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.

MY last journal entry was posted in the evening of Tuesday 10th June – day 5 – and as I sit typing this on the bus to Barcelona, hostage to fluctuating wifi on winding roads hacked through the granite mountains between Madrid and Zaragoza, it is day 11.  A lot has happened.  Not least, I’ve lost my towel – Ford Prefect would be so disappointed.

This trip begins in Spain, rather than in perhaps Florence, on account of the vast series of Moorish palace structures which look down upon the city of Grenada: The Alhambra.  It’s one of the items marked with a star on my mental list.  The Parthenon, the Temple Mount, and the Valley of the Kings are others – the Big Five (big 12 maybe?) for this time-safari across the plains of civilisation.  This was not a while-I’m-here-it’d-be-a-shame-not-to; this was the Main Event.  So it was quite important that it didn’t disappoint!

The first glimpse I got was from the minibus on the way to the flamenco show on Tuesday evening.  The old quarter of Granada is called Albaicin (or Albayzin, or Albaythin, maps differ and the Spanish don’t seem to care) and the minibus climbed its narrow winding streets while the sun infused the clouds deep pomegranate red as it died behind the mountains below us.  As it set we stopped to take in the view of 11th Century city walls which predate most of the palace, but by the time we arrived at the San Nicolas lookout point, darkness had fallen completely.  Lost in flirtatious conversation with a pretty Kuwaiti as we dismounted the bus, I was halfway across the square before I looked up and out, and the view entirely overrode both mouth and legs.  I have tried not to Google to death the sights I’m travelling to see, and was unprepared for the majesty of the Alhambra, sensitively lit in the darkness.  It simply stopped me in my tracks.

To the right you can see the oldest walls: ancient, thick, rough-hewn fortifications of the alcazaba itself.  Walls to mock Christian trebuchets, walls to withstand a seige.  On the left, the more elaborate turrets and windows and towers of the Nasrid palace, final home of the last rulers of the last Islamic kingdom in mainland Europe: the emirate of Al-Andalus.  This is a complex rather than a single palace or castle, but covering as it does the whole summit of the outcrop on which it stands, it doesn’t ramble but rather, dominates, imposes, overwhelms.  Fair to say, I wasn’t disappointed.

After that, the flamenco show was… fine.  It was, technically, “in a cave” as billed, but only inasmuch as the restaurant was cut partly into the hillside, not quite the firelight-and-gypsy-mystique I’d allowed myself to anticipate.  The dancing was good, for brief moments even mesmerising, but I know I could have seen faster and better elsewhere in the city, or in Seville.

Wednesday’s daylight was mine to do with as I chose, since my entry to the Nasrid Palace wasn’t until 10pm.  The morning’s I ignored, and even did some washing at the hostel, qualifying therefore as “traveller” rather than “holidaymaker” according to criteria thrashed out in a lively debate over dinner back in Seville.  The afternoon’s bathed the labyrinth of Albaicin as I trekked around, getting hopelessly and uncaringly lost, retreading some of the streets and viewpoints of the previous night, walking into some impressive churches and monasteries [by which I mean entering, not headbutting], and mainly just trying to navigate from water fountain to water fountain in the oppressive heat.  I bumped into Raphael [c.f. Seville] who was doing a walking tour, and I joined it as it wound up out of Albaicin, up as high as San Juan del Alto (the highest church in the city) for a view which encompassed the whole city, the cathedral, the Alhambra, and the snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada carving up into the horizon.

We walked out beyond the city, into real gypsy country, where the caves are hundreds of years old and cut deep into the hillside for secure and temperate days all year round.  The history of the gypsy people in southern Spain in a complicated and often unhappy one, and these caves were first carved by peoples persecuted and ejected from the city below by Catholic rulers who were, we might infer, a little fuzzy on the prince of peace’s views on brotherhood.  But recent relations have been better, and you’ll find one of the most highly regarded flamenco schools anywhere in these caves, as well as running water and electricity.

