A Roman Fractal

Praeger used to complain that the botanist searching for rare plants only ever made a tiny, spider-line of coverage on the map of a landscape. The tourist searching for whatever-it-is-that-tourists-search-for can increase his/her coverage by turning down side-streets, partially doubling back, and trying to ensure density of coverage, if only in one area of a city. Today's fractal took me among the streets between the Trevi fountain and the Piazza Navona, with several extra loops, one of which took in the Spanish steps. (Keats died here, of course.) As I do not have a guide book, I have to rely on chance encounters. This morning's haul so far:

the headquarters of the Dante Society in a beautiful villa on the Piazza Firenze where you can take Italian lessons and courses in Art History, etc.

the Herder bookshop on the Piazza di Montecitorio. Notionally the German bookshop in Rome, it has extensive holdings in English, French and Italian and feels like the spiritual home of heritage enthusiasts. My vote for the best bookshop in Rome (so far). Douze points.

a tiiiiiiiiny boutique on the Via Vittoria, just off the Corso, selling vintage Hermes bags.


the Via Condotti and environs - just below the Spanish steps -, for all you students of the superficial, cut-throat world of haute couture and luxury. Don't be put off by the guy in the suit standing inside the door of the Bvlgari shop: he's probably lonely, underpaid, and dying to open the door for you.

It's fun to scribble your route onto your street map, so don't bother spending 5 euros on a glossy map at the airport. The hotel will have a freebie; you won't mind scrawling all over that.

Catania-Roma

It took me eleven hours to get back to Rome by train yesterday, at least that's one way of appreciating just how much of Italy there is between Sicily and the capital. A few veteran Ireland supporters already in evidence, on their way to Bari for the match tomorrow. Their mood was glum after a wasteful draw with Bulgaria (haven't we been here before?).
On my last day in Rome I thought I'd call in on the Vatican... how can I rephrase that? Anyway, I made it to St Peter's through hordes of tourists like myself. I then gave up on the Vatican museum because the queues were horrendous.
A grand-uncle of mine came to Rome as a seminarian in the 1920s, I think, and died here before finishing his studies. I know very little about him, only that he had an interest in birdlife. My father often spoke of coming to Rome, but that was only an idea with him: travel to Italy did not come within the field of his options, so it comes to me, in a sense, to stand in the Vatican and wonder what his experience might have been. How could an intelligent young man from Kerry relate the awesome forms of St Peter's to his humble faith? And what might have passed through his mind as illness overwhelmed him? Did he have time to consider the possibility that he might not make it home? He is, presumably, buried here somewhere. Time and a little research might discover where. The thought of him here almost a hundred years ago broke the ice of my cynicism.

The Venetian Twins

Saw a production of the Venetian Twins at the Metropolitan Theatre in Catania. I had met one of actors, Felice Casciano, by chance at lunchtime, who invited me to come to the play that evening. He explained to me that Goldoni, a playwright of the 18th century, was the first to make the commedia dell'arte a fixed dramatic form, with a standard text. Two of the masked figures from the commedia dell'arte figure in this play, including the Harlequin.
I went to the matineee performance, at 5.30. The large theatre was full of subscribers to the theatre, average age seventy. When nothing had started by 5.45, they started clapping, and this seemed to have desired effect of getting things moving: the curtain duly opened without any announcements about fire exits or mobile phones. Sure enough, mobile phones kept going off during the play, and there was a level of talking that would have provoked righteous ire in a theatre at home, or in England. At the very start, several people shouted something at the stage; I thought it was that they could not be heard, but there was amplification, so I guess they just turned the sound up.
The device in this play is that there are two twins, one a boor, the other a man of distinction; they do not meet onstage, but their contradictory behaviour causes all sorts of misunderstandings and farce. One actor plays both roles. I have seen the play in Stratford where the lead actor changed costume between each entry, but here instead he chose to walk and gesture differently for the different roles and did not change his dress. A large part of this production was also about language, the twins spoke what I think was a Lombardian dialect that sounded like Italian put through a Joycean Wakeblender: that too was very funny.
Felice explained to me that this play has been touring Italy for months. At the end of the show I crept backstage to thank him and left quickly, declining an invitation to be introduced to the rest of the cast.

Opera for Breakfast

I have signed up for another night in Catania, charmed by my hosts. This morning, my landlady had an opera programme on the television as she served my breakfast. She paused when Pavarotti appeared in a recording from 1992 and there were tears in her eyes as she watched him. She explained to me that, for her son's wedding, she hired opera singers for the reception and organised the repertoire; it cost a fortune, but he paid. I explained that I knew next to nothing about opera, just a few arias from Puccini that we had playing in the car on a previous holiday in Tuscany. The people in Catania are opera fanatics, she told me.
In the evenings, I have spoken to P., who spent four months in Dublin some years ago when his daughter was studying in Trinity on an Erasmus programme. He worked in catering and stayed in humble digs on Marlborough Street. He describes it as a wonderful time in his life. I have promised to throw a kiss at Ireland and at the Spire in O'Connell Street on my way home for him. How would he cope next week, when Ireland are playing Italy in Bari? His answer was unclear, but he says that Trapattoni is a good man, a fatherly figure.

