Serenissima

I'm back in Venice enjoying the last days of no-permanent-address-ness before I start a summer job in Paris. Two great luxuries of travel are leaving a place, and coming back to a place. You never know how you're going to feel when you come to a new town, but leaving one always has the thrill of a decadent act, like smashing a plate just to hear the sound it makes--all those museums still unseen, views still unphotographed, and you flit off, unconcerned.

Backtracking is a more dangerous pleasure--a luxury, because it is a rejection of the novel--Bad tourist! You've seen this piazza before! But it is hazardous if you loved the place the first time you saw it, because a shift in the light or a rude encounter might make you love it less the second time around. Venice, I had to see twice. It took two visits for me to realise that the happiness I feel here is not just a response to the miraculous beauty--it's the happiness of feeling at home. I know, it's bizarre. It's like strolling into the Emerald City and shopping around for a bedsit and a Casa Mia doormat. Now I have this idea, what will I do with it?

Actually I just came back for a weekend break from the job junt, which wasn't going so great. I threw myself on the mercy of the Zambonis, just hoping for a few kind words and a place on the sofa bed. Their kindness is too big to be contained in words and a change of sheets, though, so they set about calling every language school and university in northern Italy to find me a job. Within a day, the offer came through from Macgregor in Paris--a room in his apartment, and a job at his language school--but I can't help thinking it was the efforts of the Zambonis that generated my luck. Good will is electric.

I'm having trouble with this post, but everything will change again when I fly to Paris tonight, so I'll tell you what I can.

venice
Names. Way of the Hundred Stars. Street of the Dead. The Broad Road of Proverbs. Bridge of the Beautiful Women. There are tiny squares in Venice with names so long you can't even say them in the time it takes to cross from side to side.

Gondoliers between jobs kick a football around a sun-baked piazza. People carry bottles to a marble well and fill them with the good, cold water from deep underground.

Men selling knock-off handbags spread out their wares on bedsheets in the street. A scout yells from the top of a bridge, and they bundle up their stuff, a dozen Louis Vuittons looped over each arm, and scatter. The police arrive a minute later.

A vaporetto glides along a brimming canal in the evening, its passengers reading newspapers or staring blankly out the window, looking like tired people on a bus anywhere.

Ravel's Bolero rings through the backstreets, sounding unlike any man-made music, as if it's emerging from the marble itself. I turn a corner and find three men playing on crystal glasses filled to different levels, and on panpipes made of the glass tubes of fluorescent lights. I have to clap my hands over my mouth to keep from shouting with laughter, and the solemn, big nosed pipe player makes eyes at me.

lagoon
I take a vaporetto out across the lagoon to see the islands. I pass an island full of cypresses, walled all around with apricot brick--the cemetery. Boys set their dinghies against the swell and gun the outboards, sending the prows shooting into the air. A lobster-coloured man driving a freight boat takes his hands off the wheel to yawn and stretch lazily, as if he were in his loungeroom. A yacht sails by, reminding me of Flavio, in his nautical striped tee-shirt, correcting his navigational charts. I love those strange, inverted maps. The land is an undifferentiated yellow, and the sea is a mass of lines and figures indicating depth, markings for buoys and coral reefs and no-fishing zones. The first time I saw one, I had the uncomfortable sensation of seeing Australia, the place which has contained most of my life, as an inconveniently large blob of stuff you can't sail through.

On the island of Murano, water taxi drivers play cards under a tree. The glass-blowers in their workshops stare balefully at the tourists behind the railing, or work on unconcerned, turning out vases and lampshades, flicking their spent cigarettes into the furnace. On Burano, kids fish from the path that runs around the island's edge, and a man in singlet and thongs dabs ineffectually at his boat with a stiff old paintbrush dipped in Yves Klein blue. All the buildings on the island are painted in gelato colours--mirtillo, pistachio, fragola, limone. It should be tooth-achingly naff, but I love it with the unreasonable affection I have for everything in Venice. Burano has its own leaning tower, a bell tower with a spire on top. It looks like someone has stuck a pencil into all that gelato, and it's started to tilt as the stuff melts in the sun. The tower's bells still ring, you can hear them all around the island, you can hear them across the lagoon from the vaporetto that's taking you home.

prego

lucca
It's raining hard in the weird, affluent little town of Lucca. Two days ago it was all golden Tuscan light, but now it's grey, grey, grey. Everything has softened and become more mysterious.All around the town are dozens of square towers. Most have bells, one has several mature trees growing out of the top. A lot of the buildings have open galleries or pergolas in their upper storeys, so the sky is forever showing through in unexpected places. The paths along the tops of the old city walls, where sentries used to walk, are deserted. When the rain stops, and leaves behind that shadowless, good-for-nothing glare, the joggers will come out in their two-piece lycra to trot up and down and perform crunching manoevres that pleat up their flat, brown tummies.

