Ciao, Italia!

March 31, 2007

Syracuse, Italy

The past few days have been a huge blur as we have spent so much time on the road traveling and seeing very little. I feel like I have spent practically my whole life in a chair watching the world roll by outside the window. Today has been the first real day that I have felt like I am truly in Italy, and so far it seems amazing! I had my first taste of Italian Gelato yesterday, and it was positively wonderful!

The first day we spent traveling—a long afternoon of sitting around in the ferry station to finally late at night board the ferry that would take us to the port city of Brindisi, on the east side of Italy. The place was cramped but we found ample space in the lobbies to drink the last of the Greek wine before cleansing our palates to prepare for the delights that were to await us in Italy. Jarrett told us that it would be a sacriliege for Grecian beverages to make its way past the sight of the Greek land, so I dutifully downed the last of the Retsina I had bought a few nights back and sat talking with the group until I went to bed, in my tiny top bunk of the cabin, a “Let’s Learn Italian” podcast playing in my ears.

We awoke at 6 am to the noise of an announcement declaring the imminent arrival of the boat at the dock, and hustled out of our beds to watch the lights of Italy emerge from the mists of the morning. We hauled our bags down the stairs and onto Italian soil, tired and sleepy but glad for a change of pace. We had no idea what the rest of the day would bring.

It turns out we had a very long train ride ahead of us, from the port city of Brindisi all of the way to the southern tip of Italy at the city of Reggio de Calabria. But since there was no train that ran straight from one city to the next, we had to board a total of four trains, each with a duration of an hour or two before a short layover. But each stop we had to switch tracks, and that meant dragging our luggage in a subway underneath the platform we had arrived upon, and back up to the other side where we would have to haul it onto the train, store it in a small compartment, usually taking two people to lift it high above our heads in storage, and then repeating the process over and over again. By the end of the day I was nearly crazy from sitting down for so long and so tired of hauling my bags up and down so many flights of stairs that I was ready to wear the clothes on my back for the rest of the trip and throw my luggage off of the moving train. One pair of underwear cannot be THAT bad, can it? But my better judgment got the best of me and I kept on slogging my stuff around, until we reached the train station at Reggio and could put it safely in the hands of the cab drivers.

As if that weren’t bad enough, we arrived at the hotel to discover that the reservations for our group had not been made by the travel agency. Instead, we were left sitting in the lobby for a good hour while Toumazou and Jarrett got on the phone with the powers that be and figured out where we would actually be staying, a good few miles farther outside the city, and a hotel with no heat or hot water. Fun. Luckily we were only staying two nights.

The next morning we awoke to what I have discovered is the typical Italian breakfast: a croissant and a caffe latte, loaded up with sugar to disguise the taste of the coffee. Compared to the Grecian thick thick yogurt, the site of this small breakfast was kind of disheartening, especially considering that with Toumazou we were never sure when lunch was coming. But we ate it up and it was surprisingly filling, and then walked out into the lovely day to go to the museum at Reggio.

Because we were so far from town we took a public bus, a smelly and crowded but relatively efficient affair, before we were dropped off in what looked like the town center—a square with the museum on one side and a statue, surrounded by a number of shops, and pasticceries, and pizzerias.

The Reggio museum is small but well done, and most of the finds were things we had seen before, the ever-present Minyan Ware, tons of Attic black and red figure pottery. The unusual objects in the museum included some terracotta relief plaques depicting Dionysus and Demeter, two gods associated both with death and with the harvest. They sat stiffly side by side in an archaic style, holding the symbols of their reign before them—the drinking cup and the wheat, and remain suspended from the ceiling contemplating the edge of their terracotta world for all of eternity. Or until they are broken—we saw a number of incomprehensible or barely reconstructed bits.

The wow moment of this museum came when we went downstairs to the basement and confronted two huge figures of Greek nude heroicism—The Riace Bronzes, so called because of their place of discovery. Deposited mysteriously in the sandy beaches off of the coast, in about 8 meters of water, no trace of shipwreck, they were found by a snorkeler who mistook the upraised hand of one of the Bronzes as a victim of mob violence. Realizing that the flesh was instead bronze, he contacted the authorities and two of the dozen or so of original Greek bronze lifesize statues was unearthed from the muck.

There they stand, side by side in the typical contrapposto. One of their arms is bent to lean upon a now lost spear, the other drifts casually at the side as the body sways to the weight hung on the broad bronze musculature. They are the pinnacle of the ideal Greek athlete, heavily muscled with curling beards and a straight aquiline nose. They look very similar in pose and in stature, except one of them has a helmet, like the helmet seen on the famous bust of Pericles, while the other’s remains bare. And only one of the original ivory inset eyes remains, leaving this Riace with an odd expression, where as the other stares vacantly out of empty eye sockets. Although there is some controversy to their date, most people accept that they are bronze originals from the classical period, sometime around 450 BC, slightly later than the Artemesion Zeus/Poseidon that we saw in the Athens Museum. They are stunning pieces—Ambrice and I immediately busted out our sketchbooks and furiously did some figure studies.

There was another interesting bronze head—one of a pair called the Portocello bronzes, known as a philosopher because of his absurdly long beard and crooked nose, that looks like a kind of portraiture, highly unusual because the Greeks tended to do idealistic studies of heroes, and not the real flesh and blood of a frail man.

After that, early in the afternoon, we were free to go. Not wanting to return to the hotel so early, we wandered around Reggio, a town with a whole street set aside for shopping. The cars were blocked off and the European women with their tall boots and skinny jeans were out in full force, with their moderately disdainful looks and their huge bug eyed sunglasses and their huge hair. We stood out like sore thumbs—dressed in bright colors, with our boat shoes and camera cases and the perpetual look of awe. But looking in all of the shops was a pleasant enough experience. The European fashions seem to be much more dressed up and concerned with brights and darks in color, not the pairing of pastels that is the norm at Davidson. After window shopping for a while, we stopped in at a store to ask where the nearest food was; we had only seen coffee shops so far and were getting pretty hungry.

