I was going to do a Carpe Diem piece about being in Verona, noticing
that a production of "La Traviata" was coming up, booking a couple of
cheap seats in the Gods and thanking our lucky stars, God or whatever.
However when we came back a week later and checked in to our (cheap!)
hotel the clerk met us with a solemn face and said that the production
had been cancelled owing to a national strike. Well, only in Italy,
could an evening of pleasure be cancelled because of a national opera
strike but nonetheless it was a warning of a different sort: making
plans is God's invitation to practical jokes. Or something.
Anyway we went and had an expensive meal instead and I felt suitably chastised. I have to say, incidentally, that when the doleful concierge told us the news Penny immediately burst into tears whereas I'm afraid I laughed. I suppose I'm just punch drunk. Nevertheless whatever one's attempts at making the best of all possible worlds God has a strange habit of moving the goal posts when one is least expecting it. So Carpe Diem makes perfect sense but don't expect to have the same success rate seizing tomorrow, let alone the day after. They may never happen.
One of many enjoyable days in the Veneto was at Sirmione, where Tennyson and Ezra Pound both visited and about which they both wrote. It's a resort on the southernmost tip of Lake Garda and on a Sunday in March sunny, crisp and crowded. We had lunch with Kate, my god-daughter, her husband James and their two small children. Come to think of it Sirmione is probably not, technically, part of the Veneto. Also, God, playing an unexpected hand, caused the cancellation of our train - a trans Europe express to Basel - but I outwitted him by nipping on the next one to Torino instead. It means getting out at Peschiera del Garda rather than Denzeuela or whatever which I rechristened Desdemona but we still made it to Sirmione. Pause for thunderbolt.
Anyway Kate who has lived in Milan for a while wanted some recommendations for places to visit and although I'll send her separate recommendations I thought I'd rehearse the idea here first. Equal first and completely different would be Bassano del Grappa and Padova, aka Padua. I'd never even heard of Bassano which is about an hour by bus from Vicenza where we stayed for the first fortnight and on the main train line from Venice to the Brenner pass. It was here that I ate my first baccala with polenta - a rather elegant variation on a Norwegian salt cod with local maize porridge staple or, as in the posh-ish hotel by the river, the said porridge dried and rolled then grilled. Bassano was also where Penny bought me a ludicrously over-priced but wonderfully authentic black Borsolino hat which goes perfectly with the Magee Donegal tweed overcoat she bought me in Dublin the other year. Old friends and others will be as amused as me by the idea of Heald as a walking sartorial statement but the coat and hat plus the Williams boots, the cords, the tweed jacket well, eat your heart out Teasy-Weasy. No better than that. I actually look almost smart. Great packaging, pity about the product.
But the high spot of Bassano is the bridge, a wonderful, unique wooden edifice with a cover and cobbles, designed by the ubiquitous Palladio. At one end there is a Grappa bar and museum and the other another bar and a museum to the mountain troops or Bersaglieri of whom the locals are very proud but about whom Brits tend to laugh. We disparage them with jokes about North Africa but never, I think, fought them face-to-face on their own terrain in the Dolomites and Italian Alps. They wear large feathers in their hats, sing wonderfully, drink a lot of grappa and have turned the bridge into a personal shrine. Anyway we both loved Bassano and it joins that select band of places where in an ideal world I would like to rent a garret and write a book or two.
Padua is another and much better known story. We decamped from Vicenza for a final week based on the Albergo Verdi which was a nice newly renovated boutique job in the old university quarter marred only the pigeons which began cooing on our window-sill very early in the morning. The other refrain, mercifully confined to non-sleeping hours, was "Dottore...Dottore..." It seemed that a lot of students had graduated recently and there were little groups all over the University area serenading semi-naked people, often covered in foam or soap, and chanting "Dottore...Dottore" in honour of their new qualification.I've heard it said that everyone in Italy is a Dottore.
This was good and there were wonderful things to do and see - notably the Giotto murals in the chapel by the old Roman amphitheatre, the huge hall above the shops in the Piazza de Erbe, the massed angels in the dome of the Duomo Baptistry. As so often I loved the strange and quirky. In the top floor of the museum near the Giottos there is a coin museum, the Bottacin. It leaves me pretty cold but Mr. Bottocin lived in Trieste where he made friends with Maximilian, the Hapsburg who built Miramare and went to be Emperor of Mexico only to be executed by the soldiers of Benito Juarez, a scene inaccurately commemorated in Manet's picture in the National Gallery. All Bottocin's amazing numismatical cabinets are there along with some sad pieces of Maximiliania. There is the hat - a sort of white, feminine Ascot job which he apparently wore on the day of his execution. There is also a lugubrious portrait of a foppish general who was shot at the same time. I also enjoyed seeing Saint Antony's bottom teeth preserved in a chapel in his eponymous basilica. You couldn't help wondering whose teeth they really were. Also why so many people venerated such absurdities and why there were people clutching on to the side of his tomb elsewhere in church and apparently holding intimate conversations with the deceased. Sometimes I really dislike the Church. St. Antony, the city's patron saint, seems to have been a dab hand at rescuing infants from cauldrons of boiling water and sewing on severed limbs. Oh well. I enjoyed the teeth though.
