Tag: dantesque-journey-through-northern-italy

Taxi or Limousine?…

Traveling to the Third World (to the Airport, that is)…

Wheelchair Formula One…

Will that be Curry or Cologne?…

Demonic Little Boys…

Sleepless over the Atlantic…

They say that getting there is half the fun. But that depends upon whether you see the glass of travel as half full or half empty. Personally, I’ve always considered those who see the glass half full to be at least half full of it, and those who see it completely full, to be completely full of it.

According to what “they” say, getting to the airport should be more than a third of the fun, since the bumper-to-bumper thirty-kilometre slog through the suburbs takes almost as long as the three-thousand-mile flight across the Atlantic. In Toronto, where there is no rail link between downtown and the airport, getting there presents two choices: taxi or “luxurious airport limousine”. That’s a no brainer, as they also say. You can call a cab and be picked up by a beat-up, broken-down, ten-year-old Chevy Impala with no springs (chassis-wise or seat-wise), reeking with the smell of one of those pine-tree-shaped artificial air fresheners that hang from the rear-view mirror, and driven by a chap who speaks no English and knows no streets, because he arrived from Bwaamba Bwaamba a month ago. Or, you can call a “luxurious airport limousine”, and be picked up by a beat-up, broken-down, ten-year-old Lincoln Town Car with no springs (chassis-wise or seat-wise), reeking with the smell of a pine-tree-shaped artificial air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror, and driven by a chap who speaks no English and knows no streets because he arrived from Bwaamba Bwaaamba a month ago, but wears a cap and natty uniform. Or you can call a friend and beg him to drive you.

We did, and he did, in his just washed and waxed Cadillac DeVille, which he never fails to remind us is “a prestige automobile” (but then, recipients of charity can hardly object to being put in their place). As soon as we reached the highway, I became convinced that I had left the front door unlocked; but then my wife reminded me that every time I leave the house I am convinced that I’ve left the front door unlocked.

 

When a traveler enters the Toronto International Airport, he already feels that he is on vacation. In the Third World, specifically. Practically all of the airport staff (the taxi dispatchers, cleaners, security guards, customs and passport officials) are either from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh. Knowing Canada’s incredibly lax immigration laws, it makes one wonder. How many of the government functionaries checking visas are themselves illegal aliens? How many of the turbaned quasi-military types wanding passengers down at the security checkpoints are sympathizers of the Tamil Tigers? My suspicions may be completely unfounded, but I doubt that I’m alone in wondering, even if the pall of silence cast by multicultural correctness means that nobody dares to ask. In any case, I’m sure that passengers entering Toronto Airport from Western Europe, say, have often looked around and stopped to wonder whether they got on the wrong connecting flight.

In fact, we remained, contextually speaking, in South Asia until we deplaned in Brussels. That’s because the cheapest flight we could find to Milan was on something called Jet Airways. No one has ever heard of Jet Airways, which is headquartered in Delhi—not even the staff whom we asked at the Air India counter.

When we reached the departure gate, it was already full of passengers, over ninety percent of whom were presumably returning to India from visits with relatives in Canada or traveling to India to visit relatives back home. The other thing I noticed were two long lines of passengers in wheelchairs. There must have been fifty “handicapped” travelers on our flight, fully one-fifth of the total roster. Immediately, I sensed something fishy; even I know that the Indians are no longer stricken in numbers by crippling diseases. When they called boarding for “passengers requiring assistance”, the wheelchairs commenced to roll, and the scene looked a bit like the scrambled start of a Formula One race. The Indians are savvy travelers. They’ve learned the quickest and easiest way to get into their seats. The rest of us stood in line with our luggage for another half an hour. I leaned on my cane, trying to relieve the pain in my hip, and feeling (as usual) like a chump.

