The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XXI

Harley Price

The Mathematical Principles of Music…

 Of Everything…

 The Pythagorean Foundation of Modern Science…

The (Macrocosmic) Harmony of the Spheres…

The (Microcosmic) Harmony of the Soul…

     Even more momentous for Western thought was Pythagoras’ discovery of the mathematical basis of musical intervals.

It was made, as Diogenes Laertius explains, by the experimental use of the “monochord”–an instrument, as its name implies, in which a single string is stretched across a soundboard which supports a movable bridge.  By stopping the string at a certain point along its span, Pythagoras realized that the pitch that it produced was directly related to the length of the vibrating portion of the string.

Stop it at the exact centre, pluck the string, and it produces a note precisely an octave above.  Stop it so that the ratio of the vibrating to the non-vibrating portion is 3:2, and you produce a major fifth.  Stop it so the ratio of the vibrating to non-vibrating lengths of string is 4:3, and the result is a major fourth.

What Pythagoras realized, then, was that the octave, fourth, and fifth–the “major consonances” of Greek music—were produced as a function of certain fixed numerical proportions, and that the sciences of acoustics in particular, and music in general, have an invisible mathematical structure.

 

It was but a small step for Pythagoras to infer that the physical laws of not only sound but of the entire natural world were informed by hidden mathematical proportions and principles.  As Aristotle relates,

The Pythagoreans…thought that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things….Seeing that the properties and ratios of the musical consonances were expressible in numbers, and that indeed all other things seemed to be wholly modeled in their nature upon numbers, they took numbers to be the whole of reality, the elements of numbers to be the elements of all existing things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.

Rather than seeking a unifying and unchanging physis or nature of the cosmos in the material elements—water, air, fire, or “the infinite”, as the Ionian philosophers had done—Pythagoras maintained that the elements themselves, material or quasi-material as they were, were secondary phenomena, necessarily reducible to the primordially elemental, immaterial concepts of mathematics.

 

One can hardly overestimate the significance of Pythagoras’ insistence upon mathematics as the foundational principle of cosmic order for later science.  Within two hundred years it gave rise, in the work of Archimedes, to the science of mechanics.  Even Galileo, at the dawn of the modern age, took it as the starting point of his own investigations:

Philosophy is written in the great book which is ever before our eyes—I mean the universe–; but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written.  This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.

Upon this Pythagorean foundation the whole structure of classical physics was erected.

 

From his conception of “the whole heaven as a musical scale and a number” arises, finally, another of Pythagoras’ celebrated doctrines–and another ongoing topos of Western thought–, that of the so-called “harmony of the spheres”.  As Aristotle explains, Pythagoras reasoned that the heavenly bodies, being of immense size and moving at correspondingly vast speeds, must produce sounds in their peregrinations, indeed, much louder sounds, necessarily, than those of the relatively smaller and slower-moving objects we can hear on earth.  If the revolutions of the heavens are inaudible to us, it is only because their music has filled our ears since birth, so that we are unable to distinguish it from silence.

The pitch of these celestial sounds, moreover, must be directly proportionate to their velocity, which in turn is a function of their distance from the earth–that is, the radius of their orbit.  The fixed stars, on the periphery of the heavens, and revolving at the fastest speed, make the highest sound; the moon, closest to the earth, with the shortest orbit, and moving at the slowest speed, makes the lowest.  What’s more, since these distances are in the ratios of the musical consonances, the sounds produced by the planets and stars blend together in a vast cosmic “harmony”.

The grandeur of this conception ensured, as I say, that it would become a perennial theme in Western poetry, theology, and philosophy.  It explains, amongst other things, why music was from Plato to Castiglione so central a discipline in the moral education of the philosopher-prince.  As Shakespeare’s Lorenzo puts it, two thousand years after Pythagoras, in the Merchant of Venice:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears:  soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholds’t
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it…

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.

For Shakespeare, Plato, and all latter-day Pythagoreans, the harmony of the spheres is in immortal souls because it was the soul’s birth-song, which it heard when it still lived in the celestial aether, before its unfortunate fall into the body and the world.  If ordinary men can’t hear it, it’s not for the reason Aristotle imagines, but because the noise of the world—the distractive din that floods in through the body’s physical organs of sensation—drowns it out.  Such men are deaf to the harmony of the spheres, because, as Plutarch explains, “The ears of most souls are blocked and stopped up, not with wax, but with carnal obstructions and passions.”

To hear that harmony requires, on the contrary, that the soul stop up her outer ears; that she mortify the senses by turning her attention away from external earthly and material objects and desires, and cultivating instead the inner incorporeal senses of reason and intelligence through which we alone apprehend reality and truth—truths that like those of mathematics are invariably “immaterial and conceptual”.

By pursuing a life of contemplation and introversion, and through the ascetical regimes already mentioned, the Pythagorean wise man creates the stillness that allows him to hear the celestial music resonating faintly in the interior depths of the soul; hearing it, he is reminded of his celestial birth and reawakened to his own divinity.

With the Pythagorean teaching in the background, later writers and thinkers referred to the wise or virtuous soul as “musical”, “harmonious”, or tonos, attuned. In the musical soul, the discordant and cacophonous carnal appetites and passions have been composed by reason in order and harmony,  and so composed, the microcosmic psyche imitates and participates in the greater order and harmony of the macrocosm.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XX

Harley Price

Pythagoras the Teacher of a Way of Life…

His Doctrine of Transmigration of Souls…

 “Philosophy” as a Methods for the Salvation of the Soul…

  Pythagoras and Mathematics…

Deductive Geometry and the Ascent of the Soul to the Divine…

     As Plato reports, Pythagoras taught “a way of life”, and it becomes apparent what that was:  a life “in accordance with what is highest in us”, in accordance, that is, with the soul whose divine origin and nature must be remembered and fully realized, and in detachment from the body and world in which it is a prisoner and exile.

One of the methods by which the Pythagoreans nurtured the soul at the expense of the body was a kind of purgatorial regime, including an abstention from meat. This was clearly enough connected with Pythagoras’ doctrine of the transmigration of souls.  As his contemporary Xenophanes records,

They say that once when a puppy was being whipped, Pythagoras, who was passing by, took pity on it, saying, “Stop!  Do not beat it!  It is the soul of a friend; I recognize his voice!”