Despite a good six or seven hours of walking, I still had plenty of time, so it was a surprise to discover myself running up the zigzag hillside road towards the entrance to the Alhambra at 9.45, so as not to be late for my allotted timeslot at 10pm.  I shouldn’t really be surprised, I have barely once in my life converted “oh, I’ve got ages” into “look, I’m here in lots of time”, preferring my own incomprehensible alchemy which instead precipitates “oh shit lookatthetime!”.  They are famously strict so having cut it too fine I arrived drenched in sweat and panting – only to join the end of a long queue.  I had largely recovered by the time I reached the front of the queue, where they pointed at my ticket, to the large “22.30” printed thereon, and explained in patient Spanish that I was half an hour early.

I was ushered to a waiting area next to the front of the queue, and struck up conversation with a couple of obviously-English tourists while trying not to get caught checking out the obviously-Spanish girl five feet away.  Tall and olive-skinned, with bewitching brown eyes and a mane of dark curls which cascaded past beguiling curves to her waist, she was playing with her phone and studiously ignoring my presence until she laughed at something I said, revealing both her Englishness and a captivating, unabashed smile.  My focus on the fourteenth century marvel all around me was only slightly split throughout the tour while I worked on reigniting that smile, and on mustering the courage to ask her out for a drink.

The Nasrid Palace, and the wider palace and garden complex which Jasmine and I toured together the following morning, is not quite as breathtaking from the inside as from the out, and certainly no more informative.  There aren’t any information plaques, not even in Spanish, and the daytime audioguide is rather poor.  Nonetheless there are some breathtaking moments and rooms, and to walk at night in these Islamic courtyards, every inch of their plasterwork mottled with unknowable shapes and unknown koranic verse, their softly serene water-features reflecting the light of the full Spanish moon, is an experience I will not forget.

The thing I struggle to get my head around, actually, is the sheer time involved in the plasterwork and stucco.  Christian and ancient Greek monuments of those scale have unadorned walls and individual paintings, or tapestries, or statues.  And each of these might have taken a master craftsman or artist months to create, but they are finite.  The Islamic and Mudejar styles though have literally square miles of ornate, intricate plaster with designs so tiny they can be measured in millimetres not centimetres.  How do you do that? Who does that? How many thirteenth and fourteenth century craftsmen and artisans worked for how long on the walls and ceilings of these palaces, and for long were they apprenticed before they could?  It’s mind-boggling to me.

Jasmine and I spent perhaps five hours at the Alhambra on the Thursday morning, and to walk the halls and gardens hand in hand with a beautiful half-Egyptian artist lent the experience a warmth and a reailty it might otherwise have lacked.  That afternoon I abandoned plans to head on to Almeria and journeyed with her and her extremely welcoming and patient mother Julia back to Cordoba.  We stayed a couple of days in Cordoba, my interloping on their holiday to seeming mutual enjoyment, and the tiny streets and grand buildings of the little city that I’d preferred to Seville or Granada, were even more beautiful this time around.

I had planned to go to Valencia on my way to Barcelona, but from Cordoba the train was expensive and the bus ride interminable, so I left for Madrid with Jasmine and Julia and found a little Pension to stay in right in the centre of the city near the Plaza del Sol.  We spent the afternoon taking our time at the Thyssen-Bornemisza gallery, and then skipping round the Prado to see a few unmissable pieces before it closed.  Seeing well-known works in the flesh never ceases to amaze me, and to come across that ubiquitous Holbein of Henry VIII, just hanging there on the wall, a foot square of royal blue and royal jowls, was arresting.  But so much more moving to bathe in the light, that unique, glowing, earthsprung firelight of Caravaggio’s David and Goliath, or to lose yourself in the fantasmagoria of Bosch’s earthly delights.

Dinner was the best tapas I have ever tasted, a light sweet lemony goat’s cheese salad and fresh prawns drowned in an ungovernably rich garlic chilli glaze.  Superb.  Later on, Jas and I  had delicious watrmelon mojitos and immersed ourselves in the centre of Madrid on a Saturday night, where on every street and square there were chilled out diners and drinkers and smokers, thronging and talking and dancing and… calm.  Just having a great night out with friends.  At 4am, the streets were still packed and the clubs overflowing but I barely heard a raised voice, and felt perfectly safe.  The Spanish football team had lost their opeing world cup match 5-1 the previous night.  Can you imagine London or Leeds at 4am the following day? Would you want to?

