To Russia With Love

I was born in the middle of the 1950s and grew up during the Cold War as Washington and Moscow prepared enthusiastically for wiping each other of the face of the earth.  We lived in fear of the day of nuclear Armageddon when all life on earth could be wiped out by the careless press of a big red button that said “do not press” and as a result of this permanently tense state of international relations the school atlas had a very different map of Europe to how it looks today.

This was because there weren’t nearly so many countries to show.  Everything east of Poland was included in the USSR which subsumed everything within it and nearby so there was no Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania; The Czech Republicand Slovakia was one nation state and on the Adriatic there was a single country called Yugoslavia.  Behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ in central Europe Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany were all part of the Warsaw Pact and all of these countries were practically off limits to travellers from the west and in terms of holidays there people may just as well have made plans to visit the moon.

Well, since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 all of this has changed of course and as the USSR has lost its unwelcome influence in eastern Europe, has been dismantled by reformists from within and occupied territories have been restored to independence then more and more holiday opportunities have presented themselves.

Since 2005 I have been fortunate to visit places I would never have imagined possible when I was a young boy – places that didn’t even exist then – Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro and, the one with the name that always intrigued me the most, Bosnia-Herzegovina; places where travellers weren’t especially welcome, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland; and now the place that seemed forever unlikely and impossible of all to visit – Russia itself.

I suppose this was always inevitable because Saint-Petersburg and Moscow were always high on my ‘must visit’ list and at last I have fulfilled an ambition to visit the country of Cossacks and Tsars, Vodka and Caviar, Tolstoy and Pushkin, Fabergé Eggs and Matryoshka dolls.

I flirted with the idea of travelling independently but all the advice was that this can be difficult because of the language and the bureaucracy, travel and hotel arrangements and paperwork and visas so eventually we decided to take a Travelsphere escorted tour which included three days and nights in Saint-Petersburg, an overnight train journey and three days and nights in Moscow.

Holiday booked, the next job was to apply for a visa to visit the country and this came with an unexpected cost – an eye-watering, knee buckling, throat gagging £137 each!  Never mind, I thought once you’ve got it that’s it, but no, how wrong could I be because for £137 each the visa is only valid for this one single entry!  Mind you for £137 the Russian Embassy does make you work quite hard and there is ten page on-line application form to complete with lots of questions about parents, education, work, travel, politics, convictions, military service, bomb making skills and movie preferences with a section on how many James Bond films we had seen!  I managed to fill all of this in correctly and within a few days of application we had passports with the appropriate approvals to visit the country.

The next requirement was cash and I quickly learned that there are strict controls on money changing as well and it isn’t like getting a few Euros to go to Greece or Spain because there is a limit on how much anyone can buy in the UK and the exchange rate is awful!  According to the most popular version, the word rouble is derived from the Russian verb руби́ть (rubit’), meaning to chop and historically a rouble was a piece of a certain weight chopped off a gold or silver ingot.  Well, I ordered what I could (£100) but I didn’t get precious metal hacked off a gold bar but just a few disappointing scruffy banknotes when, and I don’t know why, I was expecting something more exciting.

With tickets, passports, visas and cash all taken care of we left for Saint-Petersburg on an early morning flight from London Heathrow looking forward to being in this previously forbidden place in less than four hours time.

 

Padova, More Sightseeing and Shopping

A narrow graffitied lane led from Piazza del Doumo to Piazza Della Erbe where to my horror there were even more market stalls but this was principally a food market with all manner of colourful items on display and I was particularly captivated by the fungi – especially coming from a country where we only eat about four different varieties of equally tasteless mushrooms and think that chestnuts are especially adventurous – because the woodland produce on display here was colourful, pungent, mysterious, dangerous, misshapen and a whole lot more interesting than our ubiquitous tasteless varieties.

While most of our company were immediately sucked back into the clothing stalls by some sort of invisible tractor beam some of us choose instead to visit the medieval market hall, the Palazzo Della Ragioni, which is a huge building that separates the two sections of the daily market.  At ground level there are more food stall, butchers, bakers, fishmongers and purveyors of dairy produce and the assault on the senses from the competing cacophony of sights and smells was wonderful, eye-opening and stimulating.

It was here that I decided that the next time I visit Italy, or France or Spain or anywhere else for that matter, I will find some self catering accommodation so that I can enjoy shopping in places like this, selecting the ingredients for myself, cooking simple food and eating and enjoying my own interpretation of local recipes.

It was with some difficulty that we located the entrance to the upper floors but after circumnavigating the building we found the steps and paid the modest entrance fee.  The two-story loggia-lined “Palace of Reason” is topped with a distinctive sloped wooden roof that resembles the inverted hull of a ship and is the largest of its kind in the world. It was built in 1219 as the seat of the Parliament of Padua and was used as an assembly hall, courthouse, and administrative centre to celebrate Padua’s independence as a republican city.

The magnificent hall is eighty-one metres long and is considered to be a masterpiece of civil medieval architecture and today is a must-visit site for both its floor-to-ceiling fifteenth century frescoes that are similar in style and astrological theme to those that had been painted by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel (which we hadn’t yet seen) and a wooden sculpture of a horse attributed to Donatello which is massive but dwarfed by the interior scale of the building.

Walking around this place in complete dumb-struck awe it was right now at this exact moment that I was really glad that we had decided to spend the day in Padova.

Actually, a day spent in Padova was going to be nearly enough to see everything that we would have liked to have seen and I began to consider the possibility of an early return.

