We try Venice. Venice is Charming.

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. 

We took a noon train from Florence to Venice (260km, 2.5 hours) and then the Venice Vaporetto from the Stazione Santa Lucia to our vaporetto stop (3km, 1 hour).  Transport efficiency might vary between the ancient and the modern, but the slow Venice barge certainly has the best views; we hung over the side rail and gawped at the sun glittering off the boats and white bridges, and at the palazzos sliding sideways into the icy blue water.
            We had a room in a charming little residence on the edge of the Campo San Maurizio, tucked into the side of a narrow lane across a little white marble bridge, with a gondola moored to a lacquered post underneath - very Cole Porter. Our room was small and low-ceilinged, filled with a dim-underwater light, and stuffed to the gills with faux-antique wooden furniture, every piece carved and painted and brocaded and gilded until the surfaces were panting for relief.   Even the walls of our little room were padded, and covered floor to ceiling in a green and gold polyester brocade.  In the event of fire, we were instructed to tie the gold brocade bedcover into a rope and slither around the charming wrought iron screen that kept us from falling past the silver brocade curtains and out of our charming little picture window into a window box filled with perfectly charming geraniums.

We napped, briefly, in our little room on the golden bed, then we went walking and found all of the ways the local streets dead end into the water.  It took some time to outpace the tourist hordes and art-glass shops, but by sunset we were in a narrow maze of stone paved alleys that opened into small Piazzas or dead-ended into blue canals, with washing lines strung across the water.
           There is a quality of light here – it glitters over the canals and crooked streets, settling like a luminous, electric blanket over the white marble spans and the waterways.  The city has the soft, limpid quality of a fever, with heady currents and electric heat just under the surface.  Earth and water exist here in an impossible balance; the natural division between the two elements has broken down, become imperceptible.  Natural laws simply fail to operate - or be remembered - or have never existed to BE remembered.  Tall stone palazzos are built on top of the water, with the sea lapping halfway up the doorpost.  Stone pillars and stone archways lean crazily inward on each other; walls have an open relationship with the vertical - when I think about it, it is perfectly sensible; the foundations have no foundation; instead they rise and fall with the waxing and waning of the moon.
            We walked down narrow ways into the Piazza San Marco, where four separate chamber orchestras were playing in four separate corners.  We sat on a stone bench by the water and looked out at the night, and felt immeasurably pleased with ourselves.

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.  

Two Girls on the Bus

The bus was running full and I was running late.   I scrambled on board, paid my gold coin and squeezed into an empty seat in the middle of the mini-bus.  Two young women sat on the bench seat in front of me, dressed with day-glo teenage bravura in tanks and microshorts and stripped blonde hair that they tossed back with their hands to punctuate their sentences, tickling my nose.
            "Do you know Will asked me to wag with him today?  I'm like- nah, and then I seen him with Carly at the shopping center this afternoon - he wagged with HER instead!"
            "He never - !"
            "So I told Rob and Rob told me that he and Mick'd help me roll Will if I wanted.  Only I said nah, because all them stupid dumb c**ts in the class were standing there listening.   Bitches.  Whatever.  Change the subject. Your birthday's next week.  What're you buying for your birthday party?"
            "Alcohol."
            "How much?"
            "Dad's giving me money.  Thinks I'm going to buy a stereo."
            "You people's never seen me drink, have you?"  The one on the left giggled. "Give me a bottle and I'll disappear for a minute or two and come back and you'll never know me. I'm fun and -"
            " You can't drink around school, though.  Ms F-ing Friedman caught me yesterday and had a TALK with me about my ATTITUDE - I was so f***ing tempted to punch her.  Just 'cause nobody likes HER-"
            The one on the right shifted in her seat and twisted a strand of her hair between her fingers. "Mum gets paid today" she said. "Which means she'll do a bit of shopping, which means there'll be food in the fridge and - O.M.G!"  She bounced in her seat.  "Did you know, that if you go and say you have no food they'll give you food vouchers for Woolworths?  Yeah, really!  They're gift cards and you can't buy smokes or alcohol with them, and if you choose carefully, you can buy enough food for three days at least!
            And there's the Salvos - they'll give you ACTUAL food, not just vouchers.  There's SO many places that give you stuff, if you play your cards right - you can live on them for, like, a MONTH if you have to.  The Salvos gave me Milo Cereal - whoo hoo! And BREAD - OMG, they give you all the bread you can EAT.   Oh - wait!" She bounced to her feet   "Driver!  Next stop, please!"
            She was fourteen - with plugs in her ears, a stud in her lip, a pinched chin in a tight, tough little face, and her eyes rimmed with liner, black like a raccoon.  Stepping between the seats, she turned to look back at her friend and suddenly, she smiled.  Her eyes were bright, and her small pinched face was warm and wide - and wistful.
            "See you tomorrow, yeah?"
            "Wait - " Her friend jumped up.  "I'll come with you, yeah?"
            Her eyes widened briefly and she smiled again - sweet and tender and guileless and utterly, completely open.

She was only fourteen.

The Small Motorized Chamber of Horrors

Yesterday, I dropped my CV off at the Town Planning Department down by the water, and caught the municipal bus home.  I do wish this town ran proper school buses - two stops from "downtown" we stopped outside the High School and half of the eighth grade poured on and I discovered why the other grown up passengers on the bus had competed to squeeze into the front two seats.
Perhaps it's a generational thing - but I don't remember anyone swearing nearly as much when I was in junior high.  Where we used adjectives, these kids toss around expletives like popcorn.  The bus echoed with "F*** this" and "S**t HER" and - "Oi James - you're a Sheepf****r!" 
I pricked up my ears - I'd never heard THAT one before.

Sitting in front of me was a baby faced thirteen year old boy with buck teeth and rosy cheeks and a sprinkling of freckles, whose highest aim in life was to spend it hanging over the top of my head shoving his middle finger into the face of the girl behind me.
            "STOP that, James" she tittered, fluttering her mascara.  "I can't believe you.  You're SO mean!"
Being forced to bend my head sideways, I was inclined to agree.  I shot him a look.  He graciously moved twelve inches sideways and stuck his tongue out at me.
My cell phone rang - it was my sister, I think, but the ringing profanity and steam whistle titters drowned her out. 
            "Can I call you back later?"  I said.  "I can't hear you in here."
            "She says she can't hear!"  James yelled.
            "What did she say?"  The girls screamed back.
            "She says she can't HEAR!"  He bawled and bounced up and down in my face, waving his middle finger furiously three inches from my nose.

I was Absolutely. Fed. UP. 
So I laughed at him - looked him in the eye and roared with laughter, and when I was done laughing, I shook my head - very very sorrowfully.
            "It's not working."  I said to him kindly, and I shook my head again. And sighed.

            "What did she say?" the kids on the bus roared, hoping for more games.
"She said it's not working."  James said in a small voice, and turned away to concentrate on hitting the daylights out of the boy across the aisle. 
            "You're SOOOO mean, James" the girl behind me piped hopefully, but she'd lost him - he wasn't going to risk turning around and catch me looking back at him.  Little snot.

At the next stop, the kids from the private school got on, and they were either Best Friends or Worst Enemies of the kids from the public high school so the noise level doubled, but they yelled at each other, not across me.
Worryingly, James and his pack of ratbags all got off at the stop next to our house, but I'm acting on the assumption that they live in the other direction and that I have nothing to worry about vis. eggs on the windows or T.P. in the shrubbery.