A Question of Settling

I suppose the logical question is what did we do for the Fourth of July yesterday.

Nothing.

I worked, trying to finish a rambling, disjointed post (see above) before moving on to my German lessons. Himself was at the office, playing mediator between his European team and the expectations of their American counterparts who, of course, were all out of the office. We roasted potatoes and a sea trout for dinner and afterwards took a walk in the fading light, walking first under the trees along the pale green-blue River Saalach as it tumbled northward toward its convergence with the River Salzach, then turning back along the Salzach to home.

There were no fireworks. There will be a splendid display during Salzburg’s Rupertikirtag festival in September. We’ll wait for those. Nor I did not pull out the U.S. Marine Corps Band CD. No Stars and Stripes Forever for me, not this year. It was day like many others, a day on which we were grateful for dry weather, a comfortable place to live and loving companionship.

All this seems to answer another question, one that was put to me all the time while we lived in Ireland: ‘Are you settled yet?’

An unsettling question, that. A question that’s nearly impossible for me to answer. I suppose I’m a kind of unsettled individual, at best. I’m a drifting sort of person, unsure and aimless at the best of times, a girl who is still waiting to grow up, fighting all the same growing old.

An American acquaintance in Ireland, someone I knew causally over the two and a half years we were there, told me as we were preparing to leave that it was just as well. ‘You’ve never settled here,’ she said.

When I told him, Himself was indignant on my behalf. After all, we had our house, which we had designed and furnished with care. We lived among a network of a large extended family. We attended weddings, christenings, First Communions and, particularly, funerals. We voted. We had gym memberships and were greeted on the streets and when we went into shops. Who was to say I had not settled?

Yet, in a way, she was right. Such intimacy as we developed with others remained within the family. In some ways, we were waiting for life to begin. And then, almost suddenly, we uprooted and moved to Salzburg.

Have I settled in Salzburg, then? Can I even define what that would be?

Skirting the question yet again, I think back to when we moved to our house, our first house, in Thousand Oaks. Himself envied me, he said, because I seemed to take to our new neighbourhood at once, in a way he never did. It was the archetypal California ranch-style neighbourhood of irregular blocks punctuated by cul-de-sacs, neat sidewalks bordered by grassy ‘parking strips’, a neighbourhood very much like the Sunnyvale, California, neighbourhood I grew up in. It was so like our childhood home that my sister said on seeing it for the first time, wonder in her voice, ‘You live in Beverly Cleary’s house.’

That suburban community with it tidy, mid-century stucco houses surrounded by rectangular lawns and patios was far from the dwellings in the small Irish towns where Himself spent much of his youth. It was further still the rolling farmland where he spent the rest of it, the same countryside where I, apparently, failed to settle during our time there.

And now we live in a flat at the edge of a central European city, in a neighbourhood that cannot be termed urban, rural or suburban, having elements of all three. When we arrived, we had few reference points, architectural, social, cultural or familial. My circle of acquaintances is small; it is through good luck or magnanimous fortune that we have wonderful neighbours who speak fluent English, else I would have been cut off nearly completely.

And, yet, oddly, I have settled, if by ‘settling’ one means a sense of feeling grounded in my surroundings. More and more, when I look out the window of the flat or of the bus, or take in the landscape as I cycle to the market, I feel at peace with the scene around me.

I struggle, naturally, with learning German. Even though I make my way around the city comfortably, being unable to speak fluently affects me at odd times. When the phone rings – which it does rarely – I answer wondering whether I will be able to understand the purpose of the call. If it is Himself on the other end, my tension immediately relaxes. I put off making appointments, wanting to avoid those awkward exchanges in stumbling German with the receptionists who answer the phone. (Once one woman, frustrated with my incomprehension, hung up on me. I took a deep breath and called back to begin again.) I worry about what could happen if I found myself in a real emergency.

