Rocket to Rome*

Con te Partiro... Arrivederci Roma!

2007-08-04T00:31:00.001-07:00

Basta! Ho finito! Well, my time in the Eternal City has finally come to an end... Our backpacks are bulging, and await only their slightly bewildered bearers, reluctant to leave bella Roma, excited about the long and winding road to London.

Much love to any and all who stopped by this blog, and especially to those regular readers of 'Rocket to Rome'. (I will as time permits post a few videos of my final weeks in Rome - but as I'm on the road, this might take a while).

If you would like to follow these two antipodeans (Emma and Jaya), as they make their way to Londra via much of western Europe - from the Amalfi Coast to Amsterdam, Barcelona to Berlin, Venice to Vienna, click here to visit the sequel blog to "Rocket to Rome", dubbed Wonky Sky, in honour of the strange appearance of the northern night sky to those born in the southern hemisphere.

Arrivederci la mia città eterna...

Via Appia Antica

2007-08-03T01:31:00.001-07:00

Midday in summer is probably not the best time for a relaxing stroll with the dusty ghosts along the Appian Way, but it just happened to be one of the things we left until the last fortnight to do. There are bicycles for rent at the Catacombs of San Sebastian, but we opted for the walk instead. A lovely, sweaty stroll along the famously straight road of giant cobblestones, much the same size as those outside the Colloseo. The tracks of hundreds of years worth of freight are worn into the stone.

Quale ristorante?

2007-07-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

Necropolis

2007-07-07T11:28:00.003-07:00

Cerveteri: Welcome to the Etruscan world of the dead...

Roman moonrise # 156

2007-07-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

As my time is quickly coming to an end here in Rome, it's the little things that matter, like this, what is I think my hundred and fifty third Italian moonrise.

The Baths of Caracalla

2007-07-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

(The Baths of Caracalla)

Talk about scale: judging by the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, you'd swear giants used to live in Rome. Or Titans. The baths are about the size of a modern waterpark (think 'Wet 'n Wild' on the Gold Coast). It's no coincidence that Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound here - and it proved an enjoyable imaginative exercise to try to guess which block of marble the Romantic poet sat on to do so.

The Roman Forum is impressive, but I realise now it was but one of many major centers of public life in Ancient Rome. The ruins of Ostia Antica, the sea-port town are much larger (and you're free to run around through the ancient city, playing ancient traders); the Palatine hill is easily as conducive to the imagination; what's left of the Villa Adriana (Hadrian's Villa) in Tivoli suggests that the emperor's abode was the size of maybe four Westfield shopping centres; and from our recent visit to the Baths of Caracalla, one thing's for certain: they don't make baths like they used to.

(An artist's impression of the baths... see those specks in the water?)

Why so large? Well, of course you need your cold baths, your hot baths, and your luke warm baths; and what bathing complex would be complete without a gymnasium to practise wrestling and boxing, a public library and a place for gigolos and prosititutes to ply their trade? There are a few small areas where the mosaic floors and walls have been renovated (one imagines), though the bronze mirrors that aided in the heating process, and the colossal statue of Hercules are no longer about (the latter, I believe, is in the museum at Napoli). The whole thing - along with the rest of the city - went belly up when the Goths invaded and cut the aquaducts.

With summer in full swing - though it's yet to pack a serious punch - it would be calming to know that there was a public bath (or water park) this central. In Australia, the public swimming pool - like the public BBQ - is comparatively ubiquitous. Here in Rome, for all its stupendously beautiful fountains, and its countless drinking fountains (fontanelle), there's noe one public swimming pool to speak of - which is arguably why the locals head to the hills in July and August.

Circo Massimo

2007-07-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

To get to the Baths of Caracalla (see above) we caught the bus to Circo Massimo, once a grand stadium famous for its chariot races, now better known as the place where the whole of Rome came to watch Italy win the football World Cup last year. It is, of course, no longer a stadium, but an oval-shaped park between the Palatine hill and (my favourite) the Aventine hill. Em and I have walked past here a number of times, but this was the first time we actually walked through the park.

There is to this day a dusty track around the inner perimeter that schools use for athletics, but the rest is grass and, the remnants of spring flowers.

UPDATE (July 11): My kiwi friend James has recently informed me that Genesis , who recently reformed for a one off tour band, are playing their final show of their first world tour in 25 years, here in Circo Massimo this Saturday night, in front of up to 400,000 people (Yikes) - minus Peter Gabriel, but with Phil Collins. What's more, its free - the real challenge will be getting a seat. Stay tuned for a review (that is, when I finish my other reviews). She seems to have, an in-vis-i-ble touch-ah...

Via Serpenti

2007-07-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite streets in Rome, for some reason (perhaps that big stadium in the distance): Via Serpenti in Monti, joining Via Nazionale and Via Cavour. This is where I've been meeting up with my poet friend Aidan to talk shop over a cafe freddo and a nastro azzuro... or three. He's introduced me to Muldoon, I've introduced him to John Forbes, etc.

Moonrise in Trastevere

2007-07-01T11:15:00.002-07:00

Street football

2007-07-01T11:15:00.001-07:00

Here's one of the reasons Italy won last year's World Cup - this video was taken when Liam was here, two months ago. Strolling across the top of Janiculum hill, we decided to investigate the sound of nearby merriment... I guess it's a bit like backyard cricket back home.

Trinity College

2007-06-20T10:50:00.001-07:00

DUBLIN: On Bloomsday afternoon we met up with Liam’s mate Simon for a tour of Trinity College. As the privilege of viewing the college’s main attraction, the Book of Kells, costs 8 euros, and the guided tour including said attraction costs 10, we decided to take the former – two euros for a guided tour seemed more than fair.

Our tour guide was memorable, to say the least: a dashing gentleman and graduate in his early twenties, he was nothing if not a top-shelf toff, complete with cravat (class-conscious Aussie? No such thing!... ‘You can take the boy out of Queensland….etc.’) – and by that I mean, ‘young man brought up knowing he was going to become an MP because his parents always said so'– with an intimidating, towering intellect and the perfect annunciation of a QC from the days of olde.

(Our tour guide, the future Irish PM)

Our young would-be MP or PM did, however, have a charmingly dry sense of humour, which eventually disarmed us all – e.g. “To the left you can see the former residence of one Samuel Beckett, who after emigrating to Paris famously declared that Trinity College attracts the cream of Irish society – the thick and the rich… The only difference now, of course, is that we are no longer rich…” (delivered in deep, drawn-out and deadpan tones) – and though he was aware of his charm, we didn’t hold that against him. I later learnt from Simon I wasn’t the only one suffering an inferiority complex.

However, given both the beauty of the architecture, and the undeniable rigour of its intellectual culture, I was overcome by a strange desire to attend such a college (which I realized with a pang was about as likely as me playing cricket for Australia… Incidentally, Liam spied the cricket pitch that Beckett, whom we both knew played for the college as a fast bowler, probably graced).

We were reminded by our guide along the way that the empirical philosopher Berkeley (from whom the Californian college gets its name), the revolutionary conservative politician Edmund Burke, and one of the two men to split the atom were among Trinity’s numerous illustrious alumni.

The Book of Kells – an illuminated manuscript of the gospels about fifteen hundred years old – was, while impressive, not the knockout one is led to expect. At least, I didn’t think so; I suppose it’s difficult to be impressed by ‘old’ stuff when arriving from Rome. I enjoyed the ‘Long Room’ of the library, which contained over 200,000 rare books, just as much. (Another excerpt from our dashing guide: “The Long Room is the longest college library in the world, approximately five meters longer than that at Trinity College, Cambridge – and we relish… every… centimeter”.)

By this time we all agreed it was Guinness o’clock, and embarked on a Saturday night pub crawl that would end sometime Sunday. One of our detours fortuitously lead us past Christ Church, and, eventually, the church of St. Patrick.

(Christ Church, Dublin)

(St. Patrick's)

Dusk was late, but when it finally hit the overcast sky gave way to vibrant blue, which lent the churches a more upbeat mood than that afforded by the perennial grey. Needless to say we spent the rest of the night swimming in stout and Irish whiskey, debating contemporary politics, the civil war in Palestine, London’s bonus boys and the bombing of Dresden.

Oscar

2007-06-20T10:45:00.005-07:00

DUBLIN: As Liam and I found ourselves near Merrion Square (in search for the chemist in Ulysses that sold Bloom the lemon-scented soap, which we couldn’t find), I made a request to visit the Oscar Wilde statue, and the house where he once lived (now the American Academy), which we almost couldn’t avoid anyway.

(Myself and Oscar)

Such a pilgrimage to Oscar would normally in no way be an aside – and even now, I find it difficult to justify describing it thus, The Picture of Dorian Gray being one of the very first ‘literary’ books I read, at seventeen, which was a personal discovery… Ah those were the days, when literature was fresh and new. O god, am I beginning to sound jaded? (Or just more like a jobbing writer? I hope the latter.)

Hold on… Joycean moment coming on: as I write this, I remember hearing, blaring from a loud speaker on a tourist bus (!) as I stood on the corner across the road from the statue, that the jacket worn by Oscar-the-statue (see photo) is carved out of... jade.

(Wilde's former house)

After visiting the jade-coated but in no way jaded Oscar, we popped in to the National Gallery across the road. For some reason I was skeptical, but Liam showed me a guidebook that stressed the gallery was worth it. In hindsight, I’d agree. We whipped around in about forty minutes, and managed to see a handful of Goyas (the fantastic portrait of actress Dona Antonia Zarate c.1805), a Vermeer, a Rembrandt, and a Caravaggio (the latter two particularly gripping – it’s not appropriate I don’t think to use the word ‘gripping’ to describe Vermeer). What’s more, it was free. Forty minutes well spent digesting our lunch and looking at pictures.

Bloomsday 2007

2007-06-20T10:45:00.003-07:00

(Bloomsday crowd at the James Joyce Centre)

DUBLIN: It’s not every day, nor is it for every book that one flies halfway across Europe to walk in the footsteps of a certain literary character – and no, I’m not referring in any way to Dan ‘didn’t-visit-The-Vatican-before-setting-my-novel-there-so-made-numerous-howlers-oops’ Brown.

So I’ve made it. Dublin on Bloomsday – June 16 – when literary types come from all over the world to experience the city through the words of one of its greatest writers, James Joyce. (For the uninitiated, the door-stopper work of fiction that is Ulysses (1922) is set entirely on a single day, June 16; Leopold Bloom being the main character, the date is celebrated in Dublin as ‘Bloomsday’.)

The whole shebang was Liam’s suggestion many months ago (i.e. I deny all responsibility), and though I initially balked at the expense, I eventually managed to find some cheap flights in light of it being, more than likely, a once in a lifetime sort of thing. (For ‘thing’, read ‘chance to get drunk on Guinness that hasn’t traveled while using the phrase ‘literary pilgrimage’ to justify the expense.’ Well, not quite, but there’s some truth there.).

After an Irish breakfast to sop up the sea of stout we consumed in Temple Bar, Liam and I made for the Joyce Centre, where we found a healthy crowd listening to a series of brief readings. Unfortunately, most of the readers were ambassadors, for whom reading publicly from Ulysses was clearly not a forte. Visiting the bathroom in the centre, we overhead snippets from the events that actually cost money, and could tell from the truly animated voices in those rooms that we’d missed a trick by not paying up. Still, we had our walking tour to look forward to.

(In the footsteps of Leopold Bloom... ps. a leprechaun made me buy the hat... but i dig it)

The tour itself – which followed the footsteps of Leopold Bloom in the ‘Lestrygonians’ chapter of Ulysses – was, along with our Trinity College jaunt (to follow), one of the two highlights of my Dublin experience (okay, three highlights if I include the Guinness). Our guide was extremely knowledgeable, but didn’t lord it over us, ie. he was in no way pretentious. He illuminated the text by reading sections of it at each stop along the way, and suggesting ways of understanding its countless resonances. I won’t go into detail here, frankly because it would be too difficult, and too lengthy – and I don’t have enough superlatives. Suffice to say that the one and a half hours of the tour were alone worth the trip to Dublin, that being there in the flesh was worth twenty lectures on the text, that the whole thing was unforgettable, and that in light of this, my appreciation for the scope of Joyce’s genius will never, ever flag.

(Yeatsbus)

Temple Bar

2007-06-20T10:45:00.001-07:00

DUBLIN: Liam arrived a day after me, and as soon as he did we set out in search of Temple Bar, for, yes, a nice pint of Guinness. As you can probably see in the photos, I’d bought myself an Irish hat – Liam already owned one. While wearing it, I suddenly thought of all those tourists in Australia who wear Aussie hats – thus it was in Dublin; no Dubliner under sixty actually wears these hats any more.

Funnily enough, when crossing the Liffey, a well-lubricated Irishman remarked as he passed, ‘Like your hats boys’. Of course, knowing from our own culture that he was more than likely taking the piss, we were quite surprised when, a few stumbles later, he wheeled around, as we did, and repeated as sincerely he could manage, ‘No, I really do like your hats. We used to wear those y’know! We used to wear those!’

Though this guy was harmless, I must say, I found the rowdiness of some of the revelers, not so much in Temple Bar but in the pubs around the train station where I spent my first night, on my own, a bit much on occasions. From the doors of almost every pub I visited there spewed forth at least one, if not five burly red faced men, sweating Guinness, intent on picking a fight with a lamppost. After forty eight hours, I realized that this probably goes a long way to explaining where the ‘Aussie bloke’ gets his, um, style (and I’ve been known to be included in this category at times).

Temple Bar itself (well, not the bar, but the pub and club district) is, it must be said, more like a theme park than a clutch of authentic Irish bars. Oh, and teeming with tourists, such as ourselves. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any traditional music, which Liam was searching for, and which I couldn’t seem to avoid the night before – unless by traditional music you mean the Counting Crows and The Proclaimers.

Stately plump Buck Mulligan

2007-06-20T10:44:00.003-07:00

SANDYCOVE: Ulysses famously begins in the Martello Tower on the east coast of Ireland, about half an hour by train from Dublin, and it was here that I headed the morning after my arrival. I found my way to the small town easily enough, and once off the train soon discovered the strand that led to the tower. I find these solitary journeys quite rewarding; they make me feel vaguely competent as a traveler.

The bay was a blustery affair, the sea a thick spumey mess, and yes, ‘snotgreen, scrotumtightening’ to boot. For some strange reason I was surprised to find that the Forty Foot Pool (in which Buck Mulligan swims) was indeed about forty feet across – and given the temperature of the water, it would’ve taken quite a few shots of Jamesons (the 12 year old, if you don’t mind) to get me in there.

So I found myself standing on the rocks where the sea buffets Ireland more violently than I expected, thinking of shipwrecked sailors in days gone by, and also, for some strange reason, of South Head, Sydney. The tower was somewhat smaller than I expected, and the entrance fee, at seven euros, somewhat steeper.

Among the many items on display was a letter from Joyce written to his sweetheart, Nora – in which he apologized for his ‘cruelty’ toward her while indignantly professing his undying love. This, together with his scratchy handwriting, made the literary colossus seem painfully human to me.

It was easy to imagine Joyce and Gogarty (Buck Mulligan) in the Oval Room, the sleeping and living room of the Tower. The highlight, however, was the parapet, which affords a good view over the bay. It is here that Buck Mulligan shaves, at the opening of the novel, and since there was no-one else there at the time, I felt a bit like Buck himself...

('Is that, no, it couldn't be... is that sky...blue?')

Beginning with Guinness

2007-06-20T10:44:00.001-07:00

DUBLIN: My Ryan Air flight touched down an hour late (gasp) in Ireland just after lunch on the 14th; I’d not managed a wink of sleep the night before (my flight was early, and I’d been up late writing and packing, so decided to pull an all-nighter lest I slept through my alarm and missed the plane), so my first impressions of the city were rather surreal.

It was raining, and continued to rain – or drizzle, or at the very least was cold and overcast with the odd droplet condensing on my face – for the three days of my stay. Still, the brooding grey shawl seemed suit the city, the architecture seemed to revel in the drizzle, and the cold was a nice change from the stifling Roman heat (though if I was in the countryside, I would’ve wanted at least a wink of sun). As the temperature was in the high twenties in Italy, however, I didn’t think to pack my thermals, which at times I could’ve done with.

My first day was not terribly exciting, not counting the excitement of being in Dublin for the first time! It might sound like a minor thing, but I can’t overstress how pleased I was to get stuck into some Irish tucker – bangers and mash, cabbage, gravy etc, though I could only nibble at the black pudding – after four months on a strict diet of pasta and pizza.

On the other hand, I did miss the Roman lifestyle just a tad – drinking fantastic coffee at a bar (more like a fuel stop in Rome) and having an apperitivo at dusk. (The few cups of coffee I did have in Dublin were woeful – and Liam’s mate Simon, who we met up with on Bloomsday afternoon, predicted I would become a coffee snob after living in Rome, which I fear is inevitable.)

I made up for this, of course, with many ‘nice pints’ of Guinness. By many, I mean many. I’ve never been a huge fan of the stout, but I drank it like water in Dublin. It’s often said Guinness doesn’t travel well, and this is probably true. Guinness in Dublin, however, is superb. The soft inch or so of froth is a sensuous, suggestive veil one removes ever so slowly from the dark, mysterious goddess beneath. I repeat, drinking Guinness in Dublin is one of the joys of life. As I write this, however, my kidneys are suing me for negligence.

I must admit I was a little surprised to find that not every Dubliner was as excited about Bloomsday as I was – the odd punter at the bar, when inquiring as to my reasons for being here, barely registered a shrug. This was a shame, I felt, considering that Ulysses, while certainly a confounding modernist text, breathes life into and sympathises with the plight of the average Dubliner in a way no work of fiction has, nor perhaps will again. Perhaps this says something too about the bars I found myself in on the first night. But I guess I just had a silly, romantic idea that every Dubliner propped up by a Guinness could probably recite Yeats.

Two things of note happened on my first night in the Dublin. First, a remarkable “it’s a small world” moment. Corralled into idle chat with a group of people in a bar called Leary’s, near O’Connell street, I found that one of the women, a fifty year old from Leicester here for her girlfriend’s birthday, had just been in Australia for her niece’s wedding. When I said I was from Queensland, you can imagine my shock when she replied, ‘Oh really? You know, the wedding was in Queensland, a place called Bribie Island. A little suburb called something like Woorim.’!

Yes, not just Bribie Island, but Woorim, the suburb I first lived in at the age of seven when I moved with mum and Abe to the island, the suburb I moved back to for three years to complete my Masters, the suburb my family lives in now… the smallest suburb on the island etc, etc. To recap: on my first night in Dublin I met a woman from Leicester who had just come back from her niece’s wedding at Woorim, Bribie Island, Queensland, Australia.

