There is a church, in Florence, called the Basilica di Santa Croce.  As you approach the steps in the afternoon, the red-green-cream tilework of the facade is rich and sundrenched, an homage to the great eighteenth century skin of the Duomo just a few streets away.  Standing guard at the entrance is a ten foot statue crowned with the severe countenance of Dante Aligheiri.  This twelfth century Florentine’s  great respect for the Classics so conflicted his unshakeable Catholicism as to compel him to grant Virgil – banished to purgatory for having the misfortune to have been born before his own Redeemer – the role of Guide through the seven circles of hell toured in his  Divine Comedy.   In this church, entombed side by side, lie the mortal remains of Niccolo Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.

I have tried, and failed, to think of any place and time in history where three such men could have been entombed forever together.  If in Athens there were some Olympian temple in which the bones of Pericles, Phideas and Aristotle shared company, that might hold comparison, and yet there were almost two hundred years separating the statesman and the artist from the philosopher.  Here in Florence, in the sixteenth century , these masters of statecraft, of science, and of art were practically contemporaries.  These men who redefined for an entire civilisation leadership;  art; the truth of the universe itself.    Florence was and is a remarkable city.

The view from the train from Venice made good on all the promises that the unprepossessing north of Italy had reneged upon, and unveiled my first glimpse into the the beauty of the Tuscan countryside.   But even then I was unprepared for the Duomo itself.  On my walk down to the famous Ponte Vecchio on my first evening I saw in the rich evening light this masterpiece of Renaissance design, coated in the tri-coloured tilework of later lovers.   The inset sculptures, the richness and intricacy of the facade all demand focus and yet the eye is drawn to the dome, arching overhead so vast that when Michelangelo’s original plans required a timber framework for its completion, he was told that there were not enough trees in all of Tuscany to furnish such a scaffold.  He had drawn inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome, but after fifteen centuries, his world no longer possessed the technology to create such a heavenly vault without support.

My walk through the Piazza della Signoria took in the imperious statue of Neptune in his fountain of leaping fish and horses, and of the replica David outside the Uffrizi, but the sun was setting and I got to the bridge just in time.  This was the only crossing on the Arno left standing by the retreating German Army in 1944, convinced by local leadership that its historical significance was more important that its capacity to bear the the advancing British.  The setting sun refracted through billowing cumulus put on the perfect show, and after nightfall I went to bed confident that I’d found the Italy I’d been promised.

You have to be even more pretentious than me to lay claim, even in your wildest moments, to “Florence syndrome”, or “Stendhal syndrome”, named after the 18th Century Viennese visitor to the city who found himself driven almost out of his mind by the profusion of beauty on display on its walls.  Nonetheless, even without the benefit of a Classical education I found myself a little giddy touring the halls of the Uffrizi gallery the next day.  It would take weeks, at least, properly to enjoy all of the extraordinary artworks housed in the galleries of Florence and I fully intend to devote that time to this wonderful town in the future, but on this trip I had time for just two; the Uffrizi and the Galleria dell Accademia.  Just the external porticos of the Uffrizi, viewed while queueing, display sculpture of and by the masters of the Renaissance and before (mainly replicas these days), but inside this is  one of the great repositories of art in the Western world.  In this gallery, in one beautiful frescoed room, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus dominates one wall… and it’s not even the finest artwork in the room.  Not even the finest Botticelli, the prize for which for my money has to go to Primavera, a remarkable allegorical piece which should be read from right to left, showing blue-chilled Zephyr blowing in the new season and mythological beauties greeting her and frolicking in her arrival.  Botanists in the nineties, studying this painting from the 1400s, identified over 200 different species of flowers and plants.  That’s the level of detail in the background.

On a subsequent floor I came face to face with the first woman I ever I loved, or saw naked.  To be fair, I should admit that this might have been in part due to the fact that she was the only unclothed lady visible in the data repository of Encyclopaedia Encarta, (which for younger readers, was the refugee camp assigned to All Of The Information during its brief but turbulent forced relocation from libraries to the Internet.).  On the other hand, whether a symptom of nature or an agent of nurture, it’s notable how many girlfriends since have borne her smooth unhurried curves and beguiling smile.  But I was with her now, and in the flesh Titian’s Venus Of Urbino, glorious in her demure inviting nudity, made doubly-naked by the flurry of maidservant activity behind her, looks peremptorily  but teasingly out from her frame, clearer and more captivating than any JPEG has ever had the right or the wherewithal even to hint at.  I stood there for fully fifteen minutes by the clock.

A couple of rooms later, Caravaggio’s startling take on the head of the Gorgon trapped horrifically in Perseus’ shield was enough to snap me out of my reverie, and not long afterwards, three hours after entering the gallery, I emerged blinking into the sunlight.  No time to stop and stare though, on to see Dave.  This was Sunday, after all, and Italy (along with France as an ill-fated trip to Dijon last year taught me) closes on a Monday.  So I had to get to the David before the gallery closed.  The long line moved ponderously slowly, enlivened only a little by the chatter of fellow Anglophone backpackers around me, but after an hour and a half and a pomegranate slushie, I was in.

No room for excuses here: I assumed this would be a box-ticking exercise.  We all know what he looks like, I’ve even seen him animated ridiculously by Terry Gilliam; frankly I didn’t think this trip was going to give me anything other than bragging rights.  “I’ve seen Michelangelo’s David”.  Well, I have, and he really is a long drink of water.  Exquisitely curated, situated under natural light in the domed finale of a long corridor, he stands, thoughtfully disinterested in, but towering magnificently above, the unworthy and bulbous mortals who throng and waddle and chatter in his shadow.  Polished from a single piece of unblemished stone, Michelangelo’s masterpiece of contraposto shows this lithe young man in the moment his weight is shifted onto his supporting leg, with forward momentum imminent but trapped forever in the marble.  This technique, rediscovered from the Greeks for whom its invention differentiated their Classical work from its static Egyptian predecessors, is one of the things which gives Renaissance sculpture its vibrancy and life – that and a certain morbid curiosity on the part of its leading lights with the intricacies of the human musculo-skeletal system, learned illegally in crypts and charnel-houses always under threat of discovery and excommunication.  David bears all of that accuracy of the learned and preternaturally talented sculptor, but also the caress of a lover.  His youth, seen up close, might be rather troubling to a modern eye, but there is no doubting the purity of the adoration which crafted his long smooth biceps, his taught abdomen, his adolescently powerful thighs and buttocks.  He is shockingly beautiful, captivating in a way no photograph or video could convey.

After all that homo-eroticism I needed a bit of a lie down, so it wasn’t until the next day that I ascended the dome of the Duomo.  500-odd steps (yes, they are odd – whoever heard of a square spiral staircase?) lead first to the vertiginous walk around the inside of the dome, where scenes of ascension contrast with a hellscape that puts one in mind of Blake at his most laudanum-inspired, and then up out into the sunlight.   Florence is quietly beautiful from above, far smaller than Paris or Rome and lacking the headline-grabbing architecture (as is so often the case with good panoramas, you’re standing on the thing you’d most like to be included in the view) but it’s consistently pretty wrapped in its terracotta pashmina, with sporadic churches and galleries to catch the eye.  Upon descending I went to pay my triple-respects at Santa Croce, and then on to the station, and the train to Rome.