Sunday I participated in a 5K Frauenlauf – a fun-run – as part of a team from The English Center, an English bookshop and language school. Standing in line before the start of the race, I asked the woman in front of me, in German, the time. Disconcertingly, she answered in German, and I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t understand what she said. I am used to hearing German over loudspeakers, but I long for the day when rather than sounding merely interesting, it will be also comprehensible.

But still, simply participating in the race, albeit as part of a team of English speakers, created another tie between me and the community. All along the route, Salzburgers stood and cheered as we passed.

‘Bravo, bravo’, an old man shouted as I turned the corner on which he stood. That I certainly understood.

I’m not suggesting that by doing the Frauenlauf I am now settled. It was a single morning; afterwards I came home and slept, nursing the hip I’d thrown out along the way. I rose the next morning – the morning of the Fourth of July – and went about my business. Alone, as usual, for most of the day, I limped, my hip still sore, and wondered how I will manage the medical system here to have it adjusted. In America, in Ireland, I would know how to find a chiropractor and how to make an appointment. It’s not so simple here. It’s an example, however small, of how I have not ‘settled’.

All the same, that the Fourth of July, a date that should have resonated and made me homesick, passed without much more than a ripple in my awareness suggests an important, if subtle, shift in my consciousness. Being settled, like being happy, is a fluid state. I can’t define or describe it; I’m not sure I even know it.

All I can do is refer to the lightness in my being when I see the sun brighten behind the green wood outside the window. Feel the rightness in the sight of the corner of a familiar door reflected in the wardrobe mirror. Or know comfort in hanging heavy clean towels on the line. Sometimes, this simple peace is enough. 

Venice

I don’t know why I bought that copy of the then-recently released Jan Morris edition The Stones of Venice in 1980. I found it at Cosmic Aeroplane, a quirky, counterculture booklovers paradise (and headshop) in Salt Lake City and, beguiled perhaps by the enthusiasm of the book dealer, paid money I couldn’t afford for the lovely hardbound edition, its jacket a wash of pale blue, a detail from a watercolour of Venice.

Studying Victorian English literature, I had been reading, after a fashion, John Ruskin and trying to incorporate Criticism as one subject in a faltering doctoral programme. But I never made much progress with Ruskin’s dense, meandering prose. He remained an icon to be wondered about rather than a companion of the mind.

For years, though, the book, rarely opened, sat under a stack of ‘art books’ in a pile, strategically placed on a living room table to signal our ‘good taste’. Occasionally, I thumbed its pages, looking at the exquisite drawings and watercolours, but its thick ranks of type remained unpenetrated.

In truth, I never thought much about Venice. I remained nearly completely ignorant of its history, its location at the moon-shaped curve of land at the top of the Adriatic sea, of the fact that it is a series of islands, filled in by early settlers in the mouth of a broad lagoon, its buildings constructed on timber piers driven into the sea bed. I thought of it, when I thought of it at all, as merely another Italian city, shorthand for Art. Thousands of miles from where I lived, Venice was as remote as Asia, another stop on the tourist cruise I was destined never to take.

But I kept the book, one of many reminders of a part of myself I had hoped for but failed to nourish. Its dust jacket faded, developing tiny tears that lengthened as the years passed. Its edges were no longer smooth; dog-eared corners flared outward, spoiling the elegant coated paper, midway under the pile of disregarded books.

Preparing to ship our goods from California to Ireland, I culled a couple of hundred books – perhaps more – that I had kept since my university days. For some reason, though, I packed The Stones of Venice. From there it made the journey with us to Salzburg. So it was, when we decided to visit Venice, I unearthed it from the boxes still stacked under the stairs to take a look at what Ruskin was up to. I had no idea what I would find when I sat down to read it. I thought only that I should try, at long last, to justify the long-ago impulse purchase.

Ruskin had taken his new wife Effie to Venice in 1851 for their honeymoon. While she immersed herself in its social life, Ruskin took measuring tape, pen and paper and set out to catalogue its Gothic architecture, writing as he did a treatise, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, on why he considered the style, which was to be displaced by Renaissance, the apotheosis of artistic achievement. The Stones of Venice is his painstakingly detailed accounting of Gothic architecture in Venice, in which he minutely describes arches, windows, balconies, columns and capitals, backed by measurements, charts, sketches and diagrams.