Secondly, stumbling past a hotel, I asked the porter where I might get some late night bread to sop up the many pints threatening to make me unseaworthy. To my surprise, the porter, who may have found me humourous (or laughable), invited me into the lobby for a pizza that he and his mate had just ordered, at about 2 am. He was from Lithuania – being barely able to pronounce his name, I certainly couldn’t recall it here. Now most of the immigrants in Dublin seemed to be from Eastern Europe. There are many Poles, for instance, and barely any dark-skinned people to speak of, hardly the swathes of Africans, Asians and Caribbeans found in Rome and London. Anyway, my Lithuanian-Dubliner friend said something very interesting. He felt quite at home in Dublin, he said, because Lithuania was to Russia, in many ways, as Ireland was to England (he went on to explain, though I won’t here.) I wonder what Joyce would’ve made of the analogy.

Riccardo and 'Ray'

2007-06-10T09:56:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday I had Riccardo Duranti over to the studio for an afternoon glass of vino. A friend of Franca Cavagnoli’s, Riccardo is, like Franca, a major Italian translator. He is the Italian translator of Raymond Carver, and has also translated Richard Ford.

We spent most of the time talking shop over a couple of glasses of white wine. I was thrilled when he admitted that a book by George Steiner that I’m particularly relishing at the moment, After Babel, was required reading for all and sundry in the translation trade.

He also told me a wonderful story about the first time he met ‘Ray’, when in upstate New York and visiting the great writer’s partner, Tess Gallagher, with whom he had been in lengthy correspondence. It wasn’t until later in the evening that he realized who he was talking with, and he lamented the fact that he hadn’t really read a word of Carver’s work (this was in the early 80s). That night, he happened to be lodged in Carver’s library. Riccardo chuckled with glee as he told me he didn’t get a wink of sleep, but instead spent the entire night reading every short story Carver had written! The rest, I suppose, is history.

Shantaram

2007-06-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

On Thursday evening after our day trip to Tivoli I attended a session at the Rome Literature Festival, to which I’d been invited by the embassy. The session featured one Gregory David Roberts, former prison escapee, Hollywood screenwriter, and Australian author of the best-selling Shantaram, a door-stopper at over 900 pages (which I haven’t read) – and there was to be a dinner afterwards. There was quite a buzz about the whole thing, particularly given the recent news that the book is being made into a film (starring Johnny Depp).

But this wasn’t just any writers’ festival. For starters, the location was simply stupendous – the festival was being held actually in the open air ruins of the Basilica di Massentio in the heart of the Roman Forum, whose majesty under a clear night sky can not be overstated.

Secondly, the audience numbers, which went into the thousands; the place was packed.

And thirdly, the technology, which miraculously aided in making the evening run smoothly. There was no MC; rather, the names of the authors faded in on a huge screen as they approached the lectern. Their microphones were the type that is poised along the cheek, as worn by contemporary pop-stars of the singing and dancing variety. And finally: as the authors read from their work, one of two camera shots (profile, front-on) of the author would appear on the right half of the screen, while on the left appeared the Italian translation of the author’s work, as they were reading. I’d never seen anything like it.

I’d not heard much about Gregory before this, but I can declare now that he is one of the very best readers I’ve encountered. He looked every bit the prison-escapee-come-good (and-very-wealthy), with a sparkling black Indian coat down to his feet, and blond hair down tied in a tight, warrior-style pony tail that reached his arse.

He read a short story about some emerald smugglers outbound from Iran; the story itself is a cracking yarn with fully-drawn, convincing characters, sprinkled with gorgeous poetic flourishes that are devoid of all self-consciousness. A rare combination.

But more than this was his actual reading. Really, many authors (including myself) would do well to take a leaf out his book, though I suspect that one is born with the je ne sai qua of his performance: it was perfectly modulated in pace and volume, as the subject matter required, the intensity was sustained when it needed to be, as was his concentration. He actually did the crazy voices for his three characters (an Italian, an Algerian and an Aussie) and nailed them; he seemed to be a good mimic. Sometimes authors zone out a little when reading their own work, particularly if they’ve read it countless times before. But this wasn’t the case, and he didn’t make one slip of the tongue, not even a minor one. In short, it was a consummate reading.

*

Given that there were several thousand people at the reading in the forum (the guy who sat down next to me had brought his own, very tattered copy of Shantaram), I felt extremely privileged when a couple of hours later, in a restaurant with fifty or so other punters, I found myself sitting at a table of about eight, between Gregory himself and the Aussie ambassador Peter (Walcott).

For the rest of the night we heard a few of Gregory’s larger-than-life personal stories; how he taught himself German when in a German prison so as to represent himself in court; how two girls once flashed the security check at an airport so that he could get through on fake passport; and, of course, the details of the upcoming film of Shantaram.

The latter go something like this. Apparently all the major studios made a bid for the option for the film. At the end of the day, Johnny Depp (& studio) beat Brad Pitt, Ed Norton and Russell Crowe (and their respective studios) to the prize, because “Johnny” put up a six figure sum of his own money to secure the role, whereas the others only offered five figures. On the day Gregory received the cheque, he called his stepfather (who raised him) and told him to retire. If I recall correctly, the film begins shooting later this year. At the helm will be the great Indian director Mira Nair (much of the film is set in India).

George Bush in Trastevere

2007-06-04T07:27:00.001-07:00

Dear Readers,

You may or may not have heard that the 43rd US president will, this Saturday, be descending on Trastevere for some gelati, together with his hundreds of personal bodyguards. Apparently he is making a bee-line for the Chiesa di Santa Maria - arguably the oldest Christian church in Rome, perched on a piazza in which I find myself many times a week, a piazza in which I've done everything from dance to a didgeridoo to crawl intoxicated across the cobblestones. Stay tuned...

Tivoli: Villa Adriana

2007-06-04T07:26:00.004-07:00

(Words to follow...)

Tivoli: Villa d'Este

2007-06-04T07:26:00.003-07:00

Picnic at the Villa Borghese

2007-06-04T07:26:00.001-07:00

(Words to follow...)

Vatican Museums

2007-06-01T10:49:00.007-07:00

Pickpocket

2007-06-01T10:49:00.003-07:00

Those of you who know Em would know she is something of a quiet lass. But this evening, thankfully for the both of us, she was compelled to unleash another side to her usually tranquil mien.

After a very long day, during which we’d walked miles and visited four of Rome’s best churches, we found ourselves at the mercy of the city’s whimsical public transport system. Of late, the trams to Trastevere have been undergoing maintenance; this means that the eighty or more commuters for each service are jammed into infrequent, supplementary buses.

Exhausted to the point of barely being able to stand, we found ourselves packed in the sardine tin of a bus with numerous other tired and sweaty passengers, in peak hour traffic on one of the hottest spring afternoons. Amid dubious odours, we found our tiredness giving way to delirium, as it often does, and were reduced to making sarcastic remarks (eg. ‘Thank god it’s peak hour’; ‘Can someone turn on the heater?’) and bouts of sporadic laughter.

This was all well and good until we finally crossed the Tiber and came to the next fermata. Now, the bus was already so full that we were severely pressed on all sides – I kept wondering what India must be like, imagining people clambering on the roof.

We were standing smack bang in the middle of the bus. Unlike back home, one can board the buses here through any of the doors, front, middle or back; so, as the middle doors opened, about ten more people tried to get on. It was sheer madness. Again we laughed, making jokes about the lack of personal space etc.

It struck me that one particular woman who had just hopped on had her right elbow raised, and seemed to be pushing Emma in the chest, quite forcefully, as she boarded; I caught her eye, and could tell that her expression was strangely intense – but I was so exasperated at her rudeness that I didn’t even think there might be another reason for her excessive pushiness. Only later did Em and I realize that the elbow to Em’s chest was a type of ‘marking’ device for her accomplice, a smaller woman who’d managed to squash up against Em.

Em was wearing a money belt, rather conspicuously, over her shoulder. As mentioned, we were quite delirious, and had no choice really but to recommence our sarcasm, if only to make light of the truly unbelievable situation.

Barely a minute after the doors closed, I suddenly heard the usually placid Em shout with uncharacteristic aggression, and much determination. ‘Give that back!’ Silence. Em repeated herself. ‘NO, give that back’. Suddenly, Em’s purse fell to the floor of the crowded bus, and some of the contents spilled out. ‘Not me miss!’ came the reply, and a general scuffle ensued, whereupon Em somehow managed to retrieve her purse from the floor.

At the time, the feigned innocence of the thief caught Emma off guard. She genuinely thought she may have mistakenly accused the woman of pickpocketing her. Em looked at me. I was bewildered, but was ready to grab the thief by the hair if she didn’t return the purse. Suddenly, the first woman – whom we later realized, with hindsight, to be her accomplice – picked up the receipts that had fallen from the purse, and ever so sweetly returned them to Em.

An awkward silence. For the next minute – which was quite surreal, really, given the four of us were squeezed into about one square meter – I studied the older woman who had originally elbowed Em in the chest, through my sunglasses, and caught her on more than one occasion scowling at the other, rolling her eyes. I knew at once what she was saying: ‘You fool, how could you have possibly screwed that up?’ I also caught the eye a nearby passenger, and knew too what he was telling me: ‘Do you realize how lucky you are?’

The pair of women disembarked at the very next stop. When they were clear, we decided to push past the new passengers and get off the bus; we’d had enough.

Free from the crush, and still not entirely certain as to what had actually occurred, it struck me quite forcefully that the fact that the two women disembarked where they did was an important clue as to their caper: the stop was barely eighty meters from where they had hopped on, on the same street – I know from experience that it is in fact the shortest distance between any two stops on the entire route. Given the peak hour traffic, they could’ve easily walked the distance in less time than in took the bus to travel the distance. What’s more, they began walking back the way they came.

As we went over the events, our hearts racing with adrenaline, we began to piece the puzzle together, what was left of our naïveity being swept aside in the process. The two accomplices were clearly aware of the public transport situation – and were probably spending the best part of the day making a mint, getting on at one stop, pinching a purse or two, then hopping off at the next. When they saw Em standing directly in front of the door with her moneybelt, they must’ve thought they had easy pickings. It was highly probable that the purse only fell to the floor when the thief made to pass it hurriedly to her accomplice, and, thankfully, failed.

They were quick – lightning quick – but they met their match in Em. It was, she said, the sudden lack of weight in the money belt that made her realize it was gone. If it had taken her thirty more seconds to do so, the pair would’ve been off the bus with a hundred euros of Em’s, and all of her cards.

My kiwi friend James says he has seen four successful pickpocketings in Rome (and each time he has intervened). This was our first experience, and, with our new and increased awareness, hopefully our last.

The Arrival!

2007-06-01T10:48:00.003-07:00

Finally, Emma has arrived! And wouldn't you know, we unintentionally found ourselves at the very table I'd jokingly reserved for her, when I first arrived in Rome. Well, I hope this update also goes a long way to explaining the increasingly sporadic nature of this blog...

Just Another Aussie Bogan

2007-06-01T10:48:00.001-07:00

The day I got back from Milan, Liam arrived in Rome from London. While we didn’t swim the Tiber, as I’d hoped, we did manage to pack a shedload into the week that he was here. Here’s a sample.

1. Drinking Danish beer (Tuborg) in possibly the oldest bar in the world. That is, the remarkably preserved ruins of a bar at Ostia Antica, dating from the first century AD ( called the Thermopyleum)! Liam had heard that Ostia Antica was a good place to visit, much like Pompeii. It surpassed both our expectations. I was thinking maybe a block or two of ruins. Try an entire town with a two kilometer main road, amphiteatre, forum, you name it. This was the commercial hub, the sea-port at the time of the republic. We strolled around the ruins for most of the day – and when we found the bar, complete with feint frescos, earthenware jars, and most imporatantly, beer-garden / courtyard, we went to the merchandise-café area a few blocks away and bought ourselves a couple of ambers to drink with the ghosts of ancient Roman merchants.

2. Bernini in 30 seconds. Well, in truth, we saw a fair bit of Bernini, and there are no better sculptures than Apollo and Daphne and The Rape of Proserpine in the Museo Borghese. Hmmm. How to describe these? Both are remarkable in that they capture sheer movement in stasis, climactic episodes from Ovid’s metamorphosis. The former – marble representing flesh becoming wood – depicts the precise moment Daphne transforms into a tree. Her hips are wrapped in bark, her fingers metamorphose into the most delicate leaves. The latter shows Proserpine trying to flee the amorous advances of Pluto; his hardness is contrasted with her suppleness where his hand presses into her thigh. The indentation his hand makes on her thigh makes the marble look like flesh, and draws all manner of gasps. After this, we bolted to the church down the road to see Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa – a controversial piece that makes the saint look more like a lover in the throws of sexual passion than anything pious. The problem was, we arrived half a minute before mass started, and so only got the most cursory of glimpses of the work – though it was impressive enough to burn itself into my memory as though I’d stared at it for an hour or more.

3. Aperitivi in the Café Greco.

I used to hang out here a bit in the first couple of months after my arrival, a café brimming with literary cache, where everyone from Mark Twain to Arthur Schopenhauer, Goethe to Shelley used to drink. These days it’s more of an upmarket-looking tea-house, but they do serve fantastic aperitivi at the bar. So it was aperol and free salmon sandwhiches in the early evening, just a few doors down the Via Condoti from the Spanish Steps. Gold.

4. Beer at the Trevi. You might be getting the impression that there is a constant in these highlights, that being: beer. And if so, you’d be right. But this was certainly one of the best beers I’ve had in Rome. We hit the Trevi in the evening, the best time to view the fountain, and sat in the middle of the steps facing it. Liam disappeared and returned with two brews. The tide of people ebbed and flowed around us as night descended. For some reason, it was just one of those perfect beers.

5. Reading John Forbes poems in full, drunken voice, and engaging in heated debate about the world’s problems – from Sarkozy to Mugabe, Mussolini to Vanstone – on the terrace of the studio, until dawn. Alcohol involved. Complaints from neighbours the next day (but hey, the first and only complaints since I arrived, and apparently they were much more frequent with former residents).

Milan

2007-05-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

At the conference in Udine I audited a paper by Franca Cavagnoli, David Malouf’s Italian translator, on the challenges of translation presented by the ‘poetic’ nature of Malouf’s prose. The paper was marvellously incisive, eagle-eyed, sensitive to the most nuanced aspects of Malouf's prose, the music, the pacing etc etc. Naturally, I found myself hanging on every word. After a discussion with her at lunch we struck up a friendship; at the end of the conference, she invited me to stay with her for a weekend in Milan.

I gladly accepted. A fortnight after the conference, I hopped on the train and headed north. I was greeted by Franca and rain at the station; the rain would soon pass, and Franca - Italian translator of no fewer than four nobel laureates (Coetzee, Gordimer, Morrison, Naipal), novellist in her own right and dyed-in-the-wool Inter Milan fan - would take me on the most comprehensive 72 hour tour of Milan imaginable. I will include posts below as time permits.

La Scala

2007-05-22T07:41:00.001-07:00

(Teatro della Scala)

MILAN: By some stroke of fortune my host in Milan, Franca Cavagnoli scored two tickets to La Scala – Milan’s legendary opera house – for the Saturday night I was in town. I was thrilled, and did my best to dress up for the occasion, though my efforts seemed hopeless given where I was (!).

When the orchestra (the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundunks conducted by Mariss Jansons) started up, the room was positively drenched in frisson – the opening piece was Also Sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss, familiar to late twentieth century listeners as the opening theme from Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The crescendo of the timpanies at the outset brought tears to my eyes, before the exaltant, if ominous horn section soared through the roof. The piece was played in a quicker tempo to the version in the Kubrik film.

The second piece was a slow movement (Vorspiel und Liebestod) from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde – which was certainly beautiful (usually my type of music) but which for some reason seemed the least invigorating piece on the night.

Finally, a crazy piece by Bartok (Der Wunderbare Manderin), which involved much mad percussion from the string section striking the backs of their bows on their instruments with gusto.

The evening was one of those occasions on which I wished I had a million dollars so I could share it with all my friends and family. In light of this, I’m going to try my damndest to pick up some cheap tickets to the opera when Em and I are in Vienna.

The Last Supper

2007-05-21T09:24:00.001-07:00

MILAN. In an age of over-zealous MTV-style producers, cutting between camera shots at a nauseating pace; an age of carpet-bombing marketing campaigns; an age, in short, of the fetishisation of the image, arguably the greatest challenge for the observer of the work of art (and of historical artifacts) is to be able to still the mind for long enough to actually see the damn thing.

See, that is. Not merely look (at). And in this I’m making a similar distinction to that made in the film White Men Can’t Jump, when Wesley Snipes’ character chides Woody Harrelson’s character for being able only to listen to Jimi Hendrix, but unable to hear him. (I'm aware there is a certain irony here in my reference to a film in this context.)

I tried over the phone to book tickets to see Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper while still in Rome, and was informed that there were no availabilities for at least a week. But by a combination of good fortune and Franca sweet-talking the ticket vendor, we managed to fluke a single ticket not long before closing time on the day I arrived in Milan.

During my time in Italy, a mere four months so far, my understanding of what the German philosopher Walter Benjamin means when he talks about the ‘aura’ of the work of art – that strange cultural membrane through which the viewer must penetrate, as it were, in order to be able to see the painting (or sculpture) – has improved dramatically. (And this in a fraction of the time I spent studying Benjamin at uni.)

So to Leonardo, the blue ninja turtle with the kitana blade, and probably the most famous of all Renaissance men. It could be said that of his peers, he had the most ‘genius’ (if it weren’t anachronistic to apply the Romantic notion of ‘genius’ to an earlier historical period). But the fact is, while Michelangelo, who is lauded as the most sublimely talented sculptor to have ever lived, was also a gun painter and architect, and Raphael no less so on the score of each of the latter, it seems that Leonardo changed the way we understand ourselves and the world in a somewhat more substantial way.

Leo’s mastery of what are now considered distinct disciplines, ranging from anatomy and biomechanics to mechanical engineering, is perhaps his primary achievement. Oh, and the bloke wasn’t too bad with a paintbrush.

But after the prison-like preliminaries involved in entering the church in which The Last Supper is displayed, I imagine that many punters could feel a twinge of disappointment.

The fresco has, famously, gone to the dogs, despite numerous restorations (some of which have actually done more damage than rejuvenation). The giant room is other wise bare, apart from another fresco on the wall at the far end. It is also difficult to find the best vantage point from which to view the work – up close, in the middle of the hall, or from the back.

But the greatest difficulty in appreciating the work is surely the one that involves breaking through the 'aura' of the work, again, that cultural membrane through which one must penetrate just to be able to see the work. Taking the opportunity to briefly observe my fellow observers, I noticed that the vast majority seemed distracted, unable to stay still before the work, glancing for some reason at the blank walls, shrugging their shoulders - I guess I was one of them, distracted enough to look around. Without trying to sound like a snob, I imagine that many of them were the type of travelers who would leave with one thought: ‘Now I’ve done The Last Supper.”

As Benjamin explained, the difficulty of seeing is partly due to our age of mechanical reproduction. What is (ontologically speaking) the difference between the ‘copy’ of the image - on the teatowel, in the postcard or on the television - and the ‘original’? They look the same don’t they? Sure, one guy painted this version and someone else made the copies; but then the copies are the same ‘image’ aren't they. We’ve looked at this image a thousand times… so how can the original live up to the idea that it is something profoundly different?

