Reid's Travels

Now you can do Budapest in a long weekend

2010-10-20T10:50:00.003-04:00

A view of Budapest

Budapest is the Europe you've been looking for.

It's a city steeped in a wonderfully convoluted past—Romans and Magyars, Mongols and Turks, Austrian emperors and Soviet puppets—yet one that looks to the future, with elegantly odd new buildings going up to replace some of the cement-block scars from the Soviet era.

These mingle with a gorgeous mélange (yes, I said it: a gorgeous mélange) of decorous 19th century Empire structures and decorative Secessionist ones, all jostling for space on busy boulevards.

Budapest is laid along both banks of the Danube: the palatial fortress of Buda rising high above the river to one side, the commercial center of Pest splayed along the flat bank opposite. It is a city of hearty food, forthright and genuine people, fine wines, and those elegant thermal baths.

Those famous Budapest baths

The Rudas Baths in Budapest

Budapest's famous bathhouses range from broodingly 16th century Turkish (the Rudas Baths; www.budapestgyogyfurdoi.hu), to grand Art Nouveau (the famed Géllert Baths; www.gellertbath.com), to button-down modern (the Danubius Grand on Margarit Island; www.danubiushotels.com) with menus of treatments ranging from spa massages and mus baths to nose jobs, cosmetic dentistry, and laser eye surgery.

And, yes, you can do it all in a long weekend. (And, despite all news to the contrary, there is not currently a toxic river of sludge moving down the Danube.)

Getting to Budapest
How do you do Budapest in a weekend? Well, it helps if you live in the greater New York City area, because as of this year Delta Air Lines (www.delta.com)—and staring next year, American Airlines (www.aa.com)—offers nonstop seasonal flights (in about 9.5 hours) from JFK to the rapidly expanding Budapest airport.

Off-season, you can still go, of course, but you will transfer somewhere like Paris or London and the journey will take up to 12 hours.

The elegant New York Cafe at the
Boscolo Palace Hotel (www.boscolohotels.com)

How much Budapest costs
It won't exactly be cheap to fly there—coach class starts around $1,000 roundtrip (though I highly recommend their Business First service, if you have the scratch—I don't, which is why I was only too happy to let Delta pick up the tab for me; speaking of which: yes, it's perfectly natural to hate travel writers).

However, once you are there, everything in Budapest is pretty inexpensive.

It'll cost $6 for a bottle of really good wine, or $1.50 to $4 for a beer even at the trendiest of "Ruin pubs" (semi-legal squatter bars, like the classic Szimpla kert [www.szimpla.hu], in the courtyards of abandoned buildings; www.ruinpubs.com).

A goulash cooking lesson at one of
the upstairs restaurants in the central market

A massive bowl of goulasch will run you $5 to $6, while the priciest main course on a menu may break $10 or $11 (and that's not even for the famed Hungarian fried goose liver on brioche).

At online booking sites like Venere.com and Booking.com, Hotels in the center start around $26 for two people—though around $40 per night is more typical (international chain properties like Ramada or Best Western start at $60 to $90). Simple guesthouses sell double rooms starting as low as $17.

You can bargain in the central market for handicrafts—and they stall owners are refreshingly devoid of shill or tout-ism. They just sit there quietly waiting for a potential customer to ask them a question, rather than constantly exhorting passersby to come peruse their wares. I love it. (Also the prices, where embroidered linens start at $2 to $4 for smaller pieces, and sampler packs of super-fresh paprika half what they would at home.)

Runde Ecke: How an idealogical dictatorship turned calculated cruelty into a daily routine

2010-10-11T02:56:00.003-04:00

They would steam open all your mail, record your every phone call, track your daily movements, and secretly enter your home to copy any document you hadn’t managed to hide.

If they suspected you might harbor anti-government sentiments, they would engage in a years-long clandestine campaign to ruin utterly your personal and professional life—merely to ensure you had neither the time, nor the resources, nor the will to oppose the state.

They were the Stasi, the East German secret police, and their Leipzig headquarters was the Runde Ecke. This stately “Round Corner” building now contains a wonderfully homespun “Power and Banality” museum that documents the Stasi era of terror in the very offices from which they waged ongoing war against their own citizens.

It's a surprising and disturbing window into the everyday middle management of running a dictatorship and reflexively cruel police state.

Dirty tricks, Stasi-style

Though the Stasi museum consists of just a handful of oppressively small rooms off a hall done in the dreary institutional yellows and browns mid-20th century, the glass display cases are crammed with the machines and mementos of a secretive state security apparatus. The walls are crowded with photos, documents, and densely-typed explanatory placards—all, unfortunately, in German, making it imperative to plump €3 for the English audio tour to learn the (often bizarre) details behind Stasi methods.

Why did detention cells have two beds? So interrogators could recruit each cellmate to inform on the other.

What’s with the jaunty school uniform? You could sign up to be a Stasi agent and begin informing on your school chums at age 13.

Did you notice that the handles differ on either side of the doors in the office complex's antechamber? That was so anyone entering it, either from outside to come in or from the inner hall in order to exit, could simply push down the handle to get into room—but once in, you needed a key (or, more precisely, a Stasi member with a key) to get out.

Those accordioned bits of yellow felt individually sealed in mason jars? Suspected agitators would be “invited” to the Runde Ecke for interminable interviews—after which the swatch of felt upon which the suspect had unwittingly been sitting would be jarred.

This created a sniffable catalog for trained Stasi dogs to peruse and they tried to match a scent to any anti-government pamphlets and propaganda that popped up.

Paging Maxwell Smart

The Stasi Museum doesn’t dwell entirely in chilling Cold War thriller territory. The skeletal “Uncle Sam” anti-capitalist propaganda is almost amusing. As my friend Larry Bleiberg pointed out, there’s more than a hint of Get Smart to the disguise kits Stasi agents would use to keep subjects from realizing they were being tailed by the same person day after day—clownish makeup, false noses, and ludicrous mustaches and beards.

Then there are the briefcases containing quick-change outfits. A hard hat, coveralls, wig, and skin-tint were handy if you needed a new identify fast.

The most popular disguise, though, was “photojournalist”—then you didn’t even have to hide your camera in one of the false bellies or super-spy corduroy jackets with lens holes in the zippers and shutter release cables in the pockets.

(Fun fact: the Stasi helped develop the first camera with a silent shutter—the better to spy in secrecy.)

One of the museum audio tracks even includes a Stasi-era joke: A local man wrote a letter to his grandmother in Western Germany (loosely translated): “Thank you for the pistol. I have buried it in the garden.” A few weeks later, he wrote again: “The Stasi have dug up the garden. You can send the tulip bulbs now."

The beginning of the end

Every Monday evening, dozens of Stasi agents and contingents of uniformed police would arrive at the Nikolaikirche on the far side of town to keep a close eye on the church's regular peace prayers. Under oddly Miami-ish columns fashioned like rococo pink-and-green palm trees, the bishop and notable locals—including Kurt Masur, conductor of the famed Gewandhaus orchestra—would make impassioned pleas for a non-violent revolution.

During the Monday prayers of Oct. 9, 1989, the Nikolaikirche was filled to standing-room capacity, and 2,000 people heard the bishop's call to march on the Runde Ecke—but he had one condition. Everyone must carry a candle in both hands, because if you are carrying a candle you cannot carry a weapon, and if you are not carrying a weapon you give the authorities no excuse to stop you.

When the worshippers exited the church, they were met by ten of thousands of other Leipzigers.

Every single one of them was carrying a candle.

In all, some 70,000 Leipzigers marched up the ring road around the Old City to the Runde Ecke. As Horst Sindermann, member of the GDR's central committe, later remarked: "We had planned everything. We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers."

The Oct. 9, 1989, march on the Runde Ecke helped kick off the Wende movement that would eventually lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the entire Communist Block—and would spell the end of the Stasi reign of terror.

Dittrichring 24; tel. 0341-961-2443; www.runde-ecke-leipzig.de; open daily 10am–6pm; free.

Broken boats, injured crews, and other brushes with death: Day 1 of the 116 summer sailing trip, 2010

2010-06-26T09:00:00.019-04:00

Sailing: Day 1

Key Largo to Rodriguez Key. [Repeat]

Our 41-foot Hunter was called Blue Moon, but we nicknamed it "The Camry," because on two separate occasions we found ourselves in a situation in which we could sail it just fine… we just couldn't make it stop.

First day out, we got a late afternoon start because the tides trapped us in the Key Largo Marina. To relieve the boredom of waiting, I arranged to be nearly brained by the anchor of a hanging boat.

In which we almost lose one boat (and I almost die) before we even get out of the marina

Blue Moon was a whole lot bigger than Captain Rhoad’s own boat, a 29-footer (I believe) he keeps on the Chesapeake. So I don’t blame him. He was being forced to get the hang of this gargantuan new boat in a terribly narrow marina channel, in a blasted rush, with the locals yelling at him to hurry up, and at full speed.

This is because, though we had been told we'd be stuck in the marina until 5pm or 6pm waiting for the high tide to open an exit, no one had mentioned that the fuel station, which we had to visit before setting off and which lay just a few hundred yards down at the end of the marina, would be closing at 5pm.

By 4:30pm, we had just started loading our gear and a week’s worth of food onto the boats (most of it was still in the parking lot, being staged and divided between the Blue Moon and our other boat, a 36-foot Pearson called Stargazer), when someone from the fuel station wandered up and warned us of their imminent closure.

We started frantically slinging gear on board both boats. In the process, some people’s personal gear ended up on the wrong boat, other bits were misplaced for the duration, and a few pieces managed to get lost entirely.

Every five minutes or so, the fuel jerks would swing by to remind us of the ticking clock in nasty tones.

Keep in mind there were only four people on this tip who had any idea what they were doing: Blue Moon had 80-year-old Capt. Rhoad, an old Navy salt, Mark and Stew’s former Scoutmaster, and the only one of the lot of us who actually owned his own large sailboat. It also had a hugely under-qualified First Mate, me, who has been sailing precisely once before.

Stargazer had Captain Mark Weiss (who has owned boats) and his able First Mate Stew Lee, both veterans of at least three previous weeklong scout sailing trips.

Stargazer also had Scotty, who has been sailing a few times, but until this trip never really bothered paying attention.

Blue Moon had the Rosenbergs (Ian and his dad Stuart), who do know how to sail, but – with all due respect -- are used to puttering around lakes and bays in one-man Lasers, not taking on the open ocean in a 41-foot sloop. I was mightily happy to have them aboard my boat, but they had a steep learning curve as well.

Nearly all of the other boys were willing and eager to help, but they were, to a man, all landlubbing newbies to whom all the boat terminology (and protocol and operation) was a totally foreign tongue, so at first they got more in the way than anything,

So, while the boys finished flinging food and packs helter-skelter below decks, the officers hurriedly unhooked both boats' various umbilicals and stowed them (water hoses, power lines).

We cast off the Stargazer before its entire crew was aboard, and then quickly cast off Blue Moon in such a hurry we left Ian behind on the dock, still holding one of the mooring lines. He looked a little confused at first, then hurt when he realized we’d abandoned him. He threw up his arms disbelievingly, and said “What?…” Then he grumbled “Aw, man!,” and started coiling his line and turning to trudge up the marina toward the fuel station to meet us.

I probably would have done more to help him, but at the time was busy diving across the deck for my iPhone. In the rush, I had absentmindedly slipped it into my shirt pocket, which was dumb. When I tripped on the jib sheet running below the rail and my chest scraped along the cable of the mast stay, it ripped the button off my shirt pocket and the phone went flying, skittering across the deck. I flung myself after it and managed to snatch it just as it started going over the lip headed for the drink. I secured it in my pants’ zippered cargo pocket, reminding myself later to find my pack in the pile below and dig out the water-resistant cellphone case I’d bought for this trip.

Someone had told Captain Rhoad it might be easiest to back down the marina to the fuel docks, but that wasn't working, so -- with giant fishing charter boats returning every five minutes or so, each dangling 40 to 50 paying passengers form the gunwales and pretty much hogging the marina channel – the captain tried to turn the huge, ungainly, unfamiliar boat around in the tight space.

I was up on the bow, having cast off the last mooring line and stranded poor Ian, standing on call to fend and gingerly rubbing the raw rash on my knee I had just gotten from diving for my phone, when someone suddenly shouted "Reid!" with urgent terror.

I spun around to see an anchor aimed at my skull, about a foot away and closing rapidly. My brain was still trying to work out what an anchor could possibly be doing at eye level, but luckily for my brain my body reacted without awaiting instructions.

I buckled my knees and fell backward, just managing to duck the speeding anchor. At the same time, I reached up my arms to catch the prow of the boat to which the anchor was attached. My brain finally caught up.

“Ah,” it surmised. “This must be that small boat I noticed earlier that was hanging on the far side of the marina.” (Many people with houses on a permanent slip and smallish boats have winch mechanisms to hoist their craft up into a suspended version of dry dock; it keeps the barnacles off).

That sorted out, my brain also starting issuing orders.

I screamed "Reverse! Reverse!" back toward the Captain and did a pull-up on the prow of the other boat to I could lift my legs, plant my feet against the marina's far wall, and try vainly to push a 41-foot boat backwards.

Luckily, the Captain was quick and slammed us into reverse. This stopped our forward motion. Then I saw another problem, one even worse than hitting the marina wall, and screamed back, "Stop! Stop! ALL STOP! RIGHT NOW!"

The anchor-studded prow of the other boat was now fully cantilevered over the bow of Blue Moon, and it had neatly inserted itself between our mainmast stays and the jib, which was furled and trailing its two taught sheets back to the cockpit. In other words, it was a spider web of steel cables, ropes, and masts, and thrust into the middle of it was the enormous end of another boat, bristling with the pointy parts of the anchor. And we were drifting.

There was only inches of clearance on either side of the invading boat, and with the engine churning, current flowing, and tiller spinning, all it would take was the tiniest nudge in the wrong direction for the prow of the other boat to careen across our decks and rip the rigging right off our boat.

In fact, as I watched, ineffectually pushing with all my might against it, our outer stay slowly rode up along the side of the hanging boat and, with the telltale twang of a braided steel cable, sheared off a few inches of paint.

At that moment, Stuart Rosenberg and our crew captain, Jon Pfeil, materialized next to me and threw themselves against the other boat. Using every last ounce of available strength, issuing strangled shouts back to the captain of “Left!,” “Now back,” and, “No, Right! Right! Right!”, inch by inch we were able to push ourselves off while micromanaging the direction, allowing us to unthread the other boat's prow from our rigging.

We got a round of disdainful applause from the Stargazer as we pulled up too moor alongside her at the fuel docks.

[to be sung] Sailing, sailing, knowing we cannot stop…

Fully fueled, we still had to wait the arrival of high tide to get out -- the Blue Moon pulled a draft of five feet to Stargazer’s four, so we always played it safe – so we left Mark and Oliver on the boats and trooped up the road to the Circle K for giant, insulated 64-oz. plastic mugs of soda, not fully realizing the irony of buying a refillable mug from a chain store when we would spend the rest of the week at sea, far away from any Circle K (the Stargazer crew ended up stringing their mugs into a garland in their main cabin).

Finally, we motored out of the long marina channel, made it to open waters, and raised our sails. Soon, the captain let Jon take the wheel, and I plugged my iPod into the sound system to blast the main theme from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” soundtrack. We were grinning and excited. All was well.

We had sailed -- pretty much at random, just to get the hang of the boat -- a grand total of maybe 90 minutes before the setting sun and gathering clouds nudged us to turn south to head toward the lee of tiny Rodriguez Key to anchor. Stargazer had already made the same decision, and was maybe 15 minutes ahead of us.

As we sailed into trickier, shallower waters on the lee of the island, we turned on the engine, lowered the main mast and started furling in the jib.

However, as soon as we had the jib furled, something went WHANG! and the jib unfurled itself again, suddenly and violently, yanking the sheets out of the surprised boys' hands.

In the whipping wind of a gale that simultaneously came down, those free sheets (the lines used to furl and unfurl the jib) snaked wildly around and quickly wrapped around each other to formed a complex Gordian knot. Just then, the sun disappeared and the rain began slashing down in torrents.

As the boat pitched to and fro in the five-foot seas of the gale, Captain Rhoad tried to keep the ship in irons (pointing directly into the wind so your sails don’t fill with it and you aren’t fighting the wind – a fight you will always lose). This kept the jib flapping as Jon Pfeil and I inched our way to the foredeck in the white fury.

We braced ourselves against the deck and the mainstay and used a free line to capture the snaking, tangled, wildly flapping jib sheets and then wrapped the line around a stay to give us some leverage.

We took turns hauling with all our might on the far end of the tangled jib sheets in order to get a tiny bit of slack into the line. This would allow the other person to attack one layer of the multifarious knot. We switched off whenever the slack-producer's fingers gave out and arms went numb from fatigue. We’d make a tiny bit of headway, then an errant gust of wind would blow the jib, yank the sheet out of our hands, and pull it taught -- and the knot tight – again.

After about 40 minutes, with the help of a plumber’s wrench, we finally got the two sheets untangled, which would at least allow us to control and trim the jib. We stumbled back to the cockpit, exhausted, fingers cramped and hands trembling, forearm muscles aching from the unaccustomed exertion. I now know why Popeye has such engorged forearms.

The problem now was, there was no way to furl the jib. That “WHANG!” we had heard turned out to be the jib furling line disengaging and coming clean out of the furling assembly at the base of the mast. It was now nothing more than a spare length of rope.

The Captain and I sat at the bow as we headed out to deeper waters, our legs dangling off the prow and repeatedly dunked into the oncoming (and surprisingly warm) waves as the boat crashed through them. We poked around the furling drum with flashlights and were only able to determine that it was a wonderfully engineered device with a self-contained spring apparatus… and that there was no way to take it apart and fix it without the right kind of tools.

Given the dark and the storm and the wind, the captain didn't want to risk lowering the whole jib assembly with the halyard, since it would require some hand be up at the bow, gathering in the sail as it came down. One errant gust of wind could easily billow the sail, yank it overboard, and sweep into the dark seas any hapless scouts who were up there trying to control it.

So, instead, we made the only decision we could.

We simply kept sailing.

All night long.

We taught boys how to tack with the jib, warning the crew with a shout of “Coming about!” then starting the tack with a call of “Hard to lee!”

Once the boat came across the wind, the man at the wheel would yell “Break!,” which was the signal for the deckhand on the now-leeward side to crank in his jib sheet furiously while the deckhand on the other side let his line out for slack. It was a simple, but precise maneuver, and we now had 12 hours to practice it.

We spent the night pacing back and forth in the safe, deep waters, continually passing and re-passing Rodriguez Key, behind which the Stargazer was affixed to a mooring ball, its crew engaged in such soft, landlubby activities as "eating dinner" and "sleeping."

Luckily, the gale soon abated, the clouds parted, and our perfect heading turned out to be: the moon. So that's where I set my sail. I kept the full moon at my mast for a mile or so, then tacked and kept it at my stern.

The night was filled with stars and salt air. The only sounds were the gentle rush of water along the boat, occasional luffing flap of the sail or soft snap of a line in the wind, and the creaking voice that boats have always had, whether made of wood or Fiberglass. Looking from west to southwest across the velvet sky, we could see Venus, Mars, and Saturn strung out in a line like gems on the pearl necklace of the Milky Way.

Somewhere around midnight, the Captain and Ian's watch (Anthony and Oliver) took over, and Stuart stayed up with them, while Jon and I went below to fail to sleep for a few hours. The younger boys were all asleep on their feet, even the ones on watch, and had to be roused when it came time to tack--or, when eager Oliver was at the wheel, jibe. (Oliver also quickly perfect the technique of steering with his feet so he could use his hands to hold his book, a flashlight wedged between his chin and shoulder. This sharp attention to his duties might explain why he jibed so much.)

Around 4am, Jon and I roused his watch’s two deckhands, Gunner and Pretsch, and came back above deck to continue sailing for the moon until I saw Aurora appear on the faintly lightening horizon. We watched brooding Jupiter rise in the southeast -- accompanied, incredibly, by tiny Uranus, shining bright silver high in the sky.

Finally, the sun came up to warm our soaked and tired bones.

Now that it was daylight we were ready to make headway, but it was still only daybreak So we paced past Rodriguez Key a few more times, glaring jealously at a gently bobbing Stargazer, waiting for them to wake up and debating how early was too early to call, considering the relatively cushy night they’d had.

(The best we’d accomplished in terms of comfort all night was to dash below to the galley every once in a while, grab a handful of roasted chicken, and carry it topside to stuff into our mouths in the dark as we sailed. It all felt very primal and manly, if you overlooked the fact that the birds had all been nicely pre-roasted by the grocery store and neatly packaged in plastic containers.)

Stargazer finally radioed us a good morning, and we told them to get a move on, since all our scouts were now experienced sailors with 14 hours of hard sailing under their belts, whereas their crew was still comprised mostly of passengers who had merely taken a leisurely 90-minute pleasure cruise the evening before.

They pleaded they had yet to eat breakfast. On Blue Moon, we exchanged greasy grins, our chins still smeared with chicken bits, and called them all sorts of synonyms for sissy. Still, we hollered down below for someone on the other watch to figure out where the bagels and cream cheese had been tossed the day before. (The bagels were under a bench; the cream cheese was, of all the miracles, actually in the tiny fridge.)

Finally, on our umpteenth southwest passage past Rodriguez Key (we had altered our pacing a bit to put us on our eventual desired heading), we saw the Stargazer raising its mainsail.

We gave a whoop and raised our own, thankful that we could continue on our current heading without having to turn around yet again and wear our weary trough in the seas even deeper.

We radioed them to hurry up and catch up, and continued sailing merrily across the sun-dazzled waters, our sails and hearts filled with the second wind of a new day and an actual destination: Channel Five and its 65' bridge, which would allow us and our 64' mast to nip under it to gain the leeward side of the Florida Keys, where we could drop anchor in calm waters away from the wind and finally figure out what was wrong with our !@#$%ing jib. It would take us all day to get there, but we could make it.

After 15 minutes of making great time, we still hadn't seen Stargazer come from behind the rapidly receding Rodriguez Key. Couldn't raise them on the radio, either. I gave them five minutes. Then five minutes more.

Finally, wearily, I called for a tack and we turned around, yet again, to head back the way we had come and see what was going on.

Turns out Stargazer had run over its own mooring ball as they attempted to sail away, and its thick rope had gotten hopelessly tangled in their propeller. You may be picturing a propeller at the back of a boat, but that’s only on the outboard motors of dinghies or on the screws of a massive ship. On a sailboat, the prop is more toward the middle of the boat, and the rudder is actually behind it -- that way, you can make use of the wash created by the prop and flowing over the rudder to turn the boat much more quickly.

Of course, putting the prop down there under the middle of the keel does make things a bit tricky if you have to get to it while the boat is still in the water.

During their radio silence since breakfast, Stew and Mark had spent the past hour diving under their boat with knives, trying to saw through the five-inch braided line and free their boat.

They had finally gotten a smaller line untangled so they could raise the thicker mooring line just high enough in the water to hack at it while still at snorkel level. This was key, because now they didn’t have to dive down, locate the mooring line in the murky water, and have time only to give it one or two saws before needing to head back up for air.

However, this was not before the pitching and heaving of the boat overhead had done its damage to the intrepid captain and his first mate. Banging them repeatedly on the head was one thing. Infinitely worse were the barnacles lining the bottom of the boat, which flayed ribbons of skin off their backs and gouged deep cuts into their arms.

After they finally got free (and being good Boy Scouts, after they retied the mooring ball to its line, which was now about five feet shorter) and were back on board and underway, they had to institute a "blood detail" to keep swabbing down the decks, now slippery with their blood, while others swabbed and treated their wounds to staunch further bleeding.

We had been at sea roughly 15 hours, and already had one broken boat, two injured officers, and one thoroughly exhausted crew. Also, our main cabin was filled with chicken parts that had been flung around all night.

Ah, sailing.

Should tourists go to North Korea?

2010-01-28T17:02:00.003-05:00

So, now Americans can visit North Korea year-round (not just during the big showcase Arirang spectacle of creepily syncronized kindergarten kids). See: http://www.northkorea1on1.com

The real question is: should we be going at all? I am sure all visits will be as structured, regimented, and closely guarded as ever (a tourism variant on the old Potemkin Village), so would that stifle any of the potential benefits travel otherwise usually brings--a cultural exchange on a personal level in which people from both nations get to learn a bit about one another and, hopefully, foster a greater understanding.

Or will it be more of the same story: tourists blithely contributing to both the piggybank of a repressive regime and helping further its propoganda machine.

In other words, should travel to North Korea be boycotted, as it frequently is to other despotic countries like Myanmar?

ReidsGuides.com
Travel beyond vacations (tm)

New passport, how to I hate thee?...

2009-07-18T13:35:00.003-04:00

I hate the new passports. I'm not just talking about the truly horrendous digitized photograph of me that makes me look like a shiny, blubbery, 450-pound rubberized simulacrum of myself. That's to be expected (though how, in the digital age, passport photos are getting worse rather than better is beyond me).

I hate the treacly, jingoistic "America the Beautiful" theme that makes every page scream USA! USA! USA! I VOTED FOR GEORGE W. BUSH!

Also why, in a document designed expressly for the purposes of visiting other countries, does every page serve as an ad to stay home and see the wonders of this country? OK, so sure, the first photo/engraving page sports my own hometown sights of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Clearly, they're trying to butter me up. Won't work.

After Philly's contributions, we get Cape Cod, Mt. Rushmore, and the Statue of Liberty. We get a Mississippi riverboat, places in the west where buffalo roam beneath Teton-y peaks and men in cowboy hats wrangle longhorns, some flat place in the Midwest where wheat and handplows rule, a train in Utah, and a grizzly eating salmon in the shade of a totem pole in the Pacific Northwest, saguaro in Arizona, and a palm tree in Hawaii. This patriotic march of images culminates in a final photo which implies, by extension, that the U.S. also owns the moon and outer space in general. Nice. And we wonder why the rest of the world finds us to arrogant and self-important.

I also hate the instructions that the document is never to be folded, spindled, or mutilated for fear of damaging the Big Brother microchip embedded inside so anyone with a receiver can steal all my personal data. Don't they know what travel does to a passport? The one I sent in to have replaced resembled nothing so much as a wad of damp cardboard with a mash-up of some exotic stamps barely visible in it.

Finally: I hate the fact that I have to memorize a whole new passport number. What was wrong with the old one?

Brooklyn B&Bs

2007-09-23T20:56:00.001-04:00

Here are the closest B&Bs and inns in Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope, Brooklyn.

