Why Architects Really End Up Talking Like That

It's November, and it's getting hot. Yesterday I went down to our bodega (storeroom) to put away my winter sweaters and pirate hats and I came across a box of drawings from back in my first year of grad school.
            The drawing on top was a sort of vector diagram - done in footprints. Memories came rolling back. It had been a "assignment now - final product tomorrow!" all-nighter sort of project - in which we neophyte architects had been asked to go someplace where a lot of people came through and map the traffic patterns - putting all the four-dimensional traffic down on two-dimensional paper in an exciting and really neoteric fashion. (Neoteric: architecture-speak for 'an artistic vanguard that you imagined up right now all by yourself."
            And then we had to write about it. Obviously, the drawing would speak for itself, but in practical terms, a short museum-style blurb wouldn't go amiss.  (A good professor is way ahead of student neoterism as a matter of course.)
            The problem with being asked to describe a drawing project in a paragraph or two on short sleep and shorter notice is that you end up turning out some purely awful drivel.
            Because you weren’t thinking clearly. You weren't thinking at all - you were snoring between your words. And you were surrounded by people who'd gotten even less sleep that you had, and while you were confident that your own ideas were pretty darned great, to your sleep-deprived ears theirs approached towers of literary genius.
            There’s no color of jealously like sleepless green.

And I remembered that I'd written about it, afterwards, when I'd woken up. And pasted it to the back of my neoteric masterpiece so I wouldn't forget:

            One fellow held a degree in ancient literature.  He had mapped the smokers on their nicotine breaks in Dundas Square.
            “Since the Dawn of Time” he said solemnly, “Ancestral Man has been Drawn to Flame.”
            “That’s probably true” I agreed, grinding my teeth, and went off to ask editorial opinions on “The pulse, the tide, the ebb and flow of harried, feverish commuters at the Bloor-Yonge Subway station” from two students lying on the floor behind me and looking, respectively, vacuous and pained.
            One of them winced.
            "Isn't that a little…damp?"
            On cue, Mr. Ancient Literature walked past declaiming “And Now, a Tattered Subculture of Social Pariahs Clusters Around the Vestigial Memory of the Ancient Hearth Fire!”
            I, who belong to the extremely tattered Subculture that feels stoned rather than euphoric when we don’t sleep, turned back to my laptop, typed out ‘In my map I marked out a sour by fix goot frid” and ran spell-check twice.

Down in the bodega, I shut the box and sealed it up with tape, but I won't forget. I think I need a little ceremony.
            I'll unfurl the map.  I'll enter the pulsing commuter tide that hustle down my street at rush hour every evening. When the ebb and flow of shoulders and elbows have crumpled it beyond the reach of even the most accommodating professor, I will go home and make it an offering on the fires of my BBQ on my balcony.  Neoterically.

Doors and Holes

Mr Tabubil is feeling peevish. That 8.3 earthquake last September knocked our front door out of skew. and we now have a one centimeter gap between the bottom of the door and the floor.  It's not much gap, but in cold weather it leaks heat like a broken sieve, and whenever there's a wind, the draft hits the far side of the apartment with a speed that makes one ponder more exotic aspects of physics and meteorology.  It's probably something quantum.*
            Mr Tabubil has bought a rubber weather strip to cover the gap. 
We didn't get one last winter, because most of the city was in our position, and there was a run on the hardware stores and by the time everything was back in stock, the weather was warm.
            This evening he took the door off its hinges, screwed on the brass plate of the weather strip, and spent three quarters of an hour fussing and straining and worrying and fiddling and putting a hold in his hand and hammering and crimping and bashing and pulling to get the un-skewed door back on its hinges.  Turns out a lot of things were out of skew.
            And then he closed the door - and the rubber bit of the weather strip, quite unceremoniously, peeled off.

Ow.

Right now he is browsing the websites of the major hardware chains with the request to be left alone please, and, at intervals, huffing hugely.

*(Sir Pterry - respect.)

