ITALY, HISTORY AND ART

FLORENCE, THE CRADLE OF RENAISSANCE

I would have stayed another week in Paris and would have continued having a great time, but I had planned to see much more of Europe. From Paris I took a train to Florence, the quintessential city of the renaissance art and culture, of Etruscan origin, this city was founded by Emperor Julius Caesar around 59 BC, making it a strategic garrison on the narrowest crossing linking Rome to Northern Italy and The Gaul (France). Florence’s ruler Cosimo de’Medici’s eye for talent in the 15th century saw a whole constellation of artists flourish, such as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi. Cosimo’s grandson (1469–92), ushered in the most glorious period of Florentine civilization and of the Italian Renaissance. His court fostered the flowering of art, music and poetry, turning Florence into Italy’s cultural capital which in many ways it still is. In Florence I visited the famous Galleria degli Uffizi, the Galleria dell’Accademia, the San Marco Museum, the Galleria Palatina, the Capelle di Medici. Each and every one of them reminded me as it does to all visitors, the grandeur of this city at the turn of the 15th century and its influence in the development of the Western Civilization. Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo, the two greatest artists of the Renaissance are at the center of Florence’s Museums. My visit to Florence was, in many ways, a shower of history, culture and art, a reminding of how little my knowledge in those areas had been, and an invitation to expand it, which I have done over the last forty years, though I still feel that I know very little of it . Looking at it in retrospective, I was, in fact, beginning to materialize my childhood dreams, my dreams of travelling far, far away, flying in the long, long whistling trains passing by my little home village, just like those expected by my friend Ricardo Granizo from Chayaguan.
From Florence, I took a train to Assisi, the little town in the province of Perugia, known for the quality of its wine. This city, also of Etruscan origin, is known worldwide more than anything else for having been the home of St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) and for keeping the Saint’s tomb in the town’s Cathedral. This was a very short visit which I made because I wanted to pay my personal homage to the Saint, and say a prayer for my mom right there, at his tomb. My mom was more than a devote, an admirer and a follower of St. Francis the humble monk who dedicated his life to the service of the poor and all kinds of people in need of help. It just made a lot of sense to me that I visited this place and have a moment of reflection about my mother's teachings and the Saint who inspired many of them.


ASSISI, ITALY, ST. FRANCIS HOME TOWN


In my way to visit Venice, I stopped in Padua, famous for its Basilica, dedicated to the memory of St. Antony of Padua, the saint who is known to be the one who helps desperate single women to get a husband. My wife Fanny is a devote of this saint, I wonder sometimes if this has anything to do with the fact that she, miraculously, got me as her husband...
My next stop was Venice. Venice was founded in 421 AD, and was built on several islands of a lagoon, which were then linked by bridges. Throughout the centuries, the city was populated by merchants who took advantage of its strategic location and began spreading their commercial boundaries through the Mediterranean. Marco Polo, who went to China and visited the Genghis Khan in the 13th century, is the most famous of those Venetian merchants. In the middle ages, just as it happened with many other European cities, Venice lost one half of its population to the plague and, in spite of it; the city succeeded in becoming the leader of the seas thanks to the men and women who fought indomitably to beat the odds.
Giacomo Casanova, the irresistible seducer who has captivated the attention of millions of readers throughout the centuries, was a real Venetian who told his lover’s story in the famous book “Memories di Giacomo Casanova”. He was born and lived his love stories here in Venice. Incidentally, I lived my own short lived love story here in Venice.
In Venice, I stayed at a small hotel only about ten minutes walking distance from the train station and about a 20 minute boat ride to the St Mark’s square, in downtown Venice. It was an old fashioned little hotel with a room about 90 square feet with a very small single’s bed and no toilet and shower in the room but a small lavatory. The good thing about it is that the cost was only about $10/night. As soon as I checked in, I went downstairs to the front desk asking for a towel and the keys to the shower room for which I had to pay an extra dollar. When on the third day of my stay I went for the third time to pay for my right to shower, I was politely asked by the girl at the front desk if I was sick, my answer was “no, I’m not sick, why do you ask that”, the girl’s answer was: “sorry for asking, but people here do not take a daily shower“. I knew right then why the odors in the trains in Europe are not necessarily those of the Paris perfumes…



VENICE, A JEWEL OF ITALY AND THE WORLD


At seven O’clock on June 20, 1972, while sitting in a small table and drinking a beer in one of the many cafes in the Saint Mark’s Plaza after having walked tirelessly most of the day, all of a sudden I heard in the distance a chorus singing in Spanish the well known song “Borinquen”, from Puerto Rico. “Hey”, I said to myself, “there should be some Spanish speaking people over there, I should go and try to meet them, after all, all of these days I have been doing all these trip by myself”. Sure enough, I walked about 200 feet and saw this group of about 20 young people, half men and half girls, who were enjoying themselves like little pigs in the mud, at a café, right across the St. Mark’s cathedral. As I approached them, they were still singing the same song, I stood a few feet away and started to sing along while smiling and waving at the group and receiving smiles and hand waiving in return. When they were finished singing, I got closer and started talking to them. As they began talking back to me, I could recognize their unmistakable Puerto Rican accent, so I introduced myself and we began a nice young people’s chat. They immediately invited me to join their party, which I happily did. They were all freshly graduated students from the University of Puerto Rico, at Rio Piedras, and had chartered a bus in Spain to take European holidays celebrating their graduation.
It was a long, long night, talking, drinking beer and singing made the time fly fast. At one o´clock in the morning the group decided to take several gondolas and navigate our way around Venice while singing along. By midnight I was friends with everyone in the group but mostly with a good looking 30 year old brunette named Betty who had graduated as a medical doctor and was undoubtedly free to enjoy her holidays as she wished. It was an instantaneous while unexpected finding for both of us. Singing we continued and, when the people in my gondola asked me to sing an Ecuadorian song, and was about to say I didn’t know any song to sing, I suddenly remembered a song from my old days of bohemia at the Borja Lavayen School in Guayaquil and started singing “Sombras” (“Shadows”) an old romantic song which was, I’m sure, the only song I knew all the prose of. Much to my surprise and amazement, the whole group started to sing along with me. Incredibly, they all knew the prose of the song. I was so emotional that I couldn’t avoid letting tears come off my eyes, it was unbelievable, I was so many thousands of miles away from my loved homeland and was singing, late in a silent Venetian night, the only song I knew, and was accompanied, in a perfect chorus, by people from a far away country, whom I had met only a few hours ago. I said to myself that night, and I meant it: this is really a very, very small world…
At the end of this long, long night, I was invited by Betty and a few others in the group to join them in their journey throughout Europe. They had plenty of space in their bus and a lot of enthusiasm in what they were doing, I had no specific plans and I liked a lot their itinerary which included Rome, Naples, Pompeii, the Italian and French Riviera, Madrid and other Spanish cities, Just what I’d been planning to do by myself, only this time I was accompanied by twenty other people of my age who were there to enjoy themselves and their European tour.

In my next posting, ROME, NAPLES, POMPEII AND THE ITALLIAN RIVIERA