The surprise of Cremona

I am seduced by Edith Templeton, or at least by her amazing The Surprise of Cremona which I secured from ebay Australia, in local bookshops I guess because it was a Readers Book Club selection in 1955. A racy selection at the time.

I value this book because it is fun and intelligent, but especially because its sharpness offers points of irreverent entry into the mythologies of Italy. So much tourism in Italy slides on a deep, overdone lacquer of tritely trotted guidebook patter. It's nice to get a fingernail under the shellac. You plainly don't have to agree with everything she says ... and she would find you beyond boring if you did.

Templeton has a razor wit and sense of irony and the naughty haughty of Czech background, reminiscent of I Served the King of England and other wonders of Czech cinema.

But her life of aristocratic origin, French education and marriages to Englishmen giving her a different trajectory from the central figure of that film and a capacity to arrive in Cremona in the early 1950s with a gigantic knowledge – and immediate experience, born in Prague in 1919 – of history and philosophy and outrageous confidence and self-protective sarcasm, plus a world-weary warmth. 

With a local history professor as real or notional source she places Frederick II, who for a time headquartered his Holy Roman Empire in Cremona, on a pedestal (yanks him off when she gets to Parma); takes wonderful potshots at Virgil, Goethe and Dante and admires Pontius Pilate, miscast in a cathedral performance on Good Friday..

Of Virgil

His famous gentle melancholy, which lends itself superbly to pastoral elegaic poems, and which was imitated by all Europe in all ages, was not the picturesque which one might think it to be

but rather a pent up anger at the Roman army's confiscation of his peasant parents' farm between Cremona and Mantova. He ate his heart out in his writing, then

During his last days he went to live in the country near Naples... Why didn't he go and live on the banks of his native Mincio instead, among the barren stones, the slimy marshes and the bitter willows, over which he had shed his heart-blood...

On Good Friday she is appalled that a angelic young tenor is cast as Pontius Pilate in a performance in the cathedral with "three hundred yards of choir boys"

This was quite wrong of course, Pilate was an impeccable high Civil Servant, nothing unearthly about him. ... he could not afford another uprising, all because of a new religion. New religions were two-a-penny in those days. I think he retired to the south, when he was pensioned off, to Naples or Sicily... Pilate is my favourite figure in the New Testament. He is the model of a detached, fair, and judicious colonial governor who hesitates before making a move and prefers tact and negotiation to violence.

Of the pope's triple excommunication of Frederick II she writes:

I think this reckless excommunicating is silly. It is bound to lose its effects after the first time.

She reports of Dante's visit to Cremona and his finding sufficient time there to quarrel with a nobleman Cavalcabo. Having earlier admired greatly the traditional buildings of Cremona and disparaged buildings with added-on baroque facades she notes that

The Cavalcabo Palace still stands. It is one of those well-bred buildings whose beauty derives from superb craftsmanship and proportions, with no trimmings, substantial and discreet, like a well-tailored suit. The Cavalcabo family still live there. 

Cavalcabo was 'black', that is, he was Guelf and supported the Pope, whereas Dante was 'white' and supported the Emperor. This is, of course, just what one would have expected of Dante. He would quarrel with anybody if he possibly could. It was merely a matter of giving him enough time.

... and then a wonderful summation of history and its writing:

The professor tells me that Dante's faction, the Whites, were called in Dante's time, the 'accursed faction'.
"Was it true?" I ask. "Did very nasty people belong to it? Or was it called Accursed because it was against the Pope?"
The professor regards me with astonishment. "Oh, no. It was only called Accursed because it lost."

Then an account of how Dante fell out with the Whites, concluding (and this may have been a novel expression then):

If [Dante] had lived today, he could have held his Annual Party Meeting in a phone box.

This is such a cut across the conventional weaving of Dante into so much hortatory carry-on in Italy. We have a glimpse of the Cremona mind, albeit through a turbulent Czech mind.

Whereafter the professor begins the most interesting part of Cremona's history: the story of the Surprise of Cremona, for which you must find your way to page 45 of my edition.