 

The flight itself lived up to our low expectations. The interior of the plane was no-frills-airline shabby, the seats more than usually cramped and hard, and the atmosphere thick with the mingled aromas of curried chicken wafting from the galley, and curried chicken wafting from the bodies of the passengers. I wondered if the pilot had an extra artificial air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror. In the meantime, I sniffed my unlit cigar, but the cheap cologne of the corpulent male passenger next to me induced a persistent headache. We were lucky in that the only two empty seats on the plane were across the aisle, and decamped as soon as the seatbelt sign was extinguished (along with the sign to extinguish our cigarettes. Does anyone in the world still need to be admonished that “this is a non-smoking flight”? If so, where do I find a smoking flight?)

In the row behind our new seats sat a demonic little boy who, every fifteen minutes or so, shouted out, “Die, you bozo”, whenever he scored a kill in the video game he was playing. Then he kicked the back of my seat in celebration of his triumph. Eventually, I turned around and gave him a look that he correctly interpreted to mean, “Die, you bozo”, whereupon he curled up on his seat cushion in the fetal position. Then I kicked the seat in front of me in celebration of my triumph.

Even in the absence of these inevitable olfactory and auditory assaults, there is no sleeping on an airplane. Not for me, at least. On my periodic “walks” through the cabin, I saw rows of arched necks, noses in the air, gaping mouths, and lower jaws thrust forward in the configuration of a fish scooping up plankton. (On a flight to Moscow fifteen years ago, I remember another demonic little boy amusing himself by popping peanuts into the open orifices of sleeping passengers.)

But passengers who are able to descend into the cave of Morpheus from today’s economy class seats would have been able to sleep through the ministrations of Procrustes. When we arrived in Brussels at 8:30 a.m. (2:30 in the morning Toronto time), we had been awake for nineteen hours. And that was when we needed to have all our wits about us.

Like the hoteliers who have never slept in their own hotels, the travel agents who assure you that an hour and a half is plenty of time to make your connecting flight at the other end of a modern, metropolitan airport have obviously never tried it. Unless, in their spare time, they are Olympic athletes specializing in the four-thousand-metre hurdles.

Packing…

GPS (Mrs. Garmin)…

The Hotel Racket…

White-noise Machines…

Security Patrol…

Having procured plane tickets, a car, and places to stay at strategic locations along his itinerary, the modern Grand Tourist is on his way. Not quite. First, he must: call his credit card company to report that he will be away from x to y; ensure that he has adequate travel insurance (trip and medical); secure a month’s supply of his multitude of medications from the pharmacy and distribute them in their little plastic coffins; call his cell phone provider to buy a plan for Italy (he’ll need a phone to contact his hosts a couple of hours before arrival, in order to give them time to get to the apartment and hand over the keys); go to the AAA office in the suburbs to purchase an international driver’s license; then to Navigation Systems R Us in another suburb to get the European maps for his GPS; and down to the travel bookstore to buy a map-book for Italy just in case his GPS abandons him to his own resources.

Several days before departure, we turned our minds to that most unpleasant of preparatory rituals: packing. What would we require, as opposed to merely find useful, during our month away? (Here again, technology is oppressive rather than liberating.) We’ll need our laptop, of course–don’t forget the power cord, headphones, and wireless mouse–for checking the hours of museums, churches, palaces, and so on. (In Italy, the lunch-time siesta can begin any time between 11:00 and 12:30, and end from 2:30-4:30. Which means that any trip to Italy involves a lot of calculated temporizing, or else lurking suspiciously around doorways, waiting for buildings to re-open.) We’ll need our phones (don’t forget the charger). We’ll need the camera (charger, extra SD card, lens-cleaning kit). We’ll need Mrs. Garmin (as we call the lady who lives inside the black box of our GPS and imperiously barks out the upcoming turns), as well as its windshield mount and cable. We’ll need adapter-plugs for all of the above. And most important of all, we mustn’t forget our anti-noise noisemakers.