View Larger Map

Chasing Lorenzo around Rome

2007-05-24T23:55:00.000-04:00

The NorthWest Airlines employee at the gate assured me, yet again, in a syrup voice that our 4:15pm flight would leave on time. This despite the fact that (a) Frances had just told me the NWA.com web site was showing a 20-minute delay and, (b) it was already 4:05pm and there was as yet no actual plane at the gate.

I don't know about you, but I've never seen a flight land, taxi, offload, get cleaned, switch out crews, load up again, taxi, and take off in ten minutes.

Right after the woman lied to me about my flight, I noticed a man drop a plastic toploader folder out of his bag as he walked down the terminal. I picked it up, caught him up, and returned his folder.

This will become significant, in some small way, later on in the story of my day spent chasing Lorenzo de' Medici around Rome.... Full Story

The Winter Wolves of Yellowstone National Park

2007-02-15T18:01:00.000-05:00

"We're going to follow that bald eagle up the river," said veteran Yellowstone guide Leslie Quinn as we watched the magnificent bird flap past. Leslie threw into gear his bright yellow Bombadier—a vintage 1960s snowcoach shaped like a gumdrop reclining on tank treads—and crunched up the snow-packed road into the heart of the world's oldest national park....» Full Story

Horseback in the Andes

2007-01-17T00:43:00.000-05:00

Tomas Alarcon trotted his horse up to ride beside mine and pointed to the vertical layer cake of limestone and shale that rose above the ugly scar of a mining road across the valley.

"I climbed those cliffs when I was a child," said my Chilean guide. "And you know what? There are millions and millions of seashell fossils in the rock. Here, at nearly five thousand meters!"

We rode in silence for a minute, pondering the massive tectonic forces that could lift what was once the bed of the Pacific Ocean more than 16,000 feet above sea level and create the cut-glass peaks of the Andes mountains.... Full Story

116-Rafting Montana, Day 3

2006-07-30T00:20:00.000-04:00

On the third day, we broke camp early for a change and drove back through Missoula (pausing to stock up on groceries and, for the adults, to call home quickly and be sure families and work were getting along OK without us) then headed west on I-90 to rip some serious rapids and get a change of scenery along the Clark Fork of the Columbia River.

Got off Rte. 90 about a half-hour west of Missoula at Cyr for the river put-in. While Stew and Dan did the truck shuffle to leave a vehicle at the take-out point, the boys readied the raft and duckies. It too them a while to finish due to the distraction of dozens of bikini clad women all around them also preparing for the river. (Plus one disturbing man: paunchy, pasty, bandy-legged, and wearing naught but a miniscule and virulently colored Speedo.)

In the ogling boys' defense, they weren't the only ones in the group to get "Itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, red polka-dot bikini" stuck in their heads for the rest of the day. (Trust me, it was red, not yellow--what little of it there was, that is.)... Full Story

116-Rafting the Blackfoot, Day 2

2006-07-29T00:15:00.000-04:00

I was awakened nest morning by a woodpecker practicing his Morse code and the honking of Canada geese. Though hiking can take you to a greater variety of places, river trips trump backpacking in two key areas. You can just roll off your craft for a refreshing dunk in the river whenever you get overheated, and the boat can carry a ton of stuff--think: steak dinners with wine (not that the Boy Scouts guzzle Cabernet, but for rafting or kayaking in general).... Full Story

116-Rafting the Blackfoot, Day 1

2006-07-28T00:14:00.000-04:00

The great thing about having former members of 116 scattered to the four winds is that the troop retains the right to call them back into service at any moment. Agnew and Dave Henderson were tapped to purchase the new van we had waiting when the troop arrived in Colorado. I came along to held lead (i.e.: drive) for the second half of the trip (and Agnew for a week of it). And, when we hit Missoula, Montana late one night, we crashed at Dan Berger's place.

Since graduating from the troop just a few years behind the likes of Agnew and I, Dan has become not only a journalist but also a professional river guide on the side. This meant that, rather than shell out $250 per person per day for a multi-day rafting trip with some outfitter, we were going to get three days on a pair of Montana rivers for free. All it cost the troop budget was the food, the beer, and the cost of renting a couple of duckies--an inflatable type of kayak--to supplement Dan's raft...Full Story.

116-Across the Backbone of the Americas

2006-07-25T23:02:00.000-04:00

"You guys want to take the shorter, easier trail over that low pass, or the longer, harder one straight up that way?" As soon as I asked, I knew I had sealed my fate. Also, John Agnew's. No way six teenage Boy Scouts were going to let their adult leaders take the easy way over the Continental Divide.

Never mind that we'd already hiked eight miles at high altitude in the Canadian Rockies--in some places using knotted chains to haul ourselves up vertical cliffs around waterfalls. It didn't matter that we'd climbed nearly 2,000 vertical feet over the last mile alone.

The boys weren't even taking into consideration that we hadn't gotten to bed until 5am that morning, or that Agnew had arrived from Denver late last night expecting to spend his first day on the trip sightseeing in Calgary.

The vote was unanimous for the thigh-burning, lung-aching, nearly vertical little trail--Canadians apparently don't believe in switchbacks--barely scratched into the scree and dust that led up over the highest pass.

We had managed to drag ourselves out of bed at the crack of 10:30am, backtrack north to Kananaskis, and head up the trail along Ribbon Creek in the Spray Valley Provincial Park, Stew leaving us to it in order to drive around to meet us on the other side.

It threatened rain all day. In fact, it sprinkled on us at Ribbon Falls Lake campground where we stopped for lunch and to keep an eye on the weather while we were below the tree line and within an easy lope of the ranger's station should we need to escape a thunderstorm.

Hours later, at the top of the Divide as we hollered our triumphant yells and frightened a few local marmots, I felt more stray raindrops. It was humbling to realize that those drops landing on my left were bound for the Pacific Ocean, while those on the right would eventually make their way to the Atlantic.

We scrambled down talus slopes on the other side, back into fir forest, then finally to the dirt road where the van and Stew were waiting. After some debate, we had dinner at a park picnic table by a little lake, followed by a long drive during which Agnew and I jerked awake occasionally to see an impressive solitary elk or cavalcade of soft brown deer by the roadside and tried and keep up a conversation with Stew so as to keep our driver awake.

Finally, we finally found some forgettable campground by the side of the road that was open where we could flop for the night. Agnew and I set up my tent and fell instantly into deep, well-earned sleep.

116-Yoho, Yoho, It's over the Pass We Go

2006-07-24T12:49:00.000-04:00

We marched out to the van two by two--we always have to try and confuse hoteliers as to how many more people than we claimed we had were actually crammed into their rooms--and munched on cold, greasy pizza for breakfast as we drove east into Yoho National Park (www.parkscanada.ca/yoho).

Yoho receives a mere fraction of the visitors at world renowned Banff, which is what they call this exact same stretch of wilderness on the Alberta side of the border.

We stopped briefly at Natural Bridge, a Greek-Key–shaped spit of rock over a riotously rushing section of glacial melt-off thundering under the stone and gushing down the stream beyond in a flurry of freezing white water,

We pulled into Emerald Lake intending merely to take a quick spin around its cool, shockingly reflective waters--the deep color caused by light refracting off microparticles of glacial rock--and to point out to the boys the famous Burgess Shale deposit of rare, Cambrian-era fossils of soft-bodied marine animals that have taught scientists more about the emergence of early animal life than any other site in the world.

During our circuit, Stew and I noticed a second trail diverging up and over Yoho Pass. It was only 6.6 miles, so while Stew went to drive the van around to the trail's other end, the boys and I strapped on hiking boots.

Over the Pass
The trail that began in mud flats braided with streamlets and bridged by thick wooden planks quickly gave way to a narrow, steep track through wildflowers. We sang "Yoho, Yoho, across the bridge we go" and, once we realized there were seven of us, quickly assigned dwarf names to each person. Quinn was Dopey, Dan Bashful, Ezra (given his snuffly bean contact low of the evening before) Sneezy, Mike was a natural for Sleepy, Ari became by default Grumpy (though that didn't really fit his character, as even when he was bitshing it was with an infectious enthusiasm), equinamable Karis was Happy, and me, I was Doc. We argued hwo best to break the news to Stew that he had become, by the process of elimination, Snow White.

The elevation gain from the lake to the pass was 1,700 feet. We did the 1,200 of it in one fell swoop over the course of a mile, the cool rush of a nearby mountain stream, invisible off to the left, teasing us as we climbed.

Thunder was grumbling and dark clouds peaking over Emerald Glacier by the time we got to the main falls, so we scrambled across a wide talus slope made up of several old avalanches to the safety of the tree cover. A giant guardian boulder stood athwart the path right at the tree line like a gate to the forest. Just beyond it, we paused to eat apples in the shade of the fir trees while the grumbling storm decided not to hit our valley and moved on.

At pretty little Yoho Lake on the other side of the pass, we hollered a hello to two French-speaking Canadian girls looked frightened that we might decide to stay and ruin their gorgeous (and, until our arrival, quiet) campsite. Stew was waiting for us there, enjoying an afternoon of incredible wildlife spotting: mountain goats, black-tailed deer, elk, black bear, and a grizzly mother with her cub.

The trail bottomed out by a dirt road by the Whiskey Jack Hostel beyond which the trail continued to an 838-foot-high waterfall called Takakkaw, a Cree word whose meaning could apply to the whole region: "It is magnificent."

There was another squall of fat rain as we hustled up the trail, and we got soaked in mist at base, but that didn't stop the boys from scrambling over wet boulders as close to the base of the falls as they could get. Shivering, I retreated along the trail back out of the mist zone.

A Late Lunch and A Change of Plans
We finally got our lunch of cold cuts at some picnic tables near the falls. Of course, it was 10pm, but we called it lunch. In our defense, we thought it was only 9pm because we had made the mistake of determining the time by asking Ezra, and Ezra had not yet reset his watch to Mountain Time (which doesn't, incidentally, start where it should, at the BC/Alberta border along the Continental Divide, but rather over along the ridge of the Columbias, around Glacier NP).

We decided we'd be late enough (like, and hour) picking up Agnew at Calgary, so rather than take the time to find a campground in Banff and unpack so the boys and I could set up camp while Stew went and collected Agnew, we just all stayed in the van and zipped through Banff then hauled down to Calgary where, of course, we made several wrong turns trying to find the airport.

"Let's go back to that seedy part of town and look for a cheap motel," said Stew, so we all piled into the "suite" at the Traveller's Inn motel where I found free WiFi. The boys watched Gremlins 2 while Stew, Agnew, and I chatted until Stew asked, "Is the sky lightening out there?"

"Of course not," I said, blaming the city lights of Calgary as I stepped over Ari in his sleeping bag to jigger aside the curtain a bit more and look out. Sure enough, the sky was brightening. "Oh my God," I said and fumbled for my cell phone to check the time. It was 5am, so we decided maybe it would be a good idea to get a little sleep.

See, although Agnew was still under the impression that tomorrow was to be spent calmly sightseeing in Calgary, he was forgetting that, during a six-week circle tour across the continent by Troop 116, the only bit of the original schedule we ever stick to are the airport dates for swapping out adult leaders, most of whose jobs, families, and stamina only allow them to spend a week or two on the road.

In other words, we weren't touring Calgary tomorrow. No, we had decided to check out early and head back north for a little 14-mile hike over the Continental Divide.

116-Down Mt. Revelstoke At High Speed

2006-07-23T22:14:00.000-04:00

We could tell we were in a strange, foreign land just from the roadside billboards:

"CORN (Coming Soon)"
"British Columbia Improvement Project; End of Project"
"WARNING: Killer Highway Ahead"
"Executive Realty, Call Us First" (and no phone number)
"Studies Show Guys Like Cold Beer (That Was A Waste of Money)"

As we wended our way east on the Transcanada Highway, following the deep blue-green water of the South Thompson River, we were passed by nearly endless freight trains (the boys counted: 118 and 132 cars were the two longest). The river slowly widened into the long, scraggly arm of Shuswap Lake hemmed by low, fir-clad mountains.

We went past the Blind Bay Visitors Center--which doubled as the River of Life Community Church (Stew: "Either way, they'll show you the way")--and stopped at Craigellachie to pay our bemused respects to the Last Spike (Canada's version of the Golden Spike that finally linked their west and east coasts by rail on Nov. 7, 1885).

After many tantalizing billboards, we finally came upon the promised Enchanted Forest ("Climb...Explore...See & Do!"), which was described in guidebook as a "kitschy roadside attraction" involving "numerous fairies and other figures, including a craft pirate, scattered around a forest."

It looked even hokier and chintzier than it sounded: rickety miniature plywood princess castles sloppily slapped with paint. But---and this was the unbelievable part--the parking lot was overflowing with cars and camper trailers. The place was simply packed out. I yelled out the van window at the idiots as we zipped past, pointing out that there were six major national parks just a few hours up the road.

Karis Goes Head over Heels for Revelstoke
Western Canada is justifiably famous for its national parks: Banff and Jasper in the Canadian Rockies of Alberta, Glacier in the heart of British Columbia.

Naturally, Troop 116 ignored those parks almost completely.

Instead, our first stop was unheralded Mt. Revelstoke National Park (www.parkscanada.ca/revelstoke), where we met Jeff Sorenson, a Canadian who's not afraid to say "aboot." In his thick BC accent, he told us about his family's generations of lumberjacking and woodworking as he steered his truck up the Meadows in the Sky Parkway through the cedar and hemlock of the lower-altitude temperate rainforest to the balsams and spruce of the high snow forest as we crowned one of the park's 6,600-foot peaks.

Jeff accompanied us for a walk around tiny Balsam Lake and along a short trail through alpine meadows sprinkled with purple daisies, Indian paintbrush, bluebells, and Queen Anne's lace to a point overlooking the Columbia River hemmed in by the Selkirk and Monashee Mountains.

Jeff's Arrow Adventure Tours (877-277-6965, www.arrowadventuretours.com) was providing us with both the ride up the mountain and a set of bikes so we could coast back down the impossibly switchbacked, 16-mile road for nearly 4,900 vertical feet. "You'll probably get up some pretty good speed," was all Jeff said.

I'd guess we were going about 40 mph when we hit that first hairpin turn. I slowed and turned my wheel, as you might expect someone who has ever ridden a bicycle before to do.

Right behind me, Andy Karis tried a different tack. Ignoring the handbrakes and refusing to steer, he decided to slam in the bushes lining the curve at full speed.

Karis flipped over his handlebars and disappeared into the dense foliage, immediately followed by his somersaulting mountain bike. For all we knew, there was a cliff just beyond, so as the rest of the troop came screeching to a halt, I went pelting back up the road yelling, "Andy!"

After a few seconds came the reply: "I'm OK.... Just someone get this bike off of me."

A Golden Evening
After a dip in the "dangerously cold" waters in town, we cruised through the Salmon Arm and Columbia River valley, exchanging the lower, older, more rounded Columbia Mountains for the craggy peaks of the Rockies. The landscape truly began resembling a less developed version of the Italian lake district. It was glorious, it was gorgeous, and Stew and I divided our time between admiring it and trying to wake the boys up to force them to admire it, too.

We intended to camp in Glacier National Park, we truly did. But one thing Canadians are not good at, at least in BC, is signposting things. This is our explanation as to how we managed to drive into, through, and out the other side of Glacier NP--even pausing to take photographs of a particularly neat waterfall in the distance--without actually realizing it.

Rather than backtrack--never retreat, never surrender!--we continued on into the town of Golden (www.tourismgolden.com). Though the area surrounding the town was packed with hostels (charging a ridiculous US$19 to $24 per person), cabins (from $110), and campgrounds ($14 to $20, at least in the parks), we took our cue from the thick layer of mosquitoes that coated our legs every time we stepped out of the van and opted instead for Packers Place, a handful of cozy, simple rooms above a tavern in the heart of downtown (429 N 9th Ave., 250-344-5951, $46).

Stew and I had a beer in the bar while the boys jogged up the street to order up a passel of greasy pizzas from the inventively named "Canadian 2 for 1 Pizza," which apparently stood for "2 hours of intense flatulence for each 1 slice you eat." Most of us cozied up to the TV in one of the rooms to munch on the greasy pizzas and watch "My Boyfriend's Back," which we all agreed was the world's funniest zombie movie ever, followed by a terribly disturbing episode of "Family Guy" ("Dear Diary: Jackpot!").

116-The Sun Never Sets from Australia to Canada

2006-07-22T23:41:00.000-04:00

Troop 116 was an hour late, but in 116 terms that's about four hours before I expected them. No worries, though, as it took me a full 90 minutes making my way through the Vancouver airport, given the grilling I got from immigration and, later, customs when--for the first time in my life (and I travel an obscene amount)--I got pulled out of line and ushered to the Canadian Customs Interrogation and Cavity Search Division. I seemed to have found my first Cauncks who put a strain on the theory that Canadians are unfailingly polite.

It's tough to travel for more than 25 hours (including a long layover in L.A.) and still be on the same day--proving yet once again that the sun never sets on the British Empire, at least not when traveling from Australia to Canada.

You'd figure the Customs Service interrogators would understand about long Transpacific flights and cut some slack to the bleary, cranky traveler whose brain is fogged from lack of sleep and prolonged exposure to extreme boredom. But no, they only become even more dubious of you when you hesitate or have to think for a second about your answers to their inane questions, each of which is repeated several times, in slight variations, over the course of the hour-long standing interrogation.

See, they're trying to catch you in a lie or changing your story--they're pathologically suspicious of single males with an incoming flight but no outgoing one, and they didn’t seem to buy my tale that an American Boy Scout troop was picking me up and I'd be driving across the Canadian Rockies before turning south into Montana.

I must admit, I got a little nervous when--after x-raying and rifling through my bags twice--one of the two humorless Canuck Customs agents assigned to harass me pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves as he asked "So, you're not carrying anything else on your person, sir?"

The Shaving of Andy Karis
The majority of the Greater Vancouver population was at the beach on this hot and sunny Saturday afternoon--and Vancouver has a lot of beaches. The boys ogled the sea of bikinis as we skirted miles of shoreline around West Vancouver.

We talked our way into a $25 "Family" ticket at UBC's famous Anthropology Museum, well-stocked with towering totem poles and piles of beaded masks and carved objects, most of them form Native cultures across North America. After about ten minutes inside, Stew suddenly did a Columbo pocket pat-down and announced he had locked the keys in the van. He borrowed a coat hanger from the ticket desk, and ten minutes of grunting and prying and fishing later, we got into the van and headed downtown.

Stanley Park is a peninsular blob jutting out from the tip of downtown and covered in the only urban rainforest in North America. We drove its circuit road and stopped to watch some Pakistanis play a cricket match for a little while and totally failed to understand what was going on or even fathom the basic rules of the game. Still, it looked idyllic, what with the lowering sun casting a golden glow to the grass and outlining the players' white uniforms in halos.

On our way back into town, Karis said he wondered what he'd look like with a Mohawk, so we kept stopping at hair salons, only to be turned away each time as it was around 6pm, closing time. Finally, we found a Korean barber who, when I stuck my head in and said "Good afternoon! Are you closed yet, or do you have time to shave my friend's head?" looked up at the clock and said, "OK, why not."

About halfway through, the barber's wife and small daughter arrived to find out why he hadn't come home yet and just stood in the doorway, confused, watching as a half-dozen Americans snapping photos circled their half-shorn friend in the barber's chair.

In Which We Try to Kill Ezra
After a long search for a pretty sad little suspension bridge (I had been told it was nearly as cool as the one at Capilano--which costs something ridiculous like $20 to cross), we drove back into town to a street by the park that boasted four bike rental shops and a store called "You and What Army?"

It also had a Mongolian BBQ with a sign in the window promising all you could eat for $9.95, so we went in for a cheap, filling meal and to make yet another attempt to kill our Senior Patrol Leader. A young Mongolian stood in the window, using the world's largest pair of chopsticks to toss and turn a pile of meat and veg around a giant flat skillet.

We shuffled down the sneeze-guarded buffet, filling our bowls with four meats, 20 vegetables, and a mix of 16 sauces to hand over to the chef and his giant chopsticks. Unfortunately, one of the sauces was black bean, and someone in line in front of Ezra must have picked it because, by the time we got back in the Van, our resident allergist was snuffling and wheezing and requesting wintergreen snacks, which he claims helps.

We nervously joked that if he got worse we would get to use his EpiPen on him. Ezra got animated and serious. "Nuh-uh! If anyone is going to use the EpiPen it's going to be me. I've been waiting 13 years for the chance to use that thing." Luckily, Ezra was going to have to postpone that date with the EpiPen a bit longer. We stoked him with wintergreen, Benadryl, decongestant, and tissue and kept waking him up during the long ride to Kamloops to be sure he was still breathing.

The first motel we stopped at wanted too much money. The second one advertised "free adult movies" as the first of its tantalizing amenities on the sign. So we ended up at the Rodeway Inn, with beetles in the bed, pubic hairs under the pillows, and a hole punched in the bathroom door. I didn't care. By that point I had been up for 50 hours straight, more than 24 of them aboard the various planes that got me from Australia to Canada. It was a bed, it was flat, and I fell into a blessed six hours of deep sleep.

Biking Vieques' Virgin Beaches and Kayaking the Bio Bay

2006-05-05T23:35:00.000-04:00

I've learned never to argue with a man holding a machete. So when one of our guides, Mark Franco, Jr., whipped out his blade and said "Hey, you want to see something neat?" I simply hung my helmet on the handlebars of my rented Specialized Rockhopper and followed Mark into the jungle.

Five minutes of hacking later, we arrived at the crumbling remains of Playa Grande, the last of the great Victorian sugar cane plantations. Tiny Vieques—Puerto Rico's "little daughter" just seven miles off its eastern shore—was once nicknamed Sugar Island, but the local industry collapsed in the 1930s. This plant struggled along until 1941, when the U.S. Navy took over most of Vieques to use for target practice.

"They relocated the whole village of workers," said Mark as we passed Playa Grande's broken rooms filled with leaf loam, picking our way down its arched brick corridors cracked open to the sky and fringed with garlands of vines. "It didn't take long for the jungle to reclaim it."

I had spent the morning circling the island's western end with Mark and his boss, Karl Husson, owner of La Dulce Vida Mountain Bike. Our tires fishtailed though sandy beachside trails and forded shallow streams as we whizzed past cove after abandoned cove of virgin beaches lined with coconut palms, mangrove, and sea grape—no resorts, no development, and only the occasional anchored boat for company.

We peeked into long cement ammo bunkers, camouflaged by grass roofs and empty save for the tiny bats clinging to the ceilings, and crossed the saddle of the island along a narrow path through thickets of mango and papaya.

After bushwhacking to the remains of Playa Grande, we turned onto the dirt road to Vieques' northwestern tip. Beyond the 1,058-acre nature preserve of Laguna Kiani, a dark lagoon girded by a tangle of mangrove, lay Green Beach. This long swathe of sand must not see many visitors; as I waded into the warm surf, crabs scuttled nonchalantly across my toes, and a curious ray swam up to investigate my ankles.

While Karl broke out the organic snacks, I wandered up the beach to Punta Arenas and stood in the shallows at land's end. The water swirling around my legs ran alternately warm and cool as the turquoise Caribbean mingled with the deep blue Atlantic.

The fact that we could experience this storybook slice of the Caribbean at all was something of a miracle. The Navy continued using 70% of Vieques' 26,000 acres as a punching bag until 2003, when protests and pressure finally forced them to turn it all over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The island's eastern half is still littered with decades' worth of unexploded ordnance—and is closed to the general public as a National Wildlife Refuge. But while the western end has been entirely cleared of unexploded bombs, it remains gloriously abandoned.

Much has been written of the island's inhabited central strip, and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the low-key village of Esperanza. I hit the self-proclaimed "smallest aquarium in the world" (a few algae-streaked tanks, a tub scuttling with Vieques' clawless lobsters, and room of Taino Indian artifacts), and I scarfed down tostones, jerk chicken strips, and chili con carne on the breezy wood-plank verandah of Banana's on the beachside road.

But it was those jungle-clad two-thirds of the island, off-limits for more than half a century and shrouded in mystery, that drew me to Vieques. To seek out its secret trails, I needed local guides like Karl, Mark, and Tim Raymond, a bear of a man who owned Aqua Frenzy Kayaks.

I hooked up with Tim for a nighttime kayak tour of Mosquito Bay—a name that gives entirely the wrong impression. The cove is crawling not with mosquitoes but dinoflagellates. You can't see these microorganisms—not even with 720,000 of the single-celled beasties swimming around each gallon of water—but since they flash with light when agitated, anything that passes through the Caribbean's best bioluminescent bay leaves a bright blue glow in its wake.

From his kayak, Tim delivered an informative nature lecture in laid-back dude patois as our paddles churned up ghostly effervescent glows and schools of fish shot through the water like turquoise tracer fire.

When we reached the best spot, I rolled off my kayak and swam in an aura of light, my flailing arms and legs leaving trippy echoes in blue. It was sublimely surreal. I filled my cheeks, tilted back my head, and sent a fountain of glowing blue shooting into the sky.

When you go...
Arriving: Vieques is a 25-40 min flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico ($160–$180) using Vieques Air Link (888-901-9247; www.viequesairlink.com), Cape Air (800-352-0714; www.flycapeair.com), or American Airlines (800-433-7300; www.aa.com).

Activities: La Dulce Vida (www.bikevieques.com; day rentals $35, half-day/8-12 mile tours $75).
Aqua Frenzy Kayaks (787-741-0913; two-hour tour $30).

Food & Lodging: Banana's Guest House is a simple Caribbean shack–like joint across from the beach: basic plank-floored rooms with no phone or TV, but with a friendly staff and one of the best casual dining spots along Esperanza's beachside road (787-741-8700; www.bananasguesthouse.com; with fan $65, with A/C $80).

Hix Island House has 13 lofts in four funky buildings that look a bit like Bauhaus-meets-Asia done in poured concrete geometry, with lots of interplay between inside/outside spaces; stylish and hip, with the prices to prove it (787-741-2302; www.hixislandhouse.com; $160-$210 in summer; $220-$295 in winter).

Reid Bramblett is the founder of ReidsGuides.com

Copyright © 2006 by Reid Bramblett

Entirely the Wrong Witch

2005-10-31T20:57:00.000-05:00

It is around 9pm on the last day of October, All Hallow's Eve. Back home, in America, it is Halloween, and everywhere kids are looking forward to the end of the school day when they can dress up and hit the streets to fill pillowcases with candy begged from the neighbors.

Here in Venice, it is simply October 31, the day before the Feast of All Saints. In Italy, the time to play dress-up isn't for another four months and the moveable feast of Carnevale, that Fat Tuesday of partying before Ash Wednesday ushers in the 40 austere days of Lent.

