Dear Dirty Dublin

“I do not envy anyone who reads it for pleasure.” Sporting Times review of Ulysses, 1922.

Stately, slim, the teenage girl crested the hill. Below us woodland tumbled down southwards to the banks of the hither and thithering waters of the Danube, beyond whose string of bridges stretched the city of Pest, pool table flat. To our north jutted old Buda and the parapets, machicolations and towers of its castle. To her somewhat disinterested boyfriend – he dressed in traditional eastern European garb of baggy grey sweatpants, hoody top and slightly too large baseball cap – she declaimed with hand and arm extended and weaving with the contours of the landscape a short and for all I knew magical invocation, a burst of dactylic Hungarian of which I understood just one word, the very first she chanted, “Virág”. The “Vvvvir” was pronounced like a graceful helicopter lifting off, and the “rrrrrag” resembled an angry wasp zinging past your ear hole.

It meant “flower” and I knew this because once upon a time in 1983 I had first read Ulysses by James Joyce, a huge brick of paper which overwhelmed me and became my favourite ever book, a status it has retained ever since. It’s main character, Leopold Bloom, thinks often of his deceased father who was a Hungarian Jew born in the year of Waterloo and had lived all over the Austro Hungarian Empire, including Budapest. His name, Rudolf Virag, on moving to Dublin was Anglicized to Rudolph Bloom. Years later, the same day he bought a brand new straw boater hat, he killed himself by taking poison. Staying with the plant theme, as part of his secret erotic life his son Leopold takes on the pseudonym of “Henry Flower”, under which guise he conducts a delusory, literary flirting affair by post, and at one point thinks of his own penis as a bloom while bathing:

the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower

Earlier that same day I had passed a flower shop near the Great Synagogue of Budapest and photographed the sign above the door, “Virág”. The events of Ulysses famously occur over a single June day, the sixteenth (and a following dawn) in 1904, smack bang amid the Art Nouveau period. Two years previously one of its great Scottish practitioners Charles Rennie Mackintosh had written, “Art is the flower – life is the green leaf. Let every artist strive to make his flower a beautiful, living thing “. And Joyce’s book is indeed a beautuful living thing still, one year shy of it’s 100th anniversary as I write this, published in Paris, February second, 1922, on Joyce’s 40th birthday.

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

That beautiful Hungarian girl I saw on Gellért Hill had been way back in September 2017. By then I had read Ulysses five times. Now here in April 2019 I was finishing my now rather tatty old copy with its brittle, concave spine for the sixth time, on this occasion polishing off Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the Penelope chapter which closes the novel while I was somewhere over the Irish Sea on a ‘plane headed for Blackpool, as the Vikings named it, “in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf”, and my first trip to Dublin and Eire.

On arrival in the rainy, grey centre, far too early as usual to check into my hotel, I headed straight for that little bit of London ripped from 7 Reece Mews instead, the studio of Anglo Irish painter Francis Bacon. Ignoring the other work in the Hugh Lane gallery for now, I paused on the threshold of his reconstructed atelier to admire some of the artist’s canvases, all unfinished, while his voice echoed weirdly around the space from a video interview playing nearby on a loop, that impossibly posh boy English accent of his, blethering on like a hesitant 1950’s BBC news reader who had just raided a wine cellar.

A great plain of lilac formed a rough background on one picture began in 1966, Seated Figure and Carpet, that pigment he used as a smooth wall on so many of his later paintings was here rough and twinkling from the silica mixed into it, a thick paste which seemed to threaten to drag the canvas off the wall. A single awkward figure, hands unseen in lap, head sharply turned away, melted almost off the wicker chair on which he is plonked and down the hideously carpeted stairs he so uneasily wobbles at the top of, more like a stage set than a real interior, this man (George Dyer) is framed by an angry scumble of smeared black gunk, an unfinished doorway, no exit out that way.

? ? ?

As I looked on the opposite wall I received a shock of recognition. This surely was the original for the “Experiment Model”, the creature which appears in a Perspex box in the third season of Twin Peaks, only to escape and murder the two witnesses to its guttering manifestation. Here it leaps against a backdrop of drapes like those in the Black Lodge. I’d watched the episode several times now, and Lynch is often on record citing Bacon as an influence. He must have seen this picture, probably in this very room (although the creature in The Outer Limits episode, The Bellero Shield is also a possible contender)?

“Francis Bacon is, to me, the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter. There’s a lot of painters that I like. But for just the thrill of standing in front of a painting… I like everything of Bacon’s. The guy, you know, had the stuff.” Lynch on Lynch. Edited by Chris Rodley. 2005 edition.

Now I had the thrill of standing on the verge of his actual studio, bequeathed to the Gallery in 1998 and re-assembled bit by bit. On first glimpse (through a barred window Bacon usually hid with canvas) the scene is one of dreadful chaos, a mass of stuff chucked on the floor with apparently nowhere to sit down, or no path through. There is the famous round mirror framed by black slashes of paint, the single skylight, a couple of those blind cords which so often appear in Bacon’s pictures (right back to Painting. 1946)  and a cluster of unshaded light bulbs. Brushes poke out from pots like innumerably spiny, malicious house plants in dire need of the watering can.

Moving round the space I stood on the threshold and peeped in the door and the floorboards creaked beneath my feet, a squeaky Bacon sound. Encased in Perspex you can’t smell the place but I somehow imagine it would be of turps and boiled cabbage. With its single electric radiator I’d guess too that in winter it would have been fucking freezing. Of course the urge is to push open the daubed upon door, stride into the middle of the studio and have a good old 360 degree keek around, but this is the closest we are allowed to get, and anyway, there is something uninviting about the squalor of it all. I can only spot two chairs in the studio including the wicker one which appears in the 1966 painting hanging next door. His signature orange paint is sprayed around like an archaeological layer all on its own and sheets of Letraset lie discarded among the Champaign crates. In the studio, wrapped in plastic I imagined Bacon appear like a flickering Experiment Model entity, a look of amusement and bemusement playing across his features simultaneously, an actor surprised to be treading the boards of a familiar movie set he presumed had been sent to a skip decades ago.

In the next room is a video on repeat of Bacon on his set, talking with Melvyn Bragg. The two men shared a long television history going back to 1965 when Bragg produced a programme featuring  Bacon’s first even telly appearances, an interview conducted by Julian Webb, who with his grey wave looks like a remarkably fay version of Marcello Mastroianni at the end of La Dolce Vita. In it Bacon gives a hesitant, nervous performance and early in the encounter Webb corrects a miss-quote, totally throwing him. “I’ve forgotten what I was going to say now.” admits a flustered Francis, weirdly echoing Britain’s number one telly pundit at that time, Alf Garnett.

K.M.A.

About half way through sweat breaks out around Bacon’s hairline and he seems relived when the interview is brought to an end following a massive digression (at his own instigation) discussing Proust. The two men light up a couple of cigarettes and puff merrily away in a friendly, post coital fashion as the credits roll. The programme was never shown.

Just a year later the painter looks much happier chatting to chain smoking David Sylvester in various rooms (including the studio) at 7 Reece Mews, holding Sylvester’s gaze where he avoided Webb’s (Sylvester had long been a personal friend and champion of his work). Unlike the Bragg documentary this one, Francis Bacon Fragments of a Portrait, was broadcast (on September 18^th 1966). However, Bragg would go on to form a great and relaxed onscreen rapport with the artist, illustrated in the loop screened in the gallery taken from the documentary, Portrait 1985 (oddly Bacon again announces he’s forgotton what he was going to say, and produces a prepared statement from his leather jacket pocket), produced for The South Bank Show just seven years before his death.

Bacon spends a large part of the David Sylvester film again discussing Proust. Fellow Irishman Joyce never seems to occur to him, though there was a long period in the late 19^th and 20^th century when English speaking artists deferred to the presumed superiority and freedoms of Parisian culture, a lure which lead Joyce there in the first place, and which meant for Bacon his greatest professional triumph should have been his retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971, though the suicide of his lover George Dyer meant it wasn’t. “Chaos for me breeds images.” chants Bacon on screen, a slogan justifying what he has created in and of his studio workspace, and one I would hear again.*

Elsewhere in the gallery, a hangout of Sally Rooney’s bright young things Marianne and Joanna in Normal People, were a couple more Bacon’s, an exhibition of work by the American Mark Dion, Renoir’s Les parapluies (which ping pongs between London and Dublin) and very friendly staff, something of a genuine local staple, I was to discover, then it was finally time to check into my dingy little very expensive hotel room near the lower end of O’ Connell Street (In the time of Ulysses, Sackville Street).

On my way there I passed the Gate Theatre. While Bacon became the most English of Irish painters, the Gate’s co-founder became the most Irish of English actors. Alfred Willmore (a most pun-able Shakespearian surname) from Kensal Green had transformed himself into Micheál Mac Liammóir, a fluent Irish Gaelic speaking thespian “from Cork”. The Gate’s other progenitor was his fellow Londoner and lover, Hilton Edwards. He was born in 1903 at Bathurst Mansions, 460 Holloway Road, a building I’ve been walking past for years as I live close by.

WE SEE THE CANVASSER AT WORK

One afternoon Edwards auditioned a teenage American lad travelling through the Irish Free State on a painting tour. The sixteen year old from Kenosha, Wisconsin, George Orson Welles, accidently being in the right place at the right time, thus secured a gopher backstage job and subsequently made his sensational professional debut as an actor on October 13, 1931, in Hilton’s production of Jew Süss.

Welles and Mac Liammóir in Othello

Eighteen years later and with his Hollywood career already all but behind him Welles cast both men in roles in his freewheeling film adaptation of Othello, Edwards as Brabantio and Mac Liammóir in the vital part of Iago, in which he gives an unforgettable, picture stealing performance. The two year on-the-fly shoot in Morocco, France and Italy did nothing to help the Dubliners financially, nor did Welles’s further well-meaning attempts at involving them in film, television and various shambolic stage shows. Their friendship collapsed in animosity and mutual misunderstanding when Welles appeared as Falstaff in Hilton Edwards’s production of Chimes at Midnight at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, which after a short, disastrous run closed on March 26, 1960. It was his last ever appearance as an actor on any stage, thus the kid from Kenosha, now a “self-appointed Irishman” (according to the local papers) made both his debut and swansong in Dublin for Hilton Edwards from Holloway Road.

460 Holloway Road

I was drenched in yet another downpour on my way to the National Gallery of Ireland, crossing the O’ Connell Bridge at roughly the same hour Leopold Bloom did in the Lestrygonians episode of Ulysses, where he fed some seagulls. I didn’t spot any of those birds that day in the rain, but right in the middle a homeless guy was sat under a blanket, begging for change, one of the seemingly countless I’d see in the city centre, many of them, I was told, casualties of a recent tsunami of heroin.

THE GLORY THAT WAS ROME

I went to the gallery especially to see the Caravaggio that now lives there, his intense drama, The Taking of Christ, in which he has painted himself as an onlooker, shedding light on the dark action with an upheld lantern as he witnesses the Saviour’s arrest by three men in black armour. Merisi finished it in Rome in January 1603 and it is another in his series of pictures which demand of the viewer, “Can you really see?” In this case we, the gallery pilgrims, know that this is a painting depicting the moment when Judas identifies the man the soldiers have come to arrest by kissing him as described in Luke, 22:48. We know that this is Christ in the act of shrugging off the traitor’s embrace, but the metal clad men come to take him are ignorant of his divinity, they see just another prisoner to haul away and Caravaggio has placed himself among this unenlightened gang, illuminating the sequence with the only artificial light source ever to appear in his work, keen to watch the action from stage left while another man, the only beardless one in the composition flees screaming in horror stage right as the middle soldier grabs his maroon coloured cloak. Once again, as in Self Portrait as Bacchus, The Martyrdom of St Ursula or David With the Head of Goliath, he depicts himself among the heathen damned. He sees only a mortal man and is judged, unworthy of Salvation (indeed his eyes follow the fleeing disciple and pay no attention to the central drama). “But this is your hour—when darkness reigns.”

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ (1603). Ineluctable modality of the visible.

However, following this moment all four gospels report that one of the disciples cut the ear off of one of the arresting soldiers. According to John, the only witness who names the names, it was Simon Peter who attacked Malchus, a servant of the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem and hacked off the fella’s lug. Of the huddle of iron clad men Caravaggio depicts, only Merisi is without protective headgear, only he would be vulnerable to an attack by a sword, so has he in fact painted himself as Malchus? If so, according to Luke’s Gospel he is among the saved after all, because Jesus cured his wound and restored the ear, His last ever miracle. Perhaps, for once, the artist has allowed himself a smattering of Redemption, if you know your Luke (God knows he’d need it)? Finally, in this miracle of oils, in a symphony of whiskers and gestures, note the extraordinary clutching, wringing motion Christ makes submitting to the kiss, with his two hands joined, two palms soon to be nailed apart. A masterpiece all on its own.

As I sat looking a steady stream of visitors naturally stopped to admire it too. Joyce wouldn’t have been among them. Of all Italian art he wrote to his brother Stanislaus, “What did they do but illustrate a page or two of the New Testament?” One Italian lady determined to photograph it muttered under her breath about the lighting, and it was true that you couldn’t get an angle on it without one of the gallery spotlights hitting the glass. I was keen to see also the Gallery’s Vermeer, Woman Writing a Letter, With Her Maid, but couldn’t spot it anywhere so I asked one of the invigilators and we ended up having a long chat about the collection, and hearing my accent, he told me about the Caravaggio’s Scottish connection. It had hung unrecognised for over 100 years in the East Lothian house of William Hamilton Nisbet, a Scottish politician (the house is now a golf club). From there it ended up in the Jesuit Community in Leeson Street, Dublin, where in 1990 it was finally re-discovered and emerged from the darkness.

We were standing near the magical (and unexpectedly small) Landscape With the Rest on the Flight to Egypt (the only landscape Van Rijn ever depicted at night) and I mentioned I’d seen the massive All The Rembrandts exhibition in Amsterdam a couple of months previously and he showed me hanging in a nearby room Joseph Distributing Corn In Egypt, by Pieter Lastman, who was Rembrandt’s master. I’d seen a black and white reproduction of it in Simon Schama’s book Rembrandt’s Eyes (which I’d recently re-read) and was surprised by how little it was. Without The Invigilator I wouldn’t haven’t noticed it.

Pieter Lastman, Joseph Distributing Corn In Egypt (1612)

Lastman visited Italy as a young man and was in Rome at the same time Caravaggio was becoming it’s biggest star painter and possibly they even met (Merisi was still to commit the murder which caused him to flee the city), and it’s through Lastman that Rembrandt would have first heard of the Tenebrist he would come to rival. There was little evidence here though of Caravaggio’s panache. This great jumble of action and figures is very much in bright daylight, very much in the more conventional baroque style of Annibale Carracci, Rome’s go to artist before the young Michelangelo Merisi burst on the scene. Lastman’s Egypt is a curious place, with its memories of the Roman ruins on the Palatine Hill looming over the left of the picture, together with a peculiar hybrid column, part Trajan’s, but with St Theodore and his crocodile added to the summit, a little souvenir from Piazza San Marco in Venice. If it comes to it though, Rembrandt’s Egypt in The Flight is just as odd, a chilly, damp land of mists and deciduous woods, much more Amstel than Nile.

Rembrand van Rijn, Landscape With the Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1647)

Later I was particularly struck by one other work, a portrait of around 1560 of Prince Alessandro Farnese, a stunningly fabricated thing I at first assumed, with its cool precision, was by Bronzino. Actually it was by an artist whose pictures I’d never seen before except in reproductions, a lady called Sofonisba Anguissola, someone whose paintings I need to explore more of someday. She spent much of her long life in Madrid, the city where Francis Bacon died, and lived to the very grand old age of 93, excelling Titian and Michelangelo Buonarroti for longevity (and Bacon, who was 82 when he died). The Vermeer, The Invigilator told me (I had asked his name while we were chatting but sadly can’t remember it now), was on loan to Tokyo, so perhaps another time?

ITALIA, MAGISTRA ARTIUM

Come chucking out time I needed a taste of the local stuff, “the wine of my country” as Joyce called Guinness, and where better to sink a pint or two than at a nearby film location?

“Do you know the “Sean Sean” song?” asked the mayor of Stromboli in Nanni Moretti’s film, Caro Diario, and then proceeds to whistle Ennio Morricone’s memorable tune. It was written originally for Serio Leone’s epic western set in revolution torn Mexico (in 1913), Giu la testa (known by a variety of English titles, Duck You Sucker, Once Upon a Time In the Revolution and A Fist Full of Dynamite, among others). In Moretti’s film the mayor wishes such a haunting piece of music could be written to represent his island, but I often associate the track with another little town in Italy.

One Sunday morning I left my B&B in Pacentro, high in the Apennine Mountains in Abruzzo to find this same piece of music lilting from numerous little speakers dotted around the tiny town centre. Indeed it was followed by a whole melody of Morricone’s more chilled tunes. And while it was written for a western set in the Americas but filmed in Spain (as was Leone’s usual practice), it’s central character is an Irishman, a fugitive from justice and former revolutionary called John Mallory, played by James Coburn. In four brief Irish set flashbacks we learn something of the character’s origin story, and rather than just film these scenes in a local studio Leone took an entire crew plus his star to Ireland to shoot them (spoiler alerts coming up if you haven’t seen the 1971 film).

The exterior flashbacks were filmed at the Howth Castle estate, (close to the spot on the hill in Ulysses where Bloom proposed to Molly and she famously said “Yes”, the last word in the book), establishing that Coburn is in a ménage à trois with characters played by David Warbeck and Vivienne Chandler (in dialogue free roles) and is from a wealthy, educated, country gent, automobile driving background. The interior flashbacks were shot in Toners Bar, and it was to there I was off for my early evening drink. I knew it had a large, spacious front bar from watching the movie, so was surprised by how small it looked from Baggot Street, however, stepping through the door I recognised the place instantly, I doubt all that’s changed since the day Leone filmed in here was the addition of the big TV’s broadcasting sports. Here was the dark wood panelling, the mirrors adding to the light and depth of the room, the gleaming brass fittings and there, in one corner, was the spot once occupied by one of The Magnificent Seven, Mr James Coburn himself waiting with a hidden .303 rifle, The Great Escaper who made it to freedom. I walked through the ghosts of where Leone, Warbeck and several doomed British soldiers once stood near the entrance and ordered a drink at the busy bar. The place was heaving and Coburn’s seat was already taken, but I found a place near the door where I could relax, take in the scene and enjoy the familiar taste of the Irish stout, the first drink I ever bought in a pub as an underage drinker (the Winnock in Drymen, Scotland, cheers!).

It was here we first see Coburn and Warbeck at work as revolutionaries, handing out political tracts to an assortment of salt of the Earth type extras dressed in working class garb, all tobacco pipes, cloth caps and fishermen’s hats, and Coburn pauses to admire Warbeck’s passion and apparent success of his seditious rhetoric with the lads (all these sequences play under music, usually Coburn’s leitmotiv, the Sean, Sean song). But “if it’s a revolution it’s confusion.” and in the midst of the unravelling of the revolt in Mexico we get another flashback to Toners.

MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED

This time a badly beaten Warbeck is brought to the pub under arrest by a group of British soldiers and policemen, propelled through the doors in a hand held, point of view shot. At their prompting Warbeck points out various boozers who are grabbed and led away by the coppers.

Tensely watching this in the mirror at the far end of the Bar, his back to the action, is Coburn. Finally pointed out too, Coburn wheels, holding a rifle wrapped in a newspaper and shoots. The flashback cuts here but is returned to later and we see the soldiers killed in slow motion, then the two former friends exchange a long glance before the badly tortured Warbeck seems to nod an affirmative “yes” to the betrayed Coburn, who puts him out of his misery and shoots him in the head. Oh, and the office workers had now left so I grabbed the coveted spot and was now sitting right where Coburn was once placed by Sergio Leone, a fresh pint of Guinness in my hand, drinking it all in, so to speak. A young lady came to the bar to order a round and I asked her to take my picture there, which she was happy to do. Like I said, everybody was so friendly in Dublin. On the wall opposite I could see a photo of Leone at the bar door with the soldiers and policemen, Coburn’s rifle in his hands, no doubt acting out everybody’s parts, something he loved to do.

In the final flashback we are again in the Irish countryside as the trio run down a hill in slow motion, and under an oak tree Chandler kisses first Coburn and then also passionately embraces Warbeck. The camera cuts to a close up of Coburn watching, grinning, apparently benignly, but his smile slowly freezes and begins to turn to something more like a grimace as the shot blurs out of focus and we are left to ponder just who the hell the Sean in the Sean Sean song actually is. Coburn’s character is called John Mallory. His partner in crime in Mexico is the bandit Juan Miranda, played by Rod Steiger. Juan and John are of course translated to “Sean” in Irish Gaelic. When Steiger first asks Coburn what his name is, he replies “Sean”, quickly changing it to “John”, but we never know the Christian name of Warbeck’s character (in the credits he is called “Nolan”). Is he in fact Sean and is the song really his signature tune, forever haunting Coburn’s character’s memory? Certainly as Warbeck dies in close up with a bullet in his brain the music dies with him as a chant of discordant “Sean’s” sung in a downward litany. Has the ménage disturbed and displaced Coburn to the extent that he has betrayed Warbeck to the police to be tortured, only for him to unexpectedly turn up at the pub? Or is it Warbeck Coburn really loves and feels betrayed by him (there is certainly a powerful if never spoken gay theme underlying the relationship between the Robert De Nero and James Woods characters in Leone’s next and last movie as director, Once Upon a Time In America)? For me Giu la testa is one of Sergio’s finest films, the one where he turns from hugely entertaining but unambiguous operas about cowboy Supermen to a meditation on friendship, politics and betrayal, and some of that was filmed right here in this Dublin pub!**

Cheers from Coburn’s seat

After three pints and a bag of crisps I went wandering again into Bloom’s slipstream to Davy Byrne’s pub, back into the Lestrygonians episode where he dropped in for a lunchtime glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola cheese sandwich. It also appears smack bang in the middle of Joyce’s Dubliners, in the story Counterparts, arguably the grimmest tale in the collection. I doubt Leopold would recognise it today with its gastropub décor. It was here that Bloom remembered the kiss of seedcake from Molly’s mouth on Ben Howth which leads to a meditation upon women’s bodies and the bizarre question, do classical statues have bum holes?

Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I’ll look today. Keeper won’t see. Bend down and let something fall see if she.

I had another glass of stout, and like Bloom after his wine, I had a piss, though there was no one in the bar who would gossip about me while I was “off stage,” Nosey Flynn, for instance, who frequents the pub in Counterparts and Ulysses (as does Paddy Leonard and of course Davy Byrne himself) and provides the important information that Bloom is in the Masonic Order. I was flagging by now having been up since stupid o’ clock in the morning to get to the airport, and I no longer recall what I mused upon, anal related or otherwise. I had a wee wander round the streets, marvelling at just how expensive the restaurants all were, even compared to London, before retreating to my hotel with some snacks and a bottle of Aussie wine.

SHINDY IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT

As my hotel didn’t include breakfast next morning I was up and out to the nearest place I could find, the Café Nero up lemon, gale tossed O’ Connell Street. The freezing wind meant I couldn’t sit outside, so I munched my Continental repast indoors, coffee and moist pith of farls of croissant. A tune was struck up suddenly that I hadn’t heard before, wistful, beautiful, a track from the playlist of one of the gossiping girls behind the counter, Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy. Coles Corner by Richard Hawley it was, I looked it up later in my hotel (“Hold back the night from us.”) and it stuck in my mind for the rest of the day. Everyone in the cafe sounded local, which was nice as I’d been surprised by how touristy Dublin was, and with a student population from seemingly every corner of the globe; no muttering about “strangers in my house” these days, I assumed. And I hadn’t yet seen a single cleric or nun on this “priestridden Island.” A bloke came in with his missus, wearing a Superman sweatshirt and the lone lady who had braved the Aeolian blast sitting outside breakfasting was being accosted for change by another woman with a much more vicious habit to feed. I was bound for the coast that day, so soon I said a silent farewell to the sirens behind the counter, to the son of Jor-El and his missus to walk to Connolly Station. With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.

Taking the busy road along the Liffey I passed beneath the Loop Line Bridge which appears several times in Ulysses, most notably in the drowsy Eumaeus chapter when Bloom and Stephen Dedalus seek rest in a cabman’s shelter at the beginning of The Nostos (The Return), Part 3 of the novel. Today a car park attendant’s porta cabin takes its place and instead of old sailor Murphy “gaping up at the piers and girders of the Loop line rather out of his depth as of course it was all radically altered since his last visit and greatly improved” it was me, gawping at a pair of blue trainers dangling limply from the spars of the bridge.

