Tag: dantesque-journey-through-northern-italy

LOYAL READER,

Here follows, after a long hiatus, Part XIII of PARADISE, PURGATORY, AND HELL: A DANTESQUE JOURNEY THROUGH NORTHERN ITALY. I should not attribute any particular meaning to the interruption. Here, at Priceton.org, we believe that if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing slowly; and that a meandering path, punctuated by excursions and indirections, is better than a straight one to any destination on the road of life.   (We demonstrate this wisdom every time we travel to Europe, and get hopelessly lost.)

Those who wish to refresh their memories will find the first twelve parts of PARADISE, PURGATORY, AND HELL: A DANTESQUE JOURNEY THROUGH NORTHERN ITALY in the Archives, under January, February, March, June, September, October, November, and December, 2015.

 

La Scala…

Illicit Photography…

 Selfie-ism…

Photographic Gunslinging…

 Museum Guard Lassitude…

 

A visit to Milan’s La Scala is worth the trouble, in spite of having to book in advance, tolerate the always intolerable “guided tour”, and pay an entrance fee that seems to be indexed to the cost of an opera ticket (though the house, of course, was dark). About ten of us were assembled on the steps in front of La Scala’s austere, neo-classical façade—whose chasteness intensifies the effect of its flamboyantly rococo interior—, then ushered up the back stairs and past a row of portraits and busts of famous nineteenth-century impresarios and prima donnas, before whom the cognoscenti mentally genuflected. All of this was contrived to instill in the operatic devotee the appropriate emotions of reverence and high expectation, leading up to the epopteia, in which we were led from the dimly lit hallway into the opulent light of the hall. From one of the boxes, we were then invited to gaze over the orchestra and stage for no longer than the permissible three minutes.   It was indeed an impressive sight: the gilded rings of balconies stacked one upon another in a triumph of architectural geometry. Continue reading “Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 13” →

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Italian Sophistry…

Our Europcar Ragazza…

Credit Card Servitude…

I remain, like so many others, an unreserved Italophile. How could anyone not revere the nation that gave the world Pythagoras, Parmenides, Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, Palladio, Piero della Francesca, Perugino, Palestrina, pasta, pizza, prosciutto, prosecco, parmagiana di reggiano (and those are just the p’s), not to mention the three hour lunch, and the five-hour work day.

But Italy was also home to a number of the ancient Sophists, and thus her progeny have never ceased to be able to “make the worse seem the better case”. To deal with Italians, the muscles of eristic must be in perfect trim. Grasping the metamorphic sea-god Proteus is only slightly easier than pinning an Italian down to his word.

 

Our first experience of Milan was hardly propitious. Though already September, the temperature was in the mid-thirties and the humidity pushing ninety percent. After twelve hours of confinement, our clothes were already clinging to corporeal recesses that hadn’t been exposed to air, water, or soap for over a day. (One of the peak pleasures of European travel is the first shower after touch-down–assuming the water heater in one’s rented apartment is working).

Exacerbating the heat and humidity was the dust with which the atmosphere was choked from the construction around Milan’s Linate Airport. With its trailers and port-o-potties, the scene outside the terminal building resembled an Eritrean refugee camp more than the gateway to the fashion capital of the world. Things will improve (I reassured myself) once we get into the city itself.

Linate is at least a blessedly small facility, so that finding the car rental area (a dreaded ordeal of international air travel) was relatively easy. I booked (and paid for) our car well in advance on an omnibus website called Auto Europe. Auto Europe recommended itself for many reasons, besides the fact that their prices were considerably lower than those of other third-party car rental clearinghouses on the web, not to mention Hertz, Avis, Budget, and the other international chains. First, I was able to get in touch with their representative by that quaintly old-fashioned (and occasionally time-saving) device known as the telephone. Second, a living human being answered the phone—Auto Europe as of yet eschews the sadistic “voice menu” that has become the impregnable roadblock of modern communications—nor was I ever put on hold. Third, the young man at the end of the line was located in Maine (rather than Mumbai). And most miraculous of all, in addition to speaking standard English, he was knowledgeable, efficient, and polite. He reminded me of that wholly anachronistic, clean-cut species of college student one still occasionally encounters in small-town America.

I called Auto Europe four times before committing myself, in part for the exhilarating ease of the experience, but mainly to confirm (redundantly, as required by my congenital suspiciousness) that, indeed, the $900.00 for my thirty-one day car rental included (1) full insurance coverage (collision, third-party liability, and theft) with zero deductible; (2) all conceivable local taxes and bribes; and a guarantee of the model of car reserved. Finally, I was assured that Europcar (the local car rental company, whom I had never heard of) was indeed a well-established firm with operations all across the Continent.

