Wednesday in Toronto 20111102

Home from Italy five days. Last Thursday I travelled from Firenze to Roma, and on Friday I travelled from Roma to home. Today was the first day I didn't wake up before 6am! Edgar recognized me when I came back. My ankle still hurts after a long walk. Little tchotchkes have been distributed, dirty laundry is in the hamper, I've made a couple of meals, and my to do list has been replenished.
I have an incredibly long emotional delay on events. Combined with a sort of intellectual laziness to draw conclusions, under normal circumstances if you asked me what I did and what I thought you'd get a responding "yeah, you know, ok, stuff. I did stuff."
I'm attempting to challenge that vegetative state, which is why I blogged, if for no other reason than when I went soft in the head I could direct my friends here. Something did happen.
And what happened was more of an inside job, more intimate than I care to entirely share here. While I was gone visually consuming pretty churches paintings fashion art architecture mosaics pattern rhythm, apart from following CNN/bbc/sky news reports on ghadaffi, euro meltdown, and the Michael Jackson doctor involuntary manslaughter trial, I read and listened to WAR & PEACE, listened to a radio doc on George Harrison and the material world, read the big book, and watched The Borgias. Understandably, this bit of information would be more than the blah blah medieval peasant would consume in a lifetime, but for me this was a relatively narrow band of information. Four days ago I could have explained the meaning of life, and how all these bits were interconnected, me included. Now I'm just back to blithering.
I sat in a chapel the day I left Firenze, alone, for a long time. It was a door across the courtyard from the hotel, and every time I had ever used that entrance, the red doors to this church were unequivocally closed. The day I left they were open, so I went into a dark cool aged space of flickering candles and long sad faces, and sat down in one of the pews and was still.
Travel is stressful, filled with lines and noise and and harsh light, and cues to be continually mindful of. One pinprick of stillness deep in my chest was the best thing I brought back. Maybe it's the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of War & Peace, or the penny dropped on Bills's story, the blissfulness of connecting dots for even a couple of hours, my friends emailing me support through a self-loathing blip that rivaled any twenty feet of muck I've already swilled and been suffocated by, or maybe it was just the right time for birthing. The next chapter.
I'm not a traveller. I know that now. I would rather live well every day, than sacrifice a year of good living for two weeks of lineups in an exotic locale. I don't believe in exotic anymore. Globalization has homogenized many of our values and day to day experiences. For the kind of places that I would go, it's not different enough to warrant a looksee. My overwhelming desire from this trip, apart from good daily living, is to own land, savor everything bright beautiful and ugly, and find that stillness again.
So I've been cooking mindfully, rather than buying and wasting food for the family of six that does not live at this address. I punctuate the day with multiple espressos. I work three hours a day doing things I would rather not do, and spending the rest of my time following a whim or doing exactly what I want to do, without guilt. I'm grateful for a nice home, less traffic than Rome, my sister and Clive, good friends, food, a beautiful fall day, a sleeping dog nestled beside me, books, music, knitting, central heating, and choices. I will have to put my mind to "The Next Chapter", but it's already here whether I want it or not. This afternoon I'll meet Stephanie for a coffee down in the beach. We'll sit on the bench outside the remarkable bean with Edgar in the sun. Life is good.

Wednesday in Firenze 20111026

Ok.  It's official.  I've now crashed.  I cannot look at another shop window, rococo whirligig, frescoe, iconic triptych.  Done.  Memory card full.  Puking will commence shortly.  
Can't wait to be home, to see all of you and to sit with plainess (not that you're plain..lesson25-people are the Colour).  I need a meeting, and I rarely  say that.  I wish I knew how to meditate.  I wish I had a wind blowing through my head, and that I had the least bit of  bendy body pretzel abilities so that i could just wring myself out.  Blech.  Home with dirty laundry in 48hrs!   Can't wait.
Xxxx

AMC 416-469-8421
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Tuesday in Florence