The train was just about to depart when I got to the station, and I ran onto it. As it headed resolutely inland however I realised I was going the wrong way, and got off at Broombridge to head back to Connolly Station and try again. Broombridge, once voted “worst station in Dublin” in a local paper consists of two platforms. And that’s it. Though next to a large tram terminus it feels like the middle of nowhere, but the low, grey distillery warehouse buildings streaked with tell-tale whiskey mould and reed lined canal running behind the eastbound platform reminded me of numerous similar station no-where’s around Dalmuir where I grew up. On the way back to the centre I spotted Glasnevin Cemetery whizz by, which features in the Hades section of Ulysses when Paddy Dignam is buried (and both Joyce’s parents, May and John, lie there too).

ERIN, GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA

Getting on the right line this time, it wasn’t long before we were chugging along the sea side, again reminiscent of the lowland Scottish west coast. I hopped off in welcome but brief sunshine at Sandycove & Glasthule and strolled downhill to the blue and grey waters which peeked through the houses, and onto the expanse of Scotsman’s Bay (that’s what it’s called). I instantly caught site of what I’d really come all this way to see, the Martello Tower sitting on a promontory, commanding that part of the coast. It is here that Ulysses opens with Buck Mulligan being stately and plump, mounting a stairhead and ready for a shave. Many people (all?) find the opening chapter is quite confusing and the whole “where are they”-ness coloured my first encounter with the three young men uneasily living there, two Irish and one English. Once you realise they are actually, unexpectedly in a little coastal castle tower the geography and diegetic space of the book starts to make sense (even if their dialogue does not, Mulligan’s especially, who spouts off in streams of tiresome studentese). A whole string of these forts were built during a fear of invasion by Napoleon’s armies but this one at Sandycove has achieved cultural immortality, and I had wanted to come and see it for more than thirty years.

HOUSE OF KEY(E)S

“Come in, come in!” was the greeting when I entered the Tower through the big glass doors. I was asked what brought me to Dublin once it was established I wasn’t a local and the three volunteers running the place that morning seemed very much chuffed when I told them I had come to Ireland especially to visit this, their James Joyce Tower and Museum. Space being a premium in the cramped structure there was instantly a wealth of Joyce related items on display around the Reception desk, both original pieces as well as reproductions, and something mentioning Oliver St. John Gogarty caught my eye. He was the real life model for Buck Mulligan who stars in the book’s opening line, and I mentioned to one of the volunteers that he must be spinning in his grave over the naming of the tower after Joyce, who spent all of six night here in 1904, when it was Gogarty who paid for and held the lease for 21 years, and indeed there was the comically long door key on display he once held, like a relic of St. Peter. “He came here for the swimming.” The Volunteer, the fella nearest my own age told me, and I’d soon see more evidence of this. We chatted for a while not about sunny Jim but of Olly St. John, who I hope would have been pleased had he overheard us.

Next to the Gogarty’s key is the only publication by Samuel Chenevix Trench, under his adopted Irish name Dermot. He appears in Ulysses as the  Englishman called Haines, the third man. He took his own life in 1907, probably using the same revolver which drove Joyce to flee the Tower after it was fired by both Trench and Gogarty in the middle of a no doubt drunken night, the bullets just missing him.

I could have talked with the volunteers, two blokes and the lady all day, but there was the rest of the structure to be seen, and they were expecting a party of tourists from Budapest at any moment. I mentioned to them that Bloom’s father was Hungarian and all that stuff at the start of this post about the name “Virag” and was rewarded by one of the finest compliments I’ve ever received, “Ah,” said The Volunteer, “You know your Ulysses.” Resisting the temptations of the first floor I headed straight for the top o’ the Tower, up the tiny, narrow winding staircase. If Buck Mulligan (or I) had been much plumper I doubt he could have wriggled his way up there at all without losing some buttons. And then suddenly the sky burst open over the parapet with its pretty vistas up and down the rocky shores with its low hills, sandy beaches and villas, “one of the finest views on the Irish coast”, Richard Ellmann called it and since I had been a teenage boy I’d wanted to be here. Telemachus and book begins.

On the omphalos.

I spent a good hour or so up there, no Napoleonic ships to be seen and sunk by the long gone, anti-shipping artillery once mounted here, no ghost of Hamlet’s father, and although entrance to the Museum is free, only five or so other people appeared while I was up there, a couple of whom I asked to take my picture. The sounds of seabirds and garden songbirds together with the smell of salt air brought to mind snatches of verse from that great Welsh poet of the other side of the Irish Sea, (and one time drinking buddy of Francis Bacon’s) Dylan Thomas, and Under Milk Wood. Feeling compelled to do so, I re-read the opening of my copy of Ulysses once more, for the seventh time, now it was “home”.

THOSE SLIGHTLY RAMBUNCTIOUS FEMALES

At one point a trio of loudly chatting English schoolgirls appeared marching along the coast road, then re-appeared in swim suits, scrabbling along the rocks. Just one of them eventually took the plunge into the doubtless icy water, and made such a shrieking sound it put the rest of them off, and the young sirens beat a hasty retreat after half hearted attempts to shove each other in.

This is the Forty Foot outdoor pool (or “Gentlemen’s Bath”), where Mulligan takes a dip and which, I’d just learned, drew Gogarty to the Tower in the first place. Watching him, Stephen Dedalus reflects on Mulligan’s prowess in the water, he’s saved men from drowning, like the real Gogarty who would also, in 1923, escape from gunmen who kidnapped him by swimming the freezing River Liffey in winter.

ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP

Stephen seems to have a horror of water, and must have been a fairly stinky subject, not having bathed for seven months by his own reckoning, something lost on Molly Bloom at novel’s end, when she imagines him as a clean young student in comparison to her middle aged husband. The irony is Leopold visited a bathhouse as part of his wanderings just the day before which he spent carrying round a bar of lemon soap in one pocket (and a potato in another).

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.

Waistcoat of tabinet, embroidered by Ellen O’ Donnell and inherited by James via his father when he was a child. Donated to the museum in 1963 by Samuel Beckett. The Bloom’s son Rudy is buried in a wolly waistcoat.

Molly unconsciously links Leopold and Stephen again here when she thinks someone should write down all her husband’s peculiar little sayings, just as the Englishman Haines proposes to write down Stephen’s jokes and rhymes. Of the quiet beauty of this part of the coast Joyce writes little. He had wretched memories of the few days he spent at the Tower and dramatizes his expulsion from the company of Gogarty and Samuel Chenevix Trench as a betrayal at the end of the Nighttown section of the book, abandoned as homeless to a couple of drunk British soldiers who beat him up.  Indeed betrayal seemed to be the theme of most of what I saw on this trip, the betrayal of Christ in the painting by Caravaggio, the betrayal of John Mallory in Toners Pub and the betrayal of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. At least Dedulus had a saviour in the shape of Leopold Bloom. Or was it Revolution, revolutions in paining, modernist literature and Once Upon a Time In Mexico and Ireland? Time and images were becoming intermingled on the belvedere, and on the first floor visitors who have not read the book will be puzzled by the snarling ceramic black panther sitting by the hearth of the living quarters.

SUFFICIENT FOR THE DAY…

Having savoured the relics I made my way back to Reception now full of Hungarians who were being introduced to the place, while I overheard The Volunteer telling the woman about a recent thumb mishap, flourishing the digit. “The ‘quick’, they call it, get turps in a cut there and it stings like mad!”

• 

• 

Death mask of Joyce. “Here I am.”

I slipped the down to the shore and watched an ancient mariner head for a dip in the Hole, and enjoyed the waves lapping at the shore with a view of all I’d come to see, finally seen.

Passing the Tower entrance again on my way back to the main road I got chatting to another volunteer who had just arrived. The praises of his home village of Dalkey and its Pyramid on the hill, were sung by Ronan with such persuasion that I decided on a walk down the coast towards these wonders.

Dalkey appears in the novel where Stephen has a teaching job, as does Bullock Harbour, when Stephen notes a death had occurred nine days earlier and now a ship was out looking for the body.

The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am.

However I only got as far as Finnigan’s Pub in Dalkey, walking presumably in the steps of Dedulus as he headed to his job in that village, when I realised how knackered I was and how late in the day.

I’d probably never get to the still distant Pyramid on Killiney Hill and back before dark, so I retraced my steps and was soon back on Marine Parade in Sandycove, leaving the Tower behind me. A woman passing with a pushchair and baby remarked to her friend “You’ve never seen one as big. I’ve never seen one as big. It was huuuuuge!” and I noticed the bench I was resting on had one of those little memorial plaques.

A DISTANT VOICE

Heading back to the city I got off the train at on a whim at Sydney Parade to walk up Strand Road and to the Star of the Sea church. It was on a section of beach off Strand Road that one of the novel’s finest chapters is set, it’s third. Full of a young man’s thoughts I was middle aged before I could properly understand it. Proteus, which ends Part 1 of the novel is for me one of the most brilliant pieces of prose in the English language, and like the rest of the death obsessed book, mortality raises it’s decayed head here again, even for “a living dog” who racing along the sand in that ecstatic way they do at the beach finds the cast up remains of a less fortunate hound decaying on a bladder wrack bed.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.

RETURN OF BLOOM

Leopold Bloom starts his day at roughly the same hour Mulligan climbs the Tower (the beginning of Part 2, Calypso, jumps back in time some by 3 hours), talking to his cat. The moggy is never named, though it memorably speaks,

— Mrkgnao!

Bloom merely calls it “pussens” and sweetly, as Molly does later, tries to imagine its inner life.

Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.

Dogs, however, are more numerous and usually named. The “living dog” by the sea is called Tatters, yelled at by his master for “vulturing the dead.” Bloom remembers his late father’s suicide note, asking him to look after his dog Athos (“Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are”) and mutts real or imagined appear in the hallucinatory Circe chapter, including Towser, who is variously Mastiff, Terrier, Setter and Bulldog. Near book’s end, Bloom, realizing it is “high time to be retiring for the night” contemplates whether or not to bring Stephen home and recalls Molly’s temper when he returned with a gimpy stray dog years ago.

Detail of dogs (and stags) on the waistcoat embroidered by Ellen O’ Donnell.

Molly remembers Mrs Riordan’s dog “smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats”, and a dog barking in Bell Lane in Gibraltar and imagines fucking “like the dogs do”. Leopold also encounters the ferocious Garryowen, owned by the bigoted nationalist known only as The Citizen, in the Cyclops sequence, who is possibly the same person as “Grandpa Giltrap” and his “lovely dog” mentioned in the second section of the book set along Strand Road, Nausicaa.

Star of the Sea, now far from the coast.

This takes place by a church on the coast called the Star of the Sea, and as I followed my mobile phone app further and further inland to find it I realised that the landscape had changed somewhat since Joyce’s day. Indeed most of the land I had been walking had been reclaimed from the waters long since, and neither Bloom, Dedalus nor their inventor had ever set foot here before until I reached the little chapel which appears almost exactly half way into the book in a chapter which ends at 9pm with Gerty MacDowell and her friends heading off home. Having now tramped up and down the bay it was time for me to head back too and the commuter packed train from Sandymount seemed to crawl along. I had contemplated going back to Toners but just then the well-dressed business lady opposite me said on her phone, “Ah, Toners will be packed tonight!” so that put me off. I started looking up exactly where “Nighttown” had been, the locale which dominates the closing part of the book, and it turned out it wasn’t at all far from Connolly Street Station where I was headed anyway.

LINKS WITH BYGONE DAYS OF YORE

Circe opens here, “The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown,” now Mabbot Lane.

A short walk from the station, but there’s not much to be seen of the red light district popularly known as “Monto” after nearby Montgomery Street (now Foley Street). Almost the entire area was newly built, with yet more modern blocks in their midst of going up. A small display of photographs in Railway Street gives the only clue as to what the area once looked like, that and the chilling wall of the former Magdalen Laundry still waiting for the developers. In 1904 it was called Tyrone Street and was the location of Bella Cohen’s brothel at number 82 where most of Circe takes place (sort of).

By now it was dinner time and there wasn’t a soul to be seen on the streets until I got to the crossing  near James Joyce Street, of all places. Suddenly round the corner from Gardiner Street staggered a tall man in a sky blue sweater, pissed drunk, seething, wearing spectacles with lenses so thick you couldn’t see his eyes. In his mid-thirties he sported a Bobby Charlton comb-over and weaving around on the road he clutched a carry out five pack of lager to his chest, the sixth one open in his hand. Furiously he started hammered away at the gate of a building site, and when this solicited no answer he began kicking each board on the fence and muttering the usual oaths frustrated drunks do, a kind of “aaah-yaaa-fu-fuuuckkinn-fuckaa!”, like a character from a Beckett play or story, or the ghost of some long gone punter looking for a Monto brothel where he could make a utter fucking swine of himself before going home to beat up the wife and kids.

Fortunatly he took no notice of me, the only other person on the road. Bloom goes to Nighttown to keep an eye on Stephen, rescues him by magic (he makes a Masonic sign) then takes him home where Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness soliloquy closes the book and “Yes”. *** 

The maddening, hilarious, confusing, frustrating Circe episode, written in the form of a play script, movingly ends with Bloom glimpsing their dead son, named after Leopold’s Hungarian dad.

(Silent, thoughtful, alert, he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)

BLOOM

(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!

RUDY

(Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)

As I said, this was in April 2019. I ended the Dublin jaunt “With no-one there real waiting for me”, at Le Bon Crubeen for a very nice dinner (the Guinness bread was astounding!!) and closed the decade with a trip to Paris in October, only my third time there, to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, Bacon en toutes lettres, which included a cute little model of the studio now in Dublin. But that’s another story. A couple of months after that disturbing reports began coming from China about a new variant of SARS…

End.

* It seems unlikely that Bacon, who was around 57 at this time, had yet to read anything by Joyce. In his late teens he lived in Paris and Chantilly for 18 months where he learned to speak French. During the time (1928 -29) Joyce was still living in Paris  and close to Bacon’s lodgings, drinking in the same cafes he frequented and writing Finnegans Wake, which was published as Work In Progress in the magazine transition. However in his collection catalogued after his death, his copy of Ulysses was published in 1969, three years after the film was made, and his copy of Dubliners 1992, the year he passed away in a Madrid hospital, which leads to the speculation that one of the last things he may ever have read was The Dead! His earliest volume of work by Proust was published in 1960 (in the English translation by Scott Moncrieff). In the exhibition Bacon en toutes lettres (see the end of this post) there was again video footage of a tipsy Francis saying that chaos produced images, this time in French. This tanked up “Englishman’s” command of the language held the mostly Parisian audience I watched the footage with utterly spellbound.

** There were some great debates about this on the Sergio Leone Web Board, though it is no longer very active, at www.fistful-of-leone.com/forums. Vocal on the Sean Sean Song was sung by Edda Dell’Orso and the jaunty refrain trilled by Alessandro Alessandroni who was, unlike Leopold Bloom, “a professional whistler.” There is a truly wretched parody of the tune in the movie The Eagle Has Landed, a leitmotif for Donald Sutherland’s cheery Oirish Nazi collaborator, Liam Devlin. Sutherland made something of a habit of this, being involved in a similar, just as awful pastiche of Morricone in Kelly’s Heroes. The most recent variation on the theme is by Jeff Russo in the TV series Fargo. Seemingly random in the superb Season 2, the explanation for the tune comes during the end credits of the utterly tedious Season 4 (if you make it that far) as a memory of the brilliant Mike Milligan’s Irish protector Patrick “Rabbi” Milligan, killed erstwhile by a twister in the clunky as a tin man full o’ lead Wizard of Oz episode (9). Aptly Russo’s variation isn’t for the living man, but for the memory of the beloved dead one. He gets it.

*** Friend and admirer of Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, denies the Irishman’s burst of originality in inventing this form in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through his character Pnin awards the honour to a Russian, kanyeshna, Leo Tolstoy, at the end of Anna Karenina’s life. And he may well be on to something, though personally I can’t stand Anna Karenina, it took me months to wade through it. If 19^th century farming practice and reform are your thing, this is the book for you. On this one subject at least, Joyce was silent.

The Wake at the Sepulchre

Back in 2013 I finally made it to the Monumentale in Torino, that great city by the Alps in Piedmont. Twice in fact. While it was the last of the three monumental Italian cemeteries I visited it was the first to be created, founded in 1827 and officially open in 1829. To get there from the Porta Suza train station take the number 13 tram, change at Rossini and get the 68 bus from the stop on Via dell’Accademia Albertina. Or you can, as I discovered, walk there as it isn’t too far and you’ll be almost as quick as the teeny tiny bus which fairly crawls along.

It was the busiest of the trio and the vast modern sections are well-tended and full of mourners as well as people who just seem to be cutting through on the way elsewhere. Like Staglieno it has its own internal bus service and it needs it, the place is gigantic, so big that large empty plots are still available to be used in the future. At one point as I left one arcade to see yet another huge one laid out before me I felt dismayed by the scale of it.

The historic, sculpture filled part takes up less than half the site, the modern sections make up the majority of the graveyard.

While it lacks the erotic work in abundance at Staglieno or the vast mausoleums and Art Deco tombs of Milano it is still very much worth a visit for the general variety and sheer quality of many of the pieces on display.

Famiglia Maganza by Biscarra

Famiglia Eugenio Sella

Famiglia Columbo, by C. Musso. 1892

Zumaglini family, by L. Belli. The figure is probably allegorical and not a portrait.

It can boast probably Bistolfi’s greatest creation, his Angel of Death, a truly scary looking apparition, but would you know it? It was covered in scaffolding and trapped behind a condensation covered Perspex sheet on my visit.

Primo Levi. 1987

There are very few internationally known personalities buried here either, probably the best known is in one of the three Jewish sections. Local lad Primo Levi is here, author of the classic Auschwitz survivor memoir IF THIS IS A MAN and its incredible companion piece, THE TRUCE. This was the quietest part of the cemetery while I was there, not another person in sight, an odd experience as the rest of the place was so busy. There were also several small chapels and arcades in the historic sections where I suddenly found myself all alone with just the birdsong (or in one section, piped sacred music as drizzle fell).

There is a type of bird there too which sounds exactly like a human making a “tut tut tut” sound, so if you hear that don’t worry, you’re not being told off, it’s just the wildlife. I was conscious however of the “no unauthorised photography” sign I spotted just inside the main entrance gate, something Geonova and Milano don’t have. Fortunately nobody seemed to be policing this, though the first time I heard that bird I thought an expulsion from the garden was imminent.

Marchionesse Elisabetta Sanese tomb, by Giuseppe Bogliani, 1835. The “star” of the piece though is not the dying Marchionesse but the survivor displaying her piety at the deathbed. Carlotta Marchionni, who was an actor, lifts her mother’s hand to her head for a parting blessing.

Jean Servais tomb, by Lorenzo Vergnano, 1892

Bizarrely enough this Etruscan style tomb, modeled after the late 6th century Sarcophagus of the Spouses. had no inscription on it that I could find.

Giuseppina Castellazzo tomb, detail

One of the star attractions of the cemetery. Laura Vigo grave, by Pietro Canonica, 1908

Casana family tomb, by Davide Calandra, 1910

Grave of Teresa Fererro, who went under the stage name of Isa Bluette. She was a showgirl, actress and singer who died aged just 41 in 1939. Her curious grave by Giacomo Giorgis seems to portray her “playing” dead, her husband’s photograph by her side. They were apparently married while she was on her deathbed. He, actor Nuto Navarinni’s name is also on the tomb so I suppose he’s in there too, though he was married twice more after Isa’s demise and lived till 1973.

Calagaris family mausoleum. This bonkers tomb from 1954 particularly caught my eye. Designed by Fillipo Chriss it’s decorated with ceramic panels.

Giuseppe Durio tomb, Grief Comforted by Memories by Leonardo Bistolfi, 1901

When Hannibal’s army erupted into Italy from the Alps close to Torino, it found ready and willing allies among the local tribe whom their Roman enemies called “Celts”. This family seems to identify with those ancient ancestors with this magnificent Celtic cross.

This extravagant tomb of industrialist Giuseppe Pongiglione is filled with fantastic details including a stone train, a rat and a large moth emerging from a chrysalis. Pongiglione strides proudly from his open grave, watch in hand, confidently expectant of his assured place in eternity, a punctual angel on hand to guide him, more servant than heavenly host. Sculpted by Lorenzo Vergnano, it’s subject had a great deal of say in how he was to be portrayed, indeed the work was completed 15 years before his death in 1886. Unfortunately it was in urgent need of restoration and the marble and iron were rotting away.

Stone train.

The moth.

So much for eternity.

Doctor Giacinto Pacchiotti tomb, by Luigi Contratti, 1896. The doctor is shown as a philanthropist, giving comfort to the deathbed figure who dominates the piece. Usually a father or mother, here it is an anonymous workman wearing a pair of wonderfully sculpted boots.

Dario Argento set sequences in the Monumentale in two of his films, Il gatto a nove code (THE CAT O’ NINE TAILS) and Non ho sono (SLEEPLESS). Apparently during this period Torino had more practising Satanists living there than in any other European city, excluding Lyon.

The richly adorned Amalia Porcheddu Dianesi tomb, by Edoardo Rubino (sculptor) and Giulio Casanova (architect), 1912

Grave of Francesco Ballada, 1933. Died age 11

Interesting one this, the tomb of Antonio Marro (1913). A leading figure in the young fields of psychiatry and sociology, he was also fascinated by criminal psychology. He is portrayed in true positivist style, literally measuring a mind as though the bone dimensions could equate the interior life of a person, However the skull doubles as a traditional pre-Christian symbol of mortality, while behind him an allegorical figure takes craniology to new lengths and measures the Earth itself. There are schools and hospitals dotted over Italy named after him today. One of his less commendable legacies was his son Giovanni, a eugenicist who became a “racial scientist” during the Fascist era, writing articles such as THE SUPERIORITY OF THE ITALIAN RACE in which he compares Jews to octopuses because “slimy creature, it is almost symbolic of evasiveness, but it grasps everything, and everything sticks to the tentacles and suckers around its formidable masticatory apparatus.” He was professor of anthropology at the University of Turin at the time Primo Levi was studying chemistry there.

My favourite in the whole graveyard, it wouldn’t be out-of-place in Staglieno, a stunning piece by Giacomo Ginotti (sculptor) and Crescentino Caselli (architect) called The Wake at the Sepulcher. It is the tomb of Brondelli di Brondello who died in 1886.

Famiglia Davigini

One advisory note. If you are planning a visit, all three graveyards I’ve written about in my blog are closed on Mondays.

(This article was based on one I published originally on the “Around the World” section of the Hidden Glasgow Forums.)

Negronis Eleven

An Adveture in Red

Heart of the Camparisoda Insallazione, Milano Fuorisalone 2012

Campari and soda had been the overture. Free poured in the better bars, or served from the little pre-mix Camparisoda bottles elsewhere, I loved the stuff. For me it meant a sunset, usually on the Italian coast, an outdoor table, swifts dive bombing the scene, the light turning the same colour as the freshly cut orange slice floating in my glass. A silent toast to the family who invented this wonderful drink was usually offered.

Tomb of Davide Campari, Milano. See my post, Fat Purses and Skilled Chisels.

Later came the Campari spritz. I tasted my first in a now closed dive bar on Corso di Porta Ticinese in Milano a few years ago, a beverage immaculately constructed by the bloke behind the counter. Then, outside Bar Parthenope in Napoli a couple of summers ago I ordered a Negroni. I liked gin and I loved Campari, so why not?

Camparisoda, Ricette Tricolori, Milano 2012

Campari spritz, Sea Bar, Camogli, 2016. See my post Eco On the Beach

And that was that. Now when I am in Italy I try and greet each and every evening with the sublime but simple cocktail, if I can. I asked the barman one winter’s night in Bar Venezia in Mantova, as he opened a cute wee set of porcelain lined drawers and plucked out a slice of orange if it was “il Negroni” or “la Negroni“? With a slight look of horror that such a thing could have a feminine prefix he exclaimed “Eeeeeeeell Negroni!”, and finished my aperitivo by daintily adding one of those girly, black plastic drinking straws which seems to be part of the ritual in most places, and so terrible for the environment.

Number 1. Cafe Lalu, Salerno

A big contrast, at the end of a day which saw me, in the early, EARLY hours of the morning, standing at a candidate for one of London’s filthiest, most depressing bus stops, this one on Hollway Road outside my old dole office. Pasted on one of the shelter’s windows was an A4 photocopy with a picture of a twelve year old girl who had gone missing a couple of days earlier. On the other side of me slumped bins not emptied since God knows when overflowing with garbage and claggered in stabbed out fag butts. Later, bleary eyed, at Stansted bloody airport I found home and work worries hard to shift. It was only in the air, squeezed in between a window and one of Napoli’s larger, huge big fat blokes that I started to unwind, surprised to see, as we cleared the Alps, that the water we were flying over was not the Golfo di Genova, but the Adriatic. I recognised Venezia, the Lagoon and the Lido instantly, and marvelled at the various branches of the Po draining into the sea from the east coast. We suddenly arrived in Napoli not by that stunning rush over Ischia and the Bay, but over a heavily industrialised area of vast car parks and factories.

