Italian journey, 9: Orlando Furioso

Saturday, May 15—

ONE OF THE BEST books I've read preparing for this sojourn in Sicily has been Henry Festing Jones's Diversions in Sicily, published I think in 1908. (I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg and read it on my iPad.) I don't know anything about Jones, except that he was English, apparently wealthy enough to travel at leisure, and well educated in the liberal arts.

In addition he was very good-hearted, keenly observant, intellectually curious, enthusiastic, and patient. He must have made a wonderful traveling companion.

Of course the Sicily he writes about has vanished, at least from Palermo, the only part of Sicily we've yet experienced. His Sicily is incredibly poor, travels on foot or by donkey, lives in what most of us would call squalor. But the people he describes — soldiers, hotelkeepers, little boys, facchini, coachmen — mostly share his intelligence, patience, and amusement, if not always his literacy and the experiences of his travels. Some of them may be ignorant, superstitious, and gullible; but all seem to be reasonable, courteous, and good-humored.

His descriptions — of towns, landscape, conversations, the visual appearance of the people he meets — are detailed without being tedious, evocative without sensationalism. The conversations he records seem accurate and always interesting, and when he retreats into his own thoughts they're generally fascinating. He describes, for example, remembering how migrating birds do or do not skip over an island before lighting on the next by making an analogy with singers who make a wider major second when singing up the scale, a narrower one when singing back down; and his description will make sense, I think, to a musical dillettante as well as to a professional, and teach something about music to the tyro along the way.

Much of Diversions in Italy involves Sicily's traditional puppet theater, and Jones's descriptions made me long to see an example. Today we finally got to one, and it was just as he described it. We had a hell of a time finding it, because we stupidly never did buy a street map to this city. (Too late now: we leave tomorrow morning.) It turned out to be down by the waterfront behind a street market in a broken-down part of town.

(There are many of these; we've been living in one. Streets are narrow and far from straight; many if not most lack any sign of name; the streets are full of garbage; a number of buildings are still bombed-out, lacking roof and interior walls.)

A discreet signboard stood in the street outside the door to the Teatro Carlo Magno. The door stood open; there was no one in the ticket office. A young man sat on a chair toward the front of the otherwise empty auditorium which contained nine rows of benches, just as Jones describes. I couldn't understand his explanation of when the spettacolo would begin; he spoke mostly Sicilian. After a while another fellow turned up; he said the show would start in five minutes. We stepped outside for a moment; when we returned a young couple had turned up with a little boy maybe five years old.

We sat in the second row, behind them, and wondered what would happen next. An elderly man, a little lopsided and wearing the ubiquitous cap, who we'd noticed lounging about outside, walked up toward the stage, sat down at a little pianolike instrument, and began turning its crank: an out-of-tune mechanical piano it was, and it ground out the overture. I noticed suddenly that both the young men I'd spoken to had disappeared behind the scenes.

The curtain went up and a master-of-ceremonies puppet greeted us, explaining what the evening's program would be. The little boy had gone up to the edge of the stage and began asking questions of the pianist, who lifted him onto his knee, holding him aboard with one arm while turning the crank with the other.

Then the action itself began. Orlando, splendid in his armor and his bright green plume, met the bealtiful Angelica. He dispatches her infidel kidnapper, then duels and almost kills his cousin — Rinaldo, is it? — before recognizing him. He travels, for some reason, to Hell and back, slaying the Hippogriff, withstanding temptresses, bargaining with a devil. Then he kills a number of infidels, decapitating a number of them, splitting one.s head vertically, completely cutting another in half.

All the while the action is described and the puppet actors speak, in a number of passionate voices. Horses neigh; terrible birds squawk. The temptress's head suddenly turns into a skull before our very eyes. The bodies pile up. Knights, Angelica, the Priest, giants (one with one eye, a Cyclops), monsters, all pace, strike attitudes, converse, above all battle.

We were utterly captivated, both delighted and absorbed. It was funny and it was profound. And it was very very old: you could see why this narrative mode would survive.

Afterward we talked a little with the second fellow, who turned out to be the reciter as well as the chief puppeteer. I do all the voices, he told me. Who wrote the words, I asked. It's all improvised, he answered, but the subject is always Orlando Furioso, from Tasso, you know, Tasso and a few others. (He specified their names, which struck bells, but don't stay with me.)

The little boy turned out to be his son: he had in the meantime crawled up onto the stage and was sorting out the pile of dead and decapitated Saracens. It's a family affair: the man at the piano was apparently Signor Puppeteer's father, and his father had painted the scenes.

We were allowed to handle one of the puppets: it weighed a good twenty pounds. Ingenious wires and strings make it possible for them to draw swords, ride devils, lift their visors; above all to adopt lifelike attitudes while conversing. We went next door to the laboratorio, the "ospedale delle pupi," where puppets are repaired and repainted when battles have got out of hand; it was an impressive operation, though housed in what might have been a shabby (and dodgy) body-and-fender shop.

What it all amounted to, I thought to myself as we walked home, was pride, resourcefulness, literacy, imagination, respect for tradition, dedication, poetry, magic. It was exactly what Henry Festing Jones had described, a hundred years ago. I hope it goes on forever. Some things, I think, do.

Notes on our meals during this trip can be found, as always, at Eating Every Day; photos of Campania can be seen at this webpage; photos of Palermo can be seen here.

Italian journey, 8: Technology

Saturday, May 15—

YEARS AGO IN simpler times my technology, on these trips in Europe, amounted to a notebook, a triple-aught Rapidograph, a spare bottle of ink, and a camera. Communications back home were via postcards, not many of them, often mailed days or even weeks (not to mention miles or even whole countries) away from their writing.

I wrote largely (and still do, you'll have noticed) for myself; it's how I process my thoughts. (It's also how I remember things these days, but that's another story, a sadder one.) I treasure — well, the word's a bit strong — I'm glad I have those old journals full of tiny writing and the occasional sketch; I page through them and re-live, often vividly, the hotels and the dinners, the mountains and the villages; I return to thoughts about painting, landscape, food, music, national character — subjects that continue to absorb me.

Things have changed. I gradually gave up the notebooks for the same reason I gave up smoking a pipe: there were just too many damn things to juggle, too much clutter in the pocket. The advent of what Simon calls the murse, short for man-purse, didn't really help: in addition to the juggling you had to deal with the zipper. And then there was the constant danger you'd leave the murse somewhere. One fell off the back of my motorcycle, in fact, and I'll never know what happened on that year's travels.

A few years ago I enthusiastically adopted the Palm handheld computer. It's still something in the pocket, and you have to juggle it and its stylus to take notes, but it doesn't leak. Technology developed further; the Palm gave way a year ago to the iPhone: no stylus, alas, but it does take photos. One less item absolutely needed: the real camera — which in the meantime has moved from film to digital technology — is broken out only for 'important' subjects and when flash is needed. (Look at the recent photos, URL below, and see if you can tell which apparatus took which.)

Two years ago I walked five weeks in the Alps, and took almost no notes at all — I won't go into the reasons for that just now, maybe later. I did take 2500 photos: with camera; that was in pre-iPhone days. It was the last trip with the Palm, which still managed to keep up with e-mail from time to time, when I found a connection.

On that walk I did not carry my laptop, which at the time weighted five pounds. I did carry it on the previous walk, a hundred miles along the Lingepad in Netherlands; and I've always brought one along, ever since I first had one (1995, I think), because the advent of e-mail changed everything. One now could receive mail as well as send it; one no longer counted on Poste Restante or American Express for the occasional reassurance from back home.

Then too there came the Travel Dispatch, later to become this blog. Various friends said they enjoyed reading my travel notes and wanted them sent by e-mail. The number of readers grew to over a hundred, and it became increasingly difficult to send out batch e-mails in that number; many hotel internet hookups flatly refused to do it. I think they thought I was that Nigerian fellow with the temporary money problem.