Tuesday in Firenze 20111025. Uffizi fever today. I knew better, but I ran out of time in Toronto and wasn't able to acquire my online reservation. So this morning I shuffled off early and I stood in line, waiting, shifting from foot to foot, stretching my back, talking to the BC woman and her Japanese husband beside me, for almost two hours. What a reward! It's simply an abundance of riches, as any one piece could occupy my attention for a day. It was definitely a gallery day, cold and rainy. The second floor windowed gallery with all the "hit"s runs a "u", with exhibit rooms off these essentially three long corridors which are lined with sculptures, busts and portraits. Its my visual over-consumption on this trip to blame, as I gloss over the mosaic floors, frescoed and carved ceilings. Just a few more ta-das, and pretty details. Yawn. Not.
I'm struck by how derivative the Florentine aesthetic is in my daily life in Toronto. And as North Americans, we certainly are consuming the eyetalian ethos when we're cooking with olive oil, watching gangster movies, doing the work lunch at the Olive Garden, feeding the kids pasta, swilling at Starbucks, or picking tiles for our bathroom renovation. I see Florence in ironwork, upholstery, fabric, gardens, color palettes, stonework, linens, purses, shoes. Now I would say that I see more Florence than France in the living design of my daily life.
I'm not a Euro wannabe living in my urban flat, making those endlessly annoying comparisons to how real life should be lived, poo-poohing the acquisition of new washing machines, and scoffing the NFL. My grandparents photographed new factories and made home movies of cars on brand new roads. The wouldn't have known the difference between a croissant and a biscotti, and they liked their coffee percolated. But even their 1950s glass swan table ornament was derivative of Italian glassworks. I saw them, albeit far better designed and executed, in Murano. I just see the wisps and curls of an Italian sensibility in so much of our North American living experience, in "hugging" and cheek air kissing (nobody hugged outside family, and then barely there, before 1967!). Everybody used to shake hands, the French included! Dark sunglasses, movie stars, loafers, disco, wedding favours, suntans (I know it was coco, but she was probably with an Italian). I have this great Italian cookbook, written by a thoroughly arrogant Italian chef, who put forward the premise in every subject introduction that Italian cooking/methodology/ingredients ALWAYS preceded and exceeded any French efforts or claims. Hhmmmmmm.
So, the Uffizi, simply glorious. Round, pink, pouting, expanses of silky blushed skin and long necks, uplifting, ethereal, mythological. Even scenes of rape and pillage looked lush.
I window shopped the gold bridge for Clive, and ran into a series of old Italian guys intently discussing something with each other, only notable because they were all dressed the same and wagging their finger. I walked on to the Pitti palace. On the way back I saw another paper marbler, who was demonstrating. I had a nice talk with him. The paper stores keep catching me, and my take home wish list besides sewing again, is to marble paper and make books. More walking, rain, cappuccino, walking, looking into tiny shop windows alluringly arranged, a zuppa verdura, a gelato, people watching, more walking, another cappuccino, a nap in there somewhere. I'm coming to the end of my trip, thinking more about life ever after, wanting to see my peeps, check listing projects. Then a soft color, the profile of a building and trees on a hill, reflective Arno waters, a cappuccino, a stroll...

A cold and gray Monday in Firenze 20111024

Monday Firenze 20111024. Dear Lynn, Florence is where all the good hand bags are born, convene, lounge, hang out on glass shelves, and occasionally move to faraway lands with kind and adoring friends. Bags are us, every kind of leather bag you can imagine, all for the very expensive buying. This is definitely not the Coach retail outlet in Vegas.
I started the day at Il Duomo, or the St Mary of pretty little flowers church. An extravagant multilayer stacked Viennese torte of marble exterior, and a stern interior of mosaic and frescoes that were Italian liturgical understatement. It was cool and dim, and I could sit quietly. Buddah/yoga lady sat beside me in classic meditation pose, thumb and forefinger closed to a circle. Where St. Mark's was a joyful hallelujah, this space was contemplative. Not hugely busy, I was able to take my time exploring. Further down the road, I came to a small museum, palazzo Davanzati, what had once been a wealthy person's house had become a poor house and rescued in the early 20th century by basically an art restorer. It was an interesting space to be in, heavy square and maybe five large stories high, inner courtyard, walls decorated with painted motifs, carved ceilings, and a dumb waiter/interior pulley system. I saw the oldest bridge over the Arno, that the occupying German commander had been convinced to not destroy as allied troops advanced on the city. I walked through the collonade. I have now officially retail overloaded. Today I saw the shop windows of more luxury designer retailer than I have ever seen in one place. I get it. Florence isn't just art, it's shopping! I went into Hermes to price a cashmere/silk pashmina, arbre de vie, still less expensive here than in Toronto. Hmmmmm, I really have to think about that one. Stephanie, i wish i was experiencing it through your sensibilities. I can barely do thirty minutes in a thrift shop, and after hours of beautiful after beautiful I want an iced washcloth over my eyes. Tooooo much. It's not entirely wasted on me, because I'm clearer on my own aesthetic, and ready to move from stretchy pants to something a little more expressive.
This is why I don't think I'm a great traveller. I window shop the lifestyle and choices, and want to bring it home. I think real travellers let it wash over them (thank you ali), and live in the moment. Almost twenty years ago I was in the south of France, and my overwhelming response to that trip was to live better, to drink the fresh squeezed orange juice at my own table set with pretty flowers, rather than sacrificing years of good living for two weeks of vacation travel. When I got back I moved to the apartment of my dreams in the beaches, stopped drinking and living an Epicurean fantasy in my head when I was coming home alone to dry crackers and an empty fridge. This trip is doing the same thing, maybe less aesthetically and more internally. The hoarding is over. The living can no longer be a window pane away. It's breaking my heart. It has to be as solid and real as I can manage.

