The camera doesn’t speak: a short trip through Italy
I’ve been working through the seven CDs worth of photos that came back from my recent Italy excursion with my mother and sister, trying to piece them together into a coherent story. It’s not easy. The things you remember didn’t get photographed, some of the snapshots seem actually to contradict the impressions I picked up. (And a CD is missing, or I dreamed several days in Florence.) Here, nonetheless, is an attempt.
I took the night train from Duisburg to Milan. A very cheap option, until it cost me as much again to get to Duisburg from Amsterdam, then almost as much from Milan to Venice when I bought the wrong ticket. Still, it’s a lovely way to see the countryside.
I slept most of the way.
Dehydrated in Venice
By the time I arrived in Milan, it was over 25 degrees. I didn’t have the smarts to buy water, just jumped on the first train I found and headed on to Venice. In Venice, it was topping 30. Already slightly silly from the heat, I decided I would push on through the city to the hostel and have a cold shower, drink several litres, and organise myself some food (it’s now 3pm or so, my sketchy lunch already seems like a long time ago).
It turns out that it’s quite difficult to navigate through Venice, unless you’re heading for one of the major tourist destinations. If you’re lucky enough to be aiming for the Piazza di San Marco, then almost every street is signposted as leading the right way. Many of them even have helpful arrows pointing both ways… By the time I got there an hour or so later, I was very hot, very sweaty, very sick of crowds of people, and even more dehydrated. So much so that it took me almost half an hour to realise that I was waiting at the wrong pier for the ferry to the island Giudecca, our hostel, and my long-awaited shower.
Finally I staggered in the door and collapsed in the shade. There was a queue, perhaps ten people waiting, but I wasn’t so worried; it’s a hostel, right, they’re used to dealing with backpackers arriving all day long. Wrong. Those ten people took over an hour to get their checkin arranged, while I waited with my reservation turning to mush in my hand, growing more thirsty and infuriated every minute. When my turn finally came round, I slapped the reservation on the counter, muttered something incoherent about sheets and made a grab for the key. But it wasn’t to be. The reservation was for three people, and I was politely requested to wait until the other two arrived so that we could all check in at once.
Unable to explain even to myself why this was so funny, I dragged my increasingly sweat-sodden backpack to a chair in the dining room and sat down to wait. At least I could get a drink of water in the kitchen, I consoled myself. Nope, no kitchen. And we suggest you don’t drink the water in the bathrooms. Those water-bottles over there? You can buy them when the store opens, at 7:30 this evening.
I had a peach-flavoured ice tea from a vending machine, the only one left, and sat and stared at nothing.
I was just settling back into my “miserable” pose after a quick run to the grocery store, when the pretty girl who couldn’t possibly have been smiling at me a moment ago came over to my table and called me by name. I had completely forgotten, but an old neighbour from New Zealand had arranged to meet us in Venice and travel on with us through Italy. We had a catchup, another grocery shop, then my family arrived (after a three-hour train delay) and I got to check in and have my shower. After that things started to look up somewhat.
Venice isn’t really half bad
I wasn’t really prepared for the canals of Venice. Living in Amsterdam, I thought I knew what a canal city should look like, but I had to bite my tongue pretty quickly. You’re much more involved with the water, with the streets so low, and the architecture puts A’dam (much though I love it) totally to shame.
One thing that struck me (and that we totally failed to record on film) was how much the Venetians use their waterways. You have to; Venice is a number of islands occasionally (and not universally) connected by bridges. (In contrast, Amsterdam is —at least nowadays— a solid city where you can’t travel in straight lines because little bits of water get in the way.) Every Venetian house on the canalside seemed to have its water door, usually with a boat moored outside. The inner-city canals are a constant bustle of traffic, while the larger waterways between Venice proper and the larger islands play host to enormous cruise ships and freight traffic.
Besides the canals, the main impression one gets of Venice is of a city totally overrun by tourism. Not overwhelmed, they seem to be doing quite well out of it thank you very much, but the sheer number of people in the popular areas gets pretty claustrophobic pretty quickly. Having been inside the Basilica (the church of St Mark), however, I can confirm that those hordes of swarming masses converge there for a very good reason.
An intriguing observation: the tourist crap sold on the streets is far less crappy than the tourist crap I’m used to. Thinking about the most heavily visited areas of New Zealand, I have images of on the one hand beautiful handicrafts sold for three to ten times their usual price, and on the other hand plastic tikis. In Amsterdam we get wooden tulips, mass-produced china clog ornaments, and sex toys. Venice has masks, and elaborate letter-writing supplies (finely printed letterheads, seals, ex libris stamps). It also has extraordinarily expensive specialist shops with elaborate window displays (cushions starting at 150 euro, crushed silk scarves, lampshades), and a blanket prohibition against touching or photographing the ‘exhibits’. This gets a bit trying, when you’re travelling with two Kiwis very enthusiastic about their arts and crafts (Claire is an award-winning artist and clothing designer, and my mother is no slouch either with a paintbrush).
