rome to Naples to add an Amalfi Coast experience to what was otherwise a Rome/Tuscany vacation.

On Tuestay evening the 29th, as we dined at our hotel (the Palazzo Murat in Positano, see photo) my very observant brother-in-law noted that Positano, although on the west coast of Italy, and on the southern side of the Sorrento peninsula, was actually twisted around on a cove so that it actually faced eastward! That gave me a thought. If Positano faces east, and if tomorrow is as sunny as today was, and if I can manage to wake up before dawn, grab my camera and hike up to the highway above the city, I might be able to capture the scene of the town illuminated head-on by the level rays of sun coming from the sunrise to the east. I somehow managed to make it up the hill from the center of town in time. Thanks, Apollo, for the spotlight.

Click on this photo and you'll see what I saw. A real jaw-dropper.

Less than two weeks to go. [9-11-09]

I am by no means packed yet, but I do have a list!

My "What I Take With Me To Italy" list is something I've developed over the years, constantly adding items I may need, and deleting items I've taken in the past but never came close to needing. Some items are humorous, perhaps, but I know they're needed (more on that later).

I have talked to AT&T today and confirmed that my iPhone's international roaming feature is "turned on." I also purchased a digital package to handle iPhone communications over the Internet while I'm there. I'd like to get a laptop "card" for G3 linking my laptop to the Internet anywhere cell phones have coverage, but the monthly charge, and the 12-month minimum makes that convenience an unneeded luxury. I'll make to with hot spots.

I have a long list of actions to accomplish between now and my departure on the 24th. Some things can be done early (e.g., getting a Tripple A International Drivers License), other things only a couple of days before (like notifying credit card companies and home security monitors of my travel dates), and some are doable only on the actual day of departure (e.g., forwarding home phone to office so I can pick up voicemail via my work Blackberry, preparing the house for "shutdown," etc.).