 

I nonetheless entered the office of Europcar in Linate with a prescient sense of trepidation. Having looked cursorily at my paperwork–I came armed with the entire dossier of orders, confirmations, and receipts, including a long email catena–the ragazza behind the counter proceeded to improvise. The car that we had “requested” would not serve our needs. Looking at our luggage, she could see that it wouldn’t be big enough. Besides, they didn’t have a Fiat Panda on the lot, and it would take an hour to procure one. Why don’t we “upgrade” (at only a small increase in cost) to a larger vehicle?

Standing my ground, I managed to parry this first assault. (Miraculously, a Fiat Panda materialized within minutes; it was “brand new”, “not yet logged into the system”, which is why our ragazza wasn’t aware of it.)

But having survived this first skirmish, I knew that I was a long way from winning the war; and the Protean slipperiness of my opponent had already begun to sap my confidence. Trying to forestall any further surprises, I showed her a number of clauses (which I had underlined in red) in my sheaf of documents, and asked her to confirm that the car was (as it said in black and white) fully insured, and that there would be no other charges. She laughed. Insurance has be arranged and paid for at the site, she said with condescending deliberateness, in both English and Italian (as though I were incapable of understanding either language). And there are always local taxes. Now I’ll need your credit card to process your “request”.

When she printed the rental agreement and thrust it unceremoniously in my direction to sign, I noticed a charge of 677 Euros posted opposite my credit card number. Having returned to consciousness, I was assured that it was the “usual” security deposit. I doubted it; the figure was rather too specific. It could only have referred, I assumed, to those ubiquitous “local taxes” she had mentioned. When I left the Europcar office, I resigned myself to the probability that my $900.00 car rental would end up setting me back closer to $2000.00.

Naturally, I thought about telling our ragazza to find some other bleary-eyed traveler to gull. (A suggestion for a Europcar advertising slogan: Rent a car with us: we’ll take you for a ride.) But I had no reason to believe that I would ever get my nine hundred dollars back. In any case, I’d be left with having to find another rental car on the spot (and there’s nothing Italians are better at than sensing when a supplicant is negotiating under duress). So I capitulated, like a political prisoner who, after days of sleep deprivation, is willing to confess to anything.

The most depressing realization (which would turn out to be the lesson of the entire trip) was that all of my vigilant preparedness—the careful internet research, the multiple phone calls to Auto Europe, the amassing of the documentary evidence–was an onanistic waste. A traveler can be girded with the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of truth, but once his opponent has his credit card, he is confronting a nuclear power.

 

Before collecting our very expensive economy car, we decided to retire to the lounge to lick our wounds. This would be a good time for Mrs. P. to telephone Donato (our host in Milan), from whom we needed to procure the keys to his apartment. Mrs. P. had purchased a plan from our cell-phone provider in Toronto for the purpose of arranging such rendezvous. But she had forgotten to charge her phone. The call would have to be made on mine, and while dialing I mentally added the outrageous roaming fees I would have to pay to the ever-rising sum of costs we had so providently, but vainly, attempted to avoid. We had also (providently) purchased a European map program for “Mrs. Garmin” (our GPS device) before we left, and I thought that this might also be a good time to see if it worked. It didn’t. When I turned the unit on, the screen was blank. I later realized why: I was still inside the terminal building, where satellite reception is apparently impossible. But never mind. I had ample cause to be confirmed in my sense of touristic doom. I took out pencil and paper (a technology I could count on) and made a list of everything that might possibly go wrong before the end of the day. It was a long one, but not even the most prescient Cassandra is capable of foreseeing the horrors that a malevolent Fate has in store for her vacationing victims.

Airport Insecurity…

“Music” and the “i” Generation…

It took a full half-hour for us to clear passport control in Brussels (about the time it takes illegals to slip across Western borders never to be heard from again). That left forty-five minutes for another one-kilometer dash across the terminal to the security checkpoint followed by a final push to the gate. What they don’t tell you when you purchase those cut-rate connecting flights to Europe is that for a reduced fare you get to enjoy being stripped and molested twice. One oughtn’t to complain about the security regime at airports, knowing that the alternative is being blown out of the air by a terrorist bomb (even if airline passengers face a greater risk of being blown out of the air by the Russian military). And then the fact that a terrorist can secrete (pun unintended) a bomb in his underwear merely demonstrates how futile our vigilance is against anyone determined and masochistic enough to commit suicide by so exquisitely painful a method. (One supposes that Muslims believe in the regeneration of the body in the afterworld, else all those comely virgins would be a waste on the underwear bomber.)