The doctrine of transmigration of souls may have been borrowed by Pythagoras from the Orphic cult, which also flourished in southern Italy in the sixth century; or it may have been imported by Pythagoras directly from the East, if the tradition according to which he traveled eastward as far as Babylonia, before returning to Croton, is true.  Whatever its origins, Pythagoras’ belief that the soul undergoes a series of incarnations throughout the various ranks of the animal kingdom meant, amongst other things, that the killing of animals for food was a sin akin to murder.

But the Pythagorean taboo against eating meat seems to be part of a broader ascetical regime.  As Diogenes Laertius reports, Pythagoras restricted himself to the most meager diet of honey, bread, and vegetables, rarely drank wine, and never enjoyed carnal relations with a woman.  These abstinences were clearly meant to detoxify the soul, the highest and divine element of the human person, of the body’s contaminating influence.

Such ideas, as we’ll see, became salients of Platonism, as did Pythagoras’ conception of philosophical inquiry itself as a method for the purification and salvation of the soul.  Thus Diogenes Laertius says that Pythagoras was the first to use the word “philosophy”, and to call himself a philosopher, that is, a lover of wisdom:  “For no one, he said, is wise except god.”  For Pythagoras, then, as for Plato after him, the life of philosophy was essentially a religious vocation, whose purpose was the salvation and deification of the soul, or rather, the restoration or repristination of its original nature, which was divine.

Above all, philosophical inquiry for Pythagoras meant the investigation of the first principles of mathematics.  Pythagoras’ many and seminal geometrical, algebraic, and arithmetical discoveries include far more than merely the famous triangle theorem named for him, but we don’t have the space (nor do I have the expertise) to consider them here.

The major point to be noted about Pythagorean mathematics is the way it accorded with Pythagoreanism as a soteriological method, by emancipating the rational intellect from its reliance on the world of matter and the senses.  As the fifth-century A.D. Neoplatonist Proclus explains in his commentary on Euclid, geometry was first discovered by the Egyptians, who used it to measure the areas of farmers’ fields whose boundaries were annually obliterated by the flooding of the Nile.  Geometry was, as such, an entirely practical “art”, and as applied by the Egyptians to the land, it remained purely inductive and empirical.  But “Pythagoras transformed this study into a form of liberal education, examining its principles from the beginning and tracking down the theorems immaterially and conceptually”.  In this way, continues Proclus, geometry “elevates the soul and does not allow it to descend to objects of sense in order to satisfy the common needs of mortals, and so neglect the turning of the soul to things above”.

By liberating geometry from the practical necessity of measuring the land through a kind of inductive trial and error, and discovering the universal conceptual principles upon which any area could be ascertained in theory, Pythagorean mathematics becomes a deductive method (where “deductive” retains its primary sense of “leading out of”) by means of which the soul abstracts itself from its dependence upon the entire material order.  The fact, that is, that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides is not determined by what happens when any three sticks are laid in a closed figure on the ground by surveyors, but by a rational inference from first principles.  Mathematics proceeds, then, not from the uncertain testimony of the senses, but, as Proclus writes, “immaterially and conceptually”.  In this way, as Socrates would later put it in the Phaedo, the soul withdraws from the body and the world into itself, and lives as if by itself and alone.  Unencumbered by the material order and the sensory organs by which it is perceived, it rises, through the contemplation of mathematical concepts, to the invisible spiritual world in which such concepts, in communion with the Divine, eternally reside.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XIX

Harley Price

Pythagoras…

The Immortality and Divinity of the Soul…

 The Controlling Images of Pythagoras’ Myth…

 Birth in the Body as Death, Imprisonment, Exile…

 Immortal Thoughts for Mortal Men…

     Pythagoras is probably the most important, and certainly the most influential of the Pre-Socratics, if only because Plato’s thought depends so heavily upon his, and Western thought depends so heavily upon Plato’s.

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, just off the Ionian coast and slightly north of Miletus.  Tradition has it that he left Samos because of his disgust with the tyranny of Polycrates, and like Xenophanes before him, fled westward.  C. 530 B.C., when he was forty years old, Pythagoras settled at Croton, a Greek settlement on the east coast of southern Italy, where there soon gathered around him a large number of devoted disciples.  The community at Croton was less a philosophical school, in fact, than a religious cult, and indeed, as in the other mystery religions of Greece and the Ancient Near East, the Pythagorean initiates were bound by oath not to divulge the doctrines taught them by their master.

Fortunately, many of Pythagoras’ later disciples broke their oaths, including Philolaus, an important Pythagorean thinker who lived in the 5th century B.C., and who enumerates some of the basic teachings of the founder as follows:

First, he said that the soul is immortal; second, that it migrates into other kinds of animals; third, that the same events are repeated in cycles, nothing being new in the strict sense; and finally, that all things with souls should be regarded as akin.

 

That the human soul is immortal, indeed, an inhaled portion of the divine “breath” that suffuses and animates the entire universe, had already been taught by Anaximenes.  But Pythagoras was the first Greek thinker to address the fundamental ontological, anthropological, and moral problems that inevitably follow from such a conception.

First, if the soul is immortal, how is it related to the human body, and to all material things in the universe, which are so obviously subject to decay, disintegration, and death?  Pythagoras’ answer was momentous for later Western thought.  Soul and body, he maintained, are ontologically opposite, belonging to entirely different orders of existence.

As Philolaus reports, Pythagoras taught that the soul is “buried in the body as if in a tomb”.  Birth in the body spells a kind of death for the soul, whose real life is in the other world, where it was born and pre-existed in a disembodied state before its incarnation, a condition which it naturally hopes to resume after the body dies.

