Italia – Part II, Plus a Little Balkan History Lesson, Just for Kicks

We’re in Croatia now.  Of course, by the time I finish writing this we’ll probably be in Slovenia.  And by the time I finish fighting with the blog site and with the inevitable bad internet connections, it probably won’t be posted until we are in Prague.  As it stands now (while in Croatia) I still haven’t posted Part I of the Italy blog.  This is because we have no internet here, so I can’t upload the pictures, even though the prose was finished a week ago.  And then there is the delay between the time of my posting and the time you get around to reading this.  So assume, as you read, that we are now in Austria somewhere, and Italy is but a distant memory.  That said, this post is about Italy.  So don your cheesy moustache, grab a slice of pizza, and pretend we’re all in Venice together…

No, scratch that.  I’m going backwards for once.  Why?  Why not?  I’ve got to mix it up every now and then or the blog starts to smell like last Thursday’s fish dinner.  So we’re not talking Italy yet.  We’re talking Croatia.  We’ll do today first and work backwards.  You don’t like it, don’t read.  I’m not twisting your arm or anything here!  Sheesh!

Still here?  Good, I shall proceed.  Today we took a tour of Brijuni Island.  This was a vacation home for Marshal Tito for over thirty years.  It was a playground for the rich and powerful between World War II and the end of the Cold War.  We all got a killer history lesson on Balkan politics and a look at a cold-hearted killer from a completely different perspective.  I’ll give you the extremely condensed version. 

Tito came to power in the early ‘50s, resorting to Stalin-like persecutions to gain control.  His “partisan” army wiped out tens of thousands of soldiers who had supported the Nazis or Mussolini or anything that wasn’t what Tito was supporting at the moment.  He appointed himself president for life, and “dictated” with a reign of terror.  Then, when he finally had full control, he got out his warm and fuzzy side and ushered in three decades of peace to a region that otherwise has known nothing but aggression and hardship for the last century.  When he died in 1980, more heads of state attended his funeral than at any other funeral in history.  That’s a popular dude. 

Tito is revered among the peoples of the former Yugoslavian nations and in many cases, for good reason.  He had to toe the line between communism and capitalism, between East and West, never taking a side, and never antagonizing either side enough to risk a fight.  He was the father of the non-aligned nations movement that eventually included half of the world’s nations.  In his makeshift nation, Yugoslavia, he held together eight or nine separate peoples who devoutly followed four or five different major religions and who held a seemingly infinite number of personal grudges against one another.  The conglomerate of Yugoslavia flourished under his rule.  But very soon after his death, the whole kit and caboodle quickly fell apart and now we have Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovenia, Slovenia, and Kosovo instead.  The racial cleansing that followed hasn’t been pretty.  So, I guess if you are a Machiavellian sort, then you can be swayed to the general opinion of the locals (at least those in northwestern Croatia).  The extreme means were in some ways justifiable in the end.  Not that killing is ever justifiable, but it did most likely mean avoiding even more deaths with bloody in-fighting amongst the separate nations that occurred before Tito came along and has bloodied the region since.

Okay, enough of the lesson, and back to the blog.  Brijuni island (which was once a Roman playground for senators and generals and such) was bought around 1900 by a rich Austrian entrepreneur and built up with hotels and health clubs to be a playground for the rich and famous.  When Tito took it over, he kept the posh and added pizazz.  He had a golf course put in, which is still in use.  I played with the idea of using it myself.  There was also an enormous garden filled with hundreds of species from all over the world, mostly gifts from heads of state on official and often unofficial business.  He created a giant zoo/wild animal safari park complete with every possible animal you can think of, almost all of which, again, were gifts.  The bears and the big cats are gone now, but the kinder gentler animals and in many cases, their offspring, are all still there. The elephant given to Tito by Indira Ghandi gave Josh and I a bit of a show.  We have no pictures though, as Carol and Chloe were busy taking pictures of sheep and stuff elsewhere.

I guess this is who Carol and Chloe were hanging out with.