“I’m sorry madam, it’s not possible to take photos.”
“Oh no, it’s all right, I just wanted to catch that handsome gondolier going by outside your window.”
“Oh, all right then, go right ahead.”
(Sotto voice) “…the chappy standing right behind that beautiful lampshade with the intriguing string pattern…”
Another thing we spent a lot of time photographing was stone. The marble floors in some of these places were absolutely unbelievable; the floor of the Basilica is the subject of a 50 euro photograph collection that I had to be physically dragged away from. (You’ll get some idea by looking here, but like everyone else they’ve focussed on the mosaics. Yes, they’re extraordinary, but my tip is: check out the floor.) After Venice and Cinque Terre, I’m more convinced than ever that brick is boring. Sorry, my adopted city (in fact so far as I can see, the whole country), but as far as I’m concerned it’s nothing more than wannabe stone.
Cinque Terre: lizards, sunburn, and more stone
Our next stop was the Five Lands, a series of small villages on the north-west coast, most of them only accessible by train, clinging to steep hillsides and apparently in constant danger of falling into the sea. The area was once famous for its wine production, and most of the agriculture in the area is still vineyards and olive groves. It seems the climate is perfect, but it also seems that the landscape could hardly be less suitable. The hillsides are so steep that soil just falls off them. To make anything grow, you have to start by building a three-metre high drystone wall, then fill up the space behind it with dirt (this gives you a strip of arable land roughly five metres wide). Since you want to fill entire hillsides, repeat some forty times. By the time you get to the top, weathering will probably have done serious damage to your first wall, so you can start repairing it… and you’ve just consigned yourself to constant manual labour for the rest of your life.
I’m exaggerating slightly, but really only slightly — the amount of work that goes into these constructions is extraordinary. Nowadays most of them are no longer in use, although there are ongoing projects to reclaim terraced areas that have become totally overgrown. The whole area is a massive tourist attraction, and there’s a coastal walking track running below the terraced areas, with lots of places to drop down to the sea for a refreshing dip.
The villages themselves are almost too stereotypically lovely. Here’s Manarola, where we stayed two nights.
Like Venice, they’re inundated with massive amounts of tourists, but they’ve so far managed to retain a lot of their charm. People still live there without relying on the tourist industry, fishermen and farmers and so on. At midday the towns went absolutely mad, as everyone hid from the heat in the nearest cafe, but in the evenings large areas were more or less totally deserted. We ate dinner one evening in a public garden, and watched the sunset, just the four of us. We spoke to the gardener too, who lived in the village. His wife was from the next village over, they met at a dance. It felt as if, if the whole tourist industry should one day pack its bags and go elsewhere, the villages of Cinque Terre would quietly and happily go back to doing without it.
Following the theme of “photos we didn’t take,” a significant feature of the Cinque Terre experience was the abundance of lizards. I snapped a succession of three pics at greater (and less stable) leaning distances over one railing, catching a green-and-white patterned beauty basking on the green-and-white patterned bark of a tree. Only later did I realise that the first “click” of the camera marks the autofocus, it’s the second that actually takes the photo.
Queueing in Florence
The last couple of days of my journey were spent in Florence. The others went on to France, but I headed back to Amsterdam to nurse a cold and avoid working on my thesis.
Florence was a bit of a let-down, after Cinque Terre. This leg of the trip started badly, with a two-hour stop in Pisa during which we failed to get to the leaning tower and instead paid a king’s ransom for a not-very-satisfactory breakfast. I don’t even have any photos (I’m still hoping to find that CD though…), and the highlight of the visit was queueing for three hours to get into the Uffizi.
That’s not quite true: the highlight was definitely the Uffizi itself. But it is interesting to note that we left after two and a half hours, having seen everything (at a pretty leisurely pace), and still having spent less time in the building than queueing outside. (They let thirty people inside at thirty-minute intervals. When the sign at the end of the queue says “outside waiting time 3 hrs,” that’s exactly what it means.) Thankfully the square and surrounding area had its own fair share of statuary, ranging from an extremely graphic beheading scene —imagine a fountain of blood, carved in stone— to a series of portrait statues actually more lifelike than the human statue busking below them. If you’re ever in Florence, don’t miss the Uffizi. But here’s a tip: you can buy tickets in advance, and not have to wait for more than half an hour —inside, away from the heat— before they’ll let you in.
On that rather chagrined note let me finish this unintentionally epic post. The trip back was chiefly notable for my complete inability to communicate with any of my carriage-mates, another bout of dehydration and attached confusion, and the beginnings of a nasty cold that I’m only just getting over now. Nothing, in other words, that you really want to hear about.