The way I see it, ‘seeing’ a work like this requires a type of radical ‘forgetting’. Forgetting the aura, forgetting the world outside, forgetting the time that has elapsed into history, the innumerable artistic and cultural developments that have occurred since.

One is only allowed half an hour to view the work – which I found was only just long enough to approach this necessary ‘forgetting.’ It was only in the five or so minutes before I had to leave that I'd finally forgotten enough to remember how to appreciate the work - its narrative, the investment of each participant in the scene, their gestures, expressions and gaze - which are so perfectly rendered that, if we’re lucky, we can recognize in them something intrinsic in ourselves.

Villa Reale

2007-05-21T09:23:00.003-07:00

MILAN: Franca tells me that this wonderful villa was waiting for Napolean upon his arrival in the city, on account of him declaring himself ‘Duke of Milan’. The building is now an art gallery and a scenic backdrop for wedding photos, and the gardens are a lovely place to get away from the traffic and the fashionistas.

When she was studying, Franca would come to the gardens here to read. It is perhaps the most peaceful place in central Milan, a secret really. Turtles and ducklings shared the banks of the creek that leads to a small waterfall. Wild strawberries declared that it was the beginning of spring.

5 conversations with a translator

2007-05-21T09:23:00.001-07:00

During my whirlwind tour of Milan, Franca and I had much to talk about; below is a random selection of five topics covered in our conversation.

1. On the phonetic differences between the German and Austrian languages. This was not really a conversation, but a case of me listening to a master of European languages. I asked the question, she explained the difference with examples. I have neither the skill nor the memory to repeat the details of the lesson; suffice to say that I completely understood the essential phonetic differences between the two languages – if only for two minutes.

2. On the strange similarity between the remains of San Carlo Borromeo in the crypt of the paleo-Christian Battistero di San Giovanni, and the undead pirates in Pirates of the Carribean. Our tittering was shushed by a pious devotee who was sitting behind us.

3. On the relationship between ‘terrorism’ and ‘fascism’. Franca has distinct memories of Italy’s more recent, violent past, such events as the fatal bombings in Bologna in the 80s, when scores of people were murdered. The Mafioso is still a strong presence in Italy and Italian politics, and has strong links to residual fascism (if I can call it that). I wondered whether the Mafioso would find it more difficult to use force and physical violence, given that they may now risk being branded ‘terrorists’.

4. On the difficulty of forgiving oneself for wrongs done to a recently deceased loved one.

5. On the most likely candidate for Australia’s second Nobel prize for literature. As the Italian translator of no fewer than four Nobel laureates (Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipal, Nadine Gordimer – incidentally, all four received the prize within two years of her translations) Franca is infinitely more qualified than myself for serious discussion on this matter. This didn’t, however, prevent me from having input in the discussion.

We both agreed that David Malouf and Les Murray were Australia’s best hopes. I declared my position in the former camp immediately. At the time, this was partly because I had recently received my advance review copy of Malouf’s latest collection of poems Typewriter Music (UQP 2007) (keep an eye out for my review in the June issue of the ALR, in The Australian on the 1st Wednesday of the month – at 3500 wds, the lengthiest review I’ve published.)

My argument is as follows: the main criterion for the award, as I understand it, is the author’s contribution to their national literature. My first argument concerns the breadth of the contribution – a type of quantitative argument. Whereas Murray has published many volumes of poetry and criticism, Malouf has made substantial contributions not only to the nation’s poetry and criticism, but also its prose fiction, both novels and short fiction, as well as opera libretti. The depth of the contribution – which would perhaps be a qualitative argument – requires more time than I have here, and is perhaps ultimately a matter of ‘taste’. I won’t go further into the matter here – suffice to say it’s my opinion that, in these discussions, it is often forgotten that Malouf is a poet, as well as a novelist.

Ulysses

2007-05-04T13:24:00.006-07:00

TRIESTE. After my adventure in and around Miramare Castle I had a few hours left in Trieste before my train left for Rome, and so decided to set out in search of the houses and apartments that James Joyce lived in when he based himself in the city.

Thankfully, each of these places is marked with a plaque. With the help of a brochure, I managed to locate five of the fifteen or so buildings where Joyce once resided.

On my way back to the hostel, I came across a bronze statue of the Dubliner. The remarkable thing about this statue was that it was not set above the street, towering high on a plinth above the pedestrians, but was set at street level, on the pavement, among the people (see photos above), in the humble pose of a man merely going about his daily business.

Naturally, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of accosting him for a chat. (For the curious, the subjects of our conversation included the influence of Islamic poetry on eighth century Christendom, Oscar Wilde’s deathbed conversion and Amanda Vanstone’s recent appointment as Australian ambassador to Rome.)

Miramare Castle

2007-05-04T13:24:00.003-07:00

TRIESTE. In light of the thorns, spiders, wolf traps and ankle-breaking descents of the ancient path to the Miramare Castle, it was something of a relief to finally sit by the fountain in the forecourt before the ostentatious, neo-gothic façade of the castle itself. And this despite the hundreds of children on school excursions, running through the gardens.

The castle is certainly more impressive architecturally than the one at Duino (though I preferred the latter, on account of the Rilke factor). Like many, it is supposedly haunted; it is said that some mischief will befall anyone who spends the night inside. The reason for this haunting has particular historical resonance; it is due in some part to the fate of the founder of the castle, and also that of his successor, who both died in unfortunate circumstances; but more famously, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent the night here on his way to Sarajevo, where he was assassinated (the catalyst for WWI).

The library, though, was to die for, and had my train not been leaving that night, I might’ve contrived to get locked in after closing time, as I did accidentally in the gardens at Duino. Dark wooden bookshelves with priceless editions stacked high to the ceiling, an old-school giant globe, marble busts of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Goethe, a sculpture of Dedalus attaching wings to Icarus, a sumptuous desk, and all overlooking the silk blue sheet of the Adriatic sea.

Looking for Miramare

2007-05-04T13:24:00.001-07:00

TRIESTE. Although one rationally hopes for everything to go according to plan when traveling, it is often the case that the best experiences occur when those plans go pear shaped. So it was on my second and final day in Trieste.

I was quite convinced that nothing could match the serenity of the Rilke Walk along the cliffs of the Adriatic, in Duino, which I’d discovered the night before. But this didn't prevent me from visiting Miramare, a seaside town famous for its opulent 19th century castle.

It was a perfect spring day, and from the train the view over the Adriatic was postcard stuff, a cobalt slab all the way to the horizon. The problem occurred when, at Miramare station, the doors wouldn’t open. I raced through the carriage to the next door, only to find another guy standing helplessly before his doors, which also weren’t opening. A nearby conductor merely shrugged his shoulders at the both of us, and said something about getting off at Monfalcone, another twenty minutes away.

There were in fact two other guys in standing before the door. The one who had also tried to disembark was, judging by his accent, clearly an Englishman. We both agreed to hop off at the next stop, and try to make our way back to Miramare.

In this way, I came to be stranded in Auriviso - basically the middle of nowhere, a type of tumble-weed, one bar town - with absolutely no sense of how to get to Miramare... the next train was four hours away, at 3 in the afternoon.

After much difficulty, we found the town’s one bus stop, and also the strange ticket vending machine. During this time, a found out that my new friend, James (to be distinguished from by Kiwi friend James from Rome) had recently received his doctorate in physics from Cambridge, and was employed at the world famous International Institute for Theoretical Physics immediately beside the Miramare Castle. He specialized in models of heat transference, but felt under the pump to produce more results than he had managed in the year he’d been working.

James had heard of a mythical, ancient path, that apparently stretched from the next small town on the bus route, down to the ocean. Our search for the path was shambolic; we asked every single person we saw (about five) for directions, and each one of them mumbled words such as ‘lontano’ and ‘brutto’ – long and harsh / ugly / crap.

When we finally came across the long, harsh, ugly and crap path, we knew we were in the right place. For the first half, ‘path’ was too generous a word to describe the barest of impressions in chest-high grass and thorny briars. We came to a few divergences, clambered through barb-wire fences, across private property, olive groves and orchards. At one stage we narrowly averted what looked like some sort of large, rusty animal trap, clearly forgotten about in the long grass.

The whole affair turned into a matter of survival. We talked about the challengers faced by explorers; the possibility of a venture capital start-up that acted as an ‘angel’ for lost travelers; the ancient uses of the path. Eventually we spied the stone foundations of the path proper, in the distance, and upon reaching this, we saw the welcome sight of the sea.

(The 'real' path. I think I was too preoccupied to take photos when on the 'cattivo' path.)

Eventually we made it to the Institute. James pointed me in the direction of the vast gardens belonging to the castle, shook my hand, and went to work – two and a half hours late. As I turned and made my way, I felt strange about parting with this guy (we didn’t exchange emails), an absolute stranger a few hours before – for those hours were spent on a truly memorable adventure.

*

I mentioned that there were in fact two men in the train carriage at Miramare (where the doors failed to open). James was one. The other was a dark man dressed in a pair of blue mechanic’s overalls. His skin seemed olive or tanned, and dirty, as though he’d been hard at work for months. His closely cropped black her poked out from underneath an old blue cap.

The reason the image of this man has burnt itself into my memory is this: when James and I met in the carriage, we turned to him and asked if he too had been prevented from getting off the train. He didn’t reply, and obviously didn’t know English, but after further prompting, he simply shrugged his shoulders and showed us a piece of paper. On it was written two words, with an arrow from the first to the second. These words were, respectively: Trieste… Romania.

On seeing these two words, and the slightly baffled look on the man’s face, I realized in that instant that my own troubles (not being able to disembark at the station I intended to) were of absolutely no significance whatsoever.

Cafe San Marco

2007-05-02T12:15:00.001-07:00

TRIESTE. Tuesday morning. Wander the streets in search of coffee. Find myself at Cafe San Marco, which I'd tried to visit at around midnight last night; once a bohemian cafe, one of James Joyce's faves. This morning it is empty, though I find a sign on the noticeboard spruiking a poetry reading tonight. I hope to check it out, but probably wont, given my train leaves for Rome at 9pm, and the gig starts at eight.

Coffee rating: excellent (9/10). Now back to the backpackers to check out, deposit bags at the station, and set out for Miramare...

Duino Castle

2007-05-01T12:51:00.001-07:00

On arriving in Trieste, I checked into my hostel – a place that was good for a bed though not much more – dumped my bags, and set out at once in search of the bus to Duino. After some confusion, I managed to fluke the last service that would get me there before the castle closed.

The castle’s façade isn’t as grand as others, but the view! Perched high on a cliff peering out over the vast Adriatic, with the gorgeous castle gardens spread out below. As usual, I was particularly mesmerized by the literary cache of the place. I could see Rilke arriving, thinking of Lou Salome, whom he’d stolen from Nietszche; Marie Bonaparte writing letters to Freud (some of which were on display).

I spent an hour in the castle, during which time I discovered a gorgeous balcony off one of the main rooms. After the initial shock of the view, I thought it would be appropriate to recite the opening lines of Rilke’s first Duino Elegy while videoing the surrounds (see below).

from the first of Rilke's Duino Elegies (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing...

___

I also like John Tranter’s version, which opens:

I hate this place. If I were to throw a fit, who
among the seven thousand starlets of Hollywood
would give a flying fuck….

___

By this time the castle was closing – and here began one of the strangest experiences on my trip so far.

Rather than leaving, I thought I’d go for a stroll through the gardens, along the cliffs. The flora was luscious, but to my surprise I saw some of the fauna also: about thirty meters away, I caught sight of a young deer as it bounded away, no doubt spooked by my presence.

Suddenly I was startled by a man’s voice behind me. It was the gardener, and though he was yelling at me in Italian, I was certainly aware what the problem was: I wasn’t supposed to be here. When he realized I spoke English, he spoke to me in quite an aristocratic English accent, though gruffly. ‘How did you get in? Did you jump the fence?’

I replied that I’d merely walked in, through the open gate after visiting the castle. He didn’t believe me, insisting instead that I must’ve jumped the fence as the gate was locked. Thankfully, I’d taken a photo of the open gate, so I showed him on my camera. It seemed I had somehow gotten myself locked in the gardens for about an hour.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘They let the dogs out after they lock up!’

The dogs??? I suppose I should count myself lucky, really.

The gardener started to relax when he realized I was harmless, and showed me the way out through his own adjoining garden. In hindisight, I wouldn’t have swapped getting locked in the gardens of the Duino castle for anything.

Every Angel is Terrifying - The Rilke Walk

2007-05-01T12:50:00.001-07:00

Trieste by Night

2007-05-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

April 23, Monday. I decided to make the most of being in the Fruili region, the north-easternmost in Italy, by spending a night at a cheap backpacker’s in Trieste, a once great sea-port city overlooking the vast Adriatic Sea.

My reasons for going to Trieste were three-fold:

1. It is a fairly out-of-the way place, usually overlooked on the tourist trail – the approach from Venice, by rail or road, skirts the highest cliffs in Italy, overlooking the Adriatic. If the breathtaking beauty of the winding roads in and around Queenstown in NZ where anything to go by, I trusted the guidebooks when they said that the trip was severely underrated. Add to this Trieste’s location in the furthest reaches of north-eastern Italy, and I figured that, since I wasn’t coming this way again any time soon, then why the hell not.

2. In truth, it was Trieste’s literary cache, just as much as its location, that drew me there – particularly, the fact that it was Irish literary great James Joyce’s place of self-imposed ‘exile’. It was here that Joyce worked on Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, while tutoring students from noble families.

3. After doing my research, I also discovered that within striking distance of Trieste, barely half an hour by bus, stands the Duino Castle – that inspired the German poet Rainer Mariner Rilke to write the Duino Elegies, one of the great poem-series of the last century. This sealed it for me, and I decided I’d spend the night in Trieste, and make a day trip to the Duino Castle – a literary pilgrimage, you might say. The thirty-six hours I subsequently spent in and around Trieste turned out to be some of the most exhilarating of my life.

Trieste was not part of Italy until last century (when Italy looked at the great western powers, saw that they had colonized much of Africa, and indeed many other parts of the world, and felt that she should also get in on the action – though my somewhat flippant interpretation of the rise of expansionist fascism is of course debatable). It is probably worth contextualizing this by stressing that Italy didn’t officially exist as a unified nation until 1870.

Judging by its architecture, Trieste clearly cashed in as a major port. The major piazza overlooking the sea seems to rival the Piazza San Marco in Venice, for size, and nearly for grandeur.

Venice (I)

2007-04-30T13:04:00.007-07:00

Nothing I'd heard or read could prepare me for Venice... though it took about ten minutes and five canals after entering the city for me to start to appreciate where I actually was. I’m finding this is often the case; it’s as though each new city or grand monument needs to knock at the gates of my senses for a few minutes (I'm Venice... Hello, Venice here!) before I can let it in; once I've done so, however, a city like Venice makes itself thoroughly at home, kicking its shoes off and reclining full-stretch on the couch in the living room of my soul.

From the hotel, I caught the bus with the other international delegates from the conference (see below) to the city proper, and by a stroke of good fortune we managed to find our minders, Roberto, the flamboyant professor with a creative grasp of English, and his three younger assistants, Davide, Piergiorgio and Laura, all current or former postgrads from the university.

As I said, after about ten minutes, I was overwhelmed. There was a brief moment when, standing before a shop window, I had to take two steps away from the group to pull myself together. Exhilarated by the sheer enchantedness of the place, I felt that saccharine promise of catharsis – ie. the urge to cry – welling in my chest. But whether it was due to conditioning (gender, nationality etc) or something else, I kinked the hose so that no tears came.

After a good half an hour of stumbling agog through the winding alleys and charming terraces, and sharing in the blissful idleness of those couples snuggling in the gondolas (for eighty euros a pop, thank you very much), we came to a piazetta which featured, as Roberto pointed out, the oldest church in the city. Opposite this church stood a marble plinth, whose inscription Roberto pointed to, which indicated that this was where the new laws of the city, as well as other legalistic proclamations, were read out to the people. Professor Ramaswamy pointed out that this was probably the setting for the judgement scene in The Merchant of Venice (act 4 or 5? Pound of flesh etc. It’s been a while.)

It took us fifteen minutes to cross the Grande Canal (though it could be crossed in two) as many of us stopped to take snaps, got lost among the hoards of fellow tourists, bought souvenirs etc, before miraculously regrouping on the far side.

Our destination was Piazza San Marco, the main square in Venice by the sea, but first we had one more treat from the university: a three course lunch at a nearby restaurant. Now I can honestly say that with the exception of the odd slice of pizza, I’ve eaten out (ie at a restaurant) in Rome, on precisely one – yes, one – occasion. (This has been partly for matters of frugality – given I paid for storage costs and a laptop out of my bursary etc – but also because I’d much prefer to wait until Emma arrives… I simply can’t bear to eat alone at a restaurant here in Rome, surrounded by couples feeding each other spaghetti!) So, thanks to the extreme generosity of Antonella, this week saw me sampling local culinary delights the likes of which I had not experienced in Italy, nor expected for even a moment. Let it be said then that the lunch was divine, seafood, white wine, and a typically well-paced affair – all in a restaurant with tablecloths (another rarity for this writer!) in a leafy courtyard.

Sated and reinvigorated by the meal, we set off for the Piazza. The promenade by the sea was swarming with fellow tourists, and the breeze was welcome. The scale of the San Marco Piazza (named after the saint, whose remains are found in the church of that name) is extraordinary – the square must be one of the most impressive in the world. The 15th century Torre dell’Orologio, or clocktower, sports a twenty-four hour clock complete with the astrological ‘time’ also, the phases of the moon, the position of the moon and sun in the sky. The Basilica di San Marco was modeled on one in Constantinople, from where the four bronze horses on the roof were stolen; the stupendously ornate architecture is blend of Byzantine, Romanesque and Renaissance architecture.

After regrouping again, we all had ‘free time’ (though the tour was hardly a constraint) to do as we wished. The Indian contingent made for the Campinile (bell tower), Richard, Fiona and Gera (their son) went for a ride on a gondola, and Tom and Vicky went for a general wander. Though I was the only Venice virgin among them, I did none of these things, for I had my heart set on one thing: the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Venice II - The Peggy Guggenheim Collection

2007-04-30T13:04:00.005-07:00

While I haven’t yet seen many of the world's great galleries - including Madrid’s Prado, Paris’s Lourve, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches or NYC’s MOMA (though the former three are on the itinerary for Emma’s and my backpacking trip after Rome!) - I predict that the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, will forever be a personal favourite.

There are many reasons for this, and it is difficult to put them in order. Of course, the primary reason is the quality of the collection. The first thing you come across is a sculpture garden, with the usual suspects, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Giacometti, Hans Arp and others. Near Peggy’s grave (she is buried with about fifteen of her cats) is a ‘wish tree’, a gift from Yoko Ono. This is a perfect introduction to the gallery itself.