Yesterday I stepped into a dark little joint called Super Bar to escape a lightning storm. In my fourth new language since I started this trip I tried to order an apple turnover. Pomodoro? Pomme? Ok, I said. Adam. Eva. I picked a forbidden fruit off an invisible tree, the proprietress laughed, and I learnt a new word: mele. It's a small but real grief to have left France and, with it, the French language. All that hard work, the getting to love the sound of it and the expressions, and now I have to start all over again. Italian crowds into my mind, demanding attention and constant use, and already French feels like a game I devised myself to fill a quiet afternoon--does anyone really make those sounds? It's sad, but as David the Canadian set-builder said to me, C'est la vizzle, yo.

I went with Dave to see an exhibition showing reproductions of Leonardo Da Vinci's codices, alongside full-size or scale-model reproductions of the designs. There were lots of genuinely nasty weapons of war--I hadn't realised they were such a big part of his corpus, but then he fought with the Medicis in a few campaigns. There was also a perfectly familiar-looking bicycle, various flying machine prototypes, and ingenious cog systems for converting perpetual motion into alternating motion or lifting heavy weights without danger of dropping them. It was a thrill to see the scribbled designs in Leonardo's own hand, and then to turn a handle and see the machine in action. I wish you could've seen it too.

There is a music festival in town, and the high-ceilinged hostel resounds with the practice sessions of opera singers and clarinetists. It's not always easy to fall asleep in a dormitory--one cannot pretend that sleep is a happy accident, incidental to repose, when in a bland, cramped space dedicated to the impersonal work of sleep-getting. One night I preferred to fall asleep on a couch in the common room, listening to a solo violin on a crying jag. Oh, alas, alas, it sang, and it made me calm.

i'm getting used to this life
Everything in one bag, little compartments for jewellery, for pills, tissues in pocket for paper-deprived loos, laundromats. The summer is coming, and in every train carriage a hundred swaying straps hang down from the bags stowed in the overhead racks, making a kelp forest. We swim through it lazily, the other travellers and me, dreaming our MP3, travel journal dreams, toward our various destinations.

politics
Everywhere I've been, I've arrived at a time of an important national decision. It's been almost too neat, as if I were on a package tour of 21st century European politics. In London, it was the election. The conservatives were running a Pauline Hanson-style billboard campaign. Their slogan was Are you thinking what we're thinking? and it accompanied earnest 'hand-written' posters saying things like, Isn't it about time we put some limits on immigration? They weren't taken too seriously. Blair won, despite a pretty complacent campaign, and despite fears that protest votes against Blair's involvement in the WMD ballyhoo would split the left. Billy Brag wrote an open letter in the Guardian urging people not to do a Gore, and it seems to have worked.

In France, they voted against accepting the EU constitution. The document they were being asked to ratify was either 300 or 3000 pages long, I can't remember which, and it was full of ambiguities. The French decided that the increased clout of joining their economy more closely to the EU wasn't worth the loss of autonomy, and soon afterward the Dutch decided the same, and it looks like we might have to go back to changing our money every time we cross a border, and I'll have to get a work visa just like every other bugger.

In Italy they just had a referendum about 'assisted procreation', and as it involved tinkering with embryos the Catholic Church asked people to boycott the vote. Not even to vote no, but to boycott it entirely. They didn't make a quorum: so much for that. And in Lucca, they are waging their own little war against cars. Placards saying Basta traffica! and Cars kill! are propped in ground floor windows all over town. I can see why. One nearly gets run over here twenty times a day. France has tiny, narrow streets just like Italy does--the difference is, people aren't forever trying to force their cars through them, pedestrians be damned. Lucca doesn't need fewer cars, it needs more footpaths.

there were no cars in venice
Or motor scooters, or ambulances, or garbage trucks. Too many bridges to allow for anything on wheels. Try to imagine the quiet, the loveliness of that. My strongest impression of Venice--I want to write about it, I have to start somewhere--was its miraculous lack of ugliness. No cars. No advertising. Hardly any logos. Only old buildings. Around the edges of the lagoon cluster a chemical plant, an airport, sundry modern horrors. But Venice looks inwards, sees only itself, its own beauty. Venice is entranced with itself, and I was happy to be complicit in that trance.

