Italy

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Re: Italy

Postby Toby Dammit » Wed May 08, 2013 12:51 pm

A tiny child towers above the visitors high on a shelf. She stands bolt upright in a position impossible to attain in life as her body never had time to grow. A little bonnet crowns her blackened, doll like face and she points a (missing) finger at us in an almost accusatory fashion. Another brown faced toddler mummy wears a beautiful fur trimmed bonnet decorated with silver leaves and berries, the whole thing fading to dusty grey.

A man in a striped shirt wears his best double breasted blue velvet jacket, now mould patched. A tag identifies him only as PA779. Half of his tie has vanished, looking as though it’s been chopped off with scissors in some ghoulish comedy routine. To his one remaining gloved hand his other one has been unceremoniously pinned, probably for some never forthcoming restoration.

A monk’s face in a long cowl has drooped away to one side leaving him with a grim snarl. A man dressed entirely in a blue military uniform decorated with gold piped scrolls on his sleeves and dark stripes on his trousers lurches white faced, eyes bulging blankly, mouth agape, tottering to one side. He could be an extra from the Thriller video caught in mid zombie shuffle, a gloved hand (his other has vanished) gesturing towards his crotch.

These are some of the thousands of dead Sicilians embalmed, preserved and displayed in Palermo’s strangest “attraction”, the Catacombe dei Cappuccini. Originally only intended as a resting place for Capuchin monks, soon the great and good of the city asked in their wills to join the mummified ranks of the dead. One of the last to be interred there in 1920 was the body of two year old Rosalia Lombardo who is still remarkably preserved (if difficult to see under a layers of convex glass). You are not allowed to take photographs here, this one is from Wikipedia.

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Now and then a visitor chances a picture and a cheeky voice booms from a hissing tannoy “Hey meester, no photo!” Fortunately this prohibition didn’t apply elsewhere in the city. Palermo is quite small if you stick to the tourist attraction areas though the traffic is hellish, the worst I’ve ever seen in Italy. Baroque is the main architectural form though the great Cathedral’s mish-mash of add ons betrays the city’s complicated history of invasions, wars and natural disasters.

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Church of San Domenico

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Quattro Canti, Palermo’s version of Roma’s Quattro Fontane

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Porta Felice

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Porta Nuova. Now THAT’S Baroque

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Orto Botanico

Surrounded by cliffs and crags it boasts a dramatic setting and sadly I didn’t have time to take a trip out to any of these. Despite the mafia I saw twice operating openly I wouldn’t have any qualms about a future trip as there’s still so much to see there. The term "faded grandeur" could have been coined to describe this city.

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Port of Palermo

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Fontana Pretoria, once dubbed the Fountain of Shame because of its nude statues

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Palazzo Delle Finaze

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Villa Giulia

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Fig tree in Giardino Garibaldi

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Albergo dei Poveri

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Via San Sebastiano

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Via San Sebastiano

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Peekaboo balcony on Via Roma

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Via Lungarini

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The Norman church of Santa Maria della Catena

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View from my balcony
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Re: Italy

Postby Toby Dammit » Thu May 09, 2013 5:06 pm

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Pilbox, Catania Centrale

I’d been in the footsteps of arch political chancer Alcibiades before, last year in Istanbul, known to him as the city of Byzantium. Now here I was stuck in Catania for four hours between trains, a grey and rather grim looking place the Athenian knew as Catana when he brought a massive fleet of ships here for the disastrous Sicilian campaign during the Peloponnesian War. That led to the destruction of the entire Athenian expedition at Syracuse whose forces were commanded by the Spartan general Gylippus, its survivors left to wretchedly die of starvation in the quarries of the city now known as Siracusa. Alcibiades himself fled before battle started, accused of sacrilege he defected to Sparta.

All that was ancient history now and I had nothing but time to kill. Train transportation I found in Sicily is hellishly infrequent at the best of times, on a Sunday it was even worse, so hanging about railway stations became a norm during this trip.

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Catania Centrale

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Palermo Centrale, early morning

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WTF? Messina Centrale

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Catania Centrale

I’d come from Siracusa that day not planning on stopping in Catania but found myself there anyway. Most of the buildings are made from the grey tufa which erupted from nearby Mt. Etna, the massive cone which dominates the western part of the island.

