Early in the trip, especially in the first few days after my sciatic pinch had really taken hold, Leslie and our travelling companions were being nothing less than incredibly helpful in making it as easy as it could be made for me to get around.

As we were preparing to disembark the train in Florence after our quick rail trip from Venice, Leslie had already had my suitcase seized from behind by a helpful young woman who – we figured later – must have boarded the train the moment it came to a stop.

Stepping down onto the platform, cane firmly in hand, I saw our travel-mates with our remaining suitcase – Leslie’s – along with their own, amid a trio of young women of similar age to the one now bringing my suitcase down off the train.

In short order, one of our co-travellers had made it clear that they would proceed on foot to our hotel, a ten-to-15-minute walk away, but that Leslie and I were definitely going to need a taxi.

(No doubt you can see what’s coming, but it’s a good cautionary tale to get on the record anyway.)

So with me hobbling along on my cane, Leslie and I were trailed by two of the girls, each one towing one of our wheeled carry-on suitcases, while their two companions (I really want to use the word “confederates” but that would be an insult to Robert E Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia) preceded our little convoy and helped clear a path through the station crowd to get us to the line of people queuing for the taxis that were already arriving in a stream at the taxi stand.

It felt like about a kilometre and a half but, in reality, the distance we covered across the station floor was probably no more than about a hundred metres or so. And without a whit of embarrassment or hesitation, our quartet of porters and blockers simply brought us to the front of the taxi line in which about 30 people were already gathered. Spotting my cane, they generously parted like the waters of the Red Sea under Moses’ staff.

At this point one of our accompanying quartet, who had managed one of the bags, approached me and with a very demure expression on her face held out her hand. Quickly motioning to her three companions, she said, “five, five, five and (touching her own arm) five... 20 Euros per favore”.

“Wait, what?” I said aloud... “20 Euros???” (At the time about $26.) Again she smiled ever so sweetly and mimed her four-count... “Five for each.”

Now I really need to make it clear that I was not going to pay nothing, because being at the front of the taxi line felt damned good, but neither was I in a mood to be hosed that badly. So in my turn, I did a quick finger point to the two rolling carry-ons and held up two fingers, “10 Euros.” Her smile vanished but she was not done yet.

Reaching into her pocket, she extracted a crumpled piece of paper, smoothed it out and gave it to me. (Photo)

At this point, I think a little more detail is required to give you, dear readers, more of a sense of just who had helped us through the crowd. They were four young, healthy women, probably no more than about 21 or 22 years old each, with features suggesting Central American birth complimented by very well-deployed make-up. Without exception, they were fashionably dressed in form-fitting hole-free various colours of denim pants with equally fashionable blouses, fully accessorized with co-ordinated belts, scarves and shoes. If this is the face of homelessness in Florence, I thought, it could obviously be a heck of a lot worse. My other thought was if the young woman who handed me the note was indeed the mother of three hungry children, either they were triplets or she had been a child bride.

At this point, I simply stepped to the first cab in line, repeated “10” and pulled out my wallet. And of course Mr Murphy had to step in with one of his damned laws. All I had were 20-Euro notes.

I wavered a second, but must have muttered something like “No...” to myself because I pushed it at the taxi driver who had already loaded our bags into his trunk. “You have two tens?” I asked. It took him a second but I think he looked behind me and knew immediately what was happening. He smiled, took my 20 and gave me two tens. I turned and passed one to the 21-year old Guatemalan supermodel with the three starving waifs at home, said “Mille Grazie; thank you” and clambered into the open rear door nearest to me.

“Benevenuto a Firenze,” I said to Leslie, and we were off to the hotel.

And yes, their help was worth ten Euros to my now-throbbing hip and leg. Just not 20.