Soon I was immersed in a welter of detail in Ruskin’s attempts to classify stylistic differences in architectural details.  Reading, I took notes. I looked up definitions. I made lists of his criteria for the Gothic. I relied on him to set the guideposts for what to see in Venice – and how to see it.

And, when I first saw Venice, I tried to view it through Ruskin’s lens. But his attempt to classify and explain the mystery of Venice succeeds only partially. For Venice is surreal. Meticulous as his drawings and measurements are, they capture only a sliver of its presence.

Coming out of the train station into the haze of a summer’s day more heated than clear, we found the air dense with noise. Following instructions sent by our hotel, we wheeled our luggage over uneven pavement and up a steep bridge over one of the smaller canals amid crowds of other tourists and ordinary people of all ages, some stopping to talk or to take pictures or gaze in windows.

After checking in, we again set out, using the Blue Guide – my top choice of guide books for depth of information – exploring the Canneregio district, where our hotel was located.

Finding our way out of the crowds and into narrow, less-travelled calles and campos, crossing narrow canals and walking along the fondamentas, we wandered narrow lanes, at times only wide enough for three or four to walk abreast. From one window high overhead, an old woman leaned out, spitting, aiming for those who passed below her. From most, thought, it was laundry that hung, strung in colourful pennants across the passageways. Bright sun cut swaths of nearly colourless light in otherwise shadowed corners, arching and slashing designs on the pavement, sometimes cutting through iron railings to etch curling motifs. The walls were worn, bricks exposed, stucco peeling like old wallpaper, discordant colours jarring.

Then, at the end of a low archway, half in shadows, the wall would suddenly fall away and water lap at the edge of the pavement. We would find ourselves at the edge a narrow rio, the smallest of waterways that run between the canals. Sun glinting from the waters’ surface dazzled. Rippling light danced across walls, shimmered gracefully on walls, floated like thistledown on air currents.

Alleys led to narrow, high-ridged bridges that fed us onto fondamentas paralleling narrow rios, that, around corners opened onto Campos. Everywhere was the noise of motors, shattering the air between buildings as boatmen and -women navigated the passages, revved engines, puttered, idled. Boats of all sizes lay moored along the edge or, heavily laden with machinery or goods or people, churned the green water, which frothed effervescent with white. Then, around the next corner, we would cross a bridge and stare along glass-smooth water, its surface swelling, flexing solid yet fluid, reflecting the blue of the sky or of a boat cover.

Everywhere, colour overwhelmed with its garish brightness. Deep ochre and faded yellows, deep forest-greens were cut across by brilliant fuchsia and cerise. Dingy, neglected churches, walls faded to cream, were slashed by the shadows that cut diagonally across the campos they fronted, obscuring the statues that surmounted their facades. Walls were broken by balconies and punctuated with worn inlaid medallions; bronzes ornamented doors; small statues perched over doorways. Everywhere the walls and pavements seemed ancient enough and porous enough to conceal the minutes, hours, days, months, years and centuries they contained, their history swelling inside crevices, time enveloped by their depths.

These depths threaten to spill out through peeling layers of faded paint and eroded stucco, revealing worn brick and stone. Ruskin recalls the splendour of the city at the height of its glory in the 14^th century, this jewel, ‘The Most Serene Republic of Venice’, its palaces glittering with white marble, gilded and inlaid with porphyry and serpentine. The centuries passed; its surfaces decayed; its beauty lies now not in precious surfaces but in its contrasts of surface and colour, of light and shade, its rough textures slashed by bright graffiti or startlingly brilliant flowers tumbling from window boxes and over walls.

With its mass pinned into the surrounding lagoon, the city seems to float. And, after several days of boarding crowded, lurching vaporetti that criss-crossed the canals’ churning waters, or waiting to board on bobbing, moored platforms, and, on the third day of our visit, the longer boat journey to the outlying islands, I seemed to feel it float. I had the sensation of rocking, even when I was at rest, especially while lying flat on the bed. (This phenomenon, is apparently associated with frequent boat journeys and, fortunately, it subsided in me about three days after we returned.)