This explains those other conventional Pythagorean metaphors, according to which the material body is the soul’s prison, that life in it on earth is a kind of “slavery”, “captivity”, or “exile” from the soul’s native realm and true home.  That home, where the soul was originally born, to which it belongs by right and nature, and whence it fell by a kind of sin, is the celestial world, the abode of the Divine. Thus nascent already in Pythagoreanism is that distinction that Aristotle was later to make famous, between the translunary order, made of a kind of super-rarefied fire called aether–absolutely pure, immutable, imperishable, eternal, and divine–, and the sublunary, where everything is grossly material, and thus subject to corruption and decay.

For Pythagoras, the human soul was, as Diogenes Laertius reports, “a detached portion of that celestial ether”, which is to say a deracinated particle of the Divine, as Anaximenes had also conceived it.  Thus, as Diogenes goes on to say, Pythagoras insisted that “soul is distinct from life and immortal”.  It is not affected by the corruption which overtakes the body, but stands apart from it even in life, preserving its affinity with the Godhead throughout its exile in the world.  At the same time, of course, the soul is oppressed by a palpable sense of alienation, yearning to be released from its carnal prison-house, and to return to that upper region whence it came, reunited forevermore with the Divine.

 

The effect of Pythagoras’ emphasis on the innate and essential divinity of the soul was to fatally undermine the traditional Greek view of the place of man in the world-order.  We’ve already encountered a number of expressions of the idea of the unbridgeable gulf between mortal and immortal, between a life subject to misfortune and vicissitude, and one lived in eternal and unchanging bliss.  Here are three more, from the fifth-century poet Pindar:

No man can win to happiness complete….
In brief space the joy of mortals waxes;
In brief space it falls to the ground,
Stricken by an adverse fate.
We are but creatures of a day.
What is a man?
Man is a dream of shadows…

If a man having wealth surpass all others in beauty,
Displaying his strength by victory in the games,
Let him remember the limbs he arrays are mortal,
And that he will come to the end that all men come to,
Clothing himself with earth…

Mortal thoughts befit mortal men.

But Pythagoreanism completely overturns this view; as Aristotle describes the moral imperatives of Pythagoras’ followers:

We are not to obey those who tell us that a man should think a man’s thoughts, and a mortal the thoughts of a mortal.  On the contrary, we should endeavour as far as possible to become immortal, and to do all that we can to live in accordance with what is highest in us.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XVIII

Harley Price

Xenophanes…

 His Critique of the Mythic Gods of Homer…

Of Religious Anthropomorphism…

Of the Immorality of the Gods of Myth…

 Of Regional Religious Forms as Cultural Projections…

His (and Greek) Monotheism…

Xenophanes as the Source of the Tradition of the Allegorical Interpretation of Myth…

Of Pagan Religious Universalism…

Of “Negative Theology”…

     The brilliant Pre-Socratic philosopher and poet Xenophanes was born c. 561 B.C. in Colophon, a city some forty miles north of Miletus; but when Colophon, along with many other Greek cities along the Ionian seaboard, fell to the Persians, Xenophanes fled westward, making his way eventually to Sicily.

The great innovation and importance of Xenophanes’ thought is not in cosmology or physics, but rather in theology, the understanding of the nature of the Divine.  But then the immediate relevance of theology to cosmology need hardly be stated, since for the Greeks, the essential problem was the relation between the Divine and the material world.

Xenophanes was in fact the first in a long line of reforming critics and expositors of traditional Greek religious and mythological idioms.  Here are two of his most famous dicta on this theme:

Mortals believe that the gods are begotten, and that they wear clothing like our own, and have a voice and a body.

The Ethiopians make their gods snub-nosed and black; the Thracians make theirs gray-eyed and red-haired.  And if oxen and horses and lions had  hands, and could draw…, horses would draw the gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen, each giving the gods bodies similar to their own.

Xenophanes here states explicitly for the first time what intelligent Greeks must long have understood:  that the mythological gods, as described by poets such as Homer, are created in the image of their human worshipers; that they look and behave like men only because their worshipers have projected upon them their own form and habits; and that the incidental differences one observes amongst the various national and ethnic gods and their cults is the result of similar projections, each the consequence of the inability of men to conceive of the Divine except through images derived from their own immediate human and culturally specific experience.  Rather, as Xenophanes affirms, there is only

One god, …in no way similar to mortals either in body or mind.

 

The transcendent supremacy of Zeus, acknowledged from the beginning in Homer and Hesiod, suggests that the strict monotheism of Xenophanes is the development of a tendency in Greek thought already long underway:  a tendency, in fact, to define the Divine as a kind of Being that utterly negates and transcends all categories of human experience, understanding, and expression.

God, as Xenophanes insists, has no body or organs of sense, though by means of some super-sensual and super-intelligent mode of cognition, he “sees all, thinks all, and hears all”.  Having neither arms nor legs, he is motionless; yet he sets all in motion merely “by the thought of his own mind”.

Unlike men, in fact, the being of God is “totally of mind and thought”, and is eternal.  By contrast, above all, to the “innumerable world-orders”, which successively come into being and pass away, God is without beginning or end.

Spatially conceived, his being is “spherical”, but only in the sense in which it is co-extensive with the world-order, able to act everywhere in it without moving, because he suffuses it throughout as the active and living principle of order.

This cosmic order, or justice as Anaximander had called it, means that the world-order is once again a moral order, and that justice, therefore, must be of the nature of the Divine.  But if this is true, the stories told by the poets must be lies, since, as Xenophanes laments,

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things which in men are a matter for reproach and censure:  stealing, adultery, and mutual deception.

This is the most scandalous effect of the primitive propensity to project human traits upon the gods, whose moral behavior must surely be better than that of at least the worst of mankind, if the term “Divine” is to mean anything.

Xenophanes thus lays the foundation for a long tradition of moral criticism of artists and poets in general, and Homer in particular, in which, at one extreme, they are accused of being professional “liars” and blasphemers who should be banished forever from decent society (as Plato purports to banish them from his Republic).  Such a view was to fecundate throughout history periodic outbreaks of puritanism and iconoclasm.  Fortunately, however, it did not prevail; for the Greeks (as indeed for the Christians of Middle Ages and the Renaissance), the poets were to be defended as the writers of mythological allegories that were never intended to be read literally.