= = = = =

When I was growing up pre-internet, I remember just revelling in stories and “gladiator”-style or religious-themed movies in which the Roman Army was featured prominently. A seemingly unstoppable force at the height of the Empire’s power and reach, the Roman Army established itself during a run of almost 2,000 years in outposts ranging from Hadrian’s Wall in the northern UK (“Britannia”) through a ring of power that completely encircled the Mediterranean, spilling as far south as present-day Syria and as far east as the present day Black Sea ports.

As the symbol of Roman authority and might, the army and its leaders were both feared as conquerors and respected as police who kept ruthless order in the lands they subjugated.

And always they were depicted – whether in ancient art or in modern Hollywood treatments of their stories – marching under red and golden banners and insignia displaying the four-letter notation, “SPQR”. The standard is even a staple when the Roman Army is a modern-day recreation by military buffs and re-enactors.

SPQR – Senatus Populusque Romanus (the “Q” being nestled within “Populusque”) – translates as “The Senate and the People of Rome” and its appearance at the very vanguard of Rome’s legions was simply a way to inform the conquerees, “Hi, we represent SPQR and we own you people as of right now. Wanna argue? Talk to the large, armoured legionnaire over there with the sharpened Roman short sword at the end of his exceedingly powerful arm.”

Well how the mighty are fallen.

Throughout the parts of Rome we saw, it didn’t take me long to notice that the covers of sewers and storm drains with very few exceptions include a cast of “SPQR” somewhere in their design. (Look up AND look down is always excellent advice when you’re on local walking tours in a city. You see the darndest things!)

Turns out that several modern sources note that its use in waterworks-related devices is simply a tribute to the millennia of Rome’s innovations in both bringing water in (their famed aqueducts) and using it as a medium of carrying waste out.

Although I also found a couple hilarious sidebar notes: its use in present-day London open-air markets is a tongue-in-cheek expression of the stall owners’ business philosophy: “Small Profits; Quick Returns”, while another source said that the motto’s abbreviated display by some conquered peoples was actually a message from them that “Sono Porci Questi Romani” – “These Romans Are Pigs”. (That second story is certainly out there but it may also be more fable than fact. Seems the internet is not yet universally acknowledged as the final authoritative citation in serious academic research.)

TriumphAnt: You may be a lot of things here, but you’ll never be bored. Now WAKE UP! Here’s one more postcard for this post.

= = = = =

Thanks to the soaring popularity of “foodie” television, it’s no longer a surprise to foreigners to discover that a traditional Italian meal actually consists of three separate courses (four if you count some form of sweet for dessert). But while perhaps no longer a surprise, the sheer volume of what makes up a course can still come as a shock.

Leslie and I had gotten to Italy a full day ahead of our travelling companions, whom we were scheduled to meet (and did) the next day at Rome’s rail station.

So that first night we opted for a dinner choice through the simple expedient of walking along a few nearby streets and reading some restaurant menus. We found a wonderful little walk-down called the Taverna Barberini and, over a pre-dinner drink, we thought an antipasto would be nice so we ordered one. Five minutes later, this separate trolley arrived tableside with the cheery message from our waitress, “Your antipasto”.

My first thought was that this was the entire antipasto buffet and we were to select a couple spoonfuls from a few of the items. But no, this entire array of 13 separate dishes on a trolley that could comfortably seat four people around it was intended solely for the two of us! As an appetizer.

“Antipasto”, incidentally, literally means “before the pasta” and pasta in a traditional Italian dinner is actually only the official first course, or “Primo piatti”. After that, you’re expected to order a “secundo piatti”, the main course consisting of a meat or fish entree with a side of some sort of veggie. Then you’re handed a pheasant feather and steered to the “vomitorium” to make room for dessert.

(That last sentence is a complete fabrication, but what is not is that pasta in fact is not considered to be a main course in and of itself the way it is in a dinner served at a Canadian kitchen table.)

I did opt for a pasta course as well, with a carbonara sauce – a lush combination of eggs, cream, bacon and cheese that gave a wonderful smokiness to the whole dish.