I only got a glimpse of Madrid before our trip to Toledo the following morning, but I can see myself living there.  Seville, Cordoba, Granada were too small – nice places to visit but you’d go round the bend eventually.  Madrid feels big and robust enough that I – myself not a small and dainty thing – am not in danger of breaking it.  But Barcelona, they say, has all that and the sea… so we shall see…..

I am not the kind of Brit who comes to Spain in order to seek out the Dog and Duck on the Costa for a decent pie and chips.  A people’s cuisine is the font and the mirror of its culture, and by not immersing yourself in one (not literally, you can drown even in a bowl of gazpacho) you deprive yourself of a route into the other.  Nonetheless, my old mate Terry Pratchett has these words of wisdom on the subject of guilelessly trying every “regional delicacy” in the [disc]world:

Any seasoned traveller soon learns to avoid anything wished on them as a ‘regional speciality’, because all the
term means is that the dish is so unpleasant the people living everywhere else will bite off their own legs rather than
eat it. But hosts still press it upon distant guests anyway: ‘Go on, have the dog’s head stuffed with macerated cabbage
and pork noses – it’s a *regional speciality*.

This quote leapt to mind [and to the back of the throat] today.  The guidebook tells you that “flamenquin” is the thing to eat in Corboda.  Don’t do it.  Don’t be convinced that scraps of  pork unworthy of any other dish, welded together into a phallus of equine proportions, then breaded and deep fried and served with chips and a bottle’s worth of mayonnaise,  will somehow be transformed by ingenious Andalusian recipes handed down from generation to generation, into something edible.  Or into anything from which your arteries will recover.  You’ll be deceived.

On the other hand, the local rabo de toro – bull’s tails – I can highly recommend.  Think boeuf bourgignon, but richer and more rib-sticking, with large tail vertebrae thrown in for free. TP has something to say about that, too:  Genuan cooking, like the best cooking everywhere in the multiverse, had been evolved by people who had to make desperate use of ingredients their masters didn’t want. No one would even *try* a bird’s nest unless they had to. Only hunger would make a man taste his first alligator. No one would eat a shark’s fin if they were allowed to eat the rest of the shark.

Apart from the mishap with flamenquin, the food and drink has been good here in Cordoba, which is smaller than Seville, prettier, and more fragrant.  Its story is that of all of Andalusia: wave after wave of rulers and cultures layering history and architecture on the city, so that as you walk the narrow Islamic street plan, which doesn’t wind so much as zigzag, you come across evidence left by the high water mark of each those waves.  In fact from a single  vantage point on the Roman Bridge, you can see the the work of 2nd Century Romans, 5th Century Visigoths, 8th Century Moors and 13th Century Catholics, not to mention all those who came after.

I arrived on Sunday 8th June (day 4) without a hostel booked and wandered with Jade to hers, but the only room available was a private one (a bank-breaking E30!), so I begged some wifi and booked into the Hostel Osio, closer to the river, the Mezquita and the centre of the historic heart of the city.  We walked around the Jewish quarter for a couple of hours in the early evening, when the light here is so rich that the sand-coloured stone buildings seem somehow more real against the azure sky, as if someone layered an identical slide on top of the first in the projector.  We walked along the river, and through streets too narrow to walk two abreast, past crumbling churches and tapas restaurants and souvenir shops selling those ubiquitous Robin Ruth “insert name of city here” bags that Temptation used to sell.  We saw the cathedral-mosque from all sides, but entrance is E8 after the first hour of the day, so we resolved to visit at 8.30 the following morning.  Before parting company we dropped into Salon de The, one of a couple of enchanting moroccan-style tearooms in the quarter, and had a bite to eat and a delicious Bedouin cardammom tea amid intricate plasterwork arches and the sounds of a trickling fountain and soft arabic music.  I was suddenly impatient for the later stages of the trip.

