Due Per La Strada

In the early 1980s, a colleague at the Minneapolis Star who was every bit as unusual as his name – Zeke Wigglesworth – announced he was having a party in which the guests were encouraged to put on slide shows of whatever global adventures they had recently experienced.   There was a catch.  Wigglesworth, a fine writer with an off-angle view of the world, said each show was limited to five minutes.

For those of you who don’t remember slides, they were the high rez, well-lit versions of photographs.  A good slide show could be spectacular.  An overly long one could be deadly dull. The key, as Zeke understood, was to keep it moving.  Five minutes forces you to focus on the good stuff.  I showed slides of a trip to England, mostly the Stonehenge part, and I remember someone showed images of camels and pyramids. There was also, as always with Zeke and journalists, lots of drinking and carousing, so I don’t remember much else.

 The party stuck with me as a lesson in how to do travel writing.  Keep the tale moving.  And expect your reader to drink and carouse.   I should note that Zeke used to end his day at the Star by doing loud sheep calls through a long metal tube while standing on his desk in the vast newsroom.  After the Star merged with the Tribune and became less quirky, Zeke announced that he wanted to find a job in which someone would pay him lots of money to travel around the world.  Shortly thereafter, he left the Star and became the travel writer for the San Jose Mercury News.  He and his wife later traveled around the world in 79 days – beating the movie

by a day.

I’m not moving this tale along as quickly as Zeke would require, but one more story about him is needed.  Back in the early 1970s, Zeke and a group of other young Star reporters decided to build a sailboat -- a 38-foot sea-worthy sailboat.  As the story goes, they bought a book on how to build a boat, found some vacant land near the Mississippi River, and started building.   Some months -- or years -- later the boat was finished.  In 1975, the reporter/boat builders actually quit their jobs at the Star, put the boat in the river, and sailed south to the Caribbean.   They had a tropical adventure involving lots of islands, drinking, and carousing, then sold the boat, returned to Minneapolis and were given their jobs back at the newspaper.  Probably wouldn't happen that way today.

My five minutes are already up, but that was the introduction, not the actual travel piece.

Ocean, Ice Cream, Arles

The actual travel story is my recent adventure with Misti.  We recently dumped clothes in a suitcase and a gym bag, threw them into the Kangoo, and headed to Arles, France, where Reeve, Melanie, and grandson Ocean, live in an ancient house.

Trieste

Our route to Arles was intentionally circuitous, involving several days of driving through Italy, mostly across the green belt that stretches across northern Italy.  Much of it is flat.  It feels like driving through Iowa, except the buildings are much older.  And always, on the horizon, are the mountains – the Alps on to the north and east, the Apennines to the south.  Misti liked the name “Trieste,” and I have an interesting

Trieste Pier

colleague who grew up there, so that city was our first destination.   We arrived at night, driving on tiny, dark winding roads.  We went around a corner and found ourselves looking down – way down – upon the lights of a beautiful city.  We snaked our way down and found the James Joyce Hotel in the city center  (Joyce spent 10 years teaching English in Trieste).

 

James @ Joyce

In the rain and cold, we wandered to a crowded pizza restaurant, then the grand plaza.  No tourists, and not much going on.  There were lots of berths for yachts, but no actual yachts.  It was just an ancient Italian port city on a gray day.  We wandered into a shop selling pottery and scarves, looking for a remembrance of the city.  The young shopkeeper told us Trieste is struggling economically and only comes to life when the yacht people arrive in the summer.  The very rich discourage development in Trieste, he said, because they treat it like their personal city – small, out of the way, and, unlike many Italian cities, not influenced by the Mafia.

No Mafia?

We wanted to buy some Italian pottery from him, a few bowls or a dish.  He told us the store couldn’t afford to carry real Italian pottery, so he was selling knock-offs from China.  He apologized.  

Trieste

We wandered to a coffee shop.  Except for the owner, an outgoing Italian woman who spoke little English, we were the only ones there.  On the wall were photographs from the 1950s of people being blown off the streets by a very strong wind.  “The Bora,” she said.  “It was here last Tuesday, when the streets were covered with ice.  It was 70 kilometers per hour.  Very dangerous.”

