L'avventura
Thursday July 3rd, 12:08 am
I am lying uncomfortably on a rigid bench in the Marco Polo Airport, on the outskirts of Venice, wondering if I made the right choice. There are other travelers planning to stay the whole night, but we are few, and when the night custodian pushes the broom past our tiny enclave, he glares. I pull up over me the blanket I purloined from Aer Lingus on the flight to Dublin; it keeps most of the mosquitoes off. Should I have slept at the hostel and caught the 4:40 am bus from Piazzale Roma? It would only have reached the airport at 5:05 -- late by new standards for check-in time. And there could have been an accident or a detour; I could have overslept, and been stranded for days. Here on this bench at least I have some chance of sleeping. I pull the luggage closer. I don't know this yet, but only one of the suitcases will board the plane with me; the other will linger in Europe. I can't blame it.
Wednesday July 2nd, 10:30 am
I have been up and out of the Residenza Santa Croce since 6:00, roaming around Venice, drinking coffee, photographing sites while they are empty and gently lit. I've been waiting for the 10:30 opening of San Marco's, and now the line has begun to move. An early glimpse of the marble columns from deep inside the city's narrow streets had reminded me of the approach to the Treasury at Petra -- a promise of imminent ravishment. I step inside the church, and am surprised to be immediately overcome with tears. A single beam of morning light is coming in from high overhead. Every inch of the walls is covered with gold or with rich color. The floor in the middle is wavy, a reminder of water not far beneath the surface in this aquatic city. The floor is tiled in vast and intricate mosaic patterns which use shading to create a illusion of depth. It's as though we were embarked on an immense glass-bottomed boat, afloat on the Giudecca Canal with a view of brilliantly colored coral reef fish below us. I have known this place, on paper, for some 30 years through Proust, who knew it in turn from his intellectual father, John Ruskin. Religion is, finally, for me, a family affair.
Tuesday July 1st, 6:40 pm
My train is pulling into Venice Santa Lucia train station from Trento, where I have spent the morning and early afternoon walking around, visiting the town and the various offices of the university. It is a negotiation with the Vice Rector for International Education which brought me to Italy as the envoy of UB's Office of International Education. Trento is situated in the Alps, just south of the Austrian border, and an easy train ride to Switzerland and Germany. The possibilities for our students here are substantial: undergraduates will find the city a perfect size, Italian majors will be immersed in Italian (rather than tourist) culture, and science students will find programs of study in English. Graduate student and faculty exchange too will be a high priority for both institutions. I meet administrators Carla Locatelli and Laura Paternoster, who are enthusiastic about prospects for an institutional collaboration. Their assistants Flavia and Ludovica are equally gracious and hospitable. Carla was kind enough to organize a birthday apéritif yesterday. What an excruciating embarrassment had I not shown up! Relief contends with exhaustion as the train comes to a stop in Venice.
Monday June 30th, 2:45 am
That makes three times that the tall bleached blond has crept over to my suitcase and touched the latch. WTF?!? And could she not put out her goddamned cigarette? It cannot be legal to smoke in these rooms. And how long are these girls going to yammer away on their cellphones? It is unbearably hot. I will never sleep. What country are these girls from? They aren't Italians or tourists or students. I can't breathe. They seem to be in this "hostel" -- an unmarked entrance in an obscure building in Mestre -- on a long-term basis, but they have few visible belongings. How do they communicate with the Chinese lady who runs the place? When she rescued me from the street, we had only sign language... On the other hand, a desk clerk at one of the four hotels I had tried may have told her the essentials. She was happy enough to offer me a bed for 20 Euros, and her offer felt providential; I didn't ask for references. It is so late. I am unspeakably exhausted. I thought only girls from McMinville still ratted their hair. I will never fall asleep. I must be back at the station in three hours to try again to get to Trento. In the best case scenario, I will make it to the hotel only seconds before Flavia comes by to escort me to my first meeting at the university. Or will the hotel have phoned the rector to say that I haven't shown up? Stephen will kill me. Or no. He'll forgive me, and that will be unbearably worse. I will never live this down. Miss Seasoned World Traveler. I must make the first train. I will never sleep. Are these what Detective Brisco calls working girls? What an unhoped for glimpse of the coulisses of Venice! But I am in no mood to be Balzacian. I will never sleep.