The Estufa

When you live in an earthquake zone, reliably solid stuff  like walls and roofs and windows are somewhat less reliable than they are in places where the earth doesn't rumble and realign itself every other week.
            Walls develop cracks.  Inspectors and building contractors smile and tell you that the cracks are superficial and happening exactly where they're meant to - along slab lines or down the side of a core - places where the building is designed to flex. Because Chileans build really really solid.
            Structural integrity is a very good thing, but in the day-to-day, non-crisis scheme of things -
            There are air gaps everywhere!
            Doors work their way off plumb, and spaces appear between door and frame.  (Our front door has been sticking pretty good since Wednesday last. Opening it takes a shoulder and a shove.)
            Windows rattle out of alignment and lean tipsily in their frames, and narrow wedges of empty space keep the air circulating in and out.
            Every couple of years you call in a man who spends a couple of days pushing on the glass, whispering to it, and tapping gently at pressure points with a rubber mallet, and you're right and tight again for a month or three  But mostly you shrug your shoulders and be glad that no room is sealed too tight for health or happiness. 
            In winter, it takes bit of remembering.  Winter storms whistle straight through your healthy, happy environment- running up and down the curtains, ruffling furniture, knocking over bottles over the kitchen -
            It makes you feel like a protagonist front and center in a really theatrical surround sound experience, but a winter storm that breaches the walls and comes right in the apartment and cozies up next to you on the sofa is cold.
            The first really cold day of autumn nuzzles its way into your bed in the night and burrows deep into the thermal mass of the cracked concrete walls and  the next thing you know you're sleeping under four feather quilts and wearing hot- water-bottles strapped to your waist under your winter coat. (This isn't an exaggeration. I've a friend on the top floor of a building in El Golf who wears a hot water bottle every year from May to September.)
            Freezing isn't actually mandatory. Most of the apartments built in Santiago in the last half century have radiant heating.* 
            Unfortunately, running radiant heat is extremely expensive. Chile has no natural fuel reserves. Hydro exists only in the south where the rivers are.** Coal, oil and natural gas are imported from overseas, and the prices reflect it.
           Most Santiaguinos spend winter wrapped around their estufa. An estufa is a small portable gas heater that sits on a little wire trolley. You trundle it around your apartment from room to room to work up a nice localized fug, and you are very happy that the local geology has blessed you with natural ventilation that lets the fumes out as fast as they build up.
            The average human being is not overly gifted with foresight. In Autumn we watch the leaves fall and we talk about the cold weather that's coming but hardly anybody remembers to fill their kerosene can in advance of the winter.  On the first really wet, windy morning of the year, the whole city rolls out of bed, winces as warm toe meets icy floor, and lets out a collective damn.  
           Because now you have to queue.
           The kerosene that fuels your estufa is purchased at your local service station. There's snow on the mountains, which would be cause for celebration, but you can't see it because of the low grey mist rolling between the trees and the buildings. A slow rain works steadily down your collar, drip by icy drop. The chill creeps up through the soles of your shoes into your feet. The gas station attendants have to fit filling kerosene cans in between serving the cars that are pouring in (because anyone with a car is torn between filling the kerosene and getting up into the mountains to see the snow in person) and it looks like this -
 

* Most of them under the floor as per general spec, but in our first apartment here in Santiago, some unsung architectural genius installed the radiant heating network in the ceiling. The only winter we didn't spend in three layers of sweaters and a woolly hat was the year the people downstairs had a sick baby and ran their own heat all day long. They burned whole gas-fields keeping the temperature up to 70, and we walked around in shirtsleeves and bare feet.

** There's a major political kerfuffle right now over a possible huge high-voltage power line that would run 2000 kilometers from Aysen up to Santiago.
 

Construction Happens, and Happens Some More

After all the wishing and planning and designing and ordering and purchasing was complete, the contractor and his maestros (workmen) moved in and things started happening rather precipitously.  In the past three weeks, we have had:  

1) The demolition of pretty much the whole apartment down to the concrete structural walls.  Floors, ceilings, doors, lintels, non structural walls - you name it, we dug it out.
2) Lots and lots of jackhammers. Tiles don't give up easily.
3) One very seasick apprentice who'd been manning a jackhammer in a small concrete space for two and a half days straight.
4) Electricians.  Everywhere. 
5) Ditto plumbers.
6) The original in-floor heating layer was poured funny, and there’s a seven cm slope differential in the living room floor that needs fixing.  Uh oh.
7) Concrete dust, everywhere.
8) Does anyone else smell that smell? 
9) An unexpected trip to the ER with probable ripped tendons all over my foot, and a very unexpected diagnosis of plantar fascitis.
10) Crutches.
11) Physiotherapy.
12) More Plumbers.
13) That smell can't possibly be real, right?
14) It's coming from the bedroom end of the flat?  Oh God, now we have to take up the bedroom floors, too.  You mean all of them?!?!
15) Rush shopping for new bedroom floors - on crutches.  And there's an eight centimeter differential that needs fixing in the master bedroom as well? How jolly.
16) More concrete dust.  Everywhere else.
17) Ceramicists laying tiles.
18) A seriously unhappy resident who calls the police because the ceramicists decided to use the spare key to come in on the weekend and make Very Loud Bashing Noises waaaaay outside of allowable-noise-hours, and going in person to yell at the ceramicists apparently didn't work.
19) Damage control. Much abasing. With chocolates.
20) Food poisoning. All Saturday night and all Sunday.  Did you know you can move really fast on crutches?
21) Ceramicists who, sulking about being bawled out by their general contractor, turn off their phones and refuse to come in to work on Monday. Tuesday they aren’t feeling quite up to par, so they don’t come in that day either. Burp.