Seriously though Padova , as the city is locally known, struck me, us, as being wonderful, not least because in a tourist sense it is eclipsed by Venice which is very close and full of tourists. Padova seemed not to be and yet it had loads of wonderful things to gawp at.
I went to Venice for one day and interviewed the American crime writer, Donna Leon, who has been setting crime novels in her adopted city for almost two decades. Also present was her friend Toni Sepeda who has written a companion volume of Commissario Brunetti's walks and backs it up with guided pedestrian tours of the city. So after a coffee-fuelled natter I accompanied Toni and two Chicagoannes on an hour or so of chilly trudge past the Guggenheim, down to the Salute and back up the Zattere. Penny and I had lunch in the Antico Dolo, recommended by Richard, my former literary agent and a haunt of Guildo's. I had the tripe. Very good and very typical.Then we stopped for just the one at Saraceno by the Rialto. This is touristy but is also a haunt of Brunetti and of her creator. Penny dropped Donna's name to our waiter which provoked much enthusiasm but no cut in costs. And so back to Padova on the train, feeling like real Italian commuters and rather superior to the tourists stuck in the Serenissima. She is gorgeous but she is over-priced.
And so back to reality. There was a copy of the Tablet with my piece on the trans-Siberian railway, waiting at home. Good old Tablet. It seemed reassuringly literate and intelligent - elitist you might even say - and none the worse for that. I sent my piece on Donna Leon and Venice to the Telegraph and my man there pronounced it "lovely". So that was good.
A day or so later I took the train to Wiltshire to see my old Mum. Coming back we were delayed because of a wipe-out of the signalling system near Taunton. No trains into Cornwall for hours and when there was it was standing room only. I was about to make unfavourable comparisons with Mussolini and trains running on time and then I remembered the morning we had arrived at Vicenza station to find a brusque "Cancellato" against the name of the trans-European express to Basel on which we had booked. So it isn't better in continental Europe.
It just SEEMS better.
Anyway we went and had an expensive meal instead and I felt suitably chastised. I have to say, incidentally, that when the doleful concierge told us the news Penny immediately burst into tears whereas I'm afraid I laughed. I suppose I'm just punch drunk. Nevertheless whatever one's attempts at making the best of all possible worlds God has a strange habit of moving the goal posts when one is least expecting it. So Carpe Diem makes perfect sense but don't expect to have the same success rate seizing tomorrow, let alone the day after. They may never happen.
One of many enjoyable days in the Veneto was at Sirmione, where Tennyson and Ezra Pound both visited and about which they both wrote. It's a resort on the southernmost tip of Lake Garda and on a Sunday in March sunny, crisp and crowded. We had lunch with Kate, my god-daughter, her husband James and their two small children. Come to think of it Sirmione is probably not, technically, part of the Veneto. Also, God, playing an unexpected hand, caused the cancellation of our train - a trans Europe express to Basel - but I outwitted him by nipping on the next one to Torino instead. It means getting out at Peschiera del Garda rather than Denzeuela or whatever which I rechristened Desdemona but we still made it to Sirmione. Pause for thunderbolt.
Anyway Kate who has lived in Milan for a while wanted some recommendations for places to visit and although I'll send her separate recommendations I thought I'd rehearse the idea here first. Equal first and completely different would be Bassano del Grappa and Padova, aka Padua. I'd never even heard of Bassano which is about an hour by bus from Vicenza where we stayed for the first fortnight and on the main train line from Venice to the Brenner pass. It was here that I ate my first baccala with polenta - a rather elegant variation on a Norwegian salt cod with local maize porridge staple or, as in the posh-ish hotel by the river, the said porridge dried and rolled then grilled. Bassano was also where Penny bought me a ludicrously over-priced but wonderfully authentic black Borsolino hat which goes perfectly with the Magee Donegal tweed overcoat she bought me in Dublin the other year. Old friends and others will be as amused as me by the idea of Heald as a walking sartorial statement but the coat and hat plus the Williams boots, the cords, the tweed jacket well, eat your heart out Teasy-Weasy. No better than that. I actually look almost smart. Great packaging, pity about the product.