Sunday June 29th, 9:35 pm
I am -- where? -- on the gravel by a two-lane highway, near a dilapidated decommissioned bus stop, watching cars fly past me on the road to Venice. It's not the restaurant lady's fault -- why would she know the current state of bus shelters? Her compassion saved me eight kilometers, and I don't know if I had it in me to walk them. But the promised buses aren't stopping, though several blink headlights in response to my gesticulations. Options are dwindling. I can't resume walking back to Mestre with these suitcases; that was hard enough on the back roads, but here there is no shoulder, and now it's almost dark. I'd never make it back. And no buses. It's not entirely my fault. Goddamn Mestre train station, with its conflicting postings and inaudible announcements. I was on the right quay with the right ticket in hand, and I got on the train that presented itself at the appointed hour, after asking the locals if this was the train to Trento. By the time the conductor came around, we were half an hour from Venice, somewhere to the southwest, perhaps. He may have imagined it was helpful to have me descend as soon as possible, or maybe my crumbling Irish soda bread cheese sandwich was not to his liking in his train. Whatever his reasoning, he put me off in something about a tenth the size of Mayberry. No one to consult, no trains, no buses. Just one clear road sign: Venezia, 24. But now it's dark, and I'm not close. I can't. I haven't done it since junior year in France. But there is no choice. I limply extend the thumb of my right hand a timid distance from my body, looking down. Just as a string of cars approach, a mosquito from the nearby lagoon attacks. I slap it with my right hand, disrupting my already ambiguous signal. Cars race past, blowing hot air against my sweat-soaked clothes. We repeat this choreography -- thumb, mosquito, race car -- many times. I am distressed. I lift morale by wondering if I can write this up -- if I live to tell the tale -- in some Homeric parody. "Say which was the first, and which the last of the needle-mouthed warriors to meet dark death that night at the hand of Amerune?" I think about Ghazi who urged sharing food and rides and shelter with others because the karma, he said, would always come back to us in the end. Well? Where was my karma now? I send another mosquito to the underworld and thrust my hand more boldly out in the air, now making eye contact, though the rapidly encroaching darkness prevents using my distressed mien to any coercive advantage. Traffic rushes by. I am deciding to walk back to the restaurant and beg the owners to put me up for the night, or let me pay them to drive me somewhere. I grasp the handles and begin inching across the highway. But wait: up ahead, it's a bus to Venezia, and it's slowing down! If I run I can get to it! I wave wildly, desperately. It comes to a halt ten yards ahead. Three drunken Englishmen tumble out the rear exit -- the bus had stopped for them, not me -- and breathlessly, I heave the two suitcases inside, and take up position in the well, avoiding the sight lines of the rear view mirror. I'm good now. I'm ok. I'll get to Mestre. I'll go back to that Best Western where Renee and I stayed last night, and see if they have something small. Everything will be fine.
Saturday June 28th, 4:00 pm
Ghazi's plane for JFK leaves at 5:00, and mine for Venice at 5:20. We've opened a small bottle of champagne, and we're standing against the wall of the crowded departure lounge raising a toast to Ireland. I am sad to be leaving this lovely country, and to see our travels together come to an end. How many more such trips can be left? He'll Facebook me, he promises, when he gets safely home. I walk sadly away from his departure gate, wondering whether the trip has contributed positively to his life, and hoping against all raucous rude contrary evidence that he will make his way in the world. I think that if Edel or Frank or Alphonsus were to smooth the way for him at all, or for that matter Eleanor or Joseph or Allan, I would not for anything disdain their assistance.
To distract myself from this melancholy parting, I think of how grand it will be to explore Venice with my paternal cousin Renee, whom I have probably never met, at least so far as either of us remember. She is flying in from Paris where she is on assignment for Nissan; she volunteered to meet me in Venice for the weekend when I asked if she'd have any occasion to be in Ireland or Italy during our travels. Already over e-mail I have seen that we will hit it off. Although our disciplinary backgrounds are quite different, she is an engineer who is fluent in at least two foreign languages and acutely attuned to cultural realities, so we will find much in common. And then we may illuminate for each other some of the mysteries of the Jameson side of the family, the side we each understand least. I am looking forward to this Italian excursion with great excitement. It should be an adventure!
Photos from Italy are all here.