Many people hate the place, but I do love Napoli. Usually. I spent a couple of hours wandering around some of my favourite haunts, past the Caravaggio church to Piazza Dante and back again in a loop, getting slightly lost when I took a detour to avoid that bit on Via dei Tribunali just outside Gino Sorbillo’s pizzeria which often and unexpectedly becomes utterly jammed with a crush of people and cars, as it was that afternoon. I wasn’t in the mood for it that day though. Everything just bugged me. The drizzle, the squalor, the gloom, the bustle, the chaos and the sheer bloody NOISE, where at every single little alleyway some local racer came charging full speed at you on a fucking  moped from round a corner. I found the whole experience utterly scunnering. The only thing I photographed was an abandoned soft toy, a horrible looking pink thing in a pair of grubby white pants, not pig, not dragon, a new Parthenope perhaps? I imagined some bambina in a pushchair howling inconsolably at discovering it’s loss, adding to the din of the city. I quickly escaped down the coast to Salerno and after checking into my hotel and dealing with work emails (sigh!) I conked out for few hours sleep, rousing myself at la passiagata for Negroni number one of the trip.

A new Parthenope

I had been at Cafe Lalu on Piazza Sedile di Porta Nova just over a year before when I used Salerno as my base for a trip to Paestum. I found the Negroni on that occasion so inexpensive and the amount of aperitivo food accompanying it so generous that just a couple more took care of dinner that night. The staff too were full of smiles. This time the tables outside had been colonised almost entirely by two large families, each with a new baby to show off, fussed over by their noni, while one of the proud fathers strutted about like a victorious gladiator in his tiny arena of coffee cups and glasses of Aperol spritz. They seemed to know everyone who passed by, with many a cheery “Ciao”. There was a sweet scene when the owner of the toy shop Spirito, across from the Bar came over to chat with them and the waitress. This was the cheapest Negroni of the trip, I think I paid 6 Euro for it, same as last time, might even have been 5.50. The food however wasn’t as satisfying on this occasion and after a bit of wandering I found the perfect place to dine that night at La Compagnia del Concord, where spaghetti al vongole, grilled fish and white wine all were waiting for me, the only foreigner in the place. The bins on Holloway Road were finally a long way away, and I hoped they had found the missing girl.

Sleepy Salerno

Number 2. Blu Sirena. Amalfi

You know the British are in town because the “f” word suddenly explodes. In this case, at breakfast in my Salerno hotel. coming from a tall, skin headed cockney bloke about my age, whose knife, toast and butter had some sort of disagreement (Faaaak!). His Scouse wife too, joined the chorus, loudly calling the Plaza Hotel “a fooking shit shed!” though, I’m sure she must have seen far worse.

“And here I am in Amalfi. The ferry ride along the coast was just stunning, impossible rock formations jutting from the sea at extraordinary angles to fantastic heights, and dotted improbably along them, dream houses, some of them palatial in scale. Amalfi town is mobbed, but gets more bearable the further up the ravine you walk. Giant dragon flies patrol the lanes and swallows perch and send out those peculiar strings of notes that they do.” I scribbled in my notebook a couple of hours later.

The view from my hotel room could scarcely have been better. My balcony looked over Piazza Flavio Gioia. Below me was the Fontana di Sant’Andrea, with a constant stream of folk posing next to it, usually pointing at the female figure with water sprouting from both tits, and to my right, the Duomo itself. Something about the view nagged at my mind, and on returning to London and checking my ancient copy of Spike Milligan’s Mussolini, His Part in my Downfall, there is a picture postcard of the same vista  reproduced, possibly even taken from my very balcony, commemorating “the cafe where we had egg and chips” accompanying the tale of the afternoon Milligan and his pal dined at this restaurant trailed by a drunken Scot who they spent the rest of the day trying to ditch. Indeed, like that drunken Scottish bloke I’d end up following Milligan a lot on this part of the trip, the first of three Irish writers I’d encounter (Milligan was born in India and his father was Irish. In 1962 he found himself stateless and cliamed Irish citizenship).

Valle del Mulini

“Escaped from Amalfi and decided on the Valley of the Mills today (Valle del Mulini). Have been through the winding wooded valley and am now high above the town, sitting in an odd little folly garden by the path side which is called, so a sign topped by three huge cobra snakes informs me, Saint Marcian.

The trees below are filled with songbirds, the occasional cock crow and I’ve just heard the church bells ringing from the village across the valley and slightly above me (Pogerola?). Brilliant day so far, marred only by the loss of my sunglasses. Pity Sophie couldn’t make it.

Pogerola

Pontone

Amalfi

The great rock on top of which Ravello sits, with the Terrace of Infinity at it’s tip on the right of the picture.

Views from the Torre del Ziro are some of the most staggering I have ever seen. And while I saw a lot of people in the Valley of the Mills (large groups of Italians, French and Swedish) there is no one here but me!”

Amalfi from the Torre del Ziro

Atrani from the Torre del Ziro

On the way back down I found my sunglasses, hidden by a fallen leaf.

Spot by the river Canneto where I found my sunglasses

Just outside town I could hear children singing and chanting and a brass band playing, and soon I came upon a hoard of kids and uniformed band members who had by now put down their instruments and were chatting, smoking and messing about with their mobile phones.

I didn’t pay it much heed, and back on my hotel balcony I watched a very fancy wedding taking leave of the Duomo which attracted a lot of attention, then headed to one of the outside tables of the bar, Blu Sirena, by the roadside snaking out of town, for Negroni number two. It was strong, heavy on the gin and came with a very tasty selection of aperitivo nibbles. I fancied pizza that night, and had already decided where to have it, a little place just before the turn off to the Valley of the Mills, even though it was a bit of a trek again back up the ravine. Taking some photos from the famous view of the town from the end of the pier, I heard the deep, echoing boom of fireworks and heading back up the road towards the pizzeria I came across the brass band and the children again, now with a statue of the Madonna held aloft.

I had accidently stumbled into one of those Italian feast days, where they take a local venerated statue out for a parade round town.

I followed the procession up the main street, which happened to be going the same way I was. Now and then they would stop, gingerly put down the Madonna, and a different group of folk would have the honour of  taking her part of the way.

Conveniently we went right past the Pizzeria al Mulino where I dined and watched the subsequent pyrotechnic display in honour of the statue. After the fireworks had stopped, nature stepped in with her own. A thunderstorm hit us with torrential rain. Even with my raincoat I was drenched by the time I got back down the road to my hotel, the streets of Amalfi now swept clean of visitors who, mostly wearing summer clothes had been ill prepared for the deluge. From my balcony I watched folk run past with bits of disintegrating cardboard boxes held over their heads.

Number 3. Bar Della Valle. Amalfi

In the morning it was still raining and I thought I’d have a look inside the Duomo, but almost as soon as I arrived the organ struck up, the two main doors were flung open and, propelled at a great rate of speed, in came a coffin followed by mourners who were no doubt none too happy to be just another subject for tourists to gawp at. I quickly fled.

A friend of mine, Himradi, had commented on one of my Facebook pictures posted the night before that Ibsen had written A Doll’s House in Amalfi. A quick online search told me Wagner had been here too, but he seems to have got everywhere in Italy.

Atrani, Torre del Ziro on the left and the Terrace of Infinity on the right

I took the walk into Atrani (the neighbouring village) as described in my Sunflower guidebook. This was really worth it’s weight in gold on this trip, urging me up the unpromising looking alley ways which burrow right through the town like a warren, avoiding the dreaded coast road. Tiny Atrani is a very sleepy, slightly sad place, compared to it’s brasher, more famous neighbour.

Piazza Urbino I

Atrani Madonna

On the way back I took a detour up to the Amalfi cemetery only to find it was shut. I sat outside and enjoyed the views and read a bit of Exit West, the novel by Mohsin Hamid, until the rain came on strong again, driving me back into the cathedral for a second visit, paying my three Euro entry fee this time.

Cemetery view

Some interesting stuff in there (no sculpture by Michelangelo though, as Spike Milligan claimed in his book) including a fresco fragment of a beautiful Madonna which was very Giottoesque.

There was also a cute life sized, wax figure group, very southern Italian, of Tobias and the Fish, with the dog looking very mischievous and the fish very pissed off. Under this was what can only be described as a brutally murdered woman (or possibly a man?) dressed in fine robes and fish scaled armor, her throat cut and a ghastly expression on her face. Not sure what that was all about, some saintly sacrifice I guess.

Rain had fallen in pulses all day, but despite this I decided to hike up to Ravello after all, so off I went back to Atrani for the start of the climb. The way was often rather dull as the staircases were hemmed in by high walls on each side, with a sudden exciting VIEW exploding open here and there. At one point the path crosses the main road, and just after this begins the real killer part of the ramble, up a seemingly endless, narrow set of steep stone steps, walled in and kinked, so you can’t see how much further you have to go. When finally it does level out, there are views of the Terrace of Infinity towering above (with little figures moving about it) and a stunning prospect of Pontone, that day swathed in great ripped sheets of fast moving mist. I hadn’t passed a single person on the entire way up.

Pontone

Ravello was as mobbed as Amalfi, even in the rain but entering the gardens of the Villa Cimbrone I quickly started to experience the sort of peace I had hoped to find there and I peeped over the hedge at the bits only guests staying at the Villa (now a Hotel) could enjoy, complete with swimming pool. I had toyed with the idea of splashing out for a night at the hotel but it would have been a shame to go to such a romantic place alone.*

A peep over the hedge

Wandering through the public gardens I spotted a reproduction of Donatello’s cocky David, then the very English rose garden. Il Terrazzo dell’lnfinito. (The Terrace of Infinity), when I first set foot on it, I don’t mind admitting, almost had me in tears, such is it’s power. A staggering place initially – but on closer inspection oddly sweet. The marble busts adorning the balustrade with it’s alarming vertical drop are all slightly comic, one with an impossibly long, mannerist, Parmigianino like neck, others with daffy grins.

I’d wanted to visit this belvedere for years, though when seen on the telly the light is always that perfect blazing summer azure, which I didn’t have, and there are no crowds of annoying selfie takers and mobile phone jabberers. I was amazed by how sound travelled through out my time on the Amalfi coast, no where more so than this Terrace. I could hear birds singing in the woods all around me, even the sound of waves on the seashore way, way below. As usual a dog was barking, or in this case yelping and in someone’s garden a cock was crowing, late in the afternoon. I had meant to stay on longer but the rain returned insistently and I had just a quick look at the rest of the giardini. The Temple of Bacchus, where Ernest William Beckett is buried, the Englishman who laid out the gardens last century, is in dire need of restoration and the white marble Eva in her grotto looks very forlorn in her Perspex box, like a half awake Sleeping Beauty surprised to find all her clothes have been nicked.

Il terrazzo dell’lnfinito

The walk back down was uneventful and arriving back at Atrani the Magdalene church was open as I passed, the amplified sound of a mass in progress coming from the open door so I had a quick keek inside. Dressed in striking emerald green robes, an elderly priest sermonized to a tiny handful of congregants, all of them very ancient looking and so closely clustered round him you would have thought the microphone superfluous.

At the Magdalene church

Pizza in the Resorante Pizzeria San Andrea (the very same place where Spike Milligan enjoyed his wartime egg and chips, in fact I had been following in his army boot steps much of that day)  left me felling pretty stuffed. The bottle of red from Ravello was also very rich. Earlier I had enjoyed immensely Negroni number three at the Bar Della Valle in the way you only can after hiking 1200 feet up and back down again. This Bar is just far enough up the ravine that the tourist watermark doesn’t quite wash up here and I was surrounded only by locals and their bambini as the swallows made their last hunting trips of the day. After dinner I returned to the famous view at the end of the little pier where I was all alone with the whole coast lit up at night, reflected lamps twinkling in the water and it could have been the Negroni or the wine, but I had a sudden feeling of the terror of the sublime, with this massive panorama of cliffs, rocks, mountains, all outlined by tiny, distant lights, collapsing on top of me and into the Tyrrhenian Sea like one of John Martin’s lurid painted upheavals, or a sensational Achille Beltrame illustration of disaster for La Domenica Del Corriere.

Number 4. Bar Gran Caffè. Amalfi

Vallone di Praia

Next day I was at the Grotto of Santa Barbara. The vast curves of the rock formed eerie sound mirrors, causing the ample birdsong in the Vallone di Praia to distort in an extraordinary and ethereal manner. Far below me was the bluest sea, and off somewhere to my right clanked goat bells, I was surrounded by innumerable butterflies and blue flowers I couldn’t name, and oceans of mist boiled up from the hills. I had nipped down here to avoid starting the Path of the Gods at the same time as the two bus loads of folk who arrived at Bomerano at the same time I did. It had been a wild journey there on the 10.15 bus from Amalfi, which drove off at 10.05 only to stop, reverse, and a different driver to get on who bore a remarkable resemblance to the litigious actor Frank Sivero (Goodfellas and The Godfather Part II).

After driving a short way out of town he turned the air con off in the packed vehicle. Thankfully after about five minutes of suffering one of the few locals on board had a word with him and back on came the fresh air. I can only describe his driving style as “a wild charge” up the road, no quarter given as he forced others to stop and back up to let us past, with much gesticulating out of the window and muttering to himself, and at one point, theatrically getting off the bus to see what was causing a jam up ahead. Soon we were at a great height, taking crazy bends with vertiginous drops at speed which caused an American girl sitting behind me to exclaim at one point, “Oh my!”.

Path begins

Il Setiero degli Dei, which I began at noon, lives up to its name, it is an epic walk taking in a variety of landscapes, each surpassing the other as you hike from east to west, constantly surprising and never less than stunning with sea, cliffs, mountains and maquis.

At times it was slightly scary just how exposed and high up the path was and I noted how misleading many of the descriptions are of how easy a walk it is.

A long way down to Priano

For most of the way yes, the route is pretty much level, well paved and undemanding. Get past the picnic table and the cave full of flies and stinking of goat’s piss however, with it’s unforgettable views of Positano to the west and Priano to the east, and there is a fair bit of scrambling up, round, and over rock outcrops just before the pretty little village of Nocelle appears above the woods, and I wondered just how the rather frail elderly lady with a walking stick I passed would manage that bit, even with the two blokes and their entourage helping her along. Also near the picnic table I noticed a large group of Italian girls dressed in sports gear who turned out to be shooting pictures for the Instagram group Pathofgods, their climbing ropes ‘n cleats all just props.

At the start of the walk I was concerned that the mist, which at one point blotted out everything beyond a couple of feet in front of me, would ruin the trek, but it proved fleeting and this Leonardoesque haze added to the mood and dynamic of the views my eyes greedily wolfed down, just the two of them feeling insufficient for that day.

I managed to witness again that impossible to describe intense blue only Italy seems capable of providing, a real, deep need inside of me fulfilled, a treasured azure day, and warm as well, not too scorchio.

Positano in sight

So many butterflies and in the distance it was clear enough to discern the famous three I faraglioni rocks and the Capri coast. When I reached little Nocelle I celebrated with a late lunch in the cafe right by the Path’s end/beginning, which I reached at 3.30pm, before heading down the very long flight of steps to Positano (once the village’s only link to the town) to get the ferry back to Amalfi.

Nocelle appears above the woods

Nocelle transport

Top of the steps going down to Positano. Ignore all other sign posts!

I would be staying in Positano for the following couple of nights in my own apartment and was rather dismayed by my first experience of the town. Following my day in the quiet hills it was sheer tourist hell on Earth, it’s one narrow lane to the ferry pier utterly mobbed and I was forced to shuffle along at a painful pace, as horrendous as Oxford Street in London on a Saturday afternoon. There was an unseemly scramble to get on the ferry when it arrived, with largely English culprits desperately pushing their way on as though it was the last chopper out of Saigon before the VC arrived, only to discover when it left, it was so big it felt almost empty on board.

Arriving back at Amalfi

Negroni number four, and in my notebook I have added a little arrow above my description with “Best one yet!” in the marginalia. I was outside the Bar Gran Caffè, with pretty tiles illustrating scenes from Amalif history on its wall, just slightly up the road from where I enjoyed Negroni number two. Lunch in Nocelle and the Gran Caffè aperitevo food left me without much of an appetite so I spent my last night with a bottle of chilled prosecco enjoying one of the best views in town, the one from my own hotel balcony. Below me in the Piazza the fountain with it’s statue of St Andrew clutching his Scottish cross, gurgled away.

The day before I saw a gold reliquary for his supposed bones in the Duomo which recalled the stern faced, violent, bearded puppets in Jan Svankmajer’s films, and there are alleged bits of his other bones there, loot from the infamous Fourth Crusade which left Constantinople ruined and resulted in one of my favourite little sculpture groups, The Tetrarchs, being stuck on a corner wall of San Marco’s in Venezia in all their Imperial purple glory, clutching each other like rather frightened little boys playing soldiers.

St Andrew

From my perch I watched the night go by, content I had done all the planned walks and more, so far so good, with just a little sun burn on my legs and knees doing great for now.

Presepe

Last evening in Amalfi

Next morning I  walked up to the cemetery, a bastard of a climb and how the elderly folk manage it I don’t know. None the less, it was bustling with them, tending the last resting place of their loved ones. I found no interesting sculpture there, just a few Bas-reliefs, all near identical,  a head of Christ, a Pieta, an angel praying etc.

Most have just inscriptions though, and I don’t know if this is a Mezzogiorno thing, but all of them were adorned with photographs of the dead, something I always find rather creepy. Many are of frail pensioners shrunk into their too big, best clothes, staring out at us from eternity with expressions of slightly alarmed bewilderment, as though at the moment it was taken a relative stood by the photographer’s shoulder had yelled at them “We’ll put this one on your gravestone!”

Number 5. Buca di Bacco Bar. Positano

A rest day really. Ferry from Amalfi to Positano. It had to be said that my apartment was a bit of a pain in the arse to get to, though the stretch of main road I had to walk up wasn’t as hairy as it looked on Streetview. From the little ornate table in my courtyard I could see a ribbon of blue sea and up to my right, high bluffs towered overhead. Having my own place meant I didn’t have to drag myself out of bed early for a hotel breakfast.

Spent a lazy afternoon around the beach area just people watching and reading Exit West, not a cosy choice to have taken on holiday, with it’s sci-fi notion of travel portals opening up in war torn African and Asian lands through which thousands of refugees escape into Europe and North America seeking safety, shelter and stability. This Exodus in the real world has torn Italy apart politically in the last few years, 2018 especially (never mind the UK and the Brixit calamity).

The beach at Positano

The weather had turned glorious and I almost dozed off at one point in the sun. Negroni number five was at the Buca di Bacco Bar and was a rather indifferent affair, but for the first time served with succulent green olives, my favourite accompaniment. Despite being a Friday Positano seemed no where near as packed as it had been the previous evening, with no anxious English mobs waiting on the pier.

I did my laundry then ate dinner at my apartment, just some snacks, with an ice cold bottle of prosecco. It was odd looking up and seeing the outlines of cliffs black against the sky, my first starry night of the trip, with the lines of little street lights marching up and up to meet the vastly distant suns at confusing angles. As dusk fell a pair of bats began to flutter up and down the lane. I finished Exit West, which didn’t do that much for me, I’m afraid. A passage from it struck me personally near the end though: “It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible, desirable future for oneself.” Something which I feel nearly every single day. Even on that holiday in Italy. Even earlier that very same day I’m writing about here. But not right at that moment, not on that evening with the bats, the stars, the cliffs, the warm air and the wine.

Number 6. Wine-Dark House. Positano

Positano morning

I awoke at the ungodly hour of 10am, when any respectable hotel would have stopped serving breakfast by now. I ate in my little courtyard. Had coffee, fruit juice and toast with jam, which I soon got on my fingers (is it possible to have jam ever, without it ending up on your fingers?). The sun was blazing, promising an azure day and the hills were beckoning.

My little courtyard

The walk up to the village of Monte Peruso wasn’t too bad. I took it easy and stopped often in the shade. The guide book had it as “strenuous”, but for me the hardest part was finding the start of the bloody thing because it said it began by the bus stop called “Cimitero”, which it no longer is. Turned out is was the stop almost right beside my apartment. On instinct I walked up the cobbled road at the top of which I found a sign pointing to “Cimitero” and I was soon climbing uphill.

Cimitero

From Monte Peruso I decided to take the detour up to Il Buco (The Hole). As I topped a hill in the woods I suddenly saw a deer standing in a clearing. I froze, thought I saw it move then snapped a picture before realising it was made of plastic. Somebody’s joke, though it must have been a bit of a pain dragging the dummy creature up there.

Oh deer

When I got to Il Buco it had been colonised by hippie Italian rock climbers, all dreds, tattoos and tans. Being Italian they were all eating and talking volubly about food so I didn’t hang about for long.

The Hole

I next hiked up to Caserma Forestale. Again the hardest part was finding the beginning of the trail which the Sunflower book rather vaguely stated was some steps 800 meters up the road and across from a lay-by, which meant it could have been one of three different paths, none of them at all promising looking. I took the one a few minutes walk past a large restaurant (a major landmark the book could have mentioned).

Looking back at Il Buco

It was almost instantly very tough going, at first through a dense, scrubby wood, then up tall, rocky steps with next to no shade. I wrote in my notebook while I took a rest “Very strenuous going in this heat. If I’m on the wrong road, my bones and this journal will tell the tale.” I think I took the wrong path after all as it eventually met a set of steps coming uphill to my left and the going became easier if still ascending all the way. Huge mountain peaks now towered above me, and off to the east I could see Nocelle again.

Monte San Michele

Countless butterflies and wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous lizards surrounded me, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many bees anywhere, and every time I stopped all I could hear was the buzzing of countless flies. I wondered what on Earth they were living on up here?

I didn’t see a single other soul until I neared the little stone refuge building of Caserma Forestale, where I spotted an elderly man heading off in the opposite direction.

Caserma Forestale

I took the easy path up to I Trasiti mentioned in the Sunflower guidebook, going as far as the spot where a big land slide cut the path off three years ago.

A grassy medow covered in thousands of yellow flowers sloped off into a deep canyon with blissful views and I stopped and rested a while. I could have been in the Alps but for the nearby sea. On the way back I drank in the dramatic view west, a commanding vista of the whole spine of the coast all the way to Capri. In the heat haze I could just make out I faraglioni again, and the Sirenuse Islands, once the private home of Rudolf Nureyev. Unfortunately a forest fire had left much of this part of the mountainside scorched and scarred with cremated, anthracite coloured trees.

From Caserma Forestale I took the trail to Santa Maria del Castello. It was an easy enough route, a truly beautiful way to end the day but there was one section where the path became narrow and skirted a truly awesome and quite terrifying drop. I was much relived when I cleared it, and the sun was sitting low in the sky as I approached the tiny town of Santa Maria to be welcomed by it’s lazily barking dogs.

Path to Santa Maria del Castello

Santa Maria del Castello

High above Positano

Monte San Michele

I halted at a bar, Ristoranti Zi Peppe for a cold bottle of water and even colder bottle of beer and watched the sun sink behind the fields ahead before catching up with it again on the other side of the hill, and the steep path winding back into Positano far below. The colours in the changing light as the sun went down were some of the most spectacular reds, oranges and purples I have ever seen, and none of which I caught on camera.

It was dusk when I arrived back into town at a spot just above the International Bar, and dark by the time I had showered and made it into the tiny centre of Positano again.

Via Chiesa Nuova

I had been out from noon until 8pm when I sat down in the Wine-Dark House, a bar and restaurant in a tiny square by the church steps. My Negroni here was heavy on the Vermouth, with just a little bowl of nibbles to go with it, pretzels and the like. The place had an odd set up. It was very busy but the main bar guy vanished after I sat at the counter and got my drink, while dishes of food plied up around me, all brought in by one other bloke. A gang of lumpy looking vittelini hung about the counter, getting in the way, pushing and shoving each other, being shouty and aggressive and one of them had a persistent hacking cough and sounded as though he was dying of consumption. Now and then one of them would be compelled to help carry something as though they sort of worked there, but didn’t. They seemed to know everybody who walked past but were just really annoying and ruined the atmosphere.

I ended the Saturday night at the packed Le Tre Sorelle where I had a perfect pizza, watching the staff work the tables who were doing a fantastic job. It had a really great vibe and I was surrounded by some stunning looking women at adjacent tables. I barely remember staggering back up the road.

Number 7. Bar Frattina. Roma

Leaving town

That night I had a dream set in Coronation Street where Rosie Webster had a dog called “Campy”, which segued into action set in one of those South American hellhole plantations from the likes of a Conrad or B. Traven story. Waking up in the real world I regretfully left my little apartment and headed up hill to catch the bus for the first part of my long journey to Roma, abandoning my now very stinky hiking boots in a bin.