If their mythic narratives are “fictions”, it is because approximative images and provisional analogies are the only means by which the sensual and finite human imagination can approach the ineffable Divine; understood figuratively, however, the fictions of the poets conceal beneath their literal surface profound philosophical and theological truths.

 

Xenophanes was in any case the first Greek thinker to recognize the inherent problem of coming to know and represent a Godhead that is by definition beyond all human categories of apprehension and language.  The gods, he says, have hidden the knowledge of the Divine from mortals, who must apply themselves to discover it through assiduous study and effort.  Even so, no one man or sect will ever discover or reveal the final and exhaustive truths of religion, but at best a semblance of them.  As Plato (in the Timaeus) was to formulate this foundational principle of what was later to be called “negative theology”, “The Father and Maker of this universe is beyond knowing or expressing”.  For this reason, too, the various local myths and cults tended to be relativized in Greek thought, as merely partial and imperfect revelations of the Divine, just as their differences were understood as secondary regional inflections of a universal religion of the One Unknown God.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 12

Harley Price

The Sirens of Organized Travel…

Floating Nursing Homes…

Travel to Europe as Nostos…

Milan’s Bus-Barker Top Four…

The Famous Duomo…

Two days in Milan is risibly inadequate, of course. But having landed there, it seemed absurd to decamp immediately. Since a city of Milan’s size and importance requires from two to three weeks to explore, even peremptorily, a two-day stay is at least a clear disavowal of any pretense to having “done” it–of the sort, that is, affected by so many tourists on their return from ten-day, twelve-city Mediterranean cruises, during which all that they have “done” is to glimpse through the windows of their tour buses some of the beautiful things they haven’t seen. An elderly acquaintance of mine, too possessed of irony to have allowed himself to be seduced by the Sirens of Organized Travel, described his itinerary as follows: “We spent an afternoon in London during which we did not see Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and the Tower, then were woken up the next morning in Paris, herded onto another bus, and did not see the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and Sacre-Coeur. And everyone was thrilled not to have seen them.”

Odysseus devoted more time to exploring the cave of the man-eating Cyclops than the average group tour spends in European capitals today. Hence, Mrs. P and I have always disdained organized travel—hence, our travel has always been as chaotically disorganized as this memoir attests—, and disdained above all the modern cruise, in which the traveler’s every move is planned, and his every need taken care of. The contemporary cruise ship is a gigantic floating nursing home. (I’ve seen brochure photos of happy trenchermen in the ship’s “formal” dining room, where cravats are no longer required, having been replaced by bibs.) In our late-sixties, we are much too young for such geriatric conveyances. We prefer risk and adventure, of the sort that might reduce us to knocking at the door of a Lacedaemonian youth hostel at midnight outside of Bologna, or force us to sleep in our rental car at Linate Airport the night before our return flight (see below). No cruise-ship octogenarian will ever experience such thrills, or be able to regale his great-grandchildren with the harrowing tales of how he survived them.

 

As we walked under the arch of the Porta Ticinese and filed past a magnificent row of Roman and Early Christian columns, it occurred to me once again that no matter where in the West one resides, by accident of birth or other circumstance, a trip to Europe is a nostos, a voyage home. I do not refer in this regard to those questers after their “roots” who leave their farmsteads in Manitoba, their bayous in Mississippi, or their brownstones in Manhattan, in search of the ancestral villages in Ukraine, the Pyrenees, or Poland in which their great-great-grandfathers once lived. Theirs is merely an investigation into the lineage of the body, a biological nostalgia on a par with the homing instinct of salmon who return by natural compulsion to the exact spot on which they were spawned. The more conscious traveler to Europe, on the other hand, knows that he is drawn there by a far more powerful attractive force, as to the birthplace of the Western soul.

 

Milan is a relatively “young” Italian city, the original Celtic settlement having been subdued by the Romans as late as the early third century B.C. Under Diocletian, it became the seat of the rulers of the Western Empire, and in 313, Constantine published his famous Edict of Milan, giving Christians the freedom to worship (which most modern Italians, like most moderns everywhere, fail deliberately to exercise or defend). In 375, Ambrose, one of the most learned of the Latin Fathers, and a direct influence upon the thought of Augustine, became Milan’s bishop and patron saint. Since then, the Lombard capital has passed under the rule and patronage of Charlemagne, the Visconti, the Sforzas, the Emperor Charles V, the Borromeos, Napoleon, and Il Duce, all of whom it managed to survive, while attracting to its courts such luminaries as Da Vinci, Bramante, Manzoni, and Verdi.

Milan’s most famous monuments—the ones every bus-tour barker would be sure to include on his itinerary—are the Duomo, La Scala, the Galleria, and Leonardi’s Last Supper (in the cenacolo of the church of Sta Maria della Grazie). And since this is a memoir rather than a travel guide, we’ll give them the same short shrift. The Duomo is impossible to miss even if one wanted to: an enormous and uniquely soul-less Gothic pile. Construction commenced (with the chevet) in the late trecento by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, and continued throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries under a succession of Italian, French, and German master masons, before the Duomo’s façade was only finally finished in 1809. The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe typically take decades, and sometimes centuries, to complete; but the nearly half-millennium during which the planners and builders of the Duomo tinkered should have persuaded them that it would never be more than a limited architectural success. It is not that the Duomo is a chaotic agglomeration of styles, since only the façade combines Gothic and Renaissance motives (and remarkably harmoniously at that), whereas the rest of the building is pure flamboyant Gothic. But then the International Gothic Style may be rare in Italy for good reasons, as opposed to northern France and Britain, where its verticality, monochromaticism, and a-symmetry seem more at home. In any case, the Duomo remains inscrutable to both the eye and the mind, mainly because a dense forest of pinnacles, belfries, and gables obscure its every surface. One architectural historian, with only a slight lack of charity, said that it resembles an albino porcupine. (It is no coincidence that the principal cause of the building’s deterioration over the years has been neither invading armies, nor failing mortar, nor pollution, but nesting pigeons.)