For this trip, which I thought would involve a fair amount of foot-trekking (I don't now think it will), a new jump in technology looked promising: the iPad. I bought one a few days after they hit the market, and bought also a small lightweight Bluetooth keyboard. On the laptop I use MarsEdit for my blogging software, which simplifies formatting and the addition of photos; similar software (though not as good) has turned up for both iPhone and iPad.

I'm enthusiastic about the iPad; it worked beautifully for me on last month's shakedown trips to Ashland and Los Angeles. It doesn't hurt that as well as a writing instrument it is a library, carrying more e-books than you need, and crossword puzzles, and language dictionaries, and all that; and it's lightweight, and displays photos beautifully (though it has no camera of its own), and and and.

BUT. It depends on wi-fi for its internet connectivity (the AT&T-configured model wasn't yet available, and wouldn't work in Europe anyway). I though that would be no problem, there'd be lots of wi-fi here. But so far that hasn't been the case in Sicily, and it's not likely to improve as we start driving into more remote parts of the island.

Fortunately we brought the laptop along. On Wednesday, our first full day here in Palermo, I bought a USB modem with a prepaid hundred hours of connection time; it's worked beautifully so far. Our e-mail accounts won't send anything; I don't know why; but they receive, and we can write (as well as read) webmail, so we're in touch at the moment.

Tomorrow we pick up a rental car and drive away from this crowded, noisy, dirty, fascinating city. I'm assured the TIM network will reach my modem all over Italy: we'll see. In the meantime, pen and notebook are still in my shoulder-bag, and occasionally still see action.

Notes on our meals during this trip can be found, as always, at Eating Every Day; photos of Campania can be seen at this webpage; photos of Palermo can be seen here.

Italian journey, 7: Palermo

Friday, May 14—

WE HAVE SPENT two full days and halves of two others in this city so far, and I have a few impressions, set forth here in no particular order:

Dogs: I haven't seen a great many, but they're part of the street furniture. Sometimes you'll see two at a time; once, near the Porta Nuova, we saw three. They seem to spend most of their time lying on their sides, eyes closed, legs out, motionless. If they dream, I don't know it.

Yesterday we took our morning coffee in the Piazza Bologni, on an outside terrace, at the Bar Liberty (not very good coffee). A line of potted plants separated us from the piazza, and its statue, and clusters of tourists listening to tourguides telling them about all that; we saw only their heads above the foliage. We did not see the dogs, who were standing just the other side the foliage, conducting their own conversation. Yap! said one of them, a small dog I think; Yap! Yep! Yap!

Whereupon another, probably a little larger but not much, replied Roggawogga! Wow!

And so it continued. Yap! Yep! Roggawogga! Yap! Wow! while we had our coffee; and no one seemed to pay any attention.

It doesn't seem to me anyone owns any of these dogs. There are dogs that are owned, clearly, often carried, or strutting along in front of their humans, off the leash. (The dogs I mean, not the humans, who carry the leashes dutifully just in case.)

We've seen very few cats, and they have been miserable-looking things — scruffy, lean, wary. But, being feline, apparently quite proud of themselves, even as they sort through the garbage.

Garbage: it's piled up in streetcorners, doorways, abandoned buildings, and piazzettas, at least in our part of town, one of the oldest and poorest, still showing signs of the 1943 Allied bombardment. In 1943 I suppose the garbage would have been quicker to disappear, being mostly organic; now a lot of it is plastic. Metal, too: today we saw a couple of burned-out motorbike frames leaning up against buildings over in the northeast quarter. One of our guidebooks says a half alligator was noticed in that quarter last time the writer walked through. This may be an exaggeration; we haven't seen anything quite like that. I wonder which half it was, and how it had been halved, whether crosswise or lengthwise. It would be an interesting thing to see.

People: tourists and natives, of course; but a third layer, passers-through. I mentioned the other day the apparent lack of ethnic or racial clarity. There are Chinese shops, and you do see Arabic writing here and there. The internet parlors near the Via Maqueda seem to have a south Asian profile. Today at lunch most of the other diners were speaking French; we hear British English, too, and more than one dialect of Italian. Black Africans (we met one from Ghana) and Tunisians.

The young natives, like all young Italians, seem slim, fashionable, plugged-in (they talk into their telefoninos while riding motorbikes), immensely sure of themselves, and unafraid of noise. The old people, those with money, seem very attractive. We struck up a conversation with a couple in their eighties yesterday; I was curious about an apparently abandoned building, an elegant villa in the Art Nouveau style out on the via Dante. The couple had been strolling arm in arm toward us, neatly dressed, probably tracing a course they walked every evening. They were short, of course; most southern Italians who grew up before say 1960 are short; there wasn't a lot of nutrient in those days.

The man deferred to his wife about certain aspects of the the building's history, but then became more and more forthright, blaming its current condition on disorganization and failure of follow-through on the part of the local government. Sicily is full of stories, he said — the Italian word for "stories" and "histories" is the same — there's so much beauty and so much richness, and so much is wasted and thrown away and neglected.

We rarely speak English here except between ourselves; there aren't that many who understand it. Waiters and shop-attendants clearly don't know English; even information-kiosk workers are unsure of it; it's as if it were not a language but some kind of cultish set of instructions for assembling something one would rather not have to deal with. So we get by in bad Italian.

Shopping: so far, a little food, a couple of bottles of wine, a USB modem for the laptop (more on that if I ever get around to Technology), a pair of shoes. The food came from the street market around the corner from our apartment, the Balarò. This market goes on a long way: lots of produce and fruit; a few cheesemongers; a butcher or two; people who sell dry goods: batteries, iPod cases, wrenches, shampoo, pots and pans, pens and pencils, socks and shoes, nearly anything you might need.

Most of the produce stands also sell lumache, snails. These are very small, you could put three of them on the surface of a twenty-five cent piece, and they're quite elegant. They're sold live: they live in steep-walled basins for the most part, often with a stick or perhaps a braid of garlic at the center, which they crawl up hopelessly to demonstrate their vitality and urge toward liberty. We haven't tried them.

We did buy a bottle of white wine for one euro, because it was bio or organic, and, well, only one euro; it was undrinkable and I poured it down the drain. We've bought delicious little almonds, and fennel, and tomatoes; and another bottle of better wine; but mostly we're eating out, as a look at Eating Every Day will show, though we do have an apple and some bread sticks at home for breakfast, before going out for our coffee.

Architecture: I've posted a few photos, link below. Palermo was badly bombed in 1943 (by the Allies, in advance of their landing), and some of the rubble has yet to be cleared away, nearly seventy years later. Most of it has, of course, and there are plenty of new buildings, few of them distinguished. There are also the occasional old façades with entirely new buildings behind them.

Yesterday we took a walk up the 22 September, I think it was, looking for "Liberty Style" architecture — that Italian style that grew out of Art Nouveau. We found three really quite wonderful buildings, a little run down I'm afraid but still showing their pedigree. There remain some wonderful Baroque and Renaissance façades, and I find the prevailing late-19th-century style of six-story palazzo lining the avenues attractive enough. It's the new buildings, designed without ornamentation, that I find dismaying; they sit dumbly among all this older attractiveness, with perfectly blank exteriors emblematic, I'd say, of the shallow, blank character of the last forty years.

Like the rest of Sicily, Palermo has known Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arabic, Saracen, Norman, Spanish, Italian, and even British occupation, and there are architectural references to most of that. Sometimes the mix is really quite harmonious, as at the Capella Paletina. At other times you'll be walking a narrow street, come out into a piazzetta, and find a Norman tower left over from something demolished long ago standing lonely among slums. No one seems alarmed at this, so perhaps it's as it's meant to be. For what it's worth, my favorite places so far are S. Giovanni degli Erimiti and the Chiesa di S. Cataldo, which the Lonely Planet guide finds too plain.