There is a museum that we meandered through that shows picture after picture of Tito with the entire “Who’s-who” in world politics from the second half of the twentieth century.  American presidents, Indira Gandhi and Queen Elizabeth were on one wall.  Nasser, Nehru, Qaddafi, Arafat, Brezhnev, Castro, Ho-Chi-Minh, and so many others were on another wall.  All were obviously enjoying Tito’s company and hospitality.  Official visits by heads-of-state to the island numbered in the hundreds.  We were walking in some pretty impressive footsteps.  Not bad, for a little known island in a little known country in southeastern Europe.  The museum provided the kids with their schooling for the day, and I got what was to be for me, a highlight of the trip.

Tito (L) w/Nasser&Nehru (signing the non-aligned nations pact), (C) "high-five"ing yours truly, and (R) w/Queen Elizabeth

A couple of days ago, we toured Rovinj, the town we’ve been living in for the last few days.  It is a sleepy little fishing village with a lot of character built upon the ruins of a medieval castle-walled stronghold, built in turn upon the ancient ruins of a sleepy little Roman Empire fishing village.  There are also still signs of the eras that the land was ruled by the old Venetian Republic (before Italy was Italy), the Austrians, the Italians, and even the Byzantine Empire.  Who didn’t rule this little town at one point?  I’m pretty sure Costa Rica never had its turn.  We ate lunch right on the water after watching a kids’ dance group competition on the grandstand in the town square.  We biked along the cobblestone streets.  The kids played in the local playground under the enormous monument paying tribute to the Communist Era.  It was an eclectic group of experiences, to be sure, but all good stuff.

Communist era art on the square.

The next day Carol and I went back without the kids and took a Rick Steves’ Guidebook walking tour of the town.  We entered the requisite cathedral complete with the obligatory martyred saint’s sarcophagus.  We climbed the two hundred plus steps of the bell tower to get sweeping views of the peninsula, which used to be an island until they filled in the channel separating it from the mainland for easier access to the fish markets.  The bustling marina and the tourists shops made it feel as much like Sausalito as it did like a European town, but it was still picturesque and worth the trip.  We stopped for a drink at a bar that was nothing more than piped in Stan Getz music on a rocky cove at water’s edge.  A Bailey’s in one hand, and a camera in the other, we lounged on cushions on the rocks, the bar all to ourselves, for a long relaxing respite from the grind…  That’s a joke.  There is no grind.

A look at the staircase that led us up to the highest point on the Ystrian Peninsula, and the view once there.

The view from our seats at the Stan Getz Bar.

When we drove in to Croatia from Venice we finally got our passports stamped (Remember, we’re going backwards here people.  Please, try and keep up).  This is the only time we’ll be out of the European Union for the rest of the trip.  Not that this would be of any significance at all, if you were allowed to stay in the E.U. for more than three months as a tourist.  But you’re not.  So this is how we escape the long arm of the immigration police.  Of course, the U.K. and Switzerland, though both in the E.U., are not “Shengen” countries (whatever the heck that means) and so therefore do not count as E.U. in terms of passport visas.  It all gets very confusing.  Croatia doesn’t use the Euro, well at least not for the next six months.  I guess neither does the Czech Republic.  If every country we visited still had its own currency, we’d probably be out a thousand bucks in money exchange fees by the end of the trip.  As it is, its hard enough to keep track of which countries require driving permits and in which our cell phones work and which town we are waking up in every morning, for that matter. 

Carol does the lion’s share of the planning.  Which animals on the savannah get the other shares?  Once the lion is done, there’s not much left, I’d guess.  Perhaps I do the vulture’s share, or maybe the hyena’s share.  Whatever it is that I do, it’s not much.  So how Carol’s brain is not completely mush at this point is a mystery to me.  We are really planning on the fly these days.  We book each next place less than a week before we arrive.  Up until this morning we still didn’t have a place to stay two days from now.  Costa Rica planning was done months in advance.  In Asia, it was weeks in advance.  In Eastern Europe, it’s been only days in advance.  At this rate, we’ll need a time machine to book our spots in June. But hey, if I can go backwards in the blog, why not book reservations after we've already used them, right? Wrong. That's why Carol is in charge, I guess.