Across the vast Piazza Del Duomo, nearly side by side, stand the elegant Teatro alla Scala and the Galleria, temples to music and retail commerce respectively, as the Duomo tries but fails to be a temple to Christ. But ours is a multicultural world, and as Mrs. P and I tried to cross the square, our way was barred for over an hour by a kilometer-long procession, replete with pastel-coloured floats adorned with images of Hindu gods and goddesses. The Hare Krishna, which we’d managed to avoid in all three airports, had come to meet us in Milan’s centro istorico.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 11

Harley Price

Italian Espresso Machines…

Private Rental Idiosyncrasies…

Another fifteen-minute trudge from the parking garage, and four flights of stairs, brought us, finally, to our apartment in Milan. As we dropped our luggage and collapsed onto his sofa, Donato (our airbnb “host”) offered us an espresso to welcome us. His machine was one of those Keurig-style espresso makers that are ubiquitous throughout Italy and as yet unavailable in North America—one small example, that is, of the paradoxical evidence that, technologically, Europe is far more advanced than the New World. I’ve already animadverted on the befuddling gadgetry of European automobiles, but in this case, European innovation makes sense. A machine that dispenses a single shot of espresso using a sealed capsule (without the bother of filling and tamping down a brewing head) is a great convenience, whereas single servings of “American” coffee are a boon only to the profiteers of the international coffee cartel.

Unfortunately, Donato wasn’t able to divine how to insert the “pod” into the machine’s portal. This should have been a warning to us that European domestic technology is another snare, and unless one’s host is thoughtful enough to take his newly-arrived guests on an exhaustive orientation of his apartment, the first day of their stay will inevitably be wasted on figuring out how things work.

 

Years ago, we rented an apartment for a month in Provence whose owner neglected to tell us that the water, electricity, and heat had all been shut off. We fumbled about in the dark and dampness for a day searching for an electrical panel and water supply until we recruited a kindly neighbour who escorted us down into a four-foot high rubble cellar where they were occulted. The owner of the house was an American academic whose literary specialty was deconstructionism, a cultural attitude he evidently carried over to the décor of his sabbatical idyll. Though the apartment was located in the middle of a quaint seventeenth-century row in Claviers (one of the most beautiful perched villages in Provence), the interior was a slum. The subsequent three days were spent scavenging throughout the house for the odd pieces of furniture and ceramics that were not a complete affront to the famed Provencale aesthetic, and hiding the Ikea and Salvation Army turpitude in closets and the attic.

Tourists who prefer non-conventional accommodations must be prepared for such adventures. It’s jolly that in privately-rented homes (as opposed to hotels) you can wash your clothes and cook your dinners, but good luck figuring out their idiosyncrasies. Televisions invariably come with three remotes (one for the TV, one for the cable box, and one for the DVD player), but which is for which, in what order they must be turned on, and with which you change the channel and adjust the volume, is always a mystery that requires an hour of experimentation to solve. (In keeping with their technological precocity, Europeans are addicted to remotes. Even their mini-split heater-air conditioner units come with them, and though their displays offer a dizzying array of different “modes”, none of our hosts deigned to explain what they were for, and thus how to turn the damn things on.)

I wrote earlier about the blithe assumptions people make about local knowledge, which applies perforce to the owners of rental properties. All of our apartments came with WiFi, but our hosts rarely thought to leave a note with the passwords. Limitations of space mean that European apartments are usually equipped with ingenious washer-drier combinations, whose displays resemble the instrument panels in the cockpits of NATO fighter jets. In Bologne, the owner of our rental confessed that she had no idea how to program the dryer, so we were compelled to buy some string from a local hardware store and hang our wet laundry outside the kitchen window, just like the permanent residents on the street. (I’m convinced, by the way, that this picturesque European atavism has nothing to do with tradition and everything to do with the fact that no one can figure out how to operate their machines.) In the same Bolognese apartment, the refrigerator and microwave failed to work because, as we discovered several anxious minutes later, their power cords were unplugged from the single kitchen outlet hidden behind the stove.

 

One would think that landlords renting to tourists might have the ordinary decency to provide some instructions on how to navigate their domestic arcana, but as I’ve said, if they know where to find the hidden outlet, they can’t imagine that a complete stranger wouldn’t be able to. These might seem like minor annoyances, but solving technological puzzles and moving furniture are more than normally onerous chores when the churches, palazzi, and museums one has come to visit are visible just outside one’s window, and seem to mock the traveler who is forced to become pre-occupied with such trivialities. In any case, after our thirty-hour ordeal, we were too exhausted to do any exploring. Donato eventually shamed his machine into swallowing its capsules of coffee and returning two perfectly brewed shots of espresso, which he presented to us in triumph. We drank them out of politeness, bid him arrivederci, plugged in our two white-noise machines (one of which promptly blew up, because it wasn’t compatible with European voltage), then retired, at three in the afternoon, to bed. But either jet-lag, the recollected horrors of the journey, or the caffeine made sleep impossible, so we stumbled downstairs and headed up the street, toward the Porta Ticinese, determined to achieve at least a few moments of touristic pleasure and redemption.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 10

Harley Price

Male Italian Sartorial Splendour…

Photoshopping Your Property on Airbnb…

The Most Important Word in Italian…

Negotiating Parking Rates…

Donato (the owner of the apartment we rented in Milan; or rather–in airbnb parlance–, our “host”) came to our rescue about half an hour after we called. When he first appeared, he was accoutered in an immaculately tailored navy-blue silk suit, paisley tie, and tasseled loafers. And though he had walked to our location through the heat of the early afternoon, there wasn’t a bead of sweat on his person. It was only later that we learned that Italian males never allow themselves to sweat, lest they mar their sartorial perfection.

Much has been written about the splendour of the Italian female, but the men are surely no less magnificent. Coming from North America, where the ubiquitous male costume consists of blue jeans, polyester sweat shirts, “ski” jackets in fluorescent plastic, Nikes, and baseball caps (usually facing aft), it is a pleasant shock to discover that Italian men still wear shoes made from the hides of animals, overcoats of natural cloth, and hats with no conceivable athletic or proletarian application.