Arriving at what Joseph Heller called the “citiest of cities” in Catch 22. I had a bit of a job making my way to my hotel. The final stage of the Giro D’Italia was happening there that evening and many of the streets were fenced off and already packed with spectators looking for the best spots, turning a relatively strait forward walk into a horrendous  assault course, and I was sweating like a pig by the time I got to my alberogo, my phone dead and the poor chap in reception was closing up for the night to go and watch the cycling.

Balcony view

Walking into my room though all the travel tension of the day fled. I had fabulous views of the Eternal City from my balcony, a superb spot on the Via Del Corso and right across the road from me was the spectacular dome of the basilica church of Sant’Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso, the building which dominates the Roman skyline when seen from the Pincian Hill.

The pelaton arrives at Via del Corso

I spent a couple of hours relaxing and watching the race, a bunch of indistinguishable harlequins on bikes whizzing past beneath me.

After it was done I walked up to the Giardini Borghese, my favourite place to be at sunset in that city, and watched the colours gather, warm then fade. The Pincian Hill was also a favourite walking spot of the Welsh sculptor, John Gibson, pupil of Canova and creator of some of the most sensuous nude figures ever carved by someone from frigid Britain. His studio was once at the foot of the Pincian on Via Della Fontanella.

Negroni number seven was the most expensive of the trip. I was sat outside Bar Frattina and suddenly realised I was on the street where James Joyce once lived for part of his unhappy sojourn in Roma in 1906, working as a bank clerk. In fact I could just see from my table the very building, number 52 Via Frattina, where his family lodged. The city did not agree with him, though as Richard Ellmenn observed in his classic biography of the Dubliner, “to be dissatisfied by Rome is a grander destiny than to be dissatisfied by Trieste.” the town where Joyce had lived previously. James claimed “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grand-mother’s corpse.” He fled the place  early the following year having written almost nothing and spent a lot of cash on lessons in Norwegian, of all things (he was a huge fan of that Amalfi tourist, Ibsen), and drinking at the Antico Caffè Greco (Ibsen aslo hung out here, as had Byron, Keats,Wagner, Goethe and all the usual).

James Joyce’s old gaff

Another Irish writer had been here before him. On the adjacent street the young Oscar Wilde had stayed briefly during his first visit to the city, at the very grand Hotel d’Inghliterra, on the corner of Via Borgognona and Via Bocca di Leone.

Last night, I had another Monica Bellucci dream.
She said she needed to talk to me.
When we met at the cafe, Cooper was there, but I couldn’t see his face.
Monica was very pleasant; she had brought friends. We all had a coffee.
And then she said the ancient phrase:
“We’re like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream.”

I spent the rest of a lovely evening sitting on my balcony enjoying the views with some snacky food and a bottle of red wine, knowing I had to be up very early next morning for the “Pristine Sistine” tour, which I was expecting to be far more relaxed than my previous experience visiting the Vatican Museums many years earlier. Across the road from me was a giant billboard advertising skin cream, with a massive photo of Monica Bellucci on it, which reminded me of David Lynch’s recurring “Monica Bellucci dream” in season three of Twin Peaks. From Campy to Gordon Cole in a day.

Number 8. Mastro Fidelio. Roma

Ancient Roman sarcophagus

The Pristine Sistine tour turned out to be a con. It is sold as though, for an extra price, there will be just you and some dozen or so others on a guided tour through the Sistine Chapel early in the morning before the crowds are let in. What is doesn’t tell you is that you will be just one of hundreds of other tours no doubt sold on the same premis, all rammed in at once. So by the time we waited on line with thousands of others we made it inside just a few minutes before the rest of the public were admitted so the tiny city state was quickly swamped and the whole thing became rather unendurable, I’m afraid, and at times there were so many people crammed down narrow corridors it felt quite frankly frightning and unsafe. There seems to be no limit on the numbers the Vatican allows in, such is their greed I suppose? Some day there will be a kind of Hillsborough-like crush disaster, I’m sure of it, with a high death toll. Much better if they adopted a policy of only allowing a certain number in per day on a timed ticket basis, as blockbuster art exhibitions now routinely do.

Fontana della Pigna

Ancient Roman girl with bird

Head of David? Ancient Roman head excavated by Michelangelo

Bust of Pertinax

Satyricon

Anyway, the City State was fucking mobbed, but out tour guide, Maria Theresa from Pompeii was very good, full of interesting and illuminating things to say, even about Raphael’s School of Athens, a fresco I though I already knew all the ins and outs of, and at the end of her talk on it she even pointed out the Stars of David on the floor of the room it was painted in which I’d otherwise have missed. She illustrated too just how much Michelangelo’s Last Judgement has suffered and been painted over, beyond the loin cloths which I already knew about, including the original St Catherine in which she was depicted being taken from behind while she bent over her wheel! She described the Last Judgment as a “picture of love”. I caught my last look at the room as we struggled and were shoved through the exit with scores of others and I wondered if it was ever worth coming back to see these pictures of love again in my life in such strained and undignified circumstances.

Judith, in Sant’Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso

Having been up since about 5 in the morning I grabbed a gelatto which I ate on the Spanish Steps, seemingly the only place in this part of the city where you can sit down, hence their otherwise bewildering popularity, then slept for a bit before heading for the Capuchin Crypt. Not a patch on the vast one in Palermo, of course, but worth seeing, none the less. They have a Caravaggio there too of St Francis I’d seen just before Christmas in the big exhibition in Milano and not paid it much heed, it is after all a rather minor work. But here, all on it’s own I could give it much more attention, this shabby man in prayer, as Caravaggio himself probably was at this time as he executed it soon after he had to flee Roma with a price on his head, following his slaying of Ranuccio Tomassoni.

Arrividerci Roma

I decided to eat at Da Gigetto, my favourite restaurant in town, which turned out to be a terrible  idea since it is shut on Monday’s. My fault, I should have checked first. I had Negroni number eight outside a little place in Trastevere called Mastro Fidelio. It was very nice but came with the most Spartan aperitivo so far, a tiny plate with a few crisps. Afterwards I dined outdoors at a touristy joint on Via Santa Croce since I was starving by the time I had walked back up the river. Oysters, cannelloni and the most delicious blood orange and hazelnut ice cream, and odd mix, I know. Various street entertainers performed as I ate which usually bugs the hell out of me, but that night they were almost all really good, especially a Neapolitan woman who performed a version of Valerie as a slow, movingly performed ballad, and I thought of that poor girl Amy Winehouse lying dead across her bed aged just 27 in her huge house in Camden Square in London. ** Back at my hotel I was in a horribly depressed and lonely state, and had been so since visiting the crypt. Got very drunk sitting on my balcony and pondered just dropping over the side.

Number 9. Cape Town Bar. Milano

Jumped on my last train of the trip, headed for Milano. Spent a very civilised journey whizzing through some lovely scenery, reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Abducting A General. I was staying at Benedetta’s as usual, and it’s always very tranquil there, despite the racket of the traffic outside. Large clouds of screechy swifts perform acrobatic manoeuvres round her building in spring and summer. I met her at her studio when I arrived and on the walk back to her apartment we had ice cream from Mr Gello, arguably the best ice cream makers in Milano, and I bought some clothes from OVS and I tried to shake off the terrible feelings from the night before.

Naviglio Grande, Milano

She was out with her daughter Anita in the evening so I headed to the Cape Town Bar for Negroni number nine, which was merely alright, nothing special, then cooked a perfect pasta dinner for myself. For once I had come to the city with absolutely no plans, just a relaxing end to my spring journey. I finished the main bit of Paddy’s book, with he and Stanley Moss standing bare footed on a British destroyer off the coast of Crete and I determined to go there myself later in the year, though it was something that never happened. When Benedetta got back we sat up and watched hilariously bad TV.

Number 10. Manhattan Navigli. Milano

Naviglio Pavese

Too much ice means that as it melts, it dilutes the sensational flavour of the Negroni, and sadly this was the case at Manhattan Navigli. The city was heaving, even early in the evening and I chose that bar simply because there was a free seat, and of course a nice view of the canal. Service was great though, and the aperativo food delicious (unlike at the famous Cape Town the night before, where I got fuck all).

We had enjoyed a nice, relaxed and fun day out at the Fondazione Prada, which I’d never been to before or even heard of, Benedetta having allowed herself some time off work.

Benedetta in Carsten Höller’s, Upside Down Mushroom Room

The Gold House

More Damien Hirst death stuff

Self portrait in a Jeff Koons sculpture

There were big pieces by the likes of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons and amazing views over the city. It is a great collection of buildings, including a comfy cinema and 1950’s style bar designed by Wes Anderson. The main display was a bewilderingly massive collection of Italian art from the fascist era up until 1944, and closed, as things so often tend to do in Europe, with images of the piled up corpses of thousands of murdered Jews.

Number 11. Cucchi. Milano

Spotted this piece by Alice Pasquini on Via Tortona

 My last full day in Italy, and I had a nice lunch with Benedetta, snacking on food from  Macelleria Faravelli on Corso Italia. After that I headed out to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition on Via Tortona, but the line was too daunting to stand in the sun for (it was the final day of the show), and instead went to the Galleria to see the Fondazione Prada exhibition space up on the roof there.

The merry bar guys

In the evening we went to Cucchi for a drink, and Negroni number eleven, the last of the adventure, turned out to be the best. I’d been here once before with Benedetta, when she still had her old studio nearby. It’s pretty much unchanged from the 1930’s, lots of character and the most incredible aromas of baking cakes and bread wafting from the doors. We were also brought a superb selection of aperitivo too, with huge, juicy green olives. A friend of Benedetta’s who happened to be passing joined us, and after our drinks we all went to a private view at a nearby gallery/theatre, which was in a converted church, with work on show designed by architects and constructed by blacksmiths. There was free prosecco served by a trio of very merry bar guys and chunks of the most delicious Parmigiano Reggianno  As usual, when we go to these events, I ended up standing outside with Lola, her dog, while she caught up with old pals.

Following that we had a light but delicious dinner at Ristorante Sant ‘Eustorgio, a place neither of us had been to for a couple of years but was once a favourite spot for both of us. It was a beautiful night and we were lucky enough to arrive just in time to get a coveted table outside. We ended the night with a couple of beers (at least I did) while we watched the same terrible TV show we had been watching previously. Next day I was loath to leave Italy and even accidently left all the new clothes behind I had bought, though it doesn’t require a Freud to interpret this as an excuse to go back again for another sunset Negroni. Saluti!

At Cucchi, Milano.

* At the time I wasn’t aware that large chunks of the film, Beat the Devil, had been shot in Ravello, including a scene on Il terrazzo dell’lnfinito, it had been years since I last saw it, an utter mess of a picture. With Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Jennifer Jones and Bernard Lee acting, and John Huston, Oswald Morris, Freddie Francis, Jack Clayton and Truman Capote behind the camera, it proves that it takes more than all the talent in the world to make a half decent movie.

** In 2019 returning to Roma, I spotted this singer again, this time with a larger audience on the more commanding location outside Carlo al Corso itself. Her superb version of Back To Black stayed with me all evening. In 2020 under lockdown, I discovered that she is Luiza Constantin, and has become something of a regular on TV talent shows.

 

Boschland

Or Happy Days In Holland

It was in October 2015 that I first read the news. “Dutch museum achieves the impossible with new Hieronymus Bosch show” screamed The Guardian headline which went on to explain –

“Seven years ago, the director of a small museum in the Netherlands set out on an impossible quest: he wanted to borrow every surviving work in the world by the wildest imagination in the history of art, Hieronymus Bosch, to celebrate his 500th anniversary in the city of his birth. He did not have a single painting to offer on loan in return. In an exhibition opening next February, Charles de Mooij will unveil his haul at his Noordbrabants museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch.

He has secured 20 of the 25 surviving panels, including several reunited triptychs and the panels, that were scattered centuries ago, made for an altar still in the town, and 19 of the 25 drawings – a collection he believes will never be assembled again.”

Of course I knew I would have to make the trip to this little Dutch town with an impossible name to pronounce, ’s-Hertogenbosch, to see it (and how many towns are there who’s names begin with the  ‘  character?) and six months later I found myself in the place I had never expected to visit, but had known something of for years through photographs in my copy of Walter S. Gibson’s little black Thames and Hudson book, Hieronymus Bosch.

’s-Hertogenbosch

Crossing the Dommel River just outside the railway station I noticed the first of a group of large sculpture reproductions of character’s from the painter’s work dotting ’s-Hertogenbosch, making it all feel rather suitably strange as I wandered about this Boschland theme park. All it lacked was a parade of costumed demons marching up and down Main Street every hour, the jaggy things in armour harrying their human prey, eating them, pooping them back out, reflecting their faces on their arses or letting them fall through a frozen pond (Hell it seems has frozen over, or at least a bit of it).

The Prince of Hell

I had been aware of Bosch’s work since I was a child when, probably in Look and Learn magazine, I saw a reproduction of a detail from the Hell panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights and was instantly fascinated, lost in the devilish details of the action packed scene. While I didn’t necessarily know his name I could instantly spot his paintings. Years later I learned that his visions were the result of a complex series of Catholic, Christian allegories, often based on puns and saying in the Dutch language. It was something of a disappointment to discover that the pictures were not born from schizophrenic madness or that he wasn’t tripping off his face on some medieval hallucinogen. In other words “don’t eat cherries with great lords – they’ll throw the pits in your face.”

“Pure nonsense”, Patrick Leigh Fermor in a sober moment reminds us, “is as rare among the arts as an equatorial snowdrop.” and goes on to write “The wild scenes that run riot in wall-paintings, capitals and stained glass are lunacy only to the uninitiated…Familiar broodings hatched out the eggshells of Bosch, identifiable furnaces stocked his rocketing and backfiring journeys and lit up the apocalyptic scenes; and the same impulses, reinforced by Spanish tyranny and the spectacles of folly, unloosed the skeleton onslaughts of Breugel; all his allegories and proverbs and parables, even the teeming amphibian chaos, have their explanations.” (The Art of Nonsense)

It is, however, impossible to look at these paintings, half a millennium old now, and take away a mere admonition, the wagging, moralising “no no no” finger of some priggish priest or monk. They overflow with too much life, sex and extraordinary deaths for that. We are compelled to stare, to take it all in, be perturbed and puzzled like Arthur Bishop, the hitman played by Charles Bronson in Michael Winner’s 1972 film, The Mechanic who has a fine reproduction of the Garden on his hitman walls. Being Bronson though (at the time one of the world’s biggest movie stars) he never seems to see the humour in them. What’s with the “tree man”? And the way Adam touches the hem of the youthful God’s cloak with his tippy toes, and why is God clothed anyway when (almost) no one else is? Why is there a frozen pond in Hell? And you’ve got to love that unicorn kitty cat in the merry-go-round of beasts and revellers in the central panel. (expore the paintng HERE)

The Camelopard

Their scaly detail reveals not only Bosch’s study of human folly, but his remarkable scientific eye for the real creatures in his images. When he paints a butterfly it is not an  imagined insect but a real one, a specific species. As Nabokov tells us in his most lengthy book, the proto – steampunk novel Ada or Ardor, there is “a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel” of the Garden of Earthly Delights and that “actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect.”

St John’s Cathedral

Eve in the Garden

Bosch was a member of a guild which met in this building. In the lower left pane of the middle window there appears to be a bullet hole.

I kept seeing these ladies wearing red hats all over the place.

Inside St John’s Cathedral

I walked through the Prins Hendrikpark to and from my hotel each day.

I had chosen my hotel very badly (and probably very drunkly). It turned out to be some three miles outside of Boschland, across a busy motorway in an industrial estate on one of those edge-lands so beloved of the likes of Iain Sinclair and J.G. Ballard (I’ll refrain from using the word “liminal” which crops up with such tiresome frequency in these situations). As lorries thundered their way to and from Germany from my window I could see dozens of tiny white globe lights surrounding the building, like so many mini-rovers from the TV series, The Prisoner, waiting for one of the guests to make a break for it into town to see the giraffe, ready to pounce and smother (accompanied by an excited squeak rather than a roar, I would imagine).

Fletcher Hotel view

April 14th was the big day, and at 2pm, as stated on my ticket, I arrived at the Noordbrabants to see the show. On entering, one of the first things on display was the little panel of Death and the Miser. I has seen it the just the previous year in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC where it usually lives, and on that boiling  afternoon I had it all to myself. Now it was surrounded by a scrum of heads bobbing like kids watching a fight in a school playground, as was every other work in the exhibition.

The place was just too damned buggering bastard crowded. Like the Washington picture I had seen some of the other paintings before, the Last Judgement from Vienna, with the cute teeny  Jesus with a baby walker on the obverse, and the psychedelic London Christ Crowned With Thorns (not on loan for this show), usually in rather tranquil circumstances. Here, the only way to see the star attractions was to slowly worm your way into one of the mobs and through a kind of shuffling, politely aggressive perseverance get to the front to be able to finally look.

The sheer numbers meant I found it hard to take any of it in, though I was rather struck by the vision of a blind man in dark glasses and a white stick wandering among amid the hordes, like something out of one of the scenes on the walls. Although no one dared admit it, fantastic as it was to see The Haywain triptych here and all the rest, there was one guest conspicuous by it’s glaring absence. While they had a superb reproduction of one of it’s panel’s, the Garden of Earthly Delights couldn’t make it to this party, and I knew even before leaving the gallery that to finish the Boschland experience I would have to finally go to Madrid to see the damned thing and the other Prado treasures as I had been meaning to for years (cue Spanish guitar strum with a chatter of castanets music effect).

The last pictures I encountered just at the exit were a welcome sight though, and for some reason neglected by the mobs. Here were four superb panels depicting Terrestrial Paradise, the Ascent of the Blessed, The Fall of the Damned and Hell. I had been in their usual home in Venice the previous year, the Palazzo Grimani where the end of Don’t Look Now had been filmed. The pictures hadn’t been on display though, replaced by rather poor black and white photo reproductions. Now I finally gorged myself on them before heading back into the townscape Bosch would still have largely recognised but for the lack of flickering flames and ingenious, gleeful demons.

In ’s-Hertogenbosch

In Bruges

Next day I left Holland and travelled to Bruges in Belgium, leaving one canal packed place for another. I had decided to go there next because it is famously beautiful, for its proximity to ’s-Hertogenbosch, and because it was the home of Jan Van Eyck, a rather different artist to the one I had encountered the previous day. On the way there one of my three trains had passed through Ghent where Van Eyck’s great altarpiece lives (began by his brother Hubert), though it was and still is undergoing a long period of restoration so I didn’t get out for a peek.

Passing through Ghent

Almost as soon as I left the station I took a liking to Bruges. I spent the evening familiarising myself with it’s medieval streets, enjoyed a dinner of moules mariniere and retired to my hotel with a mini beer festival of Belgium brews to celebrate.

Beguinage

As if the art fest in ’s-Hertogenbosch hadn’t been enough I found myself thunderstruck when, next morning, I walked into a room in Groeningemuseum and saw for the first time Jan Van Eyck’s picture, The Madonna With Canon van der Paele. Painted some eighty years or so before Bosch’s The Haywain around 1434, it looks as if Van Eyck has just finished it and left the room such is it’s freshness, it’s staggering realism, it’s three dimensionality, it’s feeling of utter modernity. * And perhaps here lies the secret of the “tree man’s” powerful presence in Hell, his is the only figure in the triptych crowded with people that could be said to be a portrait of a singular individual rather than a generic gang of figures (many of them who also stare out at us) who are just so many “types” rather than individuals (and some historians have interpreted the “tree man” as a self portrait by Bosch). I kept expecting Van Eyck to nip back in again at any moment to add just one more minute brush stroke of glaze or colour (as though any more were needed).

Like Bosch’s work it presents an impossible vision which at first startles the viewer and then, through layer upon layer of detail and almost hidden incident, draws you in, a fascinating and glorious thing which reproductions can not do justice to, and coincidently, just a few days after returning from this trip up it popped in Nabokov’s novel Pnin which I read for the first time, and I laughed out loud at it’s sudden appearance in the form of the American college professor Laurence Clements, who is described thus while browsing an English-Russia pocket dictionary at a campus party (among the other books he notices is one titled Happy Days In Holland),

“Holding his glasses in one hand, he looked away, trying to recall something he had always wished to check but now could not remember, and his attitude accentuated his striking resemblance, somewhat en jeune, to Jan Van Eyck’s ample-jowled, fluff-haloed Canon van der Paele, seized by a fit of abstraction in the presence of the puzzled Virgin to whom a super, rigged up as St George, is directing the good Canon’s attention. Everything was there – the knotty temple, the sad musing gaze, the folds and furrows of facial flesh, the thin lips and even the wart on the left cheek.”

He later sees the picture reproduced in an album of Flemish Masterpieces and tells the other revellers “I have been looking for this picture and here it is. The publisher of my new book on the Philosophy of Gesture wants a portrait of me, and Joan and I knew we had seen a somewhat stunning likeness by an Old Master but could not even recall his period. Well, here it is, here it is. The only retouching needed would be an addition of a sport shirt and the deletion of the warrior’s hand.”
“I must really protest,” began Thomas.

Clements passed the open album to Margaret Thayer, and she burst out laughing.”

Pondering this scene again while writing this post I wondered what had given Vladimir the idea for such a playful passage? Elsewhere in the novel the London Arnolfini Wedding painting is alluded to and looking at the photo of the youthful Nabokov on the cover of my copy of Pnin, with his jug ears holding up his homburg hat, cleft chin and solemn, pasty face, did Nabokov see something of himself in the portrait of the Merchant? Was this an in-joke between Vera Nabokov and her sometimes college professor husband? In any event here was yet another masterpiece, Pnin was a real little hand grenade of emotion rolled into the soul, and funny too, parts of it will live with me as long as I have the powers of recollection.

Later in the same gallery I discovered the labyrinthine work of French engraver Erik Desmazières and as if all that wasn’t quite enough I finished this art odyssey (almost) with Michelangelo (no less) in the Church of Our Lady, because in here lives one of his masterpieces, a Madonna and Child I must admit I hadn’t been aware of until I spotted the posters depicting it all over town. The work had been purchased in Rome by the Flemish cloth merchants, the Mouscron brothers, and was admired by Albrecht Dürer who passed this way in 1521 and now it was my turn. And how strange to find this block of Italian sunshine in a rather severe, chilly and plain skyscraper like church in northern Europe (its spire is the second tallest brick one in the world), from which it has twice been stolen, by Bonaparte and Hitler’s armies. The infant Christ depicted here is one of those improbably large ones, like the almost comically huge baby Mary struggles to keep hold of in Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto which hangs in Sant’Agostino in Roma with the pilgrim’s filthy, minging feet right in the viewer’s eye line, one of Michelangelo Merisi’s favourite tricks.

Yet despite the size of the bambino there is somehow a feeling of solemnity and dignity surrounding the pair, a secret drama played out as the boy struggles to his feet to take his first baby steps and part from his protector while at the same time grasping his mother’s hand in a pose unprecedented in art history.

In Van Eyke’s painting the reading of a book is disturbed by the appearence of the Virgin. In Michelangelo’s sculpure, the Virgin is interrupted in her reading by her child wriggling away (a book lies on her lap). Buonarotti carved this around 1502, about the same time Bosch was paining the Garden of Earthly Delights, a fascinating contrast because while the Garden is a Renaissance era work, despite it’s innovative aerial perspective and attention to detail, in mood, philosophy and iconography it looks and feels part of the medieval world.

Also in the church are the tombs of Mary, duchess of Burgundy, and Charles the Bold (who found fictional asylum in a London suburb in the film, Passport to Pimlico).

Michelangelo made the Bruges Madonna and Child from flawless Carrara marble just after completing the Vatican Pieta (the two Mary’s seem to be portraits of the same unknown woman) and while the figures’ divinity can not be denied, these sculptures are more filled with the fragility and power of human emotion in what can only be described as in a “modern” way than any of the poor, tormented, yet oddly blank character’s in the Dutchman’s Hell created at almost exactly the same time.**

Marieke

Later, wandering round the town I passed another little piece of sculpture, this time in bronze of a Lolita like figure, twirling, flashing her panties and barely contained in a light summer dress. This is Marieke, apparently, a character from a Jacques Brel song in which Bruges gets a mention. The peculiar statue is by Jef Claerhout and is not far from the large monument celebrating Jan Van Eyck.

Aware that the first ever book in the English language had been printed in Bruges by William Caxton in 1473 I wondered if there was any sort of memorial set up to commemorate that event and I nipped into the grandly situated Tourist Information Centre in Markt 1 to ask. The young woman I ended up chatting to knew of this bit of local history but no, there no sort of sign or plaque, but she did show me online an image of the Bourse in Caxton’s time and she was able to point out roughly where his stall was located. After discussing Van Eyck and the Ghent Altarpiece together I went off to explore the Bourse feeling much the wiser.

