When we were in Milan in spring 2018 and stayed near the Bosco Verticale, this was the view toward the Porta Nuova development.
Last week when I was indexing the May 2025 issue of Architectural Record with its Building Type Study of tall buildings, one of the featured buildings was the new Unipol Tower designed by Mario Cucinella Architects.
Francis has been special to me too, for personal reasons. We happened to be in Sicily when he was selected as pope in 2013. We had found a parking place and I went to call a B&B that looked promising. It was a few blocks from where we parked in the middle of Noto. Christie stayed in the car with her iPad, watching the papal news and studying the map and listings. It took most of an hour to call the B&B host who wasn't at home, walk to the B&B to meet him there, look at the room, accept it, and walk back to the car. The news of "Habemus Papam" (we have a pope) happened during that hour.
We moved the car closer to the B&B and watched some television in the room and in a nearby restaurant where we went for supper. We liked the location well enough to stay for three nights, using it as a hub for day trips to Siracusa and the southeastern corner of Sicily.
We were somewhat jet-lagged and tired. The woman at the hotel had noted a few nearby eating places of varying character and none caught our fancy as we walked past them. We got to a small square and noticed a welcoming restaurant across the square. The owner was just writing the supper menu on the blackboard and we talked to her, in a mix of English and Italian and facial and hand expression, about what was on offer that evening. After we'd determined that we were really ready to eat there, she said she was Italian and was from Modena. She said you're American and you are from where? When I said "New York," she said "Il principe" (the prince) and gave me a hug and kisses.
The supper was extraordinary. We ended up chatting with a couple Italians who sat at a small table next to ours. We ended up staying until the restaurant closed and then we four went to a coffee bar and closed it down too.
I had another 9-11 experience on that trip. I was walking around San Domenico in Bologna. There weren't too many other people in the plaza and an airplane flew over. Not particularly low in the sky but a reminder of the airplanes flying into the Trade Center. Gave me a start.
On another trip to Italy, we were looking for a lunch place in Buccheri on Sicily. I went over to the prominent restaurant on the central square that said it was open but no one was around to ask about a table. When I got back to the car and reported that to Christie, she said that lots of people seemed to be coming and going from the Caffè Roma nearby. We checked it out and had a delightful lunch. The lesson I learned is that a bit of patience and observation can be a good travel guide.
That was my first time in Rome. I was excited beyond words. Carol had gotten there a while before I did. I had been warned not to take anything but a legitimate taxi from the central train station. My cab was somewhere near the taxi stand but he drove me a very indirect route to the Campo area. I had a map and was able to follow where we were. He was having trouble finding the Campo and stopped at a business on a very narrow street to ask directions. We got close, to the nearby Piazza Farnese which is in front of the French Embassy. I told him this was close enough, paid him, and got out of the car to get my suitcase from the back. He took off. I ran after him and he went out into the clogged traffic on the Lungotevere, along the Tiber River. As I ran, I was shouting something and a guard at the embassy joined the chase. (Was this a movie?) Anyway, the guard stood on the corner and I pointed to the supposed taxi. With a uniformed security man standing there, the driver got out and opened the back of the car so I could get my suitcase. I walked sheepishly the block and a half to the Hotel Campo de' Fiori. By the time we left Rome a few days later, I knew how to take the city bus from near the Campo to the central station.
Thanks, William, and thank you, Bassam Makansi on Facebook, for the good picture of the calligraphy on the plaza. The picture from the roof of the Duomo is mine from 2018.
Armistead Maupin (Teddy, to his family) visited his grandmother at the nursing home and she did not recognize him. The long-past occurrence of reading his palm triggers her memory.
"I was making a gloomy retreat from Grannie's apartment when I had an idea. Returning to her chair, I thrust out my hand with the palm turned upward for her perusal. She seized it immediately and began reading the lines in rapt silence, like a book she'd laid down the night before and couldn't wait to return to.
Then, without even looking up, she said, very softly, 'Teddy.'
'Yes,' I said, laughing. 'Yes!'
'You're in your thirties now.'
'I am indeed.'
When her eyes finally moved up to my own, they were as open and lively as the sea. 'And you've written a novel, you say?'
'Yes. And you're in it.'
'Oh, dear.'
I laughed again. 'Not literally, but your spirit is there. Your loving, accepting spirit. She's a landlady in San Francisco, and she's a little ... spooky about things.'" [ellipsis in the text]
--Logical family: a memoir by Armistead Maupin (HarperCollins), page 276-277 in the paperback edition.
The last time I saw my grandmother (Gram, we called her) was at the nursing home. I had recently come back from my first trip to Italy (1985, I think). She didn't seem to recognize me but I had a stack of postcards and was showing them to her. When we got to a picture of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, she spoke of her father's stories of his "grand tour" to Europe in 1902. He had accompanied the art historian and professor O.P. Fairfield on the trip after an unusually hard year's work as acting president of Alfred University. His doctor said that the trip would do him more good than a year's medicine. This is paraphrased from the diary he kept on the trip.