Sunday traveling from Venizia to Firenze 20111023

20111023 Sunday, traveling from Venice to Firenze. Slow filler day, waiting for a train, waiting for a seat, a 2 hour train ride, waiting for a taxi, sitting on Ponte s. Trinita, gawking in Feragamo windows, a toodledo around the blocks and a trattoria meal. Bells. CNN. Sleep.
Between saturday and Sunday I must have seen ten thousand faces. The tourists were pouring into Venice on Saturday, after days of wind and rain. At one point I could look down the pier between the three vaparetto stops on San Marco, and I had that swishy human stream feeling i get when I see television coverage on Mecca. Then the Doges palace was swimming with portraiture; saints, kings, queens, princes, pillars of society, the shoemakers guild, popes, sinners writhing in hell, cherubs on the ceiling, red cherubs, blue cherubs. I had bad timing, aggressively early, something like what my mother would do, and I sat in the train station and the cafe at ferrovia for a long time. People people people, with bags, with children, with baggage, happy, stern, coupled, alone, tourists gone italatroppo, Italians gone jersey shore, Germans, Brits. When i got to Firenze I found the official taxi line. Young friendly guy with a meter, just how I like them. He drove for blocks and blocks on a sunday best shoulder to shoulder full of people pedestrian mall to get to the hotel. I had images of being bashed like charles and camilla, but this tax just nudged them out of the way. The humanity was overwhelming, people shopping and eating, shopping, stuff stuff stuff, and people consuming it all.
I get worn out by going to a mall in Scarborough, and need a week to recover from people overload. When I came home from a whole sheeting week of a hundred yes/nos a day, I could go the mattress for a weekend without talking to one person. I don't know if my internal logic system is trying to fill in the blanks on all these people, but I'd want to know how and why they lived, who they loved, what they ate for breakfast, their shame and joy, blah blah blech. Instead they're flash cards being shuffled in my brain. I'm tired now. I must rest.

Saturday in Venice. 20111022

20101022 Saturday in Venice Not to get too cocky, but i can get around without a map in SanMarco. Right at the moon, left at the green bra, bear to the left past the "cleaning in progress", quick right into the closet, left around the dead end electrical box, over the bridge, I see a slash of white through the canyon...La FENICE! Beside being a splotchy red mess, and unable to walk for hours a a time, all is good. I was attacked by one lone mosquito on my first night here. You know, that buzz in your ear being swatted away, drifting off, she's back, ferocious swatting now, more buzz, all the lights on, climbing over the dresser to smash bits of wispy black into that padded wall, finally silence, dark, drifting, BUZzZZZZZbuzz.... I have about ten bites on my face; cheeks, bridge of nose, forehead, and a nice puffy red eyelid. A natural conversation stopper.
Today I was at the palace of the Doges early to beat any lines. It was cold clear and crisp. I hobbled my little route knowledgeably and as swiftly as i could, puffy eyes to the ground, and swept the corner round to the quay as a cruise ship was coming in. Towering over the flotilla of gondolas, the scale is immense. The wind was up, the chop was on, the crowds were already starting. Doges was palatial, is, was, a palace. Room after room of gilded ceilings, carvings, sculptures, paintings on very inch of surface, balconies and verandas, courtyards. Not as moving as the basilica, commerce and law rarely are, but impressive in it's magnitude. I sat in a couple of the rooms, and contemplated some of the larger pieces. The tour groups were starting to crowd me, so I maybe left sooner than I would have expected to. Off to the glass making island of Murano. In hyper shopper form, I bought a glass lampshade, had it packed, and brought it to the post office in my first twenty minutes on the island. I have no idea if I'll actually get it, or even receive it in one piece. The insurance and shipping from the store would have made the price prohibitive, and I'm sensing a racket. I wish i had taken a picture of it, so I could at least have that as a memory for posterity. Oh well, if it arrives in bits, maybe Marilyn could show me how to do mosaics.... I wandered into shops, bought a few momentos, went to the glass museum, had lunch. It was my favorite weather, sunny, windy and cool. Not many people. The vaparetto ride also did the whole outside turn of Venice, past a more industrial area and neighborhoods you could imagine the plainer people lived. Italy, plain? A place where tall thin, spa-ed, gilded and coiffed individuals, wearing ten of thousands of euros on their bodies did not live.
Back to the city, I then went to the accadmie, a museum of mostly medieval and renaissance paintings so lustrous that I wanted to cry. This was another space I could visit every day for a year to meditate on one piece a a time.
Now because I know some of the back doors, I was able to walk fr. The accademie back to la FENICE. I stopped in palazzo piazza pissina (I get all those things mixed up) San stefano, and took a table in the late afternoon sun at a cafe to just enjoy the space and watch the people. A pear vanilla gelato chocolate sauce extravagance in front of me. Happy. Quick hop into "another" paper marbler. Hotel. Nap. Waken. Terrace. Breath. Church Bells. CNN.