 

For serious noise, of course, nothing is effective short of the industrial ear muffs one wears while using power tools. But for side-sleepers like me, they’re painful—not to mention unromantic. Long ago, we purchased a special “white-noise” machine, which plays a variety of soothing and soporific sounds recorded from nature: a babbling brook; a crackling fire; rain; waves breaking onto shore, and so on. In theory, such devices work by cancelling out the more disruptive noises one encounters in typical hotel rooms: the self-closing metal doors that clang when they hit home; the machine-gun rat-tat-tat of ice machines; AC units that sound like the clashing of continental plates when their compressors kick in. The Socratic definition and telos of a hotel is a building in which guests exchange money for a good night’s sleep. One would think that the architects of hotels or their multinational management corporations would have given a minute’s thought to alleviating the aforementioned auditory assaults (a few rolls of Home Depot self-adhering weatherstripping foam, affixed to the jambs to cushion the blow of slamming doors, for instance). Instead, they imagine that what their customers crave are chocolates on their pillows. And so, wherever we travel, our white-noise machines travel with us.

But the manufacturers of such devices have given only slightly more thought to their design than hoteliers have given to that of their hotels. Their sounds are not, of course, recorded from nature, but synthesized: simulations that repeat themselves in an endless loop. “The seaside”, for example (our default setting), evolves in three distinct movements. First, one hears the sounds of a wave coalescing, cresting, and breaking against the rocks. Then, another wave waxes and wanes, this time to the accompaniment of the song of gulls. Finally, just before the third wave exhausts itself, comes the squawk of a single gull that is so loud and piercing that not even the dead could sleep through it. Then the cycle repeats itself ad infinitum.

Has the “composer” of these tracks or, the manufacturer the devices, ever taken one to bed with him? (Has a hotel manager ever tried to sleep in one of his own hotels?) It takes about three repetitions of “the seaside” before one has every sequential nuance memorized. Having been shocked out of sleep by the climactic shriek of gulls, one lies awake waiting for it to come round again. One counts the waves, registers the first chorus of gulls, and braces for the final fortissimo. Here is another human artifact that does precisely the opposite of what it was intended to. (Hence we travel with not one but two machines. If perfectly synchronized, they smooth over each over’s rough spots, and create the undifferentiated, amorphous “white” noise (the Pythagorean concors discordiae) conducive to sleep.

 

In the choice of clothes, one must be equally provident. September in Toronto is reliably cool, but in Northern Italy it can bring anything: scorching afternoon heat, cold nights, drenching rains. Packing clothes for, in effect, both summer and autumn, in addition to the electronic gear one has to haul, while staying within the airlines’ niggardly weight limits, is a balancing act that requires the brain of an accountant. The possible combinations are almost infinite. For two days, the candidates were strewn across beds, sofas, and chairs for adjudication. They were then provisionally folded, boxed, or wrapped, and placed in our suitcases for weighing.

 

A day before departure brings another ritual: security patrol. We live in a district of Toronto (not by any means the worst in our world-class city) in which the cliché about things being stolen unless they are “bolted down” doesn’t any longer apply. A neighbour recently had plants dug up from her own garden. I’ve had a ladder stolen while working on the roof just above it. A book that I ordered from amazon.com was filched from my front porch where it was left by the courier. (I rejoice in the thief’s erudition, but wonder where he will fence a used copy of Felix Buffiere’s 1953 magnum opus, Les mythes d’Homere et la Pensee Grecque.) Leaving the house for any extended period of time thus fills me with paralyzing apprehension. For the first several days of any vacation, I am haunted by forebodings of break-ins, vandalism, earthquake, or conflagration.

Security patrol must be prosecuted systematically. One must find a trusted neighbour with whom to leave the keys in case of fire; then install new batteries in the smoke detectors. A padlock has to be attached to the garden gate, and the lock on the attic hatch secured. Eyebolts are then inserted in the holes drilled for that purpose through the sash of the double-hung windows (the old locks are too easily forced). Timers are set for lights in the living room and upstairs bedroom. (I don’t know why one does this; any half-way competent thief will deduce, after staking out the place, that if the lights go on and off at precisely the same minute every day, the occupant must be on vacation). Finally, in anticipation of a break-in, I open the doors to the stereo cabinet and gather easily fenced or portable valuables together, then place them on prominent display. (I’d rather burglars find the cash, jewelry, and electronic equipment immediately, rather than smash the gallery of my Georgian secretary-bookcase.) Heaping up our valuables on the altar of our hallway table is the last rite, so to speak, before the day of destiny.

