Several years ago I began a still-unfinished series of posts in these pages entitled Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy. At Part Thirteen, I have scarcely gotten beyond our first port of call. In recording the trials and tribulations that beset the visitor to that glorious country, and the woes of modern travel in general, brevity is out of the question. Once the trauma of that trip has worn off, I might well complete the series. Meanwhile, Mrs. P. and I have just returned from our fourth Italian odyssey. Here follow a few random observations, along with words of warning for those who imagine themselves brave enough to follow in our footsteps.
The complete collapse of Italy’s political institutions happened to coincide with our most recent four-week sojourn there this past May. It’s telling that neither I nor Mrs. P noticed anything out of the ordinary. Over the course of the past century, government in Italy has been more the exception than the rule. It is no coincidence, accordingly, that the traditional location for the entry into the mythological Chaos is in Italy, near the ancient Greek colony of Cumae, just north of Naples. We are now hearing grave warnings from diagnosticians of the European pathology that Italy may become the next Greece. They say this unconscious of the irony, since Italy was “the next Greece” two thousand years ago, when becoming the next Greece was a glorious thing.
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Ancient Greece gave the world its first cartographers (Hecataeus, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and Pausanias). But for all the Romans’ vaunted skill at road-building, the Italians were never particularly diligent in either maintaining or keeping track of them. Not even Google’s satellites have managed to locate the nominal “roads” on which our airbnb and booking.com “villas” were usually located, and Mrs. Garmin is way out of her depth here. We wasted at least a half hour each day trying to trick her into taking us somewhere vaguely proximate to our destination, and another half hour recruiting a local Ariadne to guide us the rest of the way. I admit that these are minor annoyances in a country whose compensations include the Scrovegni Chapel and San Daniele ham. But the frustrations become more acute inasmuch as every minute going round in circles is another minute away from spiritual or gustatory bliss.
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How is it that the nation that two thousand years ago constructed giant aqueducts and irrigation systems, invented indoor plumbing, and provided public hot-water baths for its citizens in every quarter of its cities and towns, has yet to achieve minimal first-world standards of domestic comfort? When you turn on the hot-water faucet in an Italian hotel room, the government can change twice in the time it takes for the water to reach room temperature.
And here is a mystery as fathomless, and certainly more consequential, than Mona Lisa’s smile: Why is it that in every public and restaurant convenience—when you are lucky enough to find one–, the toilet seat has been removed? (A Mafia theft ring? A last-ditch effort to oppress women by the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church?) When I asked a local, he speculated that pan-Italian toilet seat removal had been ordered by the government under an obscure European Union health regulation. If that is the reason, it proves again what I have always suspected: that those who have risen to the top of the regulatory-bureaucratic hierarchy all began life as detested high-school pranksters.
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Ordinary Italians combine the profligacy of Lorenzo the Magnificent with the miserliness of Shylock. The ritual three-course restaurant lunch con vino (primo, secondo, dolce), followed by another late-afternoon dolce or gelato, is routinely capped off by the ritual four-course restaurant dinner (antipasto, primo, secondo, dolce), con more vino. Neither monumental personal debt nor chronic unemployment will ever persuade an Italian to reduce his or her bar and restaurant tab. Yet Italians live like hermits in their homes, where they sleep on army cots (see below), and stumble in the dark like troglodytes, under the pallor cast by 7-watt compact fluorescent light bulbs. In our sepulchral accommodations, Mrs. P. and I were forced to rely on the flashlight we brought from home when rooting around in our suitcases for our clothes, and regularly bruised our shins against the Ikea furnishings.
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On the basis of empirical evidence gathered during a cumulative four months in that country, I infer that (note to Christine McGee) the pillow-top has not yet arrived in Italy. None of the mattresses in either our hotel or airbnb accommodations has ever exceeded four inches in thickness, and even with as little original depth as that to work with, all of them approached almost perfect geometrical concavity. The Italian mattress can honestly be described as “orthopaedic”–in the sense that, after a few nights on one, the sleeper will almost certainly require surgical intervention.
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The ugly American tourist—along with the ugly British, German, and Chinese tourist—is impossible to avoid in Italy…The type of tourist who comes to the land of Duccio and Pinturicchio to shop, get drunk, and lounge by the hotel pool. We met such a couple (from Florida) at a café in Orvieto. They were staying at a five-star hotel in the piazza opposite Orvieto’s Gothic cathedral, which they had yet to visit, nor had any plans to visit, notwithstanding the fact that its magnificent façade—perhaps the most beautiful in the world—was staring them right in the face. The female Floridian vouchsafed to me that she had heard from a fellow guest at her hotel that the town of Siena (over 100 kilometers away) was “awesome”. Should she visit it? (This was apparently the first time she had ever heard of Siena.) I replied that the town in which she was staying, Orvieto, was also “awesome”, but that Siena was certainly one of the most architecturally and artistically important destinations in Italy. What should she see there?, she asked. I replied that, above all, she mustn’t miss the fresco cycles in Siena’s duomo by Brunello di Montalcino and Sagrantino da Montefalco. She was grateful for my advice, and asked me to write the names of the painters down for her.