I had too short a time in Tuscany.  I wanted to see Pisa and to visit Cincqueterra.  There was wine country to explore and the sea to see.  There are another two dozen galleries and churches I should like to have seen in Florence itself, not to mention the famous market, and the shopping and food here begged for another visit with a far more flexible budget.  I entirely understand the English upper-middle-class’s obsession with this part of the world, and (as long as I can avoid them all) I’ll be back very soon indeed.

There is something fantastical about Venice.  A city without roads, a great historical power built on pontoons, an island of islands… the city of St Mark, one cannot help but feel, should not exist in this world.  It should be in Middle Earth, or Earthsea, or Westeros, and there the Doges in stately robes would reign still.  But here it sits, in our world in our time… and really, I’m very ambivalent about it.

When I walked down the steps from the train station I was truly swept up in it.  Fizzingly excited.  The water laps at the steps of the pavement!  It comes right up!  🙂 This is Venice, uncontrollably pretty in the setting sun, with sleek slim wooden-hulled boats passing clunky water taxis as tourists dined and drank in side streets.  And that… vision… of Venice did indeed persist for me throughout all four days, but only intermittently.  So from time to time upon rounding a corner onto an utterly deserted backstreet, nothing but canal and moored gondolas and window boxes overflowing with flowers… yes, it is achingly beautiful, a watercolourist’s dream.  Everywhere there are specks and sparks of genuineness and loveliness; in the wrought iron of a barrier, in the flickering standard lamps of a pavement cafe reflected in the rippling canal at twilight.  The view back to San Marco from the Lagoon, or over it from the Campinile.   And certainly in the art and the real history, all of which was humbling in its scale and magnificence.

But overlaid across it all, like the faintly soiled sheet which sours an otherwise luxurious hotel room, is tourist Venice.  The place where the waiter’s face makes it clear that “and a glass of tap water, please” sounds uncannily like an admission of vile and twisted depravities performed upon the corpse of his dear departed grandmother.  The two hundred shops selling Chinese-made carinvale masks.  The place where spaghetti carbonara, a meal which must cost all of 80p to make, costs E15 to eat.  A place of gondola rides which in the flesh are simply the stupidest, naffest things I have ever seen – stripey shirts and straw boaters and gurning tourists trying to pretend they’re having a romantic time while the sweaty, bored, cynical Italian with the punt shouts over their head to other canal users whose wake threatens to drown the whole enterprise.  E12 or more for every single museum or gallery, and even the churches charge admission.  Everyone in Venice wants your money, and all of it, and everyone who works in Venice knows you have no option but to part with it.  That’s it.  Finally.  I have been looking for the right paradigm for this for literally weeks: A mark.  That’s what I felt like in Venice.  A conman’s mark. I’d retitle the post A mark in St Mark’s Square now, but I like the Doc Brown quote too.

So that’s Venice for me.  Picturesque, otherworldly, at times achingly romantic.  But grabby, swivel-eyed, presumptuous and arrogant.  I think also, Venice is a place for lovers, or rather, Venice is a place for the in-love, which doesn’t have to be the same thing at all.  Case in point: I was joined for this leg of my trip by a fearsomely bright and very lovely young psychologist named Zoe, a friend and sometime lover, and while we had a very enjoyable time together, that is not I think a dynamic best suited to bring out Venice’s charms.  The city requires a total suspension of disbelief towards it, and total immersion in each other; not the friendly sarcasm and caginess of the ill-defined relationship.  Nonetheless, as I say, we had a lovely if rather expensive time and it’s a place truly unlike any other.

I arrived accidentally, thinking the train was going to deposit me off the island (where I’d booked a hostel), so my first night in Venice was spent making it up as I went along, chatting and drinking with some pretty Americans, and eventually sleeping on the street.  I must say, if you’re going to sleep on the streets – and I’m not an expert – a quiet backstreet in Venice in late June, with music playing in the distance and, beneath you, the teasing water slapping playfully against the crumbling foundations of its longsuffering partner, is not the worst hardship a man can endure.

The bus ride to and from the airport was, however, more comfortable even than the quayside, and the hotel Zoe had booked in San Marco was a fantastic little find – once we actually found it.  “Labyrinthine”, “warren”, “maze”… none of these quite capture the Stygian experience of trying to navigate the pathways and canals of San Polo and San Marco when you have some place to get to.  When you don’t, it’s a delight.  You wander this way and that, laughing, admiring architecture and bridges and waterways, eating gelato in the sunshine.  When you do have to be somewhere, and worse still by a certain deadline, you don’t meander hand in hand by the canal, you threaten to push each other in it.  You don’t drip gelato down your shirt and laugh playfully, you sweat right through your shirt and grimace.  You don’t get joyously lost in tiny picturesque alleyways, you just get lost.  Oh, here’s better vocabulary with which to describe Venice’s streetplan: A. Fucking. Nightmare.

Anyway, the hotel was right off St Mark’s Square and it was lovely, a phenomenal bargain.  That day we splurged on a glass of prosecco in the shadow of the Basilica, toured the Doge’s palace, had a canalside dinner and experienced acqua alta in St Mark’s Square as a lightening storm ravaged the sky.  The highlight of the Doge’s Palace for me were undoubtedly the council rooms, rather than the Bridge of Sighs; to be honest I found the latter rather uninspiring both inside and out.  But the vast rooms of real power within the palace, the Collegio, the Sala Consiglio dei Dieci, and the Sala della Bussola, made me exclaim aloud.  These are cavernous chambers where councils would meet, audiences would be granted, where Dukes and Cardinals would plot and scheme and plan.  Their gilt-framed ceilings and walls overwhelm you with vast scenes of metaphor and history, countless works by Tintoretto and Veronese gazing down from amidst flowing lilac robes and radiant golden skin.  This is the apotheoses of Venetian art framing the zenith of Venetian power, and it succeeds in humbling the visitor.

That evening, after dinner, we tried to walk back to our hotel and couldn’t.  Between us and our destination, across the whole width and length of St Mark’s, the waters of the Veneto had come up in a brazen attempt to reclaim the land, and submerged the square to a height of six inches.  This tidal phenomenon is called acqua alta, and while severe events are rare and can be disruptive and even dangerous, this was just a delightful and unexpected experience.  We took off our shoes and splashed through the tepid water while overhead, roiling greyblack clouds were picked out and pierced every two seconds by spear after torturously branching spear of forked lighting.  In one of the square’s restaurants, the orchestra played classical music culminating in Nessun Dorma, and with our backs to the Basilica we were enclosed on three sides by the thousand lightbulbs of the balconies and collonades of the square: three brilliant unbroken lines shining down on us and three shimmering wavering reflected rows beneath our feet, glittering back up in a myriad angles in the wake of a hundred feet.  We took two dozen photographs, none of which came out.

The storm lasted all that night and the following day, so we stayed indoors and toured the Basilica and Il Frare.  I am choosing not to be upset by scaffolding, because it’s that or hang my head in my hands.  At the time of writing, extraordinary sights which have been at least partially marred by renovations include: the Duomo in Milan, St Mark’s in Venice, the Duomo in Florence, the Collusseum and the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and the Parthenon itself.  So you simply have to look past it.  There is a reason these places all look so good and are all still in once piece [or as many pieces or fewer as they were in fifty years ago], and if you have any kind of imagination at all, you’re only using what’s in front of you to recreate what was there hundreds or thousands of years ago anyway.  If my mind’s eye can add walls and a roof, it can erase some iron pipes.  Nonetheless, the outside of St Mark’s Basilica was particularly hard to visualise as it would look in its pomp, since opaque netting covered the scaffolding in front of the domes at centre and stage-right.  Inside was a different story: extraordinary gilted mosaics and that much-sought-after sense of space and lightness created by the domes themselves.  It was though extra for the guided tour, and extra to climb the tower, and three percent for lookin’ in the mirror twice, so we didn’t see it all.  In the afternoon Il Frare was better value for money.