White Mannequin

White People Dreaming

Etna

Modern Ort

Visited a beautiful art exhibition in a newly-restored Palazzo in Catania this morning. The brochure advertises classics of 20th and 21st century art. My favourites were a few sculptures by Giacometti and Hans Arp; also, some intriguing modern experiments from about 1916, just as Pearse's volunteers were striking out for Irish freedom.
The small scale of some of the drawings and paintings are a reminder of how poor many of these artists were, before they became famous or before modern art became a commodity like platinum or gold. Some of the techniques are intriguingly simple, like Rothko's rectangles of colour, or Mondrian's abstractions. What these pieces underline is the capacity of artists to follow an idea to its limit, and spend a lifetime, maybe, exploring it in the medium. That, and perhaps some theorising about what they are doing, although some of these artists were anything but theoretically minded. There is also a feeling of envy when you look at these things, what separates you from them is not an idea of difficulty or repulsion, but the knowledge that you could not afford to spend the time to develop the potential of a few ideas to their realisation.
One of the privilieges of modern art is the fact that such fantastic spaces have been reserved for these works. Typically, you get a bank and a city council to fund these handsome buildings where a few pieces of 'junk' get dozens of square metres to themselves. This is where the alliance between money and art is really profitable: it gives art space to be. Without the context of open, usually white, space, an appreciation of these pieces would not be possible. Andy Warhol was right when he said that wealth gives you the opportunity to possess space, empty space, that is. Clutter, on the other hand, often goes hand in hand with poverty.
I am trying to figure out if there are any lessons here for literary or verbal art. One of the qualities of modern art presented in new galleries is the great economy of expression: you stand for as long as you like looking at three rectangles on a blue background by Rothko. Literary expression,on the other hand, is much more cluttered: blockbuster novels, a poet's ninth collection, a yard of shelf space devoted to so-and-so's fantasy genre, and so on. If we apply Warhol's principle to literature, then modern literature is poor because there's too much of it, it suffers from clutter. Also, there's a beautiful anonymity about a form by Hans Arp. Most of us just get the form to look at. We are not distracted by Hans Arp the person, with his biography, his life, his tabloid encounters (if any). I guess the writer who comes closest to this condition is Samuel Beckett, who kept the biographers away for as long as he could.
If verbal art were seriously interested in emulating the clean, open spaces of the modern art gallery, first of all there would be much less of it (Beckett again). It would also come to us shorn of any distractions. I'm thinking of a radio play as one possible medium for this, plus the shorter forms in poetry and prose, all of this anchored by a miminal presence of the author. (To be continued, perhaps.)

Catania

My notions about Sciacca were comically naive in retrospect. Sciacca is a high-rise town crowded onto a slope above a fishing port. The architecture is 'brutal', soulless mass concrete everywhere. Mind you, if you're interested in the survival of the Fiat 500, this might be the place for you; little cockroaches with windows and three - no four! - people packed inside. Goethe didn't spend much time here either; he just mentions the cork trees, which I shall mention now also in their memory. Long gone, alas.
Stung by disappointment, I sketched a poem about Ulysses arriving on the shore at Sciacca and covering himself with plastic rubbish before falling asleep. Then I took the bus to Agrigento, which boasts an impressive monument complex from Greek times. The swarms of teenagers at the site discouraged me from stopping. I was weary from tramping around Sciacca in a pathetic search for its heritage, so I took the train to Catania instead. Eventually, I was rewarded.
Catania is a substantial city with lots of history for the historically minded, and a huge market. In deference to the town, I shall not name the hotel where the bed bugs woke me this morning. How, I wondered, did I manage to sleep through that lot? Not, thankfully, the biting type.
So I changed accomodation this morning and found a quaint B+B in the centre, with a charming landlady who was sending me to Syracuse for the day. But I have't seen Catania yet, I protested. She has, however, singed me up for an excursion to Etna tomorrow. The white, snow-covered massif suddenly appeared to the north yesterday afternoon as my train approached Catania. Souvenirs carved out of black magma make their appearance in the souvenir shops here. And I should also mention the dolls of Rinaldo and other characters from Orlando Furioso which are in every tourist shop in these parts.
Catania, douze points.

Photo: the fish market at lunchtime, as things were winding down.