Leaving the markets we now walked in the shadows of medieval and renaissance buildings south along Via Roma and heading towards Prato Della Valle, which is claimed to be the biggest (or at least the second biggest) of its type in Europe but I cannot confirm this because we didn’t quite make it (another reason to go back) because legs were beginning to ache, blisters were chafing, feet were getting sore and grumbles were spreading like Japanese knotweed so we diverted off towards the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua and found it in an open square with Donatello’s magnificent 1453 bronze equestrian statue of the fifteenth century Venetian soldier and general Erasmo of Narni.

The majority vote now was for a coffee break but there was still too much to see so I left the others at a pavement café table and went to visit the Basilica with its frescos and domes but what interested me most of all were the invitations to send St Anthony a message and ask for help.  I think this meant mostly physical or emotional problems so it was no real use asking for next week’s winning lottery numbers or getting a recommendation for lunch which is what we were thinking about next and after the drinks break in the sun we wandered off back to the city centre in search of food.

This was exactly the point at which plans started to unravel because we arrived back in the main squares to find that there was a restaurant conspiracy to close at three o’clock so we tried unsuccessfully to get some food and then had to admit defeat and go to a pavement café selling sandwiches and crepes. Personally I didn’t care for this so I declared my intention to leave everyone here and meet up later and go back to my original itinerary of cathedrals, art and museums and left them rearranging chairs and tables by the roadside before ordering food and drinks.

The situation didn’t improve.  The basilica was still closed – on a Sunday!  I moved on back towards the hotel and the station and the Scrovegni Chapel and the Giotti frescos but as it turned out these are so famous that there is real difficulty getting in to see them and the next available booking was at half past seven by which time we needed to be checking in at Treviso airport for the flight home.  My congested afternoon schedule was suddenly no longer so congested so I admitted defeat and we went for late lunch in a pizzeria near the railway station before meeting back up with the others, collecting our bags and making our way back to the bus station and the airport.

Padova is a wonderful city, we had missed so much but that is not a problem because one of the first things that I did upon getting home was to book some more flights to return there as soon as we could to see the things that we had missed.

Padova, Sightseeing and Shopping

““Do you like that?” I’ll say in surprise since it doesn’t seem like her type of thing, and she’ll look at me as if I’m mad.  That!?” She’ll say, “No, it’s hideous” “Then why on earth,” I always want to say, “did you walk all the way over there to touch it?”  but of course…I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say…  it doesn’t pay, so I say nothing.”  Bill Bryson – ‘Notes From a Small Island’

There were some decisions to be made over breakfast today because this was our last day but it would be a full one because our Ryanair flight home wasn’t until late this evening.  We could return to Venice but although there was more to see we had filled two days there already, we could go to nearby Vicenza, or we could stay in Padova.  As we were lodging in Padova it seemed rude not to visit, lots of tourists bypass the city in the rush to Venice so we all agreed that we would spend the day here in the Shakespearian setting of the Taming of the Shrew.

Checking out was a chore – I have never understood why it takes some hotels so long to produce the bill – It was pre-booked with an agreed rate, we stayed the number of nights that we contracted to and we didn’t have anything from the mini-bar – simple, so irritating therefore that it took a prolonged head-scratching fifteen minutes, endless staring at the computer screen and three attempts to get it right, it was a good job that we weren’t in a rush!

It was a glorious October morning, bright sunshine but with a dainty autumnal crispness to the air and we made our way towards the city stopping first at the site of the ancient Roman amphitheatre where just a few walls now remain, having been demolished long ago as a convenient source of recycled building materials.

Next to this is the Scrovegni Chapel which, on account of the Giotti frescos inside is reckoned to be the main visitor highlight of the city.  I have seen it described as one of the most important artistic works of its kind; it takes your breath away, it makes grown men weep, it makes your knees buckle, it deprives you of the power of speech – but sadly none of my travelling companions had any desire to queue and wait to see it so I agreed to bypass this artistic treasure but thought that I might come back later by myself.

This reminded me of a visit that I made to Paris in 1990.  I went with a group of work colleagues, we had just lost our jobs in local government through compulsory competitive tendering and were going our separate ways and decided on something special to mark the occasion.  Whilst there we visited the Louvre museum and like everyone else went to see Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa.  My friend Martin spent a few seconds gazing at what is possibly the world’s most famous masterpiece and then declared, “It’s ok but I wouldn’t want it hanging in my front room!”

So we carried on into the familiar sounding Corso Garibaldi and came across the inevitable statue of the hero of Italian unification.  After the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 the state worked hard at making sure Garibaldi would be remembered and the number of streets, piazzas and statues named after him makes him probably the most commemorated secular figure in history.

Such was the romance of his story that Garibaldi was at one point possibly the most famous man in Europe.  In London in 1864 people flocked to see him as he got off the train. The crowds were so immense it took him six hours to travel three miles through the streets. The whole country shut down for three days while he met the great and the good.  Literary figures including the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott lauded him as the “Italian lion” and “the noblest Roman of them all“.  The English historian A.J.P. Taylor made the assessment that “Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.”

Although my friends don’t care too much for art, archaeology or history they do like shopping so they were collectively delighted when we arrived at Piazza della Frutta which is a heaving daily market with literally hundreds of stalls selling everything and anything that anyone could possibly want but do not need.  Momentarily overcome by the shopping opportunities presented here we stopped for a while at a pavement café to catch our breath and to plan the inevitable assault on the merchandise.