The evening passed uneventfully, finishing with the shisha and wine of my previous post, and against all odds and precedent I got to the cathedral for 8.30 when it opened.  One of the finest examples of Moorish architecture in existence (although I’m pleased I’m seeing it before the Alhambra), you walk in to a courtyard of palms and orange trees but step into the building at one corner to discover arches of alternating red-and-white voussoirs stretching away seemingly indefinitely in front and to the left of you.  I’d had no idea there was going to be so much inside, with the melding of cultures once again much in evidence: at one point I paused to take a picture of a wall of perfect Moorish arches-and-plasterwork only to take another step and see the crucifix adorning the wall.  And I have no idea whether the organist practices medieval hymns with his star choral soloist at 9am every morning for the benefit of penny-pinching tourists, but the pair of them certainly added an additional air of serenity to my visit.

After breakfast back at the hostel I headed out to la Castille de Almodovar, 30 minutes from town.  It is a picture-book-perfect hill fort, rebuilt from ruins by the 12th Earl of Torravala in the 19th Century.  Undoubtedly an obsession bordering on mania, the project took his whole life and fortune, but the result is breathtaking.  It dominates the surrounding landscape with an Arthurian arrogance, and indeed was considered to be so utterly impregnable that when a 12th Century king faced a dangerous incoming horde, he sent his wife and family to Almodovar while he led the battle in the streets of Cordoba.  They say at the moment of his beheading in the battle, his queen awoke with a cry, and that every year on the 28th March her ghost can be seen walking the battlements of the castle on the anniversary of his death.  I didn’t see her myself, but then again, it wasn’t the 28th March.

What I did see, from the turret of the tallest tower, was a lake in the distance of a startling bright blue.  So having ticked my traditional box from where I stood (there was something tall and imposing, and I had stood on top of it) I decided to tick another box I’ve been jonesing to tick on this trip: to amble for miles through unmarked olive groves and swim in a lake.  The street signs in Cordoba that evening said 37 degrees at 7pm, so at 2 when I set out I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been well past forty, but the walk was blissfully liberating despite the heat.  The reservoir was entirely deserted for miles in every direction, and if the walk had been liberating, stripping off and skinnydipping in the cool water for half an hour was joyful.

The 6km walk back and the bus ride back to town earned me my evening treat: two hours in the icy cold, relaxingly warm, and soporifically hot waters of the Arabic Baths of Hamman and a much-needed (and excellent) massage.  This was an entirely new experience and well worth the £35, but I can’t wait for the real thing in Istanbul.

Today (#6, Tues 10th) has passed uneventfully after yesterday’s exertions.  Late start and having discovered the cathedral’s Visitor Centre was closed I spent four hours wandering the parish of San Pedro, looking for the non-tourist Cordoba and finding it largely unimpressive and mainly closed.  Ended up practically having to run with my pack to catch the 3.30 bus (after the terrible lunch about which I began, not fun!) but now three hours and some typing later I find myself in the much larger and so far, much less attractive and more interchangeable Granada.  But this 100-berth hostel seems friendly and professional and tonight’s entertainment is a flamenco show in the caves under the Alhambra, so maybe the day’s just getting started!

The city of Sevilla is the colour of orange peel.  Not the bright clean colour of Tesco satsumas, but the warm earthy hue of the wincingly-tart Seville oranges that grow by the sides of the road.  The size of a softball but surprisingly light in your hand, you can tear away the quarter-inch-thick pulpy skin to reveal tempting fleshy segments which should,  however parched you find yourself after a long day’s exploring, not be tasted unless you want a look of eye-twitching disdain etched on your face for the following twenty minutes.  They make great marmalade though, apparently.  I wouldn’t know, having woken up too late for breakfast on all three mornings.  Nightlife here means morning-life according to the clock, and burning the candle at both ends is really a job for the employed.  But I digress.

The ubiquitous orange accent colour of the city, found on everything from porticoes to roof terraces, from the lowliest pension to the grandest hotel,  is borne of the sand of the Plaza del Torros; a 12,000 seat  oval arena by the river which was one of the first grand bullrings built in Spain.  It holds shows every Sunday through the summer… apart from today.  Of course.  The tour and museum are interesting enough though, and I now know amongst other things that (a) bullfights start on horseback, with a rider injuring the bull sufficiently with a spear  for the matador to get close, (b) an easy killing stroke to the neck is not allowed, the matador must instead reach beyond the horns to the crest of the shoulder within three attempts to win his prize, and (c) I’d have a lot more sympathy for the whole enterprise if either the bulls got a reprieve on the occasions that the matador fails (they don’t, they’re executed by other means) or if there was higher death rate among matadors.  I don’t disrespect the primal, bravura, man-vs-beast of it all… but the statistics suggest this is not a fair fight or a real risk.  I still intend to see a fight in Granada if I can, but I’m pretty sceptical now that I’ll enjoy it.