Dinner for three

An Englishman I met at Segesta invited me to join him and a friend for dinner that evening at their flat in Trapani. P. took early retirement from his business thirteen years ago and has been enjoying himself ever since, travelling mostly. His friend T. was in Trapani to check out a berth for his yacht, moored at present in Cornwall. His dream is to come out here to live permanently - I wasn't sure if he intends to live on the yacht or on land.
One of the unstated rules of this engagement was that no-one offered much in the way of personal revelation, just a few details about family emerged by accident in the course of conversation. All three of us were on some kind of personal quest, none of us needed to deliver the whole cv (too complicated once you're past fifty anyway); there was more pleasure in holding onto a partial anonymity.
The splendours of Sicily was the common theme of our conversation. T. had read DHL, Lampedusa and Homer and was keen on the Homeric associations: one theory is that Odysseus landed at Trapani and ran into Polyphemus here. I also heard that the Dedalus/Icarus episode ended somewhere in this area. My cynical assumpition is that each area in Sicily competes for the 'true' Homeric link: there must be lots of places where Odysseus is supposed to have met Nausicaa, etc. Naturally, anywhere along this coast you can imagine a weary old man staggering up the strand, covering himself with leaves or at least plastic rubbish, falling asleep, to be woken by a beautiful princess.
It was a pleasure to break my silence of several days and open the door of English again. I resisted the mild attempts to make me conform to an Irish sterotype and managed to get back to my room in a straight, if well-oiled, line.
PS: Heading for Sciacca.

Capodimonte

I took my cue again from JWG and visited the Capodimonte museum in Naples yesterday. The core of this museum's collection is formed by the Farnese galleries, named after the powerful family that brought all these masterpieces together. The scale and quality of the collection reminded me of the great collections in Florence such as the Uffizi and the Pitti palace. The building itself, however, is massive and forbidding; some of the rooms preserve the interiors from the 17th and 18th centuries, vast, obsolete neo-classical halls. Seeing the great art of the medieval and renaissance periods in this setting is an alienating experience. Many of the paintings are removed from the more modest settings of monasteries and churches where they began life. In this respect they are like wild animals brought into a zoo and displayed there for the prestige of a noble family. Art as power is the formula here, just as nature as power was the formula behind the natural history museums and zoos of the nineteenth century.
Planes approaching Naples airport fly low over the building nowadays, announcing another form of power.

Sicily

I got my first taste of countryside today after several days in the confines of Rome and Naples. Palermo was bigger and more modern than I expected, but I passed up the opportunity of another city tour and took a train instead, heading west to Segesta, a Doric temple visited by Goethe. The temple is on a hilltop at the head of a valley sloping north towards the coast. Think Parthenon on a somewhat smaller scale in an much more picturesque setting. The cream-coloured limestone has leached what may be iron to give it a warm, rusty staining.
Spring is already well established: tall stalks of fennel up to six feet high line the roads, the fennel leaves form large masses on the ground. Under the trees there's a kind of clover with yellow leaves at the end of a long stalk, and many other flowers that I couldn't identify. The woodland is mixed and open: eucalyptus, mulberry, cedar, pine and olive. Serins were twittering everywhere, along with sylvia warblers and the occasional woodpecker.
Western Sicily must have a wind resource to match Ireland's: it was chilly today, the wind driven off the mountain tops brought with it an edge of snow; wind turbines command the skyline above Trapani (now a Ryanair destination from Luton).

Faust

I happened upon a production of Faust in the Teatro Bellini last night. The Italian writers had adapted Faust Parts I and II as a single play of two acts. The costumes, design and choreography were all excellent. At the start Faust appears as an old man with white Santa beard and long hair; Mefisto is a younger, spritely figure dressed like a circus impresario. When Faust drinks the goblet in the witches' den he and Mefisto exchange dress, and Mefisto now plays Faust so that Faust appears rejuvenated. This is a clever device to suggest that Mefisto is a part of Faust's imagination and a figuration of Faust's psyche.
In terms of drama, the focus in Act I is on Margherita's story; the directors managed to make this a genuinely tragic story of a young woman seduced by a predatory intelligence. It is the only real instance in the whole production of dramatic action. All the rest is pageantry.
Something was lost in translation by not reproducing the rhymed verse in the original, withthe exception of the opening scene. In Act Two, Faust was restored to his older self and his tone is elegiac.
This is still a problematic text to stage because of the lack of dramatic action apart from the Margherita story. The designers of this production could not have done better.