But the high spot of Bassano is the bridge, a wonderful, unique wooden edifice with a cover and cobbles, designed by the ubiquitous Palladio. At one end there is a Grappa bar and museum and the other another bar and a museum to the mountain troops or Bersaglieri of whom the locals are very proud but about whom Brits tend to laugh. We disparage them with jokes about North Africa but never, I think, fought them face-to-face on their own terrain in the Dolomites and Italian Alps. They wear large feathers in their hats, sing wonderfully, drink a lot of grappa and have turned the bridge into a personal shrine. Anyway we both loved Bassano and it joins that select band of places where in an ideal world I would like to rent a garret and write a book or two.
Padua is another and much better known story. We decamped from Vicenza for a final week based on the Albergo Verdi which was a nice newly renovated boutique job in the old university quarter marred only the pigeons which began cooing on our window-sill very early in the morning. The other refrain, mercifully confined to non-sleeping hours, was "Dottore...Dottore..." It seemed that a lot of students had graduated recently and there were little groups all over the University area serenading semi-naked people, often covered in foam or soap, and chanting "Dottore...Dottore" in honour of their new qualification.I've heard it said that everyone in Italy is a Dottore.
This was good and there were wonderful things to do and see - notably the Giotto murals in the chapel by the old Roman amphitheatre, the huge hall above the shops in the Piazza de Erbe, the massed angels in the dome of the Duomo Baptistry. As so often I loved the strange and quirky. In the top floor of the museum near the Giottos there is a coin museum, the Bottacin. It leaves me pretty cold but Mr. Bottocin lived in Trieste where he made friends with Maximilian, the Hapsburg who built Miramare and went to be Emperor of Mexico only to be executed by the soldiers of Benito Juarez, a scene inaccurately commemorated in Manet's picture in the National Gallery. All Bottocin's amazing numismatical cabinets are there along with some sad pieces of Maximiliania. There is the hat - a sort of white, feminine Ascot job which he apparently wore on the day of his execution. There is also a lugubrious portrait of a foppish general who was shot at the same time. I also enjoyed seeing Saint Antony's bottom teeth preserved in a chapel in his eponymous basilica. You couldn't help wondering whose teeth they really were. Also why so many people venerated such absurdities and why there were people clutching on to the side of his tomb elsewhere in church and apparently holding intimate conversations with the deceased. Sometimes I really dislike the Church. St. Antony, the city's patron saint, seems to have been a dab hand at rescuing infants from cauldrons of boiling water and sewing on severed limbs. Oh well. I enjoyed the teeth though.
Seriously though Padova , as the city is locally known, struck me, us, as being wonderful, not least because in a tourist sense it is eclipsed by Venice which is very close and full of tourists. Padova seemed not to be and yet it had loads of wonderful things to gawp at.
I went to Venice for one day and interviewed the American crime writer, Donna Leon, who has been setting crime novels in her adopted city for almost two decades. Also present was her friend Toni Sepeda who has written a companion volume of Commissario Brunetti's walks and backs it up with guided pedestrian tours of the city. So after a coffee-fuelled natter I accompanied Toni and two Chicagoannes on an hour or so of chilly trudge past the Guggenheim, down to the Salute and back up the Zattere. Penny and I had lunch in the Antico Dolo, recommended by Richard, my former literary agent and a haunt of Guildo's. I had the tripe. Very good and very typical.Then we stopped for just the one at Saraceno by the Rialto. This is touristy but is also a haunt of Brunetti and of her creator. Penny dropped Donna's name to our waiter which provoked much enthusiasm but no cut in costs. And so back to Padova on the train, feeling like real Italian commuters and rather superior to the tourists stuck in the Serenissima. She is gorgeous but she is over-priced.
And so back to reality. There was a copy of the Tablet with my piece on the trans-Siberian railway, waiting at home. Good old Tablet. It seemed reassuringly literate and intelligent - elitist you might even say - and none the worse for that. I sent my piece on Donna Leon and Venice to the Telegraph and my man there pronounced it "lovely". So that was good.
A day or so later I took the train to Wiltshire to see my old Mum. Coming back we were delayed because of a wipe-out of the signalling system near Taunton. No trains into Cornwall for hours and when there was it was standing room only. I was about to make unfavourable comparisons with Mussolini and trains running on time and then I remembered the morning we had arrived at Vicenza station to find a brusque "Cancellato" against the name of the trans-European express to Basel on which we had booked. So it isn't better in continental Europe.
It just SEEMS better.