If aliens visited earth after the apocalypse, and this gallery was the only thing left to represent twentieth century Western art, it would probably be enough. Being the private collection of the most astute collector of last century, there is absolutely no ‘filler’ here – every single work is a masterpiece: Picasso, Braque, Leger, Malevich, Delaunay, Duchamp, De Chirico, Mondrian, Ernst, Chagall, Magritte, Miro, Dali, Kandinsky, Bacon, Pollock and Clifford Still – and others whom I’ve shamefully forgotten. The gallery itself is immaculately curated, with Malevich staring down Mondrian, the analytic cubism of Picasso’s The Poet...

Pablo Picasso, The Poet (1911)

leading you around a corner (no pun intended) to Duchamp’s Sad Young Man on a Train,

Marcel Duchamp, Sad Young Man on a Train (1911)

... Magritte’s Empire of Light in your peripheral vision as you focus on a Dali etc etc. The gallery is really quite tiny when compared to something like the Tate Modern, but it is no way crowded – every painting has its moment. After only two rooms, I knew that it was going to stick with me forever.

Add to this the approach to the gallery. Though you can get there a couple of ways, we caught a traghetto across the mouth of the Grande Canal, and the tranquility of the lanes was in marked contrast to those in San Marco, a fact that brought much relief to myself, and Piergiorgio, and a mother and daughter pairing from New York, who accompanied me on the pilgrimage. Secondly, being on the Grande Canal, the gallery is situated on an unparalleled piece of real estate, with views to die for.

***

For a bit of fun, then, I’ll list my 3 favourite works in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and my utterly personal reasons for rating them thus – though the list is arbitrary, and could be entirely different on another day, or if I was in another mood:

1. Upward (1929) by Vasily Kandinsky

For me, Kandinsky strikes the perfect balance between the austere geometric formalism of Malevich or Mondrian, and the insanely bright pallet of Delaunay or Matisse. The result is a type of optimism: yes, there is room for colour in our world of hard edges and geometric curves, our world of inescapable rules. Up close, the subtlety of the bleeding tones is delightful. But what got me about this painting were the two shapes, in the lower left, and upper right corners. The former in particular: a simple, mauve rectangle, all at sea, a lone figure in the field. You know how in some works (ie by Monet or Goya) the artist includes a portrait of themselves in the scene? Well to me, that’s what this rectangle is: a clue to the lonely figure cut by the artist, perhaps by all artists, and by extension, the condition itself of being alone.

2. Study for Chimpanzee (1957) by Francis Bacon.

Readers of the London posts in this blog will know that Francis Bacon is one of my favourite artists. In my opinion, he nails the horror of the contemporary world, much like the way Munch does in his famous Skrik (The Scream). Bacon seems to say, we are all meat. This is kind of funny, given his name - but it is no laughing matter. His is a type of anti-humanism; just as the words beef and veal do a profound injustice to ‘cows’ – reducing them to items for our consumption – so, by reducing us to meat, Bacon seems to me to be acknowledging the utterly terrifying truth of our existence, that we can be reduced to nothing more than meat, meat that rots over time, meat that can mean nothing.

In this painting, we see the chimpanzee on its haunches – or is it Rodin’s The Thinker? – perched on a box or crate of some sort, and framed by a strange, feint geometric pattern. Indeed, the figure seems caught in a state between primate and genius, its identity smeared with the murkiest milky blue grey – like a mixture of sperm and ink. The pallet is typically nauseating.

3. Alchemy (1947) by Jackson Pollock.

The coruscating energy, the mesmerizing chaos – the universe on a canvas. What can you say about Pollock that hasn't already been said? Like a verse from Genesis, or a snapshot of the nanosecond after the Big Bang, the dominant black, white and grey is shot through with the primary colours, the optimistic yellow, traces of red and a finally the blue (water does come after light), with the faintest hints of orange and green for good measure. When the NGA bought Pollock’s Blue Poles in 1974, the typically conservative Australian public scoffed. ‘4 million bucks? My dog could paint that!’ To which I say, ‘Really? Well then why didn’t it?’

If my hypothetical apocalypse (above) was to occur, and if this gallery was saved, I’d hazard that this would be the one painting that would make the aliens (provided they could see) look meaningfully at each other, and nod in recognition...

Udine

2007-04-30T13:04:00.003-07:00

Udine is a small but gorgeous city two hours north of Venice by train, the second largest after Trieste in the Friuli-Venezia Guilia region, the north-easternmost region of Italy, which shares its borders with Austria to the north, Slovenia to the east and the Adriatic Sea to the south.

In March I received a phone call from David Malouf, who offered to put me in contact with Antonella Riem, lecturer in English Language and Literature at the Universita degli Studi di Udine. Antonella, a close friend of David’s from his time in Italy, was hosting a conference at the university, and I soon received a call from her inviting me to attend and give a reading as part of a session that featured some other Australians.

Naturally, I accepted, and quickly discovered that the Australian contingent consisted of the Melbourne-based poet and novelist, Tom Petsinis (who was B.R.Whiting resident in 1999), Dr. Richard Nile (founder of the Australian Public Intellectual Network, editor of the Journal of Australian Studies – which published me in their ‘New Talents’ edition a few years back – and visiting professor of Australian studies at a university in Copenhagen) and Richard’s wife, novelist Fiona Murphy.

The hospitality I was to receive at the conference came as something of a shock – I expected to be lodged in either a boarding house, or a college on the campus (which apparently don’t really exist), but instead, I found myself in the elegant, four star Ambassador Hotel, one of the best in the city. If this wasn’t enough, I soon found out that all meals were catered for, including dinner each night at a different restaurant – AND that we were going to be put up for two nights in Venice by the university. Well.

When I booked my train, I decided to book a ticket to Trieste also, and a backpackers place for one night. I figured, while I was in the region, this was my one chance to visit the city famous for being James Joyce’s place of self-exile, as it were; also, I discovered during my research that the Duino Castle – where German poet Rainer Mariner Rilke wrote his great Duino Elegies – was only half an hour from Trieste by bus. So my itinerary read, Udine (three nights), Venice (two nights) and Trieste (one night – but arriving at lunch on the Monday and not departing until late Tuesday night). (Venice and Trieste posts to follow!)

***

Below is a summary of my time in Udine; it essentially in note form, but then to write up the proceedings of the entire conference would take a serious amount of time and effort, which I should be dedicating to the writing of poems.

Conference Diary

Wednesday 18 April

Catch the early train from Trastevere-Roma Termini-Venice Mestre-Udine. Give up the window seat I’d booked so that a tourist can sit with his family – not a good idea, as I’d planned to catch up on sleep during the trip, and now have nowhere to rest my head. The obscenely well-dressed man sitting opposite me (dark suit, mauve tie, laptop) disembarks in Florence. Change trains at Venice. Arrive in Udine with no idea about anything, but a quick phone-call to Antonella sorts me out. Stroll to the hotel, which bowls me over. Watch CNN in horror while resting on the bed, as news breaks of the Virginia Tech shootings, and wonder again at the almost pornographic depths to which these news stations delve into tragedies; it’s almost as though they relish them. Interesting dissection of US gun laws, revealing that the so-called ‘right to bear arms’ clause found in the US constitution is a complete misreading – what would be called a howler in any public commentary, what one Supreme Court judge has called the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people (though, funnily enough, also by the American people). Quick jaunt through the city, the main Gothic church, the wonderful medieval and Renaissance architecture of the streets. Meet other delegates in the foyer for dinner at a nearby restaurant; accompanied by Raphael and Natalia, a very cool couple (she a South African spoken word artist, he a scholar of South African spoke word poetry!) whom I’ll get to know better over the next few days. Other delegates include four from India: S.L Bhyrappa (author of more than 20 novels), retired professor S. Ramaswamy (Bhyrappa’s English translator, three-time Fullbright holder, life-time fellow of Yale), K.C. Belliapa (Vice Chancellor of a university in northern India) and Saumitra Chakravarty (poet and translator). Am puzzled at dinner when Ramaswamy tells a story of Alexander the Great meeting with a particular Indian who, when offered the world by Alexander asks him to step out of the sunlight – for I know full well that this was Diogenes the Cynic, who was certainly not an Indian!

Thursday 19 April

Conference begins 9am at the university across town, to which we all walk as group. The room is packed with over a hundred students, both tertiary and secondary – which makes me slightly nervous ahead of my reading tomorrow afternoon. Antonella opens, followed by a keynote via video from Californian professor Riane Eisler, with a tough of the evangelical vibe (or is it just American?) as she stresses the need for models of partnership rather than domination – the breadth of subject matter, though, is remarkable and stimulating, ranging from cave paintings to contemporary economics. Reading by Bhyrappa from the English translations of his novels, though the translations are a let down particularly given Ramaswamy’s credentials – unfortunately, there’s not much worse than a series of poorly translated extended sex scenes, and in all honesty I have to restrain myself at times from succumbing to fits of laughter – which I’m sure is unfair on the original text. Lovely catered lunch in the courtyard, followed by wine and coffee. Terrific paper from Roberto Albarea (whose English is very creative) on education and alterity – he will be our guide in Venice. Rigorous and interesting papers on Renaissance literature; another on education by Davide Zoletto, one of numerous people with whom I will have stimulating conversation over the coming days. Dinner at a nearby restaurant, then a surprise cake organized by Vicky Petsinis (Tom’s wife, a school teacher whose organization skills kept us all from degenerating into a shambles over the conference and in Venice!) for Antonella’s birthday. Off to the theatre for a performance of Indian dancing by Ileana Citaristi and Saswat Joshi. Both are professional dancers, trained in India; Saswat in particular is phenomenal, looking just like one of the gods from the Hindu pantheon. Nightcap whiskey in the hotel bar – barman teaches me (the only patron) some of the Friulian dialect: ‘Mandi’ is the phrase used here for casual greetings and departures, like ‘ciao’ – its roots are fascintating: manus (hand) and di (God); ‘mandi’ meaning therefore ‘in the hand of God’.

Friday 20 April

The day of my reading. Morning begins with a video presentation sent from David Malouf (in absentia), reading from his new collection of short stories, Every Move You Make. (Recognise his living room, the fireplace, the indigenous paintings in the background.) Relish, as always, his peerless prose; thought he might’ve given a greeting in Italian for the benefit of the students. Three papers on Malouf’s fiction. Hang on every word of Franca Cavangoli’s, his Italian translator, as she discusses the difficulties of retaining Malouf’s music in translation. (This will provide the opening for the article I’m writing for the ALR on Malouf’s new collection of poems, to be published in The Australian in June.) Talk with Franca at lunch; later, after my own reading, she will invite me to Milan, where she works at the university (an invitation I intend to accept). She is also the Italian translator of J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipal, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer and others. After lunch, my reading; I’m the last to read of the Australian panel, after Tom (reading from his new novel), Richard (who gives an impromptu on the role of Gallipoli in the Australian consciousness) and Fiona (also reading from her novel). Reading goes well; I try out all my new poems, and they seem well received. Some are sexy, some light, some heavy – many are set in Rome. Saumitra gives her paper on Toni Morrison and Mahasweta Devi, a subversive Indian writer. Back to the hotel briefly before dinner at a very funky restaurant (think Sydney, trendy fittings, cool music, cocktail bar and restaurant) called ‘My Way’ (ie. Sinatra, and the most common tune squeezed out of every accordion in Rome!). Most of us are buggered, and there are some grumblings about the length of time between courses – I can’t help but think, though, that complaining about the extended dining habits of Italy is a bit like complaining about cows on the roads in India. Talk translation with Davide – who teaches me the word for ‘crab claw’ (‘kela di grachio’) which I can’t help calling ‘kela di Gramsci’ or ‘the claw of Gramsci’ (Italian philosopher). After a few glasses of wine, this tickles me. Most delegates retire, but I stay at the restaurant with some of the postgrads and their friends (Marco, Marta, Laura, Raphael, Natalia) and Lance Henson, an American Indian (Cheyenne) poet who once drank with Tom Waits and Bukowski, and who shares their revolutionary spirit. Proceed to finish every bottle of wine on the table.

Saturday April 21

The last day of the conference is in fact a half-day, and perhaps the most diverse. Begins with readings from Lance Henson, Cheyenne poet, and Natalia Molebatsi, South African poet – both are wonderful, sonic feasts, Lance reading some poems in his native tongue, Natalia breaking out into song the way only African poets can. Raphael gives his paper on South African spoken word, and plays an audacious audio file, beginning ‘Last night I smoked a spliff with Jesus’! And I thought my reading was a little risqué! A guy named Piergeorgio (with whom I would visit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice the next afternoon) gave a kickarse analysis of the famous Shell advertisement that tries to seduce the public into believing the company is environmentally sound. Papers by Marta (on Aussie author Gillian Rubenstein) and Laura (on Irish dramatist Lady Gregory), who have both been a big help during the conference. The conference ends with a paper by Luisa Sello, consummate flautist, who guides us through the leitmotifs in a piece by composer Giacinto Scelsi, while playing the flute! After this we are all taken on a guided tour of Udine, a shambolic affair, and we all take refuge in gelati. Visit the Gothic church. Return to the hotel to grab our bags, then are seen by Marta to the train station, where as a group we all embark for Venice. Arrive in Venice, not really knowing where to go, and our search for our hotel, which is at least twenty minutes out of the historical city centre, will not be forgotten by anyone of the group. Dinner at the nearby ‘Crazy Pizzeria’, before collapsing in bed, looking forward to the tour of Venice tomorrow.

Roman Rainbow

2007-04-17T13:05:00.000-07:00

(Dancing in the Rain)

Resurrection Day, St. Peter's

2007-04-10T12:16:00.003-07:00

Buona pasqua! Easter in Rome... Let's just put it this way: chocolate certainly isn't the priority. In fact, it was only in the week leading up to the easter weekend that the small displays of chocolate eggs appeared in the supermarket - that's right, not a month, not February, but a WEEK before easter, a couple of SMALL displays (unlike at home!).

Though I didn't feel up to braving the enormous crowds for the Pope's address, I decided to go to St. Peter's in the afternoon, when things had quietened down. This was the first time I'd been inside the great basilica...

Apparently the church can hold 60,000 people - but this seems like an exaggeration by my estimation, and I suspect this figure must include the capacity of the Piazza San Pietro also, though of course I might be wrong.

On entering, I tried to leave Michelangelo's Pieta until last, but like a magnet it kept dragging my eyes towards it so I just gave in. Standing before the masterpiece (behind protective glass since someone attacked it in '72) for a good ten minutes, I realised I wasn't the only English-speaking tourist who was compelled to mutter the sculptor's age at the time of completion, '25', with astonishment. Bernini's 30-meter high 'baldachin' (read pergola!) over the papal altar (under which San Pietro himself is apparently buried) looks to me a bit like it belongs in a Tim Burton film.

If the dome looks impressive from the outside, from the inside the cupola is simply stunning (see first photo above). There is a apparently some argument as to whether Michelangelo designed it, although he was certainly chief architect when it was commenced. Because it was Easter Sunday, the famous dome ascent was out of the question - which gives me a perfect excuse to come back very soon (not that one needs an excuse, I suppose).

Some photos from Trastevere

2007-04-10T12:16:00.001-07:00

In response to Jennifer Compton's request, here are a few photos from Trastevere (suburb of the studio), taken on the way to St. Peter's on Easter Sunday...

Gladiators: Roma v Man Utd

2007-04-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

(Francesco Totti - that penalty)

While I was in fact looking forward to going out and having a few pints at 'The Scholar's Lounge' (a rather fun Irish Pub in the heart of the centro historico, and indeed, some scholars are to be found there) for the the AS Roma v Manchester Utd Champion's League clash, played here in Rome, I decided to be good and resist the temptation.

Turns out it was just as well. 18 people who attended the game have been hospitalised with one Man Utd fan in a critical condition after receiving a stab wound to the neck. Roma supporters have the unfortunate reputation of being the most thug-like in the whole of Italy, and evidently the equal of any Premiership League team. The team itself is a bit like the Brisbane Broncos or Sydney Roosters in the NRL (or 'kick it over the H' as Emma calls it, grunting - not all sports are as sophisticated as Rugby Union Em! (Canterbury Crusaders reference there)) in that while they are one of the benchmarks of the national competition, there are many sportsfans who love to loathe them.

Well, I've been trying to support Roma, but no amount of 'as the Romans do'-style persuasion has been able to oust from my memory Grosso's 50/50 dive in the World Cup last year against the Socceroos (sure, Lucas Neill should never, ever have tried a tackle like that in the box, especially on an Italian - but, as every local I've spoken to about it has said themselves: there was no foul in the challenge) and Totti's successful penalty - which knocked us out. Roma may go through to the final four by ousting Man U (Liverpool look like destroying PSV, Valencia and Chelsea are anyone's guess, and AC Milan v Bayern Munich is going to be a cracker) but even though their style of play is attractive, I simply am not feeling it. Looks like I'll have to pick a team other than Roma to support.

___

UPDATE: Since I wrote the above, Roma has gone down in the away leg to Manchester Utd. In fact, they were humbled (read hammered) 7-1 at Old Trafford; and whilst my rant about Roma above still holds, I have come to have a greater respect, both for the Roma team and for the average Roma fan (not the thugs), for the following reason.

Now if it had been Manchester who had been beaten 7-1, we could've expected scenes of riots, screaming, angry skinheads burning effigies etc etc on the tv screens. But something I've come to realise in the aftermath of the game - Roma have been extremely gracious in defeat. This could be because they were spanked so comprehensively, but the fans I speak to seem to be in agreement on a few points: they did well in the competition, they're proud of their team, they were outplayed on the night by a very good opposition.

So while I'm not sure they are the best winners going around, going on recent events I would have to argue that they are very gracious in defeat, and unlikely to resort to vitriol against their team, etc. Which is much better than the alternative, and which for me is more in the spirit of any sporting contest. Bravo Roma.

Sunrise in Trastevere

2007-04-01T09:55:00.003-07:00

(From the window of the dining room)

Piazza del Popolo

2007-04-01T09:55:00.001-07:00

After visiting the Ara Pacis - The Altar of Peace (post to follow below) - I made my way to the Piazza del Popolo, which in terms of historical mood is vastly different: this grand piazza, which sports an impressive Egyptian obelisk in its center, was, until Italy's unification in 1870, the most popular spot for that favourite European popcorn past-time, the public execution. Charles Dickens was but one of numerous writers who witnessed and wrote about such grizzly affairs, which were thankfully less grizzly after the importation of the efficient French invention, the guillotine. One thing, though, can be said for the uniqueness of the Italian-style executions: most Europeans found it an oddity that in Rome, the victims were not tortured before death - it was only after the person had expired that the public did unspeakable things to their body.

Of note also in this piazza are the young, um, punks...or perhaps, card-carying fascists, one might say. Only a few looked like your Romper Stomper types, the rest seemed fairly, well, harmless, verging on emo really. Mind you, although their sense of fashion is clearly at odds with the Via Condoti a few vias away (see earlier posts), it's obvious they still take as much time getting ready! (Ready for what, you might ask? Well, you know, hanging out - or what in Australia would surely be called posing! - around the stairs in the piazza. What else?!).