We had some other amazing dinners while in Italy. In a coastal city like Venice or Rome, you really can’t go wrong by ordering a fish entree (and they are universally brilliant at cooking and serving sea bass, something I tried to grill once at home only to see it vanish in flaking pieces between the bars of my barbecue’s grilltop. Pan frying or cedar planking from now on. In Florence, a more centrally-located city, I had one of the best-cooked, tenderest and most flavourful steaks (a massive tenderloin filet bathed in a wild blueberry sauce!) I have ever had in my life at an incredible restaurant called the Taverna del Bronzino.

Package recommendation: A very nice three-star hotel called the Orto de Medici is centrally located in Florence; the Taverna del Bronzino is two blocks away. A head of Chianti-induced mellowness to help anaesthetize an aching hip while on a gentle flagstone sidewalk stroll back to your hotel after it has been washed by a light late summer rainfall is the stuff that can give a screenwriter inspiration, I tells ya! Highly recommended – except the “aching hip” part. I don’t recommend that to anyone.

As we exited the Bronzino we passed a glass case displaying the fruits of a nearby upholsterer’s hobby passion – a huge and intricately detailed scale model of British Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory.

We still don’t know why that model was on display in that restaurant in that city in Italy, a country that wasn’t even involved in Nelson’s most famous battle in “Victory” – against a combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, but clearly it was an incredible labour of love by the builder and, as a Michelin Guide might say, well worth a diversion if you’re ever in the neighbourhood.

(Photo: www.historicships.com)

The Bronzino “Victory” was pretty close to the dimensions indicated for this model and was certainly at least as meticulously detailed, if not more so. One of our travelling companions has made Nelson a personal passion and he was completely delighted by our serendipitous find of the model.

Random factoid: Shortly after you sit down in any Italian restaurant – ANY Italian restaurant – you will be asked if you want water. When you say “Yes please”, you will then be asked immediately, “Still, or gas?” In hindsight, of course, it is blindingly obvious what the question means but the very first time we were asked, I wasn’t even sure I had heard the brief question correctly. Fortunately, Leslie has had more extensive Italian travel experience than me and answered immediately, “Still”. And a bottle of NON-carbonated mineral water was brought to our table. Oh.

As I sat outside Florence’s Uffizi Gallery while our travelling companions secured the pre-reserved tickets by which we would be admitted, I glanced upwards at the statues and exhibit posters lining the street outside the main entrance. Reading names like Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo, I am profoundly embarrassed to admit that what first came to mind was, “Hey! All of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!” There were also a couple of forgettables like Cellini and Giambologna but the awesome display of artistic firepower outside certainly forecast the profound experience awaiting inside the Gallery’s walls.

I am especially lucky to be married to someone who studied art history in university. I didn’t, and had I not met Leslie I likely never would have seen so many of the original artworks I have seen in my life under her direction. Case in point: while we were in Rome, she was looking at the map of the streets around our hotel and suddenly said, “Omigosh! We’re really close to Santa Maria della Vittoria!”

Next morning, we were standing in a small basilica only because it is home to a sculpture that has been on Leslie’s want-to-see list ever since she’d studied it: Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”. Coincidentally, our hotel desk clerk had already told us it was one of the three most important churches in Rome and seemed pleased that we were interested in seeing it.

You probably don’t need to be told that Italian religious art is pretty much where any study of Christian artworks the world over begins, but it is only while standing in the centre of a church like Santa Maria della Vittoria that you really come to appreciate the density of Italian religious art. There was not one square centimetre of floor, wall or ceiling space that wasn’t beautifully decorated with representations of the Divine, whether with paintings, sculpture, tile mosaics, tomb inlays and even objects like the badges of office worn by the countless bishops who presided over services held in the basilica over the centuries. You could devote quite literally a lifetime to studying the works in this one comparatively small space.