St Sigismondo

I have a book hard to put down. And very hard to quote in brief.  I note two things:

• we could go to Cremona one hour by train from Mantova to see a stylish town whose best buildings by this account are pre-baroque, some much older.
• and then 15 minutes by bus to the edge of Cremona we could see St Sigismondo. Templeton is enraptured on entering.

Ah Chioggia, Chioggia

the walk from our apartment to the fish market.
If the market is on the little finger, the wharf
for the ferry to Venice is marked Porto
on the thumb where the nail is missing.
The railway station is on the wrist,
on the mainland.
Click any image to enlarge

Largely ignored is the old town of Chioggia, in the southern corner of the Venice lagoon.
[Chioggia pronounced key-ODJ-uh]

Hard to get to, no Pokemon-go-for-adults-with-inadequate-tech as abundant in Venice, Florence, Rome and as they refer to them at Tripadvisor CT and AC and want to visit them all in a week. Or more.

But hoards, if that's the right word for folk from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, go to the adjacent district of Sottomarina, which despite its name is not currently underwater but has beaches under thousands of umbrellas in summer.

The old town. where we will stay, is where the history resides.

This is a link to a google translation of a wonderful local presentation of the history of Chioggia. Even if you have no plans to go to Chioggia, if you have ever felt life is tough, if you have ever thought your community has had a trouble or two, please go and read the link. The difficulties in presenting lively proud local expression in a computer translation (or any other) adds to the telling of a history of clinging to life against adversities of the sea, of diseases and the bastards who come calling from land and sea, century by century.

We look forward to meeting people who have come through such and write about it without bad words, as I just did.

Perhaps the biggest pride is in the seafood.

If you search the web for Chioggia fish market you are taken to the 'Mercato Ittico'. Ittico translates into English as Ichthyal. And from a web search for ichthyal you get such as:

Is ichthyal a word in the scrabble dictionary? | Definition and Meaning

http://www.chioggiapesca.it/

Ichthyologists know about this word:

Ichthyology (from Greek: ἰχθύς, ikhthus, "fish"; and λόγος, logos, "study"), also known as fish science, is the branch of biology devoted to the study of fish. This includes bony fishes (Osteichthyes), cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes), and jawless fish (Agnatha).
[wikipedia]



Ms Google translates the 'who we are' (Chi siamo - pronounced 'key see-AR-mo') part of the Mercato Ittico web site thus:

Chioggia Fishing is a project born from the Fisheries Foundation for the enhancement of Chioggia local fish product, for its marketing and introduce it in the full possession of his peculiarities. Our fish is able to satisfy the most refined palates, in many varieties of species. Many species are unknown to most people because of this, our goal is not just to talk about the most famous species, but to know the genuineness of the smaller species.
Within the section "The Fish Market" the user can find the contacts of wholesale and retail dealers: the relationship between those who sell and those who want to buy will be so simple and effective.
In addition to this, we will get you in the culture of Chioggia fishing, with traditional recipes and explanation of fishing techniques. In this portal you will feel an active part of the vein of the city: the sea, the lagoon ... .l'acqua.

Wonderful, proud: "we will get you in the culture"! Italians at their determined best: wanting to get everyone, especially the rest of modern bloody Italy, to understand the real.

Note for readers. If you don't eat seafood perhaps stay in Bologna.

And to Chioggia

We have subtracted some days from our time in San Severino Marche, so as to be able to visit Chioggia, staying in Enrico's spectacular apartment with this view, from 27 to 31 March.

photo from airbnb ad https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/1576761

So we have brought forward our booking at Forli to 20-27 March. We will drop off the car in Bologna on 27 March, not 31 March, and travel by train from Bologna to Chioggia.