I am sure that I have mentioned this before (most likely several times) but I am not a keen fan of shopping especially of the browsing variety so the prospect of time wasted pushing through a market looking at things I had no intention ever of buying didn’t especially thrill me so whilst the others dawdled through the crowded lanes of the market picking over the merchandise and making the occasional unnecessary purchase I moved on to admire the buildings and the architecture which is something that I prefer to do.

 

Adjacent to Piazza della Frutta is Piazza dei Signori where there were more market stalls but also wonderful buildings soaring up into the perfect sky and then Piazza del Doumo with thankfully no market stalls and in contrast peaceful and serene with pavement cafés and bars and old meandering lanes and alleys probing through the old Jewish ghetto area but sadly no entrance to the basilica because it was closed for lunch – what happens if I need a Priest in an emergency I wondered, what if I have some sins to urgently confess? Anyway, I thought that I might come back later and the plans for the end of my day were becoming suddenly quite seriously congested.

 

Venice, Carnival Masks and the Cathedral

“What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is! Narrow streets, vast, gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries, and all partly submerged; no dry land visible anywhere, and no sidewalks worth mentioning…”                                                                                                                              Mark Twain

There was a strange calmness about the back streets which was in complete contrast to the busy main thoroughfares and here and there we came across traditional artisans shops selling glass or paper and every now and then a costumier and carnival mask maker.

Masks have always been a main feature of the Venetian carnival when traditionally people were allowed to wear them between the festival of Santo Stefano on December 26th and the start of the carnival season and midnight of Shrove Tuesday and because they were so important mask makers enjoyed a special position in society, with their own laws and their own guild.  In the tourist areas shops sell mass produced merchandise and don’t take kindly to people taking photographs or touching but the genuine traditional craftsmen were more obliging.

In one a mascherari (as the mask makers are called) broke off from delicately decorating a papier mache mask at his workbench and selected a mask and a gown and fussily dressed Kim as though in preparation for going to the ball.  She certainly looked more elegant and authentic than I did in my straw gondolier’s boater!

We crossed bridges and watched the gondolas gliding serenely below us while the tourists on-board gawped open-mouthed and wide-eyed  just like us an hour or so before as they fulfilled an ambition to take a boat through the ancient waterways of Venice and marvel at the palaces and houses of the Venetian aristocracy.

“Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur.”                    Jan Morris – ‘Venice’

One of the wonderful things about Venice however is that next to the grand mansions with their ornate exteriors there are tiny streets of working class houses with flaking plaster and rotting timber and washing lines strung across the streets with faded linen and old clothes betraying bedroom and lingerie secrets to everyone that passes by.  In these strangely silent back-streets where whispers echo from the corners and recesses I was reminded again of the Shakespeare connection because here it was easy to imagine Shylock negotiating loans with the rich merchants of Venetian commerce, the noble Othello and captivating Desdemona, and the plotting Iago and Roderigo.

As best we could we kept to these old back streets and narrow service canals as we threaded our way back towards St Mark’s Square because today we planned to visit the famous Basilica and soon we slipped out of the permanent shadow of the lanes and into the harsh sunlight of the Piazza with its geometric patterns of Istrian stone and the tables and chairs of the famous cafés, Quadri and Florian set out, alongside others, with neat precision all around the perimeter where those who could afford it sat with an expensive coffee or hot chocolate and listened to the elegant music of the famous orchestras.

You won’t be stunned to hear that the prices were beyond our skinflint budget so we listened to the music and dodged the waiters and then joined the short queue of people lining up to visit the interior of the Byzantine Cathedral.  In contrast to the bright sunshine it was dark inside and we took the wrong turning and found ourselves in the paying part which was a combination of museum and external galleries and although the museum was interesting we liked the balcony best with its dramatic views of the square and marble benches to sit in the sunshine and watch the activity below.  Also here are the famous four bronze horses which appear to be galloping into the oblivion of a long fall but these are replicas of course because the originals are now safely inside the museum where they can be more carefully preserved.

Before leaving we passed through the interior of the Basilica with its eight thousand square metres of mosaics made of gold, bronze and precious stones, its marble floor, stone pillars and soaring dome and then we emerged back into the sunlight to plot a route back to the train station.  Although we heading towards the Rialto again there are so many lanes and alleys that it was not difficult to find an alternative route to any that we had used before although on a couple of occasions my route strayed perilously close to busy shopping streets.  This required all my skill and experience to avoid the shops and on one more than one occasion needing a last moment manoeuver with a clever body swerve rather like Christiano Ronaldo avoiding a lunging full back’s late tackle.

It wasn’t all plain sailing though and once across the Rialto we walked through Dan Polo and Santa Croce on a route that kept us to the rear of the palaces on the Grand Canal and right at the last moment when we reached the Ponti Delgli Scalzi while the others stopped for a final drink I dropped my guard and was abducted by Kim and led back to where we had started this morning to find a shop that she had remembered all day and where we found the souvenir carnival mask that now hangs on our wall at home and whose eyes follow me around the room with an accusing glare as though it knows that I didn’t really want to buy it!