And the Bernini piece is indeed incredible. It is a statue of Saint Teresa in the company of an angel. She is looking heavenward while, from above, a stream of sculpted golden rays paints the entire piece with the heavenly presence that is infusing her with the emotion named in the work’s title.

I have a minor bug about places like this. Despite easily understood universal graphic signs urging silence and the forbidding of photography, there were small bands of jabbering visitors happily snapping away. We were not, however, which is why this Bernini illustration comes not from either of our cameras, but rather from a website.

There’s no smugness or holier-than-Thou intended with that statement. Frankly, in my case I was just so taken with the interior of this Church – helped along I suspect by a huge awareness of how much Dad’s Catholicism meant to him up to the moment he died – that I would have found it crass to turn the visit into a photo-op. But sometimes I just find it annoying to encounter people who seem to think the warnings are meant for everyone else – like the one idiot on an aircraft pre-departure who somehow fails to hear the eight-times-repeated instruction from the cockpit to turn off ALL electronic devices until the aircraft seatbelt sign is turned off once airborne. You just know the flight attendant who has to approach him (and yes, it’s always a “him”) is really wishing for a pointed stick.

(By sharp contrast, I felt no such compulsion in St Peter’s Basilica when I snapped a couple photos of its majestic interior, including Michelangelo’s Pieta – perhaps because it has seen the presence of TV cameras so often, it simply seemed more natural to be more of a tourist and less of a pilgrim within its walls. But I did notice that that basilica also displays no such warnings, so it seems the officials have yielded to the desires of the travelling shutterbugs.)

But Santa Maria Della Vittoria, as I mentioned, is less widely known, and we were among the first visitors this day. In the absence of crowds, it simply overpowers you into silent respect from the moment you enter its walls until the moment you re-engage with the busy streets immediately outside its doors.

I guess I digressed. Back to the Uffizi.

The Gallery’s best-known work of art is Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” but, among serious art lovers, apparently the more attractive of the artist’s major works in this same Gallery is another painting entitled “Primavera” (both easily found via online searches).

There are two highlights that especially stand out for me. The Gallery houses a central small exhibit hall called la Tribuna that has an interesting sub-text all its own. The oldest part of the Uffizi, the octagonal room is a gallery within a gallery whose interior decoration was purposely crafted to represent the four basic elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Depending on either the politics or morals of the day, the room was used for the exhibit of pieces not normally viewed by the public in private showings arranged by the Medicis and, later, by the Government of Florence to visiting dignitaries and “supertourists”.

The Medicis deserve (and have) a wholly separate history – several in fact – devoted exclusively to them. An incredibly wealthy family that became a dynasty dating from the late 14th Century, their family tree includes such instantly recognizable names as Catherine de Medici and Lorenzo the Magnificent.

(One story with which our guide regaled us – with only a hint of smugness – was how, when Catherine was dispatched for a time to the French Court in Paris, she was so appalled by what she encountered under the label, “food”, that she had a battery of her own chefs transferred from Florence. She ordered them to instruct the French chefs and kitchen staff how to properly prepare meals fit for royalty. “So French ‘haute cuisine’ today?” our guide summarized, “It’s all due to Italy.”)

In 1564, the Grand Duke Cosimo di Medici thought it would be a nice idea to give his son, Francesco, a unique wedding gift. In five months flat, he had an enclosed corridor constructed from what was his palace to the Florentine Government House across the Arno River, incorporating the halls of the Uffizi and crossing the Arno over a mediaeval market bridge called the Ponte Vecchio. At one point, the Corridor opens over the interior of the Santa Felicita Church, essentially offering the Medicis a “skybox” that allowed them to be present at regular services without actually mingling with the common folk.

The Vasari Corridor today (named for its designer, Giorgio Vasari) is an extension of the Uffizi and its long halls (it runs over a kilometre in length) are now home to hundreds of portraits and self portraits by a who’s who of artists through the centuries. At one point our guide gently admonished one of our group to watch his elbow after having just bumped the corner of a frame. Turned out he’d bumped a Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Corridor art is that accessible.