The Bora 

She didn’t actually say it just like that, but close enough.  The Bora, as it turns out, is like the Mistral wind in Arles, but shorter in duration and more intense. 

Maximilian

We left the coffee shop and ventured to the nearby Castle Miramare, built by Maximilian, emperor of Mexico before he knew where Mexico was.  Okay, he knew where it was, but he’d never been there.  Turns out he was a Hapsburg, born in a palace in Vienna.  He built his unique little castle on the Adriatic, lived there for a few years with his wife Carlota, as the commander of the Austrian navy, then agreed to give up his command and become emperor of Mexico.   Things didn’t go as planned in Mexico and, in 1867, despite pleas from European leaders to spare him, he was executed by firing squad.  Carlota, who was in Europe pleading for help when he was shot, returned to the Trieste castle, then to her native Belgium, where she refused to acknowledge his death and lived in seclusion until her death in 1927.

Misti @ Maximilian's

 

Looking toward Trieste 

From our brief visit into Maximilian’s world, it seems both he and Carlota were interesting and decent people.  We had no idea. 

On to Udine.  After spending a lot of time discussing how to pronounce “Udine,” Misti and I arrived in the city and stayed at an upscale hotel.  In the hotel restaurant, a place with enough rating

stars that the food came in small, discrete courses, we sat next to an elderly couple.  We soon discovered they were from Australia, and he, in his late 80s, was still charging around Europe by car.   Misti told him she was from South Dakota, and noted that he’d probably never heard of it.

Misti Climbing Udine

“Try me,” the guy said, and then went through his history of dam building in the western U.S., including a dam near where Misti grew up.  Small world.  Great couple.  We told him we were heading east the next day, but didn’t yet know where.

 

Udine Market

“Cuneo would be good,” he said. So the next morning, after encountering the freshly caught octopi available at the market, we headed across the piedmont and into the mountains.   Once in Cuneo, we landed at the “Royal Superga” hotel.  We were tired, so the best we could do was venture out to an Italian restaurant (they are easy to find in Italy),

Superga

and then to a specialty ice cream store, where the woman behind the counter told us about the fun she’d had learning the gourmet ice cream trade . . . in a training school in New York City.   Globalization.

From Cuneo it was a few hours of driving through the snowy Alps down to Nice.  I remember winding through similar mountains and tunnels when my

Driving the Alps

dad was driving through the Alps in our 1959 Pontiac station wagon back in the early 1960s.  It might have been the same road, so I’ll have to compare my dad’s slides to my digital pictures.  His images have better resolution.

We arrived in Arles without realizing that it was bullfight weekend.  Arles has a Roman coliseum that has been in continuous use since 90 AD, and once a year the city holds traditional bullfights, complete with picadors, bullfighters, and large bulls. 

The Picadors

The Bulls

The bulls usually end up dead (Arles is one of the last places in Europe where this is allowed), but on the day we arrived (last day of the bullfights) it was raining.  They ran the bulls down one of the streets, but the bullfight was cancelled – apparently fighting bulls in a wet, slippery arena is too dangerous.

So, just after we arrived, some 50,000 people left this small town.  Which was good.

Out in Arles

House with a View

Just before arriving in Arles, we met up with Reeve and Melanie’s family at her parent’s house in Marseille.  We had the first of what would be several birthday parties for Ocean, who turned three while we were there.  Misti got her annual "French Flip" haircut from Beatrice, and we finally found some nice pottery bowls -- French instead of Italian. 

Ocean & Friend

 Then it was off to Genoa, where Columbus was from.   The drive to Genoa includes driving along the French Riviera – through St. Tropez, Canne, then Monaco.  Along the way you can listen to Riviera Radio (106.5), which has an American-sounding disc jockey playing lots of Phil Collins tunes.  If you check out the radio station’s website, you can click on tabs for things like “top yachts” and Maserati ads.

Click here http://www.rivieraradio.mc/article.asp?id=1488793 and if you have iTunes you can stream the radio station.  It is mostly mellow, so you can pretend you’re rich, famous, and naked on a Mediterranean beach as you read the rest of the blog.  