And so we left Venice, for this time at least, because I wouldn’t like to think that this would be my last ever visit:

“Underneath Day’s azure eyes                                                                                        Ocean’s nurstling, Venice lies,                                                                                                      A peopled labyrinth of walls,                                                                                 Amphitrite’s destined halls”                                                                                                  Percy Bysshe Shelley

Venice, A Gondola Ride through the Canals

“The Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as a serpent. It is twenty or thirty feet long and is narrow and deep like a canoe; its sharp bow and stern sweep upward from the water like the horns of a crescent…. The bow is ornamented with a battle axe attachment that threatens to cut passing boats in two.”                                                                                                 Mark Twain – ‘The Innocents Abroad’

Today we were returning to Venice with the main objective being to take a gondola ride so after breakfast we made our way to the railway station for a second train ride to the city and after arriving there plotted a walking course around the northern loop of the Grand Canal in the general direction of Ponte Di Rialto.

The plan was to choose a gondola in San Marco but after a while the girls became impatient and spotting a handsome gondolier in his trademark black and white hooped shirt and straw hat with dangling red silk ribbons and after some sales talk and a little negotiation we had agreed to take the ride earlier than originally planned.

At €80 for forty minutes it was still ridiculously expensive of course but it was something that had to be done, there were six of us to share the fare and to be fair to the gondoliers, they invest a great deal in their boats, about €20,000 for a traditional hand-built wooden gondola with a life expectancy of about twenty years. They need to earn the bulk of their annual income in a few short tourist months and the cost of living is high in Venice because it is an expensive city in one of Italy’s wealthiest provinces.

The handsome gondolier in the black and white hooped shirt and straw hat with dangling red silk ribbons then passed us on to a colleague who was not so handsome, wore a black fleece and didn’t have a straw hat with dangling red silk ribbons and the man who had done the deal went about finding more gullible customers.

The substitute gondolier led us to a sleek and lovingly varnished black boat (actually like a Ford Model T they are all black) with elaborate paintings on the interior and black velvet seats with crimson brocade and after we had settled into our seats we set off into the labyrinth of tiny canals slipping quietly through the water, boring into the network of waterways as he expertly paddled his way through the pea green water, barely wrinkling the surface as we slipped through.

Rather like a London taxi driver not just anyone can become a gondolier and the profession is controlled by a guild which issues a limited number of licenses granted after a long period of training and apprenticeship and a comprehensive exam which tests knowledge of Venetian history and landmarks, foreign language skills as well as the practical skills of handling the gondola necessary in the tight spaces of Venetian canals.

To quote Mark Twain again: “I am afraid that I study the gondolier’s marvelous skill more than I do the sculptured palaces we glide among” and I like to think that I understood that as our gondolier navigated tight corners and narrow bridges, slipping past brick walls within barely a hairs-breadth (which in a collision could strip the varnish down to the wood), skilfully avoiding other boats and never making a mistake as he rocked the paddle back and forth and from side to side in its intricate wooden cradle.  The oar or rèmo is held in an oar lock known as a fórcola which is the most critical component of the boat with a complicated shape allowing several positions of the oar for slow forward rowing, powerful forward rowing, turning, slowing down, rowing backwards, and stopping.

Our friendly guide took us first through some narrow back canals heading for the Grand Canal that without pavements or people were curiously quiet as we passed by the back doors and water garages of mansions, shops and restaurants where supplies were being delivered and rubbish removed but the main canals were busier, lined with cafés and restaurants and with crowds of people crossing the narrow bridges every few metres or so.

At water level there was a completely different perspective to the buildings and down here we could see the exposed brickwork and the crumbling pastel coloured stucco, sun blistered and frost picked and giving in to the constant assault of the waters of the lagoon as it gnaws and gouges its relentless way into the fabric of the buildings.

Our boat was in perfect condition and lovingly cared for from aft to stern.  Gondolas are hand made using eight different types of wood, fir, oak, cherry, walnut, elm, mahogany, larch and lime and are composed of two hundred and eighty pieces. The oars are made of beech wood. The left side of the gondola is made longer than the right side and this asymmetry causes the gondola to resist the tendency to turn toward the left at the forward stroke from the right hand side of the boat.

From the busy Rio di Noale we emerged into the Grand Canal where the gondolier had to have his wits about him as he competed for space with the Vaporetto the motor boat taxis and dozens more gondola each one full of gaping wide eyed tourists admiring the elaborate mansions and palaces that make this Venice’s most exclusive area.

Three bridges cross this arterial waterway that is easy to think of as a river rather than a canal, three kilometres long, a hundred metres wide but only three metres deep, forty-six side canals flow into an out of it like veins and arteries and at least two hundred grand palaces and ten magnificent churches line its banks.  The railway station stands modernistically at one end representing the twentieth century link to the mainland and St. Marks square stands at the other as a bulwark of city conservatism standing proudly and defiantly against progress.

The ride continued past rows of gaily coloured mooring poles and almost to the famous Rialto bridge but we weren’t going that far so we had to make do with only a look before he turned the gondola into the calmer waters of Rio dei Santi Apostoli and we began a new journey into the back canals of Venice which after twenty minutes or so returned us to the bridge where we had started.

Back on the streets we now continued our walk and followed streets and crossed bridges explored alleyways until we came to a small courtyard with a trattoria and pavement tables and so as it was now more or less lunchtime we stopped for a while for Peroni and Pizza.

“And always somewhere on the Grand Canal, drifting pleasantly with the tide, struggling loftily into the lagoon, tossing at a post or protruding its aristocratic beak between a pair of palaces, there stands a high-prowed, lop sides, black painted, brass embellished gondola, the very soul and symbol of Venice.”        Jan Morris – ‘Venice’

Verona, Juliet’s House and the Piazza Signori

Piazza Brà, the central square with its richly decorated houses, immaculate streets and gardens and busy pavement restaurants had a prosperous, self assured atmosphere and we ate our Brek self-service pasta lunch while people rushed by on the adjacent pavement and the sun broke through the thin clouds and filled the Piazza with welcome rays that emphasized the pastel shades of the buildings and the geometry of the bricks and stones of the medieval city wall close by.