 

I realize that a trip to the most beautiful country in the world ought to have been a joyful prospect. Whenever friends or neighbours heard that we were about to spend a month in Northern Italy, their common response was “Lucky you.” Pondering Northern Italy, visions of umbrella pines, prosecco, and high-heeled ragazze danced before their inner eyes. But they hadn’t undergone the pre-departure ordeal described above. What did they know about eyebolts, prevaricating landlords, threadbare mattresses, or white-noise machines that, every ninety seconds, sound the last trump?

Readers of these pages will know that, at Priceton.org, we reject the model of the contemporary “blog”. We recognize, that is, that the quotidian trivialities of a trivial life will be of interest only to those few whose lives are even more trivial than that of the blogger. Accordingly, we don’t tell you what we ate for breakfast, how we are faring on our New Year’s pledge to reduce our daily intake of candy-cane lattes, or the salacious details of the conversation we just had with the friend we happened to run into at the Botox salon.

In what follows, we will recount, as faithfully as our senescent memory allows, the (sometimes daily) misadventures, agonies, and ecstasies of our recent trip through Northern Italy: a “blog” of sorts, but with a difference. First of all, our trivialities will be of interest to anyone who has ever undergone the dispiriting ordeal of modern travel—anyone who has been squeezed into the Procrustean bed of economy class, sucked into the Charybdis of a European roundabout, or seduced by the Siren-song of hotel advertising (“Come hither to our B&B; enjoy its quiet; recreate amidst the bucolic splendours of ancient olive groves…”).

The travelogue is, after all, the archetype of the contemporary “web-log”, and unlike its internet offspring retains some of the authentic power it has had in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Bunyan, and Swift: as an allegory, that is, of the soul’s inner struggle against temptation, hardship, and despair, whilst prosecuting its quest for safe harbor in heaven.

For a European tourist, as for a pilgrim on the highway of life, it is hard to achieve the Beatific Vision; one can be certain, nonetheless, that the inebriating beauties of the churches of Verona, the palaces of Vicenza, and the Barolos of the Piedmont, are a rather more proximate earthly type of it than any candy-cane latte.

 

It is an intractable paradox that, the more advanced technologies become–the more comfortable and affluent the human population–, the more miserable is the lot of man. I can think of no more pathetic image of human servitude than that of the hordes of young men and women who obstruct our sidewalks, their heads bent downward, their eyes fixed on the screens of their mobile devices, and their senses completely benumbed to the ambient beauties of nature or the comforting society of their fellows. In classical antiquity, there was a standing–perhaps we should say falling–joke about Socrates, his head stuck in the clouds, going topsy-turvy into the marle-pit. Today, our young philosophers, their heads in the marle-pits of simulated reality, careen off one another like billiard balls, trip over curbs, and step out into traffic, all in order to “stay connected” with the Narcissistic banalities they have recently posted on their Facebook pages.

Homo, wrote Ovid (rehearsing an already ancient topos) was created Erectus, so that he might better be able to fix his eyes and attention upon the invisibilia Dei in the celestial region of his soul’s birth. Mobile Device Man is a kind of Homo Dejectus. His posture is that of Boethius before his cure, who “forever stares downward at the dull earth”, as Lady Philosophy describes him, a pose that is the traditional moral emblem of the worldly and un-philosophical spirit.

We saw too many of these self-absorbed worldlings during our trip to Northern Italy, walking past ancient olive groves or Palladian palaces, texting, sexting, or taking selfies. But I have gotten too far ahead of myself, and quite distracted from the main point, which is the difficulty of modern travel, in spite of the miracle of jet propulsion, or the democratization of the erstwhile privileges of the wealthy.