An imposing Gothic structure, this church boasts some of the greatest works of art in the city, including statues depicting both creeping skeletons and hulking slaves but especially, over the alter, one of the most arresting Titians I have ever had the good fortune to gaze upon, which I did for some time.  The Assumption stands over twenty feet tall, framed by the domed gothic window, and the Virgin swathed in the rich velvety red of the Renaissance’s greatest colourist, steps from a cloud which divides the temporal and spiritual into a sky of shining, metamorphic gold.  It was here that I was struck by the extent to which Italian churches are as much art gallery as place of worship.  Again and again in Venice, in Florence, in Rome, extraordinary works by history’s true greats are hung not in museums or galleries but in the cathedral or church which commissioned them, five hundred years ago.  As an Englishman I had no experience of this; it occurred that perhaps the difference is that here in Italy, there was no power which could rob the Church of its treasures: the church was the power in the land.  So on its walls and in its hands these extraordinary works remain, dedications to the Son, or the Virgin, the Spirit or the Saints, but a reminder also of the wealth and influence and patronage of the Diocese, the Cardinals, the Church.

The island of Murano, which we visited the following day, is an altogether nicer experience than San Marco or San Polo, Venice’s central islands.  Venice is architecturally very busy: narrow streets and thin canals abutted by four and five storey buildings.  There is a lot going on in a small footprint.  Murano takes that idea, takes away the crowds, grips the edges, and stretches and smooths the surface like kneading a thin and crispy Italian pizza.  The canals grow wider, the buildings reduce to less imposing, less frenetic proportions.  You can see more sky, and walk four abreast while you’re doing it.

Murano is of course famous for its glass, much of which is… well, horrible.  Ungainly shapes and overbright colours, necklaces which would give you a hunch and candlesticks whose headpieces should remain forever unlit lest they illuminate the clunky, primary-hued disaster below.  We did find some absolutely beautiful pieces while window shopping though, including some of the finest, most delicate, gold-laced wine glasses in existence, each one of which sold for over four hundred euros.  Well, sold perhaps, but not to us.  And we got to watch the seemingly alchemical process by which rich orange-red malleable glass, heated to 1200degrees until it glows bright and opaque, is fashioned and blown into intricate translucent shapes by skilled hands whose techniques have barely changed in the centuries since glass-blowing was confined for safety on this island 700 years ago.  The Museum of Glass was worth the half-price admission for being half-closed-for-repair, with the examples of ancient Roman glass (yes, apparently, – I had no idea either!) worth a visit on their own.   We soaked up the sun on the ferry back to San Marco, then enjoyed the views of Venice bathing in it, from the top of the Campinile.  On a cloudless scorching day Venice looks almost peaceful from a height of 80 metres.

An eventful few hours later, we were seated in the Roman Arena in Verona awaiting the start of Carmen.  If holiday memories are best glossy, travel writing is better honest, so perhaps it is worth briefly recording the ghastly, short-tempered, forty-minute trek to the station which was the inspiration for my description of Venice’s sidestreets above.  I should probably record the purchase of the train tickets with less than a minute to spare, to a soundtrack of frustrated shouting and wounded good intentions and a backdrop of terrified Venetians standing well back from my ticket machine.  Certainly the ticket inspector, who upon discovering that we had failed to validate our ticket at the station,  suggested helpfully that we should have purchased tickets for the 6.12pm train prior to 6.12pm in order to have time to process them properly, deserves a special mention, as does the fact that I didn’t throw him out the window.

But we got to Verona on time in the end, and had forgiven each other and started speaking again by the time the performance started.  This was of course the extra show of the performance I’d missed the previous weekend, and it was so much more fun for Zoe being there to share it with.  The atmosphere crackled as the sun sank behind the Roman walls, and I was absolutely overwhelmed when a cast of almost two hundred, including half a dozen dressage-trained horses, took the stage for the opening number.  The whole thing was a remarkable, unforgettable spectacle, although I’ll admit that three hours in, when technically it was now tomorrow and we’d now had the third intermission, I was starting to become as aware of my buttocks as of the stage, protected as they were from ancient stone by only an uncomfortable inflatable cushion.  I did though get to meet some of the cast during that intermission, who were the sexiest gypsies I’ve ever seen.

We killed the time between the end of the show and the first train of the new day with coffee and gelato in the piazza, a stroll through the deserted halflit streets of Verona at 3am, and a nap in the train station.  Our final day in Venice was spent swimming and sunbathing (and sleeping) on the Lido, that long thin sandbar island which is sliced into dozens of private beaches and a couple of public ones of which our choice, Blue Moon, is perhaps the best known.  The sand is ochre, the water is cool but clean, and although Zoe thought the beach was busy, in comparison to my most recent point of reference – Copacobana – it was practically deserted.  We had a chilled out day and enjoyed a delicious seafood lunch including a new experience for me – cuttlefish in its own ink, superb – at prices much more human than in San Marco.

Zoe left the following morning and I walked the now-familiar route to the station, across the trekked off to catch the train for Florence which was… fully booked.  So I bought a ticket for the 6pm train and spent another afternoon in Venice, walking all over Santa Croce and the Dorsuduro, and found there some small part of the tranquility and verisimilitude I’d been searching for, and which I’d found so lacking around St Mark’s Square and in the Rialto.  I walked right down to the striking dome of the Santa MAria della Salute, which commands the view from the whole of the quay of San Marco, and then chose the Gallerie dell’Accademia over the Peggy Gugenheim museum because, called me a bluff old traditionalist, but I still prefer Giotti and Bellini to Yoko Ono and Jackson Pollock.  It is arguably Venice’s finest gallery, with with a superb and lively Tintoretto – Creation of the Animals – and it provided me the full knockout impact of the three majestic domes and glistering gold mosaics of the Basilica which the scaffolding had denied me, in the form of a stunning Bellini set in St Mark’s Square.   After a peaceful air-conditioned couple of hours I stepped back into the sun and the heat, and followed the course of the Canal Grande around to the station, where I pushed through the throngs of the Pride Parade (it’s quite hard to convey both “yeah! down with the Catholic Right!” and “get out of my way” with nothing but body language.  I fear I may have failed.) Finally, remembering to validate my ticket, I boarded the train for Florence.

Right.  Here I sit, drinking terrible wine which tastes like watered down ouzo, eating stuffed vine leaves, shaded from the Greek sun in a pavement cafe at the very foot of the Acropolis.  This morning I stood on the steps of the Parthenon, and sat in the Agora where Plato learned at the feet of Socrates.  Much has happened since last we spoke.

Verona is a very attractive city, but a short story.  I arrived in the early evening, bubbling with excitement for my night at the opera in the Roman Arena.  My hostel lay between the train station and the Arena, so I stopped off for a shower, excitedly explaining to the helpful young lady who checked me in that I tickets for tonight’s performance and she said…

“There is no performance tonight”.

I said “no, I have a ticket”.  She said “It was last night, the opera” .