I am lying uncomfortably on a rigid bench in the Marco Polo Airport, on the outskirts of Venice, wondering if I made the right choice. There are other travelers planning to stay the whole night, but we are few, and when the night custodian pushes the broom past our tiny enclave, he glares. I pull up over me the blanket I purloined from Aer Lingus on the flight to Dublin; it keeps most of the mosquitoes off. Should I have slept at the hostel and caught the 4:40 am bus from Piazzale Roma? It would only have reached the airport at 5:05 -- late by new standards for check-in time. And there could have been an accident or a detour; I could have overslept, and been stranded for days. Here on this bench at least I have some chance of sleeping. I pull the luggage closer. I don't know this yet, but only one of the suitcases will board the plane with me; the other will linger in Europe. I can't blame it.
Wednesday July 2nd, 10:30 am
I have been up and out of the Residenza Santa Croce since 6:00, roaming around Venice, drinking coffee, photographing sites while they are empty and gently lit. I've been waiting for the 10:30 opening of San Marco's, and now the line has begun to move. An early glimpse of the marble columns from deep inside the city's narrow streets had reminded me of the approach to the Treasury at Petra -- a promise of imminent ravishment. I step inside the church, and am surprised to be immediately overcome with tears. A single beam of morning light is coming in from high overhead. Every inch of the walls is covered with gold or with rich color. The floor in the middle is wavy, a reminder of water not far beneath the surface in this aquatic city. The floor is tiled in vast and intricate mosaic patterns which use shading to create a illusion of depth. It's as though we were embarked on an immense glass-bottomed boat, afloat on the Giudecca Canal with a view of brilliantly colored coral reef fish below us. I have known this place, on paper, for some 30 years through Proust, who knew it in turn from his intellectual father, John Ruskin. Religion is, finally, for me, a family affair.
Tuesday July 1st, 6:40 pm
My train is pulling into Venice Santa Lucia train station from Trento, where I have spent the morning and early afternoon walking around, visiting the town and the various offices of the university. It is a negotiation with the Vice Rector for International Education which brought me to Italy as the envoy of UB's Office of International Education. Trento is situated in the Alps, just south of the Austrian border, and an easy train ride to Switzerland and Germany. The possibilities for our students here are substantial: undergraduates will find the city a perfect size, Italian majors will be immersed in Italian (rather than tourist) culture, and science students will find programs of study in English. Graduate student and faculty exchange too will be a high priority for both institutions. I meet administrators Carla Locatelli and Laura Paternoster, who are enthusiastic about prospects for an institutional collaboration. Their assistants Flavia and Ludovica are equally gracious and hospitable. Carla was kind enough to organize a birthday apéritif yesterday. What an excruciating embarrassment had I not shown up! Relief contends with exhaustion as the train comes to a stop in Venice.
Monday June 30th, 2:45 am
That makes three times that the tall bleached blond has crept over to my suitcase and touched the latch. WTF?!? And could she not put out her goddamned cigarette? It cannot be legal to smoke in these rooms. And how long are these girls going to yammer away on their cellphones? It is unbearably hot. I will never sleep. What country are these girls from? They aren't Italians or tourists or students. I can't breathe. They seem to be in this "hostel" -- an unmarked entrance in an obscure building in Mestre -- on a long-term basis, but they have few visible belongings. How do they communicate with the Chinese lady who runs the place? When she rescued me from the street, we had only sign language... On the other hand, a desk clerk at one of the four hotels I had tried may have told her the essentials. She was happy enough to offer me a bed for 20 Euros, and her offer felt providential; I didn't ask for references. It is so late. I am unspeakably exhausted. I thought only girls from McMinville still ratted their hair. I will never fall asleep. I must be back at the station in three hours to try again to get to Trento. In the best case scenario, I will make it to the hotel only seconds before Flavia comes by to escort me to my first meeting at the university. Or will the hotel have phoned the rector to say that I haven't shown up? Stephen will kill me. Or no. He'll forgive me, and that will be unbearably worse. I will never live this down. Miss Seasoned World Traveler. I must make the first train. I will never sleep. Are these what Detective Brisco calls working girls? What an unhoped for glimpse of the coulisses of Venice! But I am in no mood to be Balzacian. I will never sleep.