 

When questioned, Donato explained that the construction around Milan’s centro istorico was in preparation for the World’s Fair to take place in the coming summer, and had been ongoing for almost a year. It apparently never occurred to him to mention this transportational blockade in the many conversations we had had with him before our arrival. Whether he thought it might put us off, or his reticence was just another case of locals assuming that regional contingencies must be universal knowledge, my annoyance was hard to conceal.

With Donato as our steersman we sailed through the secret gap in Milan’s southern defences toward what we thought was the street on which his apartment was located. But, as he also revealed only when pressed, the Corso di Porta Ticinese was off limits to vehicular traffic (another minor detail he might have vouchsafed to us prior to our arrival). Is it because airbnb “hosts” have received payment in advance that they seem not to care if visitors ever find their abodes?

 

As it turned out, of the seven different rental properties we either stayed at or rejected during our thirty days in Northern Italy, five were utterly beyond Mrs. Garmin’s Holmesian capabilities. On one occasion, after we had to abandon our accommodations in Bologna only two days into our twelve-day tenure because of noise (see below), we discovered what appeared, from the picture on the website, to be a charming rural idyll in the hills south of the city. Once beyond Bologna’s suburban sprawl, we advanced along a narrow dirt road up terrifying, near-vertical ascents, caught our breath as we tacked along horizontal switchbacks, and finally arrived at the isolated farmhouse that Mrs. Garmin had declared to be our “destination”. But no one was home. Finally, after more prolonged and assertive knocking, an ancient donna, visibly annoyed, opened the door to tell us that we had the wrong address, and she had no idea where (or what) a “b and b” was. After randomly knocking on the doors of every house in the area (a long undertaking, since the hillside was wild, and habitations few and far between), we came to a dilapidated hovel, its front yard strewn with the rusted carcasses of superannuated motorcycles. Appropriately enough, its owner turned out to be a gap-toothed Ozarkian right out of the movie Deliverance, who greeted us, warmly, with the question, “What took you so long?” What took us so long was that our airbnb “host” had expediently posted a photograph of the well-kept property of his elderly neighbor rather than his own.

This was more or less common practice, as we quickly learned. So that when we recognized the magnificent quattrocento gate that was depicted in the web-photo of the bed and breakfast we had reserved near Lake Garda, and Mrs. Garmin declared with her wonted confidence that we had arrived at our “destination”, we barely slowed down as we passed under the portico arch and headed directly for the most squalid section of a generally squalid inner courtyard, then began to unload the Panda for our next adventure in lodging.

 

Since we weren’t permitted to drive on the Corso, Donato suggested that we go directly to a “nearby” underground parking garage to leave the Panda during our three days in Milan. Trying, as usual, to forestall unpleasant surprises, we had asked him long before we booked his apartment to tell us the cost of parking in Milan (“Not expensive”, he assured us. “About fifteen Euros a day”). For Italians, adverbs are the most critical parts of speech, and the words “about”, “approximately”, “more or less”, are the most significant adverbs. To our dismay, the sign in the underground garage indicated that the daily rate was thirty-five Euros, “about” twice as much as Donato had estimated. My mental calculator immediately added the extra hundred dollars to the unbudgeted thousand for the car rental; and this, mind you, was still our first day in Italia. Extrapolating (as I did) for the next thirty days, I came to “about” thirty thousand in unanticipated expenses.

In fact, whatever the sign said, the daily rate at the parking garage was indeed only about thirty-five Euros. When Donato noticed our discomfort, he launched into a moving supplication of the attendant, explaining that Mrs. P was his long-lost zia from Canada, coming to meet her nephew for the first time before she died of a terminal illness that had all but financially beggared her. (The extemporaneous brilliance of this confabulation was only slightly diminished in my appreciation when I learned that Donato, when he wasn’t collecting rent from tourists, was a state defense attorney.) At the end of his plea, the reduced price the interlocutors had settled upon was seventy-five Euros for the three days. As I handed the attendant his cash and the keys to the Panda, and heard the squealing of its tires as he throttled it down a corkscrew ramp to God knows where, I began to worry that the Europcar ragazza might not have been merely trying to fleece another victim when she insisted that I didn’t have insurance.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 9

Harley Price

Italian Drivers…

Tailgating with Sprezzatura…

Hitting the Wall: H at the Crossroads…

Travel as Going around in Circles…

As a Recipe for Melancholy…

Asking Directions and Local Ignorance…

Having located our rental car, loaded the luggage, and programmed Mrs. Garmin with the address of our apartment, we finally left the dust and debris of Linate’s construction behind, and set out on the short trip to Milan. As we merged into highway traffic, it occurred to me that our Fiat “Panda” was once again rather inauspiciously named for a conveyance that would have to keep up with the carnivorous Ferraris and Alfa Romeos piloted by the testosterone-crazed Italian youths who prowled the Autostrada. To my surprise, however, it had just enough power to hold its own for a few seconds in the passing lane, before yet another would-be Mario Andretti appeared out of nowhere and attached himself amorously to my rear bumper.

Despite their reputation for insanity, by the way, Italian drivers are remarkably safe and competent. Unlike North Americans, they understand the meaning of “passing” (in the phrase “passing lane”); they keep up with traffic—disparity of velocity, in obedience to absurdly low speed limits, being the principal cause of accidents in North America–; and though tailgating is both a sport and a religious obligation in Italy, Italians tailgate with that insouciant confidence and skill to which Castiglione in The Courtier gave the untranslatable name of sprezzatura. (On a ride into downtown from Rome’s airport a couple of years ago, the distance between the front bumper of my taxi and the rear bumper of the car ahead–between three and four feet–never varied, despite speeds in excess of one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, and frequent stops. A long catena of vehicles sped down the road in this fashion for miles, as if linked together like the cars of a train. Google can only dream of such precision.)

 

At Italian speeds, we traversed the ten kilometers from the airport to Milan’s outskirts in no time. It took us another twenty minutes or so to reach the periphery of Milan’s centro istorico; but there we hit a wall. Not the medieval fortress walls of the Lombard dukedom, but a wall of construction that encircled them and was hardly less impregnable.