Today the electrician is wiring up the bedrooms, and the ceramicists are back on the job, moving steadily through the kitchen and down the hallway. They do lovely work, but the noise really is incredible. I think the neighbor showed considerable restraint. If I'd heard them doing that above my head at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, I'd have skipped the local cops and called in a S.W.A.T. team. With helicopters.

Apartment Hunting in Santiago de Chile

When we arrived here two years ago, we were told that the comuna of Providencia has two sorts of apartments: we could have a brand new apartment with all mod cons, but it would be the size of a shoebox, and the mod-con kitchen would fit in a closet. Or we could have a larger apartment, but it would be older, and it would be falling apart.  “Literally” our rental agent had told us, her eyes wide.             
            “The larger apartments are in the older buildings and the owners don’t want to do anything and the walls are all falling down.”
            We had no interest in shoe-boxes with kitchens in closet, two years ago or this time around.  So, with no faith in named addresses, subtracting fifty-percent from listed square footages, and assuming that if an agent was talking, there was fibbing going on, I went out in my highest heels to find us a fixer-upper flat.  Something older, a place that needed a little love.  It’s liberating, looking at fixer-uppers to buy, instead of to rent.  You look less sardonically, and more judiciously.  You don’t need to concern yourself with the surfaces of things – past the cracking and peeling and molding and slumping, all the way down to the bones. 

Our ‘new’ place has lovely bones. Everything else, on the other hand - the building we’ve bought into is about twenty years old and all of the former owners have been… let’s be diplomatic and say that they were uninterested in the art of constructive maintenance, and leave it at that.
            When we took possession, there wasn’t a window in plumb or a functioning hinge in the place.  The floating floor listed and boomed alarmingly, the bedroom carpets appeared to have been the last resting place for twenty years worth of incontinent cats, and the cabinetry in the kitchen was in such an advanced state of mildew that they could be pulled apart with bare hands –
            But the bones are lovely. We’ve stripped the place right down to them, and now we are neck-deep in the agonizing, exhilarating process of building her back up. 

Burano and Torcello Don't Wear Gold Chains

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Venice.

Burano turned out to be charming.  The rains stopped as we motored out of the Murano canals, and by the time we’d reached Burano, the clouds had lifted above her church towers and let through a little watery sunlight.  We could see clear across the island.

            Once upon a time, Burano was a fishing village. Today the Buranese commute to the mainland, or make lace and bake shortbread cookies, and live in square houses painted bright primary colors. 

It appeared that nobody on the boat was collecting commissions from the lace factories – on shore we were let loose to walk through the little town. The lace was impressive, but we decided that the cookies were an elaborate practical joke on the tourists.  We fed ours to a flock pigeons.  Who hiccuped and gave us looks of deep distaste.  

Because of the wet, the streets were mostly empty and we were mostly alone – the colors of the houses were extraordinary – 

Pink, and purple, and yellow, and blue, and green, and orange, and bright red and bright yellow.  Alone in the damp streets, with the rain  to muffle our steps, it was none of it quite real, like walking through a stage set after  the set-builders have left and before the cast has come on stage –

And then we went to Torcello.  Torcello was the first island to be settled in the lagoon. In the tenth century there were ten thousand people living here, and the island was a bright and dynamic trading center with a forward looking future ahead of it. In the 12th Century the harbor silted up and the population decamped to the islands that are now Venice.  Today the island is a long, empty stretch of tidal marsh, with a ruined 11th century basillica on the west side of the island (currently undergoing restoration) a small museum with a guard who liked his wet afternoons sleepy, thank you signori, and hid behind his desk when we knocked, and a few small houses with vegetable gardens alongside.  

            Sic transit gloria mundi, but after the close quarters of Venice, it was fresh and pleasant and we enjoyed ourselves very much.  And I fell down the rain-slick steps of an iron bridge and sprained my shoulder.  It's mostly better now.

We Climb a Tower

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Pisa, visiting the Leaning Tower.

After we had listened to music happening in the baptistery of the Pisa Duomo, we went and climbed the infamous leaning bell tower.  The lean has been stabilized – at great effort and expense – and today you can climb it all the way up to the top.  The climb is a deeply enjoyable head trip. The lean of the tower is only four degrees from vertical, but four degrees from vertical raised sixty meters in the air can feel like some considerable angular displacement – almost four meters.  Go check your trigonometry.