‘The city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone,’ writes Erica Jong of Venice. It does seem reflected in a thousand fragmented mirrors. Everywhere you turn, water reflects the city’s colours, textures, buildings and people. So more than most cities, Venice seems never at rest, never static. Its pavements teem with people; its waterways churn with vessels of all descriptions. The disparate colours and textures of its buildings jostle so the eye roves restlessly over them. Intense light drains colour from near-deserted calles that then slide under shadowed archways; either way, spaces seem mysterious. Nothing is clear; nothing reveals its true being. There are no straight lines; all is distorted by time or light or water.

Experience seems to fragment too. Light, colour, noise, the interminable rocking of vaperetti, shifting crowds threading through thronged streets, beggars and hawkers in their midst, delivery men wheeling trolleys, all combine to shatter continuity. Life flickers, shattering, like the flickering effect one feels while moving under a flashing strobe light. Unlike Ruskin, I could not contain the experience; no more than I can catalogue its buildings, can I catalogue the days and night we spent there. I could write of the art we saw – the magnificent Titian Assumption of the Virgin at the church of the Frari, the jewel-like Bellini altarpiece in the same church, so lovely I felt a physical tug of the heart when I saw it, the lively and beautiful canvases of the Stations of the Cross in the church of San Polo by the younger Tiepolo, and, of course, the soaring mosaics of San Marco.

I could recount of disappointment at what we could not see, especially at the Accademia gallery, under restoration, where many of the most remarkable works were not on view. As with all of our trips, there is more to tell than I can write, more beauty than I can capture. But, especially with Venice, the experience is refracted through a hundred thousand bits of colour, movement, light, texture, and image, a week-long mosaic of being, irreducible, impossible to discipline into an orderly march of words marshalled into ranks of sentences and paragraphs, grammar and syntax. It shimmers, it moves, it metamorphoses, and, as with life itself, what one would say about it in one sentence would be a lie in the next.

A Midsummer's Evening

Yesterday, midsummer, the Solstice, a lovely warm day, though threatening at times, it warmed up toward evening. Himself and I had dinner on the veranda, which practically shimmered in the unusual heat. We ate late, as usual, not sitting down before 8 or possibly 8:30. Afterward, enchanted by the gold light still striking the tall slender trunks of the trees in the wood, beguiled by the bright patches on the grass, the thin blue of the sky, I suggested we take a walk. We set off sometime after 9. I had my camera in my back pocket, but by the time we reached the fishing pond, the shadows were so long that the path was in twilight. Still the light off the pond, the pumpkin-coloured house across the way mirrored neatly in its brown-green surface, was beautiful.

We walked, as usual, to the Spitz, where the River Saalach pours into the Salzach, right at the border with Germany. There we stopped to watch the last fading pink in the pale sky over the confluence. A couple of young women had a small fire going in the sand, preparing, I would say, for a Solstice celebration. The thin blue smoke drifted over the rivers’ surface, mist I first thought, but no, smoke. It was too warm for mist, I suppose.

Across the Salzach, on the far side of the river, a slightly larger party was going, with two or three small fires and a band of smaller ones surrounding the group, candles or lantern, I would say.

‘Is that person naked,’ Himself asked.

We squinted through the dimming light. There were bodies as well as flames reflected in the river’s surface, but

‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess not.’

It wouldn’t have surprised us though, not really. It seemed a New Agey kind of group, gathering, no doubt, to mark the Solstice. Nakedness would not be out of line. No bother.

We walked along, companionable in a new-found way, sometimes holding hands, sometimes just touching. Just before we got to the bend in the path, the bend that’s just where a wooden bridge crosses a stream, we met another couple coming our way, younger, white patches on his pants just reflecting the last remnants of light.

‘Grüß Gott,’ they said.