Traffic: In our quarter the streets are narrow, crooked, and laid out apparently at random, probably millennia ago; and the buildings seem haphazard, stone or brick or concrete-block plastered over with stucco, with tin or terra-cotta roofs. This is true of the other three quarters of the old city, which remind me of the old town in Nice, or Seville. Some streets are barely wide enough to walk in; I measured one at two feet wide yesterday.

Cars avoid those streets, of course; even the motorbikes seem leery. But there's plenty of traffic in our quarter on the wider streets, which may even allow room for parking as well as the single lane of traffic. There are no sidewalks, needless to say, and you're grateful for the noise these cars and motorbikes make when you're walking with the traffic rather than against it; you quickly learn to hug the wall when you hear an engine.

In the newer part of town of course there are sidewalks, but they're rarely wide enough for a couple to stroll comfortably, and there are often knots of people, usually young and inconsiderate, standing outside café doorways, so you're continually stepping off into the street, hoping a bus isn't silently bearing down from behind. Cars park where they can, often across the few zebra crossings whose stripes in any case have generally faded almost completely from view.

(Though it's true that when you cross a busy street in one of these zebra crossings all vehicular traffic respects you, even stopping if they can't somehow slip around in front of you or behind.)

The traffic is complicated by a number of horse-drawn carriages for hire. I rarely see any paying customers riding them, but there are plenty of them on the streets, perhaps practicing for better times to come. One tried hard to inveigle us into a ride: forty euros it would have cost; I didn't ask for how long. We'll continue walking, as long as we can.

Notes on our meals during this trip can be found, as always, at Eating Every Day; photos of Campania can be seen at this webpage; photos of Palermo can be seen here.

Italian journey, 6: By train to Palermo

Thursday, May 13—

BY LAND, AIR, or sea; that was the question: how to get from Naples to Palermo. I'm not sure why we rejected flying; there are low-cost flights, though they often have hidden extra costs, and generally have to be bought well ahead, and we don't like to commit ourselves too early in the game. Or it may be that we'd just flown as much as we wanted in the previous week or so.

Then too I'd thought, back in the States, that we'd be spending a couple of days in Naples, and that we'd be walking past travel agencies with attractive posters advertising specials: Tunisia, €79; Bucharest, €119. But in the end we never got to Naples, preferring that drive to Amalfi and Paestum.

In the end it was the baggage that tipped the scale, so to speak. We were comfortably in Caserta, and could take a train from there. Going by boat would have required a long schlep from the Naples station to the docks; going by rail would require only one change of trains. On the way to the car rental office, Saturday morning, I impulsively dropped into a travel agency and asked about the possibilities; rail seemed much easier and a little cheaper.

So after an early supper in the Jolly Hotel, friendly enough but not really mirthful, we walked a block to the station and wrestled our stuff onto the nine o'clock train to Naples. This wasn't going to be so bad, I told myself; the shuttle-train is bare-bones, the seats are metal (what few there are: the cars are designed for standing), but there aren't many riding and there's plenty of room for our baggage.

I carry a fairly small back=pack: four shirts, two polo shirts, two pair of pants, a pair of shoes and another of slippers, various socks and shorts, a couple of books. I carry also an attaché case full of the thirteen supplements and vitamins we insist on bringing along. (I'm not really complaining: I seem to keep a semblance of health and strength. Besides, since I grabbed the attaché case at the last minute when I realized the quantity of pills I'd be carrying, I slipped this laptop in as well; good thing, as a later post, on technology, will reveal.)

Then there's my shoulder-bag: notebooks, hand-cleanser, eyeshade, flashlight, camera and batteries; and attached to it the small lightweight case for the iPad and its keyboard — again, more on that later.

Like me, Lindsey's responsible for three items: the black cloth shopping-bag affair she always hauls around, a fairly small wheeled suitcase, and her purse. Also, tonight, a plastic shopping bag of various food items. One two three, four five six, I count them off as we get on the train to Naples, and again as we get off. Our arrival track's a long way from the waiting room, so I have plenty of time to recheck everything, as I compulsively do.

Nothing open in the Naples train station; even the newsstand closes at ten. Our train leaves at 10:48; there's nothing to do but sit on one of the few, widely-separated benches — the station's apparently designed for commuters — and wait. Anyhow, it's late; we're sated from dinner; we're coming down a bit from a couple of days of wonder and delight.

Finally our train backs into the station. Our car is the second from the front, a long haul from the waiting room. One two three four five six, we schlep along the grimy cars in the grimy night, sweaty and dirty, and haul aboard up the steps and find our compartment. We've reserved the two window seats, facing one another: but there's a guy sitting in one of them, and two other men in the six-seat compartment. God knows how long they've been on the train, maybe all the way from Rome, maybe further: the little garbage container is full; empty plastic water-bottles stand on the windowsill. I claim our seats; wrestle our stuff onto the overhead shelves; and we settle in for what's billed as a nine-hour trip.

---

Many of the books I've recently read on Sicily seem to involve railroad trains. This is not surprising: Sicily seems to be a place you leave or return to; it's as if these books are not written for Sicilian readers but those who, like me, long for Sicily, or perhaps regret her. My favorite writer so far has been Elio Vittorini, as noted here six weeks back, though others come close — I'll try to get to some comments on H. Festing Jones's charming Diversions in Sicily one of these days. Vittorini's father worked on the railroad so it's logical he'd thread his stories on train travel: but then I worked on the railroad too, for a year or so, in the remote past.

Vittorini refers to his fellow travelers not by name — introductions are never made — but by physical characteristic: Big Nose; The Man with the Hat; and the like. I'll do the same. White socks, let's call the guy who'd been in Lindsey's seat, is now sitting next to me; he's taken off his shoes and stretched across to rest his feet on the one empty seat in the compartment, next to Lindsey. I hope the feet smell better than the guy.

Next to him, on the other side of me, is Dark Man, perhaps Indian, perhaps not. The easy racial and ethnic divisions we Americans make are much less clear on the road to Sicily, where centuries of immigration, trading, and war and occupation have left an amazingly complicated gene-pool soup. Dark Man sits motionless and expectantly; I never see more of his face than the right profile.

Opposite him sits a young and slender, clearly Italian, neatly dressed in dark trousers and a rugby shirt with a gothic-script initial on the breast-pocket and a patch reading Rough To Go on his shoulder. Once we've settled in there is total silence in the compartment until the train starts, when White Socks lunges to close the window against the racket of steel wheels and rails.

It's good for the soul, as my mother would have said, to make a long train trip from time to time. You're put in your place, in more ways than one. You're reminded of the sheer distances, for one thing. I'm not talking about high-speed trains here; they don't exist yet in Italy. (In fact protestors are trying to prevent it from happening up in Piemonte.) I'm talking about slow trains, intercity trains, locals. This long Naples-Palermo run slides past most stations without stopping, but now and then there's a long wait somewhere; finally a train rushes past in the other direction and our train regretfully strains into motion again.

There's no leg room: Lindsey's black bag is at her feet, since it won't stand upright on the shelf. White Socks is asleep: fortunately he's short; his head won't tumble onto my shoulder; he lies suspended shoulders and feet by the two opposite poltroon, cushioned seats with tattered covers and head-rests. His socks are twice as long as his feet, and drape listlessly beyond them as if seeking to get away. I sleep seated, head thrown back most of the time, cradled in my hands on the pull-out table-shelf some of the time.

We sleep forty minutes or so, then wake, whether from an unexplained stop or resumed motion. It's dark outside, of course, and often we're in tunnels, whether beneath mountains or cities, it's all the same. The light remains full on in our compartment, but we're too tired to stay awake, and the books are packed, I'm in no mood for the International Herald Tribune, and I don't want to display my iPad with its supply of electronic reading.