A spiral staircase around the perimeter of the tower climbs sixty meters to the top, housed in a stone shell between the inner and outer walls.  There are a few narrow windows here and there, but almost all of your orientation comes from your inner ear.  Part of the time you’re climbing uphill, and part of the time you’re almost walking flat, and part of the time the stairs are twice as tall as they should be, and ALL of the times that you pass a window, the view is just plain WRONG.  Sort of stomach-dropping, and inductive to manic giggles.   XXXX

XXXXAt the top of the tower, the stairs pop into open air and you circle the sloping tower on a narrow walkway with only a metal mesh between yourself and the view.  There was a breeze at the top of the tower – a soft, cool, gentle wind that would certainly pick you up and toss you against the mesh, and the mesh would burst and you would blow outward and fall -
            “It's strong, see?" Mr Tabubil said, leaning on it – leaning out and leaning DOWN. "Made of steel!"
I burst into tears.  I don’t do heights, and I do depths even less than I do heights, and when the depths are more than fifty meters deep and you’re leaning toward them on a slippery stone ledge that doesn’t stay flat like any respectable stone ledge fifty meters in the air –
Urrrggghhh.
About when I was ready to release my death-grip from the door-frame, we popped back inside the tower to climb another thirty-six steps up another weirdly sloping stone shaft up to the very top where the bells were.
            “Steel.”  Mr Tabubil urged.  “Strong as houses.  I’m an engineer.  I know these things.  Would I lie to you?”
I believed him implicitly, but my stomach wasn’t hearing it.  I wanted to do a circuit of the roof sitting flat on my bottom and sort of scooting around with my back pressed tight against the tower wall.  And to look at the view with my eyes closed.

But I did it.  Slowly, and stiffly, but on my very own two feet and with my eyes wide open. It took some time;  most of our group was half-way back down to the ground level by the time that I was half-way around the top.  But I did do it, and even I stopped to admire the view.  On the uphill side.  On the downhill side, I moved faster and I may have cried again.  Just a little. 

Uuuurrrrrgggghh.

Back on the ground, I fell asleep on the grass, and Mr Tabubil took photographs of people taking photographs of other people pretending to hold up the tower.  Out of context, it makes for MARVELOUS family photos. 

Buildings that Lean in Pisa

 Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Florence.

One day we took the fast train to Pisa and saw the Leaning Tower.   Arriving at the Pisa Centrale Train Station, we stopped at the ticket counter to ask what bus we ought to take out to the Piazza dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles).  The lady behind the counter looked up from her book of crossword puzzles with a distracted sort of air.
            “You want a what?”
             “A bus, please.  To the Piazza dei Miracoli–“
             “No buses.  Not today.  They’re all on strike.”
She shrugged one shoulder in a half-apology, and turned back to her crossword puzzle.

Bus strikes were one of the great certainties of the time I spent in Tuscany.  Timing for maximum chaos, striking without warning, bus drivers will stay off the road during the morning rush hour, then come back on duty for the rest of the day, or they will knock off early, just in time to gum up the evening commute –

At least once a month I’d come out of an evening class and discover that the bus home wasn’t happening.  If I were lucky, there’d be a paper notice taped to a post at the school bus stop. If not, I’d stand with the other stranded students, waiting for forty-five minutes or an hour - until it became clear that even the erratic Florentine bus fairy (the magic schedule fairy that pops busses out at supremely irregular intervals) had exceeded her mandate, and then I’d walk home.
In clear weather, it was a lovely walk, particularly in the spring: an hour of soft skies along the river, and quiet quattrocento back streets.  In winter, in the wet, with a howling storm blowing umbrellas inside out and driving you down the sidewalk ahead of bursts of hail and sleet, it was not so nice.  Not even a little bit.

A spring day like that would be lovely for walking through a new town, but on a late-summer day with a sky like a flat blue oven, and the world stretched thin and pegged out flat, and quivering under the weight of a sun like a great glaring brass disk,  hot riveted to the flat center of it –
Not a day for walking.

We mooched out of the train station and stood in the shade of the arcade and looked around us for a taxi.  Under the weight of that awful burning blue sky, nothing moved.  There were no taxis, no cars, no bicycles, no people–
We sighed, and slunk deeper under the awning, and a municipal bus sailed grandly into the turning circle before the station, and stopped only a few dozen yards from where we stood.
           “Strike?” The driver looked at us, puzzled.  “Not today.  NOT a day for strikes, a day like this.”
We asked again for the Piazza dei Miracoli -
           “You bet.”  He said.  “That’s my route. Hop on, and I’ll let you know when to get off.”
He grinned at us, and we saw that the bus had air-conditioning, and we decided that we loved him.