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By contrast to the roads, Italian drivers are positively uplifting. I know that as a sub-group of our species they are esteemed only slightly higher than suicide bombers. But, by comparison to North Americans, the drivers in Italy are demi-gods of competence. Yes, they tail-gate in convoys at 150 kilometers per hour, and with an avidity that resembles a line of herd-animals making the beast with two backs. Yes, they text and drive (which, along with smoking on restaurant terraces, is still legal in Italy, and represent the last remnants of European liberty). Yes, they never signal; but that makes the unpredictability of their movements predictable, whereas in North America, the whimsical use of turn signals can seduce another driver into a fatal toss of the dice. And yes, they’ll cut you off if you give them a scintilla of space into which to insinuate themselves. But they perform all of these feats with such skill and sprezzatura that I nowhere feel safer than in their rolling company. (The one rule of the road they do obey meticulously is that they enter the left lane only for passing, and migrate back into the right once they have done so. It’s an ingenious concept; North Americans ought to give it a try.)
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Unfortunately, the individualistic, if not antinomian, spirit that Italians display when they are behind the wheel ossifies into collectivist torpor when they are behind their desks. Lest your heart begin to swell as you picture extended Italian families communing twice daily at the dinner table, remember that the aforementioned three-hour lunch has more to do with the omnipotence of unions than wholesome family tradition. Since every shop, office, and museum in Italy closes from noon to three in the afternoon, it wreaks havoc with a tourist’s plans. Even the churches are locked at that time, a daily reminder of the modern triumph of carnal appetite over the hunger of the spirit.
On our first full day in Pompei, having parked the car in the modern town about a kilometer away, we raced to the entrance to the ruins (the “Scavi”, as they are infelicitously called in Italian) in order to get there before its twelve-o’clock closing. We arrived at 11:50, but (along with hundreds of others), were turned away by the unionized gate-keepers, who improvised pharisaically that our entry would have exceeded the capacity of the park. (The ancient site is vast, covering more than 170 acres, and when we were eventually granted permission to enter, the visitors were spread far enough apart to induce agoraphobia.) So it was back to town, where we temporized for the next three hours (modern Pompei is charmless, and were it to be buried by some imminent eruption of Vesuvius, no future archaeologist would bother to dig it up.) Then, at 2:15 we embarked on another forced march, to a more distant gate this time, hoping that it would be less frequented. When we arrived at 2:45, there were already hundreds of people packed together in 30-degree heat, under a blazing sun. At 3:10, the gates finally opened, and the antiquarian mass funneled into two lines in order to pick up their “tickets”. (It was a “free day” at Italy’s state museums, but regulations are regulations.) Then, the two lines merged into one, which inched along for another 300 yards toward the turnstile, where we presented our credentials to the (single) official Pompei ticket-taker. It was now 3:45; but what price is too high to pay to keep three state functionaries on the employment roles? (Reminder to self: nothing is free.)
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I don’t wish to belabor the point, but here’s another example to prove that bureaucratic rigidity can not only be tiresome but terrifying. Over the past couple of years, I have chosen to avail myself of “wheelchair assistance” at the airport; it is one of the few vestiges of civilized life available to economy-class passengers, rendering them eligible for pre-boarding and, above all, entry to the VIP line through security, which can save one hours in labyrinthine queues. Naturally, in our age of victimological compassion, passengers require no documentation to prove that they are handicapped, nor any visible symptoms thereof. Let’s call it self-identified disability.
We arrived at Rome’s Fiumicino airport the obligatory three hours before our return flight to Toronto. A half hour expired at the Al Italia check-in desk waiting for the official airport wheelchair assistant to arrive. From there, I was shepherded uneventfully through security, and thereafter, on the secret and circuitous official wheelchair route, through otherwise forbidden points of entry, into special elevators, up and down floors, toward what I assumed was the departure gate. As is typical in modern airports, the departure gate is at least a kilometer from check-in, which, notwithstanding my decrepitude, I could have walked in less than twenty minutes. When my wheelchair Sherpa had finally deposited me in a dismal basement holding cell, along with twenty other “handicapped” passengers, forty minutes had elapsed, and we had less than an hour before boarding.
There, we were instructed, once again, to wait–which we did for another half hour—for a special bus that would ferry us across the tarmac to our destination. When the bus pulled up outside, the driver confiscated our passports and boarding passes. (Apparently, in leaving the terminal interior, to re-enter it by another door a few hundred yards away, we would be leaving the airport’s security perimeter.)
Once in the bus, we waited—in the state of high anxiety that only being parted from one’s passport can induce–for another fifteen minutes before it finally pulled away. The bus was airless and hot, and when several passengers requested that either the air conditioning be turned on or the windows opened, the driver replied defensively that the windows didn’t open and the air conditioning didn’t work. (We were still in Italy, after all.) Given that the average age of the occupants was around eighty, a heart attack seemed statistically imminent.
Five minutes after the bus had finally got underway we had crossed the tarmac and arrived at the terminal door, where after a ten minute wait for another bus to clear the official drop-off area, the driver pulled in, got out, and (saying nothing to his charges) conveyed our passports to the two security personnel in Swat-team attire who had emerged from the door, and then disappeared inside for another fifteen minutes. Did we have a wheelchair bomber on the bus? I’ll never know, since it is an inviolable law that no one ever explains the reason for a delay in an airport. When our passports were repatriated, we were ushered out of the bus and into another basement holding cell, where we were told to wait until the next team of wheelchair assistants arrived to push us along the final leg of our journey. At this point, Mrs. P and I decided to make a break for freedom. Having deftly evaded our custodians and mounted the escalator to the departure area, we ventured the five-minute walk to the gate unassisted, arriving fifteen minutes before take-off. We were the last to board.
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The confinement of the airplane came with an odd sense of relief. At least we knew where we were going. I can hardly complain that during the entire eight and a half hours in the air from Rome to Toronto (as during the entire seven and a half hours from Toronto to Rome), the passenger in the row behind me amused herself by kicking the back of my seat.
Buon viaggio.