Friday in Venice. 20111021

20111021 Friday Venice. Alone during the day I can blend in, at night not so much. I mean I guess i could creep out and stand around in a dark corner and startle. Not drinking and sitting in a bar making "friends" has a little less appeal. Knitting in a tea room, sure. Knitting in night culture, blech. So i write you instead, parked on my bed in front of BBC.

LA FENICE is not THE MAJESTIC. It's an "artist" hotel, and certainly cast and crew from FIGARO have been trilling the lounge. My room is on the top floor, a double with a huge terrace, overlooking a small canal. I hear the singing gondoliers as they pass through, and I'm woken by the church bells ringing first mass. The room is decorated in a Venetian style, upholstered walls of patterned gold jacquard fabric, a pitched white stucco ceiling with the dark beams exposed, and a large hanging Venetian glass lamp fixture. Not a marbled bathroom, it does have a window out onto what looks like an abandoned square/alley of matted grasses that none of the surrounding billings have access to. The facilities are clean and totally serviceable. In keeping with the "art" theme, there is an eclectic arrangement of art on every hallway wall and in this room too; mostly dusty fading mixed media jarring pieces that clearly were done between 1970 and 1985. There is the occasional period print, but overall the impression is of eclectic throw up. The hallways are narrow, and because the hotel is a warren of buildings, like Venice, it's massively confusing to maneuver. Every door is covered in a full length print of Klimt's THE KISS, the blinking neon sign pointing to dirty business being done here. Some false start doorways are mirrored. Its a right left step up step down Escheresque print to get to the elevator. The main floor rooms are tired, and I knew not to hold any hopes about breakfast after THEMAJESTIC. And I was right. But it is behind the opera house, a quiet square, 10 minutes (if you know the way) to san Marco. I would rather stay here than the Venetian equivalent of Best Western, but I'd really have loved to stay at the Danieli (?) hotel where they shot THE TOURSIST with Depp/Jolie!
Today I had a long and satisfying drink that slated visual and intellectual thirsts. I got into St marks basilica shortly after it opened. I could go there every day for a month, for a year, and just marvel over one of it's many treasures for hours, one at a time. I stayed a long time, going to the treasure room, and behind the altar. I wished Marilyn had been there with me to observe the vastness and quality of the mosaics. I can't even describe it big enough. Gold, glowing, blue, floral, animals, saints, holy, carved, lustrous, softened in age, weight, expanse, universality, flickering, hushed, light, domed, pillared, galleried, mystic, humming. I spent at least an hour just looking at one corner of the floor, where the tile mosaics were more complex and beautiful than anything I had ever seen or imagined could exist before. Its good and so unexpected to fall in love in middle age, making it all the more precious. I've just never seen anything more beautiful. It must be my inner unrequited RC longings. I've been in many churches in France, but generally speaking they must have been stripped during the revolution. My impression was always cold stone and stillness, and sometimes beautiful stained glass in the larger centres. I have a lot to think about.
Then I hung out the back of the water bus for entire return grand canal route, slow way down and fast back. Another "wow!this place really exists" experience. I saw all the galleries I would want to go into if I had a month including the Peggy Guggenheim collection. Because I had read some of that heavy guide book, I was able to recognize some of the notable buildings including the Turkish warehouse. How this city has existed on an edge of a sea, for over seven hundred years, and not crumble or dissolve back into the swamp, sustain a higher order of living, culture, thought, is amazing to me. And in spite of the mantle of tourism, one can still feel the city it was struggles to remain. I'm reminded of the american shaker woman "I'm not a chair". It must be painful for any remaining Venetians "I'm not a museum".
Then a very late and leisurely lunch. I treated myself to a good meal; warm seafood salad, mixed greens, a Venetian preparation of calves liver with polenta, and a ricotta cake. Cappucino. Watch the tourists. Shuffle back to the hotel on aching legs (because favoring a sprain now everything hurts). Nap.