When we were finished we left and continued our exploration of the city and headed away from the piazza and the amphitheatre and into the up-market pedestrianised shopping street of Via Giuseppe Mazzini and towards the busy market place of Piazza dei Signori.  On the way we had to take a small detour because we considered it essential that we find and see Juliet’s house in a cobbled courtyard tucked away in a side street.

Supposedly the location of the famous balcony scene from Shakespeare’s love story, Juliet’s house is a popular romantic shrine and tourist honey-trap where lovers leave messages to each other on the walls and attach the dreadful lovelocks to the fences and the railings.  Although the house has become a major destination for tourist pilgrimage the house of course has no connection at all with the bard’s fictional characters and although it is old and looks authentic enough, the balcony was actually added in 1936 and declared to be “Juliet’s house” by the city authorities in a blatant attempt to cash in on the Shakespeare connection and to attract more tourists.

The balcony overlooks a tiny courtyard containing a dainty bronze statue of a graceful Juliet and people were waiting impatiently for their turn to be photographed with the heroine and to touch her right breast which is supposed to bring good fortune but I was worried that public groping was inappropriate and ever so slightly ungentlemanly so I steered clear and elected to do without the good luck boost and on the way out decided not to waste my money on a lottery ticket next weekend.

Juliet’s house was an interesting distraction but now we moved on to something altogether more interesting and stunning, the Piazza die Signori surrounded on all sides by medieval and renaissance palaces and grand buildings rising high and gaily painted, yellow, umber and crimson, with wooden shutters at the windows folded back like butterfly wings basking in the sun and overlooking the busy square and stone statues, the civic heart of medieval Verona and now the most popular and sociable place in the city.

We walked through a street market and admired the magnificent buildings and at this place at this time it was almost possible to believe that what we were seeing would have been very familiar to William Shakespeare if he had in fact visited fair Verona.

From the square we took Via Giuseppe Garibaldi down to the murky waters of the River Adige as it loops its way through the city and followed the river bank for several hundred metres until how way was blocked by the walls of the old fortress and were obliged to return to the streets and completed the trio of roads commemorating the heroes of Italian unification by walking along Corso Cavour to the Ponte Castelvecchio and crossed the river and back again over this restored medieval brick structure.

With the afternoon sliding away we returned to the Piazza Brà along the busy Via Roma and then our footsore way back towards the train station.  I had enjoyed Verona, it was more relaxing than Venice with less tourists and a compact centre and I was sad to watch it slipping away out of sight as the train left the station at the start of the ninety minute journey back to Padova.  I was glad that we had visited the city and was quiet happy to add it to my list of places to which I would gladly return one day.

It was dark by the time we arrived back in Padova and the railway and bus station not being the most salubrious area of the city we purchased some drinks from the station mini-market and arranged to meet in an hour or so to walk into the city.

We walked further tonight and I was glad that we did because we found ourselves in one of the central squares of the city, a market square that was clear of commercial activity now with cafés and bars tucked in below the stone walls, arches, balconies and colonnades of the magnificent old medieval market hall so we selected one that we liked and sat for a while for pre-dinner drinks.

Tucked down a side-street Kim had found an authentic looking trattoria so we agreed that we would dine there.  It was a traditional family run sort of place that reminded me of the restaurant where Michael Corleone assassinated the gangster Salazo and the Chief of Police in the Godfather film.  It had rows of tables, simple furniture, white tablecloths and pictures of old Padova on the walls.

The food and the house wine was excellent and we sat and chatted until it was obvious that after a long day and with no new customers the owners would rather like to lock up and go home so we left and wandered slowly back to the hotel.  It had been a good day and tomorrow we would return to Venice.

Verona, The City and the Amphitheatre

“There is no world without Verona walls                                                                           But purgatory, torture, hell itself                                                                                     Hence banished is banish’d from the world                                                                      And world’s exile is death”                                                                                      Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet

The good thing about travelling to this region of Italy and not staying within the confines of the Venetian Lagoon is that there was the opportunity to go beyond the watery city and see so much more and today our plan was to travel west and visit the ancient and famous city of Verona.

Unfortunately we misinterpreted the train timetable and where we expected to be setting off at about nine-thirty this turned out to be a peak season only service and so we had to wait until eleven o’clock and this meant that we had a hour and a half to spare.  Not wishing to hang about the train station concourse we walked towards the city along a busy ring road and when we had found a quieter back street we slipped into the cobbled streets and headed towards the river.

Coming across a café almost everyone declared it time for coffee, but not being a fan of the bean and too early for Peroni I left them to their mid-morning caffeine fix and walked to the river instead.  Here, built up directly above the banks apartments soared and reflected in the limpid and apparently highly contaminated waters of the Bacchiglione river.  These are the buildings which some claim were the setting for Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’ but they were a bit modern and much later additions to anything Shakespeare might have been aware of  so I don’t think Petruchio or Katherine would have recognised them.  After everyone had satisfied their caffeine craving we move on and returned to the train station to catch the train for the ninety minute journey to Verona.

The Verona railway station is on the south of the city and involves a death defying walk over and around busy roads until we reached the ancient walls and one of the original city gates now sadly marooned on a busy traffic island and standing proudly at the end of an elegant boulevard, the Corso Port Nouva, that leads like an arrow shot straight and true to the heart of the city and we followed this road and arrived in the central Piazza surrounded by cafés and restaurants and with the focal point of the ancient Roman amphitheatre.