My postcard of a famous bridge had penetrated my grandmother's aged fog and brought her memories of her father as it brought me a connection to the generations of my family. And confirmation of why I still love travel in general, Italy in particular, postcards, and probably even Palladio.
Some years later, in 2004, 102 years after my great grandfather's trip to Italy, I traveled to Venice with Sharon Chickanzeff, livening up my life narrative by breaking my arm at about midnight, with water on the plaza, under a full moon, while peering across the canal at Santa Maria della Salute.
Two summers ago, Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr and Cassandra Bull co-curated an exhibition in Alfred entitled "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" in which an artist and a community member developed a collaborative work which involved the eventual audience also collaborating. Sam Horowitz and I developed a piece that we called "Time Becomes Us" based on our preparatory conversations. Sam built a wood trough in which we placed layers of natural and artificial materials.
Maybe you had to be there. Matthew had his nineteenth-century dinner one evening in the mid-late 1970s in Pittsburgh. There were a couple dozen of us: grad students in art history, librarians, professors. The table stretched through the double doors between his living room and dining room. Several courses were served. I was costumed as Thomas Eakins. I don't remember who Dorothy dressed as. Julie came as Lady Hamilton, in a gauzy confection of white fabric. I so enjoyed meeting Lady Hamilton.
"In Rome I was glad to study: here [in Naples] I want only to live, forgetting myself and the world, and it is a strange experience for me to be in a society where everyone does nothing but enjoy himself. Sir William Hamilton, who is still living here as English ambassador, has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations -- standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress. The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does. In her, he has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere. This much is certain: as a performance it's like nothing you ever saw before in your life. We have already enjoyed it on two evenings. This morning Tischbein is painting her portrait." (J.W. von Goethe, Italian Journey, translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, Penguin classics, 1970, page 208)
When I first read this paragraph an hour or so ago, I was smitten by the memory of the Pittsburgh dinner and Julie as Lady Hamilton. As I type it, the description of the tableaux vivants sounds rather like inappropriate behavior by older white men. Last night's group discussion was on "The new Puritans" from the October issue of The Atlantic. Maybe it's time to re-read The volcano lover by Susan Sontag.
Mom used to travel vicariously with me. Now, we all can just about only travel vicariously when it comes to European destinations. I was writing up my Venetian adventure as a Pandemic Escape for the Alfred Sun and couldn't remember the name of the artist who did the painting of the Ospedale Civile in Venice that is at Yale now.
Walter Richard Sickert
L'Ospedale Civile
Yale Center for British Art, Mellon Collection
As I was thinking about Venice, I went to flying over the city and zooming in on Google Maps. I had meandered to the northeast and noticed a name -- Palmanova -- that seemed familiar and probably telling. I zoomed in and there was the 16th century fortified city. Designed by Antonio Scamozzi (but that leads to a different story).
Thinking about Renaissance planned cities led me to think about Sabbioneta, over in Lombardy, north of Parma, where Christie and I stopped in 2001.
Two and a half years ago, we were in Milan, really enjoying the early evening cocktails and snacks, aka aperitivo. One of our most enjoyable evenings was along the Navigli (canals), on the south side of the centro. The remnants of the canals are there but it is now mostly social engagement territory rather than trade and warehouses. Last Sunday's Times had an article about the situation in Europe as coronavirus cases increase significantly. The article was accompanied by a photograph by Alessandro Grassani for the Times. He also has done significant series of photographs on immigrants and immigration. Now, the crowded streets of the Navigli are quite empty ...
A cyclist peddling down an empty street in Milan on the first day of a new lockdown on Friday.
(Alessandro Grassani for the New York Times)
Episode "Traveling to Eat" was on The Splendid Table on NPR as I drove home from Wegmans this morning. One of the stories was a talk with Caroline Eden who has traveled around the Black Sea, investigating places and food. She did a couple road trips but visited Odessa and Istanbul as specific destinations. She considers Istanbul the most grand food place in the world.
Caroline Eden mentioned the significant evidence of Italian and Jewish food in Odessa. Though there were ancient and medieval settlements where Odessa now is, its modern origins date back to 1794 when Catherine the Great established the city and port on the shores of the Black Sea, now in the Ukraine. It was a free port from 1819 to 1858 and the fourth largest city in the Russian Empire, after Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Warsaw. There were Italians among the planners and developers and a large Jewish community developed in the 19th century. The Italians were mostly a legacy of Genoese colonies in the Crimea in late medieval times.I've never known a great deal about Odessa though we did hear about it when Atticus Aldridge was explaining his origins to Rose and the Jewish refugees in York.