‘Grüß Gott,’ we replied.

There was companionableness in their greeting: often in these walks others don’t acknowledge those they pass. But it was a sacred time, and others who were out in it were more than passers-by; they were fellow partakers of the magic.

The path, now overhung by dense foliage on both sides, became a tunnel. We rounded the bend, just by the bridge, and

‘Look!’ Said Himself. ‘A firefly!’

So there was. And another, and more, and more and more.

We stopped, enchanted. Tiny green-white stars, untethered from the heavens, flitted or hovered in among the bushes. We moved on a few paces and stopped again. Standing on the wooden bridge, staring into the water below, we could still see them, as one or two drifted out beyond the leafy banks.

‘I’ve only seen one firefly before, once, last summer,’ I said.

Himself said he’d only seen them once before, in Germany, years ago, before we met, walking with two young women in the early hours of a morning. ‘And up to no good,’ he added.

‘Are there fireflies in Ireland?’ I wondered.

‘No.’

We crossed the bridge and once more were walking parallel to the Salzach, trees along one side, water reflecting occasional lights from the opposite bank on the other. A small white waterfowl drifted north along the tide. The onion-domed steeple of the Bergheim church glowed pale gold. On its hill far above, Maria Plain was illuminated too.

On our right, in the low brushes, more fireflies glowed. All along the way, they danced or, occasionally, hovered in pairs, a few inches apart. We turned right onto the path leading through the park still watching their pale gleam.

‘It makes you understand why people believed in Sprites,’ said Himself.

It does. It was like scores and then more scores and more scores of tiny fairy lights, held by the Unseen, processing in the dark. One could imagine an invisible but parallel world, with the Little People going about their business, moving through the night.

Then – a crash in the bushes and something larger ran parallel and dashed across the path. Barely discernible but not invisible, another dark shape followed. Young deer, panicked no doubt by our voices, rushed to safety.

Then, passing the park maintenance building, we were suddenly under the harsh glare of man-made light.

‘Every building needs a fat florescent bulb,’ said Himself, grumbling.

Soon though, we once more entered the unlit dirt track running round the fishing pond. The fireflies still flitted in the dark leaves that bordered our walk. Down around the bottom of the track we went, skirting the bike and long pole of a fisherman, the lone holdout in the dark. We climbed the brief overgrown path between the wood and the last house on the street, still watching fireflies.

‘Look,’ he said, stopping suddenly. ‘Look at how green they are. Like emeralds. Greener than emeralds!’

I looked. In fact, they didn’t look as green as emeralds to me. They looked pale green, probably reflecting the light of the leaves.

But I said nothing as we turned into our driveway and climbed the stairs to the flat.

Magic is magic, after all.

In Which I Am Nearly Made A Liar

Last night, Himself and I sat on the veranda after dinner, watching the restless sky, which seethed with pewter-grey clouds.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Swallows!’

‘Sure,’ said I. ‘Make a liar of me.’

And I told him about the day’s post, written just hours before, in which I had said no swallows swoop and soar over our garden.

But I looked up and, sure enough, overhead flew a dozen, maybe a score, of swallows. They passed high above, darted into the silver mist, and circled briefly over the towering trees at the wood’s edge, and disappeared. Perhaps the storm and heavy rain had driven them from the river. Who knows?

Far from making a liar of me, their passage underscored my point.

For though we are less than a kilometre from the river, they didn’t linger here. The swallows dance no dance for us; we are just part of the patchwork of green, brown, grey and dun, the maze of concrete, asphalt, stucco and brick, over which they pass. 

Summer Skies

While it would be gross fabrication to say I miss the U.S., it would be mere exaggeration to say I am homesick for Ireland. We followed the Queen’s recent visit with uncanny fascination, surprised at the waves of emotion that overcame us at the reconciliation and mutual respect that arose from the ceremonies. I regretted that I could not stand near the motorway running between Cashel and Cork to see her motorcade pass – until I realised they made the journey by helicopter. Still, in my mind’s eye, I stood at our sitting room window in Tipperary and saw – across the pastures of Tincurry – her Range Rover glide through the landscape, past the gaze of Galtymore.