Confidence and ebullience drained as if through some hideous surgical valve, and I mumbled something about having to check and slunk to my room.  I checked my gmail.  The tickets – I’d bought two, more’s the hubris, imagining that with a day in Verona it’d be an easy and cute way to whip up a date for the evening – were for the Saturday night.  Last night.  I cross-referenced the itinerary on this blog – it said Sunday.  I’d written it down wrong when creating the itinerary, and then only referred to this blog rather than to the emailed tickets.  I had managed to bugger this up two months in advance.   That’s really post-graduate incompetence.

This stuff is hard to stomach, and harder to put into words.  It’s not the end of the world, I know, but I’m good at this… bad at this.  I have form at this, I mean, which means my self-critical faculties leap into overdrive when given yet another opportunity for mockery ridicule and self-derision.  I have a psychologist friend who defines my personality type as “fragile narcissist” (which believe me feels just as vinegary to hear as it does to read) but in layman’s terms I choose to believe it means “self-confident… mainly”.  Certainly, choosing to have a high opinion of one’s own abilities does mean that the wounds inflicted on the ego by basic or foolish mistakes… well, they really do sting.  But, these things happen, one tells oneself.  And – turnabout being fair play – a maternal grandparent deserves a namecheck here.  My mother’s mother, a redoubtable woman by the name of June Sinclair, nicknamed me the Absent-Minded Professor at the age of about eight years old, and as long as I keep her sage perspicacity in mind, I’m less likely to fall prey to delusions, not of grandeur, but of worldly competence.  Which also means I can bear frequent proof of its lack with a self-aware shrug rather than a self-loathing fist through the wall.  You can work on self-improvement – and I really am – but sometimes it helps to know who you really are.

So yeah… search “the west wing we changed times zones” on youtube to see the Aaron Sorkin version of what happened first… but eventually I calmed down and turned on the wifi to discover there was an additional performance of Carmen laid on for the coming Thursday, and I booked two tickets.  I’d be in Venice, with Zoe, the trip was doable and I wouldn’t have to miss out completely.  Then I read a book, texted some friends, and went to sleep.

I enjoyed Verona, the following day.  The Arena isn’t awe-inspiring in it’s scale (although the prices of the piazza’s restaurants are in theirs) but it’s remarkable in its preservation.  The more I learn about the ancient world, the more respect I have for ruins – well-preserved and otherwise.  Just think about the wars, the sieges, the famines, the sheer historical space filled up with ignorance and prejudice and poverty and humanity; and still something survives.  In 1687 the Parthenon, as I learned today, was hit with a direct cannonball strike while it was being used as a gunpowder magazine by occupying Turkish forces.  THAT is the scale of what we’re up against.  Think about beautiful 1920s picture houses in London torn down to make car parks, or even for reasonable housing requirements.    In that context, think of the aspiring landowner in 450AD who wants to build a home for his family… and this weed-strewn ancient unmarked unused ruin down the street is doing nothing but offering its cut stone, unguarded.  Nobody knows who built it or why. Nobody cares.  But it survives.  It has to be lucky every time, vandals and thieves and enemy canon and earthquakes only have to be lucky once.  And yet still, it survives.

So I enjoyed the Arena, and the Museo di Castelvecchio, where a fourteenth century fort, less fortunate in the face of Allied bombardment, has been lovingly and partially reconstructed into a charming museum housing statues from antiquity and Renaissance art including an explosively colourful Veronese.  From there I walked through wide well-cobbled streets showcasing Italian fashion, and pretty narrow streets offering everything from metalwork to artisanal cheeses, to the Ponte Pietra and then up many maaaany steps to the Castel San Pietro, too new to be worth entrance itself, but commanding charming views of the river and of the city of Romeo and Juliet.

My overriding impression of Verona was one of attractive dilapidation.  Walls flaking paint, plaster, even bricks are far more abundant than their less memorable and better kept counterparts.  Shutters on windows which once were dark green or deep blue are now sunbleached wood with only a hint or a memory of past perfection.  It is a charming town; unremarkable in many ways, but genteel, and lovely.  I left in in better spirits than I might have imagined possible the previous evening, and headed for Venice.

I have two pieces of advice for any single man considering a trip to Milan:

1. Be there for Saturday night, and dress to impress.

2. Do not stay in Hostel 3 on the Via Ignazio Ciaia.

I am not a man unpredisposed to noticing a beautiful woman.  Or indeed many beautiful women.  Or consecutive beautiful women one after another, who whip my head gravitationally left and right as they pass; even while the increasingly outraged beautiful woman to my side turns, flabbergasted by my artlessness, from rose to puce.  However.  Howwwwwwwwever… the Milanese in full battle dress really are something else.  On the half hour trip from train station to required metro stop I fell in love at least two dozen times and my heart and pupils swelled and contracted so far and so frequently it’s a miracle I saw the station sign.  Everywhere, just everywhere: glossy lips, huge brown eyes, L’Oreal hair, stunning A-lines, classy minis, Prada glasses, glowing skin never too-much revealed, straight backs, clicking heels, and machine-gun chatter into phones or friends faces revealing pearlescent smiles.  From fifteen to fifty and beyond, the women of the fashion capital of the world on a Saturday evening really are a sight to see; beautiful, feminine, elegant, intimidating.  It would take a braver man than I…

Not that I quite looked the part, having walked for three hours with my full pack around Bellaggio then travelled on public transport for a further three.   I just wanted my hostel, or at least knew that’s all I had hopes of, although when I got there any number of bar-side rejections might have been preferable.  It’s not a good sign when the name of the hostel is attached to the door with sellotape, is it.  Doesn’t bode well.  Doesn’t fill you with the anticipatory excitement of forthcoming luxury as does being greeting by the valet under the marble carriageway of the Waldorf-Astoria. (I’d imagine).  But there was a bed, and cleanish sheets, and if they insisted on only accepting cash at least that was all they took.  I didn’t get robbed on the Saturday night or the Sunday, despite the lack of lockers, or indeed of locks.

Sunday in Milan was going to be brief, I had tickets to the opera at the Arena in Verona that evening, and only two things to see in Milan: the Duomo and The Last Supper.  Milan’s small metro system is clear even for a man as navigationally challenged as myself, and “Duomo” station (bit of a giveaway, that) brings you up in the middle of the Piazza right in front of the countless-spired cathedral.   This was another lovely case of having absolutely no idea what to expect, and the endless almost fussy intricacy of the spires, brilliantly backlit by the morning sun, really was a jaw-dropper on the metro steps.  Inside I was choked by incense – this was after all Sunday morning –  and I tiptoed around the Mass to catch sight of some implausibly vibrant stained glass high above my head.

One down, one to go, and I trekked down a side street towards the Last Supper.  Or tried to.  Got instantly lost, the “hostel” not having furnished me with a map and Italian cities (with the notable and laudable exception of Florence) making no effort whatsoever to inform tourists where they are.  London has signs on every other street corner with 5min and 15min walking radii overlaid on a streetplan.  Italy, instead, has vendors selling E3 maps, which I was buggered if I was going to buy for a single day.  Italy does though also have very kind and long-suffering locals (cross-reference: London) who will go to great length to provide directions to hapless backpackers when asked politely in limited Italian.  Or so I have found.

So I arrived at the unremarkable site of the most famous fresco in the world, referred to locally as Il Cenacolo (“the refectory”, ie. it’s unromantically named after the little mess hall in which it was painted) and walked up to buy  ticket… to be told that it was sold out.  Sold out, in fact, until the middle of next week.  Only small groups are allowed in at any one time, you buy a ticket with a fifteen minute timeslot, and you damn well  buy it weeks in advance if you want to get in.  Or so I was informed by the officious gentleman to whom I spoke.