Sunday June 29th, 9:35 pm
I am -- where? -- on the gravel by a two-lane highway, near a dilapidated decommissioned bus stop, watching cars fly past me on the road to Venice. It's not the restaurant lady's fault -- why would she know the current state of bus shelters? Her compassion saved me eight kilometers, and I don't know if I had it in me to walk them. But the promised buses aren't stopping, though several blink headlights in response to my gesticulations. Options are dwindling. I can't resume walking back to Mestre with these suitcases; that was hard enough on the back roads, but here there is no shoulder, and now it's almost dark. I'd never make it back. And no buses. It's not entirely my fault. Goddamn Mestre train station, with its conflicting postings and inaudible announcements. I was on the right quay with the right ticket in hand, and I got on the train that presented itself at the appointed hour, after asking the locals if this was the train to Trento. By the time the conductor came around, we were half an hour from Venice, somewhere to the southwest, perhaps. He may have imagined it was helpful to have me descend as soon as possible, or maybe my crumbling Irish soda bread cheese sandwich was not to his liking in his train. Whatever his reasoning, he put me off in something about a tenth the size of Mayberry. No one to consult, no trains, no buses. Just one clear road sign: Venezia, 24. But now it's dark, and I'm not close. I can't. I haven't done it since junior year in France. But there is no choice. I limply extend the thumb of my right hand a timid distance from my body, looking down. Just as a string of cars approach, a mosquito from the nearby lagoon attacks. I slap it with my right hand, disrupting my already ambiguous signal. Cars race past, blowing hot air against my sweat-soaked clothes. We repeat this choreography -- thumb, mosquito, race car -- many times. I am distressed. I lift morale by wondering if I can write this up -- if I live to tell the tale -- in some Homeric parody. "Say which was the first, and which the last of the needle-mouthed warriors to meet dark death that night at the hand of Amerune?" I think about Ghazi who urged sharing food and rides and shelter with others because the karma, he said, would always come back to us in the end. Well? Where was my karma now? I send another mosquito to the underworld and thrust my hand more boldly out in the air, now making eye contact, though the rapidly encroaching darkness prevents using my distressed mien to any coercive advantage. Traffic rushes by. I am deciding to walk back to the restaurant and beg the owners to put me up for the night, or let me pay them to drive me somewhere. I grasp the handles and begin inching across the highway. But wait: up ahead, it's a bus to Venezia, and it's slowing down! If I run I can get to it! I wave wildly, desperately. It comes to a halt ten yards ahead. Three drunken Englishmen tumble out the rear exit -- the bus had stopped for them, not me -- and breathlessly, I heave the two suitcases inside, and take up position in the well, avoiding the sight lines of the rear view mirror. I'm good now. I'm ok. I'll get to Mestre. I'll go back to that Best Western where Renee and I stayed last night, and see if they have something small. Everything will be fine.
Saturday June 28th, 4:00 pm
Ghazi's plane for JFK leaves at 5:00, and mine for Venice at 5:20. We've opened a small bottle of champagne, and we're standing against the wall of the crowded departure lounge raising a toast to Ireland. I am sad to be leaving this lovely country, and to see our travels together come to an end. How many more such trips can be left? He'll Facebook me, he promises, when he gets safely home. I walk sadly away from his departure gate, wondering whether the trip has contributed positively to his life, and hoping against all raucous rude contrary evidence that he will make his way in the world. I think that if Edel or Frank or Alphonsus were to smooth the way for him at all, or for that matter Eleanor or Joseph or Allan, I would not for anything disdain their assistance.
To distract myself from this melancholy parting, I think of how grand it will be to explore Venice with my paternal cousin Renee, whom I have probably never met, at least so far as either of us remember. She is flying in from Paris where she is on assignment for Nissan; she volunteered to meet me in Venice for the weekend when I asked if she'd have any occasion to be in Ireland or Italy during our travels. Already over e-mail I have seen that we will hit it off. Although our disciplinary backgrounds are quite different, she is an engineer who is fluent in at least two foreign languages and acutely attuned to cultural realities, so we will find much in common. And then we may illuminate for each other some of the mysteries of the Jameson side of the family, the side we each understand least. I am looking forward to this Italian excursion with great excitement. It should be an adventure!
Photos from Italy are all here.
posted by amerune at 6:31 PM
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