When I was a kid, I used to be devastated by ugliness. Living in trim suburbs, where all the houses babble their own versions of the Australian dream to each other, I was surrounded by it. Painted concrete Aborigines in place of garden gnomes, extraneous finials, leadlighting sold by the metre, tire swans. Seeing it all from the backseat car window on the way to netball practice or German class or physical culture, it used to turn my brain to oatmeal. When you're a kid, your environment seeps into you, you think it is you. What saved me from all that was discovering the concept of kitsch. In high school art class I saw for the first time the paintings of Geoffrey Smart, David Hockney, Howard Arkley. That it was possible to relish this concensus ugliness from an ironic distance! That was a very liberating idea. Having read Kundera on kitsch, I see that concensus is the key--this homogenous bad taste is a sort of innoculation against the greater terrors that come from a lack of homogeneity. Better to have a speed boat like your neighbour has, better to be in agreement about the small things, to reinforce your agreement about the big things.

From that moment I found myself running toward the little uglinesses around me, revelling in them. They were moving, because I could see them as expressions of longing and anxiety. They were no longer toxic, but an odd pleasure--like Japanese puffer fish that's had its poisonous innards expertly filleted away. And yet, and yet--to be in a place where such semantic games aren't ever necessary, to be where beauty is valued and defended, where everything is pleasing to the eye and ear--it was a luxury I could've gotten dangerously attached to, if time had permitted.

italia

service

Italian service takes a bit of getting used to, especially after the meticulous attention you get in France. You can try in vain to attract their attention while they continue a conversation, argument or joke with a co-worker, and when they finally do address you, they make you feel like an inconvenience. But within a minute or two they're calling you cara and disappearing out the back to find you a cheaper brand of pasta than the one you got from the shelf. It has a charm of its own, but Cinque Terre is a tourist area, and it drives the tourists crazy. In the black corner, masses and masses of hungry, internet-craving, toilet-needing Americans and Germans. In the red corner, the harrassed locals who serve them. The tourists always forget to say buongiorno before they ask for something, and the locals can take fifteen minutes to produce the bill at the end of a meal. You can see the two sides shaping up to each other, making faces and snarling inaudible asides. But as in some inter-tribal battle ritual designed to diffuse aggression, just when you think someone's going to draw blood there is an exchange of balls of gelato and wedges of pizza for fluttering euro bills, and each side retreats, pacified.

Really, it's all Americans and Germans here. Even the signs are in Italian, English and German. Do you think all the pretty places of the world get together and divvy up the tourists by nationality? 'You can have the French. They're so whiny.' 'OK, but you take the Americans. They want everything yesterday.' 'Fine, we could do with the tips.' 'Right. Who wants the Australians?' 'Ooh, exotic.' 'Yeah, they're slobs, though, and they don't buy souvenirs.' 'That's ok, we've got the Japanese for that.'

ageing
The number of grey hairs on my head has tripled or quadrupled in the past two months. I think I'm going to get those dramatic white streaks that sweep back from behind each ear, like an opera singer or the undead vamp from an Ed Wood movie. In a gelato shop in Florence, the waiter called me bella ragazza. Then he changed his mind: bella donna. I had to object. Non sonno donna! Sono ragazza. Ragazza! The gelato man shook his head, with the serenity of those who've formed their conclusions and are sticking to them. Maledetta to that.

pace
The word is written on colourful flags that hang from balconies all over Italy. They were put up at the start of the second Iraq war. Now they are faded and tatty.

A guy from Serbia describes the divisions and sub-divisions of territory in the Balkans since WW2. I try to be attentive, as I know it's not often I'll hear the story from this point of view, but somewhere around the mid-1980s I excuse myself, cross-eyed with trying to assimilate so many horrible and ridiculous things.

Ido from Israel tells me he cannot travel around the Mediterranean unless he manages to get an EU passport, because so many places would turn him away or just make too much trouble.

A kid from Maryland who has 'studied' in Milan for six months without picking up any Italian speculates that the Arab guys who hang around his local kebab stand could well be terrorists.