So why is it that the pizzeria I just left is packed with babbling kids, their faces smeared with makeup, pointy hats on their heads and gauzy or silky capes tied at their necks? Why did the marble fountainhead on Campo Santa Maria Formosa have a gaggle of costumed youths sitting upon it, laughing and eating candy? What, in short, the Hell is Halloween doing in the very capital of Carnevale?

I should have been ready for it, really. I knew it was coming. I saw the signs. The stalls on Riva degli Schiavoni that hawk Italian team soccer shirts and knock-off designer scarves to tourists last week added black or orange hats stacked like felt traffic cones. Window decorations across Northern Italy have increasingly featured pumpkins, or cardboard strings of bats and skeletons stretched over the display of pastries. Last night, Rete 4 did a mini-marathon of Simpsons Halloween episodes, and I saw from the ads that tonight most TV channels were planning to screen horror movies.

Chalk another one up to American cultural imperialism. It's often not as blatant as McDonalds and the bad Hollywood action movies upon which most Euro-snobs fixate when denigrating our country's overweening influence on the modern world. Sometimes it's a subtle as changes to the holiday traditions of youth, and that's what I find so bone-chillingly terrifying. For the first time in years, I'm genuinely frightened this Halloween night. I feel witness to the ending of a cultural era, and as a lapsed anthropologist, I can't say I'm happy about it.

I'm also ticked off that they've got the entirely wrong witch in mind, and the wrong holiday in which to stick her. Various holiday traditions from the US and Italy are increasingly becoming jumbled, their meanings disappearing. It's like culture by Cuisinart. Just as Italy already has its own holiday for wearing masks (Carnevale), it has a holiday for witches, too. Only it's not on October 31. It's on January 6. The witch of Italy is a good witch, not a broomstick-riding hag, and she brings—or at least brought—sweets and presents to Italian children on the day of the Epiphany.

That’s why this is not a story of Halloween in Venice in 2005, but rather of the day after New Year's in Rome in 2002.

THE CHRISTMAS MARKET
The Christmas market on Piazza Navona has almost entirely gone over to the generic stalls, games, and toys/candy trailers common to every outdoor fair in Italy. The artisan stalls offering handmade presepio (Nativity scene) figures now make up perhaps only one-fifth of the market. There's still a carousel in the center, and plenty of the toss-the-ring-fail-to-win-the-stuffed-teddy third rate carny games ranged around it.

But most of the trailers and carts in between hawk either two dozen variations on the peanut brittle theme, mass-produced toys and trinkets, ciambelle (donuts) the size of dinner plates, cheap knock-off jerseys of famous soccer players and other calcio memorabilia, or Hollywood-induced Santa-Christmas paraphernalia. However, a few stands at the north end still carry La Befana, the Christmas Witch.

THE KORPORATE KRIS KRINGLE
Now we all know that Hollywood long ago corrupted the kindly old Kris Kingle/St. Nicholas icon to create the treacly, ultra-capitalist "Santa Claus," who has become so commercial that, though legal loopholes and contractual obligations, he can easily be replaced with Tim Allen (The Santa Clause) or Whoppi Goldberg (Call Me Claus) to suit the needs of Disney or Ted Turner, respectively.

This commercialization has been a long process. The Salvation Army has prostituted Santa on street corners for decades--for highly laudable goals and worthy charities, obviously, but no matter how you look at it, this paramilitary Christian organization has in point of fact turned the Santa image into a street beggar, a symbol of cash flow, and that's what I'm talking about here.

Even the kindly Kris Kringle from Miracle on 34th Street is, in fact, no more than the Macy's Santa, shilling for a department store--though the movie is careful not to ascribe to him any miraculous powers or actually answer the question of whether he is, in fact, Santa Claus. The sacks of letters that arrive in the courtroom at the 11th hour are, when it comes down to it, just a happy coincidence brought on by a self-serving postal employee, and even the judge accepts them as proof merely to escape a sticky political situation and selfishly ensure his own position. Seriously. Watch it again: It's an astoundingly depressing movie.

This presents-under-the-tree American Santa Claus has been successfully exported all over the world and has in the process more or less obliterated many local customs, culture, and traditions--which is of course exactly what the French are always griping we Americans do. In Italy, La Befana, the Christmas Witch, used to bring Italian children their presents, leaving them in stockings hung on the fireplace on the day of the Epiphany, January 6. This makes perfect sense, as that's when the Wise Men arrived in Bethlehem with their offerings of gold, frankincense, and myrrh--which collectively still hold the title of Least Appropriate Infant Gifts Ever.

These days it's Babbo Natale--that red-robed chap with a belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly--who leaves wrapped gifts under a Teutonic evergreen in living rooms across Italy, just like they've seen done in countless schlocky American films. La Befana may show up, belatedly, 12 days later to stuff some candy into the hearth stockings along with, perhaps, the Italian equivalent of a lump of coal: a small bundle of twigs, symbolic of the whipping the mischievous youngsters undoubtedly deserve for some infraction they got away with in the previous year.

It's interesting that, although she's lost the majority of her Christmas role (though she's still associated with the season) the Christmas Witch has reverted to the heart of her identity: the noun of her being, rather than the adjective. Santa may have horned in on her territory and stolen her job, but La Befana is still a witch.

SWEEP AWAY YOUR TROUBLES
La Bafana's Christmas gift-giving role has been greatly reduced, at least in this jaded big city. She's now sold mainly as a scaccia guai, one who "chases away troubles" with her handy broom. The broom has long been tied into the mythology of witches, and not just as a means of transportation. It’s also been one of the most useful methods for keeping witches away. In many European cultures, a witch's primary weakness is that she cannot help but stop to count objects (or to untie knots; we still have an echo of this in many personal "my grandma's old house was haunted" ghost stories, which often feature the poltergeist fiddling with boot laces and the like).

One way to escape a pursuing witch is to toss beans on the ground behind you. Cursing, she has to stop to count them--and unlike Rain Man with his toothpicks, she has to go on a bean-by-bean basis. Similarly, the age-old method to protect your home from witch access--before electronic security systems--was to leave a broom propped against the doorjamb. The witch arriving in the dead of night to cast a spell on you is foiled when she has to stop and count the broom bristles, which are so numerous and (in traditional brooms actually made from twigs of the broom plant) so crooked she keeps loosing count and never gets around to committing the witchcraft. Seriously. There are still tons of little towns, especially in Southern Italy, and especially at this time of year, where you can wander the whitewashed alleyways and see a Home Security Broom prudently propped at every single front door.

Obviously this is all assuming the witch is evil, whereas our Befana is clearly a good egg. It's no good looking for too much consistency in witch lore, as females with supernatural powers have been invoked for so many different and diverse purposes across the ages-from the Greek Medea to Harry Potter's brainy schoolmate Hermione Granger--that there's no core, official type of witch in human mythology. She can be good or bad as the story or ritual calls for, and one village's protectress sorceress is to their rival neighboring village an evil hag in league with Satan.

But back to Italy's beneficial Befana--who as a scaccia guai is in reality using her broom to keep other, evil witches away, sort of a double agent on our side. A Preventative Strike Witch, if you prefer. Good or no, she's still a witch, and as such comes in three flavors, as witches always do.

THE THREE AGES OF WITCHERY (OR: AN ACRESS'S CAREER ARC)
This scaccia guai edition of a witch or Befana is the proverbial hag, the mistress of powerful supernatural (or, some would have, evil) forces, with the fearsome ability to cast pure magic spells. There's also the porta fortuna (fortune-bringer) Befana. She's the mother figure, an apple-cheeked grandmamma wearing glasses and wielding the earth-force, exerting the family-based power of command and control from a calm, nurturing center. The principessa (princess) form of La Befana (or any witch) is the maiden, with a young woman's primal power to bewitch and ensnare men.

We still see echoes of this core coven triad even in latter-day tales of American witchery. The Wizard of Oz has its hag witch (the Wicked Witch of the West), its kindly mother witch (Glenda the Good Witch); even the maiden/princess witch (Dorothy herself, of course, who quickly enlists three males to accompany her and protect her on her quest, and indeed shows her own, inherent magic powers in the heel-clicking finale).

It's the same old symbolic three-step that film actresses are always (justifiably) complaining about, that there are only ever the three classic Gravesian roles out there for women: maiden, matron, or screaming psycho-bitch who boils her boyfriend's pet rabbit. (Though, to be fair, the "maiden" role is usually available in both Freudian flavors--virgin or whore--so really, there is a grand total of four female roles in Hollywood. This is what drives so many good actresses to the stage.)

BACK IN THE CHRISTMAS MARKET
In Piazza Navona's market, all three archetypes of Befana dolls appear in the stalls, hung from mobiles along the awning, with backups nestled into rows filling boxes beneath. Though the more traditional Italian Befana is the bespectacled porta fortuna grandmothery figure, in recent years, the elderly hag Befana has taken over the stalls. This witchy sort of witch has been heavily influenced by the American Halloween image (something else they learned from Hollywood; there is no Halloween in Italy), and for the most part she is mass-produced cheaply in China.

However, though hags are far more common now, you can find the porta fortuna, dressed in gingham or in woolen robes, or even in striped giallo-rosso (red and yellow) or bianco-azzurro (white and azure) livery--the colors of rival city (Roma) and regional (Lazio) soccer teams, respectively. One stand, a tiny one that bucks the trend by still carrying mostly artisan-made Befanas and other seasonal figures, actually has a small display mobile that makes the most eloquent statement on this whole, slow cultural changeover: tiny Befanas garbed in the white fur-fringed jolly red robes of Santa Claus.

In person, though, the grandmotherly Befana still reigns. The market has even come up with an Italian variant on the department store Santa: a cramped sleigh "pulled" by a plush, life-sized reindeer, its cabin barely managing to seat an odd, cross-cultural couple: a bell-toting, Santa Clausian Babbo Natale and his companion Befana, both huddled against the cold. "Come get your picture taken with la bella Befana!" cries Santa like a carnival barker as he swings his bell.

A father drags along two bundled Italian cherubs, a boy and a girl both under eight, navigating the strolling crowd with a tired but determined look on his face. "Daddy, who's that?" Asks the little boy, pointing to the Befana. The father looks stunned at first, stops in his tracks, and says with a face of horrified disbelief, "But, it's La Befana!" And then the horrible truth of it dawns on him. His own children recognize Babbo Natale right off the bat, but they have no idea who La Befana is.

To them on this wintery January morning, Christmas is undoubtedly already a fading memory of wrapping papers and batteries-not-included. Christmas itself was over, and this strange carnival of lights, noise, peanut brittle, giant ciambelle, and funny-looking dolls dangling from brightly lit trailer awnings was just something to pass the time on January 2. They aren't particularly looking forward to January 6, as Italian kids have for countless generations, because La Befana doesn't visit their house anymore. At most, the Epiphany merely marks for them the last day of Christmas break before heading back to school.

I watch the little family as the father steers them through the crowds, moving more slowly now, haltingly trying to explain about a witch who flies to your house on the Epiphany, a broom between her knees and sack on her back. Just before the crowd swallows them from view, I see the father pause, pluck from a stall's display two comically oversized socks (in the Roma colors of giallo-rosso), and rummage for his wallet.

Looks like La Befana will at least be adding one more house back onto her rounds this January 6. I bet the boy will even get a mini-switch of twigs; I hope there's some candy to go with it. Just so long as no one gets the bright idea to bring him some myrrh.

The Sisters Picchi & the Nobel Prize

2005-10-13T18:45:00.000-04:00

Why are there a dozen people crammed into Sorelle Picchi, one of many little salumerie (delis) along Parma's Via Farini? More to the point, why are none of them ordering three etti of prosciutto, a kilo of pecorino, and a box of homemade pasta from old Claudio, who stands behind the counter carefully bundling up giant wedges of aged parmigiano in waxed paper, using the back of his long scissors to -thwiiip!- curl the trailing ends of the red ribbon wrapped around each?

They're waiting. All of them are waiting to squeeze through the little gap between the wall and the wooden counter on which rests the cash register and enter the back room, a chaos of white tablecloths, packed with wooden chairs and bustling women serving simple dishes. Turns out, this is Parma's favorite hidden trattoria, open only for lunch and only to those who know which deli to line up in (plus random travel writers curious as to why a salumeria would be packed at lunchtime).

Occasionally joining Claudio behind the counter was one of the second generation Picchi sisters, fat in that comfortable manner of many Italian women in late middle age--double chinned over a chest of truly prodigious proportions--but sprouting oddly thin arms muscular from a lifetime of slicing salumi. "It'll be a while yet." She announced to the waiting crowd upon returning from one of her trips to the back room. "No one wants to detach themselves from the table. We tried to convince the president of the Bank of Rome to go back to work, but he won't budge!" (I figured that this was some kind of joke phrase--the "bank president" a stock illustrious figure to conjure up for an Italian metaphor I'd never heard before--but when I left, I realized the Banca di Roma was, in fact, right across the street--presidentless, apparently, for the moment.)

I spent a patient half-hour watching this Picchi sister alternately work the automatic slicer and a giant butcher knife to create mixed platters of cured meats destined for diners in the back. So when it was finally my turn to squeeze past the cash register and thread back to a tiny table against the wall, I couldn't help but order a plate of affetatti misti myself.

The simple white plate came heaped with delicate tissues of prosciutto, thick leather sheets of culatello, marbled roundels of copa, a thick, fragrant disc of salame di felino (which, I was relieved to learn, comes from a nearby valley called Felino, not from cats), and a hearty slice of strullaghiello, a pink salami made from copa and so soft it falls apart as I try to slice a bite.

The affetatti arrived with a companion plate containing only two jagged nuggets of parmigiano, each the size of a small child's fist, and creamier and more flavorful than any parmesan I've ever tasted.

Normally, I don't care much for Parma's famous aged cheese. Oh, it's fine to grate over pasta or whatever, but not for eating straight. The problem is, cheese platters are designed to be worked clockwise, starting with the softest and mildest sample on the cutting board and then tasting your way around increasingly more pungent, aged, and veiny varieties. There's always a crooked gem or two of parmigiano waiting at the end of the cheesy clock face, which I always dread arriving at but always eat because I somehow get the feeling it wouldn't be very macho to leave it there--as if I couldn't handle the intensity and was forced to give up--and I hate to be emasculated in the eyes of my waiter.

(This personal failing is also what drives me to accept a grappa duro after a meal when what I really want is a prissy, sweet limoncello, and what has led me over the years to eat deep fried whole frogs soaked in vinegar, braised ass meat, camel stew, snails, and sheep testicles, amongst other delicacies.)

But this parmigiano at Sorelle Picchi was different. Strongly flavored without being tongue-cuttingly sharp, and best of all it had virtually none of that awful grittiness I've come to associate with such foods as aged parmigiano and sandwiches eaten at the beach. I said as much to my waitress, and she agreed. "Most people serve it aged too much." She said. "Here, we serve it young, only about 27 months old, so it's still good for eating."

I was pretty confident that going with the "piatto tradizionale" today wasn't going to turn out as it did last night, when I needed generous lubrications of Lambrusco to help gag down the pesto di cavallo, which turned out to be hamburger patties of horsemeat--served raw and cold. Today it's the far more promising sounding tortelli alle erbette, homemade pasta pillows stuffed with ricotta, parmigiano, and a local wild green simply called "little herb" (long like a beet leaf, but sweet like spinach). The rectangular tortelli came in a grid of nine, dressed in grated parmigiano and a pool of melted butter. Ah, this is more like it! This time, I didn't need the Lambrusco to help wash it down. Not that I didn't have a rapidly emptying bottle of Lambrusco in front of me. Just that I didn't need it as a swallowing aid.

As I waited for the pasta to come out of the open kitchen across the room, where more Picchi women were hard at work alongside mamma--one of the original Sisters Picchi (auntie retired a few years ago) who've been running this trattoria/salumeria for 40 years--I glanced around the dining room. As I did, something started tickling at the back of my mind, so I gave it a few moments to wander about in search of the thought to which it belonged. When it finally did find a home in my memory cells, I almost choked on my prosciutto.

Sitting at the head of the table for ten next to me was an older gentleman in a squashed, pale beige fisherman's canvas hat and affecting a white wool scarf wrapped once around his neck and tucked under the collar of his dark shirt. He was eating mortadella like it's going out of style, and putting away his tortelli alle erbette fast and furious, all the while grinning genially and paying close attention to the conversation swirling around his table. His name was Dario Fo, Italy's greatest living playwright and, as of 1997, a Nobel laurate.

He's in town for a few days, co-presenting a three-night series on "Theater in Italy" at the Teatro Farnese. I know this because I saw posters advertising this fact outside the Teatro's doors, and I seriously considered attending before realizing that I know so very little about Italian theater it would be lost on me, and besides I promised myself that tonight I'd get a good chunk of writing done. I had no idea I'd be lunching with the guy in the same trattoria hidden in the back room of the Sorelle Picchi deli.

In fact, the only reason someone so poorly versed in Italian theater can confirm that it was, indeed, the maestro is that I overheard one of the Picchi (the meat slicer) whispering to a regular client as she squeezed though the gap by the cash register, "Hey, did you see who is here today? Dario Fo!" She smiled and shook her head. "That boy sure does love his mortadella."

I wonder if I should have gone over and told him about the parmigiano?

Good Night, Sleep Tight...And That's All

2005-10-11T02:45:00.000-04:00

I'm a confirmed one-star hotel man. I get a quirky, self-satisfied thrill every time I snag a railroad narrow room with creaky wood floors, a wobbly chair and table rejected by a finer hotel back in 1963, a bare 20-watt bulb dangling on its wire from the ceiling, and a bathroom down the hall I have to share with the rest of the floor.

I downright revel in my thrift. I mentally lord it over people who can afford better hotels. In fact, I picture the poor saps shelling out three or four times as much for a room with TV and minibar in the three-star joint around the corner, and I think: suckers! Sure, they don’t have to put on pants and grab their keys every time they want to nip out to the bathroom, but I look at it this way: I could stay here for three or four nights at the price they're paying for one. (I say "could stay" because I can't; I've got to dash off to Modena tomorrow, Parma the day after that, then Milan...more than one night in a city is a luxury we working stiff travelers cannot afford.)

I stand there in my gloriously drab one-star room, stripped to my undies, smugly washing my clothes in the sink (even rooms without baths in Europe usually have a sink). As I round-robin my camera, Palm, laptop, and cellphone battery chargers though the single outlet available, I reflect on my wisdom for preferring one-star rooms—"wisdom" sounding so much better than the slightly more accurate term, "poverty". I am one who appreciates that a comfy bed is all one really needs from his lodgings; anything more is downright slothful. Or maybe avaricious. One of the Deadly Sins, at any rate.

So I am content with my view of the airshaft. I can tolerate the traffic noise filtering through the single pane of glass. I don't mind the lack of a phone that would allow me to go online—just a little intercom handset that connects only to the front desk (which is unmanned after midnight anyway). I can handle rough sheets on a sagging-spring cot.

But there are certain things at which I draw the line.

On reflection, it's a good thing I decided to keep reading the next chapter of my novel, when I really should have either (a) sat at the desk and caught up on entering my research into the computer, or (b) snapped off the 20-watt bulb and gone to bed early for once to try to catch up on sleep, which at this point in my whirlwind trip is becoming rather more important than typing up notes.

But, had I done either of those things, I wouldn't have been lying in bed with the lights on. Had I not been lying in bed with the lights on, I wouldn't have noticed, out of the corner of my eye, something moving against the white of the pillow.

It was a small brown bug. Well, such things happen. I was frankly surprised I hadn't had to go on an half-hour mosquito-killing rampage within the room this evening, as I have on so many prior occasions in a country where windows are left cracked open all day to air out the rooms. I flicked the bug off my pillow, and went back to my book.

Then, my eye caught another movement. It was another bug. This one was inching along the white bulge where I had thrown the sheets back, right up next to the wall, so I squished it against the plaster. It became a smear of bright red blood, like when you smack an engorged mosquito. Eew. Two bugs got me a bit nervous, so I put my book face down and lifted the covers.

Sure enough, there was another bug. I flicked it towards the edge of the bed, but it somehow managed to land right back on the sheet. I flicked it again. Same thing. I was inadvertently working the thing up towards my pillow, my disgust briefly overshadowed by amazement that the bug kept zipping back onto the bed every time I flicked it off into space, as if the white sheet were some kind of insect magnet. Finally, frustrated, I just pinched the thing. More bright red blood. By now, my hand was next to my pillow. Suddenly, I shuddered. I scooted my butt to the edge of the bed, then lifted the pillow.

Underneath were about six of the little brown bugs.

I leapt from the cot, doing a little frantic jig and rapidly burshing my arms, legs, shoulders, and torse down with my hands. What the hell was this? The Third World? The Middle Ages? How does a hotel in Europe get bedbugs in this day and age?

I didn't ponder such things for long. I was too busy stuffing my charging cords back into their case, collecting my laundry from the line I had strung out the window, gathering up my scattered books and papers, and jamming it all into my suitcase. I scooped up my shoulder bag, heaved the heavy suitcase, and stealthily made my way downstairs.

Why the stealth? Not sure. I think I was afraid I would get caught and forced to remain.

At the bottom of the stairs, separating the reception desk from the room access and front entrance, there was a metal accordion grate like at a shop. I had already scribbled a note in Italian: "That bed was full of insects. I am not staying!" I spindled the note and shoved it through the ring on my room keys, tossed it through the grate to land on the floor, and quietly let myself out the front door.

Where did I go? Why, to the three-star hotel around the corner, of course. The young guy who eventually arrived at the check in desk to buzz me in, blinking 1:30am sleep from his eyes, said they were all out of single, but he could give me a big room at a reduced rate. As I handed over my passport, I apologized for the late hour and explained what had happened. He looked up from the check-in form, horrified.

"But, where were you staying?" The Al Giaciglio, I told him. He shuddered and made a face like someone had fed him awful medicine. "Ah! Al Giaciglio. That place..." He trailed off, shaking his head as if to rid it of the foul name he had just uttered. "You didn't pay already, I hope." No, I told him. "Bravo," he congratulated me.

As he handed me the keys and a remote control for the TV, I got a case of the flailing arm willies that shimmy shook me from head to toe. "Sorry," I said. "I just... It's like I can feel them all over me."

He nodded, knowingly. Then, with concern: "You want a drink or something?"

Although I took a 20-minute shower, scrubbing myself all over repeatedly, I still keep feeling them: little tickles on my ankles, my shoulders, my back, my forehead, my neck. I keep compulsively brushing myself off every time a hair on my leg or arm moves. The early evening mosquito bites on my face and neck that had stopped bothering me hours ago are once again tingling, causing me to swipe at nothing.

So here I sit, in a wonderfully bland room in the Hotel Minerva, next door to Ravenna's train station. My laundry is hung all over the room to dry. The TV over on the table is keeping me silent company. My electronics are all snuggled into their outlets in the various corners of the large room, and I am about to use the phone line to go online and post this tale.

Oh, sure, I appreciate all these amenities and conveniences, and the neat lines of the otherwise indifferent modular furnishings actually help convey a sense of supreme cleanliness, for which, at the moment, I am supremely grateful. Still, I'm paying more than twice as much—and damned happy to do so—as I would have had I not snuck away from Al Giaciglio and its bedbugs in the middle of the night.

Despite tonight's adventure, I remain a one-star hotel man at heart—in fact, tomorrow night I'll be bedding down in Modena's youth hostel. But you can be darned sure that next time, before I agree to take a room, I'll be checking under the pillows first.

Bologna the Fat

2005-10-08T20:27:00.000-04:00

They call this place "Bologna the Fat." And for good reason.

Every Italian region is justifiably proud of its own cuisine—considers it in fact to be the best in the whole world. But ask any Italian to name just one region, one region in all of Italy, that's known above all for its culinary prowess and he'll admit: it's Emilia-Romagna.

In Modena they make the world's best balsamic vinegar; in Parma the best aged sheep's cheese (parmigiano) and cured ham (prosciutto di Parma). And the regional capital? Ah, you must mean Bologna the Fat.

Bologna is the birthplace of tortellini—little rings of pasta stuffed with savory meats and gooey cheeses. This is the land that invented the ragu sauce atop tagliatelle alla Bolognese. The local cured meat named mortadella remains so wildly popular the world over (particularly in school lunches) that most culture call it simply "bologna"—or, if you prefer, "baloney."

Life in Bologna centers around the kitchen. These people just love to eat—and eat well. To get under the skin of this city, forget making the rounds of the churches, museums, and monuments. Instead take a morning to explore the gastronomic side of Bologna: its street markets, wine bars, fourth generation grocers, traditional pasta makers, and storied chocolatiers. Start early, around 8am, to mingle with the market workers, professional trattoria chefs, and home-kitchen master chefs out doing their morning shopping.

Begin three blocks east of Piazza Maggiore, just off Via Castiglione at Paolo Atti & Figli (Via Caprarie 7, 051-220-425, www.paoloatti.com), purveyors of Bologna's finest baked goods since 1880. Under high frescoed ceilings, crisply aproned saleswomen bustle about arranging fresh pillows of pasta into rows in the glass display cases. The signs at each tray of pasta translate as, "Classic ravioli—we put our art into it!" And, "We make our tortellini one at a time." Flower dusted women, their forearms burly from decades of kneading, come puffing out of the back room shouldering enormous trays stacked with steaming loaves of bread.

Down the block, the corner of Via Drapperie is marked by stacks of salami and pendulums of prosciutto in the old-school "supermarket" of A. F. Tamburini (Via Caprarie 1, 051-234-726, www.tamburini.com). Though it's too early to be thinking about lunch, keep this place in mind for another day, as it makes for a great cheap meal stop. In the back of the shop—past the glass displays of cured meats, aged cheeses, and fresh yellow pastas—there is an always crowded tavola calda section, an Italian cafeteria serving filling portions of prepared pasta dishes and roast meats for €3.50 to €5.50.

Turn left onto Via Drapperie to enter Bologna's main street market. On your left you'll see another Paolo Atti outlet, and across the street is the Drogheria Gilberto (Via Drapperie 5, 051-223-925), its entrance marked by a suit of armor grasping a bottle of the family's wine. Pietro opened the joint in 1905, followed by his son Oreste. Now it's in the hands of the third generation, Gilberto and Elisabetta, and their sons Danilo and Michele, the quartet selling chocolates, candies, liqueurs, marmalades, and preserves (both sweet and savory) from shelves stacked almost to the 15-foot ceilings. There's always a free sample of some lying around; last visit, I scored brownies.

From here, the market beings in earnest. Fruit and vegetable stalls groan under the weight of purple-fringed artichokes, crinkly bunches of arugola, sleek indigo eggplant, pink pomegranates, orange zucchini flowers, pungent mushrooms, tiny susine plums, pointy San Marzano tomatoes, mounds of grapes, trays of chestnuts, garlands of fiery red pepperoncini, and ropes of garlic.