The bus ran a twisting route through the old stone city, across the river and into a suburban Pisa where the old stone buildings had front and back gardens, and stopped before a high stone wall, and here - here there was movement in the world.  Through a pair of tall gates we saw a long stretch of green grass. White buildings glittered in the sun and around them moved a twisting, churning, seething mass of humanity – none of it Italian.  And all of it carrying cameras.

The Piazza dei Miracoli is lovely– even on a burning blue summer day. Tall white walls surround a wide green field, and buildings grow out of the grass, here and there – a duomo, the infamous bell tower, and a high, round baptistery.  They are built of white marble, and they glare under the sun, and all of them lean sideways.

The foundations were built shallow, and the buildings have had more than a thousand years to settle into a soft, unstable soil.  The cathedral complex was begun in the tenth century CE, and is mostly built in the style of that time – a style that is today known as the Romanesque.  Tenth century engineers hadn’t yet discovered the load-bearing potential of the pointed arch (the spectacular extent of which was what allowed the towers of the Gothic to soar so high) and they built with hefty stone walls, and rounded arches and fat stone columns to support the walls' weight.  It is a stately style – solid, substantial, and comfortable looking.

All along one side of the precinct is a paved road set up as a very long souvenir shop.  There must be half a hundred little stands and wagons, all of them hawking little copies of the leaning tower - as t-shirts, as fridge magnets, as postcards, posters, kitchen aprons, hats, paperweights, little resin paperweights, middle-size resin paperweights,  and gigantic fiberglass paperweights more than two feet high.  They are all of them irredeemably awful.  Nobody sells replicas, or even posters, of the duomo and the baptistery, which is an oversight and a meditation on the shallowness of fame.  Because the Duomo and the Baptistry are lovely buildings, each entirely unique and special in their own right.

The Pisa Duomo is quite possibly my favorite church.  The Florence Duomo is marzipan-exquisite on the outside, but inside is more or less like a barn.  Baroque churches tend to suffer from interior -decorator-itis, San Marco in Venice was dim and dark and dusty (or as dusty as a church can become when it stands ankle deep in water!) but the Duomo in Pisa is just RIGHT.  The Pisan Romanesque is vaguely Venetian, faintly Moorish, with touches of Gothic in the Arches, Byzantine Glamour in the mosaics, Baroque in the paintings – and all of it in entirely charming balance.  Begun in 1063 and a work in progress (like all good churches) ever since, it has grown up elegantly, and with a certain style-  gently proportioned to itself and entirely suited – inside and out – to the site and the celestial majesty of the baptistery next door.

The thick stone walls of the Romanesque baptistery keep out the summer heat.  Inside, we sat on a ledge and   listened to the half-hourly demonstration of the echo.  The acoustics in the Baptistry are unusual.  The Baptistry is one single circular room, almost fifty meters tall, and an accident of construction, a double-shell roof,   has turned it into a resonance chamber fit for a choir of Catholic angels.  Every half-hour the ticket guard closes and locks the doors and walks into the very centre of the space and sings. Three simple notes fall upward into the empty space, cascading into complex cascades and harmonies of that were never actually sung. 

We climbed up to the high gallery and sat in the cool of the lovely building and waited until the next performance, and heard it again.  Sometimes the gatekeeper was a whole choir and sometimes his voice becomes an instrument – a clarinet, occasionally, and an oboe, often.  Mr Tabubil turned to me and his face was wide, full of happiness.

We were filled up.  

The Instant Expert’s Guide to a Foreign City (Florence Edition)

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Florence.

Florentine drivers are as bad as South American drivers, but they are more phlegmatic about the situation.  The narrow streets are not EVER going to be wide enough for the traffic, so the lunatic in front of you dancing his Fiat across the cobbles on two wheels can be given the finger in a relatively relaxed fashion.  You’re not stopping, he’s not going to ram you, and you can call down the imprecations of God and Man in a purely philosophical and speculative sense.  Neither of you will take it personally.

Old Florence is a tourist town. There’s no getting around it.  Florence is the fount and fountain of one of the great advancements of western philosophy – the Renaissance.  This city is where all the good stuff happened – it is a city of FIRSTS.   Here Brunelleschi built the first great free-standing dome since the Romans, here Donatello re-discovered the lost art of bronze casting and sculpted his David and Goliath.  Renaissance architecture began here in Florence, when Bruneleschi built the Ospedale degli Innocenti in the Piazza Due Fontane, beginning a movement that would span all of Europe and return here to be at last overturned, when Michelangelo grew up and designed a façade for the church of San Lorenzo, and a staircase for the library next door.  There are splendid things on every street corner, and the best way to explore (in my opinion, and I am never short of opinions) is go out and get yourself thoroughly lost.