Day 1 was Thursday 5th June, and it was reasonably uneventful.  Taking the path through the trees, rather than along the road, from my parents’ house into Amersham, I always recall taking the same walk in the summer of 2000, to collect my GCSE results.  Of the hundreds of times I’ve taken that route, I must have been especially adrenaline-heightened that day, and I remember it vividly.  I can even tell you the song I was humming, although wild horses wouldn’t get me to admit that it was from Jagged Little Pill.  Strange to think that that was half a lifetime ago, and stranger to imagine what that 16 year old would have thought of this thirty year old: the choices and circumstances that led him to this walk to the station and to Seville and the next six months.  He’d certainly be disappointed that I couldn’t afford to be chauffeur-driven and be startled that the backpack wasn’t a matching set of Louis Vuitton suitcases… but then, he always was a bit of a dickhead, that young man.

It’s only a mile, and I’m about a stone lighter with the 15 kilos on my back today, than I was without it at Christmas, so walking with the pack isn’t terribly arduous.  I’ve probably packed too much – haven’t left much room for souvenirs – but it wouldn’t break my heart to dispense with a few items en route.  This route was easy: Met line then the Brighton train to Gatwick, lots of time at the airport and then Ryanair – pleasant enough, for a couple of hours – to Seville.  A taxi would have been E30 but the bus only cost 4 and got me 200yds from the hostel.  It is a point of pride for the trip that I don’t intend to take a single taxi; but we’ll see whether bad planning, exhaustion, drunkenness or just plain laziness foil that plan.

La Banda Rooftop Hostel, owned and run by four twenty-something Brits (Sam, Tom, Ollie, and The Other One ) is welcoming and well-run. Cold beers for a euro, and excellent dinners en famille on the rooftop for E6.  From the rooftop you can see the roof of the Cathedral, stone crenellations and spires scything into the deep blue sky as evening falls, and magnificently illuminated at night.  Dinner (tacos, paella, mediterranean chicken with rice and beans… tasty local fare, generous portions, and seconds on demand) tends to be followed by drinks in the bars of Calle Alfalfa.  I keep saying “and we’ll live off the fat’o’theland”… but no-one gets it.  Not Steinbeck fans obviously.  It’s a nondescript  sidestreet ten feet across where almost every unit on both sides  is a bar, so the drinkers spill out into the street and intermingle until 3 or 4 in the morning.  A little touristy, but it’s close, and cheap, and the company and conversation has been good.

Day 2 therefore didn’t get going until after 10am, but made it out in time for the walking tour.  Reviews over dinner the previous night had been extremely mixed.  If you got Juan, you got pointless anecdotes about twentieth century history, character assassination of General Franco, and sore feet.  If you got Meddi,  you got fascinating insights into the soul and history of the city, from Roman beginnings through Arabs and Moors and Reconquista, to glory days as the sole clearing post for American plunder, right up to the great exhibitions of 1929 and 1992.  And sore feet.  I asked at reception: it was Meddi today.