Finally, at four o'clock in the morning, we arrive at a brightly lit, quite modern station where we stand for quite a while: Villa San Giovanni. I try to think where that might be and give it up. A parade of long-distance trucks files by on a narrow road next to the tracks; one by one they make a slow impossible right-angle turn into a tunnel built just big enough for them. After a long wait we move again, but only a quarter-mile or so: then a long stop: then we back into the station again.

Ah: we must be breaking the train up to run its cars into the ferry; Villa San Giovanni must be across the straits from Messina. I have no map, unaccountably, and it's still dark out. Finally our car is moved into a huge steel room past three or four men who stand around holding things. We bang up against the end-stop. Out the window I see a garbage bin with three compartments; a coil of cable the size of a refrigerator, wrapped in plastic; a couple of ladders; a portable scaffold on wheels; various drums of oil and grease.

Finally we hear the sound of a quiet motor, and a little later we detect the faintest of rolling motion: we must be on the water. It would be nice to leave the carriage and look for a café; there must be one on board somewhere; but I have no idea how long the crossing will take and don't want to risk it. Dark Man is standing in the doorway leaning against the edge, as he often has; he likes to stand in the passageway and look gloomily out the window into the night. He seems ready to speak. We must be near Messina, I say to him by way of invitation to conversation: Yes, he replies in a single word, and looks back out the blank window.

White Socks has awakened, stretched, put his shoes on, and disappeared, I don't know where. Rough to Touch stands in the passageway. I don't know what he's thinking. Dark Man is prepared to leave; I'm sure he'll get off in Messina. It's seven o'clock now or so, and suddenly we feel a bump, we're connected to a locomotive, we're being pulled out of the ferry, we stop, we're pushed back again to couple on to the next car, we repeat the maneuver. It's a laborious ballet of huge apparatus and ponderous weights.

Then I suppose we somehow reach Messina. The sky is beginning to show some light, but either it's not enough, or my eyes aren't working right. Dark Man has disappeared, ditto his baggage. Rough to Touch still stands in the passageway; White Socks is yet to be seen. A woman with a big suitcase looks in: Posso? May I? Yes, I say, of course, come in. She begins to sit in Rough to Touch's seat, and I point to Dark Man's: That one is free. She heaves into it with a sigh, a smile, a thank-you.

We don't move for another hour. At eight o'clock we finally pull away from Messina; we can see tracks, rails, signals, lampposts, wires, gravel, all the familiar detritus of railyards. Then landscape: weeds, rusty outbuildings, then orchards, suburbs, hills, all interspersed with tunnels: the Italian loves tunneling.

It took another four hours to reach Palermo. I nodded off between stations, then awoke: our train was now a local, and often waited in a station for an oncoming train: there must be a lot of single track between Messina and Palermo. At a place called Termine — it was not our terminus, of course — Posso and Rough to Touch get off. White Socks shows up, grabs his back-pack off the rack, and disappears. We go back to sleep, Lindsey and I, to awake a little before noon, as the train finally pulls into Palermo.

Notes on our meals during this trip can be found, as always, at Eating Every Day; photos of Campania can be seen at this webpage; photos of Palermo can be seen here.

Italian journal, 5: Paestum

Monday, May 10, 2010—

I HAD ONLY ONE goal during this four-night stop in Campania, and that was Paestum. Well, two goals of course: the other was to visit our granddaughter who's spending a year as an exchange student in Caserta.

The real goal of the trip is Sicily, and you can only do so much. (Years ago I told Lindsey that we could eat on these trips, or visit churches, or look at paintings, but we couldn't do all of them, or even any two of them. You can only really attend do so much, or you'll go crazy. Lindsey, of course, demurs, and is not crazy.)

Naples is certainly worth a long visit, so we decided to do that later, next year, maybe, dedicating at least two weeks to it. We'll visit Pompeii then. Fran has been there a couple of times, but not to Herculaneum, so as I wrote the other day we stopped off there on our way to Paestum.

Well, then, we really should have a look at the Amalfi coast, I'm told, so we stopped off there too on our way to Paestum, spending the night among steps, as I mentioned the other day. I also mentioned theater day the marvelous Villa Rufolo in Ravello: it dates back a thousand years, has been gardened maybe half that time; and presents an entrancing history of flux, each period thriving, decaying, contributing footprints (and sometimes more: witness the beautiful Moresque arches) to the next stage of use. It's now headquarters for a Centro Universitario Europeo per i Beni Culturali, which sounds like a very good idea; it wouldn't be a bad place to hang out.

But my real curiosity this time was Paestum, so after a long peaceful night's sleep at La Vecchia Quercia we ate a nice breakfast of home-made pastries and jams and set out south, getting off the autostrada at Battipaglia — "Beat Straw": who makes up these names? — and continuing on through trashy suburbs and sprawl, then bucolic countryside, on a secondary road to Paestum.

The Greeks made up that name, but they called it Poseidonia; it was the Latin-speaking Romans who came along and made it Paestum. The site is marvelous: you can see why they settled here, Lindsey said as we got out of the car; it's open to sea and sky, the lift is quite special, the breeze soft and gentle, the soil fertile and generous.

They arrived about 600 BC, the Greeks did, and built a couple of temples, the chief one to Poseidon the god of the sea — better be nice to him when you depend so much on calm seas — and another to Hera. Just beyond her temple was a river; on the other side were the Etruscans, who were kept out by an imposing set of walls, still impressive. Another inland tribe, the Lucans, managed nonetheless to occupy the site in about 400 BC, changing the name to Paistom; then Alexander the Great's uncle took it back in 326, but the Romans finally moved in fifty years fate that, building their own empales, and a gymnasium of course, and all that.

Then came a succession of reversals: malaria, Christianity, poverty, Saracen invaders and the like. It was finally pretty well destroyed by Frederic the Second, in 1246; and then it stood abandoned and forgotten for centuries, even though at least three monumental temples stood in remarkably good condition all that time. It took the Romantics — Goethe, Shelley, Piranesi — to make these ruins and their site fashionable; and for years every American bank and courthouse has owed them a great deal.

All that information from the leaflet thoughtfully provided by the Azienda Autonoma Soggiorno e Turismo of Paestum, and I thank them for it, and for so well preserving the grounds of this hauntingly beautiful and strangely reassuring place. It would be best to spend at least one night in a hotel here: the museum offers a lot of absorbing information and some remarkable archaeological finds from the various levels of Paestum's history, and I'd want to visit the site as early in the day as possible, returning at twilight.

This is a tour of discovery, though, not a tour of fill-in-the-details. We strolled the grounds for a long hour, had lunch at a very nice restaurant recommended by the woman at La Vecchia Quercia, then strolled back along the front side of the grounds, ending with a tour of only one floor of the museum — filled with wonderful Greek painted vases found in these ruins only fifty years or so ago.

The most obvious attractions in Paestum are the three enormous temples, one dedicate to Ceres (this was a major agricultural colony) at the north end of the site, two about a kilometer south at the other end of the city as it's now been excavated: the "Tempio di Nettuno" (in fact probably dedicated to Zeus) and the "Basilica" (probably the temple to Hera).

You can only look at these monumental buildings and wonder. The stones are enormous and incredibly old — these temples were built twenty-five hundred years ago — yet they seem intimate and familiar. Their color, ranging from a warm greyed white to a very pale apricot blush, and the soft-seeming texture of their surface (you cannot actually touch them; they're discreetly fenced away) make them friendly, reassuring, rather than forbidding and austere.