Start in the Piazza Due Fontane.  Close your eyes and turn around three times, then open your eyes and orient yourself toward the façade of the Ospedale degli Innocenti.

The Ospedale was an orphanage commissioned by the Arte de Seta (Silk Guild) in 1419.  The commission was given to an architect named Filippo Bruneleschi.  Brneleschi is widely regarded as the true father (or instigator) of renaissance archutectire, and the Ospedale degli Inocento was one of the very first buildings that he designed in the trendy new style.  It was (and is) certainly the best known.  Admire the regularly spaced columns with their classical capitals. The Ospedale is built of simple geometrical volumes, piled one atop each other in individual, disconnected units, which isn’t quite how the Romans did it, but the new style certainly looked pretty.

Turn right and walk down the Via dei Servi until you come to the Piazza del Duomo.  Admire the splendid bronze doors of the baptistery (another bronze-casting first) and spend some time admiring the big fat Victorian façade on the Duomo.

The outside of the Duomo looks like nothing else anywhere – with the exception of the chocolate-box frontage of Santa Croce.  The two facades were perpetrated at the same time at the same persons, but while Santa Croce is JUST petite enough to look like a victorian valentine, and rather cute, thereby, the Duomo is so enormously large that is looks like nothing as much as a carved and buttressed marzipan mountain.

The Florence Duomo has survived several facades over its long life (the blue and white pinstriped version, like a vast stone petit-four layer cake was a good look)   The current – and hopefully authoritative - version dates to the 1880s.  It is splendid and terrible pink flamingos all over the place and I adore it without reservation.

Reserve your admiration for the marble façade – the inside is a barn, and has horrible acoustics, to boot.  I’m terrified of heights, but if you aren’t, the climb to the top of the dome is very much worth the time and entry fee.  Mr Tabubil enjoyed it enormously.

Disapproving Madonna disapproves of your uncritical approval.

Continue down the Via Calzaiuoli in the direction of the River Arno, until you come to the Piazza della Republica.   This pizazza was the site of the original pre-roman settlement here, and it has remained variously prominent and notorious ever since.  Used as a market and gathering space for more than two thousand years, by the 19th century it had become the site of Florence’s Jewish ghetto, which made it, in Italian eyes, a natural choice  for “reclaimation” by the state to create a grand piazza to celebrate the founding of the Italian Nation in 1856–  from which occasion dates the monumental arch on the west side of the Piazza.

I love this Piazza.  Although right in the tourist heart of the city, it is still very much a civic space.  Fairs pass through; families sit there in the evening, and at night there is.   While Telecom Italia couldn’t seem to pipe phone connectivity into my little apartment on the other side of the river, I was usually able get a phone line of a sort on my cell phone if I was in the very center of the Piazza Republica, and I spent many half-hours here at all hours of the day and night, listening to people shouting at me through a storm of Telecom Italia static, and hollering back at them through the same.

Continue on down to the river and cross the Ponte Vecchio.  Once all of Florence’s bridges looked like this – cobble-stoned medieval bridges built out on each side with shops and commercial establishments – all of the smelly, water-requiring businesses, like tanning and butchery, that cities like to site far away from the populace.  The Ponte Vecchio is the city’s only remaining medieval bridge ; the others perished as the Germans abandoned the city in WW2 – they dynamited the bridges behind them as they retreated, the Ponte Vecchio surviving only because it was reckoned too  narrow to support an American tank.

Cross the Ponte Vecchio.  Stop in the centre, climb onto on the parapet, tune out the tourists and sit for a while.  

And pretend that there aren't more bloody cherubs everywhere.

A side note –Unlike most of the rest of Europe, the cities of Florence and Rome largely escaped the artistic pillage of the Nazi regime.  Goebbels cared very much for art (if not for much else – people, for instance, he thought worth very little), and recognizing the historical value of these two cities, brokered an agreement with the Allied forces that neither city was to be bombed or looted regardless of how heavy or hostile the fighting.  This agreement actually held throughout the war, even during the German retreat – the only bombardment that Rome received was over the rail-yards, which were reckoned to be sufficiently distant from the historically and artistically significant areas of the city to be legitimate targets.

The far side of the Arno river is the Oltraro (lit. Beyond the Arno)  I used to live on this side of the river.  Tourists cross the river and mostly turn rightup the Via Giucciardini, heading for the Pitti Palace. I turned left,  passed through an archway cut through a building and climbed half-way up the steeply vertical Costa dei Magnoli .  I lived in a small third-floor walk-up flat just before the point on the hill where steeply-vertical became purely vertical and the engines of delivery motorcycles gave up the ghost, delivery men forced to tack back and forth across the narrow street, nursing their rev-counters, and cursing the residents who’d paid for their pizza BEFORE they’d given the address. 