There are a number of reasons to go to Chioggia. It continues to the north our excursion around the lower Po. It has its own beauty, reportedly a lot of determined character, a serious working, mainly fishing town. A daily fish market. A possible journey over water to Venice, recalling Eric Newby's wilful decision to arrive out of the mists of the sea in On the Shores of the Mediterranean. And then, not least, there is the alleged addiction of women in Chioggia to crochet. Helen is addicted to crochet (wonderful shift from complex management responsibilities at work) and moving smartly towards higher levels with more complex patterns and some of her own, now adept in the calligraphic language of crochet which means she buys from eBay crochet magazines from Russia and the Ukraine with classy dames in spectacular and sophisticated garments, which can be read without knowing Russian. It will be nice if she could join a circle of women doing such in Chioggia.

Then on 31 March, three trains to reach Mantova. There is a short 'veloce' journey from Rovigo to Monselice on the main line Bologna to Venice, but the journeys from Chioggia to Rovigo and Monselice to Mantova will hopefully be more languorous, through bucolia, marshland, hills and flat lands, nature reserves, hard working farms and towns with great history.

Not getting to Bellagio

Bellagio is a place of great beauty on Lake Como. Best known for the residence of Rosemary Clooney's nephew George, hyper-paparazzified and with a campaign against his liberal views on refugees by the execrable but sadly popular Daily Mail.

Here is the wonderful auntie of George Clooney. As we heard her when I was pre-teen

Less well know is the important Bellagio Centre of the Rockefeller Foundation.

We have no plan to go there.

But I have begun reading the Rosales saga of Francisco Sionil Jose, a highly praised historical novel series on the path of Filipino nationalism from the 1880s. A very important popular door to identity for a nation still in search of its independent place in the world. There are big time gaps in my attention to literature, places, friends, because of illness.

Dusk, or Po-On  in the Philippines, the first novel in the series, was drafted in a month at the Bellagio Centre but it took three decades to complete.

we were younger in 1965

When I arrived in Manila at age 21, on my first diplomatic posting, I walked back from my first appointment in the Foreign Ministry down Padre Faura and browsed the Erehwon Bookshop and then was gobsmacked by the shiny, new, packed with everything Solidaridad Bookshop with Frankie's lovely wife Tessie at the counter. Coming smiling from the back room was Frankie - Francisco Sionil Jose.

While so warmly received by them, I did not know immediately that this was my first really substantial, worthy, independent adult friendship, with this lovely family, life shaping, integrity prodding, in a very quiet way. Somewhat undeserved, I think. They gathered us up and included us in many things including family trips. And, he the renaissance man, writer, political and social activist, bookshop owner and soon to be publisher, steered me one day cheerily to a copy of Masters and Johnson's very new and astonishing Human Sexual Response which he assured me I needed. Which I did. How innocent and ignorant of so much the world then.

Frankie is an Ilokano, behind the gentleness an intensity and passion. A medical orderly in the resistance in the jungle in World War 2, in the way of many Filipinos of that era and with that experience of guerrilla war, he carried a small gun openly. Marcos banned that, the biggest banner of weapons before John Howard... see also this other dimension, the careless bravado of going to war. (Unlike some I spoke against the Iraq war before it began.) I'm sure there's a thesis in that dual antithesis, but not here.

Frankie and I saw each other only a few times after those days. I would go back to see him now but he's 90 at least and deserves recognition not bothering. Hurry please, Nobel committee.

We last saw Tessie and Frankie in January 1986. We were on leave from the embassy in Beijing. We dropped into the bookshop unannounced and Frankie characteristically seemed to have nothing else more important to do than, as ever before, gathering us all up, putting us into his car to drive around Tondo with its huge population and desperation while talking from the heart of the social issues; also expressing some of his chuckling pleasure mixed with anxiety about safety as he persisted in writing satirically about Imelda Marcos.

Of Bellagio he writes in the introduction to Dusk:

To reach Bellagio [early 1960s] you take a car from the airport closest to Milan and drive through a scenic route, the roads hugging the sides of the mountain, and on the left, through turns and dappled foliage, the shimmering Lake Como. I got to the villa before noon, and there at the entrance was the entire staff lined up-as if royalty was coming to visit...