A slight,bird-boned Morroccan of about thirty five, Meddi has the poise of a dancer and an encyclopaedic knowledge of his adopted city.  Take his tour, if you pass this way.  It’s mainly a tour of minor sights.  We saw the dodecahedral Moorish watchtower, the  Torre del Oro, so called because (1) it was painted in such a way that it shone like gold, or (2) it was there that the ruler kept his concubines, more precious to him than gold, or (3) because in the sixteenth century all the gold of the Aztecs and Incas entered Spain through Sevilla, past this tower on the Guadalquivir.  The historians tend to plump for version 3, rather disappointingy.  We saw the statue of Ferdinand III, father of the Reconquista, and learned about his son, Alfonso X (“the wise”), whose statue stands among the 23 greatest lawmakers in history in the US Capitol Building, and who is remembered for a farsighted inclusivity which sought to treat Christians Muslims and Jews equally and even-handedly, and laid the foundations of the intermingling of cultures which defines that era of Southern Spanish history.  We walked in the grand marble halls of the university, a building which for the first two hundred and fifty years of its existence was a tobacco factory staffed almost exclusively by women (the opera Carmen is set here.  In fact over 100 operas are set in or reference Seville, more than for any other city).  The “moat” around the university isn’t for keeping water in, it’s for keeping water out: Seville is built on a floodplain and although it rains very infrequently here floods are not uncommon because when it does rain, it really rains.  Under threat of inundation, the tobacco in the factory would be kept dry as floodwaters filled the moat rather than the building.  Finally we walked among the rotundas and plazas of the Great Exhibition of 1929, culminating in the impressive Plaza de Espania.  It would have been a vast grand circular building enclosing a courtyard perhaps 150 yards in diameter… if they hadn’t buggered up the budget and run out of money half way round.  So it’s a semi-circle, but no less impressive for that, with homage paid to each of Spain’s fifty provinces under each of its archways, and central fountains and a little waterway big enough to take the rowboats you can rent if you’re foolish enough.

I wasn’t, I needed lunch, so I walked with French-Canadian Jade and Swiss Raphael to the city on the other side of the river, Triana, (named for Emperor Trajan, native of the area and first provincial ruler of Rome) for some tapas.  We ate in a little restaurant in a covered market by the Queen Isabella bridge, where the sangria was good and inexpensive, and the food was tasty.  Refreshed and refuelled we decided to head to the Alcazar, stopping for photos outside the cathedral on the way.

The Real Alcazar (that’s rhe-all al-KA-tha) is a thirteenth century Christian expansion of a tenth-century Muslim fortress, and it is big.  The decorative style is predominantly geometrical Muslim mosaics, with water features and detailed plasterwork in keeping with that Islamic influence, but there are also biblical inscriptions in Old Gothic script, enormous tapestries depicting scenes from the discovery of the New World, and ceramic masterpieces from neighbouring Triana, long-famous for its potters and potteries.  The gardens with their fountains and peacocks are fragrant and peaceful, fit for the royal court of Castille-Lyon, who lived here, and even as a residence for Emperor Charles V when he visited.  I spent the better part of two hours at the Alcazar, rarely with any idea of which room I was in or which I hadn’t seen; with every corner revealing some new courtyard, or elaborate archway, or stateroom.  Or sometimes, this being me, a dead end.  It is a remarkable building, and the mixture of architectural styles and cultural influences should create confusion and discord but on the contrary, just like medieval Spain itself, they are brought together – for the most part – with great serenity and harmony.

Limping back to the hostel after seven hours of exploration, my feet were of course ready to take their leave of me, so I went for a swim.  To reach the city’s 25m pool was a further twenty minute trek, but it did take me to the Alameda de Hercules, where at either end of a long slim plaza four pillars stand in two pairs looking… well rather un-Herculean, actually.  Twenty feet tall and perhaps eighteen inches in diameter, the name rather flatters to deceive.  But the pool was cool and although busy was peopled with fit Spaniards with excellent lane discipline, so I have no complaints.  A couple of kilometres later my feet thanked me and my shoulders were done with me, so back to the hostel for paella, and later some Jack Daniel’s on Alfalfa.

Rather a lot of Jack Daniel’s actually.  But by lunchtime on Saturday I was alive and well-briefed by Tripadvisor as to the Roman ruins of Italica which lie half an hour away from the city, on the other side of Triana in Santiponce.   Lunch was constructed from supermarket bargains on the walk to the bus station at Plaza des Armas, and after being charmingly informed while waiting for the bus that I looked twenty not thirty (I was cleanshaven, and she was eighty-five…) the bus drove smoothly (take note please, Rio bus drivers) to Italica.