The Greeks clearly built these architectural masterpieces to last. I have no idea where this stone came from, or how the columns were erected (let alone the immense stone blocks surmounting them!), or how the labor was organized and paid for, or what kind of training developed the architects involved; all this information will come when I'm home, and have access to books and the Internet. At the moment, both during the actual visit and while contemplating it next day, it's enough to see these buildings on what is now a tranquil, even pastoral site.

Of course the temples dominate what would have been public space. We know that it became cluttered over the years with smaller temples and even smaller altars set up, even strewn about, in front of the temples; you can imagine that worship devolved from that public but essentially social and civic transaction with natural forces and spirits that need to be considered — springs, watercourses, seasons, winds, seas, sun and moon, fertility — all that attitude we used to dismiss as "pagan," but begin to honor again, more scientifically of course, under the umbrellas of Evolution and Ecology — devolved from that kind of transaction to a still publicly visible but essentially individually expressed ostentations display of moral rectitude or, worse, theocratic domination.

The Romans didn't build as well, for whatever reason. Stone columns give way to assemblies of brick and stone plastered over to imitate the Greek ideal. Enough remains of the Roman city here to suggest the social structure familiar from Herculaneum and Pompeii: small sleeping rooms, larger reception rooms in houses owned by the upper classes. One wonders where the slaves slept.

The Romans built in the familiar system of rectangular blocks of buildings — insole — gridded off by fairly narrow streets. I have the feeling excavation has only proceeded recently and, perhaps, haltingly; good thing: new technologies will likely make further research less intrusive and damaging. It was only in the 1920s and '30s that modern residences were cleared away form this site; clearly current curio stands and restaurants, even the nice on we lunched in, must stand atop things worth knowing about.

We came away from Paestum reassured, as I've said — reassured that the Past, great and Aware as it undoubtedly was, did not simply stop or collapse or anise; its presence cntiued through lesser ages, was even forgotten entirely, and recurs today. Just so Paestum will prove to be for us, I think, a compelling introduction to the next few weeks as we visit similar sites in Sicily. Sicily is Persephone's Isle, consecrated to the goddess of agriculture and the seasons, who is forced to spend part of each year among the dead; for us to flourish we must be born, increase, weaken, and die; so must our cultures. But our cultures, like ourselves wish we face it, are rooted in Place, situ, terroir. Paestum and its temples and this country and its fruits are thoroughly integrated, and tat reassures me in times of apparent disintegration.

Notes on our meals during this trip can be found, as always, at Eating Every Day; photos can be seen at this webpage

Italian journal, 4: La Vecchia Quercia

Sunday, May 9, 2010—

I LIKE TO USE two European websites for planning driving trips, playing them against one another: ViaMichelin and Mappy. Both function something like Google Maps, allowing you to plug in departure, goal, and a few waypoints along the way; they then tell you distance, duration of the trip, and approximate cost for fuel and tolls — very useful information.

Before leaving California I looked up something on ViaMichelin and found a little bonus, a short article describing a three-day gastronomic tour of Campania — just where we'd be. It involved a little more agricultural gastronomy than we'd really be up for, but it did suggest various accommodations, one of which was particularly intriguing. But how to find it?

When I phoned to reserve a room the proprietor told me she was in Pontecagno, the next town beyond Salerno. After spending the morning in the fabulous Villa Rufolo in Ravello, and stopping for lunch at a typical Italian country Sunday-Dinner destination* on the road north to Angri (no kidding), we drove on to Salerno, then, to see the Cathedral, which was of course closed, and to walk the streets of the old city, which made me think a little of Nice, a little — improbably — of Torino because of the arcades. (But then, I suppose many Italian cities have arcades, to shelter shoppers and loungers from rain and sun alike.)

Then I thought it would be a simple matter to find the via Montevetrano in Pontecagno, so we drove along the oceanfront road looking at each road leading off, finally gave up, drove inland, turned left at a sign to Pontecagno, came to a total block in the road where a bridge was being rebuilt, retraced our steps, continued toward the hills (after all Montevetrano must be in the mountains, I finally realized), found ourselves well south of Pontecagno (always thinking of Italy as running north and south when in fact it's closer to west and east); finally began hopelessly asking people almost at random for directions.

No one spoke English, needless to say, and a surprising number preferred not to speak even Italian, choosing dialect instead. Add to that the fact, for it was certainly a fact, that many of the men I spoke to (there were no women) clearly knew nothing of what I would call the local geography — their sense of Locality being much more restricted than mine. Well, maybe I should ask on the other side of that bridge, I said once, for example, pointing out the bridge we'd just taken across a small river. Came the reply: Oh well, the other side of the river, you know, who knows what those people know, who knows what they'll say, I never go there.

I drove up and down the main road between Salerno and Battipaglia probably four times, and finally came to a dead stop: all traffic was being stopped: a bicycle race was coming through. Ah, I thought, one of these traffic guardians will know. Sure enough one died: Ah, Monteveterano, you go back toward Salerno, just at the entrance to the autostrada follow the signs to Gruffone, it'll take you there.

And sure enough a few kilometers up toward the Gruffone, whatever that might be, a little inconspicuous sign jumped out at me: Azienda Agriturismo Montevterano, pointing up a narrow road. It lead us through fields and vineyards to an unmarked manor-house, I'd call it, where a number of cars were parked about. A young man was pushing his little boy on a swing on a lawn ringed by stately oaks. I told him what I was looking for, mentioning that I'd spoken to a woman on the phone — that would be my aunt, he said, and went into a small cottagelike building to fetch her.

La Vecchia Quercia turns out to be a pair of such manor-houses, each with two high-ceilinged stories containing I'd say at least four units. Ours was a huge room with a double bed and a single, and our own bath of course. It opens out onto a very pleasant covered porch set about with comfortable chairs. Next to that, a small grove of widely-spaced lemon trees, with tables and chairs; nearby, a covered outdoor kitchen with a pizza oven.

There was a pool in front of our porch, with an invisibly resident bullfrog happily brekkek-kekking away; and mulberry and loquat trees, and roses, and rosemary. We made a pot of tea and looked over our photos and talked about Erculaneo and Amalfi and Ravello and congratulated ourselves on our dolce vita; and at eight o'clock we went in to dinner, just us three, and dined very pleasantly, and conversed with Signora the proprieties about many things but particularly about the South of Italy, of which she is fiercely proud, and Napoli which she says is exuberant and a dramma, and Salerno which she said is turned inward and chiuso, and her sister an important winemaker who is teaching the locals how to make wine that does not turn to vinegar in two years; and then we looked at the fireflies, and walked back through the night to our room, and slept beautifully.

Agriturismo la Vecchia Quercia, via Montevetrano 4, Cipriano Picentino; tel. +39 089 882285

Notes on our meals during this trip can be found, as always, at Eating Every Day; photos can be seen at this webpage

Italian journal, 3: Amalfi

Saturday, May 8, 2010—

IT'S BETTER NOT to bring anything you don't really need, she warned us. She was standing in the driveway of the Hotel Excelsior, where she'd told us, when we telephoned, we could park the car. I shrugged and put the things we didn't really need back in the trunk — the attaché case and the little iPad cased — I slipped on my backpack, and looked at Lindsey's suitcase: but before I could pick it up the woman from the hotel had it.

I'm used to it, she said, I climb these stairs five times a day. There are three hundred of them, she said, rather proudly. We began the descent, carefully, for the steps were treacherous, and as usual I began counting, this time aloud and in Italian, which amused her.

The steps are steep, often of varying height, and shallow of tread. After a hundred or so the path leveled out and we strolled more gently downhill under lemon trees heavy with fruit; but then we came to more steps. At the bottom, only about a third of the way down to the shore, we arrived at our hotel, formerly I'm sure a vacation house, now converted into a B&B.

It is really quite a wonderful place, silent but for the birdsong, cooled by soft breezes, endowed with spectacular views. Our room had a double bed and a single, as we had Fran with us, and tis own bathroom with shower. Curiously, once you closed the double door into the bathroom, it could only be opened from the other side, by someone pushing on it.