I think we need get no closer.

I also think I should invite you to this first para of the Dusk narrative:

Dusk is the day's most blessed hour, it is the time when the spirits of darkness lift slowly down the bright domain. The acacia leaves droop, the fowl stop their cackling and fly to the boughs of the guava tree to roost, and as the light starts to fade and the shapes of trees and houses and even the motions of people seem shrouded, the essence of time, of change, and the brevity of life itself is realised at last. 

I find in that the character of the author, especially his gentle exhortation to go outside and be glad to be alive... alive.

I bought Po-On as usual from my favourite bookshop Better World Books. Part of the thrill of buying there is you sometimes find the history of the book, especially if it comes from a library. This one has a receipt I now use as a bookmark. It was bought in the Borders bookstore in the New York World Trade Centre on 26 September 1998. It reached me looking like it had never been read. The receipt records that it was sold along with a copy of the DVD Perfect Storm...  Go back to the end of that last quote.

a budget to travel in Italy.

pasting some text below caused changes to colour and layout that it's too hard to sort out.

We have advantage, with experience travelling or living in different places. We do not spend hugely on day-to-day living, but we eat healthy-well. We have to limit expenditure when we travel.

We prefer living in a place, more than the journey. To come to terms with the local pattern of life and enjoy it. That's actually cheaper too, than running along the tourism conveyor belt.

We have to travel 23 hours or so (from departure from Sydney airport, closer to 30 hours from home to get there), as well as the money. It was good to realise that by staying five rather than four weeks the cost per day shrank alongside the growing joy of being there. Being settled in a place, not having to restock so much, fewer Airbnb cleaning and service fees, fewer journeys between abodes and so on.

In the course of discussion recently at Tripadvisor about how much it costs to travel in Italy, I contributed as below.

We have several reasons for using apartments one of which is that it makes the trip affordable, possible. Otherwise you are dependent on, and paying for, everything being made for you, presented to you. Which is, frankly, exhausting and diminishing. I've done the big hotel thing in the past, I'm over it. Tired of being a sit-up served-up person, my public dining quota and enthusiasm was exceeded long ago. For others, that experience is part of what they seek. But expensive.
If you plan on the basis that you have an apartment with a stove, you can shop for wonderfully fresh and varied foods and experience that kind of Italy at much lower cost and more as Italians do. Buy real treats. And snack at night. And wander more than five paces underclad in own space. And fewer crumbs in the bed, perhaps.
•   Excellent accommodation 12 March to 15 April AUD3600 (EUR 2450) [33 nights]
•   Per diem provision for 34 days AUD 3500, estimate moderate dine out every other day
•   Rental car Peugeot 308 equivalent Europcar 19 days AUD1000. [this raised from 740 to include modest charge for snow chains and big charge for second driver. Snow chains sensible - but also a legal requirement in mountain areas before 15 April.]
•   Airfares for two Sydney-Rome, quickest flights on Qatar, plus more room per economy seat, AUD2538 during sale.  

from http://www.romeartlover.it/Portese.html

•   Insurance via Webjet with Allianz including AUD3000 car insurance excess cover AUD400
•  Trains and other internal travel AUD500
•   Porta Portese market Rome $?? :-) .... - but restrained by baggage allowance. As also QF, Emirates and Singapore, Qatar allow 30kg any number of bags per person (60kg for two) but excess baggage astronomical per kg. We carry a baggage scale!
•   Anticipating overruns without too much apprehension: room on card to splurge when it's irresistible. But away from the tourist rabbit-run, splurges often not so expensive. 

Hope this helps (I wrote at tripadvisor). Your tastes may differ significantly.

That adds up to $8600 for 35 days = AUD 125** (Euros 85) per day, per person, in-country, including accommodation. 
Add to the in-country costs the air fares and travel insurance ... and the strangely complicated question of how best to get the several hours from home to Sydney airport and back home again***. We have organised good house sitters. 