In the streets of Italy the bells burble around you until they pick you up and carry you along. Little shrines built into cliffs and walls and bridges bear fresh flowers. At a bar overlooking the Ligurian sea, kestrels draw arcs and a distant yellow umbrella flutters around the edges like a sea cucumber. All of this existing in the same world. I take back what I said about the unsatisfactory nature of pleasure-seeking. It's a privilege and it's an art--the art of savouring the beautiful, in the face of ugly facts.

the old masters

I wasn't prepared for the depth of the colours, the expressiveness of the faces. A thousand Marys, prim, joyous, sad. The infant Jesuses, watchful, benificent, imbecilic. The shadowy Josephs, the Magdalenes hot and defiant even in their piety, and the young John Baptists, with their crucifixes of reeds, who always seem to know what's coming. The Holy Family themselves seem to have jumped outside of time. They're not the naive young family with all their troubles still to come, but already the celebrities that history will make of them. In some paintings their smiles are almost smug, like the Beckhams receiving the media. They are unamazed that royalty has travelled across the world to see them. The child Christ hardly ever has a child's face.

It makes me worry to think of them trapped in that eternal return, their pain always behind them, always ahead of them. A ruthless circularity like the logic that needs Judas and Pilate to play their parts, but condemns them for it all the same. I keep coming back to Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola, which is an exception to my rule. From a distance the mother and child look as imperturbable as all their other selves, but up close you can see them flinch a little, and hold each other tighter. Jesus looks out of the frame to the right, the direction of the future. Well, there's nothing to be done.

this is how I travel
Missions: I give myself a mission in every town, like finding a second-hand English bookshop. I am lifted on the wings of purpose out of the gelato-slurping fanny-packing throngs into backstreets where half the shutters are closed for a long lunch, and forty-year-olds in Adidas try to interest me in weed, and I have many diverting conversationoids like,
'No, this is a women's bookshop. Women. (hands describe an hourglass in the air.) JD Salinger is a man.'
'JD Salinger, yes?'
'No, women.' (again with the hands)

I get lost: hobgoblin, trickster Florence, blocking my views and scuttling my bearings with high walls on winding back roads. I met a man, old, German, who was also lost. He sweated and leaned on a cane, looking for his tour bus.
'Are you alright?'
'Ehrr.. no.'
He wouldn't turn back with me, or look at my map. He was mock-turtle sad. I hope he found his bus.

I make mistakes: like missing my hostel curfew and accepting an offer to take the spare bed in a friendly American guy's hotel room. He's as gentlemanly as he seems, and I pass a quiet enough night, after handing over fifty euros to the sneaky concierge who intercepts us at reception. Funny--I'm sure he said 'forty' until he realised I had nowhere else to go.

I have a lot of luck, mostly good. Can't ask more than that.

I have a lot of luck, mostly good
It deserves a stronger word than that. I'll write it in Italian, so it doesn't sound so Louise Hay.

I miei miracoli:
Just when I am getting lonely, Matt Douglas blows into Barcelona from hot climates, bringing news of cities full of dust and orange trees and ancient Moorish buildings so delicate you mustn't even brush against the walls. Teaching me, through example, how to be a good traveller. Being patient and optimistic and curious. Laughing at my jokes.

Just when I am sick of the road, I meet the Zamboni family. They ensconce me in their beachhouse on the Adriatic and feed me risotto and tiramisu. And son Flavio, the yachtie, shows me and Matt D around his luscious, improbable Invisible City, which I can't write about because I loved it too too much for eloquence. A concert of Vivaldi in a church by a canal, the hard sun striking sparks off the crenelations of San Marco. That's the best I can do. He helps us find the best local bars, and defends us fiercely against the rip-off merchants of Venice. Blessings on your next voyage, Fla.

Just when my eyes are hollowed out with looking, I find a painting in the Palazzo Pitti by Giovanni da San Giovanni, of Saint Catherine wedding the infant Jesus. Mary dandles him on her knee and looks on encouragingly. It has the richness and strange calm of amazing events that come to you in dreams. It's like all the best dreams I ever had, and everything is new again.

All this luck, this reaching out! I light candles at the little shrines, try to remember to curtsy and cross properly, linger over books of ex voto paintings. I stand by the word I've chosen, but some people might prefer a more secular one. Flavio sees the word serendipity on a sign and asks what it means. Well, I say, to give you some examples...

playing catch-ups

I'm in Bologna today. I've covered a bit of territory since I last wrote, so this post will be south of France, and the next one will be Venice, and hopefully somewhere in central Italy I'll be writing about the place I'm actually in.