I soon realized I'd want my jacket, which I'd left in the car. Iw alkyd through the reception lobby on my way to the three hundred steps. Where are you going, the woman asked. Why do you ask, I said. I'm going back to the car for my jacket. Give me the key, she said, I'll get it. Oh no you won't, I said; I need the exercise. This time I kept careful count: there were in fact three hundred eleven steps, five of which were in the contrary direction. Perhaps if you count them twice in order to cancel them out, and then subtract them from the total, that's how you arrive at three hundred.

We rested up a bit, then walked to the restaurant affiliated with the B&B. This involved at least six hundred more steps down from the hotel, a stroll through the town of Amalfi, then more steps down into the town of Atrana to the restaurant, right on the beach. Atrana is a much smaller town than Amalfi, I think, probably originally not much more than a small fishing village. Eat out or in, was the first question, hesitated over, discussed, while waiters stood by, amused. Inside. Dinner was very good, involving the tiniest clams we've seen.

Afterward we took the bus back up the hill to Pogerola, arriving about eleven o'clock. We still had those 311 steps to descend. We slept well, but next day our calves were very sore. Breakfast was delicious and copious, and the day began softly, barely perceptible voices rising from a fishing-boat in the harbor far below.

Hotel Le Palme, via Salita della Spinale, 23, Pogerola 84011, Amalfi; tel. +39 0898304548

Notes on our meals during this trip can be found, as always, at Eating Every Day; photos can be seen at this webpage

Italian Journal, 2: Erculaneo

Saturday May 8: Herculaneum, we call it in English; I don't know why. Since Fran had been to Pompeii two or three times we decided to skip it and visit Herculaneum instead: she was interested at how different it seemed from Pompeii.

Erculaneo is quite below the level of the present town R________, a testament to the amount of detritus that's been piled on top of the ash and, perhaps, lava that buried it in the first place. It's a small city divided into insulae or large blocks containing a number of houses or shops of varying size, some of them rather grand villas, others clearly complexes of small crowded apartments or bedrooms, probably for the lower and working classes. My impression: excavated rather hastily in the 1930s for the most part, much of the plaster containing paintings broken away either for sale or for safekeeping; now being researched more carefully, much of the work apparently stalled, probably for lack of funds.

A very interesting site for what it says about city planning and architecture. The insulae gridded off in orderly rectangles divided by one-lane streets whose large paving-stones are perhapstwo feet below the level of the sidewalks, the streets undoubtedly functioning also as drainage. Some houses — that of Argos, for example — quite palatial by my standards, with large salons, and pluvia, nicely proportioned cloister-like gardens, though sleeping rooms still rather small.

A surprising amount of wood still in place here and there — screens, lintels, door-frames; blackened by the catastrophe but preserved somehow from decay. Most remaining décor geometrical motifs high on walls or on ceilings. A number of rooms clearly have been remodeled; marble tile is laid on earlier opus sextile (if that's what it's called); thin layers of fresco'd plaster laid on top of earlier similar decoration.

The plaster covering the stone, brick, or rubble walls is generally a couple of inches thick; on it, the fesco coat is perhaps a quarter-inch thick; often you see incised lines in the thick plaster, showing the finish-plasterer where to lay in the final colors and linear design elements.

The palestra or gymnasium clearly a very important element; as in our time and country, athletics and the gym have replaced worship and the church as the main focus of social life, at least architecturally. But what you see of the palestra suggests that by 79 BC city planning and construction had entered a historicist postmodern sort of era: the columns are not stone, but brick and tile covered with plaster treated to imitate Greek stone columns. As populations grew and inferior classes emulated those at the top, cheap construction (and fast construction) had to supplant the slower techniques and rarer materials. What had been Form was now Style.

Too, the city grew vertically; residences piled atop residences, those below perhaps being moved into by poorer citizens, or used to house animals, or as storage. I thought of the huge "basement" under Arles, and of the remains of a many-storied apartment complex alongside the Palatine. (An American is reminded, too, of such cliff dwellings as those at Mesa Verde.)

The entire Herculaneum site seems low-keyed and laid-back. There's a good-sized undergound parking garage; above and nearby, a ticket office with a few leaflets. There is no shop: instead, an open-air market with three or four booths selling guidebooks in many languages, cheap replicas, caps and T-shirts and the like; and a café offering unappealing fast food. A few men (I saw no women) stood near the entrance offering guide service, and there's a booth providing electronic guides. We had lunch in a curious restaurant next to the parking area: you go up a narrow, steep, spiral staircase to a dining room tented on the roof of a one-story building containing kitchen, reception and restrooms. The food was okay: I had a sort of pain bagnat; others had pizza, or pasta. And then onward to Amalfi…

Italian journal, 1: Caserta: the Reggia

In the next few weeks this site will become a travel journal, if you don't mind — notes more or less chronological, otherwise random. For the moment we skip past a day in Madrid, and arrive in...

Friday May 7: CASERTA

The chief tourist attraction of this provincial city is its amazing Reggia, the Italian equivalnt of France's Versailles or the Dutch Het Loo, built in the middle of the eighteenth century by Charles III, designed by Luigi Vanvitelli. We didn't investigate its interior, having really only one day to spend, and that a nice one. Instead we walked slowly up the central axis of its amazing series of lawns, pools, and fountains, a mile and a quarter as my pocket computer counted it. Water cascades from a source high above the Reggio, at an elevation of about 200 meters above sea level, to a basin at the top of the formal garden; this basin contains two sculpture groups representing Diana and Acteon at the moment the latter is being transformed into a stag and set upon by his own hounds.

Here is an entrance to an English garden, really a park, laid out alongside the formal garden, hidden from it by the very high hornbeam hedges themselves carved out of a dense canopy probably sixty feet high composed primariily of lime-trees.

The English garden features its own pools and fountains but is domianted by stately beeches, elms, oaks, and magnolia trees set about on huge gently sloping lawns. Halfway down the park, occupying perhaps a third its width and only a tenth or so its length, are the 17th-century greenhouses and sheds, a couple of huge staging-areas for working with bedding plants and small pots, a good-sized kitchen garden, and a very nice formal rose garden within its own walls.

It took nearly six hours to enjoy these gardens and eat a couple of sandwiches we'd brought along with us.

Music in the air

Madrid—

MIKHAIL MIKHAJLOVITCHIPPOLITOV-IVANOV is one of those "minor" composers known for only one piece, the colorful Caucasian Sketches*. It's a piece that means a lot to me, as it was on the winter concert played by the college orchestra when I was a freshman and still nominally a music major. I was seventeen and had just graduated from high school, where I played bassoon in the concert band — there was no orchestra in our small country high school.

I didn't have a bassoon, so when I got to Chapman College, in those days a small Christian school on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, they provided me with a French horn on which I was asked to play the first bassoon parts. My band teacher had encouraged me to learn all the wind instruments (all but flute, which never worked for me, and trumpet, which I didn't like), and to learn to transpose at sight, so while a little demeaning this wasn't too hard.

What was annoying, though, was that at the dress rehearsal a ringer showed up with a bassoon, and I was moved from hornoon or whatever you'd call it to triangle.

I've always been a sucker for Russian descriptive music, perhaps because of my concert band background. Ippolitov-Ivanov studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, whose influence is as strong in orchestration as hyphenation. I-I writes beautifully for horns and trombones. I have no idea who played oboe and English horn at Chapman; they get some pretty extensive solos.

There are four sections, as I recall: "In the Mountains" — maybe this is another attraction to me — "In the Village"; "In a Mosque"; and a long, wonderfully local-colorful "Procession of the Sardar." There's hardly any melodic material at all, just noodling, broken chords, and scale passages; but the sonorities are fabulous and the rhythmic drive, even in the lengthy slow-tempo sections, compelling.

