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

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.

The Hunt for the Evil Brewmeister

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?

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.

The Bane of the Solo Traveler

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.

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

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.

Three Kinds of Martyrdom

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.