The spot where Caxton’s stall once stood.

Markt

A bloody freezing night, and just after I took this some wanker reversed his car out of no where at full speed up the road and nearly ran me over.

Next day I took a train to get the Eurostar back to London. I knew the station in Brussels coincidently sat close to one of the major locations in the W. G. Sebald novel Austerlitz, and not long before reaching my destination I could see it for the first time, a monstrous looking, domed structure towering over the Belgium capital. About three weeks previously the city had been attacked by suicide bombers and there was a major presence of soldiers armed to the teeth in and around the Gare Du Midi.

I had expected Brussels to be a bland, boring and slightly creepy place, but heading out from the station I was instantly struck by its cosmopolitan, bustling, shabby chic atmosphere (at least in this part of town), and suddenly discovering in the huge Marche Aux Puces Des Marolles a Sunday flea market in full swing I wished I had more time here.

However I was headed up Gallows Hill where the never named Narrator, in a hallucinatory passage, again meets Jacques Austerlitz entirely by chance “on the steps of the Palace of Justice which, as he immediately told me, is the largest accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe. The building of this singular architectural monstrosity, on which Austerlitz was planning to write a study of at the time, began in the 1880’s at the urging of the bourgeoisie of Brussels, over-hastily and before the details of the grandiose scheme submitted by a certain Joseph Poelaert had been properly worked out, as a result of which, said Austerlitz, this huge pile of over seven hundred thousand cubic metres contains corridors and stairways leading no where and doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the innermost secret of all sanctioned authority. Austerlitz went on to tell me that he himself, looking for a labyrinth used in the initiation ceremonies of the freemasons, which he had heard was in either the basement or the attic storey of the palace, had wandered for hours through the mountain range of stone, through forests of columns, past colossal statues, upstairs and downstairs, and no one ever asked him what he wanted. During these wanderings, feeling tired or wishing to get his bearings from the sky, he had stopped at one of the windows set deep in the walls to look out over the leaden grey roofs of the palace, crammed together like pack ice, and down into the ravines and shaft-like interior courtyards never penetrated by any ray of light.”

Austerlitz goes on to tell him of people who had set up small businesses in “one or other of the empty rooms and remote corridors of that great warren.” Unfortunately it being a Sunday it was shut so I couldn’t see inside, but circling around the outside people were clearly using it’s countless nooks, crannies, doorways and ledges to sleep rough in. Niches were stuffed with blankets and pillows and cooking utensils and other signs of habitation.

By agreement perhaps they had also been using just one corner of the building to shit on, dotted as it was with human turds. In one of the office windows, although it was late April, a fully decorated Christmas tree was still on display, fairy lights flashing away in one of those abandoned rooms, switched on by somebody in December the previous year and then forgotten about.

What neither Austerlitz nor the Narrator mention are the tremendous views of the city to be had from here, and families with baby filled push chairs were out in the nice spring weather  to admire the landscape, backs turned to the hideous but remarkable structure on the hill and off in the distance I could spot the Atomium, arguably the most famous building in Brussels. Trying to get a good angle for a photo I walked down the Rue de la Régence to look back uphill at the Palace and was stopped in my tracks by a glimpse of a familiar white object in a small art gallery window. There, floating like one of Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, was a cloud made of chicken wire, as though a 2D mapped object on a printed page had come to life and sailed into our three dimensional Universe, it’s fluffyness negated by the industrial material from which it was crafted. I have one at home just like it, an original. This was however a mass produced reproduction of one of Benedetta Mori – Ubaldini’s works manufactured by Magis, who also make versions of her Birds and Fish. She didn’t have to chop gashes in her fingers to make these, as she usually does working with her hand made wire pieces. I hadn’t seen one on sale anywhere before and feeling like I had experienced my own version of accidently bumping into Jacques Austerlitz I gave Benedetta a call to tell her I had seen one of her Clouds (she is the designer of the Freaky Dog logo) and we chatted a bit before it was time for me to get the train back home.

A ghostly terminal in the Gare Du Midi, where, yet again, I felt like a lone character in a Sebald novel.

And then, last summer, to complete the Boschland experience I went to Madrid where, despite being almost first in line in the Prado queue that morning, when the imposing  building opened and I raced to the room where the Bosch works are kept, I found the Garden of Earthly Delights (a much bigger thing than you expect it to be) already surrounded by that same scrum of bobbing heads I experienced in the Noordbrabants, exacerbated this time by various tour guides all droning away to their punters. It has been in Spain since 1569 and the Garden, it seems, will always be a crowd pleaser. But, there were many other Bosch works all in this same room to be devoured including The Haywain (“Hello again.”), not so crowded this time, the lovely Adoration of the Magi (with it’s very Dutch windmill standing before the city of Jerusalem (centre panel) and watery ’s-Hertogenbosch liminal landscape (right panel) in the backgrounds), Table of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Extraction of the Stone of Madness.

I was in the Prado, one of the planet’s greatest collections of art, for nine hours, at one point suffering from such utter sensory overload I had to sit down and stare at the floor for half an hour in the middle of a room full of stunning Velasquez pictures before I could carry on. (“We haunted the Prado for every hour it stayed open.” wrote Patrick Leigh Fermor in a letter to Diana Cooper in 1975.) I kept returning to the Bosch room though where, around 6pm I had the Garden entirely to myself, probably committing some of the Seven Deadly Sins depicted on the table to my left as I gazed at it.

In the next room, sadly that other great icon of madness was missing. Bruegel’s Triumph of Death with it’s army of victorious skeletons was off for restoration too. This painting was the direct inspiration behind that more recent, 21st Century apolcalyptic art work packed with compelling, obsessive detail, the Chapman Brothers Hell, the original of which was destroyed by fire only to be resurrected as Fucking Hell (I have been fortunate to see both versions a few times).

Later that evening at sundown, after the Prado had shut, I was sitting outside a cafe on Plaza Mayor sipping sangria but still very much in Boschland as person dressed as Mini Mouse trudged wearily around the square handing out leaflets while near my table a man sat hunched under a cape with an animal skull (a sheep?) poking out the top while he tried to attract children’s attention with a swazzle. When tourists noticed him and  gave him money he clapped two hoofs together like a creature from the troubled mind of Goya. On this very same spot on June 30th, 1683, Charles II and his family watched a grand Auto-da-fé where prisoners from all over Spain were forced to appear in bizarre, symbolic costumes before a celebratory crowd, commanded by religious zealots, before they were hauled off to be burnt at the stake. There is a large canvas depicting the event  in the Prado, painted by Francisco Rizi, which when I looked at it much earlier that day  reminded me of the images of ritual public slaughter and the snuff movies being created by Isis at that very same moment in the Middle East for some future art historian to ponder. The world is filled still with that “teeming amphibian chaos” and savagery, a coin is tossed and the grotesque, animal skull headed Goya man claps his hooves in appreciation. Still, the sangria at sunset helped.

Plaza Mayor, Boschland

* I had a similar reaction in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid on seeing the Annunciation Diptych. It looks so staggeringly three dimensional, it’s sculptural mimicry so perfect I wanted to touch it. Madrid has three of the world’s great art galleries but I’m afraid the city itself did little for me, it sort of kept reminding me of a very sunny version of the English city of Birmingham.

** No paragone proposed here, I’m just sayin’.

Fat Purses and Skilled Chisels

Photo heavy post! This may take a bit to load on your browser. All pictures shot between 2012 and 2017.

Of all the great burial grounds of Italy, it is to Cimitero Monumentale in Milano that I have returned the most often since my first visit in April 2012. That I have still not seen all of it, such is its size, is one major draw. I know for certain that I have yet to clap eyes on the gleaming nude sculpture adoring the 1990 grave of Clelia dalla Sente, pictured in Sandra Berresford’s indispensable book, Italian Memorial Sculpture 1820 -1940: A Legacy of Love, and just three years ago I discovered a whole section in the southern corner I had never visited before, full of wonderful things.

This undated and unsigned work is inscribed simply “Stefani”.

This beautiful 1889 piece commemorates the Garassino family and is signed by Ivo Joli.

The grave of music publisher Domenico Vismarra (1887). The sympathetic portrait of old age was probably based on the deceased man’s mother. Carved by Primo Giudici.

This ethereal creature stands over the grave of Luigi (1937) and Teresa Della Torre (1947). I couldn’t find any signature.

This is the grave of Daniela Samuele, who at 17 years old was the Italian national butterfly swimming champion.

She was killed along with 46 others (including her coach and 6 other Italian swimmers) in the Lufthansa Flight 005 crash in 1966, at Bremen airport.

The Mariani family grave (detail).

The Mariani family grave (detail). There are a number of these extreme, expressionist revival sculpture groups in the Monumentale. This one was undated but probably had a mid 1950’s origin.

Another expressionist revival piece. Inscription lost under the ivy.

Corrado Luccardi, who died on Christmas Eve 1923, age 4. Her mother Olimpia was buried with her following her death 5 years later. The sculpture is signed G. Pero.

The frankly terrifying Guardian Angel of the Sepulchre standing over the grave of Fontana Roux was made in 1925 by Giannino Castiglioni.

This extremely curious tomb signed by V. Gasperetti was raised for the Ottino family.

It depicts on one side animal experimentation, with dispassionate figures operating on a dog while a basket full of rabbits awaits their fate.

The reverse shows people rock climbing, a couple sitting at a table under a tree, and the same  couple stripping off who also appear on the obverse. It’s one of the oddest and most unusual tombstones I’ve ever seen. The earliest date on the family plot is 1960.

Another moving child’s tomb. This one is for Fulvia Billi who died in 1934, age 5. The sculpture was commissioned later (unusually you would have thought) during WWII, and is signed Carlo Gadda, 1941.

When I first began to visit the cemetery it was surrounded by a huge construction redevelopment project you had to negotiate your way through walking up from Garibaldi FS. This was finally completed last year and now the Monumentale even has its own brand new Metro station. This Campo Santo boasts a palatial facade to announce you have arrived at a place of civic importance.

Designed by Carlo Maciachini, its wings embrace in the visitor while it’s cloisters act as eye-catching frames from some of the graveyard’s grandest (if conventional) sculpture groups.

Pogliani grave, 1928.

At the centre of its facade is the Famedio, with a stunning, vibrant domed hall like the inside of a jewel box commemorating the heroes of the Risorgimento, though few of them are actually interred here.

Alessandro Manzoni’s tomb.

Building began in 1863, with the first burials taking place three years later. Unlike Staglieno in Genova, which is like a peaceful haven or garden, its Milanese equivalent is surrounded by busy roads and a mainline railway, so the birds have to compete with incessant sirens, train hoots and blaring car horns. The northern city intrudes in a way its Ligurian counterpart never does.

Like Staglieno it has its seemingly endless arcades, top floor modern niches and a kind of “mine’s bigger than yours” mentality which makes these places so compulsive, or as one anonymous commentator wrote in 1900, made the Milanese Monumentale “an arena of rivalry between the fattest purses and the most skilled chisels”.

The Legacy of Love by Ernesto Bazzaro. Paolina Sioliand and Pasquale Crespi Mausoleum, 1908.

The Raising of Lazarus by Ernesto Bazzaro. Saquadrelli Mausoleum, 1911.

“The biggest stones” wrote W.G. Sebald, “are usually rolled over the graves of the richest people, for it is to be feared that they are the most likely to begrudge their progeny their inheritance, and try to take back what they have lost.” (Campo Santo.)

Francesco Bruni tomb, 1876. Angelo Colla (Architect) and Giulio Monteverde (sculpture).

Elsewhere, Sebald writes (in a cagey manner) that “In Milan” he had “some strange adventures fifteen years ago” (To the Brothel by way of Switzerland: On Kafka’s Travel Diaries), and I wonder if the Monumentale had been part of his perpetual pursuit of Doctor K?

Affection in Grief by Adolfo Wildt, Korner tomb, 1929.

Biagio Gabardi tomb.

Andrea Radice grave, Died 82 years old.

Anita Gilberti, just 19 years old, 1939.

Luigi Fossati, 1918.

Maria Passalia, Montagna.

“To the dear memory of Carolina Caimi.”

De Ambrogi family.

Sandro Bass, 1906.

Rossi grave.

Love this one from 1947, the grave of Maria Teresa who died aged 37. With her cheery wave she looks like a volunteer in a conjurer’s levitation trick, rather than somebody heading off “upstairs” as a resurrected soul.

Gueseppina Corbetta, 1905.

Giovanni Maccia tomb.

Like a piece of Wedgwood porcelain, this gorgeous thing adorns the grave of Annibale Zanoni who died in 1869. I assume it’s an allegorical figure, possibly of medicine? I found a letter on Ebay written in 1867 by an Annibale Zanoni who was a chemist in Milano (demanding payment from a debtor).

Giulio Petruzzelli (Giulietto!) 1969. Died aged 16.

Milano is a great industrial city, and the crafts and professions of metal workers, architects, engineers and sculptors combine to give the work on display here a different, far less dreamy, much less erotic feel than the Mediterranean garden to the south in Genova. Milano boasts the most grandiose collection of Liberty style (Stile Floreale in Italian) mausolea in the country, showcasing sometimes brilliant, sometimes bizarre collaborations between artists, artisans and patrons.

Pierd Houy family tomb, by Primo Giudici, 1901.

Maria and Luigi Battioli grave.

Geatano Dolcini memorial, designed by Romolo Del Bo, 1916.

Lydia and Amelia Amoretti grave, 1917.

This curious Arabian Nights fantasy commemorates Roberto Castelli whose portrait appears on the bronze magic carpet in the centre.

Titled “Christianity”, by Enrico Astorri, it was completed in 1904.

its only obvious Christian motif is the small crucifix held aloft by the incongruous,near nude  Bedouin boy, who may possibly be an unorthodox portrayal of John the Baptist?

The Last Kiss by Emilio Quadrelli, Volonte Vezzoli grave, 1889.

Marzorati and Medri tomb, circa 1905.

Dating from the same period were the Symbolists, who’s monuments appear near identical to the Stile Floreale, however Symbolism was fundamentally an idea, not a style. In a reaction to the crisis of faith following the age of revolutions and Darwin it aspired to say something significant about death now stripped of a sure and certain resurrection. The Liberty and Symbolist work was often titled and displayed in International competitions and exhibitions gaining fame and commissions for their makers.

Detail of The Last Kiss by Michele Vedani, Bonelli family tomb, 1907.

The monument to Isabella Airoldi Casati, The Dream Of Death, by Enrico Butti.

Engraving of Butti by the grave I found on the internet.

Isabella was 24 when she died in 1889. Butti’s bronze, symbolist monument was completed in 1891 and exhibited to great acclaim at the Brera Triennale.

Angel Born From a Rose Bush by Enrico Pancera. Famiglia Prada Corielli, 1920.

Obviously inspired by Butti’s Casati monument, 22 year old Zaira Brivio’s 1893 grave was designed by Alfredo Sassi. At the foot of the bed beneath the inscription I noticed a harrowing medallion photograph of Zaira on her death bed from which Sassi must have taken her portrait.

The Dream.

Symbolism’s greatest exponent was Leonardo Bistolfi, the “Poet of Death” and one of his greatest works is in the Monumentale, The Dream of 1900, adorning the grave of Erminia Caitari Vogt. The face of a beautiful woman and floral forms emerge from a cascade of near liquid, rippling stone. Bistolfi would be the most influential Italian sculptor until the rise of Fascism, when the Bistolfian school was seen as decadent, too soft for the Supermen.

A truly bizarre representation of Fascist art adorns the Umberto Fabe grave with its sculpture by Enrico Pancera, commemorating the dead airman in 1941.

Its hero is about to start a large propeller, escaping to the heavens from the clutching Earthbound tentacles of the giant Medusa head.

The head is clearly a copy of the Gorgon painted by Caravaggio (sort of a local lad) on the shield now in the Uffizi.

Pancera’s airman is a late example of the Art Deco style, and the Monumentale is rich in other examples of this Jazz age look.

Sommaruga Faina tomb, by Giannino Castiglioni. 1935.

Tullo Morgagni tomb, by Guido Micheletti and Enzo Bifoli. 1930.

This sweet piece is at the north end of the cemetery.

Pogliani family grave, by Tarcisio Pogliani, 1928

The cemetery is of course full of poignant monuments to children such as the one in the Jewish section for Luisa Estella Jung who died age 4 in 1886, sculpted by Luigi Vimercati.

Although a Jewish memorial, it is carved entirely in Catholic style, reflecting the integration, ambition and confidence of the city’s successful and wealthy Jewish occupants at this time. The toy bear is a real, recent offering by the way, and not a Teddy in stone.

Amelia Clerici Bagozzi, died 2 years old, 1904.

Ofelia Donini, died 8 years old, 1909.

Not all the images of children however are memorials to real people, rather they are  metaphors or symbols, such as the swarm of putti on Faith, Brotherly Love and Mutual Aid by Ernesto Bazzaro, on Ermeneglio Castiglioni’s 1897 grave, or the riot of musical  bambini who adorn the 1904 grave of Ulisse Merini, by Serafino Bianchi. In life Merini was a philanthropic benefactor of infant education.

Faith, Brotherly Love and Mutual Aid.

Vittorio and Guseppina Ferri tombstone.

Ulisse Merini memorial.

This one is a real puzzle, and one I only spotted in November last year, a large version of a bronze, smiling scugnizzo with a crab, a figure originally created by the Neapolitan sculptor Giovanni di Martino around 1910. I’d noticed a small variant of it in a flea market in Napoli in April 2017. Quite why it’s here I don’t know. Possibly a piece the deceased once owned?

In a space filled with wonders, three of the most memorable are all by one man, Giannino Castiglioni. Hell, Purgatory and Paradise is a writhing frieze of Michelangelo and ancient roman sarcophagi inspired forms adorning Andrea Bernocchi tomb, built in 1933.

His unique, larger than life sized The Last Supper group of 1935 is assembled above the mausoleum of Davide Campari, who made his fortune from that fabulous aperitif invented by his father Gaspare.

The tragically flawed original by Leonardo Da Vinci can of course be seen (booked in advance and only for 15 minutes) a few Metro stops away in Santa Maria Delle Grazie.

His third masterpiece takes its inspiration from greater antiquity. The Via Crucis of 1936, crowning Antonio Bernocchi’s last resting place spirals upward in a narrative form borrowed from the great pagan column of Trajan in Roma.

Monumentale’s strangest mausoleum however must be The Vital Breath of Nature, an ominous giantess looming over Work, by Enrico Butti, on the mausoleum of Gaetano Besenzancia. The figures of Work struggling with the oxen and plough date from 1907 and are staunchly Realist in manner corresponding to a new wave of Social Realism taking hold in Lombardy. However the enigmatic figure of The Breath of Life is a later, 1912 addition and owes more to Symbolism. And here is the main reason I keep returning to the Monumentale. This piece is covered in hideous scaffolding with a notice promising some restoration work taking place who knows when in the future. It has been in this state for the last six years since my first visit. I have written to find out when it might be started/finished to a couple of sources but with no reply.

I hope someday to wander in and find it on display once more as Enrico Butti intended. Twice.

Franzetti grave, (1889) by Eugenio Pelini

More wonderul Italian cemeteries here. Buy the book here.

 

 

 

On The Bridge At Noon

Part 1

A break in the clouds as I awoke and there it was, far below: unexpected. From my internet map journeys I knew it instantly, the solitary bridge across the muddy river and the little town clustered ’round its west bank, the long, Roman straight road leading to it, the absurdly huge railway marshalling yard in the middle of nowhere and on the eastern bank a green dome, much smaller than I expected even from this great height and, from this perspective, no hint of the hill I knew it stood on. I hoped to be there in a couple of days time but for now, as the plane continued its descent into Franz Liszt Airport I had to content myself with a drowsy vision of me falling from a static, vertiginous camera point of view, caught mid frame like the Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, my little arms and legs akimbo figure shrinking smaller and smaller with a whistling bomb soundtrack, a dot and then invisible until a splash appeared in the Danube, a moment of silence, followed by a distant comedy “spla-tosh” effect announcing my touch down in the torrent.

The Parliament Building from Margitsziget Bridge

That evening just after sunset I met Sarah at the Angelika bar right by the river. She was a friend from work who was coincidently in Budapest too on her final stop on an inter-rail tour.  As we sat outside under a large brolly, drank and chatted, the gothic, almost monstrous looking Parliament Building (once crowned by a massive red star) across the Danube slowly became illuminated, its spotlights attracting flocks of gliding gulls which resembled fireflies silently hovering around a wedding cake. A “frantic and marvellous pile”, Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote of it, “Architectural dash could scarcely go further.” In April 1934 the nineteen year old pilgrim stopped in Budapest for ten days during his walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, immortalising his experiences some forty years later in the second book of his brilliant tramping trilogy, Between The Woods and the Water.

None of the drinking dens his toff chums took him to were, as far as I knew, still in existence, however I like to think Paddy (as Fermor was known to his friends) would have approved of our next destination. Sarah had heard of a “ruin” bar over the river in Pest called Szimpla Kert. I had read about ruin bars in Nick Hunt’s book, Walking the Woods and the Water, his 21st century re-enactment of Fermor’s hike. From her description I thought it sounded a bit “touristy” but as soon as we were inside the building no gob was left un-smacked between the pair of us. A ruin it was indeed, crumbling, labyrinthine, a 19th century townhouse rambling over two stories with a balcony running around what would have been originally a courtyard. Almost every room contained its own bar, its own decor, its own music and atmosphere, all winking neon and fairy lights, video installations, wild style graffiti and street art, with complicated cocktails or simple pints of lager on sale. Young locals mixed with voices from all over the world (yeah, alright, tourists) and you could stray into which ever part of the building you liked, drinks in hand, absorb the scene and become part of it, inspiring talk of other places we had been (Sarah is far more widely travelled than I) and future plans (me, more Italia, she, orang-utans in Borneo).

When I lived in Moscow I had been to a squat bar a few times famously overseen by an eccentric midget with a nostalgic passion for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He dressed in tiny, home made uniforms, his chest usually covered with old Soviet medals and badges. His wife, who was a little person too usually painted her face silver for some reason. However that place, full of creepy nationalists who talked of “Russia for the Russians” while wearing expensive Italian suits and sipping Swedish vodka was an utter dump compared to this, the Palace of all ruin bars.

I awoke next day in my Váci utca apartment suitably hung-over. Sadly there was no Alsatian dog called Tim and fourteen year old boy called Micky to greet me with a bottle of Alka Seltzer as Fermor had on his first groggy morning in the city, “My ma says you’ll probably need these.” When I stepped out to see the place in daylight, I was again following not just in Paddy’s footsteps but Mozart’s teeny shoes. Wolfgang Amadeus was just 10 years old when he played in a house on Váci utca, now a pedestrianised (but really rather cosy with it) tourist trap. I wondered if Matuschek and Company had been on this street in the beautiful movie by the Berlin director Ernst Lubitsch, The Shop Around the Corner (Set in Budapest but filmed entierly in Hollywood); it seemed like the kind of place you’d expect it to be (“or not to be” – Lubitsch gag) but when I got back to London I found out no, and anyway this was the wrong season to be thinking about that Christmas treat.

Váci utca

In the 1956 revolution it had been very different as a spontaneous parade, “on that fateful Tuesday evening” surged from here “as if they were eager to let everyone know, not just the crowd but, via the dark autumn sky, the whole world, that that is where they are coming from: straight from the dingy, industrial Váci Road, in fact straight from the showers, with their hair still wet”, as an unreliable narrator tells us in A Book of Memories, by Péter Nádas.

Váci utca

Walking up river and crossing the Erzsébet híd to Buda, I was soon out of breath from toiling up one of the zigzag flight of steps Paddy mentions, finding myself at the top of the Castle Hill plateau in the Várnegyed district. I made for the Fisher Bastion for its views back over Pest of which Fermor “never tired”.

Fisher Bastion

I doubt it was such a tourist mobbed part of town when he was here (or that he had to pay to see the view for that matter).

He kipped just a short stroll away from here on the lovely Uri utca, “a waving street of jutting windows, tiled roofs and arched doors with coats of arms”.

Uri utca

Still a quiet part of town today, “Perched above the din of the capital, this patrician quarter had something of the hush of a country town, and the houses, inhabited by the same families for generations, were called Palais so-and-so, including the charming one which harboured me.”

Uri utca. I doubt the street was as choked with cars when Paddy stayed here, Bugatti’s or otherwise.

