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.