The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

I have been trying very hard of late to avoid online debates.

It’s hard.  I’ve been engaging in online debates of one sort or another for almost 25 years now.  I have strong opinions on things, I love a good debate, and it’s difficult to turn away when I see someone arguing for a position that I think is wrong.

But here’s the thing.  I think online debates tend to push us further apart.  And it strikes me that there are enough forces in this world operating to divide us, and now is a time when division is particularly problematic.

I think most of us would agree on a certain basic set of values.

• We don’t want the government to tell us how to live our lives.
• We want everyone to be able to live their lives in peace, comfort, and health.
• We have respect for those who are willing to put their lives on the line for our society.
• We think that government has a role to play, but where possible we’d rather see people be able to manage without it.
• We respect the right of others to make their own choices.
• We believe that people should be able to do what they want with their property.
• We think our society should be fair and give equal opportunity to all.
• We want our nation to be strong and do well.

I’m sure I could think of others.  I’m sure you can too.

When an issue involves only one of these values, it’s easy.  But there are many issues where different values are in conflict.  And often different people will weigh the different values differently and thus come down on opposite sides of the issues.

Sadly, online discussion in these cases usually comes down to, “You don’t believe in value X, so you are a bad person.”  “How could you possibly take position Y – that must mean you don’t believe in value Z, so you are terrible.”  And that generates more heat than light and only ends up pushing us further apart.

I had a friend named Walt who passed away last year.  While I am a staunch supporter of the Democrats, he was an equally staunch support of the GOP.  We often disagreed about what the government should do.  Our debates could get fierce.

But every now and then, we stepped back.  We dove deeper into the issues.  And invariably, we found that our differences came down to differing ways of applying and balancing our similar core values.  We actually agreed a lot more than we disagreed on the fundamentals, even though you’d never know it if you only looked at our political arguments.

With Walt, our debates were a kind of sport.  Debating politics can be a lot of fun.  But we could do this because we knew each other well, liked each other a lot, and could assume good will on each others’ part.  For a lot of online discussions – the kind of thing that seems to happen on Facebook – discussions take place between people who barely know each other.  Or often don’t know each other at all – one rubs against friends-of-friends in comment threads and the only thing you know about each other is what is said online.  It’s hard to make an assumption of good will in such cases.

I am trying hard to avoid those conversations.  If I do not know someone well enough to honestly assume good will on his part, I’m going to try my best to avoid entering the fray.  I won’t always succeed – a 25-year-old habit is hard to break.  But I’m going to try.  I’m going to try to assume good will on the part of others that I meet online, and I’m going to hope that they will assume the same of me.

We’ve been home for a week now.  I still haven’t started organizing all the photos, but I suppose it’s time to sum up our Italy experience.

Best Part of the Trip

Joe: Walking around the ruins of ancient Rome, imagining the things that had happened there, telling Julie stories of those days.  The moment when I realized that the road I was on was most likely the road that Cleopatra took into town, and was certainly the road that all those Triumphs took – Scipio, Caesar, etc.

Julie: Florence and the amazing Uffizi Gallery and all the art therein.

Best Meal

Joe: Enzo e Piero in Florence.  The food was terrific, the atmosphere relaxed.  It felt like it was run by a family (which I believe it was) and was completely comfortable.  And did I mention the terrific food?

Julie: Ristorante Quadri in Venice.  Again, the food was terrific.  The service was much more formal, but still friendly.  (A lot more expensive too!)

Best Tour

Joe: Hard choice – either the Pompeii Trip or the ancient Rome trip that included a ground-level visit to the Colosseum.  (Though neither was my favorite guide – both guides were good, though.)

Julie: Rome Catacombs and Tombs.  Combines the gruesome with the soulful – two things that Julie loves.  Also had the best guide of any we had all week (and Joe agrees with this).

Note: we did a total of ten guided tours during our trip, all set up with City Wonders tours (http://citywonders.com).  They weren’t all amazing, but they were all good.  I’d recommend them for tours in any of the places they do tours.

Best Travel Tool

Joe: His iPad.  I arranged a data plan that would work in Italy.  The iPad was amazingly helpful.  I navigated everywhere using Google Maps.  We chose restaurants using the TripAdvisor app (another thing I strongly recommend: their tool for finding nearby restaurants was incredibly helpful).  I could look up miscellaneous details online at a moment’s notice, and amuse myself with Wikipedia articles on things we were seeing.  And even find Julie a good shoe shop in Rome.

Julie: She got a book on Rome, and later one on Florence, that showed how the sites looked now and back then.  Julie had a lot of fun holding up the images of the ancient glories next to the actual sites.