 

The depressing reality is that the luxuries of travel are rather less accessible to those of modest means than they once were. Members of my generation can still remember boarding airplanes in the late sixties without having to wait for hours in serpentine lines whose eventual destination promised only the indignities of removing one’s belt and shoes, seats with room for no more than infant appendages, and food served in Styrofoam containers that tastes like, well, Styrofoam. Any traveler who aspires to the level of comfort and service passengers once took for granted in economy class would need a first class ticket today.

In the early seventies, moreover, the publishers of travel guides were still putting out titles such as “Paris on Twenty Dollars a Day”, for which one could in fact expect a decent, if unpretentious hotel on the Left Bank, and three satisfying meals washed down with some perfectly drinkable plonk. Adjusted for inflation, twenty 1970s-era dollars translate to about one hundred twenty today, for which one can expect a backpackers’ hostel in the Parisian suburbs and a petit dejeuner at McDonald’s.

Having been to Rome a few years ago and finding ourselves solvent again, we decided that we would spend a month and a few days in Northern Italy, visiting Milan, Pavia, Bologna, Ravenna, Ferrara, Mantova, Vicenza, Padova, and Verona. But unless you are as rich as the proverbial Croesus, a vacation in Europe in the year 2014 can leave one in desperate need, not only of an unlooked for legacy, but of a post-vacation vacation.

There is, first of all, the exhausting preparatory labour that modern travel entails: the search for an affordable flight; the search for an affordable rental car; the search for accommodations on agriturismo.it, bnb.com, sabbaticalhomes.com, vrbo.com, and the innumerable other dot-coms that offer relatively inexpensive studio apartments in town, or bed-and-breakfasts in the countryside.

Finding the right place to stay, as we have learned from long experience, is the sine qua non of a survivable trip. It is heavenly to commune all day with the incomparable glories of quattrocentro painting, sculpture, and architecture, and hellish to be kept awake all night by noise, creeping damp, and bed-springs protruding through the threadbare coverings of ancient mattresses. To forestall such tortures requires real vigilance. It means beginning one’s search months in advance; meticulously scrutinizing the photos posted on websites (including trying to imagine what lies beyond the borders of the frame); looking carefully at maps to ascertain if the apartment really is only (the universally advertised) “ten minutes’ walk” from the centro istorico. It means sending emails expressing interest, and waiting days or weeks for a response. It means finding the perfect place only to discover that it is already booked for the period. It means calling the 800 number on the rental car website to ask someone in Bombay to confirm that the car you will be picking up in Milan from a rental agency headquartered in Texas does indeed come fully insured, with no deductible, and all taxes paid. It means, above all, tracking down hosts by telephone, and asking futile questions (to which the answers are monotonously cheery): does the apartment have heat? (of course); air conditioning? (assolumente); shutters on the windows? (new ones just fitted); are the neighbours in the building quiet? (neighbours? what neighbours?); any construction going on in the building? (completely renovated just last year); affordable parking nearby? (just around the corner).

Of course, these are all lies, and one knows that they are lies, but tries to reassure himself that his host isn’t lying outrageously. If he is told that parking is available around the corner, the prudent traveler assumes he can count on finding a place, after some assiduous searching, somewhere within a six-block radius; if parking is said to cost fifteen euros per day, he budgets for thirty.

 

One can drive oneself mad trying to obviate all of the possibilities for disaster, and we did. It is not only that a traveler can never guess the true limit of his host’s mendacity, even if he is being generous (generous in his estimate of advertising hyperbole, ungenerous in his appraisal of the human character); there is, besides, the nagging awareness that what will inevitably go wrong is something he didn’t think to ask about. Two weeks before our departure, an inalienable sense of foreboding thus began to settle over me. I felt myself looking forward to Northern Italy as I looked forward to my next bout of diverticulitis.