The Verona arena is the world’s third-largest amphitheatre to survive from Roman antiquity. The outer ring of white and pink limestone was almost completely destroyed during a major earthquake in 1117 but the inner part is still amazingly well preserved. It was built in 30 AD and could host thirty thousand spectators. The Roman amphitheatre has been used continuously throughout the centuries to host shows and games: gladiator fights during Roman times, jousts and tournaments in the Middle Ages and from the eighteenth century until the present day the arena is the setting for Verona’s spectacular opera performances.

This was our fifth Roman Amphitheatre in only a couple of years after Arles in France, Pula in Croatia, Mérida in Spain and the Coliseum itself in Rome and there is something majestic about them which just fascinates me.  No one can be absolutely sure about which was the largest in terms of capacity and it is generally agreed that this was the Coliseum but we can be more certain about physical size and there was a plaque nearby that claimed that this was the third largest in the Roman Empire.  Interestingly using this criteria the plaque only listed the Coliseum as second largest but it’s like I have always said – size isn’t the most important thing!

Entrance fee paid we went inside and my first impression was one of disappointment, there was an army of labourers dismantling a stage set and tiers of temporary seating and this made it difficult to appreciate the full glory and impact of the structure.  We walked around the corridors and stone steps and made a circuit of the arena but my final assessment was that this amphitheatre was not as good as Arles (my favourite) or the magnificent arena in Pula.

After leaving the amphitheatre we walked for a while around the central square and being close to or just after lunch time we set about selecting a restaurant and decided upon a self-service place called Brek which it turns out is a small chain of eateries in Italy with a budget conscious menu which suited us just fine – it wasn’t a magnificent gourmet experience but we only wanted a beer and a pasta so it worked well for us and we didn’t linger over cognac or coffee because there was an afternoon of foot slogging visitor trail ahead.

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Related Articles:

Spartacus the Gladiator

Rome

The Roman City of Pompeii

The Roman City of Herculaneum

The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula

The Aqueduct of Segovia

The Roman Buildings at Mérida

The Roman Ruins at Segóbriga

Diocletian’s Palace at Split

The Roman Buildings at Arles

Verona

The Greek and Roman Ruins at Empuria, Catalonia

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Venice, San Marco, Tourists, Reflections, Floods and Pigeons

“Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.”
Henry James

From the Rialto we took as direct a path as we could determine in the direction of St Mark’s Square, a route which took us through more twisting alleyways and distracting shopping streets that were become incrementally more expensive as we got closer to the famous piazza and then suddenly we were out of the tangled web of alleys and joined thousands of others in admiration of the unmistakable square.

Napoleon Bonaparte may or may not have called the Piazza San Marco “the finest drawing room in Europe” but whether he did or he didn’t it is indeed one of the finest squares in all of Europe.  San Marco is the principal public square of Venice where it is generally known just as ‘the Piazza’.  All other urban spaces in the city (except the Piazzetta) are called ‘campi’ (fields).  The Piazzetta (the ‘little Piazza‘) is an extension of the Piazza towards the lagoon in its south east corner and the two spaces together form the social, religious and political centre of the city.

All visitors to Venice are drawn at some point to San Marco where they compete with thousands of pigeons to find a seat or a column or a piece of pavement stone to sit and rest and admire the magnificence of the place.  Something however was different about the place from my previous visits and it took me a while to work this out – it was the absence of people snacking on the steps and the pavements because there is now a new law that makes this an offence and is punishable by a hefty fine.

This is part of an attempt to stop twenty million visitors or so feeding the estimated 140,000 pigeons which have made the Piazza their home and who are increasingly responsible for damage to the buildings by continuously pecking the marble façades in search of calcium.  I cannot begin to imagine how they worked this out but it is estimated that it costs €23 a pigeon a year in clean up costs so tourists are no longer allowed to buy birdseed from street vendors who have themselves been chased  off the square.

Venice is one of the modern wonders of the World, existing in the twilight zone between reality and fairy-tale, somewhere between an EPCOT Disney interpretation and a living museum. The Piazza is dominated at its eastern end by the great church of St Mark where the whole of the towering west façade with its great arches and marble decoration, the Romanesque carvings round the central doorway and, above all, the four bronze horses which preside over the whole piazza as potent symbols of the pride and power of Venice – such a symbol of pride and power that Napoleon, after he had conquered Venice, had them taken down and shipped all the way back to Paris.

Next door in the Piazzetta is the Doge’s Palace with Gothic arcades at ground level and an elaborate loggia on the floor above and a long queue of people waiting for their turn at the ticket office and opposite the Palace, standing free in the Piazza, is the red brick Campanile of St Mark’s church constructed in 1173, last restored in 1514 and faithfully rebuilt in 1912 after a total collapse in 1902.

Apparently Venetians woke up one morning to a pile of rubble where they were used to seeing the tower and we hoped that history wouldn’t repeat itself today because we took the lift to the top and were rewarded with stunning views over all of the city and the islands of the lagoon.  what was surprising however that from this elevation we couldn’t see a canal as the red roofs of the palaces crowded in and disguised the watery highways completely from view as though we were suddenly in Pisa or Siena.