Favorite piece of Art

Joe: Bernini’s sculpture of Daphne and Apollo at the Borghese Gallery.

Julie: A medieval painting of the Annunciation at the Uffizi.

Favorite City

Joe: Rome.  I’ve never been anywhere that had so much truly vital history.  Astonishing.  Plus, I find that I really like the baroque style of both art and architecture, and Rome is a great center for that style.

Julie: Florence.  Hard to deny the draw of the Renaissance.

Best Concierge

Joe and Julie: The staff at the Porta Faenza in Florence.  They recommended great restaurants and helped us find shops that had things that we were specifically looking for.  By contrast, the concierges in the other hotels tended to direct us to touristy restaurants and did not have useful information.

Some useful travel tips

1. To find a good gelato shop, ignore all those shops with bulging mounds of colorful gelato in a display freezer in the window.  The gelato bulges because it has artificial stiffeners in it, and it’s so colorful because of artificial coloring.  Instead, find a place where the gelato is stored in simple canisters in a freezer, and where the colors are muted.  These kinds of places are few and far between (I found one in Rome, two in Florence, and one in Venice), but they are worth the search: the gelato in them is amazing.  The best gelato I had was at Edoardo’s right next to the Duomo in Florence.  Truly amazing stuff – I had it there twice and each bite was like a taste explosion in my mouth.
2. Be careful of the taxi drivers in Rome.  There is a fixed cost of 48 Euros to get from the airport into Rome, but other than that insist that they turn on the meter.  (And insist they don’t turn on the meter if you’re coming from the airport.)  And make sure you monitor the route they take.  This isn’t always an issue: we took four taxis in Rome and only one tried to rip us off.  But there was that one.  (He didn’t succeed.)
3. Be careful where you look for masks in Venice.  Most are Chinese imports – even when they say otherwise.  We went to Ca Macana, where they make masks.  You can even paint your own there.  Great masks.
4. Don’t stand in line for tickets at the Colosseum.  Walk a couple blocks to the entrance to the Roman Forum.  There’s no line and the ticket is good for both the Forum and the Colosseum.
5. When visiting a crowded art museum like the Uffizi, make sure you’re there around closing time.  The crowds thin out and you can actually get close to the famous paintings.  Sometimes these museums will have late hours one night in the week: those are great times to visit as there are no crowds.  (We also used that hint when visiting the Louvre a few years ago.)
6. Do your research on restaurants.  As I mentioned above, Trip Advisor is a great resource.  The hotel staff may be a good resource or they may just direct you to the tourist traps.  Be careful!

I’m sure there are more.  But we found the above particularly useful.

Another day in Venice.

A visit to Santa Maria della Salute.

A photo op on Punta della Dogana.

I feel the water in the Grand Canal.  (Had to, really.  Couldn’t be avoided.)  It was warmer than I expected.

A visit to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum of Modern art.

Pizza for lunch in a square with pigeons.

Another walk across the Grand Canal.

A visit to Murano Island, home of the Venice glassmakers.  Here’s one making a glass horse.

A visit to Burano Island, home of the Venice lacemakers.

An amazing dinner, followed by waltzing in the Piazza San Marco.

And a truncated blog post.

So ends our last full day in Italy. What an amazing trip.

Tomorrow is a travel day, but I shall have some summary posts over the next week or so.

It was a grand day on the Grand Canal. Well, on and about the Grand Canal, anyway.

First it was a tour of the Doge’s palace. Lots more art, some pretty impressive rooms, and an arsenal full of various deadly toys, including this pretty little cannon.

Here I am in one of the many huge meeting rooms in the palace, which served both as the home of the Doge and the meeting place for the various legislative bodies. (Venice was a republic, complete with a Senate, with the Doge being an elected official who functioned more as a president-for-life with limited powers than as a king.)

And here was a bit from the map room. Note that “Terre Incognite d’anthropofagi” means “Unknown land of the cannibals.” Isn’t Latin fun?

After that, we wandered around the city, including a visit to the Galleria d’Accademia, the museum of Venetian art. Here’s a saint who had a particularly bad end, though having a hatchet in his head doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any.

Then a stop on the Rialto Bridge.

And that evening, a nighttime tour of Venice, complete with Gondola ride.

Finally, on the way back to our hotel, we stopped by one of the three open-air restaurants with live music on San Marco Square and we had a couple drinks.

They tell us that Venice has a population of 60,000, and any given day it has 200,000 tourists.  In some ways, they say, it’s turning into a giant theme park.  There’s something sad about that.  But on the other hand, every now and then it’s nice to visit a theme park, and we certainly enjoyed our day in Venice-land.