Likewise, we would have liked to have been there to see the crowds welcoming Obama, though, as it happened, we were in Italy during his visit. As well, when Tipperary recently beat Cork, its long-standing nemesis, in the first test of the summer-long hurling national championship, we wished we could have been watching the match from the comfort of the Garryroan sitting room.

Those are public occasions, of course. The twinges of nostalgia, those passing moments of longing, more often come in the odd, private moment. Weeding the garden in the stillness of an overcast afternoon, the breeze soft and pregnant with rain, the clear trill of blackbirds the loudest sound I hear, I am put in mind the long, overgrown garden at the back of my mother-in-law’s house. Looking up, I notice the swell of currents and ripening raspberries on the bush, and I wish, once more, that she could have seen our garden here.

I recall also the low rolling hills of Ireland, green fields cross hatched by deeper green hedgerows and grey clouds swelling on the horizon. Perhaps the memory is triggered by a photo; perhaps it comes suddenly to my imagination. The Austrian landscape is beautiful, its wide open meadows spreading against the soaring Alps breathtaking. The ancient onion-domed steeples and charming villages, dignified in these vast spaces, still astonish me. But my response to the Irish landscape, whether imagined or seen, is instinctual, as if primordial. It’s the quickening recognition that draws one toward a long-missed loved one.

It’s not just the landscape I miss, of course. I think of languorous warm Sunday afternoons, when, dinner dishes done, we wander aimlessly. Waiting, perhaps, for the Sunday match to begin, we sit in the glassed-in porch of my mother-in-law’s house, where, overheated by the welcome sun, acrid dust rising from the elderly brown cushions competes with the sharp scent of geraniums. Or we drift to the long tunnel of the polythene house, where the interior temperature rises a good 10 degrees higher than the cool afternoon. Flying insects ping against its taut surface; the air is rank with humus and sweet with ripe peaches and apricots. Rusted tools, rough twine, unspooled in irregular loops, faded boxes and broken crockery litter the tottering timber table. A drumming flutter beats against the plastic in the corner as a thrush, frantic, finds her way out the opening at the far end.

Later, in the long evening, we sit outside, if we’re lucky, to watch the colour drain from the light over the tips of the towering hedges. We try to distinguish the music of the thrush from the melody of the blackbird. Overhead, swallows and swifts dance their soaring song, filling the sky with swooping arabesques, their high chattering cries hanging in the air. They fill me with contentment.

We see no swallows from our veranda in Salzburg. I spotted, last summer, a few over the Salzach as I cycled along it in the evening. They flitted over the river, dancing from current to current just above the water, their cries muffled by the roar of the water. But they do not dance over our garden.

So it was with exhilaration I listened to the high shrill twittering of a sky full of swallows above the basilica in Padua. They soared too over the campos and canals of Venice, filling the heaven with their shrieks, weaving an elegant ballet against the fading blue light, blue reflected and intensified by the mirror-like waters below. In the heat of an Italian evening, I saw the swallows and thought of Ireland and home.

View of the Galtee Mountains from Garryroan, South Tipperary, Ireland
Photo by Lorraine Seal

Giotto in Padua

In February, we made a trip to Rome in celebration of our 25^th anniversary. To celebrate my  60^th birthday, I requested a trip to Venice, a city I never imagined I’d have a chance to visit and of which I had few mental images.

Venice has the advantage of being within driving distance of Salzburg, something over five hours. Rather than make the whole journey in a day, we booked four nights in Venice, and then, working backwards, I booked a night in Sirmione, one of dozens of towns and villages that dot the shores of Lago di Garda, the large Alpine lake in the north of Italy, and another night in Padua, which lies less than a hour west of Venice. I had left one night open, the last night of the week and, at the urging of our sister-in-law, Moyra, we decided to spend it in Verona on our return journey.

