Adventures in Italian Travel

In a month and a few days, I'll be going back to New York, so lately I've been scrambling to see various things in Rome and Italy before I leave. Last week I traveled with a group from the American Academy to the Veneto region, near Venice, to see several villas designed by the Renaissance architect Antonio Palladio. (Unfortunately I also stupidly left my passport at an Internet cafe there, but I'm getting it back this afternoon.)

There's something solid and impressive about these villas, a something that proved pretty difficult for any of us on the trip to define, maybe because Palladio's designs have been copied so much that the effect they must have had on his contemporaries is probably lost on us. From what I could glean, his innovation was to use Greek temples as models for residential buildings, a choice that apparently seemed shocking to viewers in the 1500s, though not for a Michigander like me who's seen his share of Ionic columns in suburban subdivisions.

The day after I came back from up north, I went with an Italian friend to Naples, the city where he was born. The trip began with a hot, airless ride on an inter-city train crowded with noisy Neopolitans slurring their words and adjusting their glittering sunglasses and flashy silver belt buckles. That night, I stayed in an area called the Spanish Quarter, a tightly-packed neighborhood of buildings decorated with endless lines of laundry and improvised shrines to the Virgin Mary. Mopeds zip and swerve at dangeriously high speeds through the back alleys where kids play in dark, garbage-strewn puddles. The buildings were so close together that everywhere I walked through the streets I could hear ghostly voices echoicing out of the windows, though I could never tell where they were coming from. My room was a shed built on the roof of the building, from which I took in a magical view of the Bay of Naples lit up by night.

This week, a friend of mine is here to visit, and so the two of us have been exploring corners of the city I've haven't yet gotten to. We wanted to go for lunch on his first day, but the indignant waiter at the first restaurant we walked into reprimanded us, "We're closed. It's 3:00!" Apparently in Italy one is not allowed to be hungry after 3:00 because we tried several other restaurants with the same result. In the end, we settled for a take away joint serving the inevitable "pizza al taglio," or pizza by the slice.

Yesterday we rented bikes and rode down an old Roman highway that is closed to traffic on Sundays, except that yesterday it wasn't closed to traffic because of a wedding party taking place there. We've also visited a Christian catacomb, several churches with dazzling mosaics, and a market in Rome's immigrant neighborhood where you can get Arabic couscous, Indian spices, or Chinese pears. If I had my experience to do over again, I'd have spent much more time with Rome's immigrant community. I can only imagine the rich stories I might have uncovered.

The day after my friend leaves, I'll be going to Sicily to see the eastern tip of the island, and the cities of Syracuse, Catania, and Taormina. I called an inn in Taormina to make a reservation, and as I started to say my name, the man who picked up the phone interrupted me to ask, "Where are you from? England? Germany?" I told him I was American. "One American, the night of May 23rd," he said. "See you then. Bye."

How all these sights and sounds are going to impact my work is not immediately clear, but I'm glad to have had the chance to take them all in.