The piece is sizable, maybe twenty minutes long — I listened to it on headphones on the way over here, in the airplane; it's perfect airplane music, mindless and attractive. Maybe next time I'll load Reinhold Gliere's Ilya Mourometz Symphony onto the iPod; it's four times as long and even more colorful. Then there's the Borodin symphonies…

*Wikipedia is right to quibble that Caucasian Sketches is a silly title and probably a poor translation; Ippolitov-Ivanov means "Sketches from the Caucasus," but that inescapably brings Miles Davis to mind.
The whole thing reminds me of visiting the French lawyer with my friend George's death certificate, so the estate could be put into motion. The lawyer sat gravely in his serious, formal, provincial French office and silently read over the certificate. After a few minutes he smiled: this was odd, it was a sober occasion. The smile grew into a chuckle. He peered up over his glasses and explained, in French — he spoke no English — But look, it says here George was a Caucasian; I knew George, he wasn't Caucasian, he was born in Canada but he was an American; they've made a silly mistake; he wasn't anything like a Caucasian.

The Carrizo Plain

YOU CAN DRIVE from Los Angeles — well, Glendale, next thing — to Berkeley in nine hours and still take in the Carrizo Plain. I shouldn't tell you this. One of the great attractions of the Carrizo Plain is its emptiness: if all subscribers to The Eastside View decide to drive there next weekend there'll be a traffic jam.

I've put a web gallery of photos up here; in the meantime you can make do with this shot — click on it and I think you'll get a bigger version. We were there perhaps a week too late for the peak of the wildflowers, but what we saw was well worth the drive.

We took the road south to north, driving up to the first ramp off Highway 5 north of the split from 99, then the long dreary road to Mariposa Maricopa, then on twelve miles through amazing country to the an abandoned gas station at a junction. There you turn north on Soda Lake Road, driving twelve or fifteen miles on unpaved road, through dry cattle ranches, miles of beautiful empty wide valley between low hills, finally coming to the federally protected National Monument lands.

We first drove through here quite a number of years ago, from north to south that time, also looking for wildflowers. Seems to me that was the time we caught them at their peak: the west-facing slopes of the hills above the San Andreas Fault, along the east side of the valley, looked like a Persian carpet of lavenders, roses, reds, yellows, and blues. What you see in the photo above is only a hint of what can happen here in exceptional years.

We took our time but covered the ground, driving 35 or 40 miles an hour up the road, stopping at the observation point on a low hill west of the road. We continued past the ghost town — actually the never developed town — of California Valley; then west on Highway 58 and up Shelby and O'DOnovan Roads toward Creston, and up Creston Road into Paso Robles where we joined 101 for the drive up to Berkeley. I'd never taken thoset 58-Paso Robles roads before; it's a beautiful drive, first through more empty wildflower country, then through vineyards, finally the unfortunate suburbs. Well, folks have to live somewhere, I guess. I'm glad they don't live on the Carrizo Plain.

The Playboy of the Western World

Glendale, April 25—

A FINE CLOSE TO a fine season tonight at A Noise Within: John Millicent Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in a devoted, straight-ahead production, idiomatically directed by Geoff Elliott on a cluttered, atmospheric set by Stephen Gifford, set on a superb cast: a true ensemble theater with stellar performances by Michael Newcomer as Christy and Lindsay Gould as Pegeen.

It's such a wonderful play, quickly alternating among raucous humor, wry irony, and sudden pathos. There's no easy way to categorize it: from the distance of a century you can see Synge's relationship to Chekhov and even Ibsen, you can see Eugene O'Neil's connection later to Synge. I think I can even see a connection to the Tennessee Williams of Camino Real and The Night of the Iguana. But truly he's his own playwright, and Playboy is alone in its category.

It would take five minutes to tell the story plainly; it's not much more than a shaggy dog story.But Synge's dialogue is Irish poetry at its best, with far-flung, fanciful imagery, and he uses language to flesh out his characters; you get to know them, to become fond of them. Some — Widow Quin, Shawn Keogh — clearly are borrowed from commedia dell'arte; others are stock Irish comics; but all find individuality, dimension, and dignity through Synge's genius, based on keen observation, channeled through fondness for humanity, sharpened by awareness of the pathetic position of those whose place is below both their aspiration and their deserts.

Thursday night we saw a remarkably fine Much Ado About Nothing; Friday night a splendid Awake and Sing; tonight this marvelous Playboy. A Noise Within has grown over the years to become a truly inspired repertory company, with a stable of actors who seem able to turn on a dime, a team of directors who respect the scripts they're given yet bring them to life, and artistic direction that chooses repertory wisely, investigating the classics, foreign-language rep (in translation, of course), and neglected corners of the 20th century.

Best of all, you can see these three endlessly entertaining plays in a short visit to Los Angeles. The season continues through May 25, and I don't know when I've been more enthusiastic about a recommendation.

A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale; tel. 818.240.0910; www.anoisewithin.org

Curiosities

Glendale, April 24—

A FEW YEARS BACK our friends Jim and Lisa told us about a curious place down here in Los Angles, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Words don't do the place justice, though many have attempted the task — me included, of course.

We stopped off at Jim and Lisa's the other night, as we often do on our semiannual drives down here for plays at A Noise Within, and they told us about a special presentation held today at Occidental College: A Wonder Cabinet, a series of presentations of arcane matters by curious specialists, all curated by Lawrence Weschler. Since I think of Weschler's book Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees as one of the great books of the twentieth century, and respect his judgement as much as his writing skills, I could hardly turn down the opportunity. We didn't get to campus in time for the opening presentations, but did manage to take in five events. And this is what they were:

Ricky Jay, slight-of-hand master and archivist on arcana, magic, and entertainments, discussed 18th and 19th-c. English books on Illustrious Persons, special attention to those compiled by James Granger and, later, James Caulfield. Jay concentrated on persons classified by those authors as persons famous for one thing having happened to them — a fellow, for example, who, on the death of his fiancée, never washed either himself or any of his clothing again until the day he died. He mentioned a number of other persons of fleeting fame, however; among them Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that to attain perfect brotherhood among humanity man's "Common Task" was the resurrection of all humans who have died, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who, by taking the idea the next step to propose space travel in order to accommodate the vast numbers of persons who would result, inspired the Soviet space program.



Walter Murch then discussed, elegantly and clearly, the Titus-Bode Law describing (and predicting) the positions of orbits, whether of planets within the solar system, the moons of the various planets, or the electrons in atomic structure. This was an extraordinarily fascinating presentation; its complexity was greatly resolved by superb graphic presentation and, of course, Murch's calm, reasoned, persuasive voice. I wouldn't have missed this for anything.

Ken Libbrecht, chair of the department of Physics at Cal Tech, discussed the geometry and formation of snowflakes, showing a number of photographs he's taken with an impressive apparatus of his own design.

And Matt Shlian gave a summary of his brilliant career as a paper engineer, specializing in the transformation of single flat sheets of paper into incredible sculptures involving cuts, folds, and curves resulting in elaborate, often kinetic, elegant sculpture.

Weschler's model for these presentations, like Wilson's model for his Museum of Jurassic Technology, is the Cabinet of Wonders, the omnium-gatherum of specimens, drawings, books, and curiosities assembled by collectors to gratify their own urges but also to instruct their communities; these gradually evolved into the museums familiar in our own culture, whether of art or natural history or technology.

It was interesting witnessing all this the day after a hasty visit, at the Getty Center, of a display of drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Clearly the same convergence of love of aesthetic and urge to knowledge animates all this activity: it's a great pleasure to see it in operation.