Where Via Drapperie meets Via delle Pescherie Vecchie are a pair of fishmongers always mobbed by bolognesi waiting patiently on the water-slicked cobblestones, numbered tickets clutched in their hands, admiring the Styrofoam trays of squid, scampi, octopi, anchovies, every type of fish, and live—if terribly cold—lobster wiggling their feelers feebly and mazzancolle (a kind of giant Adriatic scrimp) scuttling their little yellow legs en masse whenever someone's knees bump their tray.

Turn right up Via delle Pescherie Vecchie. At no. 7B is a typical butcher ship, but look at the name above the door: Macelleria Equina. Yep. The bolognesi do love their horsemeat (though, unlike their brethren in the Veneto, they don't usually go in for the gammier, stringier donkey).

Just beyond the next fruit stand, turn left into the Mercato Clavature. This covered market is looking a bit down at the heels these days. Signs taped to the walls proclaim that renovations are underway. "Ha!" says Signora Mazzetti, who runs the drogerhia (dry goods stall) and is vice president of the market workers association. "They've been saying that since 1995!"

The stated plan has always been to take out some of the central stalls and install a café—but the building's owners have instead slowly let the place run down as, one by one, tenants move out. Of the 20 shops and stalls available, only seven are currently going concerns—and those seven must cover the same total rent that was once split 20 ways. "We 'insects'," says Signora Mazzetti. "We can't go to the comune [town hall] ourselves to get some action. We must wait for the owners to do something." She clearly deplores the condition of her market, but is desperate that it survive and return to its former glory.

More than half-empty, and dimly lit by an outdated electrical system, Clavature does look a bit dire at the moment. "We want a market with life," says Mazzetti. "But the owners..." she trails off with a defeated-but-defiant shrug of her lower lip. It's out of her hands and mired in the bureaucracy; there's nothing she can do but hang on. Just inside the market entrance, a gypsy woman in colorful rags with a babe in arms pulls faces of exaggerated suffering, begging from passersby.

Backtracking to continue down Via delle Pescherie Vecchie, you'll pass lots more fruit and veg stands, and, at no. 3C, an herbalist—Italians are mad for homeopathy and herbal remedies; but just peek in get an idea of what a commercialized one looks like, as we'll be visiting a real, artiginal herbalist in a bit.

At no. 3A hangs the sign for La Baita Formaggi, another traditional deli with an excellent selection of cheeses—eight types of mozzarella, six kinds of ricotta, and (count 'em) 21 different varieties of pecorino—in addition to the usual mortadella, salami, and both kinds of prosciutto (the world-famous prosciutto di Parma, selling at €26.90 per kilo, and the even pricier, gourmet-beloved prosciutto di San Daniele, from up in the Friuli mountains, going for €31 per kilo.)

When you hit the main square, turn left down Via dell'Archiginnasio, an arcaded shopping street stretching along the left flank of the cathedral. By now, you're probably ravenous. Wanna spoil that appetite? Pop into the grand doorway at Piazza Galvani 1 and head upstairs for a peek at the flayed statues and the marble dissecting slab for human corpses in the Teatro Anatomico (see box "Europe's Oldest University").

At the corner with Via Farini sits the chic Caffé Zanarini, a sleek, modern bar where besuited and bespoke shoppers from the high-end Cavour shopping gallery next door, and students from up the block, mingle over superior espresso, sublime pastries, and platters of free crostini and teensy sandwiches.

Turn right onto Via Farini, which becomes Via Carbonesi. At no. 5, step into the divinely scented shop of Majani, chocolatiers extraordinaire since 1796 (051-656-2209, www.majani.com). About €4.50 will buy you a sampler baggie filled with their greatest hits—one each of the chocolate "tortellini" (in milk, dark, and white, each filled with a chocolate cream), a selection of the famous cremini Fiat napoleons, and a few scroza (thin sheets of dark chocolate, roughly accordioned up into a bar).

Across the street sits the Bolognese outlet for Il Regno Vegetale (Via Carbonesi 10A, 051-263-792, www.regnovegetale.com), a minuscule "reign" for 51-year old Orazio Martini and his rigorously traditional practice of the ancient art of herbalism. "We only use natural plants and herbs in our medicines and cosmetics," he declares proudly. "No chemicals—as in 90% of the 'herbalist' medicines you see today. And we sell exclusively our own products," Martini continues. "Not some multinational pharmaceutical corporation's version of herbal medicines that's made mostly of chemicals."

You could say Maestro Martini has a chip on his shoulder, but he is an artisan living in a world of mass production, so it's hard to fault the guy. He eagerly shows the engraving of a medieval monastic herbalist printed on his shop's fliers. "You see? We make our products the same as they did in the Middle Ages." He frowns. "Well, almost the same. Now we use machines to press it into pills"—he levers his forearms until his cupped hands press together in demonstration—"We use technology to help. But the ingredients, they are all natural...so there are no side effects!"

Orazio says he has always been intrigued by plants. When he was about 20 years old, it hit him. "Like a bolt of lightning!" He says, wide-eyed. "I knew, all of a sudden: 'I have to be an herbalist'—but in the old style. So I studied for a few years, and I learned about it, and now I've been making my cures and cosmetics for 23 years." His diligence and devotion to tradition has paid off. In 1999, the University of Pavia declared his anti-wrinkle cream to be the best on the market. "And," Orazio Maritni finishes with a flourish. "It’s made with exclusively natural ingredients!" His eyes glow with triumph.

Turn right up Via de' Gombruti, then sidestep left on Via Porta Nova to visit the Stregate Tea Shop at no. 7A (051-222-564, www.stregate.it), its air scented with more than 160 varieties of tea piled into numbered crocks on the shelves. I know: you're thinking: Tea isn't Italian! Well, they got coffee—espresso and cappuccino alike—from the Turks, pasta from the Chinese, wine from the Greeks, and tomato sauce from the Native Americans, so what, really, is Italian cuisine if not borrowed? And besides: this shop smells incredible.

Continue north up Via A. Tostoni. At no. 9A, La Braseria Sfoglia, you can peek past the sales counter into the back room to see bologna's famed sfoglini rolling out fresh pasta in great sheets then cutting it into strips using rolling pins set with rows of plastic discs. Some strips are cut narrow, destined to be coiled into bird's nests of tagliatelle, tagliolini, fettucini, and other noodles. Other strips are kept broad then cross-cut into squares, each of which will receive a dollop of filling then be deftly folded into those little winged pasta-pocket rings we call tortellini.

Turn left onto Via Ugo Bassi, then left again onto Via G. Marconi to pop into the church of San Francesco—those impressive and intricate tombs-on-stilts by the roadside just south of the main entrance belong to several 13th century law professors from the university (boy, they treated profs right back in those days). Behind the church's high altar inside sits an incredible, massive marble altarpiece sculpted in 1388-92 and bristling with saints in niches, martyrs standing on balconies, all topped by a comb-tooth row of lithe pinnacles. OK, so it's not culinary, but few tourists bother coming into this church, so you can have it all to yourself.

On the north side of the piazza begins the narrow, arcaded Via Pratello. It doesn't look like much at this time of day—though you should definitely grab some lunch at Trattoria Fantoni while you're here (see Dining), or, if you want something lighter, at any of the numerous take-away pizza shops or kebab shacks. But after dark, this street transforms into one of the hoppingest scenes in Bologna. It comes alive with trattorie, pubs, osterie, and wine bars. To whit: a pleading homemade sign scrawled onto a sheet hangs from one window: "Your right to party ends where my right to sleep begins."

Return back east along Via Ugo Bassi. In the second block, on the left just after a little food shop, is the blink-and-you'll-miss-it entrance to the Mercato delle Erbe. This covered market houses 36 specialty food shops and 72 fruit and vegetable stands—much more of a going concern than the Mercato Clavature, though make sure you get here before they close up shop for the lunch break around 1pm. Exit the market on the back side, onto Via Belvedere. Free of those bland modern structures that have grown up around the Via Ugo Bassi entrance, this 1910 temple of gastronomy can only be appreciated in all its orange and yellow Neoclassical grandeur from the back side.

Just across the street from the market's back steps, at Via Belvedere 7B, is Le Sflogline, another traditional sfoglini shop run by a trio of smiling ladies who spend their days making fresh pasta, pastries, and simple lasagne in tiny take-away foil containers.

Ok. This is Italy. All the fine food in the world is worthless if there isn't a fine wine with which to wash it down. Continue wending your way east and north to Via Marsala and the Enoteca Italiana (Via Marsala 2B, 051-235-989, www.enotecaitaliana.it). If it weren't for the crowds, you'd never suspect that this blandly modern wine shop with its crooked, cheaply varnished bar and racks of bottles in the back has won Il Sommalier magazine's "Oscar dei Vini" as the best wine bar in all of Italy in 2000 and again in 2002.

Once more, pinstriped suits an silk dresses mix freely with the tatty sweaters, leather jackets, and untucked shirttails of students—but everyone here is a genuine wine aficionado, debating the merits of a Tuscan Sangiovese/Merlot/Cab mix as compared to a Bordeaux cru (though the vast majority of the 35 fine wines available by the glass are Italian, not French). Elbow yourself a spot at the chipped bar, place your in the capable hands of the barrista, and ask for a plate of bread, salami, and mortadella to fortify yourself for an evening sampling some of the greatest wines Italy has to offer.

Bologna the Fat, indeed.

Up the Blue Grotto without a Paddle...or a Boat

2005-10-01T19:06:00.000-04:00

It's the seventh wave that'll get you.

Oceans and seas across the world all craft waves the same way. They come in a simple sequence: each wave is larger and more powerful than the last. This sequence builds in a set cycle: the number of waves in each cycle is seven.

And it's the seventh wave that'll get you.

I've been counting waves for a good ten minutes now, and my arms are aching from hanging off the precipice so long, peering into the darkness of the tunnel. Is it my imagination, or is the sea getting rougher? I know the sun is getting lower and lower, and I can't hang around forever—nor, for that matter, can I hang on all that much longer, physically.

I can't figure out whether I'm psyching myself up or psyching myself out, but there is one thing the tiny rational portion of my brain is sure of: this is easily the stupidest thing I've done in quite a while. It's even stupider than two weeks ago, when I followed a goat path several hundred feet above the Grand Canyon floor past the point where even the mountain sheep were looking at me as if to say "Uh, dude? Even we don't try to go that way."

And to think, the emergency €20 bill folded up in my zippered pocket could have bought me the easy way into the Blue Grotto.

When most people arrive at the mouth of the Grotta Azzurra for the first time, few actually realize they're at the entrance to the world famous Blue Grotto of Capri. They're expecting to motor into a vast sea cave filled with unearthly blue light. Instead, the boat that brought them around the island from Marina Grande (€8.50) has stopped dead in the water, in the shadows of a high rock cliff, and is being swarmed by tiny rowboats. The tourists are then divided into small groups and genially forced overboard to clamber into one of the rowboats bobbing in the waves, where they are told they have fork over another €8.50 per person to the oarsman.

Each rowboat, loaded down with fleeced tourists, starts pulling toward a tiny gap in the cliff where the rocks meets the crashing water. Just to the left of this gap, a thin metal chain is anchored into the rock. The chain runs, horizontal to the water, into a dark hole no more than three or four feet high. As each wave crashes against the cliff and is funneled through the hole, the open space between the surface of the water and the ceiling of the dark tunnel shrinks to under three feet. Then, with the next wave, two feet. Then one foot.

When the seventh wave hits, the water claps together, spurts back out from the top of the tunnel, and the hole disappears completely.

At this point, the tourists in the rowboat look at one other nervously. If they knew that a trip to the Blue Grotto was going to entail threading such a dangerous needle in a frail little rowboat, they probably would have stayed back in Capri Town and spent that €17 on gelato and cappuccino.

As it is, the sequence of waves cycles back down, the tunnel reappears, and suddenly a series of rowboats comes shooting out of the hole, each oarsman leaning way back--almost flat on his back--and hauling on that chain to pull his boat through quickly. As soon as the hole is clear, the boats waiting outside paddle quickly up to the entrance. The oarsman in each grabs the chain, and shouts to his little clump of tourists, "Please to lie down flat on you backs so you don' bump-a you head." And with no further warning, he begins hauling on the chain, sweeping the boat through into the dark tunnel.

At least, that's how I assume it still works. I haven't actually been inside the Blue Grotto for years. I did it with my parents back when I was 11 or so, and again 12 years ago when I came to Capri with a group of friends. It was fun, it was neat, and I saw no particular reason to waste another $20-plus on it again—especially as you have to tip heavily in order to stop the oarsman from singing (poorly) Neapolitan folks songs while you're in there for the whopping two-minute audience that each rowboat is granted.

That's why I'm here now, clinging to two convenient handholds in the algae-slicked limestone, my bare feet balanced on a shelf of rock just under the water, leaning out to peer into the Blue Grotto's dark entrance, counting waves.

It's around 5pm, but that's just a guess. I left Villa Eva some time around 4:30 for the half-hour walk to the Blue Grotto, and I left everything, including my time-telling cellphone, back at the hotel. All I brought was a towel, which I left back up the path piled atop my shirt and shoes, into one of which I stuck a business card (to help identify the body—see? I'm a responsible guy). It's early October, the very tail end of the tourist season, so the rowboats have knocked off early for the day, and the entrance to the Blue Grotto is empty. Empty and quiet—except for the crashing of waves.

There's no one else around, which makes it that much spookier to be leaning out over the pitch-black mouth of a sea cavern. The solitude also makes it seem that much more bone-headed of an idea to think I can swim into the grotto, especially with such a strong current sucking in and out—I can feel it against my calves—and with every seventh wave swallowing the tunnel whole.

The main problem is that I'm on the right side of the tunnel, and that anchored chain is over on the left. It can't be more than five or six feet from where I'm balancing on the underwater rock ledge, but there's the whole sucking current/crashing waves thing going on within those five feet. I'm wary of trying to shuffle across on the bit of rock ledge, as once I were to leave the safety of the wall I would have nothing to hold onto, plus I know from past experience that black sea urchins nestle into the rocks of Capri just below the waterline, and that their five-inch spines can pierce right through your foot and come out the other side.

Distracted, it suddenly registers with me that the last set of waves nearly kissed the top of the tunnel, so I brace myself for that seventh wave, which sure enough comes along and swells the green water up to my chest. First it tries to force me toward the tunnel, then—after the splashback of water closing off the tunnel washes over my head, it changes its mind and tries to drag me away towards the sea.

Shaking water from my eyes, I suddenly gasp and let go of my left handhold, a piercing pain throbbing in my pinkie. I look into the hole where my hand just was, and see a mottled dark green crab with thick yellow hairs on his legs is waving an outsized pincer claw at me as if to say, "Go ahead! What are you wating for? Just you try to stick your hand back in my hole, buddy, I've got plenty more where that came from!" I hiss at him, and yell at him, and puff my cheeks to blow on him as hard as I can, and otherwise try to get the bugger to budge. He just fixes me with those beady, dead black eyes and waves that claw menacingly, refusing to back down. Grumbling, I find another, far less stable handheld, and turn back to the tunnel to start counting the waves again.

'OK, was that wave two or three of the new cycle?' I think to myself. Then, cross at the crab, and at myself for being so damn analytical about the whole thing, I say out loud "Ah, the Hell with it," and, during a trough between waves, launch myself through the air towards that chain on the other side of the tunnel.

It isn't until I'm about halfway across, a new wave surging up behind me and my fingers reaching toward that dangling chain, that the thought passes through my mind: 'I wonder if there are any sea urchins where I'm about to land?'

I splash into the water, my left hand closing about the chain, the forearm slamming into the rock behind it. As I vaguely register with relief that no urchin spines seem to be piercing my body, the incoming wave sweeps me along and helps carry me into the tunnel, the chain slipping rapidly through my palm.

Funny thing is, once I get inside, it's all much easier. I haul myself all the way through the tunnel and into the grotto itself, which starts to take dark, shadowy shape above and before me. I avoid looking back toward the bright entrance so as to better let my eyes adjust. I still can't see the far walls, but I can hear the scattershot echoes of the water splashing against them, under the constant, cycling roar of incoming waves, their sound amplified by the tunnel.

Ten feet or so in, the chain swoops up, away from the water, to anchor somewhere into the rock at much higher level, so I can no go no further and still use it as a lifeline. I tread water, clinging to the chain that's now a good arm's length above my head, and let my eyes continue to adjust to the darkness. I can begin to make out the pale stone of the ceiling soaring away from me and the walls widening to each side. The water, though—that famous glowing azure water—is dark. It's blue alright, but a shade of blue just shy of black.

Damn. I tarried too long. The sun's too low in the sky. The effect of the Blue Grotto has been turned off for the night. All that silly fear and senseless bravado for nothing.

Well, might as well get a little swim out of it. The current that was so concentrated by the narrow tunnel isn't nearly as strong even this short distance inside, so I steel my fears and let go of the chain to paddle a few feet further into the cave. Just so I can gauge how strong the current really is, I turn to look at the only fixed point of reference I know of, the tunnel entrance.

Which is when the true extent of my own idiocy finally hits me.

The famous glowing effect of the Blue Grotto is created by the daylight from outside refracting through the entrance tunnel and filtering through the limpid water. That is to say, you cannot see it if you're staring toward the cave-dark of the back walls. You gave to be looking towards the entrance.

As soon as I turned around, I realized I was swimming in liquid lapis lazuli. My arms and legs were windmilling around a field of pale blue so intense it looked fake, like the light from a neon sign. The effect was so shocking, it actually made my jaw drop (didn't know that jaw-dropping happened for real; though it was just a metaphor), whereupon, of course, I started shipping water down my throat. Once I get the coughing and sputtering out of the way, I scramble to unzip my pant's pocket and yank out the waterproof camera I had bought earlier in the day, and started snapping a few giddy photographs.

The waves and current weren't strong, but they were definitely present and persistent. After so much time spent hanging around at the entrance, and all that adrenaline wasted on worrying and getting myself in here, I realized my out of shape bod wasn't going to permit me to swim about and fight the pull of the sea for too much longer. Besides, the eerie, intense, impenetrable blueness all around my pale, flailing limbs was starting to creep me out.

Unbidden, the words "Monster of the Blue Grotto" floated into my mind—a local legend I managed to conjure up, just now, out of thin air as I treaded the glowing water, spooked by being alone in this sea-filled cavern. I could almost feel my invented monster grabbing my ankles and jerking me under the water. All they would find would be a shirt, towel, and shoes with some travel writer's business card in them. Silly, I know, but YOU try putting that sort of thing out of your mind when you're swimming around a giant, echoing, sea cave all by yourself, a place as sinister and dark above the water as it is bizarrely opaque and bright below.

I paddled back over to the point where I could lunge up and grab the chain again, and that helped calm me down a bit. I took a few more pictures, then treaded water, hanging off the chain, facing the tunnel, and started counting the waves again.

The seventh wave came. It filled the entire tunnel, blocking the air and the light, and then rolled over my head, raising me higher than the chain for a moment. When the tunnel reappeared and the water level fell to a deep trough, I started hauling myself along the chain, through the tunnel and toward the setting sun.

I passed the territorial crab, who set to waving his claw again when he saw me, and scrambled over the rocks to the little rowboat landing platform at the trail's end. As I hauled myself up to the platform's railing, I scared the hell out of a young French mother and her little blonde girl, who were leaning over to peer towards the tunnel entrance. They stepped back to let me slither up and over the rail, and I stood there, dripping and grinning like a maniac.

"Ehh… Bloou Gra-TOH?" The woman asked, hesitantly. Yes, I replied, wiping water off my face, this is the Blue Grotto. "The boats?…" She asked, and I explained that they left around 4pm. "No boats?" She asked again, seeking confirmation.

"No," I replied. "No boats." Then I smiled mischievously. "But you can swim in!"

She laughed a bit nervously, and stammered something about how the water was probably too cold. I was already bouncing up the trail toward my towel and little pile of clothes. No, I called back, the water was really just right.

The fine art of packing light (a.k.a.: always know where your towel is)

Big Brother Berlusconi

2005-09-29T23:39:00.000-04:00

You think Bush has got the U.S. press well tamed (Katrina outrage notwithstanding)? He's got nothing on Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's wily master of corporate greed-turned-Prime Minster. Back when he got the country's Top Job, Berlusconi refused calls to divest himself of some his businesses, claming to see no conflict of interest between his and his companies' holdings and the greater good of serving his country.

No conflict of interest? Before he was PM, this media mogul was Italy's Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney Corp. all rolled into one. Italy, you see, has seven main national television channels: the three state-run RAI networks—inventively named, in the great tradition of the BBC, RAI 1, RAI 2, and RAI 3—the three private channels owned by Mediaset—Italia 1, Rete 4, and Canale 5--and tiny little Telemontecarlo, which a few years ago, apparently feeling left out of the number club, re-branded itself as "La 7."

Two guesses as to who owns Mediaset. I'll give you a hint. It's the same man who now, as Prime Minster, has direct control over the three RAI stations as well.

Yep, Sivlio Berlusconi personally controls a whopping his 98% share of Italy's national television market. Did I mention he also happens to own the nation's largest publishing house, and as a sideline publishes several of the country's most widely-circulated daily newspapers?

Well, apparently this near-lock on the flow of information in Italy wasn't enough for old Silvio. I can only imagine him sighing with envy over the kind of control exercised by Kim Il Jung in North Korea. Which is why, this fall, Silvio has set his sights on the last great bastion of information available in Italy: the Internet.

On September 26, a brand-new Italian law went into effect. They call it Anti-Terrorism Law 155/05--one of those ridiculous "let's show the public we're doing something, at least" legal Band-Aids that won't amount to much more than a massive waste of time and bureaucracy. The new law requires every Internet cafe, every hotel with a Mac on an ADSL line, and every pub with a PC stuck in the corner to photocopy of the identity card or passport of anyone wishing to use the Internet, so that the government can track what they do online.

OK. Italy is (understandably) getting a bit jittery about the specter of a terrorist attack. Britain and Spain have both suffered bombings due to their participation in Bush's war, but—all due respect to Poland and the Federated Republic of Micronesia—the next major US ally in the Iraq war is Italy, which has so far gone unscathed (unless you count the attacks on Sharm el Sheik, which is a bit like Italy's Cancun).

In fact, on Monday they're going to kill 26 manniquins, gravely injure 312 amateur actors, and close off all traffic in a vast triangle of Rome's historic center from the Colosseum to Piazza della Repubblica to Piazza Navona. It's all part of a test to see how the Eternal City's emergency response teams would react to a series of suicide bombs (in this case, faked with smoke cannisters) going off at the Colosseum, on the Metro, and on the famed no. 64 bus as it cruises down Corso Vittorio Emanuele II on its way to St. Peter's. (This time, though, they'll do without the fake blood that turned a similar exercise in Milan into such a farce.)

But this frighteningly Orwellian turn of events with the Internet law doesn't seem as if it'll be able to do much good in the end, anyway. No one seems to be able to explain satisfactorily just how keeping these kinds of tabs on surfing will help them catch the bad guys. All the bad guys have to do is find some bar with a few Internet terminals on unsecured WiFi, loaf around outside, and use their Palmtops to surf. I've found spots like that in every town so far--and we're talking teensy places, like Sorrento, Anacapri, and Positano. Imagine how many there are in Rome or Milan.

OK. So the law is, in the end, not only useless, it's fundamentally unenforceable. So that means it's merely a big pain in the neck for all us non-terrorists out there—beyond just the issues of violation of privacy, concept of free speech, and other high-falutin' ideals.

Let's say your hotel keeps hold of your passport, as many do (in order to register the information in it later at their convenience, rather than now at yours), or you decide to leave it in your hotel or room safe rather than cart it around with you—for safety reasons, or because you are headed to the beach to swim, or whatever. That means you can't just pop into an Internet café whilst you're out and about to check email or dash off an "I'm in Capri, aren't you jealous?" email to friends back home (or, ahem, update your blog).

There's also been a (totally understandable) knee-jerk reaction amongst the providers of many free WiFi hotspots to yank the plug, as they have no way of knowing, let alone collecting data on, who might be piggybacking on their signal, and yet they would be held responsible for breaking the law.

As for me, it means it's back to the old hotel room phone line or finding a good, clear cell signal and suffering ultra-slow (and expensive) dial-up when I want to go online with my own laptop.

So here's to Big Brother Berlusconi, doing what he can to keep Italy safe from video poker players, teenage porn downloaders, students researching papers, lovers trading mushy IMs, road warriors checking in with the office, tourists booking hotel rooms, and travel writers doing their jobs.

Oh, and on the off-chance that a highly-trained sleeper cell might slip up and decide to pop into an internet café in order to broadcast a mass email detailing its secret plans to blow up the Colosseum, the terrorists as well.

Cybercafes and Internet points in Europe

The Saint & the Sea Monster

2005-09-28T11:09:00.000-04:00

The man could hold his own against sea monsters, so they say. He could also exorcise the possessed like nobody's business. His name was Saint Antonino, and he gave up life as a hermit to tend to the spiritual well being, demonic possessions, miracle granting, pirate attacks, and general carpentry needs of the people of Sorrento.

Antonino didn't even want the job. He would have been perfectly content to continue living his isolated life of prayer up in the mountains, building hillside oratories on the orders of St. Michael the Archangel, with whom he chatted regularly. But when the Lombards came rampaging through the region—remember, before they settled down in Milan to become industrialists, the Lombards were one of those Barbarian hordes from the wild side of the Danube who helped bring down the Roman Empire—the saint hustled down from his hermitage at Montecassino for protection on the plains. He took a cell in the Benedictine Abbey of St. Agrippinus, was soon named its Abbot, and set about performing miracles—though in his down time, the saint was far more fond of tending the abbey's vineyards, and puttering about town doing odd carpentry jobs.

Sorrento's adopted saint died on February 14, AD 626—must be rough, sharing your feast day with a Big Ticket saint like Valentine—but he didn't let a little thing like death get in the way of his ministry. He's been watching over Sorrento ever since, saving the town from everything from Saracen attacks to the Black Plague, as well as answering the panicked prayers of many a Sorrentine sailor caught in a tempest.

His real specialty, though, is exorcisms. Whether you're possessed by demons spawned from the depths of Hell, or by a mild skin ailment, Antonino's your man. With such power residing in the venerable bones, it's little wonder that, when Turkish conquerors made off with the saint's arm in1558, a Sorrentine merchant made the journey to Constantinople to buy back the relic.

The appreciative locals in return have given him, not one, but two statues in prominent squares (Piazza Tasso and, of course, Piazza S. Antonino). In both statues, the saint is shown treading victoriously upon the neck of a sea monster that looks a bit like a toothy porpoise. It's not. It's meant to be a whale.