It’s a worth-while climb, if you have muscles like a mountain goat – it’s a straight shot up to the Belvedere, a star fort overlooking the city.  If your legs are less like steel and more like molasses, veer left up the Via Guicciardi when you come off the bridge, and saunter up to the Pitti Palace, because the Pitti Palace is worth a look and saunter.  And a second look – spit-take style.

The Pitti palace was begun in 1458 by an upwardly mobile banker hoping to out-grandiose Florence’s free-spending hard-building ruling family, the Medici. In one of life’s little ironies, Signor Pitti went bankrupt, the Medici bought the palace, moved in, and it became a symbol of THEIR wealth and power for more than 250 years.


It’s been thumbing its nose at Florence ever since.  The Pitti Palace is one of the oddest buildings in Italy. Every time I walk away from it I’m certain that I must have been imagining things – no building could possibly be so impossible, but when I turn back to it and look again, there it is – a vast brooding lump of badly piled stone, rough hewn boulders and piled up sandbags.  It has all the hulking presence of a squat, seven-story toad.  The inside of the Pitti Palace houses a rather nice museum, and the sprawling gardens behind it are a marvelous place to spend a summer afternoon, with a Rococo grotto, and formally geometric promenades, and a cultivated wilderness leading down to a lake.  And you can barely see the palace from most of it.

Or pass on – past the palace, turning right, and lose yourself in alleys and cobbled streets of Oltrarno.  You’ll pass open doorways and see craftsmen carving mirror frames, restoring old furniture, building violins –

It’ll be a GOOD afternoon.

Florence has All Sorts of Architecture

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Florence.

With the Pantheon sorted out to American Universalist Satisfaction we took the morning Eurostar train to Florence.
(Buckety buckety pale white horse.  Sway in the saddle, sway on the rail, doze at the stations, but stay the course.)
Slipping between wheat-fields and sere golden hills, we snaked through stands of tall grey Cyprus, rounded grey and red-roofed hill-towns and forded stony olive-bottomed river valleys, and two hours later, we were in Florence –swept off the train and tossed out into the gaping stone halls of the Most Over-praised Train Station in Europe.

When I came to Florence nine years ago and looked at the Art Deco Stazione Santa Maria Novella for the first time, I thought that it was a building so uncomfortable and uncomfortable and that it had almost certainly been awarded a major architectural prize.
I was right.
A year of catching local coffee-pot trains out of it twice a week up to Pisa and Prato didn’t change my opinions. Santa Maria Novella was uncomfortable and uncongenial and definitively, wordlessly ‘-un’  in every possible respect.
Eight years further on and with a masters-load of architectural theory under my belt, I can read the fascist declaration of strength and command (we rise up in a statement of industrial and social might as done up in lines of brand-spanking modern architecture and with self-referential historical overtones to remind people of our long and glorious heritage of architectural successes see if we don’t!) that the designers were attempting to make with the building.  I can appreciate, in a disinterested way, the clean modern bones of the thing.  I can even comprehend – and sympathize a little – with how ivory-tower types could spend the next eighty years going gaga over it.

Nontheless and taking all that into consideration, while the architects of the Tuscan Group who built the Stazione Santa Maria Novella were cheerfully checking off every stylistic ‘x’ in their post-war designer brief,  they were completely and totally failing to build a building that is actually pleasant to inhabit.  From their lofty post-war-modern heights, they made the dark error of thinking about People instead of actual persons while they were designing.  In the station’s dark, drafty, shadowy and echoey, glary and icy, over-heated open-air bowels, there isn’t one iota of indication that this station was ever meant to be anything more than a cardboard model centerpiece in a biennale exhibition somewhere.

And THAT is a rant nine years in the making.  Forgive me.

Stazione Santa Maria Novella stands on one edge of the Florence’s old city.  We are staying on the other edge of it - down by the river in a third-floor hostel on the Via Borgo Dei Greci.

If you hang out the window and look right you can see the pink-and-green-and-white marble chocolate box façade of the church of Santa Croce.  After dark, all flood-lit, it loses its chocolate box aspect and becomes something ALMOST (as much as anything built in the deep Victorian neo-gothic period can be) awesome and broodingly nocturnal, and a fitting burial place for the likes of Niccolo Machiavelli, Lorenzo Ghilberti, Leon Battista Alberti, and Michelangelo Buonnaroti - far more than it could ever be in the shadow-free mid-day light!