Then it was up a stairway, to the beautiful Pincio gardens, dappled with afternoon sunlight. It was here that Keats went for walks to try to convalesce, on advice from his physician (looking at the place, you almost wonder why it didn't work)- the hill links up, about ten minutes down the way, with the summit of the Spanish Steps. The gardens and parks on this hill are pretty much the place you take your missus (and where I'll certainly be taking mine!) if you're anywhere nearby - as evidenced by the oodles of canoodling going on. Seriously, you're lucky not to trip over a couple making out. So I can say with some certainty that the famous hills of Rome (my favourite so far is still the Aventine, though this one, Pincio, and Janiculum, which are not included among the famous seven, are not far behind) are the spot for lovers. Of course, it's a cliche to say the Italians have good taste, but the views really are spectacular, and the gardens are like a retreat from the hustle on the streets, which, even in early spring, are starting to get riotous. If you were on the tourist trail, you might never know these places existed, so I count myself very lucky to be able to explore these pockets at my leisure.

Santa Maria del Popolo

2007-04-01T09:54:00.002-07:00

(Chigi Chapel, designed by Raphael)

This church, at the north end of the Piazza del Popolo (see post above) was built on top of the graves of a particular famous family, whose most famous spawn was the Emperor Nero. Legend has it that a tree here had become the haunt for a murder of crows (you know, I think that's the first time in my life I've ever actually used the collective noun for crows!) said to be the incarnation of Nero's soul. So it was cut down in 1099 to make way for a chapel (though all this has been consigned laregly to the realm of legend). The church as it stands now was built in the late fourteen hundreds.

The photo above is of the Chigi chapel, which was designed by Raphael. Near the main altar of the church are two famous Caravaggios, but as I approached them I was shushed away by an old man - who I soon discovered happened to be the priest, wanting to start mass!

The thing is, I would've made it the two or three minutes earlier to see the paintings if I hadn't been distracted by a rather humorous event, which goes like this. You may be aware of the religious act of intercession, whereby one prays to the good lord (perhaps the best justification ever devised for talking to oneself) on behalf of, or for someone else; the practice is common in fact to both Christianity and Islam, and probably many other religions. In churches such as this one there are candles you can light, to help a soul in purgatory, which is another kind of intercession. (Incidentally, the final poem in my 2005 collection is actually called 'intercession'.)

Well in this church I was struck by a strange sight, which I'm sure is quite common, but was a first for me. Instead of actual candles, I found a kind of rickety old switchboard, from which protruded roughly three dozen candle-like lengths of plastic, and which rested on something akin to a keyboard-stand; along the front edge are a number of switches; beneath this is a sign in Latin, which reads if I remember correctly per animae in purgatoria or 'for the souls in purgatory'; and beneath this, a coin slot. So the idea is, you put your money in, you flick a swith, the electric candle comes on and bingo, you've saved a soul. The contraption is I suppose a type of vending machine for wandering souls.

Now as I was looking at this strange contraption, somewhat bemusedly, a woman walked up beside me, clearly intent on 'using' it. I might mention that of the three dozen or so candles, only about seven or eight were 'on'. So she put her money in, and the poor woman flicks one of the switches; but it transpires that she's actually flicked one of the ones that was already 'on', 'off'. She realised right away, and, muttering something to herself (or God?), she quickly flicked it back on, and then flicked another one 'on' that had been 'off' (which of course revealed that payment was optional). As she underwent this ordeal, she caught my eye, and must've seen in my look that I was aware of the implications of her mistake; if in fact you save a soul by flicking one of the candles on, then had she just snuffed one out by mistakenly flicking one off?!!

She hurried away, and despite the gravity of the situation, I couldn't stop chuckling even after I left the church.

Ara Pacis

2007-04-01T09:54:00.001-07:00

The Ara Pacis or 'Altar of Peace' was constructed in the decade before Jesus was born, to celebrate Rome's golden age under Augustus. The period was one of unprecedented stability and prosperity, which future generations looked back on as ideal; unlike the emperors who followed, Augustus was pious, lived in a modest pad, and didn't indulge in the decadent lifestyle (flamingo tongues for dinner, orgies for dessert etc) that we've come to associate with Roman emperors.

It is perhaps the most famous example of Roman sculpture, and has been pieced slowly together since the first marble fragments were rediscovered in the sixteenth century. It's about the size of a single garage, and shows various public personalities of the time in a pious procession. My favourite figure is the young child tugging at his or her mother's skirt.

I have to admit, though, that the building in which the altar is housed left me a little cold. It stickes out like a sore thumb as the most contemporary architectural structure in the Eternal City, and from the outside looks quite interesting. But the interior is sterile, and considering the entrance fee (with audio guide) was 10 euros, I don't think I was the only one who felt a little underwhelmed, despite the marvellousness of the altar itself.

A night at the theatre

2007-04-01T09:38:00.001-07:00

Having attended both an art gallery opening and a soprano recital at the invitation of the Australian embassy, I was recently invited to a night at the theatre, to see acclaimed Aussie stand-up comic, Sarah Kendell, who is doing the whole London / Europe touring thang at the moment, and is, I think, presently based in the UK.

I had some difficulty finding the place, and was thankfully assisted by a kind stranger who gave me directions; it seems that if you make the effort with the language, the Romans can really be quite friendly. The delightful theatre-cum-club (whose name slips my mind at the moment) actually contains a Raphael fresco in the foyer; for the rest, think red Venetian velvet curtains, piano, bar, with a theatre in the basement.

In the foyer I met the Ambassador and his wife again, and I suppose it's not going too far to say we are now on friendly terms. I was then led by Clelia, the studio's contact, to a woman who was probably in her fifties, well-dressed in a slightly exotic sort of way, (think Morroccan jewellry etc) and quite a snazzy, cropped hair-do. "Jaya, this is Princess Nicoletta." Of course, when Clelia said the 'P' word I nearly fell over; I wish I'd been warned. We talked briefly about what I was doing etc. Then the Ambassador spotted us. "Ah Nicky, how are you?" So I was standing in a very busy foyer, between Princess Nicky and the Australian ambassador to Rome, and, feeling thoroughly out of my depth, proceeded to get slowly plastered on the free red wine.

The show was fun, and catered particularly to what was by far the biggest gathering of English-speaking expats I'd come across in Rome, with jokes about the English and the Kiwis, and some classic Aussie taking-the-mickey out of Italian stylishness etc. After the show, I met Sarah (and her charming Cambridge-educated partner, with whom I got on like a house on fire; incidentally, he was mates in college with former English cricket captain Mike Atherton, who gave him free tickets to all the home tests!). It turns out Sarah is best friends with the Sydney poetess and mover-and-shaker, Johanna Featherstone, with whom I've worked, and who I often see when I'm in Sydney. This was certainly my first 'it's a small world' experience in Rome - I agreed to return the next evening to have a drink after the show.

That night, the owner of the club, Enzo, and his son, gave the three of us a very special treat. He took us into the small salon with the piano, and the two proceeded to sing a duet in Italian, with guitar. Their voices were amazing, the harmonies spot on, full-throated ease, modulation, exhiliration. It was a love song that seemed to stress the fact that we are all water; Sarah was very moved, as we all were. 'This is my gift to you,' said Enzo to Sarah, 'for the gift that you have given to us.'

So the following weekend I returned to the club, on account of its friendly and very talented owners. This time, Enzo's wife, who seems a fair bit younger than he is, and who is a famous Roman violinist in her own right, put on a joint show for a the small, cosy audience. The videos here don't really capture the atmosphere, but it was the best I could do, given I was captivated during the best parts of the evening.

A Taste of Tuscany

2007-03-29T13:30:00.001-07:00

(Orbetello, Tuscany)

About a week after I arrived in Rome, I received a phone call from Lorri Whiting (nee Fraser), the widow of Bertie Whiting (both benefactors of the studio) and sister of Malcolm Fraser. (Yes, that Malcolm Fraser, PM of Australia during the first five or so years of my life.)

When Lorri discovered I was from Queensland she asked whether I was into sailing, or more specifically, whether I’d had any sailing experience. I wish I could’ve answered in the affirmative: it turned out she was looking for someone to add to her crew, to help her shift her yacht from Portugal to Spain (though Gibraltar)! As my answer was negative, we arranged instead for me to visit her upon her return in March.

So yesterday I caught the train to southern Tuscany, a seaside town called Orbetello, where Lorri moved from the studio after Bertie’s passing. She met me at the station, and we headed to the Porto’Ercole (Port of Hercules) for lunch. The seaside village was a welcome change from the bustle of the capital, with only a handful of locals about, sanding hulls, repairing nets etc (though Lorrie assured me the place is swarming with visitors in summer).

(Porto'Ercole 1)

(Porto'Ercole 2)

We had lunch on the seaside, at a dog-friendly place, on account of Lorrie’s bulldog. Lorrie is a visual artist, trained in Melbourne, and has exhibited all over the world. One of her works is hung in the living room of the studio. We talked art, poetry, politics, and her favourite topic, sailing. On a few occasions, she mentioned ‘her brother’, and it took a great deal of restraint on my part to not disclose my awareness of his identity, or to press her with questions regarding him! Unfortunately, Lorrie has recently had eye-surgery, and the long recovery is causing her some discomfort.

(Lorri and I after lunch)

After lunch we drove to the top of the hill overlooking Orbetello and went for a lazy amble with the bulldog, the late afternoon light dancing through the ubiquitous silvery-khaki leaves of the olive trees. The air was brisk; a cool change has swept through Italy in the last week, and temperatures have plunged back to almost winter lows, four or five degrees the evening.

(Orbetello 2)

(Olive leaves)

We then returned to Lorrie’s place for coffee. The maid that helped nurse Bertie still lives with Lorrie, a dramatic Austrian woman whom Lorrie describes as ‘Wagnerian’. Lorrie mentioned that, on account of an imminent visit from her brother, she was trying to spruce up her garden (apparently Malcolm is a keen gardener). We then went on a tour of her studio in the basement, where she still has many of her works.

(Lorri's front yard)

After a couple of hours, Lorri drove me back to the train station. I’ve had some difficulty recently navigating my way around some of the stations, and would you believe, when my train came, I failed to realize it was the intended one, and it left without me. So to kill the two hours wait before the next one, I went to a bar around the corner, and started a poem about the day.

After a couple of drinks, I became plucky and tried to explain to the bartender – who thought at first that I was South American – why I was here, in Orbetello. Sono Australiano. Il mio treno ha partita senza me. E fredo, e vorrei essere caldo (pointing to the drink). Purtroppo, non parlo bene l'italiano. Which I hoped meant: ‘I am Australian. My train has left without me. It is cold, and I want to be warm. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Italian well.’

Piazza San Pietro

2007-03-21T12:02:00.001-07:00

From the Ponte Sant'Angelo (post below) it’s a brief walk to the Vatican. I had a quick coffee on the grand street that leads to St. Peter's, and would you believe, a crowd was forming and starting to get excited. My trip had turned out to be a fortuitous piece of timing. Before long, a very large convoy, beginning with emergency vehicles, police motorcycles, cars, vans, then limousines of all sizes, came blaring around the corner, and the masses began cheering and taking photos. I think it was the pope.

(Piazza San Pietro 1)

As it was dusk, I decided to stay in the Piazza San Pietro, leaving my visit to St. Peter’s and the museums for a later date, rather than attempt to cram the experience. (I’ve been building up to this, you might say, and studying up also, to prepare for what is apparently one of the most rewarding, but also most exhausting museum experiences in the world. Apparently there is even a specific medical diagnosis for exhaustion in the face of the Vatican museums, called ‘Stendhal syndrome’, after the novelist, who collapsed and had to be taken to hospital!)

(Piazza San Pietro 2)

The piazza is really the first that has had a physical effect on me, and I’m in no way overstating this. The massive columns, which I forgot to photograph really, embrace the space in a god-like group hug – it is impossible not to feel ‘included’ you might say. As Dickens wrote: ‘The beauty of the Piazza… with its clusters of exquisite columns, and its gushing fountains – so fresh, so broad, and free, and beautiful – nothing can exaggerate.’

(Piazza San Pietro 3)

Ponte Sant’Angelo to Piazza San Pietro

2007-03-21T11:53:00.000-07:00

(Angel 1)

The bridge across the Tiber to the Castel Sant’Angelo is perhaps the most wonderful I’ve ever crossed, though not because of the architectural characteristics of the bridge itself; rather, the thrill lies in the ten angels lining the way, carved by none other than Bernini (and his assistants).

(Angel 2)

(Angel 3)

Their poses and expressions are nothing if not dramatic, and are particularly effecting against a clear blue sky; you can’t help feeling spiritually elevated at the scene, despite the hordes of black-market stalls at the base of each.

(Angel 4)

(Prada Angel)

(Sunset Angel)

On the north side of the Tiber stands the Castel Sant’Angelo, a castle designed for strategic defensive reasons, where popes lived and enemies were imprisoned and tortured. It is an imposing structure, a fortress really, named after an apparent sighting of St Michael – I’ve been wondering ever since: why is it that no-one seems to see visions of angels any more? I left the visit for another time.

(View of Ponte Sant'Angelo, St. Peter's)

(Walk to Ponte Sant'Angelo)

(Me, Ponte Sant'Angelo, St. Peter's)

Pasquino

2007-03-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

The Piazza Navona is a symmetrical, narrow piazza with a large central fountain, and two smaller ones flanking it at either end. The former, Bernini’s Fonatana dei Quattro Fiumi ('Fountain of the Four Rivers'), is currently undergoing renovation, so the grandeur of the place is at present, unfortunately, somewhat diminished. Which is a shame; the American poet Henry Wadsorth Longfellow, who once lived in an apartment overlooking the square, relished its refreshing vibe, and the usually cynical Tobias Smollett was forced to concede that it is “perhaps the most magnificent in Europe.” Some wrap, but I unfortunately couldn’t see it for all the scaffolding. Instead, I sat by the Fontana del Moro, a smaller work by Bernini, while a three-piece gypsy outfit busted a lazy afternoon groove.

(‘Pasquino’ the talking statue)

Around the corner stands the most famous of Rome’s so-called ‘talking statues’. That it depicts a scene from Homer’s Iliad is of only minor import. Its uniqueness stems from the fact that in 1501 a politically-minded cobbler (Pasquino) decided he’d had enough of papal Rome’s excessive censorship, and started attaching to the statue satirical remarks concerning current events. The trend caught on, and Romans from all over began attaching their own comments. Soon, other statues in Rome began to ‘talk’ and respond to each other. The practice has continued ever since, even during the brutal censorship of Mussolini’s reign. Even now, the statue is covered in bits of paper, with writings of both a political, and romantic nature.

(My new friend)

For something more contemporary, I thought I’d check out a restaurant nearby that I’ll probably take Liam to when he visits, knowing his passion for all things to do with both William Faulkner (a favourite writer of mine also) and Humphrey Bogart.

(Passetto, closed for siesta)

According to my invaluable ‘Literary Companion to Rome’ (from which nearly all literary allusions in this blog stem – see ‘reading list’) one of Faulkner’s biographies recounts how he dined at the then fashionable ‘Passetto’ restaurant with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in 1954, when in Rome on movie business. Bacall asked the recently crowned Nobel Laureate:

‘Bill, why do you drink?’ Liking the slim, green-eyed girl, he answered. ‘When I have one martini,’ he said, ‘I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there’s no holding me.’

Well, I know how he feels, but I’m trying to cut my drinking down a bit myself, and so am resisting the temptation make a role-model out of him… even in terms of prose style.

(On my way to the Ponte Sant'Angelo - see above)

26 Piazza di Spagna

2007-03-07T13:01:00.001-08:00

(View from the top of the Spanish Steps)

The apartment in which the poet John Keats died after living for four months in Rome is literally on the corner of the famous Piazza di Spagna. The place itself is now a museum dedicated to the poet; of the house-museums I’ve been to (Samuel Johnson’s, Keats’ in London) this was probably the best value (3.50 euros) and also the best.

(Salon, Keats's Apartment)

This is primarily because of Keats’s bedroom. After the salon, and the dining room, all lined floor-to-ceiling with books in dark majestic bookshelves, and filled with exhibits (letters, photos, trinkets, drafts etc) you walk into a very small room with views of the piazza and of the Spanish Steps themselves.

(Keats's bedroom)

(View from Keats's bedroom 1)

(View from Keats's bedroom 2)

Entering the room is an overwhelming experience, and I came very close to choking up when I stepped in. A chill shot down my spine, that feeling of frisson which I didn’t really feel at his grave (perhaps because I was distracted; though I did, to a lesser extent, at Shelley’s). I suppose this is partly because the main parts of the room, the walls, the fireplace and the ceiling, are all exactly how they were in 1821. The bed isn’t the same (all furniture was burnt after his death), but the one that’s there is in the same spot. The room is tiny, so as soon as you see it, you see Keats lying there in your mind’s eye.

It was a draining afternoon - the most effecting of the Keats triumvirate I've now visited (his house at Hampstead, his grave in Testaccio, his Rome apartment). Two Camparis at the Café Greco helped matters, after which I wandered to the very top of the steps to take in the view (photo, top).

(On the Spanish Steps; Piazza di Spagna)

The Sopranos

2007-03-07T13:00:00.000-08:00

On Saturday night I was invited by the embassy to a recital by two sopranos – one of them Australian, with a borsa di studio like myself – in a little church off the Piazza Baldini, in the Jewish Ghetto, one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe.

Now I know you would rarely expect the words 'Australia' and 'opera' to be found in the same sentence, but the Aussie girl really did us proud... she was actually the stronger of the two, and I think others agreed. She sang arias from Mozart and Puccini, as well as some by a guy called Gounod, who I’d never heard of – unfortunately I missed her do Puccini’s Oh! mio babbino caro while I was having a cigarette, which I berated myself for.

It was such a treat to listen to these girls sing in a relatively intimate setting. Though I’m certainly no expert in opera, their voices were impressive, and on occasion went straight through me like a jolt of electricity. Not that I’d forgotten the fact, but this really made me feel as though I was in Rome.

The accompanying pianist was sublime, as those experts who were there made sure to point out during the mingling (one woman seemed to be your typical music college head). He’d apparently received the music the night before, and the 5 Ravel pieces were particularly complex: he was that picture of the perfect pianist, restrained yet not stodgy, extremely disciplined yet able to smile with his singer. All three artists had worked with major orchestras around the world, and what’s more, for me, the concert was free (though it was surely worth the 15 euros they were asking).

I left feeling uplifted, though a little lonely. This turned into an edginess, which I put down to the full moon / lunar eclipse that was occurring that night. As is my usual response, I pulled into a bar, this one looking particularly Irish, though staffed mainly by Italian party boys.

There was a fine la Liga match showing, Barcelona vs Seville, and when I left at half time, Seville were 2-1 up, having shocked Barcelona with a spectacular free kick. The Brazilian magician Ronaldinho had turned his back on the striker when forming the wall, and I wondered whether this sign of disrespect (by the master of free kicks) had incited the scorer to pull something special out of his hat, which he did.

I didn’t see the eclipse, which apparently made the moon appear red, and which could be seen perfectly from Europe (the photo above is not mine). This was partly because I didn’t know precisely when it was to happen. In hindsight, I know how to ask ‘At what time’, and the words for ‘moon’ (la luna) and ‘red’ (rosso), so I probably should’ve tried to ask (ie. 'a che ora e la luna rossa?' - 'At what time is the moon red?'!). Knowing who to ask was probably another matter.