Back at ground level we had to watch where we were walking now because parts of the Piazza were under water as the sea water made its way through the drainage system below the paving slabs and was spreading in puddles around people’s feet.  Due to a number of complicated environmental reasons Venice is slowly sinking and at various times is prone to serious flooding and for this reason the doors of all of the shops and cafés around the square are protected by water boards which are quickly put in place when a flood is imminent.

This is called the Acqua Alta, the ‘high water’, from storm surges from the Adriatic or heavy rain and the place is quick to flood. Water pouring into the drains in the Piazza runs directly into the Grand Canal and this normally works well but, when the sea is high, it has the reverse effect, with water from the lagoon surging up into the square.  The most dramatic floods are recorded on the brickwork of the Campanile and it was a bit disconcerting that some of the high water marks were above our heads.

Actually we were lucky because a couple of weeks after our visit there were a few days of continuous rain which resulted in waist high floods in St Marks Square which would have spoilt the visit for sure.

I like Venice and I adore St Mark’s Square but during the day it is too busy to be enjoyable as visitors push and shove, long queues snake around the buildings and the pigeons swoop and pester in competition for the dwindling supplies of food.  It is estimated that on an average day sixty-thousand people visit Venice and this doubles the population.  Venetians consider this to be too many and especially resent the people from the cruise ships who come ashore, take a few pictures and then return to the ship without spending any money.

So without staying too long we passed through the Piazzetta and down to the banks of the Canale di San Marco and moved away from the crowds and the flocks of culture vultures from the cruise ships to where gondolas were tied to their mooring poles and bobbing madly in the water as the boats and Vaporetti passed by and each one created a swell that disturbed the surface of the lagoon and then we walked east towards the quieter district of Castello.

Venice, Piazzas, Palazzos and Padlocks

“To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.”                                                                                                                                 Alexander Herzen

The Hotel Grand Italia provided a splendid breakfast and after we had had several plates of excellent food we gathered together at the reception desk and when we were all accounted for we made our way to the railway station.

Padova Stazione is one of those grand public buildings that are a legacy of the fascist era in Italy and Mussolini’s principal architect Angiolo Mazzoni Del Grande.  His public buildings are iconic features of twentieth century Italy and they have an impressive functional design and layout that makes them a pleasing monument to an otherwise unpleasant era of Italian and European history.

The fare was reasonable and the short journey took about forty minutes and at half past ten the train pulled in to Venice Santa Lucia Stazione  and we stepped outside the passenger terminal to look across the Grand Canal to a city that on the surface seems more to resemble a theme park than an important regional capital because looks deceive and Venice is a city equally famous for  both tourism and for industry, and is the capital of the region Veneto.

The name is derived from the ancient tribe of Veneti that inhabited the region in Roman times. The city historically was the capital of a powerful and successful sea-born independent city-state. Venice has been known as the “La Dominante”, “Serenissima”, “Queen of the Adriatic”, “City of Water”, “City of Masks”, “City of Bridges”, “The Floating City”, and “City of Canals”.  It stretches across one hundred and seventeen small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon along the Adriatic Sea and the saltwater lagoon stretches along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po (south) and the Piave (north) Rivers.

The plan was to take a Vaporetti, which is a sort of public transport water bus, along the Grand Canal to St. Marks Square but inflation seems to have had an impact on the fares and at €7 each for a ticket that was only valid for an hour this seemed rather expensive to me even if it is a good way to see the Grand Canal so rather than fork out for a boat ride we decided to walk instead and crossed the Ponte Degli Scazi and slipped into the labyrinth of narrow alleys of the district of Santa Croce and followed signs for the Rialto.

As we walked through the narrow streets and small piazzas, each one similar but every one different, I was reminded again of the Shakespeare connection because it occurred to me that almost any campo here would serve as a backdrop for a Elizabethan street scene, any palazzo interior a setting for witty or romantic dialogue because there is possibly no other city in Europe so little changed since Shakespeare’s day.  The Rialto Bridge may then have been made of wood but the Erberia and Pesceria markets, dating from 1097, continue to supply the city with fresh produce and a view from any of the bell towers across the canals and the lagoon must look the same as what Shakespeare would have seen – had he ever been here of course!

We didn’t have any sort of structured plan so we just ambled through the streets, at one point getting in the way of a film crew and Nigella Lawson recording an episode for her TV series on Italian cooking and then passing through alleyways and around surprising corners, wandering through San Polo with its pastel coloured apartments until we came close to the Rialto and stopped for mid morning coffee in a back street café serving biscuits and cakes and smelling delightfully of roasting coffee beans.  Everyone ordered their favourite but I don’t really like coffee so I had a Peroni beer instead!

The Rialto is the mercantile hub of the city and although the market traders were now packing away and disappearing for the day there was still a atmosphere of frenzied commercial activity as we pushed our way through the busy streets and out once more onto the Grand Canal, carving its way in a regal curve through a parade of palaces and  where the water was alarmingly high and lapping over the stones which should have marked the boundary between pavement and water but were now sunken as one simply merged into the other as the water leaked without hindrance onto the footway.

The medieval Rialto Bridge links San Polo with San Marco and together with hundreds of others we made the crossing through the unlikely parade of shops and the railings covered in love lock padlock graffiti which seems to have become an irritating epidemic all across Europe.  This is a lover’s plague where by signing and locking the padlock and throwing the key into the river they become eternally bonded.  Now, this is an action where I would recommend extreme caution because it sounds dangerously impulsive to me; I think I would further recommend taking the precaution of keeping a spare somewhere in case I needed to release myself later.