And I can speak Italian again.  I couldn’t in Rome.  But the Florentine accent and dialect are completely comprehensible, and roll pleasantly and lilting upon my ear.  I haven’t spoken Italian since I left, and what I do speak now is a patchy Spanish-Italian pidgin, but the words are there when I need ‘em and come without the conscious intervention of my fore-brain: half the time I don’t remember the word I need until I’m saying it, and then it rolls out of my mouth and drops into a sentence before I know I’ve said it.  At the local grocery i can ask for fruit, and make polite commentary on the weather, and agree that yes, it is quite unseasonably hot and that there ARE far too many tourists in town this season - and so my vocabulary  advances!

A Tourist Meets the Pantheon

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Rome.

On our last morning in Rome, we stopped into the Pantheon –that building with the enormous free-standing concrete dome, and a hole (or oculus, if you like) at the top to let the rain in.  It was a compromise between history and engineering.  We both had plenty of material to goggle at.
            The Pantheon was built somewhere in the third decade CE as a general purposes temple – with room for all of the gods in the roman pantheon (hence the name!)  Since the seventh century it is been a catholic church, and it is a very catholic church, with statues of catholic saints standing in niches all around the perimeter and an altar opposite the doorway, with six enormous gold candlesticks and a bronze remonstrance, and a pulpit with a microphone for Sunday services –  
            And a round American woman who advanced into the middle of the floor and threw her arms up into this most catholic of catholic spaces and cried out:
            “And do you know what is the most wonderful thing about the Pantheon?  The way the Rome City Council has so very kindly turned this into a completely non-denominational spiritual space!”
And then she eyed the wide sun-filled oculus above her head, and the two very small bronze drain-holes beneath her feet, and she screwed up her nose dubiously.
            “The Romans mustn’t have expected it to rain very much.  How do they drain this place? In a good storm, you’d be up to your ankles while you worshiped!”
            There, at least, she had a point.

Music in Saint Peter's

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Rome.

St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  The world’s largest wedding cake.

I sniff.

From the outside, St Peter’s appears a modest-seeming three stories tall, but as you see the clouds move behind the building, and as the multitude of ants crawling before it resolve into people, you realize just how large the building is, and the tricks of scale resolve into an order several hundred times larger than life.
            Inside, the church is a warehouse of wonderful sculpture, all of it drowning in the immensity of the space, and where there isn’t something splendid and sculptural, there’s something cheap tacked onto to fill the gap - swags of second-rate saints and sibyls and cherubs, chiseled by assembly line and cheerily defying gravity, swinging from the clerestory arches.  There’s no grace. Or if there was, it was lost among the shadows and swept out years ago.
            The cherubs are worse than second-rate: giant stone babies with cellulite and the eyes of eighty-year old congenital sinners, dipsomaniac and debauched. When a ten-foot infant leers out of the shadow of an altar and eyes you up like he means to try something on right there in church, you know things have gone somewhere that they shouldn’t have.
            I sang there once. I was fifteen, and the concert was the grand prize at the end of three weeks through every hill town church and square in Tuscany: the Cardinal’s Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, with five choirs singing in unison, and the Pope there to listen while we sang. 
            My parents and my sister were meeting me in Rome at the end of the tour, and they thought it would be nice to come along to the Vatican to watch us sing.  My father made it inside the basilica. My mother, good ex-catholic that she was, spent the mass outside the door, standing nose-to-nose in a shouting match with an overly-striped member of the Swiss Guard.
            Inside, before the altar, we sang.  Right there in front of the great bronze Bernini Baldacchino. It had been a long and dusty three weeks and we were somewhat under-rehearsed: we were all unfamiliar with the music, and the tour hadn't made space for even one proper practice with all five choirs singing together, and in that great big barn of a space, the acoustics were just too good.  The basilica was so enormous that our conductor was three bars behind us right from the start – we were booming, we were grandiose, we were all of us over the musical map, and she simply couldn’t hear.
            I know for a fact that my own choir began the piece three full bars behind at least two of the others, and one poor group, all the way from Australia, trailed off to an uneven finish half a verse after the rest of us had finished for good.  Our choir directors melted away like snow in a Roman summer, vanishing behind pillars and stepping quietly into side chapels.  Dad told me afterward that it had been the most excruciatingly embarrassing musical moment of his life –
            “I went and hid behind that baldacchino!  Pretended I was there for the paintings.  You were like cats, Tabubilgirl!  Cats who harmonized, but cats!”
            There was only one small scrap of silver lining.  As the whole thing trickled its way to an inglorious finish, Mum swept into view, flushed and square-shouldered with triumph.
            “It wasn’t what he said,” she said. “It was how he said it. There needs to be a complaint.  Where’s the Pope?”
            “Ah.”  Dad brightened and beamed at her.  “That’s the good part.  He has a cold.  He didn’t come.”