Awake and Sing

Glendale, April 23—

For our second night of theater here Noise Within gave us a stunning performance of Clifford Odets's Depression-era Awake and Sing, a solid, often poetic, tense, deep drama set within a Jewish family in the Bronx, with three generations of immigrants and first-generation Americans squaring off against one another, Capitalism, ungrateful employees, hard times, repressed strivings, bitterness, and the human condition in general.

It was like Chekhov with a seriously nasty case of heartburn, I thought after the first act; not long into the second I realized it was much more than that: it was like a Mahler symphony. Humor, grief, anger, transcendent yearning all flow into and out of one another. There's a story, of course, and it's well conceived and well developed; but it's the matter beyond the story that held the near-capacity audience in a grip. I'm on the road, not at my computer where I have facts at hand, so I can't list the plays I've seen over the last few years this resonated with, Italian and English and American plays, many of them set in the same general period, when totally desperate situations forced families and individuals to totally desperate actions.

One play that it particularly resonated with was last fall's adaptation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, also produced by A Noise Within. They have in common the drama of intense socio-politico-economic moments impacting desperate, sensitive, intelligent characters, of course. Beyond that, though, they even share the idea of a physical set influencing, or at any rate underlining, the way those tensions are achieved on the stage.

We like this Glendale company for the same reason we like the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; both are repertory companies, developing and performing a number of productions simultaneously. Shakespeare's Globe Theater, Odets's Group Theater, Molière's Comédie, Chekhov's Moscow Art Theater — all, if I'm not mistaken (and I repeat: facts are not readily at hand), were repertory companies centered on the players, strong companies with strong ensembles.

Players lucky enough to work within such ensembles can trust one another, share ideas, probe the depths of the works they interpret. Further, they inescapably grow from one production to the next — not becoming better actors; they're already enormously skillful — but developing greater depth and complexity, just as do the audiences lucky enough to follow them through Shakespeare, Racine, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, Synge, O'Neill, and so on.

Tonight's performance was draining. The entire cast turned out on stage a few minutes after the final curtain to field questions from the audience, and it was immediately clear that the audience was exhausted, the cast exhilarated. I think that's as it should be: Aristotle's catharsis reversed, perhaps; but we'll have time and matter to think this over in the weeks to come.

Much Ado About Nothing

Glendale, April 23—

We're in Glendale to see the spring season of A Noise Within, the Equity repertory company we've subscribed to for the last several years. In four days you can catch three plays, the first half of the season in November, the second about this time of year. Shakespeare, recent American plays, European standards (Ibsen, Chekhov), most years a French classic (Molière, Racine), often an American standard.

This time it's Shakespeare, Odets, and Synge. I'll write in more detail after having seen all three: tonight we saw Much Ado About Nothing in a very entertaining production, set in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sicily, with a Katherine Hepburny Beatrice (Torri Higginson) and a curiously Ray Millandish Benedick (JD Cullum) and a fine supporting cast, neatly directed by Michael W. Murray.

It's late and I don't want to look up the links or write in detail about the performance. Or, for that matter, the play: I've always had trouble with it before, and it occurs to me that's because most productions I've seen have been overladen with shtick and/or concept. This was a nice clean interpretation, speaking the lines clearly without apology. Oh: and the clowns were wonderful, especially Mark Bramhall's Dogberry and Mitchell Edmonds's Verges. I'm glad we saw it.

Books, wine, war, talk

TAKING A BREAK from reading about Sicily, on Lindsey's advice, I've just read two books touching on World War II, a subject that's never really attracted me. (Lindsey's mother was a WWII buff, watching all the documentaries, reading all the books; and Lindsey herself recently read William Shirer's mammoth The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)

The Twentieth Century was a violent one. Militarily I suppose it began in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian War; Central and Western Europe wasn't to see much peace from then until 1945, and the reconstruction of Western Europe was hardly complete until the 1960s. I used to think of World War II as a terrible interruption in the century; in fact, it was a termination.

(A termination of one kind of terror, perhaps followed by the beginning of another kind — not military but economic. Jury's out on that; we're in the midst of it, and can't see the forest for the trees.)

Lately World War II has been too much in mind, as if we knew, somehow, that we were on the cusp of another such trial. There's been a lot of discussion, for example, of honor and culpability, a lot of blame thrown at people whose own trials we can never really know. I'm thinking, for example, of Janet Malcolm's treatment of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007), a book that annoyed me considerably when it appeared. We must investigate; we must document; we must discuss: but we must never cast judgment backward on the past; it's hard enough to practice it on the present.

We can, however, learn. This is what Robert Mnookin does in his book Bargaining with the Devil. It's written as an argument for negotiation, even at times negotiation with enemies, even those one might think of as evil (or at least as having done evil things); but in support of that thesis Mnookin recounts two examples drawn from the period of World War II: Winston Churchill's refusal to negotiate with Hitler in May 1940 — there are times when even Mnookin agrees it's wrong to negotiate — and Rudolf Kasztner's decision to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann over the release of Jews from Hungary in the waning days of the war.

A third example, the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and his refusal to negotiate with the KGB, contrasts vividly with Nelson Mandela's negotiations with F.W. de Klerk — negotiations that contributed to the end of apartheid in the Union of South Africa. (De Klerk himself is not examined in any great length, but appears as a sympathetic character emerging from an evil system: it would be interesting to hear a conversation between him and Mikhail Gorbachev.)

Mnookin's book appears at the right historical moment, when some of the American Right is vilifying the State Department's evident embrace of negotiation and diplomacy as the right course, even with potential enemies. Beyond its immediate political value, though, Bargaining With the Devil is an interesting book and one offering useful application to everyday life: I'm glad I read it.

Bargaining With the Devil: Simon & Schuster, 2010

Tartuffe, again

WE'VE SEEN MOLIERE'S classic Tartuffe four times in five years now, and what I wrote about it the last time, nearly three years ago, still holds:

The country's second-favorite play
This year? Moliere's Tartuffe, they say.

Second most frequently produced,
That is, and now its wit is loosed
On Ashland's public, and they see
That lust and greed, hypocrisy,
And false religion can be fun.
Depends on where and when they're done.
Heroic couplets, stylish sets,
Elegant costumes—no regrets
At seeing Moliere's play once more.
Trenchant satire's never a bore.

We saw it again last night, in Santa Rosa's Sixth Street Playhouse, in a good-looking production with no-particular-period set and costumes (but very interesting and often funny costumes, suiting — sorry about that — the characters) and a fine cast having fun with Richard Wilbur's apt and entertaining verse translation.

It's community theater. Many of the actors teach drama in various schools in the area; their students are lucky. I was particularly struck by the way the director, Sheri Lee Miller, allowed individual takes on the roles, even the lines, while making a real ensemble of the cast.

Keith Baker was a marvelous slimy Tartuffe, the religious zealot-hypocrite who lusts after his protector's wife. As Orgon, the wealthy fool who takes Tartuffe into his family, Eric Thompson was solid, subtle, and very likeable. Jenifer Cote held center stage well as Elmire, Orgon's wife, and Kendall Carroll was a perfect, leggy Marianne, the petulant daughter.

Both John Craven, as Cléante, and Joan Felciano, as Mme Pernelle, were particularly effective in their long introductory speeches setting up the action. Jimmy Gagarin played the young romantic Valere (Marianne's suitor) nicely, and Freddie Lambert was effective as Orgon's son Damis. Mary Gannon Graham ran away with the role of Dorine, and Laura Tennyson was as funny a clowning Flipote as you could ask.

Tartuffe will probably never lack relevance, alas; if you don't know the play, a look at Wikipedia's entry will suggest the reasons. If you're nearby, give this production a look: it's really good.

Sixth Street Playhouse, 52 W 6th Street, Santa Rosa CA; tel. 707 523-4185; performances Thursday-Sunday through May 2, 2010.