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Active Etna (shot from a bus)

The drabness of the colour wasn’t helped by the drizzle and cold wind blowing off the Ionian Sea, or the unhelpful bastards in the “Customer Care” office (“Complete Lack Of” would have been more like it), unusual as all the other Sicilians I met were incredibly friendly and even went out of their way to aid you.

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S. Placido. Someone has scrawled “fish fuck matrimonio!” across one wall

Being a Sunday the ancient “Greek” (in fact Roman) Theatre was closed. I’d had as much luck in Siracusa too, their magnificent ancient Greek Theatre, the largest in the western Mediterranean is currently hidden under modern seating, scaffolding (my eternal travel curse!) and lighting for a festival which doesn’t finish till near the end of June, and so I didn’t bother paying to see that.

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Terme della Rotonda, ancient Roman bath house

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Duomo di Catania

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Via Della Mecca

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Giardino Pacini

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Via Bozomo

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La Fontana dell Elefante

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Beautiful Liberty Style building on Via VI Aprile, can find no info at all about it

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Via Scuto

Who knows, if the sun was out maybe I’d have seen a different Catania altogether?

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Via Castello Ursino
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Re: Italy

Postby rabmania » Thu May 09, 2013 8:48 pm

The elephant fountain Toby- pastiche of the Bernini?
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Re: Italy

Postby Toby Dammit » Fri May 10, 2013 10:02 am

rabmania wrote:The elephant fountain Toby- pastiche of the Bernini?


I'd have said so, but apparently the basalt elephant was a "found" object of uncertain age transformed into the fountain by Giovanni Battista Vaccarini in the 18th century (he also added the eyes and tusks). The pylon on top of it while Egyptian isn't as straight forward as the ancient obelisk dug up nearby and plonked on top of Bernini's pachyderm, it was more probably part of the spina from Catana's Roman hippodrome.

Last time I was in Roma Bernini's elephant was surrounded by a corrugated tin hut and you could barely see the thing.
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Re: Italy

Postby Toby Dammit » Mon May 13, 2013 3:54 pm

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Temple of Apollo, Siracusa

Siracusa is a small city of two halves. You arrive by travelling through the “modern” section, ironically where the powerful democratic city of Syracuse once stood, victor over the Carthaginians and Athenians, thorn in the side of the Roman Empire until conquered by the Republic, home of Archimedes and Theocritus. Surviving Byzantium, Vandal, Islam and Norman rule it was devastated by two huge earthquakes resulting in the dominant Baroque style after it was rebuilt in the 18th century.

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Santo Spirito

The majority of these grand buildings however are on the island of Ortygia, Siracusa’s “other” half to the south. The northern section of the city is chaotic and largely downright ugly following unregulated expansion after WWII. Once described by Cicero as "the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all” he wouldn’t know the place now.

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Viale Luigi Cadorna

Here you’ll find the remains of the classical Greek city which I was hoping to see, especially the Theatre. However the night before going to Sicily I read on Tripadvisor that it was covered over for a festival and not worth paying for, so I’ll need to go back some day. The Archaeological Museum is also in this part of town and if you like Greek pots you’ll be in ancient pot heaven, they’ve got thousands of the buggers on display in this bizarrely laid out labyrinthine place. Sadly there’s no great works of sculpture in bronze or marble which I found disappointing.

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Sacred phalli apparently, and not some kinda strap-on

Near the Museum is one of the most peculiar modern buildings I’ve ever seen, the Santuario della Madonna delle Lacrime, or Our Lady of the Tears shrine. Basically a gigantic wigwam housing a “miraculous” plaster sculpture, it can be seen from all over the city. Designed in 1956, construction didn’t begin till 1966 and took 28 years to finish due to the controversy over the design.

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Santuario della Madonna delle Lacrime

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Wigwam bam!

Eventually you wander onto the island of Ortygia.

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Lungomare Alfeo

Many of its little streets are too narrow for traffic so you can quickly be plunged into that rarity in an Italian city, peace and quiet, getting lost in medieval lanes without imminent death by car or fucking scooter. At this time of year at sunset the streets are bombarded by swarms of screechy acrobatic swifts.

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Fonte Aretusa

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Vicolo Al Forte Vigliena

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Via S. Nicola

Built largely from local, lion coloured stone, this part of town reminded me of Rabat in Malta. Outside the police station (which was closed) I came across a statue of the head of police “Gino”, from the inscription presumably murdered by the mafia in 1997. Despite its location it has three bullet holes in the chest.