Now… as a brash and doubtless sometimes grating adolescent I was often enjoined by teachers not to behave as if there were one rule for me and one rule for everyone else.  Asked in fact, where would we be? if everyone behaved like that.  And while their underlying point – Joel you arrogant little shit just toe the line will you! – might be reasonable in the setting, as a well-trained debater I don’t much like “slippery-slope” arguments.  Yes, if no-one obeyed any rules we would have anarchy.  Result: net diminution in gross happiness and utility.  Bad thing.  But if you just let me get around this one rule (and crucially if your doing so does not actively bring harm to someone else), then I’m happier, you’re where you would have been, and so is everyone else.  Result: net increase in gross happiness and utility.  Good thing.

This is not about  queue-jumping, not about me stealing someone else’s ticket or getting off paying my taxes.  It’s about the little things, the little if-you-don’t-ask-you-don’t-get things, which I’ve always happily bumbled through life knowing I am usually one of the people able to get, if I do ask, one way or another.  Usually people can be persuaded by reasonableness and politeness, sometimes they can be charmed, occasionally and if necessary they can be bounced.  I don’t know whether this … trait? ability? assumption? … breeds a little arrogance or if it simply provides me an escape clause that those with greater organisational ability do not require.  Personally I like to think it’s charming as long as it’s not over-relied upon, and only on the understanding that it is others’ kindness and generosity of spirit, and not any particular exceptionalism on my part, that allows the trick to work.

Anyway, I wandered off, and wandered back once the officious official was taking a break and the room had largely emptied of other loudly disappointed tourists, and I had a little chat with a charming 40-something called Nicolletta who was by that stage manning the desk.  Explained that I was only in the city for one day, that I had been hugely excited to see the Last Supper while I was here, that I was travelling all by myself and wouldn’t take up noticeable room in an entry group… and she very kindly sold me a ticket for later that day.  I paid subtly and thanked her profusely – and quietly.  Later in the afternoon once I’d gone into and come out of the viewing I managed to catch her eye from a distance and cross my hands over my heart in thanks.  She smiled and blew me a kiss.

You would imagine that shopping in Milan would be pretty damn good, and you’d be right.  At one point in the afternoon, killing time until my viewing of the Last Supper, I could see two Louis Vuittons, two Pradas, an Armani a Gucci a Farragammo and God knows what else besides, from a single vantage point in the beautiful seventeenth century arcade beside the Duomo.  But it was of course the Leonardo which took the breath away.

Entrance to the Last Supper is via a series of three climate controlled vestibules which work as demi-airlocks, each progressively colder until you are ushered into the chilled but otherwise ordinary refectory building in which Napoleon’s troops once stabled their horses and in which, before that, the great polymath from Vinci worked for four years on his uniquely innovative methodology for wall painting.  True frescoes are painted with tempera onto (into?) wet plaster, and therefore have to be completed in a matter of days.  Leonardo, inventing as he went along as was his want, wanted longer for his rendering of the moment Jesus announces he will be betrayed, and to perfect the sfumato, soft-edged, soft-focus effect he sought.  In fact on some days he would come, ascend the scaffold, look at the previous day’s work for an hour or so, and leave.

I’m not a proper art buff, far from it, so my words and comprehension can’t do justice to the work itself.  But the truly extraordinary thing, to the layman seeing it in the flesh, is the perspective.  As you walk in you are sure, absolutely sure, that the wall on which it’s painted is not flat.  That it is in fact painted onto the inner five walls of a cutaway space, with its own ceiling below-and-beyond the ceiling of the room you’re standing in.  That the frame around the painting must be of carved stone, the physical demarcation of this strange cubby.  But, no.  It’s just a painting on a wall.  A very good painting – even if it does rather uncomfortably confirm all that Dan Brown stuff about the femininity of John and the negative space between Jesus and John/Mary.  I was really quite moved to have seen it, and felt more connected to it than I ever have to a work in a gallery or museum.  There was something timeless about standing here where the artist stood, drinking in the faces which had looked out – one resigned and twelve indignant – unchangingly from this wall as empires rose and fell around them, surviving neglect and vandalism and Napoleanic cavalry and Allied bombs.  Thank you, Nicolletta.

So.  With two out of two Milanese boxes ticked, it was on to the train to Verona and the opera, where an unpleasant surprise lay in store…

PS.  There should really be a third piece of advice shouldn’t there: book your ticket to The Last Supper ahead of time. It’s really worth seeing.

Being near, being by, being on-in-under the water simply makes my heart soar.  It always has.  My whole torso tightens and lightens in anticipation; I become a walking, almost skipping contradiction of jittery elation and beatified calm.  A grin plays at the corners of my mouth, in fact usually it bursts forth uncontrollably, to elicit a certain warmhearted bepuzzlement from strangers.  My chest bubbles and foams and my throat constricts and I can feel that underlying quartzpulse behind my heartbeat crackle and accelerate, supercharged by the smell and the sparkle and the sheer blue green grey black freedom of the water.

So, dear reader, you can reasonably assume that the bus ride up the winding mountain shores of Lake Como was a toddlerish feast of unselfconscious glee… and possibly a journey of some concern those other passengers whose view of the glinting waves and pre-Alpine villages was obscured by two-hundred-and-something-pounds of bouncing, giggling, 30 year old manchild.  But the drive did have to attend on my usual maladministration and incompetence.

Nobody I had met to date had much good to say about Milan (although since they’d all omitted to mention Da Vinci’s Last Supper I might with hindsight revalue and devalue their advice) so I decided to head straight to the lakes.  In April over drinks in Rio, some old uni friends had insisted that the trip to Como would repay the investment of time, so using airport wifi I booked myself into the Lake Como Beach Hostel and set out following the hostelbookers instructions. Bus to the domestic terminal, metro to the train station, train to Serrano, train to Como, bus to Doma…. oh.  What do you mean, “it’s 9.30pm and the last bus to Domaso was an hour ago”?  What do you mean “it’s fifty kilometres away a taxi would cost E100??”.  What do you mean “No, you can’t sleep in the train station”???

Lake Como, it turns out, is rather bigger than I had understood.  Shaped like an inverted lowercase y, the town of Como itself sits at the foot of the bottom-left fork and Domaso is towards at the apex of the tail (hat?), two hours away by bus.  Hotels in Como (pretty, tranquil, and long famous for some of the best silk in the world) are expensive, and hostels are rare.  The Respau Eco-Hostel, a converted 11th century monastery, looked promisingly local but lost late and wifiless beyond the patio of the pub which was providing my connection to hostelbookers, I reneged on my principles and ordered a cab.

E13 later I was dropped off at a unlit stone archway framing a steeply-rising cobbled street.  The driver and a small plastic sign declared that the hostel lay “a little way” up this street, which was inaccessible by car.  It was also, after the first 100 yards, totally unlit.  Now… a little dramatic licence is tempting here.  Utter solitude throughout the half-hour hillclimb in inky blackness?  Battery failing on the phone which provided the only weak illumination of the road ahead?  Distant howling – or worse, nearby rustling – in the forest-covered mountains? Sadly not.  Just a couple of German cyclists who joined me on the trek to the summit after about ten minutes.  But it was, nonetheless, bloody dark,  bloody weird, and bloody scary for those first minutes, and had I not turned around to greet them and had they not been returning to the hostel at which they were staying, I don’t know whether my nerve would have held, or whether I would have convinced myself I’d taken a wrong turn, plausibly denying under cover of navigational incompetence what was in truth a primal fear of the unknown dark.