Venice was a kick in the pants.  It was also a kick in the wallet.  That romantic forty minute gondola ride was $135.  We had to take a second mortgage out on our house in order to afford the twice-a-day gelato habit that we’ve all developed.  But at least we’ll go to the poor house fat and happy!  The water taxis aren’t cheap either.  But here is what really gets me.  In Rome and Venice, and even on the Amalfi Coast, you pay for the bus tickets in advance at a tobacco shop or a bar that isn’t necessarily even near a bus stop.  No ticket, no ride, as we found out in Amalfi (read the last post for further details).  But when you board the bus or the waterbus or even a train (as was the case into Venice from the mainland) nobody ever checks your ticket!  I guess they have random checks that when and if you are caught ticketless, you need to pay a large fine.  But other than that bus in Amalfi where we unwittingly announced that we had no tickets, we were never once asked to produce one.  We took maybe thirty buses of one sort or another in Italy.  It seems like a pretty dumb system.  I imagine that over half of the locals just risk it and don’t buy tickets.  I certainly saw quite a few people duck through the turnstiles without a ticket in the Rome underground. The fine amount was posted on the boat-buses in Venice, and was only about five times the ticket cost.  You certainly aren’t going to be asked for a ticket one out of every five rides.  So why not work the system if you are lacking in scruples or short on cash?  The result is undoubtedly prices that are much higher for those who do pay, in order to make up for all the free-loaders.   And what’s more, it is really inconvenient to get those tickets when you suddenly need them, especially when the tobacco shops run out of them (as happened to me in Rome) or are closed at inconvenient hours (before 10:00 a.m., between 1:00 and 4:00 p.m.)  The kicker? You are supposed to “verify” the ticket in a machine that date-and-time-stamps your otherwise generic ticket.  These machines are on the buses or, in Venice, on the docks.  Why not just provide a ticket-machine instead?  OK.  Rant over.  I guess I’m just so bitter about the Amalfi fiasco that I wish that at some point somebody would have asked to see the tickets that I so diligently bought every single time after that.

Walking 'round Venice.  Well, I guess, technically, Josh is riding 'round Venice.

The ubiquitous symbol of Venice - the winged lion.

If you are familiar with Venice, then you know that there is a whole lot of walking involved.  Before I arrived, I thought it would be all water taxis and gondolas.  I figured I’d ride every canal two or three times and have enough energy left over each night to compose another opera.  But that wasn’t the case.  You can pay a whole bunch for a water-bus to take you where you aren’t really headed anyway, or you can walk.  You’ll get lost five or six times on the way, usually running into a dead-end at some minor canal.  You’ll cross bridges just so that you can cross another over the same canal, but in the opposite direction, a block down, and then you’ll cross some more, which is especially fun with luggage in tow.  But any way you slice it, you’re going to walk an awful lot.  If you are keeping track, yes, my foot is still broken.  If you’re not keeping track, well, good for you, you have better things to do than to read every word of my often-way-too-lengthy blog.  To catch you up, I’m 95% certain that I broke a bone in my foot at a waterfall in Thailand and have been hobbling around ever since.  It is not painful enough to figure out how to get it fixed in a foreign country.  But it is just painful enough to be an ever-present nuisance and to be a good enough excuse to complain, every chance I get, about how much walking one must do in Venice.

Ceiling inside St. Mark's Cathedral

The walk across the "Bridge of Sighs" at the Doge's Palace.  The last look at freedom, and finally, the cell in the dungeon.

We did the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Cathedral.  We even caught the beginning of a big deal mass at the Cathedral (the procession of bishops was over a hundred miters long, see what I did there? :), as we just happened to be inside at the wrong time on the Feast Day of St. Mark, or some such special day involving San Marco.  We did our best to sample every gelateria in town, including the ones on the outskirt islands of Murano, Burano, Torchello, San Michelle (OK, this was just a cemetery – no gelato), and Mazorbo (not sure I got that last island name right, but lacking an internet connection, we’ll go with it).  On Murano, they do glass craft.  The island has been known for its glass-work for centuries.  We watched a couple of demonstrations while there.  In one, the guy made an unbelievably intricate, beautiful glass horse, while we watched, in a matter of maybe sixty seconds.  It was an unreal display of artistic talent in a crazy medium.  How does one harness that kind of talent?  Do you just wake up one day and say, “Hey, I bet I’d be really good at sculpting glass!”?  And if it is to be handed down through the generations, so that the talent can be molded from early on, then what if your kids are all artistic losers?  Just because my dad could wail with the best of ‘em on his saxophone, doesn’t mean I’m not a total hack.  He could.  I am.  I’m pretty sure I couldn’t blow glass either.