Venice, Padua and Verona are cities associated in my mind with the plays of Shakespeare, with literature I haven’t necessarily read, and with the ghosts of art history lectures decades ago. It was then I fell in love with medieval and early Renaissance Western art with little expectation I would ever see the masterpieces in situ.

So it was with taut nerves and hard-to-contain excitement that I waited with about twenty others to be admitted to the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua to see the cycle of frescoes painted by Giotto for the ruling family of Padua in their private chapel. Depicting scenes from the life of Mary, mother of Jesus, from the life of Anne, her mother, and from the life of Christ, the cycle was completed in 1305. It is considered to be one of the masterpieces of Western art. 

An early master, Giotto bridges the divide between the stiffer, hierarchical figures painted against gold ground that mark medieval work and the opening up of perspective with naturalistic settings and more lifelike figures that heralded the coming of the Renaissance. Put plainly, he was one of the artists who opened our eyes so we could see the world differently.

The high, round vault of the chapel in Padua is painted deep blue with a regular pattern of gold stars. Across the ceiling and down the walls patterned bands of colour divide the space into panels, each of which frames a different scene from Mary’s life, so the whole is viewed like a picture book. They are lovely; the colours, both rich and soft, are varied. Giotto shows technical skill, too. The modelling of the drapery carefully rendered to indicate the solidity of the flesh, bone and muscle beneath. Backgrounds are simple but there is early use of perspective, so the depth of a scene in shown. Decorative borders under some of the panels are painted with such skill that they appear as if carved from wall.

But what draws one to the paintings is the humanness of the figures. Faces are beautiful and expressive. Tears stream down the mothers’ faces in the scene depicting the massacre of the innocents. The faces of Mary, her companions and John the Baptist are anguished as they cradle the body of the dead Christ, disposed from the cross. Over their heads, tiny angels mourn, arms spread in agony or clutched to their faces. In these faces, the artist captures vulnerability, volatility, softness and beauty.

Giotto, The Lamentation, Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Still, Giotto’s naturalism is not the realism of the later Renaissance and Baroque. The figures are charming and lifelike in the way of beautifully drawn picture book. They lack the full physicality and complete individualisation of painting that would follow in later centuries. However, like a child, I wanted to study every small detail, to hold them in my mind, to somehow own them though my first-hand experience of them. I love the translucence of the water that laps around Jesus’ legs as he stands in the Sea of Galilee while John baptises him. I love the delicately overlapping feathers in the angels’ wings and the softness of the women’s faces. Since I first was introduced to these works, in slides and four-colour pictures over thirty years ago, I have wanted to be in their presence.

Giotto, The Kiss of Judas, Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Frescoes are created by mixing pigment in plaster that is painted onto the surface of a wall, so they are chemically bound to it. This gives them durability, but they can be damaged by exposure to the elements, in particular salt. The frescos of Giotto in Padua are still in place more than seven hundred years – nearly three-quarters of a millennium – after they were created. Yet they have suffered some damage; to protect them from the effects of humidity caused by respiration, only twenty-five people at one time are admitted, and then for only fifteen minutes. All too soon for me, our fifteen minutes were up, and we were escorted out, passing on our way the next group of twenty-five waiting to be ushered in.

So Himself and I came out of the dim chapel into the heat and glare of a May afternoon in Padua. Before us stretched the week in Venice, where we would see many more landmark paintings and many more masterpieces of art. Seeing the Giotto frescoes was but one dream fulfilled. I can’t hold them in memory as acutely as I would like: to write this, I referred to images online, pale imitations of the originals that can only hint at their power.

I am lucky to have had the chance to worship at their shrine, inconceivably so. Little by little, I am learning to see the world differently.

The Spy at Another Site

Three months ago, I was asked to contribute to NileGuide, an travel planning site with on-the-ground 'Local Experts' in cities around the world. One of the reasons the Spy has been quiet is that writing for NileGuide has absorbed more time than I realised it would.

This is not to say I'm abandoning The Spy. These pages represent my personal commitment to myself. However, because of my silence here, this is what I've been up to on the NileGuide site.