But after arriving drenched in sweat from the climb with my pack, I was resuscitated by water and wine from the charming Francesco, who also provided a lift down the mountain after breakfast the next morning.  (This is categorically not a story of breakfasts, but I will never excuse Francesco for providing, for my first cup of truly Italian coffee, a packet of Nescafe Instant).  I had planned to travel by boat to Domaso but the right bus was just leaving, so I got my first, and (see above) increasingly gleeful view of Lake Como from its windows as we wound further and further north along the shore.

On that day, in that mood, under sun so bright that even the halfmoon shone in the sky at midday, Lake Como looked almost fictionally beautiful.  On either side of the lake the pre-Alps rise sharply, their foothills butchered into agricultural terraces in the small hinterlands of each little town.  Every few miles these sit, fishing by the water’s edge, nestled around miniature bays.  They don’t have the chocolate-box quality you’d find across the border a hundred miles north, but personally I prefer the earthier and more limited Italian palette over its Swiss counterpart.  Gorgeously, hilariously Italian names, too – Cernobbio, Argegno, Menaggio, Bellagio –  it all sounds like a puppet show.  My grandfather, whose three-year stay in Italy in the 1940s was neither as enjoyable nor as consensual as mine is proving, always held that to speak Italian one simply needed to”add an o”.  George, it seems you were right.

In Domaso I sunbathed, I swam, I kayaked, I hillwalked, and I drank a terrible, bitter, campari-and-prosecco Aperol Spritz (“go on, it’s a local delicacy“).  Over light and tasty pizza I got into a fascinating discussion with some otherwise-normal San Fransiscans as to whether or not the world was 6000 years old, but we all went skinnydipping by moonlight after dinner and wine, so maybe I’m losing my Dawkinsian abrasiveness.  I got excessively stoned on the hostel balcony, and spent an hour gazing into the Milky Way, musing on whether any life could possibly be of any value that didn’t contribute to mankind’s eventual step into the stars.  And I broke my shoe.  Not on the balcony, you understand. I was still listing Domaso-based-activities.

On the Friday, from the bus and from the lakeside, the water was blue.  OhmygodlookhowBLUEitis blue.  That night, invisibly black.  On Saturday morning though under cloudy skies it was the colour of uncut jade, and choppy.  The windsurfers I’d been able to overtake by shoulder power alone the previous day would have left me splintered in their wake had I crossed their paths that morning, so land-based activities seemed best.  A sweat-drenched, soon-shirtless walk up the steep hillside and along a quaint winding path to the next town took three hours, and soon saw off both my hangover and the clouds, and by the time I boarded the ferry to Bellaggio the water was blue and inviting once again.

The town after which the casino is named is known as the pearl of Lake Como.  It sits at the point of bifurcation looking out over all three spurs of the water from a sprawling collection of settlements old and new, most of which I didn’t have time to see.  The oldest part of town is closest to the lake though, and I spent a very pleasant two hours between ferry arrival and bus departure seeing old churches and superb restaurants, and the hotel from the lakeside scene in Casino Royale, and delightful artisan shops and unaffordable designer clothes shops and botanical gardens and sidestreets so steep that every step, was a step.  One could spend a lot of time – and a lot of money – in Bellagio.  I though caught the bus to Como, and then the train to Milan, and found myself by nightfall in somewhat less salubrious surroundings.

Fourteen years ago I spent a different 48 hours by a different lake, which count among the happiest of my life.  It was a time of two exhilarating  ‘firsts’ for me as a young man: unforgettable, 50mph jetskiiing the diurnal one; and a Motown-voiced Jewish American Princess called Sarah a pivotal participant in the nocturnal.  Hard to top that, as lakeside experiences go.  But these two days by the shores of Como have come mighty close.  Ultimately, after swimming and kayaking and glorious sundrenched ferry rides I’m more inclined than ever to agree with Ratty:

“It’s the only thing,” said the Water Rat solemnly as he leant forward for his stroke. “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” ‘

[written on train from Milan to Verona, published later].  In the course of writing the Seville piece I realised I didn’t really want this to be a story of what I had for breakfast and how uncomfortable the hostel beds were;  I wanted to try, at least, to aim a little higher.  However, this is a travel blog, so here are some diarist thinkings and musings and stories of travelling rather than of travels:

1.  I lost my expensive, miniature, microfiber travel towel towel in Grenada having left it out to dry in the sun and, of course, forgetting it when I went back for my bag.  Since then I have been to Cordoba, Madrid, Toledo, Barcelona, Como, Domaso and Milan and have not missed it.  Bedsheets, it turns out, are remarkably versatile.  And they’re quick-drying, too.

2. My beloved fit flops have finally given up the ghost.  Since buying these at Champneys in 2011 they have proved a unique and panaceaic balm for the plantar fasciatis which otherwise induces deep, sharp pain in my heels after only a couple of hours of walking.  My catching my toe on an uneven paving slab yesterday, at the end of a lovely two hour hillside stroll over Como, finally did for the right one where the toe strap is joined to the sole.  They don’t owe me a penny, but I’d repair them out of sheer reciprocity, were it not for the wizened Alpine shoemaker who told me yesterday at Como that she was “not 100% but 1000%” sure they were beyond the repair of leather, glue, or man.  Fitflop.co.uk were out of stock but an Amazonian pair are winging their way towards me via a little FedEx account holder I know in Chesham Vale, and hopefully the two (three?) of us will find each other in Venice.

3. “Hostel” is a strangely broad term.  The pick of the bunch, in terms of Artistic Merit (Eye Rolling Category) has to be last night’s flophouse down a couple of decidedly rough Milanese backstreets.  The sign on the door was printed on A4 and affixed with sellotape, payment was strictly cash only, there was no toilet paper and at times no running water.  Were it to transmute (back?) into a crack den, that might well be classed as gentrification.  The Pension I booked into in Madrid had a full width mirror positioned where a headboard should be and I’m pretty sure rooms were available by the hour.  The room I was in the second time around in Cordoba was literally a foot larger, on all sides, than the double bed, and had no AC (like most) and only one socket, so choosing between charging my phone and running the standard-fan was the very Devil’s Alternative.  On the other hand, La Banda Rooftop Hostel in Seville was lovely and extremely welcoming, and the places in Granada and Barcelona were also big and professional.  I’ll just jot them all down while I remember, and so that I have a chance of remembering in the future.

Seville – La Banda

Cordoba – Osio

Grenada – Grenada Inn

Cordoba – Apartamentos Alberca Deluxe

Cordoba – Hotel Triumfo

Madrid – Pension Lemus

Barcelona – Hostel Sant Jordi Gracia

Como – Eco Hostel Respau

Domaso – Lake Como Beach Hostel

Milano – Hostel 3

Verona – B&B Re Lear

I think – not to leap to conclusions at this early stage – but I think my takeaway so far is that I don’t actually much enjoy the larger places even though they’re more professional.  With the smaller places you’re taking a much greater risk, but when you get lucky it’s perfect: Hostel Osio in Cordoba was beautiful, and to top it off I had a four bed dorm to myself with a private bathroom.  I could chat with the handful of other guests if and when I chose to, but felt under no social pressure to do so.  The little monastery in Respau near Como was like that too.  I am really enjoying the anonymity and total freedom of being on the road on my own, and when one stays at a big hostel it feels like living in a university dorm again, with all that goes with that.  In Seville, in Granada, in Barcelona, yes there was camaraderie and flirtation and company for lunch and dinner… but… there were also repetitive conversations and peer pressure and juvenalia and nosiness and delays and compromises and faux-amis.  I am a little older than most  – although many are mid-to-late-twenties so it’s not like I’m trying to bond with undergrads – but ultimately I guess I’m just not much of a people person.  c. f. travelling for several months on my own I suppose.  It goes in a sine wave though, after a few quiet out of the way places I’ll be ready for forty drunk Yanks and Aussies again.  Maybe in Naples.