The Corridor tour is available as a private adjunct to a Gallery visit and the well-informed guide is a font of stories about the artists, their subjects and the all-pervasive power of the Medicis through hundreds of years of Italian history.

(Another digression. I never knew him beyond, “I’m Chuck from Princeton”, but halfway down the entrance staircase into the Corridor, he seized the wheelchair from Leslie as I hobbled carefully down with one hand firmly on my cane, the other on the railing. By the time I reached the bottom – about 60 steps away, he had opened out the chair and took it on himself to wheel me along the entire Corridor and made sure I stood up to catch the highlights – the mid-river view from the Ponte Vecchio overlooking the Arno, and the “skybox” view of Santa Felicita’s altar. I just want to repeat my vigorous thanks, Chuck, for the record.)

If you do the Uffizi, plan (you have to reserve and pay in advance – easily accomplished online) to do the Corridor too. It’s worth it. One especially tragic footnote. At the beginning of the tour, we paused by a painting so badly fire-blasted, it was unrecognizable. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation (essentially as told to us by our guide): “The area closest to the Uffizi entrance was heavily damaged by a terrorist attack commissioned by the Italian mafia in 1993. During the night of May 26, 1993 a car full of explosive was set off next to the Torre dei Pulci, located between via Lambertesca and via de' Georgofili, and five people died. Many others were injured and several houses were heavily damaged, including this section of the Uffizi Gallery and the Vasari Corridor. In the Corridor, several artworks were destroyed by the explosion. These paintings, some hopelessly damaged, have been pieced back together and placed back on their original spot to serve as a reminder of the horrible attack.”

The piece at which we paused was a massive Michelangelo from which the explosion had literally blasted the paint from the canvas.

When we got home, I asked Leslie what had been her favourite recollection of our Uffizi visit. Without a second’s hesitation, she said, “The Madonna of the Long Neck”.

See what I mean about the joys of having an art history buff in the family?

Photo: The Ponte Vecchio. The uppermost row of small square windows marks part of the Vasari Corridor. In a moment of hilarity, about the same time as I was taking this picture, a small group of Japanese tourists was standing beside me as their photographer – facing the opposite direction from me – snapped them with a modern highway bridge across the Arno behind them. Given a choice between the ancient Ponte Vecchio and a modern highway bridge over the historic river, I can only assume they were operating under a friend-at-home’s instruction to “Get a picture of yourselves with the bridge”. They probably should have gotten a few more details.

And finally, there’s not a lot about Adolf Hitler that contains a shred of positivity, but in WWII as the German armies retreated across the Arno in the face of the advancing US armies, Hitler ordered every last Florentine bridge over the river blown up... except the Ponte Vecchio. However, he did have buildings at both ends blown to bits to effectively deny the bridge’s use to the American forces.

But Ponte Vecchio stands today because of his direct order.

Ciao for niao.

Einstein once famously said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. It’s a sentiment that, at its broadest stroke, was summarizing his belief in the rationality of the universe. At its simplest, it can be seen to mean that everything happens according to some logical order and rule set, not the Divine proclivity for reward and punishment around which many of the Bible’s messages are framed.

Maybe.

One thing is for sure, someOne up there has a sense of humour.

The red-shirt in this photo is me. (Oh yes, Star Trek fans; I was indeed wearing a “red shirt”! What the heck was I thinking?)

I look glum and grumpy because (a) I’M IN A FLIPPING WHEELCHAIR! and (b) it’s only about three days into the start of our planned three-week trip to Italy.

It’s the day after Leslie was able to find a wheelchair rental, and the day after I had experienced what at this writing seems – after the first two of what will be several visits to doctors and clinics back here in Ottawa – 99 per cent certain to have been an attack of sciatica. A first for me. Anyone who’s ever suffered one knows exactly what I’m talking about; but for anyone who hasn’t, I’ll spare you the wincing details – Google’s got them all described perfectly – and not wish it upon you... ever.