The clerk knew almost no English, but with my phrasebook Italian and Ambrice and I’s knowledge of Spanish we managed to understand each other enough to get directions to a local panini shop, with the helpful addtion of Jess’s mangere from French to substitute for our Spanish comer. Then the directions for left and right and straight were simple enough to follow, she wrote down the name and off we went. We did manage to find it, a small hole in the wall with a huge list of sandwich varieties, completely in Italian. With the help of some local teenagers that were in line behind us that laughed at our incompetence with the menu, we figured out what went into and how to say (como se dice) the food we wanted before we sat down to our first genuine Italian food since entering the country. Of course, it was delicious.

It was quickly followed by a dessert of gelato, what else, which I actually managed to order almost completely in Italian, except for the fact that I didn’t know the word for “scoops”. I just said “two” and hoped that he got the hint, which he did, and I asked the price, understood the answer he gave, and paid him in exact change. Kudos for me! An entire Italian experience.

Then we had to take the bus back to our hotel, which was all of the way across town. We ended up getting on the wrong bus line, and headed the wrong direction all of the way to the end of the line where the driver forced us to get out, but thanks to our Spanish skills once again we loaded another bus, and after switching buses a few times and asking questions in our spangalian we finally managed to get home. I went to my room for an afternoon siesta, and awoke just in time to go grocery shopping for the picinic of the night: a wonderful fruit salad with yogurt and gnutella (what else?).

But, not wanting to return to our work, Ambrice, Jess, Chris, Sam, Anne and I stayed in Ambrice’s room and had a four hour conversation, that lasted well into the night and covered such diverse topics as Davidson vs Ivy league work load, scary movie plots that we retold to those who hadn’t seen given movie, good books, the new president of Davidson, course schedules, nostalgia for things of the late 80s/early 90s which included: Little Shop of Horrors, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, The Chronicles of Narnia, giga pets, Mario, and all those things that we thought were SO COOL in elementary and middle school and could laugh about now. The VH1 show I love the 80’s is a perfect summary of our childhoods, and we reenacted it story after story. But right about when we were exhausting our retelling of movie plots one of Ambrice’s roommates returned home and sent us all to bed, which was probably a good idea anyway. I fell asleep with the noise of a local discotec thumping in my ears.

This morning came early, but it was greeted by another Caffe Latte—which I decided I am starting to like, a croissant marmalata, and another packing-and-hauling of bags down to the taxis and off to the port, where we were to catch an early morning ferry from Reggio to Sicily, and from there take a bus, stopping along the way but finally coming to rest in Syracuse.

The first place that we stopped was called Taormina, the site of an ancient Greco-Roman theater. The bus stopped in a stark looking bus parking lot just outside of the city, where we loaded another bus to the inner part of the city. THE sun was shining and the sky was a bright blue. All of the buildings had a creamy tan wash, with scrolls of iron adorning the balconies of the upper levels. Our bus trundled into the city and we ventured out into the Italian day. We lunched in the square, a bunch of open air cafés and trees with benches demarcated the area where a number of roads met. At the far corner a booth selling gelato stood and sold its cool tasty treats to us. We had a long time for lunch, so we walked into some small shops that sold a number of highly priced purses and shoes, watches and even painted ceramics. We continued down to a region where a grand church stood on a plateau overlooking the water. The church rose up, a white building with Corinthian columns and volutes arching its way up the front, surmounted by a big cross, the ave maria in a niche above the entrance, looking down upon us all.

I looked over the green rugged countryside and back into the city, where the winding roads with their iron scrolled balconies hung heavy with potted plants and the sounds of accordions and the smells of pasta cooking. Italy looked like the female consort to the rugged Greece, an older lady with good taste that always smells faintly of spice and bread, compared to the grizzled Greece with his fresh vegetable breath and retsina. The architecture more ornate, compared to the stark white sides of the Greek buildings, with its volutes and echanthus leaves and tapering silhouette. The heavily ornate Byzantine and Greek orthodox churches contrast with the white colonnaded interiors of the Catholic buildings, stark except for the windows and the altar where the nave is filled with lifelike paintings of Christ and crosses with and leaves gilded only at the edges.

We surveyed the town and then moved our way back through the shops to reach the center of the town, were Jarrett led us to the Theater. The second largest in Sicily, this theater had a capacity of about 15,000, with the Roman modifications in mudbrick stacked upon the bowl carved by the Greeks. The columns and arches on the stage building stand in stark contrast to the bright blue sky, and the proud snow covered Mt Etna rose and put its head in the clouds at the distance. The seats have crumbled but have been covered metal and wood scaffolding, and we went halfway up the cavea to hear our lecture. When it was done, we moved to the very top of the theater, where moving past the seats we could see down the other side of the mountain and out to the water.

The rolling green hills dotted with terracotta roofs folded down into the azure water, that glowed bright in the afternoon sun. Clouds marched along the tops of the hills, crowning them, and the entire scene was framed by the upstanding brick walls of the theater. We all loved the day and the place and took tons of pictures, before descending back down into the town and loading the bus to stop at Syracuse.

We got to Syracuse very late into the day, but the hotel had wonderful big rooms, a refrigerator, and a downtown area that we watched slide by from the bus window and then out to our hotel, an American type that had a large number of school groups. We spent most of the evening checking up on our email, camping out by the side of the road and enduring the strange looks by the Italians, went grocery shopping and had a great dinner before reading and going to sleep.