Details on the legend of Antonino's most famous miracle differ, but the upshot is: a distraught mother came running up to the abbey, wailing that whale had swallowed her child whole. Antonino wasted no time. He strode down to the sea, called the monster from the depths, and with the force of his oratory forced the cetacean to spit out the boy, alive and well (though presumably covered in whale slime). Jonah really coulda used this guy in his corner.

You can still see what are said to be the monster's actual bones—they are certainly whale ribs of some sort—mounted high on the wall to the right of the main doors in the vestibule of S. Antonino. The town built this grand—but unfortunately baroqued—church around the saint's tomb so as to have room to leave ex votos of thanks in return for their patron's intercession on matters ranging from saving foundering ships to helping survive breast cancer.

Floor-to-ceiling glass cases surround his tomb in the crypt under the unfortunately baroqued church of S. Antonino, and these cases are wallpapered inside with silver talismans. One case is devoted entirely to legs; another to images of be-suited men and women in long dresses that look as if they were copied from the cover of some 1940s Madison Avenue Better Villas and Vineyards mag. Many are labeled simply "Per grazie ricevute"—in Italian, the word for 'thank you' (grazie) is the same as the word for 'grace', so this double-meaning message it thanking the saint "For grace received."

Other cases are a motley arrangement of body parts cured, the thin silver ex votos shaped and stamped with graphic anatomical detail—backs, chests, throats, lungs (one or both), breasts (one or both), heads, hands, eyes, mouths, hearts, and whole torsos opened up like a cadaver in Gross Anatomy 101 to show the GI tract in exacting detail.

Several cases behind the altar are stocked with silvery babies, some alongside blurry snapshots—many neonatal—of the miraculously cured infant in question, and a letter gushing thanks and grace—"Grazie! Grazie! Grazie!"

As you turn to leave the crypt, you see that the entry wall is lined by more than 30 prints and paintings of 19th century shops tossing in stormy seas, with S. Antonino popping out of the dark clouds in an aura of light to raise on arm and save the devout mariners (as in foxholes, there are no atheist sailors during a tempest). The paintings were donated by grateful captains and crews. The most recent one is a photograph, dating from the 1950s, and clearly that captain was taking no chances on the Sorrentine seas. The name of his motorboat: the "S. Antonino."

The Dangers of Dinner in Sorrento

2005-09-27T22:23:00.000-04:00

Sorrento is one of the very few places in Italy where it is easier to eat badly than well.

Mark it down to a constantly changing clientele—why bother putting yourself out to cook a great meal when the tourist you're making it for is going to be gone tomorrow, never to return? The food at Hotel Loreley was just a step above Boyar'dee. The grub at Taverna dell '800 was only decent. And there's one place, tucked into a cave halfway down the switchback road to the Marina Piccola docks, where I once got food poisoning—though my traveling companion, J, got it even worse; started throwing up on the ferry over to Capri.

This time, I'm wary, so I've reverted to an old habit picked up in seventh grade in Rome: scooping up the hard little pellets that have shaken out from between the tough petals of umbrella pine cones, staining my fingertips black with the layer of sooty dust on their shells. After I've collected a good handful's-worth, rattling around in my pocket, I find a quiet corner and a good sharp rock. It's a delicate art, cracking the thick shells of pine nuts without squashing the tender pinoli within. It's laborious (no wonder the suckers cost so much shelled), but the meat tastes so much sweeter when you have to work for it.

Since a man cannot live solely on pine nuts and fruit filched from low-hanging branches, I do have to find restaurants for dinner. The only place in town where I've ever had memorable meals is the massive La Favorita O' Parrucchiano—and even that one is quite touristy. Green waist-coated waiters keep up a brisk two-way traffic on the terraced staircases between the kitchen and the dining patio up top, carrying laden platters up and empty trays down, calling out table numbers and orders to a woman sitting at a lonely table to one side, scribbling furiously at an array of still-open restaurant checks spread out on the table to keep them up to date.

The food, at least, is of very good quality, and the jungle-like dining patio is lovely, hung heavy with vines, pomegranate and lemon trees, and other signs of Mediterranean lushness. Shame I can't do anything about the inevitable guitar-mandolin duo—though it's a sight better than the piped-in schlock at most Sorrento restaurants—who are strumming their way through the Play List of Approved Sorrento Songs for Tourists: O Sole Mio, Funiculi Funicula, My Way, Tu Vo' Fa L'Americano (a weird mambo number from the 60s poking fun at a Neapolitan who pitifully apes everything American), and, of course, That's Amore!

I swear to God, if the moon hits my eye like a big pizza pie one more time, I am going to go Audrey Hepburn on one of these guys and smash the guitar right over his head. Plus, I keep catching myself whistling Funiculi Funicula, which must be annoying not only to me but to anyone within earshot. Little wonder that one gets stuck in my grey matter; it was one of the world's first successful commercial jingles, commissioned to inaugurate the funicular (cable car) up Mt. Vesuvius.

Given how fully Sorrento has been given over to the mass tourism machine, I'd argue that it's really a place for folks who really don't want to be in Campania in the first place. They just want to check the region's Big Ticket sights (Pompeii, Capri, Amalfi) off their list, and Sorrento is the most convenient base from whcih to do it. Sorrento also happens to save folks from many of the little inconveniences of being in a foreign country.

This place is no tourist-friendly it's boring. English is without a doubt the first language in town. A ridiculous number of English-style pubs try to entice people in with blackboards promising to screen upcoming rugby and (British) soccer matches. Even the tourist office is installed in the entrance to the old Grand Tour-era Circolo dei Forestieri—the Foreigner's Club. OK, so I admit I always repair here in the late afternoons, in some pale imitation of Grand Tour style, in order to catch up on my notes and sip a Campari-soda while watching the sunset fire the surrounding cliffs, the night slip over the triangle of Vesuvius across the way, and the lights twinkle on around the Bay of Naples.

Sorrento is bursting at the seams with giggling German schoolgirls, Americans and Aussies teetering along under their impressively large backpacks, and British package tourists letting down their hair for a Mediterranean holiday—the women donning spangly skirts in showy colors, the men opening their shirts to the sternum to display pale or sun-reddened pecs. I don't mean to poke fun at any of these people. I just wonder why they came all the way to Italy, to one of its most beautiful corners, and then all ended up clumping together in this relatively uninteresting town, spending time in each other's company at the pubs, rather than seeking out some place more genuine, more Italian.

Instead, everyone congregates here to sip overpriced cappuccino or catch gelato drips with their tongues while having the same five basic conversations, with slight variations:

"Did you see that brothel at Pompeii? [giggle]"…"Oh, you simply HAVE to do the Blue Grottto. The boatmen even sing for you! (I know; the trick is getting them not to.) No, it's on Capri; you can just catch the boat over and be back in a few hours."…"Did you hear, Fred got pickpocketed at the Naples train station!" (Sadly, a likely story. Even more sadly, that's the one bit of Naples most of them ever see—and it serves Fred right for not keeping his valuables in a moneybelt). Then there's in inevitable debate on whether to ride to bus down the Amalfi Coast and back, or just relax in Sorrento tomorrow.

Oh, and: "Where are you headed to next?" (Most common answers: "Home" and "Paris.")

Not me. I'm in Sorrento for two days, largely to give myself a chance to recover from jet lag in a place where I won't be tempted to sightsee, go sniffing around for odd and interesting things, or otherwise try to get any work done.

Yeah, sure. That plan only lasted until my second morning.

Sorrento: Equidistant from Everywhere You'd Rather Be

2005-09-27T19:19:00.000-04:00

Sorrento is a turnstile town, a gateway to other, far more interesting places. It's the place to catch ferries to Capri, trains to Pompeii and Naples, buses down the Amalfi Coast. It's a stopover to pick up your rental cars to get to your rental villa further out on the Sorrentine Peninsula, or hop the orange-topped launch back to your cruise ship docked in the deep waters off the headland marking the east end of town.

There's very little to the town itself other than the general Mediterranean lovliness that it shares with most towns in the area—citrus groves and grape vines, that clear and rich seaside light, fresh seafood, and warm welcomes. There's nothing wrong with Sorrento per se (other than a thick tourist veneer of souvenir stands and pricey cappuccini), but very little that's special, either—especially considering its massively more intriguing neighbors. In fact, a phrase we once used to describe Columbia, Missouri is just as apt here: Sorrento is equidistant from everywhere you'd rather be.

Sorrento is close and convenient to many great things, but it manages it without being all the great in of itself. It exists mainly to absorb the region's tourist influx, and it's been making a living off that role for nearly two millennia. This has been a middle-class resort ever since Imperial Roman times, when wealthy Romans built villas out here in pale imitation of Tiberius' imperial pleasure palace on the nearby island of Capri, barely visible in the smoggy haze today.

Sorrento, sitting in a pretty clifftop position 165 feet above the sea, became a fixture on the Grand Tour of wealthy Brits. In 1843, a sensory-overloaded Mary Shelley proclaimed "This is Paradise" and claimed to have found Italy, the real Italy, for the first time at Sorrento. Later, it became part of the scene for Italian celebrities (Enrico Caruso was fond of the place), and throughout, Sorento remained the favored regional base for tour packages and groups from Cook's to Rick Steves'.

But Sorrento has no great cathedrals and no great museums—just the usual small-town collection of second-rate baroque paintings and ancient artifacts, plus a new center devoted to the local artisan craft of wood inlay. It's not a charming fishing village or hill town, and it boasts no truly ancient quarters, just a grid of narrow lanes following the ancient Roman plan.

The city's most famous son, the poet Torquato Tasso, made his name in Rome, and its biggest cultural endeavor would appear to be the local "folk show" of costumed folks dancing the tarantella (about which I heard one American coo to her husband, "Ooh! Let's do that. I hear it's, like, the Italian flamenco!").

This town is on the Med, and it doesn't even have a decent beach, just a string of $10-to-walk-on piers built out on the breakwaters surrounded by green waters. There are a few scraps of black sand at the base of the cliff, but those get no sun and as such are ignored, left to collect the refuse tossed overboard by ferry passengers and folks crisping on the breakwater piers.

Sorrento does have a trio of churches providing a mild diversion (more on those later). But most visitors spend their time washing back and forth along the narrow Via San Cesareo—the old decumanus maximus of the Roman city—shopping for trinkets that aren't even local, like ceramics and lace, and scoring free hits of limoncello. These come from dueling purveyors on opposite corners of the cross street Via degli Archi, where young employees sling plastic shots of the lemony liqueur to a chorus of "Please, to take a taste," and proclaiming "No problem, is included in price!" When a browser knocks a bottle off the shelf and it shatters.

The bottles themselves are a riot of shapes and sizes: globes, mermaids, sneakers, pagodas, grapes, anforas, male torsos, pulcinellas, fluted columns, prancing ponies, the Italian "boot," violins, sailing ships, hearts, smiling suns and grinning quarter-moons, pineapples, beer barrels, and all sorts of geometric shapes. And what's in them isn't just straight lemon liqueur. There's the even tastier crema di limoncello creamy variation, as well as alcoholic infusions of peach, walnuts, fene3l, melon, mandarin orange, liquorice, chocolate, and bay leaf. (Yeah, I've had that last one before, and believe me, there's a reason you've never heard of it.)

Tipsy on free booze and wired from its high sugar content, the parade wanders on to the Sedile Dominova to take furtive pictures of the old men playing inscrutable and eternal games of cards at little wooden tables surrounded by 18th century frescoes. The men are members of the Worker's Society of Mutual Support—Italy, especially in the south, is full of these union-like clubs for retirees. Their communal living room is a high porch, raised above street level and open on two sides, built in the 16th century as the seat of power for one of the two ruling noble families in town. If you step to the far side of the little square and peek over the café umbrellas, you can see the 17th century cupola, tiled in shiny ceramic dragon scales of green and yellow and sprouting weeds.

That's it. A few hundred feet later, the trinket shops peter out, and most folks turn around to wander aimlessly back up the street again until it's time to go in search of dinner.

The Road to Sorrento

2005-09-27T13:15:00.000-04:00

Delta did exactly zero things to impress me on my trip from JFK to Rome. The total waiting time from getting out of the car to striding up to my gate was 90 minutes, including 18 minutes shuffling up the sidewalk jut to get up to the front entrance.

Then, they stuck me in seat 42E, the very back row of the plane (the check-in desk never asked me "aisle or window?" just gave me a boarding pass). Problems with the back row? Noise from the galley behind you, folks waiting for the bathroom (also behind you) abusing your personal space and leaning on your headrest, and the seats only recline about 1.5 inches. Also, Delta hasn’t yet invested in those plane seat headrests with the little adjustable wings that help sandwich your head in an upright position for a slump-free and crick-less nap.

The only saving grace was that I had the whole row to myself. Huzzah! I never manage to sleep sitting up on planes, so for the first time in about 40 overnight flights, I would be able to stretch out across three seats and actually doze off a bit. Then, just before we taxied onto the runway, some guy got out of a middle seat ten rows up. As he picked his way down the aisle, the already strapped-in flight attendants sternly called out (apparently not for the first time) "Sir, you have to stay in your assigned seat until after take-off. Once the captain has tuned off the seatbelts sign, you can look for another seat."

"Screw that!" He spat at them in a self-important tone, settling into the other aisle seat of my row. "I’m not about to sit in a middle seat!" He then proceeded to arrange all his worldly belongings in fussy piles taking up the entirety of the empty seat between us.

I sent hate-vibes at him during the whole, sleepless nine-hour flight.

Fiumicino had, in its infinite wisdom, decided to open only four passport control windows to handle the dozens of incoming morning flights. The line stretched the length of the immigration room, around the corner, and down the corridor to the base of the escalators down from arrivals. It took nearly an hour to get through.

Then, the doors on the shuttle train from the airport to Termini closed on my foot as I put it on the first stair in order to clamber aboard. I yanked out my abused shoe, the doors snapped shut, and I watched the train pull away. Damn. Half an hour until the next one.

Luckily, at Termini I managed just to make the InterCity train to Naples, and was delighted to discover it was one in the old compartment arrangement. In this era of straight-through carriages that always make me feel more like I’m commuting than traveling, I revel in this throw-backs where you get to investigate a microcosm of six people crammed uncomfortably close for a few hours.

Across from me, in the other window seat, sat a hulking teenager with a do-everything cell phone permanently attached to his right ear by an umbilical earbud. Like a first true love, he ignored the world to pour all his attentions and devotion into this slab of plastic and microchips. First he played video games on it, then used it to chat with friends, and later fell asleep listening to tinny mp3s. In the seat by the door, a raisined little Italian man in a salt-and-pepper beard and cheap, threadbare, but scrupulously clean clothing carefully worked his way through four different newspapers over the course of the ride to Naples. Across from him, a dumpy Korean tourist clutched her purse on her lap and darted her eyes constantly for the full two hour trip, as if she suspected us of being the pickpockets she had been warned about.

Just as we pulled away, a nice older couple from the South Island of New Zealand arrived, panting and sweaty from having dashed for the train (which had switched arrival tracks at the last moment), and collapsed across from one another in the center seats. They were clearly excited to be in Italy, en route to Pompeii, and had a remarkable knack for looking out the wrong window at the wrong time—staring at a bleak suburban wallscape, for example, when the Mediterranean was glittering out the other side of the train.

I took it upon myself to catch the woman’s eye periodically and silently point to the other window at appropriate times so they wouldn’t miss things, starting with those oh-so-Romantic broken, weedy stretches of ancient aqueduct arches that parallel the tracks through farmland of the Castelli Romani. (Unlike the Acqua Vergine and other Imperial Age aqueducts that still run fresh water into Rome from the Appenine foothills to the east, the aqueducts south of the city weren’t kept in good repair by the popes, and long ago gradually crumbled to create scenes straight from a Piranesi print, complete with milling sheep.)

By the time we were in the Campania heartland, the woman broke our compartment’s silence, first to ask politely if I spoke English, then why we kept passing water buffalos? I explained about the mozzarella, and they broke into delighted grins. A bit later she asked "And are those olives?" No…but those are, with the dusty silver and dark green leaves. As we fell to chatting, they bemoaned having spent so long waiting in line at the Vatican, so I told them about reserving Uffizi tickets, and later, in Paris, to buy the Carte Musées et Monuments in order to save money and skip lines.

Occasionally, the little red cart with from the bar car would slide past our compartment, its pusher tinkling the bell occasionally and merely glancing quickly into the compartment to see if anyone showed interest. Much more proactive was the Old School itinerant drinksman. I thought these guys had disappeared, chased off by the now for-profit railroad and its exclusive license with Chef Express to provide crappy food and overpriced drinks on all the trains. But no, here was a small-time entrepreneur, trolling the corridors, swinging a heavy plastic bag at the end of each hairy arm, calling out a patter of "Caffe, caffe…bibite, aranciate, coca, acqua, birra…bibite!" Later, a barrista in Sorrento confirmed that the only bit of the entire national railways he knew of that still featured these bibite (drinks) guys was the Formia-Napoli stretch, where they were so entrenched and so much a part of tradition that no one seemed able to get rid of them.

At Napoli Centrale, I wished the Kiwis luck and hauled my bag down the station platform. I was about to take the stairs down to the basement and the long, twisting corridor leading to the private Circumvesuviana train line strung along the Bay of Naples, when I thought, "Damn. They’ll never find this on their own. No one does." Grumbling about the continued short-sightedness of Neapolitan authorities in not putting up a big sign for tourists saying "POMPEII"with a giant arrow pointing down the staircase, I backtracked until I found my Kiwis—looking, as expected, vaguely lost. I accompanied them down into the warren of underground tunnels, showed them where to buy tickets, and warned them about not accidentally getting on the Metro—the turnstiles for which are, confusingly, directly across from the Circumvesuviana ticket windows even though the Circumvesuviana tracks lie several hundred yards away, down more twists and turns of tunnels.

Waiting on the platform, I extended my adopted circle of tourists to a quartet of backpacked Americans by stopping them from hopping on the first train that came along, as it was headed for Sarno and they (as I) wanted the one for Sorrento. They squinted at me, unconvinced by this stranger offering advice. I shrugged and explained that, on this train, they’d end up clear on the wrong side of Vesuvius, wondering where the sea went and what all the buffalo were doing here. (I left it to my Kiwis to explain the buffalo-mozzarella connection.)

Aboard the correct train, I pointed out the gypsy family working its way through the car—mamma with an infant slung at her breast and small child in tow, little girl squeezing an accordion in a semblance of music as a distraction—and motioned everyone to keep their hands on their wallets. Then I left the tourists alone and got to finishing off my mystery novel as the ancient train shrieked and clattered its interminable way along the southern crescent of the Bay of Naples. It stopped every two to five minutes in identikit suburban towns to disgorge loud packs of schoolchildren sausaged into too-bright, too-tight clothing. I bid the Kiwis goodbye at the Pompeii Scavi stop, advising them not to miss the frescoes in Villa dei Misteri, and stayed on until the end of the line: Sorrento.

I shuffled along with everyone else down the platform stairs—the last line I’d have to stand in for the trip, hopefully—and muscled myself and my bag through the turnstile. I jounced the bag along narrow, red-cobblestoned sidewalks to the eastern edge of town and a small pile of dusty pink cubes clinging to the cliff's edge 200 feet above a little swimming pier. The black paint of the sign at the top of the main building's walls was flaking so badly it was almost impossible to make out the words "Albergo Loreley," the full name continued on the next building "et Londres."

I dropped my bag in room 15—hideous pea-green modular furnishings, no TV, A/C, or phone, but drop-dead views—and, while the light was still good, snapped a few pics of the room and its bougainvillea-lined balcony with the panorama of the sea and busy Marina Piccola port below. Stuffing the camera into my waist bag, I quickly soaped my hands and face to wipe away the grime of the road and weariness of a sleepless night, and headed right out the door again before the bed could tempt me to crash.

As I turned the simple skeleton key twice round in the lock, a smile spread across my face. Somehow, that did it. Sliding the deadbolt into place on the first of dozens of new hotel rooms that would crop up every night, that slid me into the groove. I was back. Back on the road and back on the job. Pocketing the key, I trotted down the stairs, poking my head in the slightly ajar door of room 6 for a peek and some mental notes on the decor, wondering if I'd make it to the curving, bamboo-shaded terrace in time to get an antipasto misto and plate of pasta alla Sorrentina before the chef knocked off for riposo.

Coming to Terms with the German Wine Thing (and the Viewless Rooms Thing)

2005-07-10T23:24:00.001-04:00

I decided to skip the most famous town on the Romantic Road, Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Last time I was there, dragging the boy scouts through Europe, I ended up in a shouting match with a giant tour bus. Well, the bus mostly just shouted, "BEEP!" It was one of those double-high jobbers where the passengers sit way up, leaning against tinted windows, their feet dangling well above the heads of people trying to walk around the thing on the ground. I wasn't trying to walk around it. I had planted myself firmly in front of it, and was yelling at it.

While it kept repeating "BEEP!" I gave a long and, I thought, very cogent series of arguments regarding the definition of "pedestrians only," what this particular brand of mass tourism has wrought upon the beautiful places in the world, and how driving such a monstrosity right into the postcard-quaint cobbled town square lined with its half-timbered buildings spoils the very postcard view the people on board came to see.

The bus just kept shouting, "BEEP!"

Its driver was adding something of his own, and though I couldn't hear him through the soundproofed glass, his vast vocabulary of hand gestures got the point across. Some of the tourists on board apparently decided I must be part of the "local color" and took pictures of me. A few of my boy scouts thoughtfully dragged me away before I could get arrested, and to this day, every once in a while, one of them will say "Hey, remember that time Reid got in a fight with a German bus?"

So I skipped Rothenburg.

Instead, I pushed on west and north toward the Neckar Valley and my final castle, the Hirschhorn. The swift Neckar River winds through the southern reaches of the Odenwald Forest. It is lined with half-timbered villages and castles like a mini-Rhine, but suffers a mere fraction of the tourists, and along much of the river the trees still march right down to the water's edge. However, the forests blanketing the hills did look a bit odd. Generations of systematic logging have left it to grow back in overlapping, mismatched, rectilinear patches, not always aligned, so the greensward is covered in a network of subtle seams and slight color variations like a much-patched road.

Still, only modest swatches of the Odenwald had been permanently shaved away to make room for villages and small farms along the riverside. As I approached the Neckar and began twisting along its length toward the castle, I even saw grape vines strung up on one hillside. "Oh, no!" I said to myself. "Not again!" Sure enough, my guidebook described this as a "…small, but high-quality, wine-producing area."

And on my last night in Germany, too.

The thirteenth-century Schloss Hirschhorn overlooks a bend in the Neckar where a little waterfall dam provides a pleasant white noise background of rushing water to the chirping of sparrow hawks wheeling below the high walls of the castle and the tolling of bells in the little steepled and red-roofed hamlet by the riverside. I spent the afternoon on the castle's popular terrace, set like the prow of a ship at a panoramic point with sweeping views down the valley, and whiled away the time contentedly arranging my notes and working on my hotel reviews while nursing a few chilled beers.

As the afternoon light turned pale orange, I realized dinnertime had arrived and that the folks sitting around me were clinking forks to plates. I raised the dregs of my last beer, silently toasted the view, and drained the glass. I called for a menu and ordered the set-price feast. It opened with melon and ham, followed by beef strips, then a platter crowded with a tiny steak, a pork chop, and a medallion of, well, a different cut of pork. All of it drenched in sauce. Oh, and potatoes. Mustn't forget the potatoes. Ah, well. It's not like I came here for pizza. Suggested to accompany the menu was (yep) a local dry white wine. Well, when in Germany…

I ordered the full bottle.

Just before 9pm, the hotel manager came out and sat at the table nearest the back of the terrace but still against the cliff wall so she could see the panorama. I nodded to her in greeting and went back to reading my book. The waitress brought out a tall mug beer for her boss, and the manager just sit there, along with the middle-aged American couple and the middle-aged German couple, and me, enjoying the sunset, which was reflecting rather spectacularly off the clouds on the other side of the river.

After a while, she was joined by her husband, the chef, who stripped off his apron and poured himself a glass of red wine. She clinked it with her beer stein, staring him in the eyes with a smile in silent toast. They sat for a while, talking in low voices, drinking their beer and their wine, until the sunset faded from the clouds and the sky darkened to navy, then indigo.

I decided to retire early—I had a flight out of Frankfurt in the morning, and still needed to finish packing. I worked a crick out of my neck, marked my spot in the book, and headed back to my room. Before I set about packing, I took a minute to gaze out the window, because, for the first time this trip, my room had a view.

I saw a grassy lawn spilling steeply below the stone of the high castle walls. Sparrow hawks wheeled on the thermals beneath my window and keened to one another as they hunted in the dusk. The grassy slope was bordered by crumbling castle walls that stretched right down to mingle with the red-roofed village below. Beyond, past the vineyards, the Neckar curved silver into the forests of the night-dark hills.

Braumeisters and Bullseyes

2005-07-09T22:10:00.000-04:00

They call the Pegnitz a "river," but on my drive downstream I didn't see it get any wider than about 35 feet, if that. Most of the time is remained a little brown brook meandering through the wildflowers and half-timbered hamlets. It moved so slowly that stretches of the surface were flecked with lilypads topped by tiny white blossoms. Parting the pads were dozens of paddlers, for this was a Saturday morning and folks were out in force to enjoy nature (Germans adore the outdoors), by canoe and kayak, or walking their dogs down streamside footpaths, or strapping on harnesses and belay ropes to tackle the numerous little rock pinnacles that had calved off the walls of the narrow valley.

I could tell I had entered Bavaria because suddenly, the Guten Tags became Gruß Gotts (in traditionally Catholic Bavaria, the Protestant "Good Day" never really replaced the old "God is Great" greeting), and the first station the radio's auto-search feature hit upon as I crossed the border was called "Bavaria 1"—and it was playing oompah band music. That and ordering a beer didn't elicit contemptuous looks. What's more, no longer was anyone trying to force wine "from one of Germany's best grape-growing regions" down my throat.

I worked my way across back roads through the gentle farmland of upper Bavaria, avoiding the official Romantic Road route with its giant buses and ready-made tourist traps and churches charging $5 to see their Renaissance altar carved by Riemenschneider. My goal was the secondary capital of the Romantisches Straße region, the aptly-named Dinkelsbühl, a dinky walled medieval town that is a little too perfectly preserved and polished, the result of dedicating itself to servicing the needs of mass tourism. Still, it suffers a mere fraction of the international hordes that overrun nearby Rothenburg ob der Tauber (a veritable Bavarian Disneyland of gift shops schneeballen pastry makers).