I’m mentioning this only for information purposes and rest assured I’m not about to go on and on about it once I get into my “Postcards from Italy” posts over the next several weeks that will really begin a few days after this prologue.

So why “someOne up there has a sense of humour”? Well picture this. The attack hit me in a city where no motor traffic travels the few streets that aren’t waterways – Venice, so the only “taxis” are boats and the only regular public transit service is a multi-passenger aquatic “bus” called a vaporetto. Getting back and forth across the canals requires, in pretty much all cases, a climb of several steps to get up to a bridge level, followed by a descent of the same number of steps on the other side. (Oh it may well be a magnificent work of art, but it’s still a footbridge that was not designed to be traversed on wheels.) The dry streets and sidewalks, meanwhile, while not the English-style cobblestone, are made up of large rectangular flagstones that begin to feel like the passage over a level rail crossing – just one that goes on forever.

So what’s not to make you laugh as you try to imagine a sillier set of circumstances in which to be slammed with a sciatic nerve hit?

That’s the whine.

On the upside, even before scoring a wheelchair, Leslie found a pharmacy where she purchased my one and only physical souvenir of Italy: an adjustable tubular steel “bastone da passeggio” (cane) that, even more than the wheelchair, was utterly invaluable in enabling me to get across pedestrian gaps like dock-to-boat; a stairway to the next level where no lift exists, and other such access “hiccups” where wheeling clearly wasn’t going to happen.

On another upside, Italy is insanely helpful and Italians are unbelievably generous and courteous when it comes to assisting people who obviously need assistance. So much so that my travelling companions, after a couple days of sticking close to me as we were let in the exits of busy tourist attractions, ushered around the lines at security scanners and sped to the front of lines waiting for taxis, etc, agreed that they were all going to remember to pack canes and rent wheelchairs the next time they travelled to Italy! (I’m pretty sure they were joking... right guys?)

That said, Leslie and I truncated our trip by a week. After several days at a magnificent Tuscan villa with its much-needed mental recovery time just doing not much of anything (and you will find no better place, short of a mountain-top monastery in Tibet, perhaps, to do nothing than at a villa offering a commanding vista of the Tuscan countryside) I simply was not up for yet another city. So Leslie and I opted for a return home a few days earlier than planned, leaving the Amalfi Coast and Pompeii for a future visit and leaving them, too, to our other two travelling companions to experience and share their stories when they got back.

That said, here’s the list of locations from which the many postcards to come... will come: Rome (pre-sciatica), Venice, Florence, Tuscany. Not bad for two weeks, is it?

And it was fabulous! Despite the limitations on my mobility, we still managed to experience a pretty good range of the tourists’ Italy and I loved it!

Finally (whoops, almost finally), it likely will also be a cold snowy day in high summer before I will say anything negative about Air Canada ever again. Their support services for people with mobility issues are utterly incredible! Thanks to those services and Leslie’s thorough planning, from the moment we arrived at the Rome airport to begin our early trip home, there was not one single travel process-related issue that we had to worry about. Like Disney’s Land or World, Air Canada seems to have a hidden pool of staff support people that spring seemingly out of nowhere to place you entirely into their care and make sure you get precisely where you need to be – on time and in comfort. Golf carts are frequently involved.

So here at the end of the prologue is the only other piece of information you might like to know about my sciatic hit: I’m already on the mend. (I must be. My painkiller and anti-inflammatory ingestion is already way down from what it was even a few days ago.) I’m also retired so I’m not faced with the stress of trying to hasten a recuperation in order to satisfy a need to get back to work.

The coming postcards will not be chronological; they’ll simply be about what and when I feel like rambling or ranting. Hope you enjoy the trip as much as I did.

Here’s a teaser.

See what I meant when I said “mental recovery time”?

Ciao for now!