Exactly just which Palais so-and-so I didn’t know. I could only slowly pace the Uri utca, wondering what on Earth it had been like to be here as a teenage boy, not long after leaving school (or, in Paddy’s case, being expelled) in such a foreign setting, and with a night out at the ball with the no doubt lovely “Annamaria” to look forward to. *

I quickly discovered the square with the equestrian statue of Andreas Hadik, but was sad to find no trace of the “snug Kávéház, a coffee house” where Paddy spent a morning reading, writing, sheltering from the rain and miss-translating a Magyar newspaper headline, “O boldog Angolország.” A modern looking building stands in its place with an upmarket bistro called Ramazuri on the ground floor, sharing the piazza with a Jamie’s Italian Restaurant. Even the bronze sculpture couldn’t have been the same one Paddy clapped eyes on, I noticed the foundry date on it was “1936”. Presumably it must be a replica of the one that was here that April morning in 1934?

Further down the Uri utca I spotted a tiny, wide eyed and excited girl clutching a soft toy emerge with her parents from a doorway and noted the sign above, “Prison Cave of Dracula”. Looking it up now online I wish I hadn’t given it a miss, it looks brilliant, part of the miles of tunnels dug into the limestone hill. Next, just off Uri utca I passed the Harry Houdini museum. I hadn’t realised he had been born in Budapest, he always seemed so “American”. Other notable Hungarians (most of them Jewish, most of them from Budapest, some from parts which were once in the Kingdom of Hungary which changed hands after WWI) include film directors István Szabó and Béla Tarr (though I have yet to see one of Tarr’s movies), Endre Friedmann (photographer Robert Capa), composer Béla Bartók, Manó Kaminer (film director Michael Curtiz), László WeiszI (artist László Moholy-Nagy), János Weissmüller (Olympic swimmer and movie star Johnny Weissmuller), composer Miklós Rózsa, Gyula Halász (photographer Brassaï), György Schwartz (businessman and philanthropist George Soros), Sándor László Kellner (film producer and director Sir Alexander Korda), Günszberg Dénes (scientist and Nobel prize winner Dennis Gabor), Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó (actor Bela Lugosi), Andor Kertész (photographer André Kertész), pioneer of solar power technology Mária Telkes, László Löwenstein (actor Peter Lorre, I wonder if he and Michael Curtiz chatted in Magyar which making Casablanca together?), serial killer Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, writer and Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész, cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács, porn star and politician Ilona Staller (better known by her Italian stage name Cicciolina), László József Schweiger (László Bíró, inventor of the ballpoint pen), György Pál Marczincsak (film maker George Pal), Ernő Rubik, inventor of that fucking annoying cube thing and of course Ferencz Liszt (composer Franz Liszt).

Joseph Pulitzer, another famous Hungarian.

I hastened on to the Castle only to find the area swarming with mobs of builders, chippies, sparks and riggers, like a medieval besieging army of engineers but with peaceful intent – they were preparing temporary stalls for an upcoming wine festival. Power cables and strips of astro-turf covered the terrace dominated by another equestrian statue, this time of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the famous general of Austria’s armies, Prinz Eugen (British schoolboys of a certain age will remember the Aifix kit of the war ship named after him).

Vienna Flashback

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had been in one of Eugene’s houses, his grandest in fact, the Upper Belvedere Palace in Vienna. Paddy had been through Vienna too, naturally, in A Time of Gifts, arriving on February 14th, 1934 to the sound of gunfire on Valentine’s night, the rumblings of a far right terrorist attack which had began a few days earlier. He was broke and crashed in a hostel for homeless men where he teamed up with one of his journey’s most memorable characters, “Konrad”.

Upper Belvedere Palace, Vienna

Back in December 2010 when I arrived in Vienna if I was aware of Major Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO, at all it was through the disappointing and ill fated Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movie, their final collaboration, Ill Met By Moonlight, where he was played by a badly cast Dirk Bogarde. Or through the riotous episode in Michael Powell’s second volume of memoirs, Million-Dollar Movie, where he meets Fermor in Athens in 1950, gets hammered on retsina and ouzo and breaks into the grounds of the Acropolis with him to see it “by moonlight” where they end up being arrested. Fermor bursts from  the paper hoops of Powell’s pages like a lion shot from a canon. “He was a brilliant storyteller and entertainer, but I had read his fastidious prose and knew that he was an artist.” Powell wrote of him. Powell and Pressburger’s interest in Fermor stemmed from his audacious exploits in Crete in WWII, when disguised as  a local shepherd he took part in and led guerrilla operations against the Nazis, cumulating in 1944 with the kidnapping and removal to Egypt of the general in command of the island.

William Stanley Moss, Fermor’s fellow British officer in the operation had written the book Pressburger based his screenplay on. Director Michael Powell had worked for two decades with writer Emeric Pressburger under the name of the production company “The Archers”, and together the pair, never taking individual credits for writing, producing of directing, made some of the finest films ever made in Britain or anywhere else in the world, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, 49th Parallel, I Know Where I’m Going, Black Narcissus, A Canterbury Tale and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to name a few – masterpieces all.  Pressburger’s “Heil Hitler” monologue, spoken by Viennese actor Anton Walbrook in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, made in 1943, is arguably the greatest speech ever written for an English language film. Emeric was born Imre József Pressburger, of Jewish heritage, in Miskolc. Screenwriter, novelist, director and producer, another famous Hungarian.

Sophie takes a picture at the Upper Belvedere Palace

In the last couple of weeks of his Vienna sojourn Paddy met “a marvellously beautiful girl” called Ailsa McIvert with whom he explored the art galleries (including the Belvedere). I met up with Sophie, my marvellously beautiful friend from our college days, a photographer who was keen to catch the same exhibition of paintings by Frida Kahlo I had seen in Berlin that summer (Sophie had lived in the Americas and had already visited Frida’s house in Mexico City). Together we also went to Prince Eugene’s old gaff, the Belvedere, to see it’s famous collection of paintings and as I was also in Vienna to record a few more Nicholas Roeg film locations, on this occasion from Bad Timing, there was one art work here I was especially anxious to finally see, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss.

Theresa Russell’s character Milena has a reproduction poster in her apartment of that great golden icon which tower’s above the whole movie, and she’s there in the fifth shot in the film, in the very same room in the Österreichische Galerie the artwork still hangs today (though on a different wall), the rolled up reproduction poster in her hand and for years in my various flats I too had that image of lovers under the spell of each other on display somewhere.

Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, the music of Tom Waits and Keith Jarrett, Roeg’s movie introduced them all to me when I saw it for the first time as a teenager at the Glasgow Film Theatre around 1981.

Alex buys a copy of Dr. Max Lüscher’s Colour Test book from an arcade on Stephansplatz at the back of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. I walked past this spot many times in the few days I was in Vienna but didn’t spot it was a location from the film then. The manipulative psychotherapist Alex was played by singer Art Garfunkel, another instance of Roeg preferring a “performer” rather than an actor, and he does rather well in this, even up against the heavyweight method acting Scorsese star Harvey Keitel as the policemen determined to elicit his confession. Garfunklel’s Jewish family were from what is now Moldova, a region where Fermor lived for two years with Princess Balasha Cantacuzène before WWII.

St. Stephen’s Cathedral

This was the one location I was determined to see, Milena’s flat. The location is named in the film by Garfunkel and we see it written down in one of the police reports. The surprising thing is that it is a real address of a real house on Schönbrunner Schlossstraße 2

Curious to see who lived in Milena’s flat today I checked the door buzzer. Imagine my astonishment at the Roegian coincidence when I read it was a female psychotherapist.

Milena drops by the Freud Museum on Berggasse to surprise Alex, who is teaching a seminar in its Library. They embrace on the famous consulting room couch, in a part of the building too dark for my camera to cope.

Roeg cuts to an image of Freud seemingly looking on with disapproval at their antics. Both these photographs were still on display when Sophie and I visited, though in a slightly different order.

Sophie in Freud’s consulting room, with the two photos from Bad Timing behind her. I’m reminded of the time at college when we watched the classic Max Ophüls melodrama, Letter From an Unknown Woman, another great Vienna set film (though not a single second of footage was shot there), in the old Metro Cinema in Derby. After the movie, the tutor asking our opinion of the Joan Fontaine and Louis Jordan characters was surprised when Sophie nailed it with her response, “I think they both need to see a psychiatrist.”

Not since Michael Powell has a British director been so obsessed with the celebratory lineaments of the sensual and the erotic. Danke!

Frida’s “Bronzino” in Vienna

The other major film set in Vienna was of course The Third Man and I was eager to track down some locations from that movie too. Near the rather small and over crowded Bank Austria Kunstforum where we saw the Kahlo exhibition was the doorway where Orson Welles makes his famous first appearance in Carol Reed’s picture, though I hadn’t realised looking at the map that it was up such a steep hill. Twice I think I slid on my arse as we wobbled up the icy tor called Schreyvogelgasse where we found the door and Sophie snapped a photo of me as it chucked it down with snow.

The Welles doorway on Schreyvogelgasse 8, though I doubt he was ever actually here. An extra probably provided the feet and his “reveal” was shot in a studio by the look of it.

Unknown extra with cat (name also unknown) in The Third Man

The street name translates as “Shriek Bird Lane” and I know this now because (of course) Patrick Leigh Fermor lived here for a few days “in a gaunt and fascinating rookery” after Konrad had headed north and Paddy unexpectedly received some birthday money from his distant father.

Schreyvogelgasse

The Third Man

Odd though that he fails to mention in A Time of Gifts that Ludwig Van Beethoven lived for eight years just round the corner in the Pasqualatihaus, a thirty second or so crump away from “The Third Man door” (and presumably even less from his “rookery”). Perhaps he didn’t know?

Pasqualatihaus

Stairs outside Beethoven’s apartments

Pasqualatihaus. Beethoven lived on the top floor

Right across the road from the Pasqualatihaus is Universität Wien, where in this courtyard, Roeg shot one of his greatest ever sequences in Bad Timing, with the twisted “lost your tan” dialogue.

More Mozart, outside his house on Domgasse

5 Josefsplatz

The Third Man

Snow across Europe meant most of the airports in England were shut, giving me an unexpected extra couple of days in Vienna, so I managed to visit the Prater Wheel after all, scene of one of cinema’s greatest confrontations and ending with the Cuckoo clock speech. And while most of it was acted by Welles and Joseph Cotton in a studio in front of a screen, there are a few shots of the pair in The Third Man filmed on this actual location. Famously Welles wrote the Cuckoo clock speech himself, claiming to have pilfered it from “An old Hungarian play” the name of which he couldn’t remember. This was the late Dave Gold’s favorite movie I should add here, projectionist at the old Metro Cinema in Derby, a film and theatre historian in his own right and one of the nicest and most knowledgeable people I have ever met.

“Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.”

The Casanova club is the only location shared between The Third Man and Bad Timing. On Dorotheergasse, the famous coffee house Cafe Hawelka (where Nick Hunt had so much trouble trying to pay the bill he left without doing so) is right next door.

Prince Eugene had ridden to Vienna as a young cavalry officer in 1683 as part of the relieving force which defeated the vast, besieging Ottoman host camped around the city walls. In later life as leader of the Habsburg army and it’s allies he would inflict a series of crushing defeats on the Turks, driving them back behind the fortress of Belgrade which he took from them in 1717, bringing him fame and enormous wealth. If he is known at all in Britain (apart from that Airfix model kit) it is as Marlborough’s (often downplayed) co-commander in the victorious battles against the troops of Louis XIV in the baffling War of Spanish Succession. Eugene was himself French and took enormous, life long relish in causing the “Sun King” who personally insulted him and his family to forever rue that day.

Eugene with captive Turk on the Savoy Terrace

Back In Budapest

While he could be said to have decisively liberated Hungary from the Ottomans in the early eighteenth century, he was still only a junior officer when he took part in the successful 1686 siege of Buda, ending the hundred and forty seven year rule of the Sultans. Eugene spent very little time in Budapest (though he owned the island of Czepel just south of the city), so why is there a giant statue of this Frenchman on a terrace named after the House of Savoy (in Italy) outside this Magyar royal castle? It was apparently designed by Róna József for the Serbian town of Senta where Eugene won another great victory against the Turks. The town couldn’t afford the price however, and in 1900 it was placed here  “temporarily” where, one hundred and seventeen years later it still stands. Paddy, usually a lover of military minutia barely mentions him though in either A Time of Gifts (maybe once) or Between The Woods and the Water (five or six times).**

View from the Citadel

Leaving the castle I climbed past the waterfall and up the Citadel hill, where I discovered my own favourite views of Budapest, then I headed way back up the Danube and over the Margit híd to a corner of the capital off the tourist map to visit a murder scene. In Between The Woods and the Water Paddy recounts the brief love affair he had with a married Hungarian woman he calls “Angéla”, whom he met in the summer of 1934 in “Rumania” (pre-1970’s spelling). “Our short time together had been filled with unclouded delight”. The last time he saw her was at Deva train station from which she headed back to Budapest (presumably to meet her husband). Now I stood outside one of Angéla’s final addresses at 48 Pannonia Street.

The house on Pannonia Street

Her real name was Xenia Cszernovits, a “ravishing, dark haired beauty”, adored by all who met her. However. “Once Hungary had become a postwar Soviet satellite state, her life was altered in a way that was unimaginable in 1934. As a ‘class enemy’, she was sent to do menial work as a house painter and later in a textile factory in Budapest. She ended her days in a squalid little basement flat which she moved to after she strangled her former flatmate in a fit of rage in Pannonia Street on 20 December 1969. Such was her popularity with her neighbours that many of them testified in court to the justification of her actions, claiming that the victim was an unbearable woman, thus leading to a reduced charge of manslaughter.” (From Michael O’Sullivan’s unpublished book, Between the Counts and the Comrades.)

Pannonia Street

Leaving Pannonia Street I sat in the parkland on Margitsziget and re-read parts of Between the Woods and the Water as seemingly the entire population of the city jogged round the island (I’m slightly annoyed that I now realise I missed the statue of Peter Falk as Columbo with his Basset hound dog on Falk Miksa utca, which would have been right across the road from me as I walked up and back down Szent István krt). After sunset I discovered this rather wonderful “dancing waters” fountain, one of my favorite Budapest things.

I could have sat here all night. (Until it got too cold. Or some drunk guy started hassling me.)

At the end of his chapter titled Triple Fugue Paddy imagines, in the way we do of loved ones, Angéla arriving “an hour before midnight, at the East Station in Budapest.” Early next morning I was at this same station, Keleti, to buy a ticket from the International Departures hall on platform six in that brown, crumbly biscuit of a grand Terminal, a dreary whiff of the hostile Soviet style of “customer relations” emanating from some of the older staff. Leaving on the dot at 9.34am my northbound train was soon trundling past the usual suburban factories and low-rise tower blocks to be found anywhere in Europe these days punctuated with chunks of architecture from the 19th and early 20th century graced with oriental touches.

As the city fell behind, the Danube began to peep through the woods as we passed through industrial towns like Vác, where the river makes it’s dramatic bend to the south, and Nagymaros, where a large flight of swallows was darting and hunting insects over a timber yard by the station, still snacking in September before leaving for Africa. Across the muddy river, clutching tightly to the hill was the Upper Castle of Visegrád, looking like something out of Hammer’s most beautifully shot movie, The Brides of Dracula, lacking only a flash of animated fork lighting and crashing music by James Bernard. Paddy passed through Visegrád as he walked to Budapest along the southern Danube bank (and Nick Hunt attempted to sleep rough in the castle) and I yearned to visit the place. Once the capital city of Hungary, in 1462 King Matthias Corvinus had Vlad Dracula arrested and imprisoned here for twelve years. Another couple of famous Hungarians.

Štúrovo

An hour and a half or so after leaving Keleti station the train pulled into the sprawling Štúrovo goods yard in Slovakia which I had spotted from the ‘plane a couple of days before. I was in a different country now but hadn’t even noticed leaving Hungary. The station, on a flat, featureless plain in the middle of nowhere, smelled powerfully of pine resin coming from wagons loaded with freshly cut timber. The ticket office had it’s Slovak name emblazoned across it, of course, but also it’s old Magyar moniker, Párkány.

Walking into town along the rigid ruler of a road I noticed all the streets had dual names in these languages which struck me as odd before I remembered the Celtic regions back home have, in the last couple of decades or so, adopted such signs too in English and Gaelic or Welsh.

Paddy had made his way to Štúrovo from the west along the riverbank, but in his recreation of the Great Tramp, Walking the Woods and the Water, Nick Hunt cut across country following the rails to the train station before heading into town, so I was walking in his footsteps now. The level land all around was perfect cavalry country and every imaginable invader had been here, the Romans, Attila the Hun, the Magyar, Genghis Khan, the Ottoman Turks with their Tartar raiders, the Nazis and the Soviets. Now I was heading straight for the site of an epic battle.

Borderland in Slovakia

End of Part 1.

To be concluded.

* I have since discovered it was at number 15, thanks to an arcticle by Michael O’Sullivan posted at patrickleighfermor.org. Also, his favorite coffee house is still there, next door to the modern building which fooled me. It is called Ruszwurm.

** His cheeky footnote in A Time of Gifts on Rene Descartes “unexpected” presence as a private soldier on the winning side at the battle of the White Mountain (outside Prague) in 1620 is my favorite footnote in all literature. Eugene’s reconquest of Belgrade was mentioned in Fermor’s book Mani (first published in 1958).

Part 2 is here

More Nicholas Roeg film locations here

A Roeg’s Guide to Venice

This is an article on the locations used in the horror film Don’t Look Now. There are MAJOR plot spoilers from the start, with an assumption the reader has seen the movie. If you haven’t this will ruin it for you so stop now. It was updated with new material in April 2021.

I thought it had ended in April 2015 when I met Heather in the anteroom of the Tribuna in the Palazzo Grimani, but five years later I was still adding, editing, detecting, being drawn back to the city.

She was dressed from head to toe in scarlet. Standing in the heart of the lair of the red coated dwarf I was astounded by the coincidence, and hearing her speak to her companion (she sounded Canadian, like Donald Sutherland) I had to ask them both if they had ever seen a film called Don’t Look Now.

He was English (like Julie Christie) and had watched it several times and liked it, and thankfully didn’t think I was a crazy person with my seemingly random question. Heather was aware of it but hadn’t seen it as she didn’t enjoy scary movies. Heather’s friend (whose name I never learned) was amazed when I told him we were in the location for the climax of the picture and he told me just a few days before he had spotted a possible prototype for the dwarf in Giotto’s celebrated fresco cycle in Padova (a place I had yet to visit). Above our heads soared an ancient sculpture of Ganymede snatched by the randy eagle and in an another room in the palace just a few feet away a snarling, distorted face carved on a wall anticipated Adelina Poerio’s (the actor who played the murderous dwarf*). Morning light reflected from a canal and rippled across it’s cross-eyed features. Just outside on the Parrocchia Santa Maria Formosa I had spotted a similar grotesque head.

Back in 2006 a combination of things happened, I acquired a DVD of the movie Don’t Look Now, had recently bought a book on Venetian architecture and had a dull April Sunday on my hands. I had known the film for years and viewing it yet again I became intrigued by how the director Nicholas Roeg used the city of Venezia. Another factor was now added, Google Earth was just being perfected. Searching the location of the church Sutherland’s character John was restoring I was curious to see where the park was that Julie Christie as Laura wandered off to in the following sequence with her two new companions, the blind medium and her sister.

After much confused online flying around I realised the only possible place it could be was right across the other side of the island. In the space of one cut Laura and the sisters leap some two and half miles away. Roeg was using geography in the same way editor Graeme Clfford bent time on the editing desk, splicing impossible blocks of frames to create new associations, meanings and emotional states.

I began to catalogue each exterior and trying to map them using freeze frames, the book (The Architectural History of Venice by Deborah Howard) and Google Earth. I realised however that the project needed boots on the ground, I’d have to return to this city to look for myself. I had been just once before and here was a good excuse to go back (as though one was needed). Indeed since then I have returned several times and mapped out the following Don’t Look Now trail you can follow on the map at the bottom of the page.

1. Bauer Hotel Bar Canal Terrace
We never see the building itself, only a balcony and the foundation wall, as John Baxter claims it’s a church he’s restoring. Instead, he is in and on the Bar Canal Terrace of the Bauer Hotel in the San Marco district, and is right opposite one of the most magnificent buildings in Venice, Santa Maria della Salute (begun in 1631) at the mouth of the Canal Grande. This is glimpsed again later when John “sees” Laura from a vaporetto  dressed in widow’s clothes in the company of the two English sisters. La Salute too was undergoing restoration when I was there in 2007 and the dome was submerged in scaffolding. For years I had incorrectly thought this was next door at the the Ca ‘Giustinian which  used to be the Grande Albergo l’Europa, and it was from one of it’s balconies Mary Ann Cross’s husband John, on their honeymoon, flung himself into the Canal. Mary Ann was better known by her pen name, George Eliot. I’m not sure if the author of the stunning novel The Mill on the Floss, with it’s tragic portents of death by drowning, was on Roeg’s mind or not on choosing this spot (John Cross was fished out alive by a gondlolier called Corradini), but the shot does announce “we are in Venice!” Thanks though to Elena who has her own Livejournal Don’t Look Now website (see comments below) I now know this is indeed the Bauer. We briefly glimpse the sheild of the statue on the terrace on the right of the frame at the start of the shot, and in the frame grab here those egg shaped finials on the balustrade are a give away too. We’ll return to the intertior of the Bauer later.

2. Ristorante Roma

The restaurant where the Baxters meet the English sisters in the Cannerigio district. It is right next to the train station, so if you arrive in Venice this way it’s easy to bag your first Don’t Look Now locations by wandering onto the bridge, the Ponte degli Scalzi and peering at the view. You’ll see the restaurant, the route the river ambulance took following Laura’s collapse, and behind you is the green dome of San Simeon Piccolo (begun in 1718). This was also being restored when I was there in 2007, and was covered by a vast hoarding advertising Armani tat.

The dome of Santi di Geremia e Lucia can be seen in front of you, and is glimpsed again later in the background when Laura arrives in Venice after her emergency trip to England. Today it is impossible to match up the interiors of Ristorante Roma, it is now a very modern looking pizzeria.

Christie and Roeg in the Ristorante Roma

In November 2007, this entire part of the canal was closed off for the winter. I had to nip over a fence to get a picture of the view of the bridge Roeg shot, but there is so much more waterside street furniture now it was difficult to get right. While trying to match the shot with my camera from the bridge itself I noticed that Roeg has not filmed the view of the Canal Grande from the centre of the crossing. He has stayed firmly on the Eastern bank, fitting in with one of my theories about his symbolic use of the city.

3. Ponte Minich

Leaving the hospital, in a maze of little canals and bridges, the Baxter’s taxi is stalled by a police investigation, the first hint of the further tragedies to come. Inspector Longhi and John catch their first glimpses of each other. Behind John is the Ponte Minich.

4. Ponte dei Conzafelzi

The little bridge here which the taxi goes under is the Ponte dei Conzafelzi. Both bridges are on the Fondamenta dei Felzi. It’s from this bridge that Roeg has filmed the view of the split canals.

  The building is the Palazzo Tetta, the “tit palace”, with the rio della Tetta on the right and rio di San Giovanni Laterano on the left.

2007

2016

I blundered into this location entirely by accident when I got totally lost looking for somewhere else, and was in such a great mood when I realized where I was. It has become one of my favorite views of the city and I always come back here when I visit.

5. San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti
Floating down a canal Laura suddenly wants to go into a church they pass. At first I thought this was San Stae where John’s funeral takes place at the end of the movie. However Roeg has gone to the trouble of instead taking us to Fondamenta Mendicanti, in the opposite direction of the previous shot for this pan across San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti, a church never to be glimpsed again. Designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, it is near identical to San Stae’s facade. Outside it is docked a water hearse.

Yet another of Roeg’s very clever slights of hand. John insists it’s “closed”. As the name “Mendicanti” would suggest, the city’s main hospital is in this district, where presumably the prior interior shots of Laura watching the happy children in a ward were filmed (note the boy playing with a red and white striped ball).

6. Sante Giovanni e Paolo
Instead, Laura lights candles to the memory of their dead daughter in the vast Gothic interior of Sante Giovanni e Paolo, begun in 1333. John spots the English sisters again, and tells Laura “I don’t like this church at all.” (Dialogue apparently improvised at the location when Roeg overheard Sutherland say this to Julie Christie.) It’s also in the Castello district, just a couple of canals away from the Ponte dei Conzafelzi.

As a sermon begins the Baxter’s flee the church

7. San Nicolo dei Mendicoli


The church John is restoring is a rare Veneto-Byzantine survivor, begun in it’s present state in the 12th century, and was being restored “for real” at the time of shooting in early 1973. When I was there one wing was again being prepared for some minor work. It is by tradition the oldest church in Venice and both interior and exterior scenes were shot here.

In her 1960 book Venice, Jan Morris wrote “out towards the docks is the weird, shadowy, barbaric, gleaming, candle-lit church called San Nicolo di Mendicoli.”