Typical glass art.  The 1000 degree furnace.  The first few seconds in the making of the horse.

Venice is so different from every other city I’ve ever been in that it is hard to compare it to any of them at all.  But in the end, I’m not sure it lived up to its hype.  Everyone falls all over him/herself proclaiming its virtues.  And I’m not about to go on record saying it isn’t romantic and beautiful and all that jazz/opera.  Carol and I even went to a classical music concert (harpsichord and seven piece strings playing Vivaldi and such) in a gorgeous Renaissance style church.  It was super cool to experience the music in a setting that actually matched the period in which it was written - perfectly. Some of it was even written in that very city.  Statues and frescoes and marble columns and arches really make the music come alive.  But still, my expectations for the town were somehow not quite met. 

Maybe it was the fact that there are five times as many tourists as locals, even in the non-touristy sections.  The town is apparently dying as people move out for lack of funds to live there.  It is also slowly sinking back into the Adriatic, as the streets flood over fifty times a year.  The buildings are losing a battle with Mother Nature and you can somehow feel it as you cruise the canals in overcrowded buses watching the many deserted buildings float by, with six layers of mold and mildew creeping up their bottom floors. 

I know what your thinking.  “That Steve, he’s a wet blanket.  I’m not going to let him “glass is half empty” my warm and fuzzy memories/feelings about the most romantic city on Earth (apologies to Paris).”  Well, fine.  My purpose is not to ruin a good thing.  I am merely reporting how I felt, not how one should feel.  Even Carol, the eternal silver lining girl, made mention repeatedly of how things did not quite feel how they did on her last visit twenty some years ago.  But then again, when your expectations are so high that you need a ladder to realize them, there is no shame in coming up short when the ladder doesn’t fit into your luggage.

Our gondola ride on the Grand Canal wasn't too shabby.

And if measuring up to expectations is going to be the theme, then I’m happy to report that Assisi scored high marks across the board.  We left Amalfi with no clue where we going to sleep that night.  We weren’t going to make it all the way to Venice, as it was simply too long a trip after we included a stop in Pompeii along the way.  So we kept typing in new cities along the Adriatic coast into the GPS, to see what we could find.  When I finally stumbled upon Assisi, I had a surreal moment of channeling my inner-Catholic.  I’ve spent too many years teaching in Catholic schools and attending mass to not have some of it rub off.  And my memories of discussions about St. Francis of Assisi were of the warm and fuzzy variety.  He is after all, the guy they named San Francisco after.  He’s the main man for all those wacky Franciscan monks and what I think is the number one largest order of Catholicism.  Why not check out his hometown?  There has to be a pretty sweet basilica or something dedicated to him.  I know it is a destination for pilgrimages for thousands.  There could be some good restaurant choices, right?  Forget the Adriatic, we’ll see that soon enough.  I really had no expectations, and it was a hoot.

The approach to Assisi was tough.  We were already behind schedule when Pompeii took two hours longer than expected.  So it was getting late.  And we ran into some heavy traffic (we were stopped for a while with Italians getting out of their cars and starting a soccer game on the highway), so when I called the woman with whom I’d booked our lodging, she wasn’t there to help us find her.  Her mother did do a lot of screaming at me on the phone in Italian, as she spoke not a word of English.  So we were on our own in finding the place.  When we pulled into town, we soon discovered that one cannot drive within the walls of the city if one doesn’t own a local permit.  So we parked in the nearest parking lot, hoping we weren’t too far of a walk from our apartment.  Well, I was hoping that anyway.  Carol was insisting I learn Italian and call the mother back to see if there was a better place to park.  We decided to remove the clothes and things we’d need for the night from our suitcases and bring it only in backpacks, just in case the hike up the hill was longer than I anticipated and exactly as long as Carol dreaded it would be. 