Cafe Greco

2007-03-07T12:59:00.000-08:00

After visiting the Palazzo Doria Pamphilij, I went for a stroll to the Piazza di Spagna to sit on the Spanish Steps. On the way, I ducked into the Café Greco on the Via Condotti (the famous shopping street I mentioned in an earlier post).

Because it was Friday night, I felt a little underdressed, flanked as I was by the Prada store, and next to it, Yves Saint Lauren, with Valentino and Armani just a few doors down. A lot, it seems, has changed since 1891, when Chekov wrote (in a letter to a Moscow friend), “neckties are amazingly cheap here, so terribly cheap that I may even take to eating them"!

Now, I remember in high-school debating the topic, ‘That clothes make the man’, and I objectively imagine myself not being fazed at all by such things, but being surrounded by fashionistas while wearing a t-shirt I picked up somewhere back home for ten bucks, coupled with being alone, made me feel as though I could do with a whiskey… or four.

And what better place to do this than Café Greco. This was the ‘local’ for countless eighteenth and nineteenth century artists; the café/bar’s regular clientele included Goethe, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Mark Twain, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nikolai Gogol, Byron, William Thackery and Hans Christian Anderson; composers, Liszt, Wagner, Bizet and Medelssohn; as well as mad King Ludwig of Bavaria (favourite subject of Australian infant terrible Michael Dransfield’s!). (Strangely enough, the café doesn’t really trade too much on this fact.)

I must’ve had three whiskeys in fifteen minutes at the bar, and was feeling quite a bit better. What’s more, they serve sandwiches and nuts with every drink – apparently it’s the law – so you get quite a meal with a few beverages. When I walked out onto the street I no longer cared a jot about the fashionistas (I suppose I wasn’t looking particularly derelict!), and felt altogether un-selfconscious.

I stopped only briefly at the Spanish Steps, wrote a few lines, then decided to leave. On my way back to the tram I took a detour and wandered into the Sant-Ignazio di Loyala, the church of the famous Jesuit saint (the first Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesu, is nearby, but I haven’t been in yet). Now I haven’t been to St. Peter’s (building up to it, you might say) but this is a remarkable church; the frescos on the ceiling, which must be ten storeys high, are very dramatic. Giant figures peer down at you as if they’re leaning over a ledge – all the more exciting, possibly, after a few whiskeys.

I spent about twenty minutes in the church with my jaw on the floor – when I left, I made the sign of the cross with some holy water on my forehead; it’s hard not to, really. As when in Westminster Abbey (see earlier post) all those years at a religious boarding school seemed to flood back; some habits are hard to break, it seems.

Palazzo Doria Pamphilij

2007-03-06T12:59:00.000-08:00

The Palazzo Dorio Pamphilij is, well, a palace; it also happens to contain one of Rome’s largest private collections of paintings. Some rooms have no paintings at all, just very high ceilings, Venetian velvets and tapestries lining the walls, busts of important family members, priceless antique furniture etc.

The most famous work here is the Spanish master Velasquez’s portrait of the most prominent family member, Pope Innocent X Pamphilij. It shares a room with a bust of the said Pope, carved by Bernini.

(Diego Velasquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1650)

When he saw Velasquez’s portrait, the Pope exclaimed ‘E troppo vero!’ – ‘It’s too real!’ You can see why; in this portrait, the Pope isn’t portrayed as some mythical or divine figure, surrounded by trumpeting angels or saints; he looks simply like an ageing man, weighed down by the burden of his office. The red velvet upholstery, curtains etc, all accentuate the true subject, the Pope’s all-too-human gaze.

Incidentally, the 20th century English painter Francis Bacon (see London posts on the Tate Britain and Tate Modern) reinterpreted this painting for one of his most famous works – I'd hoped this piece might've been at the Tate Britain, but it turns out it's in the US.

(Frances Bacon, Study After Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1953)

There are also two Caravaggios, exhibited side-by-side. That the artist used the very same model (‘reformed prostitute’) for the female figures in both was the cause of major controversy, because the two figures are The Virgin Mary, and the ‘working girl’ Mary Magdalene! (And I thought the problematic ‘madonna-whore’ dichotomy was particular to twentieth century feminism.) Moreover, Caravaggio has painted the former as though she was a contemporary (16th century) prostitute, rather than a biblical one.

Other highlights include works by Titian, Raphael (which disappointed me a little), Breughel the Elder, Guercino and Lorenzo Lotto. There’s also a ‘mini-Versailles’ room, gilt with gold from floor to ceiling; oh, and full of mirrors, of course.

When I have fears... / Keats's Grave

2007-03-06T12:55:00.001-08:00

The Protestant or “Non-Catholic” cemetery in Testaccio is a pleasant half hour’s walk from the studio, across the Tiber. Well, it would normally be pleasant, but on the day I went I happened to witness a hatchback plough flush into a motorcycle at an intersection at which I was waiting to cross. The motorcyclist seemed to do a 720 on the spot before being pinned between his vehicle and the car; he then stood up, clutching painfully at his shoulder. He was lucky not to have been killed, as I saw it; after my nerves had settled, I considered it a strangely apt prelude for my visit to the necropolis.

It’s fair to say I’d psyched myself up for this trip. The cemetery is the resting place of the two English Romantics, Keats and Shelley, as well as that of the great German poet, Wolfgang Goethe, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci and, as I discovered, the American beat poet Gregory Corso – among many others.

While it was Keats’ grave I was most interested in, it was probably Shelley’s that most moved me. I think this was because I’d placed so much importance on the former, that the latter took me somewhat by surprise.

You might recognise Ariel's lines from The Tempest. This place moved John Ruskin “to tears almost”; touched George Eliot “deeply”; Henry James considered it “a happy grave every way” and Wilde wrote a sonnet on both his and Keats’s grave.

Like burnt-out torches by a sick man’s bed
Gaunt cypress-trees stand round the sun-bleached stone;
Here doth the little night-owl make her throne,
And the slight lizard show his jeweled head.
And where the chaliced poppies flame to red,
In the still chamber of yon pyramid
Surely some Old-World Sphinx lurks darkly hid,
Grim warder of this pleasuance of the dead.

(from Wilde’s The Grave of Shelley)

(The nearby ‘pyramid’ to which Wilde refers is the tomb of Caius Cestius, minor Roman bureaucrat who died in 12 BC; it is about six to eight storeys tall, and is the only pyramid in Rome).

A few feet away from Shelley’s is the grave of Gregory Corso, Beat Poet whom Liam introduced to me all those years ago as an undergrad; I still remember him handing me two little books, one of Corso’s (the other was Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems), from City Lights, on the bus to UQ, perhaps around 1998.

If I’m reading the Latin correctly, I think Goethe is buried with his son; the grave is, like Shelley’s, between two massive cypress trees.

After these, it was to the oldest part of the cemetery, in search of Keats. The grave is in the corner, nearest to the main road. Keats arrived in Rome in November 1820, hoping to convalesce from his tuberculosis, but died four months later at the age of 25.

Oscar Wilde (here in 1877) visited the graves of the poets Keats and Shelley on the same day he had been granted audience with the Pope. It is said he prostrated himself before Keats’ grave more humbly than he did before the Pope – he remarked later that he considered Keats’ grave to be “the holiest place in Rome”.

I’ve recorded a recitation I made of Keats's sonnet, ‘When I have fears’, while standing before his grave, and though I made two minor errors, I’ll included it below as soon as I can sync the audio on youtube.

**

At sunset I thought I’d go to my favourite hill so far in Rome, the nearby hill of Aventino (photo, top). The views of the city (St. Peter’s straight ahead, the studio to the south, the historical centre to the north) are breathtaking. Plus, the magical orange grove and gorgeous little fountains are especially charming.

(Moonrise, Aventine hill)

Top 5 at the Capitoline Museums

2007-03-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

A few days after my visit to the Forum, I returned to the Piazza di Campidoglio to visit the Capitoline Museums, which together, in my estimation, are very close to being on par with the astonishing British Museum. Below are the five exhibits I spent the most time with on my first foray.

1. Bernini’s Medusa (Palazzo dei Conservatori)

A Hollywood actress could practice for a thousand years in front of a mirror and never for a frame achieve the cocktail of emotions present in this sculpture’s expression; nor a writer describe them. Horror, pain, bemusement, fear, anger and seductiveness – they’re all there. This is, I suppose, how she turns you to stone – the irony being that in this case, she is actually made of the stuff.

This is probably the work that held my attention the longest. What’s more, it’s helping me learn the difference between your dime-a-dozen sculptures (which are still good), and your absolute masterpieces (I haven’t yet seen Michelangelo’s Pieta at St. Peters, or Bernini’s Rape of Proserpine at the Museo Borghese, but have high expectations).

2. The Dying Galatian (Palazzo Nuovo)

Another sculpture, probably more famous than Bernini’s Medusa (above). A strong gladiator, having just received a fatal, piercing stab wound to the ribs, lies fallen, propped up on one hand as he looks to the earth, contemplating his imminent death (not my photo).

Lord Byron wrote of the statue in the fourth canto of his poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, noticing the staunch resistance to agony in the dying man’s expression, and imagining him in the ‘arena’ of the Coliseum as it ‘swims around him’:

I see before me the gladiator lie:
He leans upon his hand – his manly brow
Consents to his death, but conquers agony.
And his drooped head sinks low, –
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy; and now
The arena swims around him – he is gone,
Ere ceased the human shout which hailed the wretch who won.

(from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrammage, Canto IV)

When the American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the statue fifteen years after Byron’s poem was published, he couldn’t get past Byron’s famous lines: ‘The Dying Gladiator is a most expressive statue, but it will always be indebted to the muse of Byron for fixing upon it forever his pathetic thought.’ Neither, of course, could I.

3. The Hall of the Emperors / The Hall of the Philosophers (Palazzo Nuovo)

There are a few rooms in the Palazzo Nuovo that contain nothing but ancient marble busts of ancient dignitaries, and two of these rooms struck me particularly forcefully. The Hall of the Emperors was the one that made me shiver… when you walk in you are suddenly surrounded by virtually every man who ever ruled Rome, from the kind gaze of Vespasian, to the moody frown of Caracalla, to the thoughtful concern of Marcus Aurelius… uurgh.

Secondly, the Hall of the Philosophers, which also includes writers (Homer, Sophocles etc.). This is similarly eerie. There are a handful of similar busts in the British Museum (first post of this blog) but there must be about forty in this room.

4. D’Arpino’s frescoes (Palazzo dei Conservatori)

This is the only one of my top five that isn’t a work of sculpture. Don’t get me wrong, there is an extensive collection of paintings in these museums, with a few of the superstars, two Carravaggios that I saw, and a Rubens, for instance. Also a massive, three-storey tall Baroque altarpiece by Guercino. But the museum is really about the plastic, so to speak.

However, the frescoes in the first room you walk into caught my imagination, and I spent some time in this room. The walls are very large, with six frescoes altogether, two on each side wall, and one at each end, all depicting the founding of Rome. Each of the frescoes is perhaps seven or eight meters in length, maybe four meters high. Death features prominently; there are some enormous battle-scenes, horses’ eyes bulging, countless men clutching spears in their chests, everyone clambering over each other, the action happening in very close proximity, and at full tilt. Think Braveheart on pause, just as the armies are clashing, so you can study the expression on each crazed individual’s face.

5. Fragments of a Colossus: Constantine the Great

In the first courtyard of the museum there is a foot, an elbow, a hand, parts of two legs and a head (photo above, not mine) – all once presumably belonging to a colossal statue of the emperor who made Christianity the official Roman religion, and shifted the capital to modern day Turkey etc. The toes on the feet are about the length of your arm, and the size of your torso. It would be nice to see the thing whole, but it’s kind of fitting that it’s all in pieces.

Foreign Language Gaffe # 39

2007-02-26T13:04:00.000-08:00

After today, something tells me I'm never going to forget the name of one of Italy's most-read broadsheets!

This afternoon I was wandering through Testaccio (sort of clubbing district) and on an impulse decided to buy a newspaper. I saw a sign that said 'Il Messaggero', or 'The Messenger', evidently one of Italy's main newspapers.

So I walked up to the newspaper stand, but under pressure couldn't quite remember the exact name of the newspaper. 'Ah, un mass...agio per favore', I asked. In hindsight, the look on the guy's face was priceless; though at the time, I was only vaguely aware I'd made some kind of mistake. When I saw his response, I said, 'il giornale?' ('The newspaper?').

'Ah, Il Messaggero,' he said, with almost an audible sigh of relief.

It was only when I was walking down the street, trying to figure out what went wrong, repeating the word over and over to myself, that I realised (remembering having seen the word in the dictionary; and confirming it as soon as I got home): instead of asking for 'The Messenger', I'd actually asked for a massage!

In a way, it's kind of fun to be able to provide yourself with the best comic moments of the week... albeit unwittingly.

Fresco Battle: Raphael vs Testaccio Tags

2007-02-26T13:01:00.000-08:00

For a bit of fun, I thought I'd set up a Fresco Battle between Grand Master Raph (see post below), and a random crew from Testaccio.

Villa Farnesina (pt. 2)

2007-02-22T13:01:00.000-08:00

(Detail from the Loggia of Cupid & Psyche)

Yesterday I returned to the Villa Farnesina in Janiculum to check out the frescoes inside, particularly the Raphaels. Wow. A gorgeous villa, all the more breathtaking because every wall sports scores of visual interpretations of classical mythology. It's amazing to think that so many of the best painters were inspired by the best poets! Interesting too that the theme running through so many of these works seems to be that 'untamed desire really does transform the bearer' - ie. the central theme of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the main source for these Greek & Roman myths of transformation.

The Loggia of Cupid and Psyche (detail above) - depictions of which fill an entire room in the villa - is based not on Ovid, but on the three-part account of these lovers in Apulius' The Golden Ass. As soon as I got home, I read these tales in the English translation, and it's amazing how much more you can get from the work, even in hindsight, with a knowledge of the myth, which is summed up rather crudely as follows:

1. gorgeous girl, youngest of three sisters, is so famed for her beauty that Venus becomes jealous;

2. said jealous godess instructs her son Cupid to ruin the young woman, Psyche, by making her fall in love with some hideous beast;

3. directly contradicting his mother's wishes, naughty Cupid falls in love with Psyche himself; her own sisters also get jealous and try to ruin her (scene above), but get their just desserts;

4. Venus tries everything to 'get rid' of Psyche, but can't, as the innocent mortal is aided at every turn by some god or other;

5. in the end, Jupiter declares that the mischievous Cupid and a now-pregnant Psyche are to marry, and the story ends in a wonderful wedding feast.

Of course, the joy is in the poetry - and in this case, the paintings. The room is covered top to bottom with different scenes from this story.

Dear Raphael,

Please don't begrudge me taking the following furtive video of your wonderful fresco, The Triumph of Galatea, in the Villa Farnesina. I know I wasn't supposed to, but I dearly wanted to share it with my friends and family back home - even if the resolution quality on good old youtube doesn't come close to capturing the experience of standing before it. I want you to know I'm writing a poem in response to your masterpiece, though I realise this isn't a fair bargain, as the poem will no doubt pale in comparison. However, I do hope you understand my dilemma,

Yours sincerely,

JS

Roman Sunset

2007-02-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

From the balcony...

of the B.R.Whiting Studio...

in winter....

...after my first day at the Forum.

Forum

2007-02-20T11:23:00.003-08:00

I didn’t know quite what to expect from my first trip to the Forum, but I decided that if I couldn’t take it all in the first time, I wanted to see one thing: the Rostra - ie. the place where the great Roman orators such as Cicero addressed the populace all those years ago, where Brutus and Antony delivered their speeches after the assassination of Julius Caesar – indeed, where Shakespeare has Marc Antony deliver his famous speech… I’m sure you know the one.

From the tram terminus at the Largo di Argentina it’s only a five minute walk to the heart of Ancient Rome, the Capitoline Hill, the Forum and beyond, the Palatine and the Colosseum.

I made my way toward the Capitoline Hill, turned right down a side-street and beheld my first destination, the Cordonata, a massive marble staircase designed by Michelangelo, flanked by a pair of two-storey high statues, the horse-bound twin sons of Jupiter, Castor and Pollux. This leads to the Piazza del Campidoglio, also designed by said Michelangelo, which is a paragon of open urban design, surrounded by three impressive palaces, now great museums.

I was feeling perky, and was about up to race up the stairs, but decided first to get some smokes. I pulled into the nearest Tabacchi and tried to ask if I could pay for my cigarettes with credit card (I hadn’t found a ‘bancomat’ on my way), but unfortunately my voice came, as per usual here, a bit more like a mouse's than a Roman's. The woman at the counter, who clearly didn’t suffer bumbling tourists (ie. fools) gladly, threw a slab of words back at me that I realized afterwards must’ve meant, ‘What’s that? Come on, speak up a bit!’ – well, I lost any composure I had and asked my question again, but in English this time. Anyway, the answer was no, and I went away feeling like my positive vibes had been dashed. After reminding myself, however, that those are the breaks, I got back on the proverbial horse and pushed that feeling of humiliation back down to the place it sprung from; found a bancomat and returned, to again bumble my way through asking whether they had rollies etc. (I know this might sound a bit soft, but you’d be surprised how difficult it can be when you can’t alleviate feelings of uselessness by sharing them with another person.)

So it was with mixed feelings that I ascended the staircase and into the piazza. I’d bought a gelati (pistachio and something else) to cheer me up, and ate it as I sat on a slab of very cold marble, wondering why the hell I was eating gelati on a slab of cold marble in winter. Then I remembered: when in Rome...

As you leave the piazza, you come around a corner and the Forum is laid out before you. I had an idea that Monday might be the best day for the trip, assuming I wouldn’t have to contend with a throng of fellow trekkers. But if today was a quiet day, I’d hate to see it on a weekend.

It turns out the Rostra is one of the first things you come across when entering from the Campidoglio, though you might miss it if you aren't keeping your eye out. For me, though, this was the highlight. I stood on the Via Sacra (The Sacred Way) staring at it for ten minutes or more, though my imagination spanned two millenia, imagining all the speeches delivered from that marble ledge, Marc Antony offering Caesar the diadem, and Caesar refusing it; and later, Antony's wife, Fulvia, holding up Cicero's decapitated head in a rage and stabbing the dead orator's tongue with her hairpin.

If you keep your head down, it isn't too hard to mistake the sounds of hundreds of tourists' footsteps for those of ancient times.

Monastery of Sant'Ornofrio

2007-02-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of videos taken in the courtyard of the Monastery of Sant'Ornorio during my walk up the Janiculum hill (earlier post).

(Sant'Ornofrio pt. 1)

(Sant'Ornofrio pt. 2)

Janiculum Hill

2007-02-17T13:46:00.000-08:00

After lunch on Friday I went for a stroll up the Janiculum hill, along the Via Garibaldi, following in the footsteps of the eighteenth century writer John Ruskin, who, according to my literary companion to Italy, came this very way. It was on this hill that Garibaldi held off a major attack by French troops in 1849.