In fact, the only horde in evidence this day in Dinkelsbühl was a troupe of American teenagers hailing from up and down Middle Atlantic. They spent the afternoon alternately wandering the streets (the girls in giggling clumps, the boys in strutting trios) and hanging out in the local pool hall/Internet café, where I had to wait until one of their harried-looking minders arrived to shoo them back to their hotels—to don the red vests, grab their instruments, and pack into the church to give their concert—before I was finally able to get a terminal to myself.

I was staying in Dinkelsbühl, in a huge $40 room under the beamed attic ceilings of a microbrewery called Weib's Brauhaus, because the castle I had picked in the area was fully booked. (Not bad: it was the only one of the ten on my list that had no rooms available.) I dropped my bags, told the young waitress who checked me in that I'd see them for dinner, and hit the road again to drive to Colmberg and check out its castle. Damn shame I couldn't stay there, as it was handily one of the best of the lot, but at least, after a little bullying and a little pleading, I finally convinced them to give me a pretty extensive tour (more to get rid of me before the dinner rush than anything else, I think).

Heading out of town, I decided to try a different road—never go the same way twice—and nearly ran over two medieval peasant girls, an archer with a full quiver and a six-foot bow, and a monk in a brown frock leading a goat on a rope, all of them crossing the road towards a sunken field with some tents. I pulled over and followed the motley crew into a medieval market and full-blown archery competition.

Little kids dressed in their medieval finery were nervously petting a pair of docile ponies and the monk's goat, which attempted to eat the kids' medieval finery. Two women were selling chunks of homemade soap scented with local wildflowers. An old man sat methodically weaving baskets out of straw. A wood carver hawked his hand-carved bowls while older boys tried their hands (and feet) at working a foot-pedaled lathe to turn out decorative posts. A seamstress was selling Renaissance dresses, doublets, and vests. And a man in the booth next to the massive pigs roasting in spits sold me a giant bottle of beer for €1.50.

There were also professional bow makers and fletchers, demonstrating their craft to the curious, hitting on the peasant girls, and then turning serious to sell their best works to some of the archers, who were killing time as they waited for their time slots in the competition. Seventy-five archers had come to test their skills against targets set in a mowed-out section of the field—and this wasn't just some medieval fair fancy. These guys were pros. Only a handful of them were dressed in period costume and using simple long bows. Most were clad in jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps, wielded impossibly complicated-looking compound bows, and peered through a monoscope mounted on a tripod next to them after each shot. I dunno; I was kind of rooting for the guys with enough sense of fun to show up in tight jerkins, leather pants, and blowsy shirts.

Back in Dinkelsbühl and the Brauhaus, I kept my eye out for the evil Brewmeister (I was on a quest for one, see) whilst I chewed my salty but tender steak-on-toast, but no one looking like Max Von Sydow made an appearance. I finally asked my waitress, and she said the owners were out, but that they'd be around tomorrow for breakfast. Ah, I thought, tomorrow morning then. That's when I shall finally meet the Brewmeister and have the chance to foil his evil plan.

Problem is, the Brewmeister turned out to be the most relentlessly cheery German I think I've ever met. Not only that, she was a woman, Melanie Gehring, and though she did indeed have a diploma in Braumeistering, she didn't seem all that evil. In fact, with the apple cheeks of late middle age and a mass of dyed-blonde curls piled atop her head in a kind of hammerhead bouffant, Frau Gehring was downright motherly.

When I politely asked if she could replenish the empty milk pitcher at the breakfast buffet, she exclaimed "Naturlich!" in her sing-songy voice, and bustled away, When she returned, she insisted on pouring the milk over my bowl of meusli herself. I think it was all she could do to stop herself from tucking my napkin at my waist.

With an attitude like that, she's never going to conquer the world.

The Hunt for the Evil Brewmeister

2005-07-08T13:02:00.000-04:00

After many oddly wine-centered meals in Germany, I am sure I'll be for a beer in my future tonight. That's because I am staying at Burg Veldenstein, the castle on the hill above Neuhaus am Pegnitz, a village of smart little red-rooved houses each painted a different pastel shade—robin's egg, peach, canary, mint, pink. The lynchpin of the local economy is obvious at a glance down into the valley from the castle ramparts (not from my room; from my room I get to watch the driveway).

Neuhaus serves to staff the giant Kaiser Braü brewery, which takes up about one-quarter of the town below. Oh, sure, I saw a few tractors parked up against some of the houses during my stroll around town, but I'll bet they're used to grow barley and/or hops. In fact, as I discovered, the brewery even owns Veldenstein castle itself, and the place is so focused on beer that they don't even have business cards—just coasters printed with their address and phone.

Sure enough, at dinner the hotel's gregarious manager even scolded the two elderly German gentlemen seated at my table (in Germany, large tables for six or eight become common seating on crowded nights) for ordering wine with their meal. He gestured at my giant, foam-headed mug and entreated them to try "just a little glass." They demurred, and the owner eventually relented and left to get their wines. I lifted my massive glass and, with a giant smile and a tone suggesting they were truly missing out, assured them, "Schmecht sehr gut!" ("It tastes great!")

But something was bothering me. An almighty brewery down in the valley... it owns the castle up on the hill... Hmmm. Now, why does that ring a bell? I wandered out onto the castle ramparts, ducking under joists and beams laced with dusty cobwebs, and found a little stone bench built into one of the arrow-slit windows for footsore sentries. I sat for a while, watching a luckless fisherman standing in the high grass and working a bend of the slow-flowing Pegnitz at the base of the cliff atop which perched the castle. He gave it up after a while and stomped off toward the massive brewery, past which flowed the stream and the railroad tracks. What is it about that brewery…?

I went down to poke around town. The only thing of interest was a little baroque, onion-domed church dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul. Inside, the ends of the last six pews on either side bristled with a dozen 10-foot-tall staffs, each topped by a foot-high statue of a saint. This gaggle of martyrs had clearly been chosen for their patronage of local traditional crafts and callings, represented by the painted shields below each saint's flowing robes—St. Michael for the masons, St. Crispin for the cobblers, etc. Even the church's two apostolic namesakes seemed picked less for their fame than for their patronage, of blacksmiths (Peter) and merchants/businessmen (Paul—though I had always heard the was patron of upholstery or something similarly inappropriate; perhaps his vigorous "selling" of Jesus all over the Mediterranean won him a kind of traveling salesman cred, the way St. Francis's deathbed ability to see a mass taking place miles away later got him tapped as the patron saint of television).

As I snapped a few pictures of Neuhaus's venerated statuettes, I wondered idly why the bells were tolling at 6:50pm, but when folks started filing in I realized it was calling them to mass, so I left quietly. A tiny, wizened old woman in a red cardigan, wielding an aluminum cane and long white hair that was trying desperately to defy gravity despite the berets she had clamped on it, came rushing out after me. I turned to face her as a tidal wave of high-pitched German washed over me. I caught the words "...patron of [something]" a few times, and she kept gesturing towards somewhere up and away on the hillside, then pointing back to the church.

Her face looked calm, so I figured I wasn't being chewed out for using my camera in the church. I fell to smiling vaguely, nodding, and saying "Ah, so," whenever seemed appropriate whilst trying to figure out how to politely extricate myself from the one-sided conversation before she realized I didn't understand her in the slightest. Suddenly, I realized the flood of German had stopped. I snapped out my reverie and saw that she was leaning on her cane and looking at me intently with piercing blue eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said in my best German accent, trying to keep up the charade and avoid embarrassment. "I didn't catch that." She pointed to my camera and finally said something I understood. "You were taking photographs in the church?"

Oh, crap. I am in trouble after all.

"Oh, it was just so beautiful!" I stammered. "And the saints…"

"Ah!" She cried, and asked which saint I was taking pictures of. My mind fell upon the last one I photographed, St. Bartholomew holding his skinning knife, and said "Barthamüs" as my brain started working overtime to phrase, in German, an explanation that my great grandfather had been a butcher (which is true) and hoping that would be enough to excuse my actions.

But before I had to drag my ancestors into it, the old woman gave a little cry and, with a delighted gleam in her eye, said, "Our patron!" She raised her fist in the air triumphantly. "Bartholomew, with his knife in his hand." She waved her fist around happily. "My family, we are butchers!"

I grinned. "My great-grandfather, too." She gave a glad little cry, said goodbye, and toddled back toward the church door, chuckling. I started walking away, toward the brewery, thinking that she turned out to be quite nice, if a little nutty…

Insanity! That's it! An insane asylum connected to a brewery connected to a castle up on the hill. It's Strangebrew! That's the set-up in the movie, history's silliest riff ever of the basic plot of Hamlet.

The next morning, excited, I drove down to Kaiser Braü itself and peered through the glass doors at the ranks of stainless steel tanks and computerized monitoring equipment supervising the brewing process. It was a Saturday, and no one was around. Damn. I had hoped to finagle a tour and perhaps even meet the Brewmeister, so I could ask him about his plot for world domination. There wasn't even a murderous hockey team made up of mental patients hanging around.

Foiled in my plans to foil the Brewmeister, I quit the brewery and turned my wheels south to follow the Pegnitz River towards the Romantic Road and another night of ensured beeriness. And this time, I would actually be staying in a brewery itself. No way THIS Brewmeister was getting away from me.

A Tall Frosty Mug of Real German…Wine?

2005-07-07T14:01:00.000-04:00

The Rhine is one of Germany's wine-producing regions. So was the Mosel, two nights ago. So will be Franconia, two days hence. Sometimes it seems every Teutonic nook and cranny has been declared "one of Germany's best wine-producing regions." That is all fine and well as far as it goes, but it means waiters are always trying to foist off a Riesling or Gewürtztraminer on me.

Now, one nice thing about Rieslings in Germany is that, unlike the bulk of that gets imported in the States, many are actually troken (dry), not "sweet as syrup," which is unfortunately what "Riesling" usually means in the USA (the same way a decades of spurious 'oaking' tactics by second-rate California wineries have come to make "Chardonnay" translate as "tastes like hamster bedding").

That said, I did not come all the way to Germany to drink wine—and certainly not at eight bucks a glass. I came for beer, for crying out loud! I came for a country where every town has its own local brewery and its own proud tradition for mixing fermented hops and barley. I came for frosty mugs made of thick glass where ordering a "small" gets you half a liter, and "large" means ein Maß—a liter.

Every time I try to order ein bier in a restaurant, though, it gets me a condescending look—almost a sneer. Beer, it is implied, is for slobbering in a tavern with the working classes, not for accompanying such a fine dinner composed entirely of pork products. Everyone else in the restaurant is drinking wine, and having a beer is obviously trés declassé. I usually end up caving into peer pressure (and the waiter's impending disapproval), and whenever I open my mouth fully intending to order ein bier vom faß (whatever's on tap), I find myself instead asking for a wine recommendation. So I spend most dinners ruefully sipping at a half-filled, $8 glass of mediocre white wine, poking at my slab of pork in a pool of mustard sauce, and thinking wistfully of the lucky slobs in the taverns gulping down their $3 Maßes of beer.

That's why I've taken to grabbing my beer furtively, in places where it won't be frowned upon. I'll have lunch in a tavern—which I know means my choices will be wurstel and saurkraut, or this other kind of wurstel, also with sauerkraut (or perhaps with a virulently yellow, terribly sticky, grapefruit-sized ball of gelatinous starch). But at least I can hold my frosty mug up high and proud and say Prost! to the fellows at my table (when you toast in Germany, you have to hold eye contact all the way through to the sipping of the beer). And one day, as I sat at an Internet cafe in Coburg, I noticed that there was an incongruous bar wedged into the back room, so I ordered up a glass of the wonderfully named Frankenbrau, though it was only 12:30pm, and happily drained it whilst deleting spam from my Webmail inbox.

I can't, however, bring myself to break that old Puritan taboo of drinking alone in my room. That, as I know from after-school specials on alcoholism, is just one step away from sneaking in the kitchen at night and slurping vanilla extract to get a fix, like Tom Hanks did in that guest spot on Family Ties. (Of course, the first thing I did upon seeing that episode was go to my mom's spice cabinet and take a giant swig of the vanilla extract, because it had never occurred to me you could do anything with it other than put 1/4 teaspoon into recipes for baked goods. I don't know if you've ever tried to drink the stuff straight, but it tastes exactly the opposite of how good it smells. That one experience, more than any sit-com moralizing, has convinced me never to become an alcoholic. Yes, despite my parent's best efforts, 70s and 80s TV really did play an unhealthily large role in my upbringing.)

That is how I ended up with this can of miXergy, which I bought on a whim at a gas station, because I figure it doesn't count as "drinking" alone in my room, as it is merely a form of soda. In fact, the label heralds it as "bier + cola + X!" I popped it open as I sat down to write this part, took a sip and, once the involuntary gagging was over, glanced at the side of the can to see what, exactly, they meant by "X." The can was of little help, other than announcing the alcoholic content, so I can report only that it is composed of 3.1% alcohol and 96.9% oh-my-god-that's-nasty.

It’s enough to drive a man to Riesling.

As for me, it drove me down south, to Germany's bastion of beer: Bavaria.

Would You Like Some Pork with That?

2005-07-06T12:59:00.000-04:00

Most menus in Germany are suspiciously similar: a half-dozen variations on the schnitzel theme swamped in a creamy mustard sauce, some veal (usually subjected to the same inundation of sauce), a steak or two, venison stew with wild mushrooms, and whatever the local wurstel is.

Each dish is accompanied by any of a number of preparations of potato or a dense dumpling made from a starch-based food so cooked-down it's impossible to tell what it started out as, plus some form of sauerkraut. It's hearty, it's filling, and it's fairly obvious, after a few days on this diet, why there are so many Italian restaurants in Germany. French, Chinese, and Greek ones, too. Yesterday I passed one called "Ristorantisches Zagreb," proudly offering Balkan cuisine. It was packed.

Don't get me wrong: a platter of wurstel, a side of roasted potatoes, a salty bretzlern, and a liter-sized stein of bier to wash it all down is great fun and terribly tasty. But a steady sausage diet can get real old real fast, and there are some varieties of wurstel...well, let's just say the sheath of pig intestines into which the filling is stuffed is by far the least offensive ingredient involved.

Plus, it's all meat-and-starch, all the time. As a general rule, I care very, very little for sauerkraut. But here I find myself attacking the piles of slimy, pickled cabbage with a relish, egged on by a primal need for something resembling a fruit, a vegetable, or, really, just anything containing vitamins.

Schnitzel, too, gets pretty boring pretty quickly, especially when it's invariably protected under an armor of fried bread crumbs and hidden beneath a creamy sea of mustard sauce. I know it's just me, but every once in a while, even when it's well-prepared, in the midst of forking my way through yet another platter of schnitzel, the whole thing suddenly looks and tastes exactly like a Hungry Man TV dinner. That's when I know it's time to order another liter of beer.

Still, I grimly plow on through the many and varied regional preparations of cholesterol and polyunsaturated fats, my perverse sense of travel correctness keeping me from even glancing askance at the menus posted outside the dozens of pizzerie, "trattorien," and restaurants named after famous Italian cities and islands. I have to stick to the local specialties, even if it kills me (here my arteries would like to voice their opposition to this rule).

My vague rule of thumb is that you have to spend at least two weeks in a country before you're allowed to cheat and get a pizza. There are exceptions, of course. London, like NYC, is home to a globe's worth of interesting exotic options. In Prague, French cuisine ranks a close second to Czech in local popularity. The nineteen-course Indonesian feasts in the Netherlands are incredibly tasty and perfectly legit, given the country's colonial history in Southeast Asia.

Even Germany has an exception to the rule: they have now reached the critical mass of immigrant Turks necessary to make Turkish food a legitimate local option. Therefore, for the occasional lunch you are allowed a dönnerkebab, a split piece of flatbread stuffed with carved slices of spicy roast lamb with lettuce, tomatoes, and three kinds of sauce, one of which burns off your taste buds. Otherwise, though, it's wurstel and schnitzel all the way, baby.

Still, there are plenty of opportunities for the weak-willed to cheat, to take the coward's way out of arterial sclerosis. On most German menus, even in the most heuiriger (cozy) lilttle gestätte (tavern), if you look closely enough you'll find an escape clause, a dish such as "currywurst mit pommes frites," or "hen-flesh strips" prepared Orientischer art (Oriental style) with a pepper/cashew sauce, pan-fried veggies, and rice. But frankly, I have yet to meet any chef but an Indian who can apply curry to a dish in an appetizing manner. As for Orientichers art, if God had intended the Germans to stir-fry, he would have had them invent the wok. Instead, He apparently blessed them with a surfeit of pigs.

I've only been in Germany a few days—well shy of the two-week mark—and I already used up my lunchtime get-out-of-schnitzel-free dönnerkebab, so I'm finding other little ways to rebel. For instance, I am writing this bit in the Rhine village of Bachrach at a table in the Weinhaus Altes Haus—a half-timbered structure of red beams and white plaster that was apparently saved right in the midst of falling in on itself, so all the walls are at odd angles and from the outside it looks like a spritely illustration from a book of Grimm's fairy tales. I am awaiting the delivery of my carefully crafted light meal, to consist of a large mixed salad, a cheese sampler platter, and Apfelstrudel with cinnamon ice cream for dessert. I plan thusly to run an endgame around the "main courses" part of the menu—which promised schnitzel in a cheese-potato sauce with French fries, boiled beef in a berry sauce with potatoes, and something unfortunately translated as "Beef broth with stripes of noodle bags."

I am making amends for having ordered a modest bill of fare by padding my meal with not merely a glass of wine (which is the most that the largely abstemious Germans will drink with their meals—and which insanely always costs at minimum €2.50, usually €5 to €9), but rather a full bottle of the 2000 Toni Jost Reisling, grown on the slopes just outside of town.

What? Wine? In Germany? What happened to the massive mugs of beer? Tune in next post…

The Bane of the Solo Traveler

2005-07-05T13:57:00.000-04:00

I just checked into a hotel installed in the medieval gatehouse of mighty Burg Reichenstein, overlooking the valley of the Rhine River from on high. I was handed a room key, lugged my luggage upstairs, and opened the door to my third parking-lot view in a row.

Chalk it up to the old "single rooms suck" law, which is aimed at punishing those who dare to travel without companionship. I may be here to write an article on sleeping in German castles, but what I'm really becoming an expert on is what medieval castle parking lots look like. To whit: gravely, littered with rental cars parked at odd angles, and amazingly, precisely, just a tad too small to turn around in properly. Most of the guest rooms in these German castles come with a panorama of the local river valley, vistas over unspoilt forestland, or at the very least a peek at the red roofs of the timeless village that grew up around the castle's feet. All of these fall under the category of views that my room invariably lacks.

The trend started with my very first castle of the trip. I had crossed the lower Rhine at Bonn, where the valley widens and pancakes into vast flatlands peppered by Germany's twin pinnacles of tradition and progress—church steeples and factory smokestacks—above which white gliders wheel on the thermals. Once across the plains, I turned south to join the parade of weekend motorcyclists slaloming down the turns of the Ahr River Valley, whizzing through evergreen forests that stand on tall stilt trunks.

The forestland soon gave way to the Eifel, Germany's largest volcanic region. Save for the giant, lazily spinning Mercedes symbols harvesting wind on ridges and hillsides, the bucolic scenery was straight out of a 19th century painting. A fertile land of green-gold fields unrolled in between the little Christmas tree farms planted in neat Teutonic rows, and the strings of eyelet lakes filling ancient volcanic craters. Hay was harvested into seven-foot-tall rolls placed just so around stubbly fields. The fields were being mown closer still by sleek muscular horses, round piebald cows, and roly-poly sheep freshly shorn for summer. Congregations of fat, contented-looking silky-maned blond ponies standing placidly in the dapple light of woods’ edge alternated with flocks of fat, contented-looking children with corn-silk hair romping in the pineshade of riverside campsites.

This fairy tale of forest and farmland was occasionally interrupted by half-timbered villages built around rocky promontories topped by craggy castles. Some of the ancient fortresses were roofless and shattered beyond repair, their stone walls yawning apart. Others looked comfortably lived-in, with steep slate roofs and tan stucco-cemented walls picked out with brightly painted shutters in heraldic red or blue stripes against white.

Luckily, my castle on that first night, the Kurfürstlishes Amtshaus, turned out to be of the latter type, a bastion of creamy yellow walls trimmed in dark red and topped by ranks of dormer windows clad in dark, mossy slate tiles, and its stood next to a white-steepled church above the bustling market town of Daun. Christa Probst, the owner, was genuinely surprised when, while I was completing the check-in form, I told her I was an American. "How did you find this place?" She marveled. "No Americans come to the Eifel!" She gave a nervous, disturbing little laugh. "This is an empty region. A poor region."

Frau Probst elaborated. "In 1850s, many people went away—to America, mostly. Sometimes their descendants come back to look for family, but it has been so long. Too long. Everyone is gone. This area is only good now for walking and for bike riding." And motorcycles, I pointed out. She gave her disturbing little laugh again. "Yes. We Germans, we love the motorbikes!"

I finished signing in and tried to express the idea that Americans might like to come precisely because the Eifel is not full of factories and other signs of modern commerce. It's simply farmland and forests—and very pretty ones at that—along with the odd reminder of the region's volcanic heritage, like mini Old Faithful-type geysers, giant smooth boulders plopped in strange spots, and those lovely little eyelet lakes. She stared at me bemused, as if there might be something a bit wrong with me, and handed me a set of keys.

My room had a lovely view of my rental sedan.

I got the same panorama from my lodgings at Castle Liebenstein the following night, another Romantically crumbling Rhineside fort, so I abandoned my digs and watched the sunset from the ramparts and chatted with a couple from Montana while their 13-year-old daughter and her cousin clambered around the castle ruins in little black chiffon capes and baseball caps, popping in and out of view as they discovered hidden passageways on their determined ghost-hunt.

And now, the vista from my new digs in Burg Reichenstein: gravel lot, lots of cars. Well, at least it's a proper room. A corollary of the "single rooms suck" law states that any space in the hotel that was once a broom closet, storage room on the airshaft, or substantially sized bathroom may, in a pinch, be converted into a single room. I've stayed in all of those, plus a few worse. Once I was put up in the little manager's office off the hotel lobby, sleeping on the night watchman's cot wedged between the wall and the comically oversized hotel safe (that was in Enna, Sicily, where despite my copy of a months-old faxed reservation they insisted the hotel was fully booked).

Another memorable time in Marostica, a town famous for its biennial chess match on the main piazza using costumed people as pieces, another lost reservation meant I had to set up housekeeping in a little windowless room of the basement parking garage, most of which was taken up by the building's central heating/cooling unit, which would periodically roar to life, popping and squeaking and clanging, at irregular intervals throughout the night. In Germany, at least, I was getting actual hotel rooms. Just tiny, crappy ones.

However, as a consolation, my crappy castle singles do always come with the entertainment of watching folks try to execute 42-point turns in a tiny parking lot at the wheel rental car they're not really that used to. Since many castle rooms don't come with TVs, this is about as exciting as my evening gets. But since everyone now seems to be in for the evening here, the fun's over and I figure it's time I stopped putting it off. It's time to go rustle up some dinner.

Enzo and His Hot Love Liqueur

2005-07-01T21:21:00.000-04:00

Seven years ago, I immensely enjoyed a dinner at U Bossu, and accordingly gave Enzo's seven-table restaurant on a forgotten Taormina side-street a star rating in the Frommer's guide I was researching at the time.

Enzo was gregarious, friendly, jocular, and overall a genuine impresario for his little trattoria—and the food was fantastic, especially for a moderately cheap joint. At the end of that meal, he had poured me (and everyone else in the place) a shot of a fiery pepperoncino liqueur of his own invention. I love spicy things, and I love sugar, and Enzo's homemade hooch was a perfect marriage of the two tastes. Also, it packed an alcoholic wallop.

Fast forward to last night. As I entered, I saw the little "Recommended by Frommer's" sticker proudly displayed in his window, and gave a little smile, wishing I could tell him who I was and why he had so deserved that stamp of approval. Instead, I just dug into my dinner with relish, delighted that the food was as excellent as always--tagliatelle alla mafiosa (egg noodles made fresh that morning topped with a ragù of pistachios, tomatoes, cream, pancetta bacon, and mushrooms) and cartoccio di spigola allo scoglio (buttery sea bass baked in tin foil along with a handful of mussels)--and that Enzo was still a great character, endlessly entertaining to his few guests.

The pair of English ladies talking in low voices by the wall looked a bit taken aback at and overwhelmed by Enzo's gregariousness, but the Irish couple sitting behind me, who had eaten here every night of their holiday so far, thought he was a hoot. They shared with me their belief that our host looked like an Italian version of George W. Bush. Enzo made a sour face when he overheard that, but I had to agree there was a resemblance, and had trouble from then on shaking the image of Bush, with a tan and a little paper hat, speaking English in an Italian accent so heavy it was almost comical. When two young Dutchmen strode in, Enzo grinned widely and held out both arms "Welcome back!" then made a show of looking anxiously behind them. "But where are your girlfriends tonight?" When the pair explained that the women were off "For a ladies' night, without us boys." Enzo winked and said, "That's OK. We can have fun on our own. Sit here, I bring you good wine." And he hustled back to the kitchen.

At the end of the meal, Enzo asked if I would like an almond-flavored digestivo. Now, when I had arrived at the restaurant, Enzo had asked how I found his phone number (as I had booked ahead). I told him that he had provided me with a memorable dinner in the summer of 1998, and I'd always planned on coming back. So when he asked me about a digestivo, I said I recalled he had served me a fantastic liqueur of pepperoncino before, and could I please have that?

Enzo stared at me for a moment, bemused, then sighed. "Ah! My great failure." He smiled wanly, said, "Just a moment," and went to the little desk to rummage around under stacks of paper. He returned with a coated, unfolded paper brochure for his Liquore di Venere, and explained how he had tried to make a go of it.

In 1993, when he was still working as a chef in someone else's restaurant, Enzo thought a digestivo as fiery hot as Etna looming in the distance might prove popular. He admitted to knowing nothing of liqueur-making, or even really of basic chemistry, and so went through a lot of failed batches of moonshine before finally hitting on a method for distilling an essence of pepperoncino, mixing that into a sugary syrup, then marrying it all to a liquor base.

At first he served the stuff to patrons at his employer's restaurant as a "digestivo artigianale." By 1995, he had opened up U Bossu--dialect for "The Boss," which he finally was (though he jokingly calls himself little more than a "plate-ferrier," carrying dishes from the kitchen to the tables and back)--and decided to try and make a success of his invention. He picked out bottles, had labels designed and printed, and sent a sample of his liqueur (along with reams of paperwork) to the official governmental body in Rome that regulates such things.