Besides the sheer annoyance of airport security, one should never underestimate the challenge of divesting oneself into those little plastic bins when, after seven hours in the air over the Atlantic, one is sleepless and in orthopedic distress. Extricating one’s shoulders from camera, passport, and computer bags (without getting their straps twisted together); removing coat, sports jacket, belt, and shoes; emptying pockets of bills, change, credit cards, keys, and lighter (oops!); liberating the laptop from its case; and doing it all while a hundred passengers are watching and waiting impatiently in the line behind, takes a degree of coordination and composure that would have taxed Houdini in his prime. Doing it all in reverse on the other side of the metal detector, with the same travelers glaring at you again as you try not to leave anything behind and fumble to get your clothes back on, is likewise no mean test. Over the years of traveling, Mrs. P. and I have left enough items of clothing (hats, scarves, gloves, ties) in the security bins to start a small haberdashery shop. For reasons of soi-disant security (compounded by senility), the guards at Heathrow already have a lifetime supply of my Zippos.

 

One final sprint brought us from security to our departure gate, where we arrived five minutes before take-off, and as the last passengers to board, were subjected to the scowls of another angry mob.

The connecting flight from Brussels to Milan was tolerable enough, save for a passenger across the aisle whose earphones overflowed with an incessant, high-pitched ch-chka-ch-chka-ch-chka. Polluting the atmosphere with the “music” from one’s earphones or car radio is now a form of self-assertion, scarcely more refined than the ritual in which animals lay claim to new territory by urinating around its perimeter. (But then animals don’t urinate into your ears.) In the age of My Computer, My Pictures, and My Music, my music is your music, whether you like it or not. And so one’s ears are inundated by these aural effluents everywhere in our technological age, when the ubiquity of i-Pods, i-Pads, i-Phones—the “i” being the subjective form of the possessive “my”–, and other mobile disturbers of the peace bespeaks our culture’s primordial fear of being alone with its thoughts (if it has any thoughts), and its consequently hopeless addiction to auditory and visual stimulation. If Islamists really wanted to terrorize the population of the West, their most effective tactic would be to disrupt the supply of these adult pacifiers.

Music that is offensive to captive listeners—and how could anything downloadable from i-Tunes not be offensive?–is a form of torture. It was most recently recognized as such in Guantanemo Bay, when President Obama ended it and other cruel interrogation practices on the high moral principle that anything that was instituted by the Bush Administration must be ipso facto wrong. So, Mr. President. You believe in regulation, don’t you? How about it?

Flight Delayed on Account of Ice (i.e., lack of)…

Airport Ikea Floor Plans…

Basic Training…

Expecting the Worst…

Architecturally, with their soaring glass vaults and high-tech construction materials, modern airports are all about the future. And so is air travel. The departure of your flight is always about the future–into which it has inevitably been delayed–, as is its landing, when your plane is in an interminable holding pattern, waiting for the backlog of incoming flights to clear (waiting, that is, for the past to catch up to the present).

There is more hurrying up in order to wait in airports than in hospitals, doctors’ offices, or prisons. As a people, we are loath to keep our doctors, prison guards, or flight crews waiting; so we dutifully arrive ahead of schedule, lest, by some miracle, our doctor, prison guard, or airline is on time. (Unless you are my eighty-six-year-old mother-in-law, who kept a 767 along with two shuttle buses idling on the tarmac for forty-five minutes because, as she said, she was “enjoying a nice cup of tea in the cafe”, and she “thought they would come and get me when they were ready”.)

The official reasons for flight delays are always either lies or truths so absurd one wishes they were lies. Before the aforementioned odyssey to Moscow, I checked in at Kennedy the prescribed two and a half hours ahead of the nominal time for take-off, only to temporize at the gate for another seven hours. We all assumed that there had been some minor mechanical malfunction that was taking seven hours to repair (in the way that all minor mechanical malfunctions take my car mechanic seven hours to repair). But the flight was delayed, as we were told, because the cabin crew was waiting for a delivery of ice. The airline’s thinking was that passengers would rather be kept awake until 2:00 a.m. in a cramped, un-air-conditioned departure lounge than suffer the intolerable hardship of drinking their Mountain Dew at room temperature. Was I the only one who was struck by the irony that Aeroflop Flight 666 was scheduled for a refueling stop in Iceland?