Walking up the hill, the first stop is the San Pietro in Montorio (‘St. Peter on the Golden Hill’); next door is the Tempietto, apparently the first true Renaissance building in Rome, a 'mini-temple' reportedly built on the very spot St. Peter was crucified (his grave is under the Papal Altar at the Vatican).

(Il Tempietto)

From here it’s about a hundred meters to the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, one of the best fountains in Rome, with a spectacular view overlooking the entire city below – and virtually unknown compared to the Trevi. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in 1835: “as often as once a week we pass the day there, amid the odor of its flowers, the rushing sound of its waters and the enchantments of poetry and music”.

Further along the way is the giant Garibaldi Monument; the walk-way is lined with the busts of the generals who held off a vastly superior French army for a month; ‘Roma o Morte’ reads the plaque on the monument: “Rome, or Death!” There were quite a few lovers, too, in this place of fighters, canoodling by the edge of the hill, the whole of the city spread out like a banquet below.

The next stop was something I’d been looking forward to: La Quercia del Tasso, or ‘Tasso’s Oak’. The great Italian poet, Torquanto Tasso, liked to sit here in the days before his death in 1595. It is a strange sight though: not much at all is left of the tree, which sprouts up through a plinth of memorial bricks, its trunk and remaining few branches supported by rather ugly iron corseting; add to this a lightning strike from 1843, and there’s nothing much really to speak of. It really is in a sorry state; I might add that I found an empty Foster’s bottle catching the sunlight by the base of the tree, which was a nice detail for the small poem I’m writing on the experience.

Nearby, further along the hill, was probably the highlight of the walk for me, as I didn’t even plan on visiting the Sant’Onofrio. Thankfully I ducked into this little monastery courtyard, emerging from the rush of nearby Vatican traffic and into a sanctuary of silence. The church was founded in 1419, bears some wonderful frescoes, and was the death place of Tasso. The serene courtyard overlooks the city; I sat on the bench, and wrote a few lines. After then finding some inconspicuous plaques on the side of the church, one written in German with the word ‘Goethe’ and the other in French with the word ‘Chateaubriand’, I looked in my literary guide, and found it confirmed that many great writers had made the pilgrimage to this very courtyard, including Goethe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Longfellow, Chateaubriand and John Cheever.

On the way home, along the Tiber, I visited the Villa Farnesina, former abode of a wealthy Sienese banker, which is famous for its frescoes, particularly the Triumph of Galatea and Loggia of Cupid and Psyche, both by Raphael, and others by Baldassarre Peruzzi. Unfortunately, it was too late in the day, and the place was closed… so instead I wandered around the gorgeous gardens, hedgerows, orange trees, fountains etc, with not another soul in the entire place. I sat and wrote a few more lines, thinking on how Raphael and his model cum mistresses might’ve frolicked in this very spot; then decided to leave just as the sun was setting behind the Janiculum hill.

(Villa Farnesina)

Pinacoteca

2007-02-13T06:00:00.001-08:00

Thursday night I was invited by my contact at the embassy to an Art Gallery opening, an exhibition by a Sydney-based artist, so I could meet the Australian ambassador and his wife. Because it was nearby, I thought I’d go via the Trevi fountain, which, like almost everything I’ve found so far, I sort of stumbled across by accident, when I actually thought it was a few more streets away. It was dusk, and the blue lit water looked quite magical; I threw a few cents in but forgot to make a wish; in fact, I thought it was just for general good fortune, until I saw a Japanese man close his eyes and concentrate extremely hard before he threw his coins in.

I then got lost, which is not fun when on one’s own in Rome. All of this teething stuff is starting to get to me… but pain means gain, I suppose. I really do feel like a virgin, wandering everywhere for he first time with no real understanding of where I’m going. I can see how one could get very low when not versed in the tongue of the country they’re in; it’s like studying all the time, with no respite. You simply can’t keep trying to understand a language you know about one or two percent of, without it taking its toll. But it’s a matter of simply (or not so simply) riding it out, seeing off whatever darkness threatens, knowing somewhere deep down that it will pass, and that all is well.

I finally found the street, by the Piazza Barberini, and eventually, the gallery, or pinacoteca. I’d dressed up, and was terribly nervous, but the Ambassador was relaxed, and I’d worked myself up over nothing really. He told me that he is now president of the ‘non-Catholic’ cemetery across the river from me, which I didn’t know about. He told me that both Keats and Shelley, and many others are buried there – I’ve since done some research, and will make a day of it sometime soon.

The paintings were of Australian landscapes, and the clouds were particularly good, stained with a murky, khaki-grey indicating imminent thunderstorms. Those recognizable, wide open spaces, foreboding yet rife with possibility, together with suitably Raymond Carver-esque titles were like a little piece of home. I met some people about my age, all visual artists, mainly locals and one guy from New York who’d come here four years ago on a scholarship and decided to stay. The artist Jason Benjamin was also relaxed, though he said he was feeling severely jetlagged.

As the evening wound down, I took my leave. I ventured a different way to the way I came, and managed to wander straight into the Piazza di Spagna from a side street, without intending to. Keats died in the house right on the corner, by the Spanish Steps, but the museum was closed as it was late. Another time. I left via the Via Condotti, which, for those fashionistas out there, must be the street for shopping, with all of the famous designer stores here one after the other, Gucci, Dolce & Gabana, Armani… you get the idea.

This was really just a lazy stroll back to the Largo Argentina, where you get the tram to Trastevere. I strolled down the Via del Corso, but didn’t get to Goethe’s former abode, which I think is down the far end. I went past the Palazzo Venezia (from which Mussolini addressed the people below), took some photos at Il Vittoriano (“The Typewriter”) then headed back to the tram stop.

Pantheon Writing

2007-02-12T12:03:00.003-08:00

Buona sera! Over the flu and out and about... Having been quite frugal so far, I thought I'd treat myself to un bicchiere di vina bianca, which was €4.50, at this cosy little ristorante / cafe. Very worth it. Then I had some gelati (baci & orange chocolate) on my way back to the tram... to top off a fabulous winter Sunday.

Starting to get into the swing of things, though in truth I'm still terrified every time I open my mouth to try to speak the language - and 'timid' is one word that certainly isn't associated with communication here! You have to put your whole body into your speech, even if only subtly... made a few friends in Trastevere (see post below) who are giving me some tips.

The Pantheon (background!) is wonderful - formerly the place you'd go to worship all the Roman gods at once, and so the best preserved of all the ancient monuments in Rome.

This cafe certainly ranks right up there with two others I've been to recently in New Zealand with Emma over Christmas (one at the top of the sky gondola in Queenstown, overlooking Lake Wakatipu, the other at the Hermitage at the base of Aoraki / Mt. Cook). Em, that seat across from me has your name on it ;-D Va bene!

Kevid Rudd's Anaphora

2007-02-12T12:03:00.001-08:00

Well, as an addendum to the previous post regarding Obama vs Howard, I thought I'd mention that my ears pricked up at a curious sound today. If I'm not mistaken, it was the sound of a modicum of rhetorical flair rearing its head in Australian politics.

Fancy my surprise when, listening to the news on the ABC website, I heard the following from Kevin Rudd (verbatim, my transcript):

"To accuse the Democratic Party of the United States, as being Al Qaeda’s party of choice; to accuse the Democratic Party as being the terrorist’s party of choice - this is a most serious charge. To accuse the party of Roosevelt; to accuse the party of Truman; to accuse the party of Kennedy and Johnson, of being the terrorist’s party of choice.

I cannot understand how any responsible leader of this country can say to the nation that it is his serious view that the Democratic Party of the United States is the terrorist’s party of choice, but these are your words Prime Minister. "
____________

Clearly, the speechwriter knows what he/she is doing, employing two of the oldest tricks in the book: anaphora, the repetition of a phrase ('to accuse') at the commencement of successive clauses; and anadiplosis, the repetition of a phrase ('terorist's party of choice') at the end of successive clauses.

Many great speeches use such classical techniques, not least of all MLK's 'I have a dream' and JFK's Civil Rights address. The winds of change...?

& in the Red Corner...

2007-02-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

(Warning: the following post may contain traces of bile.)

Well, now I've heard it all. Embarrassing. Nauseating. If JWH wasn't the Prime Minister of a sovereign nation, Senator Obama wouldn't even have to bend down to wipe that shit off his shoe. Alas...

The central fact is pure and simple: surely, those responsible for a catastrophe should not lecture others on how to avert one.

Mr. Obama is of a completely different political species to John Howard; he is of the breed that is, in fact, the only thing that prevents me from harbouring all-out anti-Americanism.

I am well aware the US has both the best and the worst. At the very top end of the spectrum, the US produces the type of politician that is found nowhere else... enterprising, deeply ethical yet not sententious, courageous but without the bravado, understanding, firm but not heavy-handed, intelligent, purposeful, tolerant, eloquent. Obama is all these and more, of the highest order of human being, in my estimation, the type of person who should be the leader of the free world.

(If you haven't already watched his DNC speech from 04, click here. (My favourite part is from 7:00 - 7:50). And when you've finished, watch part 2.)

Howard is, of course, pretty much the opposite. Obstreperous, recalcitrant, arrogant, narrowminded, intolerant.

So Obama can calmly, but firmly brush away the flies. He's well-prepared specifically for this type of rubbish. When I first saw the video linked above, mid-way through last year, I unfortunately thought, 'that's the way you talk if you want to get shot in the US'.

After teaching Julius Caesar last year, I got to thinking that, of all the bullets fired in the twentieth century, the sound of the one that got JFK echoes the loudest - a case of the US knocking off it's own brightest star, the very epitome of its greatness, the embodiment of its core principles found in its Declaration of Independence.

I pray that my generation doesn't ever hear that particular sound.

(Thought I'd add this photo, for good measure)

E tu Brute? / Area Sacra dell'Argentina

2007-02-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

One of only two trams in Rome stops pretty much right outside the studio here in Trastevere, and heads straight into Rome’s ‘historical centre’, near the Campo del Fiori, at the Largo di Argentina.

Once off the tram you virtually trip over the Area Sacra dell’Argentina, a wonderful set of ruins the size of a small city block – four Republican temples, fluted columns, non-descript blocks of marble, dating back to 300BC, and so some of the oldest in Rome – sunk about ten meters below the pavement, so that you lean over a set of railings and peer right into it.

This was the site of the original Senate, and, according to a guide book, of Julius Caesar’s assassination. Imagine it occurring on the steps in the photos below.

I’ve been here before, but there are a number of things of particular interest about the place.

Firstly: as I mentioned, Julius Caesar was stabbed in the back here by his buddy Brutus for getting too big for his boots. Having re-read the play last year, I distinctly remember the assassins (Brutus, Cassius et al) rushing to intercept him before he made it to the Forum, and I can now imagine the scene unfolding in this very place, about five minutes walk from said Forum.

Secondly: the excavation of this site was overseen by Mussolini; he actually rejected requests by developers to build over the site, opting instead to restore it. Apparently, at the opening of the newly excavated site, he remarked in typical fashion: “I should like to have brought to me here those who opposed this work, to have them shot on the spot.” Now I’m not one for Fascism, but there’s something admirable in this fierce riposte to over-zealous developers. (The source I’m taking this from suggests he didn’t mean this literally; but who knows.)

Finally, and more obviously, the ruins have in recent years become a kind of refuge for the city’s enormous stray cat population. In the late sixties there were apparently 784,000 of the furballs, though their population has drastically declined. Anyway, it’s quite a sight to see cats of all different colours, shapes and sizes cruising about, reclining, playing, fighting, play-fighting, pouncing, stalking etc through the ruins. Lovers mill along the rails, cooing, picking out favourites and wiling away entire hours.

Trastevere & West End, Brisbane.

2007-02-11T10:27:00.000-08:00

I can now confirm that the suburb the studio is in is pretty much the equivalent of my former abode, West End in Brisbane, in a number of ways, chief among which is its proximity to the city centre.

The suburb is across the Tiber (hence, Trans-Tiber... Trastevere) from the CBD, somewhat toward the lower end of the market (though as those at home know, West End in Brisbane is now nearly completely gentrified) and very, very funky. In an ancient kind of way. A maze of charming winding streets and alleys packed with restaurants and bars.

After shaking the cold (am now dragging around a cough, but everyone in Rome at the moment it seems is getting over a cold), I thought it was time to do a little exploring. I'd planned originally to visit an Aussie pub called Ned Kelly, but fortunately fate intervened in the form of an alternative impulse and kicked my unadventurous backside off the tram in Trastevere proper.

I'd looked in the trusty Lonely Planet for a straniero-friendly, and picked one, Mr. Brown's; but I soon realised I had buckley's of finding one pub in the maze of alleyways and sidestreets... so I thought I'd wing it, and after about fifteen minutes I pulled into a bar with no signage, from which an ambient blue light (and some English words!) emanated. Also, it was still happy hour.

After about five minutes at the bar, I noticed, up on the wall, a display cabinet, and in the cabinet, something remarkable: an old cricket bat, three stumps and a ball! A warmth spread slowly throughout my body; I'd come to the right place. Then I saw the actual sign: 'Mr. Brown's'! The one pub I'd stumbled into completely at random, having wandered blindly from laneway to laneway, turned out to be the very one I was looking for in the first place!

Anyway, I spent most of the night propping up the bar with a couple of guys, one from New Zealand, the other from Belgium. The bartenders were locals, but originally from Ethiopia and Bangladesh. We then formed a table, at which no two people were from the same country! Going round the table, we had a Welsh, a Scot, a French, an American, a Portugese, a Belgian, an Italian, a Kiwi and an Aussie!

My heart sank a bit when I realised most everyone has much, much more Italian than I do, though they all understood I was fresh off the boat - it's particularly depressing when you try out your very best 'una Heiniken per favore' and the waitress justs laughs at you, before addressing you in English! But by the end of the night I was doing much better, and seemed to have a small reservoir of words that I could draw from to make conversation with the locals (plus of course many of them have a fair bit of English).

'Grande Fratello'... 'Big Brother': Italian Style

2007-02-08T09:49:00.001-08:00

A few days of constant rain combined with being sick gave me a chance to check out some Italian television. Now I first thought - wouldn't it be great if I didn't watch TV the entire time I'm here. But after switching it on on the weekend, I've realised how helpful it can be. Now I have it on while I'm studying Italian in the mornings.

One of the most helpful things are the children's shows! Think playschool, where they pronounce each word slowly, and use very basic sentence structures. Fantastic. Game shows can be hilarious (I still haven't figured out what you have to do in most of them) but you can hear common expressions all the time. Apparently there's an Italian version of 'Deal or No Deal' that is as supercharged with emotion as any opera (tears, the lot!)!

'Grande Fratello' ('Big Brother') is not that helpful with the learning, but it is mildly intriguing nevertheless. Whereas the Aussie version is replete with tracksuit pants, scratching arses, and general bogan behaviour, the Italian version is, unsurprisingly, the complete opposite. Even the most casual dresser in the house still looks as though they've just 'casually' stepped off a catwalk somewhere... oh, and the host is much more attractive than Gretel Killeen. The similarities, on the other hand, are just as intriguing as the differences - the underlying constant, raw human behaviour and emotion etc. But let's not go too far. I've only caught this show once, and I think that is enough.

The Not So Quiet American

2007-02-08T09:48:00.001-08:00

The rumours appear to be true. Today I heard a frustrated American customer at the internet cafe I'm using actually BEGIN SHOUTING (IN ENGLISH) WHEN HE REALISED THE ATTENDANT COULDN'T UNDERSTAND HIM (IN ENGLISH). (The request was a rather complex one, involving the transfer of money).

I've got not idea how this guy thought he could get his point across any clearer by raising the roof. When the attendant kindly asked him, in Italian, to cease shouting, even I could understand him - though I didn't know the words he was using; any non-Italian speaker could've. Except for the gentleman in question, it seemed.

Needless to say, the Italian gentleman then developed a sudden air of the well-then-you-can-go-fuck-yourself-if-you're-going-to-keep-shouting-at-me-after-I've-asked-you-nicely-not-to variety, and the American left in a state of exasperation - much to the relief of all in the internet cafe. (I suppose I should add that I realise this may not be restricted to, nor representative of American people per se...)

Roma: il primo 72

2007-02-05T13:21:00.001-08:00

Well, I've arrived safe and sound in Rome, though I now have the flu - a combination of a reasonably large week in London, and the air around the Colosseum. (The eponymous hero in the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller, actually dies after taking in the miasma around the Colosseum... fortunately malaria is no longer endemic here, as it was in the 19th century!)

Below are some rather hasty videos from my first 72hrs in Rome... I hope it gives anyone who's interested a good idea of where I'm staying. Please note, these videos aren't the greatest, but they will get better with experience etc. (As with all youtube vids, unless you have very quick bband, perhaps best to press pause until they've fully loaded, then watch them etc...)

(Disclaimer: the audio on some of these videos is out of sync; I've since converted others into a format that allows for synchronised audio, but the trade-off is a poorer image. Also, inexperience in posting videos is a factor. The videos also come with a severe AAW: Australian Accent Warning - no doubt something I'm noticing even more so in Rome than in London!)

1. Gardening at the B.R. Whiting Studio on a sunny Roman winter's day; a fairly uneventful vid, but shows the view from the studio. I'd originally had an introduction to this one, explaining that I'm obliged to water the plants etc, but had to cut it due to file size restrictions...

2. Colosseo with gladiator! (Again, this one is brief and not so good... will post a better one in the coming days/weeks). Notice how the gladiator says 'Kangaroo' when I tell him I'm from Australia!

It's a shame the batteries ran out on this one - he let me kill him twice, rather gruesomely. And then he asked me for 5 euros! I gave him 1. [The person holding the camera for me in this one is Maria Hyland, former resident and shortlistee for the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for Carry Me Down - and, generously, tour guide for my first trip into the city centre.]

3. Jaya's new jacket... my cold got a lot worse after this! (Audio definitely out of sync on this one.)

I Shot the Sheriff / Last Beer in Brixton

2007-02-04T13:09:00.000-08:00

Here's a video of Liam and I having one last pint (or two) in Brixton before I left for Rome the next morning. On at least two occasions between the tube station and the pub we were offerred 'wicked skunk, wicked skunk mun!' - the Jamaican guys here were clearly not the 'trustafarians' we saw in Notting Hill (see earlier post, 'Flogged in Notting Hill')!

Stepping out of the KFC (where you can buy a bite-sized burger for 99p) we plunged into a haze of gunja smoke. Liam then pointed nonchalantly across the road at the McDonalds and said, "Someone got shot there".

The first half of this video is very shaky, but the second half is still. It is is fairly uneventful, just us at the bar; and the whole thing seems slightly warped, as I took it while the camera was on it's side, and had to alter it afterwards. Still, fun for a bit of a laugh...

