You might recall that Leslie’s and my first trip to Italy late last summer was cut short when I discovered the joys of a slipped disk. You might also recall that, despite this, we still managed to get through a single day in Rome, a few days in Venice and Florence and several days at an Umbrian villa when I finally decided after several sleepless nights and a growing immunity to the painkillers I was gobbling that the planned conclusion of our trip – a week along the Amalfi Coast and a visit to Pompeii – was simply not going to be in the cards. For another thing, even though Leslie never said so in so many words, after her having rolled me around Venice and Florence in a wheelchair, I have no doubt that the thought of pushing me through Pompeii and wherever else I could manage was clearly going to be more pain than pleasure.
So after getting an OK from our travelling companions, we took the single most expensive limo ride I have ever taken – from Umbria a couple hundred kilometres to the Rome airport (But oh Lord, was it worth it!) and caught a re-scheduled Air Canada flight back home where I committed myself to the swift and thorough care of the Ontario Health Care system. Within a week, I was mobile, upright and wheelchair-less, and within two weeks I had even chucked the cane I had been relying on, thanks to a completely accurate diagnosis by my GP, and astonishingly good physiotherapy at the Carleton University Sports Medicine Centre.
One thing we discovered, however, was the huge advantage that a wheelchair accords you when it comes to moving through airports – whether connecting or clearing customs. I confess to feeling some guilt when the Air Canada flight assistance person rolled us right past literally hundreds of people waiting to clear customs when our flight – and from the numbers waiting in the queue, at least three other flights – simultaneously hit the clearance line. But with my having already done several agonizing days of penance, any feeling of guilt at getting through the system quickly only lasted a few brief minutes.
So with that background and with fingers crossed, late in May we embarked for Italy II – several days in Rome and Orvieto on our own, then a week-long small-group bus tour booked through an organization called Back-Roads of Britain Tours that carried us through Naples, down the Amalfi Coast, including Pompeii, Capri, Amalfi, Ravello and Positano. Then, bus tour concluded, we returned to Rome for a few days on our own. So that’s the travelogue you’ve got in front of you, Dear Readers.
Let me end any suspense from the outset by revealing that I am very happily writing these coming travel notes. So no wheelchairs were involved this time around and you will find in the coming days – weeks probably – a whole heck of a lot by way of recommendation. It was just an amazing trip and there were parts of Italy I feel like I fell in love with.
It seems a simple thing, but would you drink from a decorative public water fountain in your town? Throughout Italy, unless a fountain carries a specific “Non Potabile” warning, its flowing water has been perfectly drinkable for centuries. And depending on the fountain’s sculptures, the “aqua potabile” can flow from any orifice you can possibly imagine, and probably a few you never thought of. A local resident, pausing open-mouthed to quench his thirst directly from the flowing stream, or a tourist pausing to fill a water bottle are routine sights.
You will read occasional episodes of my amazement, too. How, I wonder in retrospect, did I ever get this far in life without ever having heard of Paestum, a 2500+ year old ruined town whose city plan is clearly visible in its excavated streets and foundations, and whose trio of Greek temples (yes, Greek… more about that later) are in an incredibly well-preserved state despite having been, among other things, at the very point of the spear of a World War II Allied invasion of Italy’s Salerno coast region, an invasion code-named Operation Avalanche? (You might also note that I’ve lost none of my penchant for eschewing the period in favour of yet another comma and one more subordinate clause.)
Paestum is about 80 km southeast of Naples and, archaeologically, is every bit as fascinating as Pompeii. There are no crowds in Paestum, however, and probably for the simple reason that it lacks Pompeii’s hugely romanticized tragedy of a smothering Vesuvius ash cloud to mark its abrupt and total destruction at so precise a moment in history: 12:00 noon, August 24, 79 A.D. More about Pompeii – and Paestum – farther on in this diary.
You will also read of my awe – no other word for it – when I finally found myself with Leslie, standing in an almost-empty Sistine Chapel, looking up, for a full hour before it was opened to the public. Awe, too, at viewing a magnificent sculpture in Naples that, like the ruins of Paestum, I had never heard of before – Cristo Velata, the Veiled Christ.
But even more generally, I found myself many, many times simply pausing in the realization that just scant feet below my own dusty shoes were pathways that have been trodden by over a hundred generations or more of all of our predecessors, whether in a collective assembly like a marching legion of the Roman Army, or in solitary rumination like Nero, as he tramped about his magnificent palace on the Palatino and tried to craft yet another visible manifestation of his insatiable ego.
One reason that the Colosseum is as well-preserved as it is today is because Pope Benedict XIV, who headed up the Church in the mid-18thC, was alarmed that so much of the structure was being plundered for stone to build Christian churches throughout the city. So in a most prescient burst of preservationism, he had the whole site declared a Christian place of worship to honour the Passion of Christ, as well as the many Christian victims who died in the arena. The plundering stopped instantly. There is a marker set in the Colosseum wall (visible here) bearing a Christian cross, which casts that Papal declaration, literally, in stone.
Some of the coming weeks’ writings will feel like bits of déja vu for my Facebook friends – I posted a few photos and regular brief updates from Italy thanks to the ready availability of free Wifi almost everywhere we stayed. So apologies for any redundancies but most of those brief notes will have considerably more detail here.
Before Italy was Italy, it was Rome. Not simply a city, but rather an all-conquering power that eventually came to rule an incredibly large portion of the Mediterranean, North African, European and Near Eastern worlds before it began its long slow slide into the decline into which every Empire must necessarily sink when its own corruption eats it away from within.
If you believe that Ben Hur was a documentary, then this is where the chariot race took place, the Circus Maximus (Great Circus) of Rome. This large, open space is all that’s left of an arena that could seat over 100,000 people at capacity. The echoing cheers seem to ring to this day.
And it was that sense – of global power won and lost – that really struck me in almost every place we visited. Pick your cliché, but the one that struck me most strongly was that I often felt like I was surrounded not by the ghosts of a hundred generations of dead Romans and their descendants, but rather by living history.
I also came to realize almost with a laugh that – the few lumpy remains of Viking settlements in l’Anse-aux-Meadows notwithstanding (on the northern tip of the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador) – the oldest European-built structure in Canada is likely to be found among the waterfront buildings hugging the St Lawrence’s north shore in Old Québec and rings in at about 400 years old. But in Italy, I discovered in casual conversation with someone else in our tour group that she has a friend living in a house that is older than that!
Or… amazement when shown by our bus driver a passing line of Mediterranean pines that marks a still-used portion of the Appian Way, a road built so well by the Caesars to unite their Empire at its height that even to this day whole sections have not had to be repaired to support the hikers and domesticated animal herders who still make use of it.
We’ll also meet a woman who, with her sister, are together only the most recent generation of the same family that has run a small-town winery for at least seven hundred uninterrupted years! (I wrote that out lest you read “700” and think I added one zero too many, or accidentally keyed “7” when I meant “2”. No – seven hundred years is correct.)
The Mustilli Winery. Now THIS is a cellar! – a subterranean cave about 50’ underground.
And although they have recently moved their storage to a more modern and larger cellar, they still use portions of their original cellar for storing several bottles from each vintage. The cellar was cut centuries ago from the soft “tufa” (the lava rock that underpins huge swaths of the Italian countryside even today) when the winery first discovered the cellaring benefits of constant temperature, constant stillness, and a perfectly controllable, constant level of light – candles originally, for centuries in fact, and then low-wattage electric bulbs.
Phew! And that was just the introduction!… Back soon.
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