Genoa is just around the coastline from Monaco.  The city is a bit like Trieste, but bigger.  We walked through most of the harbor area, and discovered that there are more than a thousand ships at the bottom

Genoa

Misti in Genoa

of the harbor – most sunk during WWII.  The history, of course, is deep.  We were struck by the fact that Columbus opened an account at the Bank of St. George in Genoa well before he discovered America.

I’ve always thought of Marseille as looking like a European version of Baltimore, but it turns out I was wrong.  Genoa is actually the sister city to Baltimore, and it looks like it.  Actually, it’s what Baltimore might look like in a thousand years.  Genoa dates back to the 5^th or 6^th century BC.

The Canal

The Tower

From Genoa it was on to Portogruaro, Italy.  No, we hadn’t heard of it either, but it was about 450 kilometers from Genoa, and that was as far as I wanted to drive.  Turns out it is to Venice as the Hamptons are to New York.  Rich Venetians used to go to Portogruaro, apparently to stand on dry land and shop.  It is small, very old, and has a single, lovely canal. The tall tower in Portogruaro resembles the St. Mark’s tower in Venice, except that it leans like the tower in Pisa.  We wandered the old streets, stunned to see stores that were actually open on a Saturday evening.

Portogruaro

That never happens in Vienna.

Then it was home again, just in time to see the first blossoms in Uwe’s garden of wonders. 

Perfection

April 15.  9:12 a.m. Vienna. Perfection.

We awake late this morning to an unfamiliar sound.  Groggy on a Monday, I ignore it, get coffee and open the laptop to catch up on news.

Still, the sound of a woman’s voice singing an elegiac melody accompanied only by what sounds like a concertina, doubling her simple line, continues to infiltrate, seeping through the windows and doors still locked against winter’s chill, habit.

Jim looks up, “Is that live?”

The Windows

I open the double windows I so love in this apartment to behold Uwe’s jungle, the barely budding trees and an evergreen obscuring the view from where the voice emanates.  Yes, the voice, amplified and sonorous, caressing the mysterious tonality of the Middle East, is coming from the backyard of the Israelis.

 A few children are laughing.  The two unseen musicians are rehearsing, not performing.

I look down.  At last the turtles are out, atilt with bellies nudging the stone wall to bask in the sunshine that has eluded Vienna and most of Europe for far too many months.  Nefertiti, the impassive cat—gorgeous as her namesake-- has joined the turtles,

The Turtles

nestled in the sunshine.

 

The Cat 

I listen closely, and the clucks of the hens caged along the back fence provide a natural ostinato.  I strain to hear the buzzing of the bees that have finally staggered, drowsy, from their winter hives, trying to recall what it is they’re supposed to do now.

A ridiculous range of remembered music floods my morning brain: Oliver , “Who Will Buy This Wonderful Morning, “ Mr. Rogers, “It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, “ Vivaldi’s Four  Seasons and the Bach Brandenburg Concerto I heard for the first time  while sitting in a junior high classroom, gazing through tall windows framing the lilacs in bloom, sublime.

 

The Bees

I’m reminded of the line we discussed in my American Jewish Literature

The Hens & Israelis

class almost 40 years ago: the Jewish people have their feet in the cloaca, their heads in the stars.  I’ve always thought, not just them, all of us who are alive to complexity and contradiction.

9: 37 a.m.

The spell has broken.  The turtles have warmed up enough to feel greedy and territorial, bashing shells, nipping necks reluctant to withdraw into the safety of the shell, clumsily copulating, emitting little turtle moans; Nefertiti has tired of my teasing “Here, kitty, kitty” as if she could simply leap up the 10 feet to the window sill, the soulful Hebrew ballad has been replaced by recorded pop music, the whine and thumps of construction work in the neighborhood cleave the air.

The hubbub in the Israeli backyard has risen to not quite a din. Another instrument – a violin – is tuning.  Now, a clarinet.

As poet Blake wrote, “Kiss the joy as it flies.”

Winter has finally bidden us goodbye, the yin, the yang and whatever exists in the in-between of the human experience will be in fuller view to be savored for a few too-short months.

Close the laptop. Say yes to doors ajar.  Fling wide the windows.

Spring has deigned to grace us once more.

Spring