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Head of police

It’s worth coming here to see the Duomo alone, with a fabulous Baroque façade covering what was once the temple of Athena whose Doric columns can still be seen moulded into the building.

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Duomo

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Duomo door

At the other end of the piazza I was again in the footsteps of the murderer Caravaggio. I’d been on his fugitive trail before in Napoli and Valetta in Malta. For the church of Santa Lucia alla Badia he painted a Burial of St. Lucy. Though in a poor state of preservation I never got to see it. The churches doors, framed by magnificent Solomonic columns remained firmly shut.

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Santa Lucia alla Badia

Another excuse to go back I guess. His greatest Sicilian painting I’ve never seen either, the Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence. It was robbed from a Palermo church by the mafia in 1969 and has never been recovered.

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Foro Vittorro Emanuele II

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Passeggio Aretusa
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Re: Italy

Postby Botanic Squirrel » Wed May 29, 2013 11:28 am

I love these pics, thanks for sharing. I haven't been to Italy for six years and I crave another visit more than I crave Tunnocks Tea Cakes.

:)
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Re: Italy

Postby Toby Dammit » Fri Jun 07, 2013 9:09 pm

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“Any family who hides the boy Vito,” yells a man with a shotgun standing on the church steps “will regret it!” Dawn is breaking in the frightened village. Meanwhile, the hunted child makes his getaway under the noses of the pair of hunters, and they are disguised literally as hunters in their rustic corduroy suits and caps. Vito, hidden in a basket carried on the back of a donkey could be in a blasphemous re-enactment of the flight into Egypt to escape the slaughter of the innocents. The animal clatters in front of the church with a goat companion and exits down one of the alleys flanking the church.

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Many years later Vito has returned, taken vengeance on his family’s killer and stands on the steps of the same small Baroque building as the tiny piazza fills with a Palm Sunday congregation spilling from la chiesa. In his arms the multiple murderer holds his youngest son Michael as another donkey saunters by. Indeed all his natural children are present including the doomed Sonny and Fredo on this trip back to the old country.

The same church appeared briefly in the previous film in the trilogy for just a few seconds, but such is its strangely powerful presence it seems to symbolize a whole idea of a village, an archetype of superstitious rural Sicily itself as the fugitive Michael strolled past in the care of two bodyguards dressed as hunters with guns, just like his father’s tormentors. “Corleone.” one of them declared in a previous shot, the one who will later betray him, waving in a short montage of the place Michael has hiked to see, the hard but beautiful sun drenched land his father was born in and fled from and where he will spend a dangerous idyll, the village the mob clan was accidentally named after on Ellis Island in New York. We see it one last time in Part III when many years later Michael and his ex-wife Kay visit Corleone once more, this time a joyful wedding bursts from the church as they arrive, an ironic reflection of their disastrous union.

This church however, which appears only briefly in five shots in a trilogy of films made over a twenty year period is not where the film makers would have us believe it to be. This only architectural constant in all three Godfather films is not in Corleone, now a large, ugly, overdeveloped modern looking town, but in Forza d’Agro, a tiny medieval hill village perched 1377 feet up on a coastal cliff overlooking the Ionian Sea.

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To the north are the Straits of Messina and the mountains of the toe of Italy, Calabria. To the south is the stunning coastal holiday resort of Taormina. Across the valley to the North West also perched on a hill is the even smaller settlement of Savoca where the majority of the Sicily scenes were filmed. Behind the town steep hills rise up to Monte Kalfa where goatherds sing across misty landscapes to each other.

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Straits of Messina

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Monte Kalfa

You see nothing of these views in any of the three films however. Co-writer, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola brought his cast and crew all the way to Forza d’Agro to focus almost entirely on one mid shot of the church of Santissima Annuziata e Assunta, and for these brief moments with it’s decorative scrolls, flaming urns, scallop shell, winged doors and windows all typical of Italian Baroque architecture, the building exemplifies a mythical ideal,

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For me watching THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART II over the years it had become an icon (of the appalling 3rd movie the kindest thing to say is that it should never have been made). Who knows why we chose such icons, places which so intrigue us when seen in a film, painting or photograph? In mediaeval times vast populations would risk their lives to make arduous journeys to distant places to gaze upon and worship the bones of some saint (of usually dubious provenance). In April, wrote Chaucer of such adventurers, “Then do folk long to go on pilgrimages” so in April, pricked by Nature to ramp and rage I made my own pilgrimage to Forza d’Agro to see the place myself, a stone and brick star in two of the greatest films to be produced in the United States in a decade which saw an embarrassment of cinematic riches flow from its shores.