A delay in posting today.  Bad internet at this new hotel, but it seems to be working now.

We left Florence today. Just to mix things up a bit, we decided to rent a car and do a road trip.

The drive through Tuscany was gorgeous. The Apennines are beautiful mountains. Think of driving through the Shenandoah during spring, only with higher mountains and fewer forests, and you’ve got an idea of what it looks like. No pictures, alas – I was busy driving.

We decided to make a stop in Ravenna. Ravenna was the capital of the Roman Empire in the west for a while right at the end, largely because it was easily defensible at a time when the Romans were taking it on the chin from a lot of sides. It also served as the capital of Justinian’s attempt to recapture the western Roman Empire about a century after it had fallen. As a result of all this, Ravenna has some beautiful mosaics from the late Roman Empire and early Byzantine Period. I had heard that they had the best Byzantine mosaics outside of Turkey, and from what I saw today, I can believe it.

There’s also marvelous Romanesque architecture, a pleasant change after Renaissance Florence and Baroque Rome.

As to one other thing we saw…

Remember a couple postings ago when I mentioned seeing Dante’s Tomb in St Croix Basilica in Florence? Here it is.

Today we also saw Dante’s Tomb, this time in Ravenna. Here it is.

What, you say. How does Dante manage to have two tombs? Well, there’s a story there.

Dante came from Florence. But the city fathers of Florence took offense over something Dante wrote, so they exiled him. He spent the rest of his life roaming around Italy, and he ended up in Ravenna, where they happily took in the famous poet. Dante died there and his hosts buried him locally.

At this point, Florence decided that they really wanted him back. Apparently there’s nothing that Florence likes better than a dead Florentine – much more than a living one. So they asked Ravenna for the return of their famous poet.

Not a chance, said the people of Ravenna. We took him in when you kicked him out, and now we’re keeping him.

A few years later, a Florence man was elected pope. Send back Dante, said the pope, who was much harder to refuse than the city fathers of Florence.

Oops, said Ravenna. We seem to have misplaced him. So sorry, but we can’t accommodate you.

Florence apparently built him a tomb anyway. And a couple centuries later, a coffin full of bones was found hidden away in Ravenna with a note saying that this was Dante. And it appears that it actually is.

And so Dante has tombs in both Florence and Ravenna, though only the Ravenna one is inhabited.  And to complicate things further, in Ravenna they shifted his remains about a couple times over the years, so he actually has at least three tombs here in Ravenna.  Supposedly he’s in the big one above, though at this point I’m not sure how anyone could  know for certain.

So where are we now?  Well, if the buses are boats, then it must be Venice!

What a fun city – more to come later.

Meanwhile, here’s some other pictures of our day.

And so ends another day in Florence.  Nothing too spectacular today: we visited the Palazzo Vecchio, the palace of the Medicis when they first came to power.  We visited a modern art exhibit.  We visited several churches.  We ate a great dinner and the best gelato I’ve found in Italy.  All in all, we ended up at several of the second-string attractions in the city, but had fun doing so.  And tomorrow we’ll be off to Venice.

But first, the pictures.  For those of you back at home living through the ebola panic, rest assured that you are not alone.

For those of you who have been seeing Julie’s pictures posted on Facebook, here’s an example of how she’s taking them.  Her camera gear is much easier to carry than mine!

For those of you who like to collect artistic oddities, here’s a piece of art that made me ask, “Did I just see what I think I saw?”

It’s not clear in that picture, but Diomedes (or maybe it’s Antaeus – reports vary) is grabbing Hercules’s manly bits.  Here’s a closeup of the deed being done:

This is a statue in the great hall in the Palazzo Vecchio.  The Medicis identified with Hercules.  I’m not sure what it means that Hercules is getting grabbed like that in their great hall, but there it is.  (It should be noted that Hercules went on to win this fight.  A mighty man indeed!  But I wonder if they had this scene in the recent Hercules movie.)

Here’s a picture of Julie wearing a new headband that she got at an exhibit we saw of Picasso and other Spanish modern art.

And here’s a picture of me next to the shop selling the best gelato we’ve had in Italy.  (Gelato is kind of like ice cream, and frankly I don’t understand the difference.  There’s lots of gelato all over Italy, and I’ve been eating an average of 1.5 cones a day.  But this place, called Edoardo’s, next to the southeaster corner of the Duomo, has the best I’ve tasted.  At some point I’ll share the terrific rules taught us by a guide on how to find good gelato shops.)

And then we visited the churches.  Three churches.  Wonderful religious art.