 

In modern airports, the only time the hurry-up-and-wait formula doesn’t apply is when you are trying to catch a connecting flight: then it becomes, hurry-up-and-hope. The footprints of metropolitan airports cover millions of square feet, every one of which is always between you and your departure gate. The theory of probability suggests that the two points in space at which your incoming flight arrives and your outgoing flight departs must, at least some of the time, be closer to each other than half the length of the airport. But this never happens. Even if they are contiguous, there is a law (literally; see below) that prevents you from taking the shortest distance between the two, and requiring instead that you circumambulate the entire airport only to approach it from the opposite direction. Airports seem to be laid out like follow-the-red-arrow Ikeas, which ensure that you walk the entire store on the way to whatever item you’ve come to buy.

When we deplaned at Brussels, we had ninety minutes to catch our flight to Milan. We were doing splendidly, I thought, on the first stage of airport basic training: running—well, walking fast (about 8 mph, with a 4 mph assist from the moving sidewalk)–down one of those long glass corridors that are so suffused with light you almost forget how miserable you are. I might have reached 9 mph, but for the computer bag, camera case, and document wallet suspended from my neck and oscillating violently with each stride like the streamers on a Maypole in a reversing wind. The multiple lacerations caused by the straps digging into my flesh would have been only a minor irritation for, let’s say, a member of the Navy Seals, but the bags kept shifting and throwing my gait off balance. The only way I could restore their equilibrium (since one hand was dedicated to my carry-on and the other to my cane) was to stop periodically and shake myself like a dog that had just come out of the water. This also served to dispel the rivers of sweat that were coursing down my forehead and cheeks; but it didn’t endear me to the other passengers on the moving sidewalk, who evidently had the news about Ebola on their minds.

 

After twenty minutes of running, stopping, and shaking, I arrived at the end of the corridor. Mrs. P. had been waiting there for about five minutes (but then Mrs. P. takes weekly classes in Yoga, Tai Chi, and Osteo-Fit, which is apparently better exercise than driving a golf cart). When I reached her, exhausted, I considered collapsing in a heap at her feet in the theatrical manner of Olympic cross-country skiers when they are three meters past the finish line; but Mrs. P. would not have been impressed.

The corridor gave out into the main terminal, and there everything ground to a halt. We had reached the first of two chokepoints through which all airport traffic is funneled (hence the logic of airport floor plans, as described above). One line, for passengers carrying EU passports, moved briskly. The other, for the lumpenproletariat from the rest of the world, was a rodent maze that followed twenty switch-backs, each fifty feet long, and occupied by a total of some five hundred passengers. (As we inched forward, I wondered why the deadbeat inhabitants of Greece, Spain, and Portugal should be allowed to flounce through, while Canadians, who haven’t cost the German banks a penny, are treated like supplicants. At least in Canada we only sponge off the productive citizens of our own country for our cradle-to-grave welfare entitlements.) At the end of the line, I could see three passport control booths, and a lot of shuffling back and forth from one to the other by the officials. Apparently they only had one stamp amongst them.

 

I knew then and there we wouldn’t make it. My universally optimistic disposition, if you are wondering, is predicated on the utterances of three of the most venerable founts of philosophical wisdom in the entire Western Tradition: William Shakespeare, Melvin Brooks, and my late Aunt Freda. In King Lear, Edgar laments, “The worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’.” By Act IV, scene i, Edgar has already been dispossessed of his birthright by his evil half-brother Edmund, driven into exile on the heath, and reduced there to the state of a “poor, bare, forked animal”. Then he encounters his father Gloucester, whose eyes have just been put out. (Edgar recognizes the folly of assuming that, after a string of disasters, one’s fortunes are bound to improve.) Mel Brooks updated the language, but preserved the meaning, of Edgar’s paradox in the refrain of the theme song for his movie The Twelve Chairs: “Hope for the best, expect the worst”. Good advice, given that the film is set in nineteenth-century Russia, when things were rather unpleasant for the peasantry, until they followed the example of their French cousins. Then they got Lenin, Stalin, the Ukrainian famine, the Siberian gulag, and the Lada sedan. Wisest of all was the sapient imprecation of my old aunt: “When I die, may I go straight to hell; I don’t want to be disappointed again.” I have it on good authority that my aunt went, disappointedly, to heaven, where she complained about the accommodations, the weather, and the fact that she couldn’t find a decent piece of brisket.