Then, since moonshine is illegal everywhere, he had to have an official distillery to produce it. Since starting one from scratch would take far more money, time, resources, and--most significantly--paperwork than he could handle, it was far easier simply to buy a distillery that already existed on paper but wasn't actually in business. (The sheer bureaucratic inertia of the Italian regulatory systems makes such seemingly oddball solutions far easier than just going about things in a straightforward way.)

So, Enzo ran his new restaurant, and he made his Liquore di Venere, named for the kind of burning desire the Goddess of Love could instill in mortal man. He served the digestivo to all his customers, who were generally delighted and would often buy a bottle to take home. Selling the odd bottle to a patron, however, wasn't going to pay the bills--especially since most of the time Enzo would refuse to accept payment, and usually ended up just giving the bottle as a gift, insisting that the customer had already paid him "With excellent conversation." I know, because that's how I ended up taking home a bottle seven years ago. But the testimony of a few satisfied restaurant customers (not even those who would go on to encourage their guidebook readers to sample the stuff) were not going to be enough to turn Enzo and his liqueur into the success he was sure was in the cards. "Cinzano. Martini & Rossi. They all started as just one man with a recipe. Now look at them! Why not me?"

Enzo started sending letters and making phone calls. He contacted every liquor label and company he could think of. No one was interested in distributing a single item from a lone producer in limited quantities. He told them, no problem: he could make more. They all said, essentially, no thanks. They didn't really want to work with an outside producer.

Eventually, about a decade after perfecting his formula, Enzo finally gave up. He started serving a mass-produced almond liqueur from Marsala to his restaurant patrons as the digestivo he always offers "on the house" along with the bill.

"I still have three or four crates of the Venere at home." He said, and for the first time all night he looked sad--not the sad-sack act he puts on when moaning that he's nothing more than a glorified "plate-ferrier," but genuinely defeated. "I give bottles away as gifts, sometimes. I open one or two for special occasions at home. But in the restaurant, it's just the almond liqueur now."

He walked over to fetch a bottle of that and poured me a small glassful. I weakly said something about how unfortunate it was about the Liquore di Venere, because it really was a fine digestivo. "Eh, si." He said, with downcast eyes. "I was going to have great success with that." He looked up at me and smiled bitterly. "It was good! It should have been a success. The liquore would become famous, and I would have been rich."

It was late. The restaurant was empty of other patrons by then, and I was feeling downright awful having inadvertently re-opened what was clearly a painful wound. I tossed back the bitter almond liqueur, and stood up to leave Enzo and his cook to clean up and head home for the night. "Beh,' buona sera and thanks for another excellent meal." I said, sticking out my hand to shake Enzo's. He shook the vague cast of sorrow off his face, and beamed at me. "Tell you what." He said, taking my hand firmly and not letting go after the standard pump-and-a-half. "I'm back here around eleven in the morning, to do the shopping and get ready for lunch. Stop by around 11am tomorrow, and I'll bring a bottle of the Venere for you." Then he let go of my hand.

So, the next morning, I went by U Bossu. Enzo was bustling about in his little paper hat; though the open window to the kitchen I could see the taciturn chef chopping things up. Enzo smiled when he saw me and shuffled into the dining rooms, pausing to take a bottle from the desk covered with stacks of paper. In the clear liquid floated a hot pepper bleached white by time and long exposure to alcohol. Enzo dusted the bottle off with his apron before handing it to me.

"Liquore di Venere," he said with a flourish. "I hope you enjoy it!" I could tell he meant it.

And, just like before, Enzo refused to let me pay.

Jane Eyre, Forbidden Love, and the British Dukedom in Sicily

2005-07-01T14:54:00.000-04:00

The old inland SS 120 used to be the only road from Sicily's east coast to Palermo until the Autostrada from Messina was built along the island's north shore. It wraps around the north side of Mt. Etna, passing the bushy grapevines that thrive in the volcanic soils and a number of small towns whose crumbling castles and thriving little medieval centers are a reminder that, though now an agricultural backwater, this used to be a main highway through an empire.

Exactly whose empire we're talking about has changed repeatedly.

Just in the past 2,800 years or so, Sicily has variously belonged to the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish Bourbons, French Angevins, and--only since Garibaldi landed at Marsala in 1861 to start the Savoy King Vittorio Emanuele's conquest of the peninsula--the Italians. Also, just in this one forgotten corner of the island, for a time, technically it was part of the British Empire as well. Well, a Dukedom, really. One belonging to, of all people, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.

The forests through which I was passing, which were blocking the sun from drying out my passport on the dash, lay on the edge of the Duchy of Bronte, a realm which was based around the town of Bronte (famous for producing the best pistachios in Europe) but which was ruled from the Castello di Mainace, a good ways north of town in the forest.

The castle was named for the Byzantine general Geroge Maniakes, who fought the Arabs in Sicily, won a decisive battle here, and founded the castle in 1040 on the site of an Arab fortification. In 1173 the place was turned into a monastery, which tumbled down (along with most of the rest of eastern Sicily) in the massive earthquake of 1693. A century later, the castle was rebuilt, and these days it mostly goes by the name "Castello di Neslon."

Here's how that went down.

In 1799, the Spanish Bourbons--monarchs over The Two Sicilies--had been forced out of Sicily #1 (Naples) by Napoleon, and had taken refuge in Sicily #2 (Palermo). King Ferdinand wanted Sicily #1 back (my guess: because of the mozzarella), so he looked for outside aid to help slow the juggernaut that was the Napoleonic army.

The British counsel in Palermo at the time was able to secure the services of their Admiral Nelson to lead his fleet against the French (something he was to prove incredibly good at) and drive them away from the interests of the Bourbons. The reason the consul was able to convince Nelson into the fray had nothing whatsoever to do with his talents as a diplomat, and everything to do with the fact that he was Lord Hamilton. Lord Hamilton's wife was Lady Hamilton, and Lady Hamilton was Horatio Nelson's lover.

In gratitude for chasing off the French, Ferdinand gave Nelson the Dukedom of Bronte, which included this castle and estate. This royally granted British fiefdom in sun-drenched Sicily gained a measure of fame back home at the time. One rabid fan of Nelson's, a certain Reverend Patrick Prunty, went so far as the change his last name to Bronte--only he added an umlaut over the "o," for reasons clear only to himself--and passed along the new surname to his bookish daughters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.

Officially, Nelson never even set foot in his Sicilian castle. Unofficially, however, he just may have spent here the happiest days of his life. Voices whisper that Nelson consummated his tryst with the Lady Hamilton here, in the Castello Mainace, and that this is where they conceived their illegitimate daughter, Horatia.

Whatever the case, the bliss was short-lived. Nelson had his fleet to command, and within four years, he heroically lost his life--yet again besting Napoleon--at the Battle of Trafalgar, and the Sicilian estate passed to his brother, William. Lady Hamilton and Horatia fared even worse.

In that era, even when a hero as great as Nelson was involved, the scandal of such a relationship with another gentleman's wife was utterly unacceptable to British society. In the end, Lady Hamilton was reduced to serving as a maid back in London, where she died destitute. The bastard daughter Horatia descended into poverty as well, and disappeared from history.

Castello Mainace, however, stayed in the family of Nelson's brother, and was passed down to his niece Charlotte, who married the Baron Bridsport. The Bridsports held onto the joint all the way up until the land reforms of the 1960s did away with noble holdings. By 1981, everything but the little English cemetery across the road became the provenance of the local comune, which has set it up as a museum to the distinguished Nelsonian connection.

The most interesting item in display in the upstairs living quarters, isn't the lovely tilework on the floors or the period furnishings behind velvet ropes, nor is it portrait of the petulant teenage Bridsport who served as the last Duke of Bronte, nor even the engraving, signed by both men, commemorating the only meeting, in early September 1804, between Nelson and Arthur Wellesley (this was five years before Wellesley was elevated to "Viscount Wellington," and ten years before he got bumped up to "Duke").

No, the most interesting artifact on display was a set of crystal: a wine carafe and two glasses set into a wooden base, with little metal clamps that swiveled over the foot of each glass designed to keep it steady and in place as the ship pitches and yaws. It was the drinking set the Admiral used onboard his ship just before the phyrric victory at Trafalgar.

It was this everyday item, a token of the nuance of Nelson's shipboard life, which struck me the most. The idea that the Admiral might have done something as gloriously mundane as enjoy an aperitif before the fateful battle sat well with me, and it reminded me of Enzo and his fiery Liqueur of Love. But that tale will have to wit until the next post.

All Wet

2005-07-01T11:50:00.000-04:00

I am staring at the reflection of my passport photo in the windshield. I'm on a road winding through the forested northwest slopes of Mt. Etna, and every time I pass from the treeshade to the sunlight on a curve, there it is: my face, with a silly grin; my signature, in Sharpie; the bold words USA (in frills), PHILADELPHIA (where I was born) and New Orleans (where the thing was issued, but which European hotel clerks always assume indicates where I live, so that's what they write on the check-in form I have to sign).

My passport is there, up on the dashboard, staring at me accusingly, because it needs to dry out. It needs to dry out because I took it swimming with me this morning, breaking a half-dozen of my own iron-clad travel rules in the process.

As my Brazilian friend Daniel would say: lemme 'splain.

When I left Taormina this morning town, I followed the same twisting road winding down to Giardini Naxos that Jay and took on scooters seven years ago (on which ride, if I recall correctly, I bent my right thumbnail back almost in half flicking the starter, which still ranks as my one and only scooter-related injury). I followed the valley of the Alcantara Torrent inland to the point at which it issued from the tall, narrow basalt walls of the Gola di Alcantara, which means Alcantara Gorge but actually translates literally (and more poetically) as the "Throat of Alcantara."

South of the Taormina promontory, all of Sicily is Etna-formed territory, and the Throat of Alcantara is one of its most striking features. The volcanic basalt here cooled into long, geometric columns ranging from pentagons to octagons -- geological cousins to Giant's Causeway in Ireland and Devil's Tower in the States -- all fitted together in giant woodstacks and pipe organs. These formations have subsequently been lifted, twisted, and turned by volcanic convulsions, carved into a narrow, twisting slot of a valley by the Alcantara, and polished to a smoothed, gleaming leaden gray by millennia of water flow.

The effect is remarkable, and in the wide valley floor where the close walls of the Throat open up, allowing the Alcantara to braid itself into several streams rushing around low, pebbly island flats, Italians by the dozen were strewn out, raisining themselves. Their kids, too impatient to lie there roasting for hours on end, were splashing in the shallows or wading up to the opening of the Throat, where the water swirled above their heads in a deeper pool and they could haul themselves up onto some rocks and challenge each other to jump in.

I, of course, stripped off my shoes and socks, zipped off the legs of my convertible pants (momentarily becoming more interesting than their sunbathing to the surrounding Italians), undid my belt with the camera bag on it and slung it over my head and one arm like a bandoliero, emptied my pockets of cell phone, wallet, and change and stuffed them into my shoulder bag along with the pants legs, took my shoes in one hand, and started wading across to the far shore of the braided streams and as close to the Throat as the dry land went. There, under a scrubby tree, I broke another major travel rule. I put down my shoulder bag -- which contained several thousand dollars worth of electronics, my irreplaceable notebook, and various and sundry other items -- took off my shirt and left it on top, and then walked away from it all, around a corner and well out of view.

I waded into the deep pool at the Throat, holding my camera bag and belt way up over my head, and sort of breast stroked/doggy paddled to the slick rocks at the entry to the gorge. One of the Italian kids, a morbidly obese little guy of about 11 called Tancredi (it's nice to know that some names from Sicily's early medieval Norman dynasty survive down to today), saw me and called down for me to hand up my camera to him so I could use both hands to scramble up the slippery rocks.

I thanked the kids, left them to dare one another to jump off the rocks, and continued wading up the now much deeper waters inside the Throat, taking pictures and fretting endlessly about the camera over my head and the unattended bag way back on the beach. I got several hundred yards in, just before the turn where the Alcantara rushes down over a series of waterfall rapids, when it became too deep to go any further--not to mention too cold. Tancredi had told me the water temperature was about 14 degrees (57 degrees Farenheit). "In the afternoon, it gets as high as 16 degrees, but now, it's about 14. Maybe even 13!"

By the time I got back, it was getting on lunchtime. The little pebbly beachlets were clearing out, and the kids were gone. I managed to slither down the rocks, swim/wade back to dry land, and located my (thoroughly unmolested) bag. In wading back across the stream braids to the far shore -- at some point I had lost my Molefoam, and the sharp river pebbles were murdering my heel blister -- I even managed to find a nice souvenir stone with just the right leaden color and smoothed geometric form to recall the geology of the gorge. I sat on a rock to dry out a bit, reassembled my pants and footwear, and hobbled back up the trail to the cafe-cum-car park at the lip of the valley.

It was when I went to the bathroom and unzipped my fly that I realized there was one precious item I had not left unattended in my bag on the beach. My moneybelt was still safely clamped around my waist under my clothes, and it was dripping wet. Inside it was a small Ziploc-type (and, apparently, not waterproof) baggie filled with folded-up twenty-dollar bills, and a soggy, lumpy roll of some kind of cardboard that turned out to be my passport. Cursing, I took it out, flattened it as best I could, and placed it on my dashboard when I got back in the car to hit the SS 120, the old back road towards Cefalù.

Breaking the Rules and Wasting a Morning in Taormina

2005-07-01T11:20:00.000-04:00

I must be seriously out of shape, mentally. This trip started with me breaking a trio of travel rules right off the bat: (1) I picked up a rental car at the airport (which always incurs an extra fee), (2) merely to drive it into downtown Palermo (never drive in a city--especially not an Italian city; and especially not a Southern Italian city--if you can avoid it), and then (3) paid for it to sit, parked, for two days whilst I traipsed about town on foot and by bus (always pick up the rental on the day you leave the first big city on the trip, that way you avoid paying for those few days of a needless rental, for the parking, and for that airport pick-up fee).

Another disturbing indication of my mental flabbiness occurred during the drive from Palermo's Punta Raisi Airport--now renamed (though not all road signs have got the memo) Aeroporto Falcone-Borsellino after the two crusading anti-mafia magistrates assassinated in the early 1990s. During the ride, I started getting really aggravated about all the slow, timid, and downright stupid drivers all around me. It was while I was accelerating to weave through the traffic, throwing Italian invectives and complicated hand gestures at other drivers, that I realized what was wrong with this scenario. One does not find European drivers to be slow and timid--especially not Italian drivers, and especially not Southern Italian ones.

That was all a week ago, when I first arrived in Sicily. Yet my mind has still, apparently, not gotten itself back into whack. I managed to infringe upon yet another travel rule before I even woke up this morning. Yesterday, when I checked into the Villa Gaia in Taormina, I asked the hotel clerk if there was anything exciting going on in town--concerts, spectacles, or simply anything new to see or do that hadn't been available seven years ago on my last trip here.

Turns out that, as with all the other ancient Greek theaters in Sicily that have been rehabilitated (and spoiled, visually, with ranks of aluminum risers where the stone seats have crumbled away) to serve as summertime stages for all sorts of entertainments, I managed to pick the one week out of the whole summer during which every single one of them is "between series."

Segesta had just finished a run of classical Greek plays and was gearing up to start classical concerts next week; Siracusa was taking a breather between experimental modern theater and a schedule of ancient dramas; and Taormina had just ended one set of theater and art shows and now had a team of workmen scurrying around trying to turn the 2,500-year-old Sicilian stage into a sheet of ice (on the day when local temps hit 100 degrees) for a revue of skating prowess that was to take place two days hence, which was to be followed the next day by a concert by Diana Ross (whether or not the Supreme would also be required to wear ice skates was not clear).

At any rate, I was out of luck in terms of actually getting some use out of the visual eye sores represented by the intrusion into these glorious ancient spaces of modern seats and scaffolding-pipe erector sets serving as grandstands and to hold lighting arrays. However, the hotel clerk told me, Isola Bella was now open to the public. I had only ever been able to admire from afar this tiny, gardened islet cupped in one of the pocket-sized swimming bays on the coast below Taormina's promontory. Yes, the clerk said, this summer they were ferrying the public to the island on tours at 10am and 3:30pm every day. I knew I had to take off next morning (in order to go swimming with my passport, then drive to Cefalù), but this sounded like a worthy diversion, so when she asked if I'd like for her to call and book me a spot for the next morning, I said sure.

Travel rule: Never rely on a hotel clerk to provide some service you can do perfectly well on your own. At worst, the clerk's going to turn out to be all rotted out underneath the smiles and language of deference and will end up scamming you into something shoddy and at an immense profit to themselves. At best, you're relying on someone else's ability to recall a passing promise made to some stranger from New Orleans they're trying to get to sign the check-in register so they can go back outside and finish that cigarette your arrival interrupted.

What I got was the "at best."

I duly slept in a bit later than I had planned to do when I had planned on an early start. I took breakfast in the garden, where I taught an older American woman sitting near me to ask for "Hag" if she wanted a decaffeinated espresso. Then I watched in horror as a newly-arrived middle-aged Australian man abused first his girlfriend, who showed up a few minutes after he did, then was nasty to the hotel clerk and ordered her to take away the "nasty pastries" and go inside and bring him some sliced bread instead--"Can you do that, d'ya think?" he sneered--which he proceeded to slather with avocado and slices of raw tomato he produced from a plastic shopping bag. He then ordering the clerk back inside to bring him a phone, whereupon he called his boss (who was apparently staying down in the beachside resort community of Giardini-Naxos) and suddenly turned all oily sycophancy, bitching crudely about this "god-awful little town" and eagerly arranging to go down to Giardini-Naxos to see the boss's hotel and make arrangements to stay there instead.

In the face of his maltreatment, I put off bothering the put-upon clerk about my Isola Bella arrangements until about 9:15, at which point I inquired politely. She blanched, said "Scusi!" and dashed back inside. A minute later, she returned, apologizing that it was no longer possible to take the 10am tour, as I would have already had to have left to take the gondola down to the beach. "Do you want to do the one at 15:30?" I sighed inwardly, smiled outwardly, and said "No. Unfortunately, I have to get on down the road."

Still I tarried in town (more on that in a moment), and spent 45 enjoyable minutes wandering the back streets where Taormina's annoying, polished resort air falls away. Laundry flaps on balconies, street corner shrines support tiny vases of dried flowers, and an itinerant fruttivendolo (fruit and veggie seller) operates out of the bed of a teensy three-wheeled ApeCar pickup, selling his produce to a small clump of local ladies of a certain age and with each sale gallantly offering to carry her purchases back to her house.

Three Kinds of Martyrdom

2000-08-30T18:25:00.001-04:00

The year was 1545. It was late in November, and the German preacher, frozen to the bone, had barely made it over the last mountain pass on his journey south. He stopped at a crossroads, and before him he saw a pretty Tyrolean city called Trent nestled in the valley at his feet.

He stood there for a few moments, contemplating what the coming ecclesiastical conference might hold. He wondered if church officials from Rome might finally be willing to hear him out, perhaps even to revoke the label of heresy hovering over the radical ideas he had nailed to that church door. For seemingly the thousandth time on this journey, he started going over the words he planned to use in order to orate the members of the Papal envoy around to his point of view.

As Martin stood there, lost in his deep thoughts, a figure appeared toiling up the hill from the town. It was a farmer's wife, returning from a moderately successful day at the market. She still had some fruit in her basket, so the reformer asked politely if he might buy some, adding a casual comment about how Trent must be in a tizzy with preparations for the Great Council as she handed him an apple and he slipped her a silver coin.

"You got that right, sir." Said the woman in that odd, thick, medieval dialect of German the locals spoke, her eyes sparkling at the sight of the silver.

"All the church dignitaries already arrived I suppose." Martin asked offhandedly, biting into the apple.

"Oh, I don't know about all that." She replied, slipping the coin into a fold in her layers of clothes. "I'll tell you one thing though: that Martin Luther fellow isn't there yet, and he better not show up, neither. I poked my head into the church of Santa Maria this morning and saw that they were getting ready for him. They were building a big bonfire in the center of the aisle, and had a pot of oil boiling off to one side." She cackled with glee. "Oh, yes, if that German blasphemer is stupid enough to come down here, he'll get what's coming to him!"

Though Luther may have been deft with a quill and handy with a hammer—and dead certain he was the one to reform the Catholic Church—he didn't trust his personal rapport with God enough to assume he'd miraculously been made fireproof as well. He thanked the woman, who trundled off down the side trail to hide the silver under the big rock in her back yard.

Martin took one more look at the pretty little city spread in its valley below him, tossed the apple core into the bushes, and turned around. He clambered back up toward the mountain pass, hoping he'd make it back to the Austrian side of the Tyrol before the first big snow shut down the Alps for the winter.

THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
Trent is where Catholics held their Great Council of 1545-63, which repudiated that German proto-Protestant Martin Luther and his wacky ideas about reforming the Church. Luther himself was invited to this esteemed liturgical conference, and they even had a seat of honor waiting for him—after a fashion.

The first council actually started in December, and I've no earthly idea of Martin Luther really was arriving at the last moment—or even if he bothered coming at all to what was bound to be an ecclesiastical (if not actual) auto da fée for him and his reform-minded colleagues.

The little scene I just laid is merely my own rendition of a folk tale told in the valley above Trent about a fruit seller and the strange German fellow she met on the road that winter. I have neither the historical background nor the desire to dig through ponderous tomes regarding this watershed event in church history to discover whether Luther even made it as far as the high Trentino valley before wisely turning on his heel and avoiding the trumped-up council entirely.

For the whole council was a sham. Oh, sure, it was touted as the grandest debate of its time, a chance for Paul III and his loyal papal cardinals to listen—really listen for once—to the worrisome reformists gathering in their proto-Protestant clouds north of the Alps. In fact, a full 700 bishops had been invited…but a mere 31 turned up for the first session, along with 50 other theologians of lesser stripes.

By the tail-dragging end of the great ecumenical council—18 years later, in 1563—the rolls of attendees still only totaled 270 bishops in all. And even that deck was, shall we say, stacked slightly in the pope's favor (the pope by that point being Sixtus V, Paul III having given up on the Council, and his time on earth, in 1555).

Of those 270, 187 of them were Italian and, presumably, archly loyal to His Holiness. Another 32 were Spanish (keep in mind, this was less than a century since the Christian re-conquest of Spain, so the Spaniards, too, were as fervent as Catholics can get), and 28 of them were French, also not known for rocking the religious boat (at least not until the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Napoleon). In the end, a whopping two bishops were contributed by any of the countries that were, at the time, in any way seriously engaged in questioning Holy Truths and the bureaucratic architecture of the church, and they were both from Germany. Neither of them, of course, was Martin Luther.

I'm not going to get into the whole Council thing here—let alone any sort of religious debate—except to say this: like so many political to-dos, it was trumpeted as the instrument of great change, but ended up merely solidifying the status quo (and, I might add, gave the Protestants up in the British Isles all the excuse they needed to go on persecuting my own Irish Catholic ancestors). I'd rather focus on the city Trent has become since its 15 minutes (er, 18 years) of fame in the 16th century.

A LAND OF TWO COUNTRIES
Trent lies in one of those hotly contested corners of Italy that hasn't always been, technically speaking, Italy—let alone Italian. Given the way all locals will speak to you in the Tyrolean dialect of German first, and only in Italian (mit ein Strong German Accent) if you force them to, you may wonder if it's part of Italy at all. That's because it's not, really, Italy. Not Germany, either. Neither is it Austria. It's the Tirol.

There's a region of Europe's central Alps—stretching from the Bavarian border with Germany, through Austria, over the Brenner Pass, and down through this section of Italy's Adige River to the sheer, craggy Dolomiti Mountains—which has a common culture, dialect, and style known as Tyrolean. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with liminal cultures, the cohesive region of the Tyroleans now has national boundaries running right through the middle of it.

The Tirol is split into two main halves: the North Tyrol in Austria (Innsbruck would sort of be its capital), and the Südtirol (South Tyrol) across the Italian border, with centers such as spa center Meran (Merano "in Italian"), the Alto Adige capital Bozen (aka Bolzano), and the northernmost of the major towns, medieval Brixen, so solidly Teutonic that Mussolini really had to engage in some queer linguistic gymnastics in order to nationalize and Italianize its name into "Bressanone."

They tried to make Trent sound Italian, too, by tossing an "o" on the end of the city's name on maps, but Trento around here is always called "Trent," and while on the minutiae scale of cartographers it is part of the Trentino region and not the Südtriol proper, in the bigger cultural picture, Trent is Tyrolean every inch of the way.

Trent's hilltop Castello di Bonconsiglio, the "Castle of Good Council" where many of the Council of Trent meetings took place, was a big part of the flip-flopping of this province between Austrian and Italian control over the centuries. (Local control ended when the Austrian Hapsburgs took the lands away from the Counts of Tyrol.) But even though they're most comfortable as semi-Teutonic Tyroleans, the locals are also very well aware of the fact that, unlike their brethren in Innsbruck, the Südtirolischer live on the sunny side of the Alps. Though nationalistic sentiments have understandably always been (and always will be) split, there has always long been a strong pro-Italy sensibility in these parts.

SACRIFICING TO ITALY
When speaking of the Italian nationalist movement in this corner of Italy (not only the Trentino/Alto-Adige but also Trieste's neighboring Friuli region to the east), everyone mentions Gabrielle d'Annunzio, the poet turned patriot whose private little war to grab more of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian empire for Italy so embarrassed Mussolini that the dictator ended up giving d'Annunzio a gorgeous lakeside villa and helped fill it with art and antiques just to shut him up.

If another name pops up, its usually national martyr Cesare Battisti (1875-1916), hero of the Irredentiste movement to return the Trentino and Südtriol to Italy. Intellectual, publisher, father, one-time member of Vienna Parliament, socialist, and military commander, Battisti was also, I might add, something of a colleague, as early on he tried to make a go of it writing a few Trentino guidebooks (which still sell in Italy). Caught up in the region's changing fortunes and political allegiances, Battisti ended up imprisoned in Trent's Castello di Buonconsiglio and later hung for treason in the castle's long-since-drained moat.

No one, however, mentions Bice Rizzi. I only discovered her by carefully reading all the tiny 3x5 cards typed up to accompany the displays (mostly photocopies of yellowed documents and photographs) jammed into the glass cases of the Castello's museum. Bice Rizzi (1894-1982) was sentenced to death for high treason by the Austrian military in 1915 for her part in the Irredentiste movement. The sentence was later commuted to 10 years of hard labor in Wiener Neudorf.

In the meantime, the Friuli did, indeed, become part of Italy. When she as released, Rizzi returned to Trent and became director, from 1923 to 1970, of the Museo Storico in Trento's Castello di Buonconsiglio, which to this day celebrates the unification movement for which she and her more famous compatriots fought so hard.