Naples, Florida

as George Dubya used to say.An internet search this morning failed to find an Irish pub in Naples, Italy; I don't know if I can see the rugby.
The city is flooded today with scouts from all over Italy joining the anti-mafia protests. I got my first view of the Bay today.
My morning excursion was to get to Cuma, where Aeneas joined up with Sibyl to go to the Underworld. I took a regional train covered in graffiti along the northern shore of the bay, where the beaches are cluttered with rubbish. The map of the network suggested that Cuma was on the return leg of a circular loop, but in fact you had to get off the train and take a bus. After some confusion (long story) I decided that the best value for my 1.80 was to get back on the train and go back to the city. So I didn't make it to Cuma. I had no nation-building mission, no smart-alec poem to write about going to Cuma in 2009; I just rode a train for two hours and spotted a couple of lakes, one of which must have been Lake Avernus. Also: the volcano is inactive right now; this fact, coupled with my own laziness, means that the mythical possibilities are going to be limited on this trip.

Naples

The spring is well under way in the countryside south of Rome, cherry blossoms, crucifers in flower, winter wheat greening the fields. Close to Naples, large heaps of rubbish fly-tipped at the end of country roads are a reminder of the waste crisis in the city last year.
Just two hours south of Rome you are definitely in new territory. The physical fabric of the streets is very run down; people are struggling to manage. The vitality Goethe praised in the Neapolitans is still here, but the problem with the Camora (check spelling) hangs in the air like a rumour of plague. Lots of posters referring to this problem: students are demonstrating tomorrow against the mafia.
There's also the startling beauty of many young women to contrast the tatty state of footpaths and buildings. You turn off a main street here and laundry hanging from a window flaps into your eyes.
Stonechat recommends: the museum of modern art. Very new, very way-out; visitors were outnumbered by attendants by a ratio of four to one.
A severe, dry wind all afternoon.

Footsteps

I have spent a day or two getting home concerns out of my system, something which happens at the start of a trip, the kind of guilty conscience that almost keeps you rooted at home permanently. I even wondered what I was doing here. So I have decided to follow Goethe's itinerary and head for Naples tomorrow, then on to Sicily. (Vesuvius was pretty active when he got there; I wonder how things are now?)
The Goethe Museum here in Rome is a kind of sanctuary, where a troubled soul like myself can get his bearings before setting out farther. There's even an exhibition opening there this evening to give me my first social outing. Reading the man himself fosters a not-completely-serious seriousness about oneself and the world around.
Between the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Goethe House, I wandered through the incredibly upmarket area around the Piazza di Spagna. The Fendi store is an art gallery in its own right devoted to Lagerfeld and another designer. No photographs allowed there either. I said to the Asian assistant that I would just admire the merchandise today; she was kind and saved me the freeze-out you get from the touts in other stores. At the retail edge of that business there are too many suited banksters standing between your slender wallet and the splendour of many of the designs.

Rome

On my first full day as a tourist in Rome I'm unable to work up any appetite for history. The only place I could relate to was the Goethe House on the Via del Corso, a surprise, as I had no idea there was a museum in the building where Goethe lodged during his Roman trip. The first floor is tastefully set out as an exhibition of books, mss and engravings from his time there. Warhol's screen print Goethe dominates the vestibule.
I spent much of the rest of time trying to find antiquarian bookshops that were open, and that took a long time. One shop was so crammed with stuff that there was no way in, almost, and I was just handed a card and told to consult the website. Eventually bought a Thomas Farnaby edition of Terence's Comedies, an early edition, although a bit scruffy.
Curious to think that the book is clearly in retreat as a medium in this city as elsewhere, but there is an added irony in the fact that this is the home of Christianity, a religion of the book. A huge video screen rises at St Peter's square, of Michelangelo proportions, so the Church handlers have moved on. Visibility is the basic criterion of existence nowadays; the privacy and linguistic encoding of the book is increasingly obscure.

Arion-upon-Shannon

The image is a detail from John Speed's 1610 map of the Province of Munster, reproduced in Thomas Stafford's Pacata Hibernia (1633).

Stanihurst in Offaly

Followers of early Irish print culture may have spotted an advert in last Saturday's Irish Times for an auction next Thursday, 12th at Birr. Included in the sale are The Image of Irelande (could this be a copy of Derricke's original?) and Stanihurst's De Rebus in Hibernia, 1584 as well as 'scarce Cuala Press editions' etc. Stonechat has not decided yet if he can go, but is tempted. See purcellauctioneers.com

Colin Clout and the Graces

In his introduction to his edition of Spenser, Yeats praises a passage in Book VI of the Faerie Queene where Colin Clout plays to the Graces and to the girl he evidently lost as a young man. Oddly though, Yeats didn't include this passage in his selection. The passage is remarkable as a lone instance in that vast allegory of the voice of the poet, thinly disguised as Colin Clout, still grieving over a woman he lost, evidently as a young man, probably the same Rosalind whose departure causes him so much anguish in The Shepheardes Calendar. The real poignancy of Colin's voice casts a spell over the arcadian delights of the landscape. 

   The passage in question is Book VI, Canto X, stanzas 5-28.

Cross at Fahy

This photo by Mark Granier was taken at the cemetery overlooking my house.