Italy
: Introduction
[This section is in the earliest
stages of development:28
December 2006
]
I have visited Italy many times. At first, perhaps due both to my age and inexperience, I found the places I visited to be rather tired and run down. I found it hard to grasp the attraction of crumbling old churches, foetid alley ways, and mosquito whine of Vespas everywhere. I was close to my school days of learning Latin and living in a city (Chester, UK) that traded heavily on its Roman past. My passage through countryside used to be at a fast walking pace, rather than lingering to drink in the scenerey. Now that I am much older, my tastes have changed, and I have also grown in experience about what is of greater or lesser value in the grand scheme of things. The cities, towns, villages and countryside of Italy now resonate with much that I have come to understand about the continent in which I have lived all my life. On other pages I have written about Rome and about Venice.
Sicily
I visited
Sicily
with my
father in 1977, staying in a seaside resort, Giardini-Naxos, near
Taormina
(of D.H. Lawrence fame).
Taormina
has an ancient Greek amphitheatre and some very pleasant gardens, both of which
are worth visiting if one is staying nearby. I saw something of
Catania
,
but now recall only a large, bustling city with an attractive park / formal gardens near the city centre.I should like to visit the little town on the north coast of Sicily immortalised by Tornatore in the movie Cinema Paradiso.
We went on a coach tour of Etna, a
rather active volcano. The scenery looked a bit like how one might imagine the
Moon or Mars, but with snow, clouds of steam and other gases, and tourists. I was a little disappointed that we did not go to the summit, but that is how I was in those days. I recall not only how cold it was standing in the snow (obviously we were high enough), but also some typical volcanic features, such as vents, and tunnels created by cooled, solified lava while the hot, molten lava flowed away downhill. We
also went on a day trip to the
Aeolian Islands
, north of
Palermo
, my father to Lipari where
he had some pumice business to arrange, and me to Vulcano where I took my first
and only natural mud bath. I climbed to the top of the dormant volcano, and saw
native sulphur around some of the gaseous vents.
Tuscany
I visited
Tuscany
in August
1999, flying into
Pisa
(about which
I wrote a poem). The Campo dei
Miracoli, with the
Leaning Tower
,
Camposanto, cathedral and baptistery, is wonderful. The Camposanto has stunning
medieval murals (which, it almost goes without saying, British bombers made a
good and fairly thorough attempt to destroy during the second world war.) The
rest of
Pisa
was much less
interesting.
I stayed for a week in the towered city of San Gimignano
(which is sumptuously photographed in the film Tea with Mussolini). This
little city does fill with tourists, but its medieval streets are unmissable,
as is the view over the Tuscan countryside from the top of one of the towers.
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San Gimignano from a distance. I walked along the road from which this
photograph was taken. There are some lovely Tuscan countryside walks around
San Gimignano.
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The hotel in which I stayed was about a mile from the city. This had the
benefits of being more peaceful than hotels in the city centre, away from all
the tourists, and the luxury of a swimming pool. This was the view walking
through the woods in the morning.
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The central piazza in San Gimignano.
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I found Volterra less interesting, although more obviously Etruscan. (I love
the spin given to the Etruscans, who were reputed to have loved life and lived
it to the full - carpe diem!). Siena
is a much larger city. Certainly the Campo, its 14th century central piazza,
around which the Palio (its annual horse race) is run, is worth experiencing
(analogous with the open space at Place de Beauborg in central Paris).
More significantly, the cathedral is very impressive, with its bands of black
and white marble stonework, and fascinating mosaics on the pavement floor of
the nave.
I should also like to visit Firenze (Florence),
Assisi, and maybe Capri.
One day, my spoken Italian will be sufficient to sustain a walking holiday
during which I should like to go looking for porcini mushrooms in the woods.
p.g.h@btinternet.com
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