But let me make a brief digression on the strangeness of medieval/renaissance religion.  Catholicism was awfully strange back then.  In particular:

Every one of those golden objects in the display cases is a reliquary.  A reliquary is a special case used for the display of a relic, which is usually the bone of a saint.  For example, here’s a reliquary for Saint Sebastian, the saint who is usually depicted getting shot full of arrows.

And here is a closeup in which you can see the displayed bone.

This is supposedly one of Saint Sebastian’s bones.  A great holy object.  Worthy of veneration.  And prayer.  To a bone.

To which I can only say, Ewwwww!

Of course, one of my favorite museums in Washington is the Army Medical Museum, where you can see bone fragments from two murdered presidents and the leg bone of one Civil War general, not to mention the bones and organs of many other less distinguished dead people.  So perhaps I’m not one to talk.

Nothing super today, just a lot of enjoyable things in Florence.

Our initial goal was to visit the Pitti Palace, but we got a little lost, so first visited St Lawrence’s Cathedral, where Cosimo Medici, the founder of the family fortune, is buried.  Donatello, who was Cosimo’s favorite artist, is there too.  Note that this church, for some reason, has no facade.  A tour guide explained why a couple days ago, but I must confess to not paying sufficient attention to remember why.

After that, we got to the Pitti Palce.  The home of the Medicis starting sometime in the 16th century, later the Italian home of Napoleon, it now houses more art that the Medicis collected.

Long-arm duel selfie!

The art here was not as good as what we saw in the Uffizi, but there was another Caravaggio and two more versions of Judith and Holofernes.  You can see again from these just how sanitized most of these are.

Does she really look determined enough to have cut off that head?

Does she really look like she has the upper body strength to do any real damage with that sword?

The Pitti Palace also had a fashion museum that Julie liked.  She was well dressed for it.

After that, we visited the Boboli Gardens, the gardens of the palace.  They are extensive and lovely, though not as well groomed as some of the gardens I’ve seen in England and France.  There were terrific views, however.

There’s even a grotto with sculpture made of cave formations.  You couldn’t get away with doing that back in Virginia!

And a giant head.  No, not mine.  The one next to me.

After that, we went to St Croce’s Cathedral.  Julie said this was her favorite church we’ve seen on this trip because of the terrific medieval art.  (Julie is a big fan of medieval art.)

I liked it because of the who’s who of tombs that it contained: Michaelangelo, Enrico Fermi, Macchiavelli, Dante (though remember Dante – there’s going to be more on this in a later blog post).  And here I am next to another, the tomb of Gallileo:

Later, after a marvelous dinner (most of the food we’ve eaten has been terrific, but this evening’s was a standout), we went for a night walk by the Duomo.  My biggest regret was that I was still too stuffed to get another gelato.  Good thing I took the precaution of having one earlier in the day.

It is always interesting to see how different artists depict the same story.  And artists love telling the same mythic stories.  This week, I’ve seen at least a dozen versions of the Rape of the Sabine Women, several Davids in various stages of fighting Goliath, and any number of versions of any number of events in the life of Jesus.

One story that I’ve frequently seen is the tale of Judith and Holofernes.

In the Biblical story (well, Biblical if you are Catholic: not all protestants count the Book of Judith as part of the Bible), Holofernes is the general of an enemy of the Israelites.  Judith, a heroine of Israel, manages to seduce him, get him drunk, and cut off his head.

There’s many artistic depictions of this.  Here’s one that we saw today at the Uffizi:

That one’s fairly typical: a nice delicate lady performing a bloodless decapitation.

We were walking through the gallery and came across this very different version:

You can practically hear the bone crunching as Judith saws through Holofernes’s neck in this one.

Julie mentioned that this was her favorite painting of the story, when two women who were walking by joined in on the conversation.  From all of these eager fans of this painting, I learned the following:

– This was painted by a 17th century woman artist.

– She had previously been raped.

– It’s thought that she painted Holofernes to resemble her rapist.

There is something rather satisfying about seeing an artist take some measure of revenge in this way, even if it is not all the justice she deserved.  And it’s also nice to see works by a woman artist of that period, something that was rare.

And as Julie says, this is far from the sanitized view of the Judith story that most male artists present.  This Judith is powerful and not at all squeamish about the work she must do, and the work itself is an act of butchery, not at all delicate.

But it was also interesting to see these three women, Julie and the other two, so enthusiastic about the history of this painting.