——————————————————
** Times change, my old head finds that number large, although compared to many other travellers' budgets it's small. I remember in the mid-1960s buying a copy of the revolutionary and wildly popular Europe on Five Dollars a Day. I think my (quite good) income was around $60 a week, air fares (from Australia) impossible from own pocket, ship travel interminable, anything but working unconscionable, working class and going to university highly questionable, degrees in the humanities for boys plainly deviant. Boys took girls out and paid the bills. Girls never paid when 'taken out for the evening', virtuously saved their money for their trousseau or hoping to go and work in London and perhaps find moments with a Latin Lover on a jaunt to Rome. We were barbari then. These days we are still barbari-abundant, see how they risk death mainly by continuing to thumb FaceBook while crossing the road and risk destruction of whole civilisations by taking their news from FaceBook. 

*** To get from home to Sydney airport and back, more options than for getting around in Italy!
 The train is cheapest, say $90 return for two. Takes 3.5 hours (every two hours, that is), may be cancelled by a bushfire (did that to me once). To return home on a flight arriving arriving on Easter Monday at 5.30pm, then take 'next' train, may involve McDonalds meal at airport after arrival and additional cost of funeral. Travel insurance might or might not cover that, might call it a pre-ordained illness. Wills and powers-of-attorney and terminal-instructions are done... :-)
To take the 'shuttle': $250 or so return, for two. Did that once, waited at the airport an hour for the little bus to turn up, then visited the front gates of five other couples, via meandering roads, along the way—all 5x2 of whom had been away on a cruise and who, to the extent giving signs of life, gave the impression of never wanting another cruise and never wanting to see each other again. Arrived home five or six hours after plane got in. 
Take own car? Well over $400 to park it in Sydney for five weeks. Hope that the battery has not died — it did that once. :-)
Rental cars? This may be the smart option, $130 + $170 for two <24 hour rentals, one-way between local rental depot and Sydney airport and reverse. 
Such are the little costs you have to add in.The ohandthentheres.

Mantova to Peschiera del Garda

Mantova, Peschiera and the course of the
Mincio river: the 'Parco del Mincio'
from Lake Garda to the
confluence with the larger Po River.

This little map indicates the extension of green space around Mantova, especially to the north and southwest, the course of the Mincio River from Lake Garda to where it flows into the Po. In times past this flat land was hugely productive of agriculture. Agriculture has these days contracted and much has been done to save that space to green purposes.

Discussion at TripAdvisor with a person interested in biking in Italy led me to mention that there was a lot of bike riding in Mantova, riding in the city that is... and then to discover that there is an excellent bike path all the way from Mantova to Peschiera. My health will not allow me such a venture, but the temptations of delightful villages along the way means we may take the bus/

This little film is not only a great introduction to the bike path (north to south) and the villages, but also, contrary to many little films of people in Italy, the people who ride bikes there seem to speak a clear Italian at a comprehensible pace. So it's a pleasure to watch and can be used as a language tutorial as well.

The bus [timetable for route 46 here] will not have quite as grand a path as a bike but we will research where to get off along the way.
That last link not working, start here.
For those bike-inclined, in summer months a trailer is hitched to a bus. You should book. Or perhaps parents with children too small to ride 2 x 40 km could take turns with bike and bus-child for the round trip.

To follow the Via Flaminia

We have realised that in seeking a route other than the Autostrada del Sole north from Rome to Vasanello, and then heading for Le Marche, we are in fact heading out on the Via Salaria, 2200 years old.

These days great road and rail tunnels have opened the way north through the Appenines between Florence and Bologna. Historically the great road north was via this road to Rimini and beyond to the Po Valley and away to Byzantium, Constantinople. Caesar came this way heading for Rome in the civil war. In the years of Rome's decline this was called the Ravenna Road, when  Ravenna was the capital of the Western Empire.

I didn't know any of this until I read the wikipedia article, I'll stop pretending I knew this and let you read the wikipedia article.

So we now, Helen's initiative, have decided we should try to find our way north and east via the Via Flaminia, hunting the ruins, driving the remnants.