It was far too dark for me to photograph inside with the celluloid film stock I was using back in 2007. There are no mosaics there, like one we see John working on. Instead just below the roof are a series of mannerist paintings of the life of Christ. In the movie these are all covered by white, curtain-like sheets. The ancient looking columns and capitals  inside are the only obvious Byzantine remaining features. In the Dorsoduro district, off any tourist trails and surrounded by industrial buildings with a huge college of architecture next to it.

In February 2019 I went back hoping to shoot inside the church only to discover that, at the moment, it has very restricted opening hours, only once a day for 4pm mass weekdays, and for a bit longer on Sundays (and I wasn’t in Italy that Sunday). Last time I was here this area was pretty deserted. This time it was bustling with hundreds of students  and all the cafes were full. I was intregued by Calle Nova de le Terese which can be glimpsed behind Massimo Serato, who played the creepy Bishop Barbariggo. It’s still an arena of paint and posters just as it was when Roeg and his crew were here.

8. Hotel Gabrielli Sandwirth



The Baxter’s fictitious “Europa” hotel was actually two different locations in the Castello and San Marco districts (an echo of the old Grande Albergo l’Europa in location 1 above?). The lobby and exteriors were shot at the Gabrielli Sandwirth (now just the Gabrielli). The Campanelli di San Marco can be seen in the background. Not as old as it looks, the original collapsed dramatically in 1902. Incredibly, no one was killed, and it was rebuilt exactly like the original (completed in 1912).

9. Hotel Bauer

The famous bed

Christie, Sutherland and Roeg in the Bauer

The Baxter’s hotel room interiors were all shot in the Bauer, very near Piazza San Marco. It has a mid twentieth century facade, somewhat at odds with the stunning Baroque church of San Moise it shares a piazza with. Here, possibly the most famous sex scene ever filmed was shot, and of course I always wondered in which room exactly. Stuck in lockdown since the end of March 2020 has given me some time to have a peek. Not expecting it to look the same after all these decades I was surprised to quickly find a candidate or two on the Bauer’s website and social media feeds.

San Moise, Bauer Hotel on the right.

Beyond midshots of the bed and the bathroom we see very little of the room the Baxter’s occupy which is kept in constant subdued, artificial lighting. The real revelation was when I finally pinned down the possible candidate to the grandest of the rooms in the Royal Suite, the most expensive part of the Bauer available for rent today.

The ballroom of the Royal Suite, where the famous sex scene was filmed. The bed was placed roughly where this photograph was taken from, and you can just see the doorway to the bathroom at the edge of the right of the picture. I didn’t shoot this, unfortunately, I took it from Google images. To stay here would have cost you around four to five thousand pounds per night before the plague hit in March 2020. As much is made in the film of hotels closing for the winter, perhaps this was the case while the production was located here back in 1973 and filming there was relativly easy, especially with two such famous Hollywood stars involved?

And yet in Don’t Look Now Roeg has gone out of his way to disguise the luxury of the space. He makes nothing of it’s obvious assets, cluttering it up with papers, books and magazines, keeping the shutters firmly closed on the views outside, shoving the bed (taken from the near identical room next door, see black and white photo below) up against the wall in the corner, not including any of the wall paintings, Murano glass chandeliers and rarely using a wide angle lens (almost a constant else where) or natural light.

You can clearly see the rococo stucco work, fireplace, (closed) doorway and ornate mirror here. A mirror is also visible behind Roeg in the black and white picture above. The ornate floor too is briefly glimpsed, though it is mostly covered with carpets.

The other end of the room, where the bed was placed with a couple of small tables and a writing bureau, and by the far winow, John’s desk and sketches. Photo from the Bauer website.

You can see the mirrors, sconces and stucco are all still the same.

Checking out time.

The Royal Suite from the Grand Canal. The rooom the Baxter’s occupied was the one with the balcony with the five ornate ogee arched windows on the middle floor, right, with furniture taken from the room with the three windows on the middle floor, left. See picture below (photo from Instagram).

The room next door in the Royal Suite, circa 1950. The bed, carpets and writing bureau were, I think, dragged next door (on the left of the picture) for set decoration (photo from Instagram). Searching a booking website gallery today the bowed writing bureau is still in there, though now on the other side of the room.

And as if further proof were needed, having looked at almost every photo of the hotel on the internet over the last couple of days, this morning I read on another web site a quote from Francesca Bortolotto Possati, who ownes the hotel today, together with a picture of the same room: “This is the Bauer’s Royal Suite. I spent my wedding night here by pure chance, because our flight was canceled. It was very emotional. The room is also featured in the horror thriller Don’t Look Now, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, in which Venice is both the setting and a character.”

So while Roeg has gone out of his way to hide the fact that the couple are staying in such stunning comfort, down to the cheap, crappy, plastic alarm clock he gives them, John’s expensive taste is revealed when he cracks open a bedside bottle of whisky while waiting for Laura to finish her makeup. It’s a 1954 Macallan finished in Sherry wood, which would cost you about £20,000 pounds these days, if you could find one.** Also on his table, behind a photo of his chidren (one dead, one alive) is a copy of a play in German by Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter (usually translated as The Deputy). Is this to show John is multilingual (he struggles with his Italian now and then, when it suits him) or does the story (subtitled A Christian Tragedy) of Pope Pius XII ‘s failure to speak out against the Holocaust reflect upon his choice to work for the Catholic church? Roeg only knows.

10. Ponte del Remedio
Following this, the for once happy couple go out on the town and Laura, crossing a bridge admits she doesn’t “mind being lost in Venice.” There are many bridges in the city, The Bridge of Straw, The Bridge of the Honest Woman, The Bridge of Fists, The Bridge of Courtesy, even the Bridge of Tits, and this one, on Calle Remedio, is called Ponte de Remedio. filmed from Fondamenta de L’anzolo, a short stroll to the north east of San Marco.

I finally managed to photograph it, and the following few locations on the morning of 6th March 2020, just a few days before the plague hit, and Italy was put into lockdown, and then everywhere else in Europe. Incidently, it would be impossible to be lost in Venice on this, of all bridges, as to your right (walking in the direction of the Baxter’s) you can see one of the most famous sights of the city, the Bridge of Sighs just three birdges away. Sigh!

11. Sotoportego Lucatella
They stumble down a dank tunnel and a white rat in the water scares Laura off, but John is convinced he knows the place, tapping a distinctive piece of white stonework.

Eagle eyed Ingo tipped me off about this passageway (see “comments” after the post) while searching the following location on Google Streetview, so thanks again! This part of the city was affected by flooding that moring, as you can see here that white rat would have no trouble swimming out now and I couldn’t quite reach the white stone to rap on it.

12. Ponte Storto
Laura calls on John from a bridge she rather unhelpfully calls the “Pont of Giretto”.

From the local dialect this would literally translate as “Walking Bridge”, and there is no structure called that in Venezia. This location bugged me for years as what happens next is one of the most important moments in the movie, the first glimpse of the the red coated dwarf. And one night in February 2019 after looking at hundreds of pictures of Venetian bridges I finally found where this sequence was shot. The bridge is one of six called Ponte Storto, meaning “crooked” or “distorted” bridge. This particular Crooked Bridge is off Calle Castagna, and the canal is called Rio di San Zanirovo.

13. Calle Querini

The reverse shot shows John at the corner of Calle Querini. He then hears a shout and a commotion to his right. The camera whip pans to…

14. Fondamenta Remedio

I waited for ages hoping someone wearing something red would walk by.

Fondamenta Remedio, which joins on directly to the Calle Remedio and the previous bridge. For once, real geography is being followed, though in the dark.

The view from Fondamenta Remedio back up Calle Remedio to Calle Querini

Fondamenta Remedio

15. Ruga Giuffa
The sequence ends here, staying with “real world” geography. The couple walk up Calle Castagna from the Ponte Storto which opens out onto Ruga Giuffa (which leads directly to Palazzo Grimani). Thank you once again to Elena (see comments below) for solving this one, which bugged me for years!

16. Giardini Pubblici
At San Nicolo Laura again spots the English sisters, and they wander off to a park to chat. The park is two and a half miles away at the opposite end of the city, in gardens which have hosted the Biennale festival since the 19th century. The “hag” statue we see in the film is of Invidia, one of the seven deadly sins, Envy. It’s in a shocking state now and is missing an arm and a leg.

The wonderful lion statue was even worse on my first visit. Behind the former Soviet Union Pavilion it was fenced off and almost invisible, screened by a forest of rhododendron bushes and in desperate need of restoration. Fortunately the vegetation has now been hacked back and the beast is out of it’s jungle. Last time I was here I started re-reading the novel Dune and fed crumbs of panini to countless, cheeping enthusiastic sparrows.

In her book Venice, in a chapter on the city’s beasts, Jan Morris wrote “The silliest lion stands in the Public Gardens, removed there from the facade of the Accadmia: Minerva is riding this footling beast side-saddle, and on her helmet is perched another anatomical curiosity – an owl with knees.”

17. Viale Trento
The very next scene was also shot in this same park, just a few garden plots away, starting on the Largo Marinai d’ Italia, it then pans to the gate at Rio Tera San Isepo,

18. Rio Tera San Isepo

Right gate, wrong angle

with John angrily walking off through Campo San Isepo.

19. Campiello Mosca

Laura goes to visit the English sisters at their first hotel, situated at the end of Campiello Mosca in San Polo. The “Franco Bar” John gets drunk in is now (as of 2019) Ristorante Pizzeria Dolfin, and very nice it is too. When I was there last in March 2020 it was very quiet, and I asked the guy who seemed to be the owner if he had heard of Don’t Look Now, and I showed him some pictures on my phone. He hadn’t and seemed quite thrilled at the idea that part of a movie had been shot in his place, and at one point later the chef popped out of the kitchen to have a quick look at me. Sadly they would have been forced to shut just a few days later.

Roeg shoots the scene quite deceptively, making it look like a narrow alley. Instead it partly opens out to a spacious piazza and lacks the sense of claustrophobia the director manages to invest it with. The Franco Bar windows were adorned with miniature bottles of J&B Scotch, and that brand was a staple of often blatant product placement in seemingly every horror and giallo movie made in Italy in the 1970’s, though in Roeg’s film their lables have been chastely turned away from the camera, no doubt in deference to that Macallan back at the albergo. Also note that Chistmas staple Panettone is still in the January 1973 window. Following the séance (and where was that filmed?) John and Laura wander down the Calle Molin, which you’ll find if you follow in their footsteps is actually a dead end!

20. Riva Schiavoni

After hearing about an accident involving her son, Laura decides to fly back to England right away. She gets the hotel barge to the airport, which leaves next to the vaperatto jetty outside the Londra Hotel. It’s the last time she’ll see her husband alive. The hotel, having boosted itself a notch,  is now called the Londra Palace and the jetty has been renamed San Zaccaria. When I was there one day back in 2016 hundreds of Chinese tourists were gathered here, a kind of Marco Polo in reverse.

21. Piazzetta San Marco
Having said goodbye to Laura, John walks through the south end of the nearby Piazzetta San Marco. Behind him can be seen the campanella of Palladio’s masterpiece, San Giorgio Maggiore. Yet again John the sceptical atheist is juxtaposed with a church. This is the film’s one and only out and out, “typical tourist” shot, something Roeg avoids in the rest of the movie.

It puzzled me for years why he did it until, reading Sheila Hale’s biography of Titian it mentioned that the two pillars in the background, the granite columns holding the statues of the winged lion and St Theodor and his crocodile, were once the main execution centre. Criminals decapitated here were then quartered and their remains hung and exhibited on the columns. Apparently superstitious Venetians to this day avoid walking between them, and here John is caught spatially between them as he walks “into” the camera. Perhaps Roeg was using this as the first Italian instance where John Baxter’s fate is sealed, foretold and apparent to see if only we can read the symbols (the first occurs in England with the glass photographic slide). I found the story confirmed by Jan Morris in her book Venice, relating the fate of Dodge Faliero. He made several blunders when he arrived to take up his post and “he also made the foolish mistake, when at last he stepped ashore at the Piazzetta, of walking between the two columns on the Molo, than which, as any fish-wife knew, nothing was more certain than to bring a man bad luck.” He was executed eight months later.

22. Calle Rielo Dorsoduro
After surviving the accident with the scaffolding, the Bishop and John take a stroll from San Nicolo to the Calle Rielo, another instance of rare moments where cinematic space matches geographic reality.

La Chiesa di Santa Teresa with its distinctive doorway can be seen on the left bank (the large white building) and at at Inspector Longhi’s suggestion John returns to this location looking for the English sisters.

The pair walk down Calle Rielo Dorsoduro

23. Corte Magiore
and then John and the Bishop witness a murder victim being fished from a canal.

The building on the right is part of a large and unlovely complex of 19th century docks. On the left background can be seen the 17th century church of Angelo Raffaele. Almost in the centre background is the 16th century tower of San Sebastiano, which not only houses a cycle of paintings by Veronese, but also his tomb. In 2019 it was very firmly in the middle of a massive and deafening restoration project. The little bridge is on a street called Corte Magiore.

24. Ponte del Miracoli
After seeing the body dragged from the canal, John crosses the small bridge next to Santa Maria dei Miracoli, more than a mile away from the previous scene. This church is a 15th century masterpiece desperately in need of restoration in 1973. It wasn’t saved from ruin until 1998, following a ten year project.

For once it is clearly signposted so we know where we are, and as the church contains a statue which, according to legend, miraculously saved a person from downing and another from a stabbing, the two forms of death bookending the film, I assumed it held this significance for Roeg, however…

25. Harry’s Bar
after leaping off a vaperetto at the San Marco stop by Harry’s Bar John rushes back to his hotel after “seeing” Laura with the sisters on the Grand Canal...

26. Calle Largo Widmann
and is suddenly (impossibly) here, heading in the wrong direction towards Miracoli just a few footsteps away (filmed from the Ponte Del Piovan O Del Volto). The little bridge seen here joins on to the 17th century Palazzo Widmann, designed by Baldassare Longhena.

Watching the Orson Welles version of Othello again in 2015 I noticed that both these locations were used in the same order using the same camera positions by Welles. It seems Roeg is possibly paying homage to a film maker he will quote again in Eureka?

27. Calle de Castelforte San Rocco
At the back of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. A puzzled John tries to find the English sister’s hotel again. He enters a little piazza which is a crossing point for several canals,  finds a “drowned” plastic doll and gets a bad feeling. He also sees the Ponte Vinati from here.

Ponte Vinati

The Calle de Castelforte San Rocco is still a very quiet, nervous pigeon haunted place today. John hears a Polanskiesque piano playing scales on his visit. When I was there on my first visit, a caged canary was singing away brightly. San Rocco is one of Venice’s biggest tourist attractions, yet pop round here and (usually) the city feels utterly deserted.

2007

2015

Roeg captures this unsettling aspect of Venetian atmosphere perfectly time and again, especially here and in the first murder scene at Calle Quirini.

28. Ponte Della Scuola

He is later followed to this square again by a policeman. Walking round the arcade at the back of San Rocco, he sees his “daughter” for the second time from the Ponte Della Scuola lurking in a rather dark and spooky alley called Sotoportego Calle del Cafetier.

29. Sotoportego Calle del Cafetier

Calle del Cafetier 2007

2015

30. Ponte Vinanti

John is followed by the policeman through a number of locations, including this one just inside San Polo. The closed off space on the right of the picture is presently occupied by a kebab shop.

31. La Fenice et des Artistes
The second hotel the Sisters move to is in San Marco, to the left of this shot (the cannon ball and gun encrusted wall in this shot is a different hotel).

La Fenice et des Artistes still has a plant pot sitting on exactly the same spot and in 2016 I stayed here for a couple of nights. To confuse things in the film the actors never go in or out of the hotel by the front door, but by a side entrance usually kept locked these days.

2016

32. Calle Fenice

When John walks Heather, the blind sister played by Hilary Mason back to her hotel, they are seen here on what Google maps will tell you is Calle Fenice, but the sign on the wall actually says Fondamenta S. Cristoforo. Venice is kinda infuriating that way. Again, a location I have not visited yet (or at least I wasn’t aware of it if I had blundered down here), and again a rare moment when real space, if not time, is followed. This is where she says the wonderful line “Milton loved this city. Did you know that?”

The dwarf appears outside the hotel

In the waiting room of La Fenice et des Artistes are photos of many famous stars of opera and cinema who have stayed there over the years, but none at all relating to Don’t Look Now. On the top floor where I was staying however was another Roegian coincidence. All the doors were decorated with reproductions of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, the painting around which whirls the doomed Viennese romance in Roeg’s astounding Bad Timing. Venice/Vienna merged.

33. Rio di San Severo

Leaving La Fenice et des Artistes, at the Rio di San Severo John spots the dwarf again across the canal, in the doorway of Calle Arco

34. Calle Arco

Calle Arco

35. Palazzo Grimani
Crossing the bridge, the Ponte Novo, and chasing who he thinks may be his dead daughter up the canal by boat jumping, John Baxter is lead to the nearby Palazzo Grimani and one of cinema’s greatest and most tragic endings. The Palazzo was derelict for decades until the late 1990’s, and during my 2007 trip it was frustratingly still off limits, undergoing a period of restoration lasting seemingly forever. I finally saw inside it in 2015 when I met Heather and her friend.

The “Darlings” gate in 2007

2015

2015

As can be seen by the distance between the Sister’s second hotel and the Palazzo in the map at the bottom of this page, some artistic license has again been used by Roeg.

And this is as far as we can accompany John and the killer. The staircase he runs up and the room where he meets his fate are still closed to visitors.

36. Campo San Stae

John’s funeral takes place at San Stae in Santa Croce. San Stae’s facade was designed in 1709 by Domenico Rossi, taking his inspiration from San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti. Glimpsed just for a few seconds earlier in the movie, San Lazzaro was created in 1672 by Guiseppe Sardi who was Rossi’s uncle. On my 2007 visit, the building in the background, like seemingly everywhere else I went, was undergoing restoration and was covered in scaffolding and tarpaulin.

2015

And that “symbolic use of the city” I mentioned earlier? Pondering the map of La Serenissima, it suddenly struck me that perhaps the choice of locations are imparting some kind of message all of their own, a hidden psycho-geography.

If we look at the first two Italian locations they certainly appear significant. The Venetian section opens with John working on a building at the Southern end of the Grand Canal, right at it’s mouth and on it’s Eastern bank. In some way using this location confuses things, as John never works here again, his job is restoring San Nicolo dei Mendicoli, miles away (though it does of course say “we’re in Venice!” quite unambiguously).

The very next scene takes place at the Ristorante Roma, which is at the Northern end of the Grand Canal, also on it’s Eastern bank. Only the train station prevents the location being right at the mouth of the Canal again. Roeg has jumped from one end of the Grand Canal right to it’s other extremity. The Grand Canal is always described as the main artery of Venice, and John dies from a haemorrhaging artery when his throat is cut. Is Roeg using the entire city itself as a pointer to the inevitability of John being killed in this fashion? The other significant moment the Grand Canal is used in the film is in it’s last three shots, which were filmed at the church of San Stae (one of which, the very last in the movie is a very poor freeze frame). This is located almost exactly half way along the artery, and is on the West bank. The western shore has been the symbolic realm of the dead in many cultures for millenia. Has Roeg mapped out the artery in John’s throat in the shape of the Canal, and slashed it in the centre with the film’s final location?

Cut throat costume

Roeg was attracted to all sorts of esoteric ideas about magic and the occult and his previous film Walkabout (which receives a direct quote in Don’t Look Now) concerned the Aboriginal practice of using stories and myths to create a sense of location and direction within vast landscapes.

Of course, this only becomes obvious if you look at the locations on a map, but as this occurred to me after just working on the location guide for a couple days over a dull weekend, imagine what a film maker with Roeg’s vision could have conjured, looking at maps of that heart shaped Island for the months of pre-production? Or maybe I need to get out more…

* Donald Sutherland and Adelina Poerio eventually had another cinematic connection. Adelina had already performed for Federico Felllini in his splendid little mocumentary, I Clowns (1970), in which she played a crazy, staircase climbing nun. Some three years later Donald would return to Venice (at least one built in Cinicitta studios in Roma) to portray Casanova in Federico’s epic.

** The Macallan as a luxury item also appeares in Skyfall (a 1962 bottle) and episode 6 in season 3 of Better Call Saul (a 1966 bottling). In episode 5 of season 1 of True Detective Woody Harrelson bribes a former superior officer with a more economic bottle of 12 year old. The screenplay for Don’t Look Now and four of Roeg’s other movies was co-written by Scotsman Allan Shiach under the name Allan Scott. His other main line of work was in the Scotch whisky industry, and he was chairman and chief executive of Macallan – Glenlivet for 18 years. Bottles also appear in Roeg’s Castaway and The Witches.

More Nicholas Roeg film locations here

Eco On the Beach

Camogli. Charles Dickens declared it “a perfect miniature of a primitive seafaring town; the saltest, roughest, most piratical little place that ever was seen.”

It is a writer infested coast to be sure. Here poet Eugenio Montale, recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature spent his formative years. Hans Christian Andersen, John Milton, Ippolito Nievo, George Sand, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Beerbohm, D H Lawrence, Stendhal, T. S. Eliot, Marco Polo, Elmore Leonard, Edward Lear, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeates, Gerhart Hauptmann, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and the romantics all came here to live or visit, the Shelley’s and Byron, as well as the ghastly Ezra Pound and the inevitable Ernest Hemingway (and, it would seem Stefan Hertmans, whose novel War and Turpentine I’m reading at the moment. In it he claims James Joyce visited Rapallo “once for a visit”, but I can find no evidence of this in Richard Ellmann’s biography or skimming Wilhelm‘s Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years ). On September 15 1944 Joseph Heller flew over it during the bombing and sinking of the Taranto in La Spezia harbor.

Some of the 1500 steps down to the tiny collection of buildings called Monesteroli

But I don’t go to that region of Italy because of that lot or the composer from Saxony  (Wagner woz ‘ere too), I go there because it is just so stunningly beautiful and I have yet to find or to be in another land which fills my heart with such content as that strip of coast, of mountains, cliffs, seas, terraces, maquis, vineyards, olive groves and woods between Genova and La Spezia called la Riviera di Levante.

Parco Naturale Regionale di Porto Venere

Monesteroli

Golfo Paradiso

Parco Naturale Regionale di Porto Venere

Bric Campana, Monte di Portrofino

Parco Naturale Regionale di Porto Venere

Cinque Terre

And of course there are the towns, Porto Venere, Sestri Levante, Chiavari, Santa Margherita Ligure, Portofino, Camogli and as if that wasn’t enough there are the five villages of la Cinque Terre – Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare. Just the train journey alone from Genova Principe to Sestri Levante never fails to captivate me. This is no attempt by the way to dismiss the other half of Liguria, the Ponente, which I have travelled the length of to San Remo near the French border, it’s just that I don’t know it as well as I do the east.

Porto Venere

Riomaggiore

Schiara

Corniglia

Manarola

Camogli

Vernazza

San Pietro, Porto Venere

Sestri Levante

Vernazza

Monterosso al Mare

Riomaggiore

Monterosso al Mare

Riomaggiore

Manarola

Camogli

Riomaggiore

One of the peculiarities of Liguria is the tradition of adorning buildings with painted trompe l’oeil decorations which makes an already magical landscape even more dreamlike, even more of a joy to discover.

Camogli

Sestri Levante

Camogli

Sestri Levante

Camogli

La Spezia

Genova

Camogli

Levanto

Camogli

But I don’t just go there to sit on a beach and stare at the sea with an occasional dip in the azure waters, though that is an attraction in itself, no, I go there to walk, exulting in the surroundings, and I’ve hiked the Cinque Terre and the more demanding companion trails through the Porto Venere national park in both directions.

Porto Venere and the way ahead

My first scramble along the 8 and a half mile Porto Venere path to Riomaggiore (the southern most of the Cinque Terre villages) was back in August 2012 in scorching summer heat. The trail begins with a steep and uneven set of steps at the foot of the imposing Castello Doria, quickly transforming into ankle turning boulders as the path becomes increasingly vertical and demanding even before the fortress is left behind. Resting under a tree half way up the hill I had an encounter with a tiny red squirrel who slowly ambled down one trunk and across my path, close enough to pet, before vanishing into the undergrowth.

This frankly shattering climb led to views over the so called “Gulf of Poets” to the south and the distant Carrara marble mountains of Tuscany shimmering in the haze. From here to the village of Campiglia the way was nowhere near as demanding, though rising in places to 1,750 feet above the sea at times you have to scramble along cliff sides on narrow ledges with little to hold onto, walking on severely folded, jagged metamorphic rock. Unlike the Cinque Terre (which some happily do in beach sandals) you need proper walking shoes and a head for heights.

Vertigo

After a break for water and food in Campiglia the path led me through deep forests of cork and pine and I could at one point almost have been in the Scottish highlands but for the fierce heat and the chirruping of the cicadas who seemed to become more frantic as temperatures soared.