And a special bonus travel note: several of the great art museums of the world, museums that gather huge crowds, will stay open late one or more nights a week.  If you go there on those evenings, the crowds are much smaller.  You can see the famous paintings without having to elbow your way to the front.  We used this trick at the Louvre a few years back to see the Mona Lisa without being mobbed.  It worked just as well today at the Uffizi: we did an earlier tour, but then stayed until closing.  There were huge mobs around the most famous paintings earlier in the day, but at night we practically had Venus and the others all to ourselves.

Today was a day of iconic artworks.  For example, my Venus with Venus:

And here’s, well, no.  I can’t really claim to be a David.

I was fairly blown away by David, however.  The setting is amazing and the sculpture is just plain gorgeous.  It definitely lived up to the hype.

We spent the morning at various art activities, including the Galleria Academia, where David is, and visiting the Duomo, which is astonishingly beautiful and elaborately decorated outside but rather plain inside.

Of course, after St Peter’s and all those other Baroque churches in Rome, just about anything would look plain to my eyes.

In the afternoon, we visited the Uffizi Gallery.  The Uffizi was the personal art collection of the Medicis, and the Medicis had amazing taste and the money to indulge it.  In addition to the Birth of Venus, they have three DaVincis, a Michaelangelo, a bunch of Donatellos, several Raphaels, and, outside of the Ninja Turtle school of art, tons of Titians, three more Caravaggios to add to my list, and a truly astonishing range of Medieval, Renaissance, and later art.

Which raises an interesting little point about the art museums we’ve been visiting this week.  We’ve visited five art museums so far.  All but one was the personal collection of some wealthy family.  Even the Vatican Museum was the collection of a virtual family: the popes.

This is an entirely different approach to art museums than I am used to.  But perhaps most interesting of all: all these personal collections are amazing.  The Uffizi is one of the greatest art museums in the world.  But I suppose you can collect a lot of great art when you were the leading family of the city where the Renaissance began.

Speaking of which, here’s the home of the Medicis – a beautiful building right next to the Uffizi (which means “Offices,” as the building was originally built to be the offices of the Florence government, until one of the Medicis decided he’d rather have an art gallery than another set of government offices).

Today was a travel day.  We moved our base of operations from Rome to Florence.  Which limited our time in both.  So in Rome, all we did was:

– Three churches, one of which had another three Caravaggios.  That brings me up to, gee, I’ve lost count.  Eight?  Nine?  Something like that many Caravaggios.  Rome is full of the most beautiful churches that are incredibly well decorated and contain art by the masters.  You can walk down the street, stop into a random church (no entrance fee!), and expect to see at least one masterpiece inside.

– One dead rat.  I’ll spare you the photo I took.

One other observation about Rome, before I move on:

The original Romans were some of the best looters in history.  One of the places they looted was Egypt, taking away many obelisks that they used to decorate their various public spaces.  At some point over the years, Rome’s later masters moved those obelisks all around the city.  So in addition to running into random beautiful churches on any corner, you’re likely to find a random obelisk pop up where you least expect it.

But there’s one weird thing about all those obelisks.  Here’s the base of one:

Note the guy on the bottom left, the one with a hawk head.  That’s Horus, an Egyptian god.  In fact, the carvings on the obelisk are all Egyptian religious writing.

But at the top of the obelisk, you find this:

Those crazy Christian Romans didn’t even bother removing the pagan religious symbols. They just slapped a cross on top and figured it was now a Christian monument.

You can see this on a lot of the old Roman and Egyptian monuments throughout the city, though the symbols on top are not always crosses.  Sometimes they are statues of saints.  It’s an interesting approach to recycling.

After an education in the Italian train system, an education that only cost us an hour’s delay and a bit of stress, we find ourselves in Florence.  We enjoyed a rooftop snack in view of the Duomo.

Then after a quick meal, we took an evening tour that told stories of various bloody doings in Florence.

My impression so far: Florence is an amazing place, where you see designer shops set in medieval towers.

The Duomo is so beautiful and unusual that sometimes while looking at it I find it hard to believe it’s not just a model.

And there’s all sorts of lovely views at night.

But I am discovering to my chagrin that I did not do enough homework for this trip.  While I read a survey on Italian history, I did not study the history of Florence in detail the way I did Rome.  I did not memorize the Medicis in the way I memorized the Roman emperors.  (Yeah, I actually did that.  I’m a geek, I admit it.)

The result is that I’m failing horribly at serving as Julie’s guide.  Further, the place doesn’t have the same buzz for me as Rome, given that I am not steeped in its history.  I shall have to find a way to spend time over the next few days poring through Wikipedia.  What’s worse is that we’re headed to Venice in a few days and I didn’t study up on it either.  Sigh – better get cracking, Joe!