Hercules could at least rely on his own moral compass when he came to his famous “crossroads”. But with a concrete barrier preventing my forward progress, and no idea where I was–the dark shadow of the miracle of GPS is that, without a physical map in hand, one is always effectively lost–, I had to make a choice. I chose left, and proceeded as slowly as the tailgaters would allow while Mrs. Garmin “recalculated” (as she would have to do so often in the coming weeks). I continued to obey la donna Garmin in good faith and confidence as she led us through a maze of streets, commanding me to “turn left in 500 metres”, “take the second exit at the next roundabout”, and so on. But after twenty minutes of this, another concrete barrier lay athwart our path. This time, I elected to go ad dextram, but a second “recalculated” voyage of discovery left the Panda facing what I thought was a third construction barrier. (In fact, being the sharp-eyed observer that I am, I soon realized that Mrs. Garmin had merely returned me, twice, to the same place. We had been going around in circles, literally, for the past forty-five minutes).

Having endured the curry-and-cologne ambiance of Jet Airways; the video-game-addicted delinquent kicking the back of my seat; the touch-and-go race to our connecting flight in Brussels; the oleaginous larceny of the Europcar ragazza; the Sisyphean ramps of the garage at Linate, climbed and re-climbed in search of our rental car; and sleep-deprivation now into its second day; and with La Scala, the Galleria, the Ambrosian Library, Leonardo’s Last Supper, and the other glories of Milan lying across a Hesiodic chasm of construction, as near but as inaccessible as the fruit that lay just beyond the grasp of Tantalus; I came to the inevitable conclusion that travel is nothing more than the illusion of going somewhere, beneath whose pleasant integument is concealed the futile reality of merely going around in circles.

Shakespeare’s Jaques said it best in As You Like It, when he observed that it is easier to suck melancholy out of travel than any other vocation or pastime:

I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

Rosalind. A traveler! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

Jaques. Yes, I have gained my experience.

Rosalind. And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad—and to travel for it too.

Surely I had gained enough “experience” in the brief time since leaving Toronto to justify a Jaquean case of melancholy. Staring at the construction barrier for the third time merely confirmed my original intuition that the gods did not want me to visit Northern Italy, as Juno did not want Aeneas to reach Latium, and Poseidon did not want Odysseus to reach Ithaca.

 

Having probed the limits of Mrs. G’s computer intelligence, I pulled over while Mrs. P went into a bar across the street to ask for help. While, admittedly, I suffer from the proverbial male horror of getting lost, combined with the stereotypically male aversion to asking for directions, it is not, I insist, merely a matter of masculine pride. In my sad experience, when one becomes lost, the perfect recipe for getting desperately, hopelessly lost is to ask a local inhabitant for directions. If your local is familiar with whatever landmark you are looking for, he will assume that everyone in the world must be as familiar with it as he, and his directions will be correspondingly indefinite: “Keep going for a few traffic lights and you’ll see it on the left. You can’t miss it”. (Ah, but you can, and certainly, will. The “few” traffic lights might turn into a dozen, and “on the left” might mean in a strip mall a block in from the road.)

There is another species of locals, moreover, who are cognizant of nothing in their environment (however proximate) that doesn’t lie directly on their route to work, market, or home. It is too often true that those who have lived longest in any given city, town, or village will know the least about its amenities–as I learned, for instance, when, after two weeks of exploring Rome, I was giving travel advice to those who were born there, but had never heard of the Palazzo Massimo or Santa Maria Maggiore, though they had walked passed these celebrated monuments practically every day of their lives.

The denizens of the bar belonged to the latter category of locals. And so we telephoned the owner of our apartment in the hope that he could be our Sibyl and guide us across the Acherusian moat of construction.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 8

Harley Price

Vicarious New-Car Ownership…

European Automotive Gimmickry…

Driving Your Mother-in-Law around Europe…

Getting behind the wheel of a car confers upon one an intoxicating sense of liberation after sequester in the fuselage of an airliner. Even in a sub-sub-compact, the legroom is better. There is also the illusion of being in control of one’s destiny (although that fades as soon as one has completed three panicky, which-exit-do-I-take?, revolutions in a European roundabout).

I’ve always enjoyed renting cars. Since I tend to keep my own for between fifteen and twenty years, renting gives me the exhilarating sensation of being a new-car owner (with the tranquilizing knowledge that, if it turns out to be a lemon, I can give it back). Rental cars are sometimes even new enough to retain that “new-car” smell (unless, of course, the previous renter has visited the Alps and is prone to car-sickness. But then, after a few cigars, I barely noticed.)

In the case of some cars I’ve rented (e.g., a 1969 Quatre Chevaux in Paris, a Soviet-era Zil limousine in Moscow in 2000, and a 2002 Miata), I sorely regretted having to give them back. The Fiat wasn’t one of them. In spite of its mawkish model name, our “Panda” (what tone-deaf genius comes up with modern car appellations?) was anything but cute. Like so many European models, its quirky angularity strikes the eye as a vestige from the Cubist era. And its interior is a triumph of plasticky cheapness last achieved by Japanese export manufacturers in the years immediately following World War II. Like many other European cars as well, the Panda tries to make up for its diminutive size and horsepower with an array of useless and imponderable technological gadgets.

 

My first encounter with this tendency occurred in 2004 at the Amsterdam airport, where I leased a “Clio” from Renault Eurodrive for a month. Because the Clio was nominally leased rather than rented, it was indeed “brand-new”—so new that when it was delivered to me straight from the dealership, the Renault salesman had no idea how to roll its electric windows down.

It may not seem so, but this was a desperate situation. It was hot and muggy (once again); early in the morning after another sleepless overnight flight; following nine hours in a smokeless fIying coffin, I desperately needed a cigar, which was permitted only with the windows open; and my ill-tempered octogenarian parents-in-law were sitting in the back seat, anxious to get to a hotel, where bathrooms are in predictable proximity.

Mrs. P’s parents had always enjoyed touring Europe, but were getting too old and frail to manage a trip on their own. So, in a gesture of filial gratitude combined with reckless charity, we offered to act as escorts and facilitate their return to a place in which they had formerly been very happy.