To observe among the leaves the distant

quivering scales of the sea,

while the tremulous cries rise

from cicadas on the naked hills.
(To Rest in the Shade. Eugenio Montale.)

Vinyards. The local wines are excellent, so much so that “Corniglia wine” was celebrated for its healing properties in the second story of the tenth day in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, completed in 1353. He was however rather less enamoured with the Genoese.

Steps up and down to Monesteroli, path 4D off the main trail from Porto Venere

At the hamlet of St Antonio I found a litte shop and never had a humble Cornetto ice cream tasted so good. As well as countless lizards scuttling from my boots I’d seen birds of prey, dragon flies, gigantic bees and more butterflies than I’d ever encountered in my life in the wild before. The fish scale tiled dome on the spire of the little church of Santuario della Madonna di Monte Nero suddenly rose above the woods and I had a first glimpse of the Punta Mesco, the dominant feature of the next day’s hike, the Cinque Terre itself and the end of the day’s journey far below me, the stunning village of Riomaggiore.

Riomaggiore

The first time I saw the Cinque Terre coast many years previously I thought I would die. Embarking from Sestri Levante on a small ferry one beautiful July morning the boat was packed and I stood on the upper deck the whole way, right at the stern. As the vessel pulled out into open sea it began to violently roll in an alarming manner which left me convinced the damn thing would flounder. As it lurched around the mountains of the Cinque Terre, all thought of pulling into the tiny, rocky harbours of Vernazza or Manarola abandoned it was announced over the Tannoy, I spent the trip calculating if I was a strong enough swimmer to actually reach the coast when we sank or where indeed I could even land as we passed mile after mile of vertiginous cliffs. And anyway I’d  probably be chopped up by the propellers as we rolled over. I was utterly relieved when the boat finally pulled into the unexpected destination of Porto Venere (which I’d never heard of until then) and find it to be so beautiful the terror of the trip was quickly wiped away. My companion that day, Benedetta had also been convinced we would sink and had apparently spent the ride wondering if she, a fine swimmer, would be able to save me, a really crap one, and like myself had concealed her fears by appearing casual and unconcerned. I noted as we disembarked that the side of the boat was spattered with vomit from our fellow passengers.

Porto Venere

San Pietro, Porto Venere

In May 2013 I was back and did the walk in the reverse direction in kinder weather and discovered how much easier it was and that it hadn’t been fitness which had almost defeated me that previous summer but sheer heat. It also meant a rather less demanding ascent out of Riomaggiore and an easier descent down into Porto Venere.

Suger cane on the path out of Riomaggiore

I paused at the same tree I’d seen the tiny squirrel before, forlornly expecting to see the creature once more, wondering how I’d managed to drag my arse up that path in the August heat the year previously.

Riomaggiore has some of the most bonkers municipal art I’ve ever seen, all painted by Silvio Benedetto, an Argentinian artist who has lived in the region for decades. His work is a trippy take on late 19th century neo-realism, full of heroic locals scrabbling a living from the sea and soil (certainly the regions hard won terraces for vines and olive trees are mind boggling constructions). *

Sestri Levante has work by Roberto Altmann

In contrast I found the Cinque Terre trails much easier going (one short section even has disabled access lifts) and hence busier and sadly with less wildlife. However in my August visit the heat was again a problem (I was wearing a fully packed rucksack too) and I found myself taking frequent breaks in the few shaded parts (which weren’t already occupied by other walkers) though I took some grim pleasure in seeing blokes half my age also struggling.

Walking access to the Cinque Terre is controlled at various points along the way. A pass is required which also, once stamped, allows free rail travel between La Spezia and the large town of Levanto. The way begins (or ends) here at Riomaggiore station with a popular “lovers walk”, and and easy stroll to Manarola, but it is closed when the sea is rough.

Vernazza is probably my favorite of the five villages though I’ve only managed to spend a few hours there.

Perched on a cliff Corniglia is the cheapest option to stay in the Cinque Terre as it has the only hostel in the National Park**

From the train station Corniglia is reached by a mini bus for an extra fee or by foot via a flight of 384 steps (and yes, I’ve counted them)

Corniglia high street, leading to a superb vantage point

Looking north towards Monterosso al Mare

Monterosso al Mare is the largest of the villages and the only one with a sandy beach, though your Cinque Terre pass also entitles you to free train travel to the nearby town of Levanto which has much more extensive sandy beaches.

Corniglia

In contrast in May I ran along some sections I was so filled with joy at the experience of being there again with that light and those colours, sounds and aromas. Sadly though it was too early in the year for the cicadas whose din I was so desperate to hear last June in the middle of yet another grim, wet, gray and cold excuse for a “summer” in England one dreary Saturday afternoon that come Monday, the first day of July I was on my way to Camogli (where I’d never been before) just to hear cicadas and see that blue sea light through the trees again and there, as I stepped down from the train in that little station festooned in dazzling purple bougainvillea, it was all there, the insects singing in the pines and it was all perfect too.

View from my window, Albergo Casmona, Camogli

Via Giuseppe Garabaldi, Camogli

Camogli harbour

Back in February this year I discovered yet another writer who had visited Riviera di Levante for there, in a Guardian article a few days after his death, was a photo of Umberto Eco standing on the beach at Camogli. However the caption insisted he was “in Genoa”, the inscrutable capital city of Liguria 10 miles to the north.

Camogli beach (honest)

As the jolly author of The Name of the Rose reminded us though in his essay Critique of the Image, “But we have been taught, too, that the optional variants, like the prosodic features (that is to say, the intonations which add determinative meanings, on the phonetic plane, to the phonological articulations) can be subjected to conventionalisation.” Jings! Who knew looking a photo was such hard work? Anyway I wrote to the online version of the paper and a few days later a correction confirmed indeed he was “in Camogli in 2015” at “the Festival della Comunicazione”. It was finally all official, phonological articulations satisfied.

Corniglia

But this year I don’t have the time or money to go, yet part of my mind will always wander  that coast, those paths, those cliffs, those colours with the noon time chorus of cicadas and the sounds of swirling clouds of swifts at sunset.

*I finally returned to Riomaggiore in March 2022 for my first post Pandemic trip to Italy. All of Silvio Benedetto’s murals have been removed.
**There is now also one in Manarola.

And You’ll Even Find Joy In the World

“Avoid the Golden Dove in Verona” scribbled Mark Twain in his winter notebook of 1878. I did so (not realising the hotel still existed), but the paranoid narrator of W.G. Sebald’s novel Vertigo ignored the American’s advice during his hallucinatory pursuit of Franz Kafka. The Czech author of The Trial holidayed in Verona the year before WW1 broke out and couple of weeks before Christmas 2015 I was also in town, to see an exhibition. It was my first trip to the city in the Veneto and I arrived during passeggiatta, that mysterious early evening event where Italians traditionally (not all of them, mind) feel the urge to wander round and round the streets, dogs and children in tow, to say “Ciao” to friends and family and to simply be. (As an outsider this can be the loneliest time to be a solo traveller in Italy, or if you are simply trying to get from A to B the most frustrating.)

Come around 9pm and the great host of people (now with panting dogs and sleepy bambini) hadn’t abated so I realised it must be some kind of public holiday. Indeed a quick text to my chum Benedetta in Milano confirmed it was the feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrated every December 8th.

I’d been through “fair Verona”­ a few times before on the train but from the Porta Nuova station it is a rather unprepossessing industrial sprawl. Once past the barbican walls however and the ancient part of town cradled neatly in the arms of the Adige river is joyful.

Porta Borsari

Beautiful little car free streets lead to grand piazzas echoing with the happy cries of locals and visitors alike and the Christmas trees and other festive seasonal decorations gave everything an extra sparkle as a thick mist blossomed from the river.

It was bloody freezing though, so tired of foggy wandering (I refrained from the temptation to search for Sebald’s “Pizzeria Verona”) I escaped back to my hotel with a few beers.

Ponte Scaligero

Next morning I headed to the Palazzo Forti modern art museum to see its exhibition of work by the artist Tamara de Lempicka.

The museum is located in two different buildings which caused some confusion but I eventually found the right one. I’d only ever seen the odd canvas by her in the flesh before but here there was an abundance of them waiting, together with photographs, films and even some of her clothes (turns out she was a very tall lass with an amusing taste in gloves). There may not have been many profound paintings here but certainly much that was delightful.

It being the public holiday of the Immaculate Conception however the galleries were unusually mobbed which made seeing some of the work difficult. I don’t usually use audio guides but picked up one this time and through it I learned that all my life I’d been incorrectly calling her “Lempika”. Her Polish name was properly pronounced “Lempiska“, a fact I could irritate my friends with for weeks afterward (it was news to them too).

Piazza Bra

Following a post-exhibition siesta I spent the rest of the day and night just enjoying the city Shakespeare wrote of in three of his plays but never visited and awoke next morning to find the holiday crowds gone, the ancient streets largely deserted and my feast of the Immaculate Conception all over for another year and oh look, that plaque says Maria Callas lived here…

Via Ponte di Pietra

Stradoni Porta Palio

Not Venice

Ponte Scaligero

Teatro Romano

Ponte Pietra

Arche Scaligere

Castel S. Pietro

Cattedrale Santa Maria Matricolare

I wasn’t going to bother with the Juliet House, but with a bit of time to kill waiting for a train to Milano I popped in for a peek.

Star-crossed lovers

Verona

Manchester

Four nights later (Sunday) I was in Manchester, again a place I had passed through often before but never stopped. It was raining of course, and chilly as I walked from Piccadilly Station to my hostel. W.G. Sebald, that other famous German writer to have lived in the city (Friedrich Engles being the first) was here from 1966 to 1969. On 12 November 1966 (a Saturday) we even know he was in Chorlton as he scribbled in his copy of Michel Butor’s novel L’Emploi du temps (set in a fictionalised version of Manchester named Bleston)

Sunday night 12th
13th November 66
Chorlton/Bleston

Hatters Hostel window view

“On those wanderings, when winter light flooded the deserted streets and squares for the few rare hours of real daylight, I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialisation had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation for anyone who cared to see.” writes the narrator of the Max Ferber section of Sebald’s The Emigrants as he explores a 1966 version of Manchester. “Everything then would appear utterly unreal to me, on those sombre December days when dusk was already falling at 3 o’ clock, when the starlings, which I had previously imagined to be migratory songbirds, descended on the city in dark flocks that must have numbered hundreds of thousands, and, shrieking incessantly, settled close together on the ledges and copings of warehouses for the night.”

Manchester, 1am

That narrator would be surprised no doubt to wander the streets today to find The Midland Hotel for example, “on the brink of ruin” in his time now brass bright and wonderful looking though by all accounts very expensive to buy a drink in, even if it’s just a cup of tea. Most of Manchester’s grime has been scraped away if left in patches here and there, much as a restorer of an old fresco will leave traces of it’s ghastly prior condition to remind the viewer of what had been; the Joy Division dystopia (“a Manchester band except for the guitarist, who comes from Salford. A very important distinction”) has now morphed into reasonably successful post-industrial English redevelopments it seems, Hilton hotel, trams ‘n all, though no doubt Mark E Smith would have something vicious to say about it all-ah.

River Irwell, Water Street

I was here to see a street existing in a quantum state, it both was and wasn’t at the same time. Walking there along Quay Street I noticed an estate agent’s building, “Jordan Fishwick” written above the door. A two minute stroll away from the old Granada Studios I assume this very store front was where, once upon a time, a television script writer working on the soap opera Coronation Street appropriated the “strange” surname of Colin Fishwick, alter ego of the sheepish, almost accidental murderer John Stape who only ever wanted to be a teacher. It was to Colin/John’s old haunt I was now heading.

The old set, as seen from space

Coronation Street which had been shot here since 1982 had for the last couple of years been produced two miles away in a new purpose built location, the back to back houses, cobbled roads, lanes, yuppy flats, builder’s yard, Audrey’s Salon, Roy’s Rolls, the Factory and all the rest recreated at Media City. The location I was seeing was open to the public for just a few more days before being torn down after some 30 years of broadcasting history, a legacy rather movingly brought to life by recorded voices of past stars living and dead (in both fact and fiction) crying out unexpectedly in the “ginnel”, the cramped back lane behind the terraced side of the street, distant voices evoking still lives.

“A shout in the street.” shrugged Stephen Dedalus, is God

Following our closely shepherded tour of the interior sound sets and displays of props and actors costumes (no photography allowed, but I sneaked a cheeky if blurry one in the Rovers Return) the group I was in exhibited a very un-British display of collective excitement when the studio doors (of Nick’s Bistro as it tuned out) opened out onto Viaduct Street and there across the road was Coronation Street itself, Dev’s shop, Rita’s Kabin and of course the pub, THE pub on the corner of Rosamund Street, a Corrieland where we were free to stroll and snap for as long as we liked here in Weatherfield, a “very important distinction” as the architecture we saw was based on Archie Street in Salford, long, long ago torn down but seen in the original programme’s opening title sequence.

Weatherfield

Victoria Street

View from the Medical Centre on Rosamund Street

Tracy Barlow’s pawn shop

Victoria Street

Audrey’s Salon

Gardens of no 8, 6 and 4

trompe l’oeil on Rosamund Street

Streetcars and Brewry Gate

Builders Yard on Victoria Street

The Duckworth’s notorious stone cladding at number 9

A sneaky peek up Emily Bishop’s stairs at number 3

In t’ Rovers. Of course the layout of the pub’s toilets would in real life mean they occupy most of next door Number 1 Coronation Street’s ground floor. However this being soap-land, they do no such thing.

Though the exterior set is quite small, magnified on screen by theatrical construction tricks, depth of field and focus illusions, wide angle and telephoto lenses and subtly disorientating sound effects, I spent hours there, part of the time just watching the pleasure on other visitors faces as they saw a “real” place which many of them would have known as a fictional space all of their lives. I’ll add here that I am not the world’s greatest fan of the show. Growing up it was never on in our house, my parents didn’t like it. It was only through girlfriend’s watching Corrie that in the 1980’s I started to take note of just how well it was written, how compelling it could become and more importantly how funny it was, with more belly laughs and  perceptive humour than many shows whose sole purpose was allegedly comedic (Fred Elliot and Graeme Proctor, we still miss you). Of course it could be grim too, no wonder Ken Barlow’s kitchen is decorated with poppies, that symbol of forgetfulness – there have been many hard times best not dwelt on since 1960 when the show was first broadcast with Ken Barlow sitting in t’ same kitchen played by t’ same actor. Mike Baldwin’s King Lear, Richard Hillman’s Norman Bates with a briefcase, Alan Bradley and the Blackpool tram, poor Tina McIntyre’s unlikely endgame and gawd knows how many times the factory and pub have burned down taking a compliment of discarded cast members with them? And just whose attic does Sarah-Louise Platt keep her portrait in?

The set in the mid to late 1970’s. Image borrowed from the internet

“A warm hug on a winter’s night” as Mary Taylor, a character who could only be found in Coronation Street once perfectly described the appeal of the Rovers Return and in a way the whole show itself. If you seek the programme’s  legacy in more serious drama see Happy Valley on the BBC, astounding television populated almost entirely by former (female) Corrie talent, though set in the next door county of Yorkshire.

A recent welcome addition to the Street is Derek Griffiths as Freddie Smith who, mourning for his lately deceased wife tried to look forward to happier days and declared, partly to himself, partly to Kylie, the pretty girl trying to cheer him up, “You’ll have pangs. But you’ll be living. And you’ll even find joy in the world.” But this being soap-land Kylie, the troubled lass trying to blot out a tell-tale heart has not long past killed her drug dealing ex-boyfriend, father of one of her children, and helped bury him under her mother in law’s bedroom floor.

The final section of Sebald’s The Emigrants concerns Max Ferber, a Jewish German shattered by childhood separation from his parents who were destroyed in the Shoah, now a painter who has lived and worked in Manchester for most of his life. Says Ferber “Throughout the nineteenth century, the German and Jewish influence was stronger in Manchester than in any other European city; and so, although I had intended to move in the opposite direction, when I arrived in Manchester I had come home, in a sense, and with every year I have spent since then in this birthplace of industrialisation, amidst the black facades, I have realised more clearly than ever that I am here, as they used to say, to serve under the chimney.”

Mr Melmoth Left Flowers

Sometime in February 1897 Constance Holland glimpsed her husband for the last time through a spy hole in a prison door. As she left Reading Gaol in tears he, convict number C.3.3 had not even been aware that she was there. He saw her the previous year, on February 19 1896 in the same jail when Constance had come to inform him of the death of his mother. They would never meet again and she died in Italy following surgery on her spine aged just 39 years old, on April 07 1898. Constance was buried in Staglieno cemetery.

In March 1899 her husband travelling under the name of Sebastian Melmoth, on his way to Switzerland during the brief wandering time he had left to live following his release from prison, brought flowers to her grave. Although she never divorced Oscar Wilde, she changed her name to Holland following his disgrace and two year sentence to hard labour. Wilde read the simple tomb inscription “Here rests in peace Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd QC” and felt he had never existed. “I was deeply affected” he wrote to Robert Ross, “with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.”

I first visited Staglieno in May 2011. I had been keen to have a look ’round after seeing it  featured on a TV programme about unusual aspects of architecture some four years previously.

The vast site lies in the outskirts of the port city of Genova in my favourite region of Italy, Liguria. To get there it’s an entertaining half hour rattle on the number 43 bus from outside Principe railway station. Il Cimitero monumentale di Staglieno opened on January 2nd 1851, with four burials that day. Those original four have multiplied to what must easily be hundreds of thousands in one of the largest graveyards in Europe.

What makes the place so special however is not simply its scale (it has its own interior bus service to get mourners around) but the extraordinary quality and quantity of grand funeral architecture and monuments, with an emphasis on realism and eroticism not to be found anywhere else in the country. Here Thanatos meets Eros, sometimes with a bowler hat. There may not be many illustrious names here, unlike say, Pere Lachaise in Paris or Kensal Rise in London, but the bourgeois dead of the 19th and early 20th centuries have ensured this is a must see part of Italy.

The Last Glance by Giovanni Battista Villa, Raffaele Pienovi tomb, 1879

Celle Family tomb, by Giulio Monteverde, 1894

G.B. Lavarello (1914), The Vision of Death by Demetrio Paernio

Giacomo Carpanetto memorial (1886), sculpted by Giovanni Scanzi

Carlo Raggio (1872), by Augusto Rivalta

Salvatore and Emma Rebora (1916), by Giacinto Pasciutti

Delmas Family (1909), The Last Kiss, by Luigi Orengo

Da Costa tomb (1877) by Santo Saccomanno

Evasio Quara (1906), Gaetano Olivari

Salvatore Queirolo tomb by Guiseppi Navone, 1911

Castagnola memorial (1905) by Luigi Brizzolara

Lavarello Anselmi (1926), Luigi Brizzolara

Tomb of Giuditta Varni, 1875. Sculpted by her husband Santo, it took him two years to complete

Luigi Pastorini tomb (detail, 1902), by Guiseppi Navone

Scala Tomb, 1913, E. Sclavi, sculptor

Guiseppe Benedetto Badaracco tomb, 1878 (detail), by Giacomo Moreno

Like a character in a Sebald novel, on my first wander round Staglieno I found myself almost entirely alone for the whole day with not another person in sight. So huge was the ground to be covered I barely saw a third of it, that mostly confined to the colonnaded lower eastern half of the cemetery, the open air museum part of the still very much in use Cimitero. The experience was overwhelming.

Guiseppe Benedetto Badaracco tomb, 1878 (detail), by Giacomo Moreno

Gallino family tomb, by Giacomo Moreno, 1894

Amerigo tomb, 1890, by Giacomo Moreno

Pino Balconi, died 1964

Repetto Tomb, 1897, Vittorio Lavezzri

“Genius of Memory”. Sculpture by A. Rivolta for the Bartolomeo Savi tomb, 1865

Carlo Celesia family (detail, 1899), Demetrio Paernio

Last year, reading Vertigo by W G Sebald, it came as no surprise when suddenly it’s  unreliable narrator, researching in a library in Verona finds a postcard photograph of a general view of Stagliono in a tome  which he never names. He steals (“pockets”) it and goes on to describe the old picture (which is also (badly) reproduced in Sebald’s book) but this brief paragraph aside it is never directly mentioned again.

Ferrari grave

Pellegrini tomb (detail) 1888, Domenico Carli

Canessa tomb (detail, 1893), Nicolò Pittaluga

Pierino Beccari memorial by Lorenzo Orengo, 1888

Entella Contini, died age 9, by Roberto Ersanilli, 1921

F.G. Casella Memorial, 1884, Santo Saccomanno

“We shall continue to remember it after we shall have forgotten the palaces.” Mark Twain wrote of Staglieno in his 1869 travel book The Innocents Abroad. Of the sculptures he noted “that they are exquisitely wrought and are full of grace and beauty”. He saw it just 17 years or so after it opened when the marble skin of the statues was still gleaming white. “They are new and snowy; every outline is perfect, every feature guiltless of mutilation, flaw, or blemish; and therefore, to us these far-reaching ranks of bewitching forms are a hundred fold more lovely than the damaged and dingy statuary they have saved from the wreck of ancient art and set up in the galleries of Paris for the worship of the world.”

Bertolo Memorial by Giovanni Scanzi, 1915 (the year of the artist’s death)

Pizzorni Tomb, 1906, by Luigi Orengo

Carved by Ezio Rigacci, 1912

Rosso family tomb

Casanova family, by Antonio Besesti

This fabulous thing is the tomb of Francesco Oneto (1882) and was the work of Giulio Monteverde

Much copied there are versions of it in graveyards worldwide. For some reason former footballer David Beckham has an image of this very angel tattooed on his right shoulder.

I thought I knew next to nothing about the place beyond that BBC documentary but on my return to Britain a bit of research revealed images of its monuments had graced two Joy Division record covers I was very familiar with. Also a couple of years later I bought a copy of Denis Gifford’s classic A Pictorial History of Horror Movies I had known well as a child. There almost on the last page was a still from the film House of Dark Shadows in which was a rather masculine version of Monteverde’s Angel from Francesco Oneto’s grave. A  beautiful book I have found invaluable since visiting is Sandra Beresford’s A Legacy of Love, a history of Italian memorial sculpture which since 2011 has inspired a whole series of expeditions and eventually a modest, self published book of my own photographs, Monumentale. You can buy one here from the Freakydog bookstore.

Serra tomb (1885), Antonio Rota. Brichetto Tomb (1888), D. Carli

Love Will Tear Us Apart (12 inch single version). Ribaudo family (1910), Onorato Toso

Closer. The Appiani family tomb by Demetrio Paernio

One of the few “big stars” in the cemetery is Risorgimento propagandist and activist Giuseppe Mazzini

Piccollo Tomb, 1891, by Giacomo Moreno

Mazza Family

Parpaglioni family (1884), Federico Fabiani

Gennaro Rubiera (1953), Giuseppe Mancuso. Died off the coast of Normandy, aged 31, “Noble daring generous”

Alfredo Gargiullo (1928), Olympic sprinter, died age 21

Bartolemeo Queirolo (1910), Guiseppe Navone

Giuseppe Ratto Tomb, (detail, 1890) by Lorenzo Orengo

I found the cemetery a surprisingly life affirming place to walk through and meditate, the sound of songbirds and the scent of Mediterranean pine combined with that dazzling Italian light meant I came away with powerful memories which are still hard to shake. Turns out I am a taphophile, and I finally made it back there in 2013, though for a shorter wander.

This is one I went back especially hoping to see. It’s was hard to find as the cloister it is in was closed off at one and end and you could only get to it through a hidden garden. It is the tomb of Caterina Campodonico who died in 1882. She was a nut and bread seller, and she holds a string of her wares in this stone portrait completed a year before her death. Dressed in her finest lace and starched apron this piece, by Lorenzo Orengo, cost Caterina her life savings but led to great posthumous fame and affection among the Genovese public. Married at an early age to a drunken waster she took the unusual step for the time of dumping her husband and living life an independent single (childless) woman.

The inscription on the base of her monument asks the passer by to say a prayer for her. This sculpture is near unique for its period in that it commemorates not a wealthy man or family but a single working class woman.

Above the inscription “Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd QC” the epitaph “wife of Oscar Wilde” has since been added to the simple Celtic cross over her grave. I did not managed to visit and photograph it myself on either of my trips but I do think it is sad that Constance is remembered only in the brief inscriptions on her headstone as a very Victorian piece of property – as one man’s daughter and another man’s wife.

“God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” reads the final inscription on her little Irish protestant monument, a quote from the last book of the Bible. Even this recalls her errant husband’s brilliant jest in his play A Woman of No Importance.

Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.

Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.

(This post grew from a thread I started originally on the “Around the world” section of the Hidden Glasgow forum)