5 Signs you migh be Getting Over Impressionism (& Postimpressionism!)

2007-02-04T10:35:00.001-08:00

1. You find yourself intellectualising Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
2. Cezanne’s large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) fails to actually move you.
3. The time you spend looking at Monet’s The Water Lily Pond can only be measured on a digital stop-watch.
4. The pleasure you take from Renoir’s The Umbrellas is entirely due to the fact that it reminds you of a poem. (In this case the poem is by Luke Beesley… I don’t remember the title, but I know it ends with umbrellas opening at once all over the city.)
5. You are compelled to write a somewhat (but not altogether) facetious list such as this, and post it on a blog.

(Cezanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses 1894-1905)

Since seeing my first major da Vinci, Raphael, Caravaggio, so on and so forth, my respect for those artists loosely known as the ‘Impressionists’ has started to wane (and for the sake of this discussion, I’m including Manet and Cezanne in this group).

The controversial nature of their exhibitions around the fin di siecle was of course due mostly to their apparent disregard for mimetic fidelity, in favour of some other insight into the nature of human perception; whereas many of the figures in mimetic art, from the Renaissance (particularly da Vinci, Michaelangelo's and Bernini's scultures etc) onward, are so lifelike it wouldn’t be a surprise to see one start breathing right there on the canvas.

My gripe is not solely based on this unfortunate comparison between Impressionism and Renaissance painting and sculpture, in terms of ‘realism’ or mimetic fidelity. But the fact is I now seem to be able to only take an intellectual pleasure from most of the so-called 'Impressionists'; how Cezanne flattens the canvas for others to follow, how Van Gogh’s sunflowers are strangely tormented. In short, whereas once they meant something in and of themselves, they have been reduced, for me, to little more than a stepping stone, ie. to Cubism and Abstract Expressionism etc.

In short, give me a good Pollock, Frank Stella, Rothko or whomever else over a good Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec etc any day. For the record, my two favourites from this exhibition of Impressionist paintings in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, were Monet’s The Houses of Parliament (partly because I’d only just seen these in London myself and because I like sunsets) and Camille Pissarro’s The Boulevard Montmarte at Night (because I haven’t yet seen Paris, and it looks pretty at night on this canvas).

(Pissarro, Le Boulevard Montmartre, effet de nuit 1897)

Maxwell's Silver Hammer

2007-02-03T13:47:00.001-08:00

Ext. Abbey Road Studios - My final day in London before heading off to Rome was a relaxing one. I didn't leave Liam's place until after lunch, but even so, failed to make it to Lords (aka the home of cricket - forgive me guys) though it was only 400 yards down the road. I had to hurry off to meet Liam at the National Gallery after he'd finished work.

There was a handful of fellow pilgrims around, stopping the peak-hour traffic, which kept tooting. Wasn't able to get the exact angle from which the Abbey Road album covershot was taken, as I'd gone on my own.

I still, however, managed to get a rather dorky video of me crossing the road (see below). (The tripod I bought on the advice of both Emma and Katie has probably turned out to be the best 5 quid I've spent so far).

Soho

2007-02-03T13:45:00.001-08:00

This pub is called The White Horse.

Evensong / Marriage of Heaven & Hell

2007-02-03T06:05:00.000-08:00

After visiting the Tate Britain (see earlier post) I caught the tube to Westminster to work on the poem I'm writing for Pete Minter for the SWF this year (which Pete has organised to appear on postcards during the festival) - and found my way to The Red Lion, a pub about two minutes walk from Downing street, a stone's throw from Big Ben.

At 5 o'clock, after two pints, I headed for the Westminster Abbey to partake in the evensong. No, I'm not suddenly bjorn again, but neither do I really want to admit that I went just to get free entry to see the place, particularly the famous Poets' Corner.

I walked in late (ie. after the Lord's Prayer) and took a seat on the right, in the very back row. Recalling my Catholic boarding school education - though the abbey is Anglican - I pulled out my pious face and sang along to the hymns. If the truth be known, it is a very moving experience, listening to the wonderful choir singing along to Bach arrangements, enough almost to convert a fairly godless soul such as myself.

It turned out that I'd stumbled on a particularly special event - the consummation of a 25 year-long dialogue between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Anglican... with the Archbishop of Constantinople and the Archbishop of Canterbury addressing the congregation in their appeal for harmony (which seemed fairly heavily politicised).

Now the funny thing is, when mum decided it was finally time to splash some water on my head at the age of about twelve, it happens that it was in the name of the Orthodox church, so I found some personal significance in the event.

Anyway, throughout the whole thing, a bust of William Blake happened to be staring me down at about five paces (certainly ironically). It wasn't until the end of the service that I got up, took two steps to my right, and realised I'd been virtually sitting on Shakespeare's bones. I was the closest person in the entire place to Poets' Corner.

I scribbled down a list of all the writers apparently buried there, but it turns out some of the memorials were simply that, memorials, and not the peeps' final resting place - though some of the following are, apparently, actually buried there:

Jimmy Dryden, Dylan Thommo, Wazza Auden, Al Tennyson, Davo Lawrence, Tommo S Eliot, Will Owen, Bill Wordsworth, Chuck Dickens, Sammy Johnson, Matty Arnold, Geoff Chaucer, Bobbie Browning, Jim Keats, the Bronte babes, and Peebs Shelley. And of course, Bill Shakers.

Waterloo to Tate Modern / 5 Favourite Headfucks at the Tate Modern

2007-02-02T09:31:00.001-08:00

(Disclaimer: this list is somewhat predictable and may be boring for aficionados... Nick, Dave ;-D).

1. ‘The Rothko Room’ by Marc Rothko. Of course, any Rothko is moody – think the look on a Shapelle Corby’s face when convicted, expressed as variegated colour. But in this room, moody is an understatement.

(The Rothko Room)

The four walls are like a migraine just as the valium’s kicking in: the throb with the receptiveness, the thump with the rush. There’s a guilty pleasure to be had here also in the subtle figurations; gaping squares like mental yawns, straight lines like lazy sneezes. (Come on, it is abstract art after all). To me the room seemed to express the whole gamut of consciousness.

2. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) by Francis Bacon. Long before an otherwise unknown actor begged of Sigourney Weaver, “Kill me!” in the Aliens franchise, there was Francis Bacon. If you ever hear anyone complain about being treated like a piece of meat, refer them to the plight of Bacon’s sitters. These ghastly abominations sum up your worst imagined idea of suffering (probably a bit like being nailed through the wrists, having your legs broken etc) physical and mental. For some reason, the deep arterial-blood-red background always comes up as orange in the prints.

3. The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) by Giorgio de Chirico. I'd never really understood this iconic painting before, but standing before it I felt something slip out from under my feet like, well, a banana-skin.

(The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) by Giorgio di Chirico)

The comparatively pliant feminine torso turning to face us is juxtaposed with the bunch of bananas, which is much like the feminine torso as if it were lying down. The bananas are, of course, individuated, but as a group, they constitute a body.

The key, perhaps - and also to the title - is the single banana that is detached from the bunch. How can a bunch of individuated objects respresent something else - without there being something left over? How does a poet assemble a bunch of individuated words to imitate life? How can a bunch of words be a body, and why is there always a word that doesn't fit, a remainder - something that can't be said? These and many more imponderables saw this de Chirico make my top 5 headfucks at the Tate Modern.

4. The Metamorphosis of the Narcissus by Salvador Dali. Well, does having a print on one’s wall back when one was still listening to The Doors mean it too is to be grown out of? That’s for you to decide. But for me, seeing this up close and personal was like, well… like Ovid cumming all over my retinas. (Okay, so that one’s a bridge too far... oh no! I'm sounding like Kevin Rudd.)*

5. Piet Mondrian. This one’s lengthy but worth it. Now normally Mondrian wouldn’t make such a list, but this is an exception. Though I don’t recall the exact name of the painting, it was one of his famous ‘red, yellow and blue’ compositions. The headfuck begins like this: in such a Mondrian the red, yellow and blue is usually snug within the vertical and horizontal black axes, so that from front-on, all is clearly contained; but peering around to the edge of the canvas, I noticed one tiny moment ie. about 1 cm sq where the red ‘bleeds’ out, into where the black line should be – clearly intentional. This is not done with any other square of colour. Now I thought this was perceptive of me, and I believe I mumbled ‘smartarse’ aloud. But that’s not the headfuck. About an hour later, I recalled that around seven years ago at uni, my sometime art history lecturer Rex Butler had described this very detail to us once in class (HA105). Later that night (ie. a few nights ago now) – and this is the screw – guess who appeared in my dream – and actually shook my hand. The one and only Rex Butler. It wasn’t until a few hours after I woke up that I realized the significance (at first I wondered, why the hell did I see Rex Butler in my dream?). So I’d noticed Mondrian’s smartarse detail; then remembered Rex Butler describing it to my class seven years ago; then that night dreamt that I shook Rex Butler’s hand, and didn’t figure it out until lunch the next day.

And to top it all off, two days later, I came across another Mondrian in the Tate Britain, same vintage, in which he’d done exactly the same thing – only this time with the yellow square, rather than the red.

Tate Britain

2007-02-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

Int. Chelsea. Today I hoped to see Van Gogh's Portrait with Bandaged Ear at Somerset House, but changed my mind at the last minute and headed for the Tate Britain (which was free, whereas Somerset House is about £5) in the hope of seeing some more Francis Bacons (which were promised). In effect I was swapping one tortured soul for another...

Of course the sandwiches at the gallery cafe were around five quid each, so I ducked despondently across the road and fortuitously noticed a doorway into the Chelsea School of Art and Design, through which I spied a good old uni refectory. This made me feel at home, particularly with a sandwhich and coffee for two quid fifty.

As it turned out, the Bacons weren't on display - this is something you have to learn to deal with when visiting galleries: sometimes the works that are your entire reason for going aren't displayed - but this gives you a chance to see something you otherwise wouldn't.

The surprise highlight for me was the Turner Wing. I'd never really been a fan of Turner's, but this is overwhelming. Massive canvasses, perhaps forty or more, depicting some of the most dramatic scenes of the ancient world (the rise and fall of Carthage, the coupling of Echo and Narcissus, Hannibal crossing the Alps etc), amid heaving oceans, treacherous mountains and shitscary storms. They are usually dazzling with light and the style is, to this amateur, proto-impressionist; or, as Liam put it, it's as if at times he out-Monets Monet.

(Turner, Hannibal Crossing the Alps 1812)

Then there was Ophelia (1851-52) by Sir John Everett Millais. Being a bit of a bardolator, there was a definite thrill in seeing this one up close.

Hey there Emily Tomlins! This post is dedicated to you! (Let me explain for others who might not be aware, that Ms Tomlins is to play Ophelia in the joint QTC/SATC production of Hamlet in '07). I do believe I first saw this on her's and Mars's wall in Herston, circa 2001. (Yes, I was a latecomer!).

The detailed foliage (top left) into which, or rather through which the drowning Ophelia gazes, was considered during its day to be the most precise representation of nature ever achieved. This is, obviously, more evident on close inspection.

All in all, though, the National Gallery is probably more exhilirating if you like the older stuff; if it's now you're interested in, see my post below on my 5 Favourite Headfucks at the TATE MODERN...

The Wooden O

2007-01-31T15:56:00.003-08:00

After the Tate Modern, we wandered a few doors down to check out The Globe, Bill Shakeschaffe's (there are spies everywhere, even still) old fixerupper. Okay, so it's a cracker, but we didn't do the tour, or a show, as it was nearly 10 quid, and we wanted to do some other things - also, I thought I could wait till Em gets over.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel

2007-01-31T15:56:00.001-08:00

After checking out the Globe, Liam and I walked across the Millenium Bridge to St. Paul's, certainly the most impressive building I've seen close up (though as I write this in Rome, it's recently been trumped by a couple of others!... more on that later). Then it was down Fleet Street in search of the former house of one Dr. Johnson.

We found the alleyway fairly easily, and ducked into a courtyard. It was quite obvious which was his place, four (or was it five) storeys worth of apartment (which, incidentally, he left to his black servant, Frank). So this was where much of the first English dictionary was written. It was here too that I was reminded (given the recent furor over the Aussie flag at the Sydney BDO, which was just as I was leaving Aus) of one of his many great pithy maxims - which I've used for the title of this post.

(below: Dr. Johnson's stairwell)

Then it was off through Grey's Inn, to the former house of one Chuck Dickens. We eventually found the place, but by the time we got there (as with Freud's place - see earlier post) it was shut. There were people moving in next door, and I wondered aloud whether they liked the idea of moving next door to Dickens' old place. "Maybe they hate Dickens," said Liam. I think he was getting tired of all this jaunting about.

(Liam outside Dickens' former house)

We were going to have a beer back home, but I convinced Liam to have one at a pub in the West End called The Fitzroy, which I'd recently read in the Time Out guide to West End pubs was, yes, you guessed it, once a writers' haunt. A red bus later and we were there, ordering a pint with the ghosts of Georgey Orwell, Dylan Thommo, Bernie Shaw & Ginnie Wolf.

(Pint at The Fitzroy.)

Covent Garden: Lamb & Flag

2007-01-31T06:34:00.001-08:00

Int. Covent Garden. On the Saturday evening, after visiting the National Portrait Gallery, Liam and Katie took me for a beer at the Lamb and Flag, one-time favourite watering hole of Charles Dickens', and, long before him, John Dryden's... can't get enough of this.

(at the Lamb & Flag)

Now it might seem that these 'literary' pubs are everywhere, but they're not. It takes a bit of energy find these places, and I know I'm starting to wear Liam out - which is exactly what I expect him to do to me when he gets to Rome!

5 Observations from the National Portraiture Gallery

2007-01-31T06:33:00.000-08:00

1. JOHN DONNE was one stylish homie, proto-Byronesque if this portrait by an ‘unknown artist’ is anything to go by; arms folded, he wears a massive broad-brimmed hat tilted upwards, and sports a thin, pimpin ‘tache. His brown velvet jacket looks like something you’d see in St. Kilda.

2. DAPHNE de MAURIER was a babe. Check that: uber-babe (though not as much of an uber-babe as my babe, Em, of course). Her eyes are warm, her flapper hair-do exceedingly becoming. This portrait was painted when she was sixteen, so it’s probably indecent to say so.

3. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, author of Astrophel and Stella, the sonnet sequence more highly regarded than Shakespeare’s in its day, was, like Donne, also a stylemonger. His Elizabethan ruff is noticeably restrained, as is his bling, which he kept to one fuckoff chunky ring on the index finger of his left hand.

4. JOHN MILTON looked like a baby at 21. His eyes bulge from his head like he is seeing the world for the first time. Perhaps this is the real answer to the mystery of his blindness in middle age.

5. CHARLES DICKENS was also rather youthful looking – which is no surprise, considering this portrait was painted when he was twenty-seven, just after he’d finished writing The Pickwick Papers. His black suit is very business-like, but then so, one might say, is his prose.

Essentials: Westminster to Trafalgar Square

2007-01-31T05:25:00.000-08:00

Canterbury, NZ

2007-01-30T16:33:00.000-08:00

Thought I'd put this one up for my sweetheart... Canterbury Province is where Emma is from, where her family lives and where we stayed when in NZ over Christmas. It is also, of course, the home of undoubtedly the strongest Super 14 team since the competition started, the Canterbury Crusaders!

Flogged in Notting Hill

2007-01-30T16:32:00.002-08:00

Int. A bar in West London, Notting Hill. Saturday night, and it just happened to be Rod and his partner BK's going away. Rod, an old mate of Liam's, had been in London for four or so years and was leaving on the following Tuesday. Liam and I had agreed to a 'quiet one' given I was about as jetlagged as one could be (having not slept much my first night), but of course this just wasn't going to happen.

After the first couple of pints Liam decided to show me a few of the different beers: we started with a Fruli, a strawberry Belgian beer, which was very drinkable, and though it seemed a bit girlie, there seemed to be no shame in a bloke drinking it. Then we had some banana, vanilla and something-else, which they had on tap, another belgian - more straightforward but with a hint of the other flavours. Fanfuckintastic.

When midnight came around, Rod suggested we go to a nearby club. Again, can't remember the name, but it was (I found out later) pretty much the true West London experience, a funky, fairly small basement beneath a cocktail lounge, filled with heaps of happening mofos, nymerous 'trustafarians' (apparently the term for rastafarians with a trust fund) and other types who could probably afford it more than me, but who also had more street cred than me. The place was R&B/Hip-Hop with a dash of Old-skool for good measure, and it pretty much went off. Liam and I both agreed it was better not to have had a quiet one after all.

(I might add that on this, my second night in London, I also had my first, real 'it's a small world' moment... not jawdropping, but authentic nevertheless. So, was chatting with an expat named Davey and he asked if I liked cricket; I mentioned I played in a comp back at home, and when he found out it was the Brisbane Bands Comp (hey all you Apes) - well, there were celebrations all round. It turns out he played in the same comp about 7 years ago, and is the brother of a guy named Liam, one of the absolute guns of the comp (I know him more by reputation). So there you go.)

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...

2007-01-30T16:32:00.001-08:00

After visiting Keats' House, Liam and I went to check out Dr. Freud's former abode... it so happened that I had a packet of cheap Cuban cigars in my bag, that I'd picked up in Changi airport. Since the house was closed (we'd spent some time at Keats's) we decided to light up at Freud's old gate, joking about the famous quote attributed to him (but unsubstantiated).

In this case though, the cigar wasn't just a cigar... but neither was it a phallus! It was, in fact, an homage to the much maligned old doc who made it possible for us all to talk about the 'unconscious' mind, and the significance of our dreams, and not be laughed at. (Detractors tend to forget this part, and focus on his shortcomings - though nobody, it seems, harps nearly as much on the fact that Hemmingway was a thug, or that Shakespeare left his wife and young children to join the Queen's Men.)

John Keats' House

2007-01-30T16:31:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this was one of the first stops for me. Liam had saved it, and while the exhibts weren't exhilarating as such, just being there certainly was for me. His bedroom in particular was haunting, this is where he coughed blood the first time, before heading to Rome to convalesce. I'll be there soon! And one of the first stops, of course, will be the Keats-Shelley House, by the Piazza di Spagna... where he coughed blood for the last time.

RIP Karl Marx

2007-01-27T19:47:00.001-08:00

Int. Clapham North. Saturday. First up for the day is a trip to Highgate Cemetery to see Karl Marx's grave...

Australia Day 2007

2007-01-27T19:43:00.000-08:00

Int. Heathrow 6: 30 am. Didn't sleep much on the flight from Changi, so when I stepped out into the 1 degree C air in London, I almost didn't feel it - until I did. Brrrr. Didn't sleep at Liam's due to sheer excitement, so had a shower and headed straight for the famous British Museum...

The very first thing I bumped into was the Rosetta Stone - you know, that chunk of rock with two Egyptian and one Greek script that provided the key to translating Egyptian texts, and which has become a symbol of the importance of translation between languages. Interestingly, it was moved from the museum from 1917-19 to protect it from possible bombing raids during WWI. How times have changed (considering the countless US tanks rolling over pristine archeological sites in once-ancient Babylon).

(Homer, Hesiod)

(Foreground: Hesiod. Background, l-r: Plato, Antisthenes, Chrysippus, Epicurus)