 

We eventually discovered the idiosyncratic location of the Clio’s window controls on p. 292 of the owner’s manual. In every car I have ever driven, they are located on the driver’s and passenger’s armrests. In the Clio, they were occulted under a hinged cover on the central console (like the red button for 007’s ejector seat, which, once the back-seat commentary had commenced in earnest, I began to wish the Clio had been equipped with).

While I was doing my best to negotiate the maze of highways between Amsterdam and Bruges without benefit of maps or GPS, my mother-in-law regularly emitted a high-pitched shriek every time another car came within twenty feet of us. (In her, I had my own living, breathing lane-guidance warning system, although rather too sensitively calibrated.) When she wasn’t emoting at the top of her lungs that she “didn’t want to die”, she was reminding me that she hadn’t “come to Europe to be on a boring superhighway”.

After three and a half hours of such back-seat abuse, I finally entered Bruges. A typical medieval European town, Bruges is a spider’s web of culs-de-sac and narrow, one-way streets, both sides of which are invariably lined with parked cars. After finally finding an opening in which to pull over (a long queue of Flemish motorists honking at me from behind), we asked Mrs. P’s parents to wait in the car while we searched on foot for a nearby hotel. They objected; we’re just going for a little walk, they assured us.

Bruges is a safe town, but naturally, with the luggage in the trunk, I was careful to lock the car and listen for the chirp from the key-fob. But something made me walk back to the Clio and check the doors. They were open. I pressed the padlock icon on the fob again, tried the driver’s door (spraining my middle finger in the process), walked away a second time, and returned to dispel any lingering doubts. The doors were unlocked! I performed this futile ballet three more times, before sinking to my knees in despair. How was I going to travel through Belgium and France (including Marseilles, metropolis of bandits) without being able to lock the Clio’s doors?

The answer was in the fine print on p. 383 of the manual this time. The Clio came equipped with a convenient little feature: a sensor in the key-fob that automatically unlocked the doors and rear hatch when the driver came within a ten-foot range of the vehicle. Now you’ll never again have to fumble for your keys while your hands are full of groceries, as the manual exulted in the Renault motoring company’s tradition of innovative genius. (Of course, it’s a useless gimmick, since you still have to open the unlocked doors with your grocery-laden hands. I did, however, employ it as a party trick on the Renault dealer when I returned the Clio, and thoroughly enjoyed his befuddled exasperation.)

Three hours after departing for their “little walk” my parents-in-law showed up back at the car, smiles on their faces, and incredulous that we had been anxiously hunting for them for the entire time—there was no hotel to be found in the area–throughout the city.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 7

Harley Price

Dismissive Vagueness and the “Hospitality” Industry…

Searching (literally) for the Right Car…

When I asked where I might collect our “brand-new” Fiat Panda, the Europcar ragazza told us to go to the company trailer in the parkade outside the terminal, whither she gestured with dismissive vagueness. Dismissive vagueness, as I have discovered over the course of years of travel, is a special qualification and talent of those who work in the hospitality industry, who are invariably the most inhospitable creatures amongst the plenitudinous ranks of the animal kingdom.

The last time I encountered our ragazza’s expression of contemptuous ennui, it was creeping over the face of a waiter in a restaurant in Arles, at the moment when Mrs. P asked if he would remove and replace the soupe de poisson he had just served us. (The soupe had no poisson in it that either of us could discover, was covered in a congealed varnish of cooking oil, and was garnished with croutons that the waiter had parsimoniously recycled from the un-bussed table of a previous party of diners.) To Mrs. P’s suggestion, le garcon replied that there was nothing wrong with the soupe (implying that we were gastronomic malcontents), and proclaimed, like Moses revealing the Law on Sinai, that in France, if you order it, you pay for it.

It was in the same spirit of hospitality and accommodation that we were dismissed from the Europcar office and sent outside to search for the car we had (over)paid for. The “parkade” was a vast four-storey above-ground garage approached by six different ramps. Having been given no instruction as to which was the magic ramp, we tried them one after another at random, dragging our luggage behind us in the heat of the noon-day sun, until, on the fifth Sisyphean ascent, we hit upon the level and sector occupied by the major car rental agencies. We immediately found Hertz, Avis, and Budget, whose agents instructed us that Europcar was in the far corner of the parkade. Thirty-five minutes after setting out from the terminal, we finally found the Europcar trailer and presented our paperwork to the attendant. Would he bring us our conveyance, we wondered; or would we be dispatched on another voyage of exploration through the rows upon rows of parked cars to find it ourselves?

Such naivete is the residuum of the eternal hopefulness with which travelers embark on every new trip. After narrow escapes from the murderous Cyclopes, Laestrygonians, Scylla, and Charybdis, Odysseus set out cheerfully to reconnoitre the dark hinterland of Circe’s Isle, his spirit of adventure wholly undiminished. But with Homer’s and a thousand other admonitory tales to guide him, the contemporary traveler has no excuse for optimism.

 

The Europcar attendant tossed me the keys with the wonted dismissiveness of his vocation, recited the license plate number of our car, and told me I could find it in the Europcar section, “six rows over and nine pillars down”. Leaving Mrs. P to guard the luggage, I set out on another fruitless quest. Naturally, the “Europcar section” was unmarked; and never having seen a Fiat Panda in my life, the normal process of elimination was unavailable to me. After ten minutes’ of scrutinizing dozens of license plates, I gave up, returned to the trailer, and commenced upon a long and impassioned speech about the minimal standards of “service”, and the Christian imperative of showing compassion to homeless wanderers. Shamed into human decency by the tears that were at that moment beginning to well up in Mrs. P’s eyes, the attendant agreed to fetch the car. I importuned him only one more time: to give me at least a cursory introduction to the Fiat Panda’s instrumentation which, in the fashion of most European automobiles, was opaque and idiosyncratic. Having memorized the iconography and location of the light switch, AC button, and electric window controls (all of which were secreted in the most illogical redoubts), I inserted Mrs. Garmin into her mount, pressed its suction cup onto the windscreen—which held only after several attempts–, programmed in the address of our apartment, and set out in a mood of utter defeat for the city of Da Vinci, Bramante, and St. Ambrose.