When I arrived I was lucky, there were no cars parked outside the church, a rarity I discovered. I had the place pretty much to myself as I strutted along the small flight of steps just as the hunters had. I imagined Robert De Niro standing here in that busy sun drenched shot, jutting out his jaw in imitation of Marlon Brando, dressed in his flashback Sunday best surrounded by palm waving extras and the donkey trotting by.

I went into the church, nobody there. The interior seemed huge; the façade of the building, hemmed in on its tiny piazza is deceptively compact.

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Built apparently in 1707, architect unnamed or unknown, to replace the previous one built in the 400’s which, this being Sicily, collapsed in an earthquake. There was an organ loft and a sculpture of Santa Caterina d’ Alessandria. I imagined the American cast and crew wandering round the place too, out of curiosity amid the tedium of setting up a scene for the Technicolor camera. I said a silent thank you for the pilgrimage to the god I didn't believe in and went outside to study the “reverse shot”, the scene you never see, from the point of view of the hunters, of Al Pacino and De Niro and Diane Keaton in Part 3.

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Reverse shot

I could picture Coppola standing beside Gordon Willis’s camera in the piazza surrounded by the usual assortment of crew watched by the two little winged angel faces carved from tufa above the church door. On one of the piazza walls was pasted a funeral announcement. A local lady had been sent off from the church the previous week. She was just fifty five but in the already fading photograph she looked much older possibly through illness or a hard life up here on the mountain, certainly there are no shops in Forza d’Agoa apart from a little pharmacy. The other businesses were hotels and restaurants and a single bar and gelateria.

I spent the night in the village and after a gigantic meal even Coppola or Brando couldn't have finished either I strolled round listening to the frogs and crickets croaking and chirruping in the valleys below and an owl hoot loudly from the steeple of the other main church in the settlement. Next morning I left early to head back to Palermo, a journey which took all day. It was pouring with rain while I waited at the station in Sant ‘alleseo Siculo after exploring the deserted beach. High above me on its peak Forza d’Agro appeared and disappeared through drifting clouds of mist and drizzle with its church pretending to be Corleone, the one I’d come all this way to see. The train arrived and I looked up for one last time but the village had vanished. It was the day after my fiftieth birthday.

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Piazza Giovanni XXIII

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Re: Italy

Postby rabmania » Sat Jun 08, 2013 4:24 am

Marvellous TD.
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Re: Italy

Postby Lucky Poet » Sat Jun 08, 2013 4:07 pm

Eccellente. I especially like the reverse shot for some reason :)
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Re: Italy

Postby Toby Dammit » Sat Jul 06, 2013 3:42 pm

Botanic Squirrel wrote:I crave another visit more than I crave Tunnocks Tea Cakes.


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Return to Staglieno

I know what you mean Botanic Squirrel, I had a terrible hunger again for more Italy, and a few days after getting back from Sicily I had already planned my next journey, this time travelling to Milano, returning to the Cinque Terre and Genova. I made it back to Staglieno cemetery too, so I’ll update that thread soon plus I also photographed the last of the great three northern graveyards in Torino, the city on the edge of the Alps. Why it deserved the awful Anglicised name “Turin” is beyond me, though not as bad as taking a beautiful name like Livorno and ending up with the ghastly “Leghorn” (cartography I suspect rather than bastardized Italian).

On the edge of the Alps and surrounded by dazzling peaks Torino is the most civilised Italian city I've visited, due entirely to its famous arcades. These restrict the flow of traffic and size of vehicles so it’s possible to stroll around the place without fearing being run over by those fucking scooters wherever you go.

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Tornio

The mountains are very beguiling though, and you want to leave the buildings and head off to explore them. No time for that though, I was headed for the sea instead.

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Ferry Port, Genova

Genova remains a complete enigma, to me anyway. Built on the hilly coast, bristling with tower block estates it resembles a massive sun drenched Greenock of all things, and the hideous folly of driving a dirty great motorway on stilts across its sea front and historic harbour was an error of Glaswegian or Brummie planning proportions.