4. I think dieting, which I still am, is helping me not to resent my lean budget.  In the absence of bathroom scales, I have drawn a line on the infinitely-variable belt I’m wearing, so I can see if I’m gaining or losing inches, even if I can’t measure pounds.  It’s on a country-by-country basis, and I am pleased to report that the “arrived in Italy” line is inside the “arrived in Spain” line, so it’s going in the right direction so far.  Dieting in Italy, were I to think about it, would be an unconscionable act of self-denial, but in truth I am trying to cram in so much [activity rather than food], and moving so swiftly from place to place, and am often so hot and sweaty from the heat and the walking and the pack, that I really only have the time or inclination for two small meals a day anyway.  Today’s lunch in Milan – of all places – was a plastic packet of salami with crosstini bought from a metro station vending machine for two euros and eaten on the train, washed down with a bottle of water recently refilled in the toilet. (Not from the toilet, you understand.  From a tap, at a sink, in the public lavatory).  But I’m not feeling the lack of the sit-down dinner and am only eating lightly when I do it – although I am enjoying wine and beer freely, not least because it’s often cheaper than the water.  There’s even a tour of the Valpollicella vineyards I’m thinking of taking… but again… £££.

5.  Bloody kindle just died on the metro in Milan.  Just stopped turning the page in the middle of reading.  “Action not actionable” or something.  If it stays dead I shall be heartbroken, I’d really got into the hang of it.  All open and being progressed roughly evenly, at the time of writing, are:

The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway

The Adventures of Don Quixote De La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes

Ancient Greece, Thomas R Martin

The Lonely Planet Guide To Italy, various

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett.

Actually I’ve just finished the Discworld one, but I’d be varnishing the truth by omitting it.  Have also not long finished The Dogs of War by Freddie Forsyth, but to be fair they don’t take quite as much reading as Rushdie or Cervantes.  The Hemingway has picked up again I’m pleased to say after getting a bit bogged down in the rain and the farmhouses half way through.  Have really rediscovered reading… yay.

Just an aide-memoire this one, writing here to save writing elsewhere.  Extended stays in Venice and Florence means need to work out remaining Italian plans.  It’s currently Monday 30th.

Mon 30 – Florence, travel to Rome, Rome, sleep in Rome

Tue 1 – Rome, sleep in Rome

Wed 2 – Rome, sleep in Rome

Thu 3 – Rome, sleep in Rome

Fri 4 – Rome, sleep in Rome

Sat 5 – Rome, travel to Naples, Naples itself (Arch. museum?), sleep in Naples(ish)

Sun 6 – Naples (Pompeii/Herculaneum/Stabiae/Vesuvius), sleep in Naples(ish)

Mon 7 – Naples (Pompeii/Herculaneum/Stabiae/Vesuvius), sleep on boat to Palermo?

Tue 8 – Sicily, sleep in Sicily

Wed 9 – Sicily, sleep in Sicily

Thu 10 – Sicily, fly from Palermo to Athens 4.35om, Athens, sleep in Athens

Have to skip Naples itself and Sorento and the Amalfi coast, but that’s a holiday sometime. And no Pisa and Sicily squeezed, but not bad plan.  Right, gotta book a ferry. … Ferry booked, overnight on the 7th.  Only have “deck space” not a private berth, don’t know if that means sleeping on the deck or a cot or sth… we’ll see.  .  And Rome accom booked too, a little out of the way but not in the really shady part of town.  An additional 17 euros over five nights well spent, judging by comparative reviews for the place I’m staying and the place I nearly stayed 🙂

This is helpful: rometoolkit.com

The city of the Catalans – and of Gaudi – is far removed from the cities of the Moors of Al-Andalus.  Islamic rule lasted less than a century here.  Barcelona’s heritage instead moves quickly from the Visigoths to the evocatively named Wilfred the Hairy, the hirsute Catalan warrior whose king’s fingers, smearing Wilfred’s blood on his shield, created the gold and red stripes of the Catalan flag which flies here, as high as the national emblem on civic buildings and proudly and provocatively from residential windows.

Proudly because, in spite of losing out on the honour of primacy to Madrid, and of crushing defeat in the War of the Spanish  Succession, and of ruthless oppression and forced homogenisation under Franco, Catalans have nursed the fierce and perhaps slightly embittered, shoulder-bechipped determination of underdogs and the overlooked everywhere.  These days, on every official document, every street sign, every bus stop, Catalan either precedes or replaces Spanish (and just as I was starting to pick up a few words!).  The is a relatively recent phenomenon though, significantly strengthened as the independence movement has gained followers since the economic crash.

The provocation of the flags comes from that  movement: almost every flag which flutters from the windows of the Gothic Quarter is inset with a star for Catalan Statehood – set against blue yellow or red to inform the street below what conception of statehood (Rightist, Centrist or Leftist) the flag flyer supports.  The sight of conflicting hues cheek by jowl on the narrow streets of the Old City does convey the prominence of the movement and the strength of feeling; but it also moved me to wild grinning as I replayed in my head John Cleese and the PFJ abjuring the “bloody splitters!” of the Judean People’s Front.

To be honest, I have no great love for Barcelona.  The beach is artificial, the old quarter is unextraordinary and the 18th Century  grid-plan extension is pretty and spacious and well-designed, but it feels like any modern European city.  The architecture of the everyday buildings is attractive, mainly 18th and 19th Century, but it all lacks the charm of Paris or Vienna.  I didn’t get as far as the Olympic Park or the magnificently imposing Museum of Catalan art which the bus just drove past, perhaps they would have left me more enamoured of the city.

Barcelona is also the City of Gaudi, as any guidebook or souvenir shop will immediately inform you, but I can’t help but be a little wary of a metropolis which can define itself with a single word.  London can’t, New York can’t, and God knows Parisians would set about you with a baguette if you suggested that a single architect defines their city – even if the view begs to differ.  Anyway, for me this “City of Gaudi” business rather begs the questions: “what were you before?”, and “what else have you got?”.  Nonetheless.  I’m not a modernism buff and I didn’t go into the Sagrada Familia (entrance+audioguide an eye-watering E19.50) or the Casa Battla (an unfathomable E21.50), but to be fair they are extraordinarily thought-provoking and striking from the outside.  The Gaudi houses have a whimsy,  a mystical quality to the free flowing shapes and unexpected colours, but even in the straight lines and sharp corners of the towers of the Sagrada Familia – pinched by some Godly hand and stretched and pulled upwards towards the holy seat – there is some modern magic at work.  No, at play.