This Roman settlement originally dates to around 200BC, when some of Scipio Africanus’ legionaries needed some R&R, and some stitching up, on their way back from the Punic Wars.  But it gets exciting when local boy Trajan becomes Emperor, and in the 100s he and his son Hadrian (yes, that Hadrian) order a series of expansions and redevelopments which would make even the EU blush for sheer unjustified expenditure and pork-barrel politics.  The Forum and the centre of the Roman city now lie beneath present day Santiponce, but Italica remains almost completely untouched – at floor level at least – on the outskirts of the town.  This was the hill-town of the patrician class, with semi-public buildings which had a residential and public function: large houses with meeting rooms, large public baths, a Temple to Neptune and to Trajan himself, and a 15,000 seat amphitheatre.

The town and its mosaic floors can be walked and explored exactly as they were laid out nineteen hundred years ago, and to see such a large site (walking around takes well over an hour) in situ like that allows for a very special and visceral form of that mental time-travel to which any historian can relate.  Even the landscape is as much Umbria as Andaluscia, and the sight and soft earthy scent of the rows of poplars transport you to a world of togas and intrigue and bacchanals.  The amphitheatre though is simply breathtaking.  It is also, (thank you, Spanish attitude to life) mercifully unmanned, so while many areas are railed off or gated, such rails are almost seductively jumpable.  I was able to cross the floor of the theatre itself, as well as walking the entire rotation at each level, clambering to the very top and even finding an unmarked (and unlit and in places almost untraversable) passageway into the subterranean centre where equipment (and the occasional Gladiator) would have been kept until needed.  I managed not to make any mention of my murdered wife or son, nor of finding vengeance in whatever life, but the place is simply alive with the bated breath and sweat and blood of the men whose armour chinked in the dark corridors before they burst out to live or die under the blazing Spanish sun.

There is, rather less poetically, a Roman theatre of the non-amphi variety at the other end of the town, but it is entirely sealed behind ten foot metal fences, and even the viewing platform was closed by the time I arrived.  Both this and Italica were built by Hadrian to an unsustainable scale, and by the third century the buildings were being re-purposed, by the fourth abandoned and by the fifth, cannibalised for local buildings.  Given all that it’s a miracle they survive as well as they do, early twentieth century  excavations unearthing all this and statues of Diana the Huntress and Trajan himself which now reside in museums while replicas grace their former site.

My return to Sevilla brought on Saturday night and my last night in town, so in a vain attempt to see some flamenco in its spiritual home (other options being sold out or out of budget) I went on suggestion from Sam to Casa Matias, just round the corner, where the wine was as rough as the locals who were drinking it but the music was roots-deep and the singing communal.  Needless to say I couldn’t understand the words, but belted out in that hoarse-tenor of Spanish and Arabic singing, you hardly need to.  The guitarist strummed so harshly it was almost percussive, while his friend kept the complex twelve-beat rhythm with his hands, and the patrons sang while the local Mr Charisma strained at the very edge of his range to bring the song to life.   It was clearly just a standard early Saturday evening at Casa Matias, nothing special or deliberate, but it was a little slice of unadulterated Sevilla that I feel rather lucky to have seen.  This is though a bar in which tourists are endured rather than welcomed, and before long I returned to the hostel and a more Anglicised version of Spain.  Dinner at 10pm was good and the better for being needed, and the night concluded in conversation about the vicissitudes of running a hostel and the healing period of a broken heart, at around 3am in a local bar.

Sunday morning taught me once again that I am constitutionally unsuited to making a checkout time, but that I’m getting marginally better at packing my bag, and then it was a tour of the bullring- see above.  Shame there was no fight – and that Mass until 2.30pm ruled out a full tour of the inside of the cathedral and the Tower – but it meant I got to see and climb the Metropol Parasol, the famous “mushrooms” of Jurgen Mayer-Hermann built in 2011.  The views of the city are almost as good as can be found anywhere, and the structure is surreal… but nice.  Thence to the bus station with Jade, who was also headed for Cordoba, and I finally pulled out my Chromebook to start to write.  I’m concluding this entry sitting outside a bar in the shadow of the Mezquita-cathedral de Cordoba, drinking good Rioja and smoking a watermelon shisha, having had a charming afternoon with Jade exploring the Jewish quarter and drinking a Bedouin infusion in a local tearoom.  But that’s Cordoba, and that’s a story for another day.