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Great if noisy B&B views of the world. Genova

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Sprawling Genova

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Typical Genova street scene

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Palazzo San Giorgio, once a bank then a prison, it’s most famous inmate was Marco Polo. Tradition has it that it was here he dictated his famous travel memoires to pass the time.

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The wonderfully named Vico Dell Amore. The romantic moniker probably derives however from its proximity to the port and its use as a convenient spot for sailors to have a quick knee trembler with a local prostitute. Thus the men following Genova’s most famous son Christopher Columbus brought back from the New World syphilis which spread like wildfire across Europe. A couple of streets away prostitutes still openly ply their trade.

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I’d have to live there for months to make any sense of the place, though its historic centre is really quite small I’m always left rather bewildered by it, much of which is due to unregulated post war construction.

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Monterosso Al Mare

Back in the Cinque Terre I realised with some relief that in the August heat wave last year it wasn’t my fitness that was the problem but the weather. It took me 2 and a half hours to hike from Vernazza to Monterosso Al Mare then. This time, going in the tougher opposite direction I did it in just over 1 hour, almost running in parts from the exhilaration brought on by the views and the pleasure of being there again.

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Riomaggiore

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Vernazza

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Montenero

Similarly the walk from Riomaggiore to Porto Venere was a bit too easy, so I took a detour on footpath 4D. There are some 1500 steps down to the sea and the tiny collection of buildings called Monesteroli, just slightly less than the Empire State Building, and while the trip down is dazzling you are all too aware that you’ll have to climb back up again at some point.

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Path 4D

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Views north

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Views south

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The long way down

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Monesteroli

The final couple of hundred or so stairs have been washed away by a recent landslide though, so I didn’t quite make it to the mare mosso.

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Climbing back up

Still one of the best days walking I’ve ever had, but at the end the path down into Porto Venere is murder. Can’t believe I ever managed to struggle up the ankle turning bastard things last year. I found the spot where I had collapsed in the heat and saw the little red squirrel and paused, vainly hoping I’d see the little critter again.

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Back at Porto Venere
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Re: Italy

Postby rabmania » Sat Jul 06, 2013 9:21 pm

Such pleasure to read your Italy posts Mr Dammit.
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Re: Italy

Postby Toby Dammit » Mon Jan 06, 2014 1:15 pm

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Virgil monument

Former home of the poet Virgil, author of ancient Rome's origins story, the tiny northern city of Mantova is surrounded on three sides by lakes created in the 11th century to form vast defensive moats. I had hoped the water would generate some atmospheric, misty winter morning landscapes during my visit last month. I certainly didn't expect the freezing blanket of thick fog which covered the place the entire time I was there.

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Mantova station

Known as La bella Addormenata, the sleeping beauty's skyline of domes, towers and palazzo's were mere smudges glimpsed through an eerie grey veil. Sound was muffled by the frigid pea souper and after dark the near empty arcaded streets were made even stranger by the festooned Christmas lights.

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Lago Superiore

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Via Mainolda

I had come to see the celebrated frescoes in the baroque Palazzo Te, a pleasure villa built in the 16th century and decorated by Giulio Romano. There are three notable cycles by him in the palace, the first is an equestrian room, filled with superb life sized portraits of horses posed against classical architecture. His two most famous works however are in the Cupid and Psyche room and best of all the Sala dei Giganti, the Room of Giants.

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Palazzo Te (literally "Tea Palace")

The former, in what was a huge banqueting hall features a Bacchanalian orgy of naked ancient gods, goddesses, satyrs and mortals. The colours are stimulating, intense and Titian like, however the modeling of the human figures is often clumsy, the cast of characters ill-proportioned. Lorded over on one wall by a colossal Cyclops, the room's initial impact with its hardcore novelty of stiff cocks and buxom girls bent in impossible contrapposto poses gradually looses its allure due to poor rendering and technique, though ain't that so often the case with erotic art? Arousal gives way to criticism of Romano's reproduction of proportion and control of anatomy. Much better is his chamber filled with Giants battling the dwellers of Olympus spiraling above.

The world of the Giants crumbles around you in the domed Sala, huge collapsing columns crush the life out of the Titanic race while on two walls cheeky monkeys scramble across the struggling figure's cityscapes as they vainly try and prop up their tumbling buildings, a thrilling tromp l'oeil effect in a space from which the painting seems to explode. Unfortunately I had ignored my own best advice on visiting Italy on this occasion. "Always take a pair of binoculars". If you are looking at art or buildings they can enhance the experience so much and, unlike cameras, are always tolerated by the invigilators. Photography is not allowed in the Palazzo Te but there are plenty of pictures online if you search for them to whet your appetite for a visit. You didn't need optical aids though to see the elegant but annoying graffiti carved into the plaster walls of this room mostly by milords on their Grand Tours in the 18th century.