Play was very much the order of the day  in the Sant Jordi hostel I stayed in, resulting in too much time and money spent with other Anglophones, too much rum and God knows too much tequila, and too few pre-noon hours spent sight-seeing.  But I did get a lot of laundry done, and avoided Tuesday’s crashing thunderstorm, and Lexi and Anna and Jackie and Stephanie (hmmm is there a theme here?) were interesting and well-informed company (for Americans).  The walking tour run by  little Zoe-Deschanel-alike Helen from Edinburgh was good if a little light and fluffy- the aural equivalent of filling up on white bread rather than enjoying a well-balanced meal- but the little otherwise unknowable square she took us to, Placa de Sant Felip Neri, was worth the trip on its own.  In this quiet secluded place, mottled sunlight reached down through the leaves of trees which rained a gentle shower of orange flowers on our heads and into the stilled fountain in the centre of the square.  And we saw on the church walls the  pock marks that bear testimony to the Italian bomb which killed over 40 civilians including 20 schoolchildren in 1937, as the laughter from the adjacent primary school reached the edge of our hearing.  Unlike so much of modern, modernist, Barcelona, this was a place of contemplation, of exhalation.

I’m leaving Spain now.  I’m sitting on an Easyjet flight to Milan, and I’ve just had my first prego to my first gratsie.  I’m looking forward to Italy.  I’m two weeks into my trip, haven’t lost anything of vital importance, and am not toooo far over a budget which was anyway always rather ambitiously conservative.  But I’m going to miss this country.  Southern Spain was everything I wanted it to be: a land of fearsome heat and the shade of tiny winding alleys, a place of rough red wine and vast stone edifices hewn and accreted and inscribed by peoples of different times, different skins, different gods.  Madrid and Barcelona belong to today’s world, and they suit it well, but the view of the Alhambra from the Mirador de San Nicolas belongs beyond time and outside of it, and now a little part of it belongs to me as well.

While in Madrid I saw a bullfight.  Actually I saw three, the evening’s entertainment consisting of six fights, and my having left half way through.  I have been struggling to write anything about it, not out of some deep scarring but because I couldn’t quite reach the right metaphor, which just came to me on the plane from Barcelona.  It felt like watching an audience humouring an old prestidigitator, once great and still much-loved, but whose fingers no longer have the dexterity to amaze and confound as once they did.  All the old showmanship is still there, the twinkle and the flair, but they know how the trick works now, and he knows that they know.

Maybe it was me.  Maybe it was the knowledge gleaned at the museum in Seville.  Maybe it was the fact that the stadium was half empty, or that I was in Madrid not in the south, or that the only show in this off-season was the novillados, young bulls facing less experienced matadors.  Maybe if I saw a legendary bullfighter in full pomp, in the salad days of the [festival] in July, in the Plaza del Toros de Sevilla, facing down a giant of a bull six years bred and fed for the fight… maybe it would be different, maybe it would be truly gladiatorial. This though… it was a circus, and not the kind Pompey knew how to throw.

When the bull emerges, and however young these were they were still, y’know, bulls, he is an intimidating sight.  Almost five foot high at the shoulder, perhaps half a ton or more of stamping, charging, horned bepuzzled fury, he tears and kicks out into the stadium where half a dozen men with pink capes lure him this way and that, enraging and exhausting him.  But whatever the circumstances and however reasonable the provocation, there is something clownishly comic about a full grown man running away – as if given the order by Graham Chapman –  and as often as not that’s exactly what these men have to do, to retreat behind their walled hiding places around the circumference of the bullring.  Had they been wearing big shoes and a funny wig and being chased by a fire engine, they would have looked no less ridiculous and emasculated.

Once the animal has started to tire, the cavalry approaches.  The greatest danger of bullfighting in the past was to the horses, but these days they wear full armour to their shins, looking like a cross between the steed of a herald at Agincourt, and, well, a horse wrapped in a leather mattress.  The mounted bullfighter spears the bull behind the shoulders, wounding deeply with a barbed lance, while 500lb of confused and enraged beef tries ineffectually to gore horse and rider.

Thus bloodied, the bull  is engaged by the pink-cape-brigade again, the draw its attention while the bandilleros [I’m not sure that’s quite right but I’ll clean up this and other Spanish once I have better access to wifi] approach and dig and twist the coloured three-foot staves into his back.  I have no idea why they do this.  Certainly it amplifies the effect when the animal rears and tosses his head, the sticks bouncing from side to side.  And there is some skill in it to be sure – you have to get almost within an arm’s reach and stabbing and twisting in order to make them stick is not something at which they succeeded at each attempt.  Nonetheless, even beyond the work of the matador itself this seems the most barbaric, taunting, archaic moment.

The bull has therefore chased the capes, fought the horse and charged the bandilleros by the time the matador swaggers onto the field of play, so has pretty much run himself to a standstill.   The bullfighter’s art therefore, it seemed to me, was not as I had supposed in evading the charge,  but rather in provoking it.  By the third fight I had learned from the crowd’s cheers that  what impressed was getting the bull to go for the cape several times in quick succession: flick-shout-charge-sweep-turn…flick-shout-charge-sweep-turn….  After a few of these even the bull has started to cotton on to the futility of the exercise, so stands panting and immobile, while the matador puffs his pigeon chest to its fullest extent and in a daring feat of faux-bravado, turns his back on the bull to reposition himself a few paces away.  The crowd reacts every time, as if they can’t see the streams of drool running uncontrollably from the panting animal’s mouth; as if they can’t feel his impotent exhaustion in the sun.

This goes on for five minutes or so, the bull decreasingly willing to participate in the charade, until the sword is unsheathed and the dance becomes more intimate.  It would be tempting now to use words like “the moment of penetration”, but if this is about sex, it’s rape.  The swordstroke has to be deft, to give Mr Shiny Pants his due, and just because a large, angry bull’s horns are moving slowly towards your midsection, it may be fair to acknowledge that the critical word in that sentence is not “slowly”.   To count, the sword must go in beyond the shoulder, not easy to reach and it takes a few passes before the stroke is attempted.  If done well, it goes in to the hilt on the first attempt, if not it strikes bone and sticks out juddering and foolish until the bull throws it free.  Even when the killing stroke is cleanly delivered however,  the bull doesn’t die from it.  Pink capes re-emerge and work with the matador to coax a few more doomed half-charges from the animal before it is clearly incapable of moving any further.  Then the executioner leaps forward with a dagger and jabs deeply just behind the head, I think with the intention of severing the spine if the result is anything to go by.  The cleanest coup de grace I saw still lasted over two minutes (I timed it), from the moment only the hilt of the sword was left visible sticking out of the bull’s back, until it finally keeled over dramatically, four legs out rigidly parallel to the sand .  The worst involved perhaps twenty attempts by the executioner to deliver the killing stroke, to a baying crowd which was clearly incensed by the poor performance, rather than by the repeated hacking and slashing of the animal’s neck.

The fallen creature is tied by its horns to a team of horses which drags it from the stadium.  Everyone goes for a beer, and five minutes later another bull, peppered up and raring for the fight, bucks and kicks his way into the stadium.  An hour into the proceedings I concluded that if you’ve seen three bullfights, you’ve seen them all, and left before the second half.

Am I pleased I went?  The cheap ticket cost less than 5 euros, for the sun-exposed seat high above the action, so if this is unconscionable barbarism I’ve done relatively little to fund it.  It is a long-established practice, with what it’s adherents would call a noble heritage, and this trip is about the culture and the heritage of the places I’m visiting.  I can saw that I’ve seen a bullfight, and my children may well be prevented by law from ever being able to say such a thing.  But would that be a bad thing?

I don’t know.

I went to Toledo.  It is old, and there are many knives and swords.  The bus sightseeing tour had amusingly poor translations into English.  This is all I have to say about Toledo.