Arriving at our cute little apartment.

It all turned out OK.  The parking structure had a machine in it that sold tourist maps.  The walk wasn’t too bad.  We found the correct street without trouble.  It did take a while to find the correct number as the address system only made sense if you were fluent in hexadecimal Roman-numeraling or something.  But we found it, and it was a perfectly charming place.  The woman who did speak English was incredibly friendly, and her mother turned out to be even friendlier.  She kept pushing chocolate on the kids.  So much so, that I wondered if she had some hidden ulterior motive for getting them sugared up.  They pointed us in the direction of the main square and a nice place to eat.  Assisi was beautiful and peaceful and romantic and tranquil and (insert upbeat adjective of your choice HERE), especially under the moonlight.

The next day we took a walking tour of the town that included the Basilica of St. Francis and the church of his nearly-as-famous protégé, St. Clare.  The architecture was top-notch.  The feeling of the history of the town was palpable.  The views of the green valleys below were breathtaking. I, for one, was sad that we only had an evening and a morning there.  I could have stayed for a week and got lost in the nooks and crannies and been as happy as a monk at communion.  But Venice beckoned, and St. Francis would have understood.

The basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, and some Franciscan monks enjoying the sunshine.

I’ve already mentioned Pompeii, a couple of times, so I guess I need to give that a shout out.  We didn’t stay overnight.  We just showed up, checked it out, and then checked out, all in one whirlwind of a morning.  For those who don’t know, Pompeii was a thriving Roman city, until the top third of Mt. Vesuvius got unceremoniously blown off from the rest of the volcano in 69 A.D., burying the city in pyroclastic ash. Unfortunately for the tens of thousands of residents, there was nowhere to run.  But there is a positive twist to the story for the Thies clan and the zillions of other tourists, because the ash perfectly preserved the town that it buried for two thousand years.  Not only did we get to see the houses and the temples and the shops and the roads and the baths and the theatres almost as they were in the first century, but we also got to see some of the residents themselves.  When excavating, the archaeologists found holes in the layers of compacted sediment.  They carefully filled them in with cement which they let dry, and voila, instant statues!  Only rather than being in the pose of “The Thinker” or of Michaelangelo’s “David,” flexing his glutes for posterity, they were in the fetal position as they huddled instinctively, shielding their faces from the onslaught.  Again, it was too bad for them, but morbidly fascinating for us. 

Buried alive 2044 years ago.

Walking through the city was eye-opening.  Remarkable details were preserved.  One example is the grooves in the stone roads, ever deepening from the stress of the wagon wheels that rolled along them, wearing them down, until suddenly there was no groove at all. It seems as though they had just finished repaving part of the road, and were in mid-project until they were so rudely interrupted by Mother Nature or by Vulcan (the god of fire, hence the word volcano), who can say?  Details like this made the ancient Romans come alive for us.  They did public works projects!  Heck, they ate fast food!  We visited the local pizza joints, complete with brick ovens and take-out counters.

Here's where Josh asks if I want fries with that coke.  I hope he realizes the manager of the establishment is no condition to pay him for manning the counters.

Look for wheel grooves and watch them disappear back where I'm standing.  The kids are on one of the many stones placed in the road by the ancient Romans for easy crossing when the road is filled with water due to the regular washing of the streets.

Other than the public bath houses, for lack of means to get everyone their own private showers, and the lack of electricity and combustion engines, it seems that life in Pompeii was not so different than life in the 21^st century.  The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker would all chew the fat at the local pub and they’d argue about their local sports teams and they would go to work and come home to their families and bitch about taxes and back-aches and that couple next door who made too much noise at all hours.  We think we live in an advanced civilization, but it really doesn’t feel all that removed from the ancient ones.

OK. So that is it for what I have to share about Pompeii. If I continued to go back in time, before we visited Pompeii, but not quite so far back as before Vesuvius visited it, we would come full circle to our visit to Amalfi.  As I have already waxed so eloquently about that experience in my last post, I guess that means my work here is done, at least until we trudge on to Slovenia.  This permanent vacation thing is a real bear.  OK, maybe not.  Until I write again, arrivederci!