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Piazza Virgiliana

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Piazza Castello

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Piazza Sordello

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Piazza Erbe

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Piazza Sordello

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Palazzo Ducale

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Every home should have... a grotto! Palazzo Ducale

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This foundering world of the Giants is a very relevant one unfortunately. Almost half the historic part of Mantova is currently covered in scaffolding and its buildings closed due to a recent nearby earthquake including much of the city's other major attraction, Palazzo Ducale, a mini town within the town including its famous fresco by Mantegna. As I'd forgotten my binoculars anyway it's a good excuse to go back some sunnier day and once again relive my ritual evening stroll to Bar Caravatti for a glass or two of it's house aperitif, invented in 1865. It's ingredients remain a secret to this day and for now that's how I'll remember Mantova, a secretive place of unlikely paintings, fog shrouded parks and palaces. I've still to see what's on the other side of those lakes.

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Corso Umberto
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Re: Italy

Postby Toby Dammit » Mon Jan 06, 2014 2:00 pm

I was about half way to Bologna when the train finally bust through the wall of fog into a sundrenched plain of scattered farms. By the time I got to the ancient university city it was a glorious morning, spring like less than two weeks before Christmas. I hadn't been to Bologna before and didn't know what to expect. It is as though Milano and Torino had mated and produced this arcaded, furiously bustling place.

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Via Zamboni

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Via delle Belle Arti

The first thing I'm afraid that struck me as I walked to my hotel down Via dell'Indipendenza was just how many beggars there were, there seemed to be one in every arcade arch. Normal for the city or a sign of the appalling recession Italy is slow diving through I can't say. The second thing that struck me was just how busy everywhere seemed, more mobbed than Rome even. The third thing was how beautiful so many of the women were, I've never seen so many stunning looking girls in Italy as in Bologna, a result of its historic University I suppose, claimed by many to be the world's oldest.

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Via Malcontenti

My hotel was next to a sex shop just off the gloriously named Via Malcontenti. I'd come all this way to see the notorious Wax Anatomy Museum, not a Tussauds like assembly of vapid dummies who look nothing like the celebrity names on their labels, but a collection of teaching aids created in the grim era before modern medicine in the 18th century. However, having just escaped the grip of icy winter with such superb light and no idea of next day's weather I headed instead to the cemetery, which I'd also come to see, and I'll add my impressions of that incredible place to my Staglieno thread later. Turned out I was there till sundown.

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Via Zamboni

Next day was a Saturday and on an appallingly researched trip found the Wax Anatomy Museum was shut. In fact as I wandered round everything seemed to be shut except the shops and churches. All traffic to the historic city centre had been banned that weekend making strolling the streets a delight. Naturally I had to head for the Twin Towers.

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The tallest, the Asinelli at 319 feet high it's still the tallest structure for miles around. The Bologna skyline used to be filled with 180 of these things built not for defensive purposes but as displays of wealth, a mine's bigger than yours statement still to be seen most dramatically in the tiny Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano which still bristles with the things. Bologna however now just has twenty one survivors. One of those, the Garisenda, leans over at an alarming angle and of its neighbor, erected in 1119, one can only guess that Signor Asinelli (literally "Mr Donkeys") who had it built must have had a very tiny penis indeed.

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The leaning tower

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Views from the top are however well worth the crazy climb up the 500 steps. On a clear day apparently you can see the distant, blue Aegean to the east, though sadly not on my visit. I'll be going back again some day for the wax models and the cemetery though, and Mantova is one of the most romantic places I've ever been to. Such a shame I was all on my own. Next time...

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Via San Felice
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Toby Dammit
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Joined: Thu May 11, 2006 11:27 pm
Location: Laaaandan

Re: Italy

Postby rabmania » Mon Jan 06, 2014 4:29 pm

As ever, bravo TD; I never tire of your Italian adventures and await your addition to the Staglieno thread.
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Re: Italy

Postby banjo » Mon Jan 06, 2014 5:15 pm

yes,how lucky we are that you choose to let us into this world of yours. :D
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