From Barcelona I went back to the south coast of France to meet up with Macgregor and his partner Anton, who were down from Paris for a few days. We met up in the space-age medieval town of Montpellier. Trams and electric mini-buses zoomed hushly around the town centre. The few cars allowed for residents' use got in and out thanks to remote-operated retractable bollards set into the cobblestones. We were just there to eat and drink and ogle, really. Montpellier's a student town, but not as we know it--there was nobody sharing jugs of warm beer or customising their Cure t-shirts in scruffy cellar bars--all the casually coiffed, tanned young things went gliding back and forth between little tables under big umbrellas, carrying aperitifs and violin cases.

The boys shouted me lots of delicious local food, lots of drinks with heart-shaped swizzle sticks in, and sundry other good things. Thankyou Anton and Macgregor! To recover from our debaucheries we ambled around the medieval university gardens for a few hours. Montpellier's arguing with Genoa as to who has the oldest gardens in Europe, apparently. There were medicinal herb beds and frogs in the ponds and a small observatory. Then we had more drinks with swizzle sticks.

I had thought I'd go straight from there to Venice, where I was due to meet up again with Barcelona Matt. I discovered it would take about 24 hours on the train, rather than the seven or eight I'd anticipated. Moreover, for obscure bureaucratic reasons I wasn't allowed to book a couchette. I was supposed to get on the night train and ask the conductor if there were any beds left. Umm, no. So I stopped for a couple of days at the Cote d'Azur. It turns out these movie stars and media magnates are really onto something--it's gorgeous. It was soothing to be by the sea after so long away from it. Yes, there are pebbles instead of sand at Nice, there are cute little ripples instead of breakers, and there are odd patches of beach cordoned off and planted with corn-straight rows of umbrellas and deck chairs, to rent by the day or for the season or gratis to hotel guests. But there are also familiar things. Kids leaping, writhing piscine in the air, off the ends of piers. Fishing rods by the water's edge, half-attended by men holding beers. People in groups, with guitars and dogs, or alone and peaceful, with books or cigarettes or their thoughts for company. Travelling alone one doesn't often find other solitary people except at beaches and parks. A bit of Nature seems to grant some sort of reprieve from socialising.

I day-tripped to Cannes, which was worth it for the train ride. The road and train tracks are seperated from the sea by a thin strip of sand, and I saw sun bathers dotted along it in ones and twos, flashing past the window like a code I couldn't read. The town itself was a bit manic--the little pockets of beach not claimed by the umbrellas of the five-star hotel enclosures were shared between a few pleb bathers and some parked bulldozers. Europe seems to be almost entirely under construction--whether this is in preparation for High Season or a constant thing, I don't know, but those bulldozers in the sand, with their prim little yellow and black no-entry skirts, were a first for me. So I abandoned the Cannes script, sat in a park next to a billboard-sized photograph of Sharon Stone in diamonds, and tried to toast my pastey legs while reading a book. It was short stories by someone whose name I can't remember--I abandoned the book in Nice--and he had some nice Obs on Human Condition stuff going on, but he used that leaves-in-wind-look-like-shoal-of-fish simile, which was disappointing. And he used the word 'rebarbative' too often.

I also had a moment with one of those eerie self-cleaning toilets. I put in my forty cents and all that, but I freaked out at the hydraulic airlock noise the door made as it was closing, and jumped out again. I had to hold it in all afternoon because people kept directing me back to the hateful things and I couldn't say 'I don't want to drown in disinfectant' in French. Life really does revolve around toilet breaks and clean clothes when you backpack, but I'll spare you the anecdotes.

Oh, oh, oh! I nearly forgot the most amazing place I saw in France. I had to stop over in Marseille for a couple of hours on my way to Nice. I stepped out of the station, which is on a hill looking over the town, and was hit by a blast of excitement and malice I've not met since London. Maybe moreso. Even before the first smelly crazy person asked me for money or the meaning of life--and you can be asked many times in two hours--I could feel the hot, rank breath of the place on my neck. It's very beautiful. Rocky red hills all around, and in the hollow in between, a huge grid of grime-blackened, battered city. I made a little sortie but, mapless and on a time limit, I could only go so far as I could safely backtrack. My backtracking plans were scuttled by a man--yes, a smelly one--who slipped his arm around my waist and tried to steer me toward a group of sketchy characters. Finally, a chance to use my battle French! Mais quest-ce tu veux? Degage! Which worked fine, but then I couldn't walk past him again, so I beat it back to the station by the simplest alternative route I could find. But the place really appealed to me. I'd like to come back and explore it properly, perhaps with a couple of sane locals and/or a bodyguard. It was just so alive, it made the rest of France look like a theme park. Is that why I liked it so much?

Have to catch my train to Florence, I'll tell you about Venice soon.