This might sound all rather lovely but apparently all of these love tokens do lots of damage to the bridge because as they age and rust this spreads to the ironwork and thousands of padlocks need to be removed every year and which the city authorities consider to be an act of vandalism.

To anyone who thinks this is mean spirited please bear in mind that in June 2014 the ‘Pond des Arts’ in Paris across the River Seine collapsed under the weight of these padlock monstrosities and had to be temporarily closed.  They are not just unsightly – they are dangerous!

To deter people there is a €3,000 penalty and up to a year in prison for those caught doing it and that is a much, much higher price than I would be prepared to pay for eternal bondage!

Actually, it may be that there is some truth in this tale about commitment and everlasting love because according to ‘Eurostat’ even though the divorce rate has doubled recently Italy still has one of the lowest rates in the European Union. Sweden has the highest and although I don’t know this for a fact I am willing to bet that across all of Europe the Vatican State probably has the absolute lowest!

‘This is most apparent on the Pont des Arts, which has been terribly degraded, both visually and structurally.   In a few short years, the heart of Paris has been made ugly, robbing Parisians of quality of life and the ability to safely enjoy their own public spaces along the Seine, which has itself been polluted by thousands of discarded keys…. The time has come to enact a ban on ‘love locks’ in order to return our bridges to their original beauty and purpose.’          Petition Against Love Locks, Paris.

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Other posts about Italian Fascist architecture:

Fascist architecture and the rebuilding of Kos

The Post Office at Pula, Croatia

Palermo, Sicily

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In the Footsteps of William Shakespeare?

“Ever a shadow, he disappears, all but utterly, from 1585 to 1592….There is not a more tempting void in literary history, nor more eager hands to fill it”           Bill Bryson on Shakespeare.

It is an interesting fact that thirteen of the thirty-seven plays of William Shakespeare were set either completely or partly in Italy and if we rule out the ten English history plays (which naturally have to be set in England) then half of the remainder of the major works are set in the Italian states and no one knows for sure just why.

Those who question Shakespeare’s authorship make the point that he sets his plays in Venice, Milan and Florence not Warwick, Oxford and York and they just may have a point!

The plays in which some or all of the action is set in Italy are: All’s Well that Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter’s Tale.

This curious fact has led to a lot of conjecture and academic debate about whether or not the Warwickshire playwright may actually have spent some time in Italy and whether this explains the Italianate settings.  The most extreme theory, by the Sicilian professor Martino Iuvara (2002), is that Shakespeare was actually a Sicilian born in Messina as Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza but the evidence is desperately flimsy and serious academics dismiss this has completely unlikely.

The obstinate bastions of Shakespeare orthodoxy refuse to consider these alternative theories and in my (humble) opinion they are probably right but let’s not forget however that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust got the matter of Mary Arden’s house hopelessly wrong and for years showed visitors around the wrong property and managed to tell a very convincing story at the same time!

Having got that so catastrophically incorrect  what store can be placed on their explanation that: “Italian literature was so widely read in the society in which Shakespeare lived that it would be surprising if he did not have knowledge of the Italian language”.  The pace of speculation has continued to increase and most recently the Venetian TV historian Francesco da Mosto has waded into the debate with some wild and unproven theories about the travels of the bard.  “Shakespeare,” Francesco claimed, “managed to capture the essence of us Italians — how we speak, how we behave, how we love.”

One reason why there is this speculation and debate is that for seven years from 1585 to 1592 Shakespeare simply disappeared and no historian or biographer can offer a really credible explanation about where he might have been.

So there does therefore remain a possibility that he was in fact on a grand tour of Italy but the truth is that unless some previously undiscovered piece of compelling evidence comes to light then we will just never know and after four hundred years this is becoming less and less likely.  The most probable explanation is in fact that lots of the plays have an Italian setting because Shakespeare adapted a lot of existing stories and used Italian literature as one of his primary sources for plays like ‘Taming of the Shrew’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ so, when we spent a few days in the Veneto in North Eastern Italy, we may or, more likely, may not have been following in William’s footsteps.

The holiday club all wanted to visit Venice of course so the plans began with an expectation that we would be spending four days in the famous waterlogged city but during the search for suitable accommodation it soon became clear that the price of hotels was some way beyond our normal hotel room budget so I started to look for alternatives and very soon found something suitable in nearby Padova – the Hotel Grand Italia right next to the train station.

It was a late flight so we landed in the dark at nine o’clock and the first job was to arrange the transport so I asked at the public transport desk to be told that there were no buses directly to Padova and we would need a bus to the Venetian mainland suburb of Mestre where we could catch a train.  This turned out to be a pack of lies because there was a bus service to Padova at a third of the price but handing out this duff advice was a Ryanair partner bus company so not knowing any better we fell for the trick.  It was my fault really because I had forgotten that Treviso airport is virtually in the middle of town and the direct service SITA bus had a convenient stop just fifty metres away from arrivals.

Apart from the additional cost this didn’t inconvenience us too greatly and soon we were at the train station and buying our tickets but after we found the platform with minutes to spare before the scheduled departure there was then a twenty-five minute delay to the service which meant that we were going to be arriving in Padova too late to be able to find somewhere to eat.

The train journey took about thirty minutes and after we arrived in the city we immediately located our hotel, which was excellent but had no restaurant or bar and the streets outside in contrast to the hotel appeared run down and inhospitable with danger and suspicion lurking in the shadows of every doorway and street corner so we decided against a midnight walk and went straight to our rooms.  Tomorrow we would visit Venice.