DEATH BY SLIPPER
The Duomo museum, on the other hand, is full of images of local ecclesiastical hero San Vigilio—by himself, or keeping St. John the Baptist company, or posing alongside the Madonna and Child, or watching St. George defeat his dragon, or otherwise just generally making the rounds of the saintly fetes and Major Biblical Moments pictured in countless Renaissance and baroque altarpieces. Virgilio was an evangelical bishop (Trento's third) and was invested, supposedly at the age of 20, by Milan's Sant'Ambrogio himself in 381. Vigilio died in 400. So much, we know, is more or less true.

Later Lombard texts brag that Vigilio was martyred by "slippering," an odd sort of stoning that apparently was supposed to involve many everyday objects (including farm implements, sticks, and, yes, stones) being hurled at him, though the primary missiles of choice were the nail-studded sandals of common workers. (Apparently, Vigilio's destruction of their beloved Saturn idol didn't sit too well with the peasants of the then-pagan Val Rendena, whom was trying to convert.)

And though the (most likely invented) history texts pin the martyring on sandals, since the late 15C his icon in art has nevertheless been the zoccolo, a soft silk slipper. That is the martyrdom item what he always picture holding—like Catharine with her spiked wheel, Stephen balancing teensy boulders on his noggin, Lorenzo hefting his human hibachi, or Peter Martyr sporting a big ol' knife stuck in his head. Vigilio, the weenie saint, is invariably shown carrying a pillow on which are perched a pair of silk slippers. Poor Vigilio.

Still, it's nice to see some consistency in a place. Trent didn't truck with its traditions and identity being changed back in pagan times, and it doesn't now. It didn't appreciate strangers coming along and explaining patiently just why the locals' ways of worship were wrong in the 4th century, and they still felt the same way by the 16th century. And the staff at the museum in the castle will proudly explain—in the thick accents of a medieval German dialect—how they can be proud to be both Tirolisher and at the same time a part of the Italian state, just like their Lombard, Veneto, and Fruili neighbors who live here, in the mountains and valleys on the sunny side of the Alps.

The Heights of Monte Bianco, the Girth of Entreves

2000-08-25T23:59:00.000-04:00

An older British couple shared my four-seater gondola for the long, dangling ride back from Mont Blanc's Aiguille du Midi to Punta Helbrunner. This is the world's longest cable car without any supporting pilons. Instead, an impressive set of cables stretches horizontally between two rocky peaks about halfway along intersect the main cables and help keep us from plummeting to our deaths. At one point, when we were hanging roughly three kilometers over the canyon-sized cracks in the Mer de Glace glacier, they nervously asked me whether there were any U.S. military bases in the area, a clear reference to the Aviano catastrophe a few years ago when a hot-dogging pilot clipped the line of a cable car over in northeastern Italy, killing all 29 people inside.

On the way back down, I spent half an hour relaxing and sunning in the scrabbly (but beautiful up close) botanical gardens half-way down the Italian side.

Back down in Entreves, I finished washing out my laundry in the sink and hung it on my wrap-around Alpine balcony to dry some during dinner. I strolled to the other end of the village and to the Maison de Fillipo and one of the most remarkable dinners I have ever had. The restaurant occupies the ground floor of an unassuming little chalet, and to enter I had to duck through the low doorway. Or rather, I had to duck through after first squatting to hold a brief but earnest conversation with the curly-haired toddler who was blocking it; he eventually deigned to let me pass. Inside was a converted farmhouse, all low ceilings, stone arches, and odd ancient farm implements nailed to the walls.

An older lady with a string of pearls, hot pink jacket, and eyeglasses on a chain sat me at a table already laden with several small dishes containing broad beans, anchovy fillets swimming in oil, and the local equivalent of chow chow. This, it turns out, was the beginning of my antipasto. Dinner, as I eventually gathered, is a fixed-price deal over which I was to have little, if no control, and for which I would eventually gladly hand over 60,000L ($28), too stuffed to do otherwise.

Soon a platter of long salamis with a tiny cutting board and sharp knife balanced on top arrived, as did a plate with paper-thin slices of cow tongue under a tomato sauce. My waiter was short and wiry, with sinewed forearms and small, serious black eyes fixed between graying wavy hair and a bushy moustache. He kept bustling by bearing platters laid out with little florettes and rondels of various goat cheeses, each dolloped with a tiny bit of tomato or pesto sauce, and he'd toss an example of each on my plate as he passed.

After a bit, my water and a full bottle of the house wine (a Dolcetto d'Alba so dark red it was almost black) appeared, as did a basket of bread with those great, thick, buttery Valle d'Aosta grissini—the best homemade bread sticks in the world. Feeling full, I placed my knife and fork across the plate to indicate I was done with the appetizers (hell, from a sheer stomach-capacity point of view I was done with dinner, really, but didn't want to seem rude), and my waiter asked what I wanted for primo. The tortellini were the thing to get, he confided, so I complied.

While I waited, my waiter dashed by again, pausing with a silver plate smothered in wedges of roast pepper topped with a bit of some kind of pesto and slid a few onto my plate, explaining "The antipasto isn't done yet." No sooner did I clean my plate of those than he spooned out some kind of kraut with giant white raisins. I finally got that down, and they bussed the plate away to replace it with another. Ah, finally. The primo will come before the antipasto does me in completely.

But it wasn't over yet. A young lady came by with a huge serving platter supporting half a pig, explaining: this here was the cooked prosciutto, this pile of pale greenery next door was the sauerkraut to go with it, oh and here are some potatoes and fresh, warm applesauce and some kind of spiced meatloaf just for good measure. I was, by this point, to say the least, stuffed. She smiled conspiratorially and whispered, "Don't worry. This is the last of the antipasto."

Bloated and still waiting for the tortellini, wondering vaguely where they would fit inside my stomach, I tried to stretch my legs out under table, only to run into something soft, giving, and furry with my shoes.

?.

I lifted up the tablecloth to discover a medium-small sheep herding-type dog under there, who looked up at me with mournful, sleepy eyes as if to ask why I felt the need to kick it, when all it was trying to do was take a nap. I looked back at him accusingly, as if to say "Why didn't you tell me you were under there earlier? I could have been slipping you the bulk of my antipasto all this time!"

After a full hour and 15 minutes (remember, I started eating the instant I sat down), a primo finally made its appearance: spinach and ricotta tortelli under a fondue of Fontina and other mountain cheeses.

These mountain folk don't know how to do anything light. If the concept of a low calorie, low cholesterol, low-fat diet ever caught on here, it would obliterate the entire regional cuisine.

Mercifully, the tortelli were served on a separate platter, which meant I was able to get away with spooning just a few over to my plate (though some explaining was in order when the waiter came to reclaim the shamefully unfinished remnants of my primo). For secondo I opted for the camoscio, meat of the local mountain goat we call chamois, provider of the soft, soft wool that has given its name to the "shammy" with which (though now made with synthetics) one polishes one's car or one's glasses. It came with a chunky—and, need I say, filling—polenta.

Dessert consisted of prunes and dried figs soaked in honey, sweetened chestnuts, and both crema and hazelnut gelato with hot fudge and homemade whipped cream. No, I am not joking. Mercifully, they spared me the cheese table (though seemd disappointed in me) and let me get away with just a caffè and a shot of blackberry grappa while the woman put her chained glasses on to rummage in an old red leather purse for my change.

I stumbled back to my hotel, threw open the balcony doors to cool the place down, and fell with a groan into the bed—on my back, of course. My stomach wouldn't fit anymore.

The Melandris & The Mud Angels

1999-11-16T02:36:00.000-05:00

I had dinner tonight at the apartment of Massimo and Vittoria Melandri in Florence. Their place was beautiful, a 14th-century building restructured in the 19th century, which is when they frescoed all the ceilings and the walls. Gorgeous.

The ceiling paintings in the main salon where we dined were a bit obscured by soot, since (as explained Massmimo's 86-year-old mother, who lives on the top floor of the building and who joined us for dinner) two families were living in that small space during World War II, and as the electricity and gas were cut off, they cooked by building little fires in the middle of the room. Massimo can't clean them up properly since they aren't technically frescoes but rather paintings on the dry plaster, so to remove the soot would also remove the paint.

Massimo had managed, however, to clean the 20th-century whitewash off the walls, which are (buon) frescoed with tromp l'oeil architectural elements. However, the surface of the plaster is microscopically pocked and flaking, so the frescoes are milky and faded looking, unless they get wet (a state that was demonstrated with the swipe of a damp rag), at which point the colors burst off the wall again in all their 19th-century splendor, only to fade slowly again as the plaster dried.

Dinner was a penne casserole with ragu, followed by chicken breasts in a fresh porcini sauce, artichokes cooked in a bit of olive oil, and aldente cannellini beans, over which we drizzled a strong, deep green, perfectly opaque olive oil that Massimo had gathered and pressed just last Saturday at their small farm outside Casciano Val di Pesa, on the Chianti's western edge. To wash it all down we had the ruby red wine that Massimo makes himself — he doesn't use the communal press, but rather gathers the grapes from his few strings of vines, and has his own little press and aging facilities for making them into wine. Afterwards it was homemade crema gelato with a shot of whisky poured over it.

During dinner, we first discussed some of Massimo's job, arranging art exhibits for the city, including a big one this past summer that placed all about town sculptures by a Bottero, famous for his paintings and huge bronzes of incredibly fat, but smooth and sort of minimalized, figures.

Since the sculptures were displayed in public spaces it created some controversy — especially those on Piazza della Signoria, which is already full of famed ancient, Renaissance, and baroque statues. But in the end the exhibit was successful. Vittoria was even saying how a famous television personality and critic said good things about it, to which Massimo replied "Of course, he was paid to do so." But the mamma broke in with a phrase that makes sense only in a place like Italy: "Sara stato anche pagato, pero` non e stato comprato." (He may have been paid, but he wasn't bought.)

Then they began regaling me with stories of the 1966 Arno flood, which inundated the city with a 20-foot wave after rains in the hills dumped 19 inches in less than 48 hours. The swollen river proved too much for the Florentine embankments.

The Melandri's street, Via Fiesolana, runs north-south for two long blocks and then ends at another street, so the water rushed up it like a river, carrying along at first bicycles and motorini, then things like the newsstand from down at the corner, then entire cars, which came flying up the street at tremendous speed, borne by the raging waters, to smash into the wall at the top end of the street, where they stayed until the water began receding again after two days.

At this point, the cars were carried by the water back down to the low end of the street, where for some reason (engine weight?) they all ended up tipped trunk-upward, with their front ends plunged deep into the ten feet of mud left behind and their back ends stuck up in the air, all lined up one after the other like dominoes frozen in the process of falling over.

When the flood first started around 7:30 a.m. and water began swirling up the street around his feet, young Massimo was sent up the block to his grandmother's house to take her some bread, meat, and eggs. She asked why the provisions? and what was the matter?, and Massimo replied "Beh', c'e qualcosa che non va con l'Arno, ma non si preoccupi." (That would translate as the wonderful understatement 'there's a little something wrong with the Arno, but don't worry about it'). On his way back home, minutes later, the water was already surging strongly above his waist.

His family gathered on the first floor (second story) originally, in the apartment now owned by Massimo (and where we were dining). Out the window they noticed a stunned local veteran, who had lost both legs in WWII and now had two false ones, standing on in the middle of the road, watching the waters rise around him. They called out to him, but he was in a state of shock and just stood there in the rising flood.

Since the front doors on all the buildings had already waterlogged to such a degree they had swelled shut, people lowered a rope and hauled the old veteran inside, at which point the entire population of the building removed itself to Massimo's mother's place on the fourth floor to escape the waters that were already rising up into the second story (they'd eventually reach about four feet up the walls of the second floor).

The building's inhabitants continued to live together up there for a week or two, the metal hinges on the veteran's false legs rusting up quickly and causing him to go "squeak, screech" continuously as he moved about. Luckily, it continued to rain — they say 'luckily' because, with their supply of fresh water cut off (water, water everywhere and not a drop...), their only recourse was to put pans on the roofs and collect rain water.

The flooded part of the city, still encumbered by more than 12 feet of mud even after the waters receded, was sectioned off by the military, who set up blockades enforced by loops of razor barbed wire to keep out looters. Of course, life had to go on outside the flooded area, and Massimo said it was eerie, especially at night, to move from the "normal" part of the city on the periphery past those guards (identification papers, please) back into the center, where everything was dark for lack of electricity and every surface was inky black.

Everyone used oil heat back then, and one of the first things the flood waters did was enter basements, fill the small private oil tanks, and float off the entire supply, creating a thick film of fossil fuel that rode on top of the flood waters. When the water started running back toward the Arno and its levels in town fell, the oil slick was deposited, inch by inch, as a solid sheet of grimy midnight on all the walls to a height of about three meters.

The shops were empty. What hadn't been carried off by the torrents was left useless anyway, and one of the first orders of business for stricken owners was to shovel the ruinous remains of their stock into the street in growing rubbish heaps. The military drove around day and night delivering fresh water and bread rations to the houses and apartments in the flood zone.

Massimo's mother turned to me at that point and for the first time put into heartfelt words what I had before only read about. The most incredible part of the whole flood, to her, was all these young students who came from all over — from France, and Switzerland, and Germany and other places — to help. They dug in the mud for hours on end to help locals reclaim their homes and historians liberate and save materials and art from the Uffizi, and from the thoroughly inundated state library down by the river.

"They worked like demons all day," she said. "Quietly and seriously, then trooped up to sleep in unused train cars up at the station, still in clad their mud-caked and sweat-soaked clothes, only to came back early the next morning and start digging again." Looking out at these hardworking "Angeli del Fango," these Mud Angels, Massimo's mother felt a gratitude and a tenderness she's never experienced before or since. "They didn't ask for anything," she said with long-harbored respect. "Not at the time or afterward, they just did what they did to help the city, to help the people, to save Florence."

Copyright © 1999 by Reid Bramblett.

Thin Walls

1999-07-11T21:17:00.000-04:00

You name a noise, the guy in the room next to me is making it. It's 2 am, and he has been at it for the better part of an hour now. In fact, I'd wager good money that the body of the man in room 28 of the Hotel Pratic in Paris is emitting every sound possible outside of actual speech.

It began with a prolonged session of rat-a-tat's, a queer sound that would start off grouped into two long burbles, then repeat as a short burst, pause for several seconds, then start in again with the double long burbles. At first I thought it was some kind of weird Morse code. Then I realized it was snoring. Oh, great, I thought. He's going to snore at me all night.

Oh, how I wish he had merely kept it to snoring.

The man in room 28 soon took to harumphing and clearing his throat. He took to sniffling, snorting, and blowing his nose quite triumphantly and repeatedly. He took to wheezing, hacking, and making little strangling sounds, rounded out by a good stiff bout of coughing (which ended with the inevitable hocking of lugies; this popular pas de duex was encored several times throughout the evening). At one point engaged in a single, memorable sneeze that I don't think the residents of this Paris neighborhood will soon forget.

Then, at a certain point, he grew weary of the nose and throat division and began to explore the whole range of noises that upchucking afforded. First came the wet, squelching streams of vomit, splatting against the aluminum of what I can only assume is an identical copy of the tiny dustbin in my own room. This was followed by a protracted session of systematic, cyclical retching. Almost hypnotic. Almost rhythmic enough to lull me back to sleep. But then he had to go and finish it with a staccato series of irregular dry heaves. And just to be sure I was still awake, he ended with one large, reverberating — and somewhat relieved sounding — belch.

You thought it couldn't get worse, eh?

To top it all off, running like a melodic theme throughout the freakish aria that has become my evening's aural torture was his resounding, boisterous, earth-shattering, powerful, positively monumental flatulence. We're talkin' the sort of grandiose emission of noxious vapors that wakes up the neighbors (case in point); that registers on the Richter scale; that causes flowers to wilt. When this guy broke wind, it was a meteorological event.

He farted with great fanfare and with wild abandon. Sometimes it was a high pitched, fluttering whine that lingered before lilting up at the end like a question mark, sounding like nothing so much as the mating call of some odd and (thankfully) extinct bird. Sometimes it was an old fashioned Bronx cheer, sputtering along strongly for a good long moment before trailing off smoothly; other times it was an antique locomotive engine letting off steam, whooshing out and hissing angrily. Occasionally it idled: a souped-up motorcycle at a stoplight. The worst was when it started as a low muttering growl in the distance, then crescendoed steeply to roll like a mighty thunder across the landscape, finally to recede and end with a short — pffft—.

Well, all misery must at some point come to an end, and eventually the one-man orchestra in room 28 ran out of orifices with which to create sounds. He drifted off with only the occasional sniffle, cough, or fart to mark his journey into sleep. He didn't even bother to start snoring again. It was wonderful. It was glorious. I could stand such occasional noises. I could stand the muffled zoom of the odd car out late on rue de Rivoli a block away. I could stand infrequent drip-drip that my room's sink makes every night no matter how hard I twist the faucets shut. I could even stand the oddly regular creaking of bedsprings that was emanating from the wall on the other side of my bed, coming from room 26.

Oh, no.

And so, the woman in room 26 began her long, slow, loud, and none-too-shy-about-it ascent to orgasm. It was not to be her last of the evening. Her lover must be a stallion. It is a shame I shall have to kill him in the morning.

Copyright © 1999 by Reid Bramblett

The Madonna of Tears

1998-08-29T19:29:00.000-04:00

This is the story of the Madonna della Lacrime, the Madonna of Tears. A Siracusan family buys a little factory-made plaster plaque-relief of the Madonna back in 1953. They hang it on the wall.

The next morning the husband goes off to work, after which the gypsum Madonna image starts crying, at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Wife calls husband. He comes home. They marvel at the thing, a bit scared, and try to figure out what to do.

Relatives they call start coming over to see it and confer.

Then neighbors start arriving to see the miraculous Madonna (that'll teach them to reveal secrets to nosy Sicilian relatives).

Then strangers start showing up at the door.

You can see where this is heading.

Within days, hordes are descending on the residential block in Siracusa. The family lets them troop through their modest living room, pray, and tramp out the back door. The local top prelate, at a loss for how to call this one (genuine miracles in this century have been few and far between), starts making phone calls. The town doctor and local pharmacist show up as representatives of the world of detached authority figures.

The pharmacist performs perhaps the most common scientific test known and announces that the water leaking from the Madonna's eyes tastes just like human tears. (Careful kids, don't try this at home. It takes years of pharmacology training in order to know how to lick salt water off a chunk of plaster.) On the third day, a scientific team arrives in time to take samples of the last tears to flow down the plaster Madonna's cheek. She stops weeping at 11:40 a.m. on September 1, 1953.

The samples turn out to have the exact chemical composition of human tears, and basic chemistry precludes that either gypsum or the paint on the relief could have produced such a liquid. No longer weeping, the Madonna proceeds to perform a whole passel of miracles of the curing-the-blind and healing-the-maimed variety.

The little mass-produced plaque is quickly proclaimed a holy, miraculous relic and Siracusa sets about building the requisite God-awful enormous church to house it, across the street from the archeological museum. Recently completed, the oversized shrine resembles nothing so much a giant alien badminton birdie that landed out of bounds smack on a site that turned out to be, as they dug the foundations, a temple to Demter and Kore/Persephone, Sicily's oldest goddesses (lots of ancient devotional statuettes for the Archaeology museum).

I, until this morning ignorant of all this history but knowing vaguely that some Big Time miracle thingy from the 50s was cooling its holy heels in that skyline-defining ice cream cone structure, decided to stop by this morning on my way to the San Giovanni catacombs.

If you will kindly recall from a few paragraphs ago, the Madonna of the Tears started weeping at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Today is Aug 29.

I showed up at the church around 9am, and ran headlong into the Mass celebrating the exact moment of the 45th anniversary of the miracle. The miraculous Madonna plaque itself was in attendance, looking kind of funny and out of place. Up at the altar was this itty bitty kitschy Christian cast-off, mass produced to be placed above the mantle of people who are just a little too religious.

And here it was, surrounded by legions of the faithful in a structure built for it alone and that clearly follows the architectural premise that if you pile cement high enough into the sky, God will notice. There were grown-ups dressed like ersatz cub scouts passing 'round the collection plates. Throngs filled the church. People wiped their hands down their faces repeatedly as they prayed and moaned. Weird weird weird.

Later, I got to voice my discontent at the archaeology museum. After going through what I could tell were normally some of the best collections in all of Italy of prehistoric and Greek-era artifacts, I approached the guest book, which invited me to leave comments. So I told it that a museum which has loaned almost every single major piece in its collections out to special exhibits elsewhere and has stuck in their places just photographs has no right to charge the full admission price. I could even cite you the (more conscientious) Italian precedent of the archaeology museum in Taranto, Apulia, which is currently charging half price since half the galleries are closed for rearrangement.

I spent the later afternoon tramping about the Siracusan farmland, bushwhacking through reeds and Dr. Seussian papyrus plants, fording streams, jogging down the middle of railroad tracks, and broad-jumping over irrigation ditches in what turned out to be a two-hour fruitless attempt to follow the Ciane River all the way to it's source. The source is called the Fonte Ciane, where the nymph Cyane — who rooted for Persephone during her the abduction by Hades — was turned into this very stream by the angry underworld god. Either that, or (other myths say) it's where Pluto plunged back into the ground to take his newly acquired bride back to hell after bursting out way up in Lake Pergusa near Enna and grabbing up Kore as she picked flowers.

(Siracusa is full of these things; down near the docks on Ortigia, the island core of the city, is a very pretty little natural fountain and pond planted with papyrus and swimming with ducks. It was formed, so they say, when, way back in the Peleponesse, the nymph Arethusa was bathing in the river governed by Alpheus, and the River God took a liking to her. As he grabbed her by the hair an began trying to rape her, she pleaded for mercy and Artemis heard her. In pity, Artemis turned Arethusa into a spring, and the nymph plunged underground, racing away from her captor.

Alpheus, not to be deterred, took on watery form himself and followed her under the earth. When Arethusa burst back above ground, she had made it all the way under the Mediterranean and popped out here in Siracusa, gushing from a grotto as she still does today. Alpseus was hot on her heels though, and he swiftly came flowing out of the grotto too, mingling his waters with her for eternity. This, to the Greeks, was romance. They used to think if you tossed a chalice into the river Alpehus in Greece it would eventually come bobbing up in this pond in Sicily.)

But anyway, back to other watery nymphs and the Ciane, all this tramping around activity only served to bring back my chronic heat rash with a vengeance, so I am hobbling around again, experiencing both intense pain and embarrassment simultaneously. Back at my hell-tel and after a welcome shower in a bathroom I survived only by shutting my eyes to the squalor, I returned to my room to regroup my energies and clamp a freezing bottle of Gatorade between my thighs in an attempt to find some rash relief (this was an extraordinarily delicate procedure, requiring me to ice certain parts of that general region while keeping other, neighboring bits of my anatomy from any contact whatsoever with the icy glass, for obvious reasons).

I got in free, thanks to the nice tourist office lady, to a show tonight in a medieval church with no roof but lots of hibiscus and flowering vines spilling off the wall tops and down the columns of the nave open to the stars. The entertainment consisted of an actor performing monologues from various Shakespeare plays, then a baritone (accompanied by piano) singing the operatic version of the same scene from operas by Verdi and other based on the plays. Interesting concept; it was weird to hear Shakespeare in Italian—odder still that Shakespeare, even in foreign lands and languages, is often considered perhaps the greatest playwright of all time.

Had a late dinner of pizzas named after biblical characters under dwarf palm trees, and a small beer at a pub while I compose this message. I think I am now sufficiently tired be able to return to my hotel room and fall asleep quickly so as not to spend much time conscious in that skanky place. Tomorrow morning I transfer to what can only be happier quarters.

Copyright © 1998 by Reid Bramblett

Sweet, Sweet Heaven

1998-08-05T19:36:00.000-04:00

I was walking up the street in Lecce near Santa Croce church when someone across at the edge of my peripheral vision started calling out to me in English: "Hey! Hello! Excuse me, hello!"

As usual — as with the hotel touts at the train station, the man at the postcard stand today, and the guy playing his guitar (badly) yesterday in a doorway — when strangers on the street start talking to me in English, I ignore them completely. Not to be rude, but because 9.99 times out of ten they want to sell me something I don't want or need, and they're out to fleece me to boot. So I kept walking ahead. Then the voice said "Eh, uhm... Frommer's! Frommer's, hello!"

Wait a minute. This guy knows who I am.

I turned and it was a face I vaguely recognized. He shook my hand and said (In Italian from here on in), "It's me Andrea, sorry your name slipped my mind for a minute there, but it's Reid, right?"

He introduced me to his friend, we smiled, and he asked, "So, still touring around for work, yes?" Yes, I am. "Did you ever get the chance to go to the beach?" I shake my head. "You work all the time, yes?" Unfortunately, yes.

I still haven't the foggiest who this guy is. Someone I've met in the past several days — not here in Lecce, but somewhere in Apulia — but I can't place him at all. He asks where I'm headed and I said to lunch, that-a-way. Ah! His car is that-a-way, too; let's walk together. So we chat. The peny finally drops: Andrea is one of the group of Italians who adopted me last week at a pizzeria in Taranto, inviting this solo American to come sit with them and share their wine.

As we ambled the back streets of Lecce, Andrea asked if I know of the Suore (sisters). What Suore? He grins."Follow me."

We diverge up a side street and cut through two nameless piazze where clearly buildings once stood but where now people just park. One side of the second piazza is a long, windowless wall interrupted only by a solid double metal door painted green with a "No Parking" sign yellowing on it. Andrea walks up to the door and presses a buzzer. He grins at me again. After a few moments, a feathery old woman's voice crackles over the intercom, "Si?"

Andrea asks in extremely polite terms for something, and the voice crackles, "Si, certo. Un attimo soltanto." (Yes, of course. Just a minute.)

We start chatting again, waiting up against this green double door. After about five minutes, the door cracks open and a delicate, liver-spotted parchment hand reaches out, proffering a flat package wrapped in white paper secured with a thin green ribbon like a present. Andrea hands the wrinkled hand the equivalnet of $5, and I peek through the crack in the door to see a kindly old nun in her habit and wimple smiling at us from the dark. She's the lucky nun, in my opinion, the only one within this cloistered order who's allowed to communicate with the outside world.

We thank her profusely and walk back through the two nameless piazze to get out of the sun. There, I untie the green ribbon to open one end of the package. Out slides a cardboard tray piled with florettes of marzipan, sugary almond paste shaped into candies, with a dollop of pear marmalade hiding in the center of each. Whatever else might make up the particular calling of the good Sisters of San Giovanni, their marzipans are quite heavenly.

Now THAT is the sort of thing I wish I could put into guidebooks.

Copyright © 1998 by Reid Bramblett.