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"The streets of Rome are filled with rubble,
Ancient footprints are everywhere.
You can almost think that you're seein' double
on a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs"
When I Paint My Masterpiece
– Bob Dylan
I had a wonderful
time in
Italy
and returned home yesterday night. In two weeks I travelled from
Genoa to Cinque Terre, then from La Specia to Rome, to Florence,
Venice and finally home from Treviso airport on Wednesday, spending
a few days at each place and even squeezing in a day in Pisa. I even
considering travelling to Slovenia for a day, but that never
materialised. Italy is a wonderful place. I was shocked at how
reasonable transport is there. Their infrastructure isn’t as slim
line, or as superficial as ours appears, its practical however, it
actually works -unlike our own - in general their transport is much
more reliable and reasonable than our own, such a different country,
time is nothing, there's no rush....
Rome
was such a culture shock for me, walking round in the ruins of the
past, greatness fallen, seeing people worshipping graveyards of
fallen glory taking photographs. Photographs on one level mean
nothing... I wrote to a friend during my trip: "I'm trying to take
pictures, but what the does a photo really mean? Its the memory of
an event personalised and immortalised in the mind that counts, the
poetic images you gather and make your own from as opposed to the
pictures of a moment gone by. Remember thinking it happened, that it
existed as opposed to trying to prove to yourself with a photograph.
Some things have to be felt and experienced on a profound level and
a Photo can never do that justice. Photographs can make ghosts of
people, they can take away the magic of an experience, "look where
I've been, see this photograph here?” does it really matter in the
end? Isn’t that a failure of our own vanity? ... I absorbed so much
that a photograph didn’t matter. Either way I do have photographs,
though I felt that I was betraying the beauty of what I was seeing,
somehow 'taking' from it instead of 'investing' something of myself
in seeing it, seeing hundreds of people scattered across the
monuments in Venice, or Rome or Florence taking photographs and
touching, making their own empire from the dust of old. Seeing all
of those remnants of time and decay is just something completely
beyond words and sentence....
I'm still a bit sunburnt, but even at the time it didn’t matter, the
culture and what I was able to scramble from the massiveness of it
seeped so far into me that i felt no aches and pain. All I did was
walk, the sun on my back, streets ahead... Echoes of ghosts on the
streets of Rome, Florence and Venice, wandering all the way up the
Spanish Steps, round the forum, the coliseum, throwing coins in the
Fontana di trevi.. Yes, and maybe I will return one day...
There’s only one place that gave me that same magic feeling I felt
when in Rome and that’s NYC. But Rome... Rome is far more authentic
and much closer to the soul somehow, not dazzled by the sparks of
electric suicide at Times Square or the falling of autumn leaves in
Greenwich village, but feeling the past so close to my own skin, but
feeling the sublime, lost in a daze, wandering through ancient
footsteps and ghosts of previous times back through the streets of
Rome and happening upon The Pantheon...but the decay, the faint
suggestions of what it once was, there in all its grandness, the
faded beauty, the beauty of decay indeed.. it was something else,
beyond the words i know, beyond everything, beyond definition,
somewhere deep within the mystic. Falling asleep in the park, blue
skies above, mythology scattered like leaves across the city and
across my mind.
Seeing the balcony where
Mussolini
gave his speeches was surreal, I wish id been there all those years
ago, I'd have thrown my reality right at him... Piazza Venezia,
tribute to the greatness and glory of Italy and the Italian people?
I’m not so sure, beautiful nonetheless.. A Tribute to Mussolini’s
great egotism, perhaps.
Florence
like Rome was a beautiful city, yet its beauty was one that had to
wash over you. It took me time to adjust to it in that sense, we
went on a quest to discover which parts of the city had been used in
the film Hannibal, and we found sketches, pieces, fragments... sad i
know, but it was all part of the quest. Seeing the Cathedral - The
Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore - incredible, just incredible to see.
Walking across the Ponte Vecchio and then up the hillside on the
opposite side of the river seeing the whole panorama of the city,
fallen below the horizon, coloured like rust, browns and oranges and
creams all faded into one - The Florentine Renaissance indeed.
Its so hard at this time to even pour out the experience, the views,
my feelings on emotions are so awash with tiredness, the return to
some form of normalcy is taking time and the recollections will be
more fluid in time. But it was indeed a great trip. Venice was
wonderful and St Marks square was magnificent, but there again
everything was magnificent in its own individual way, the sunset on
the rocks at Riomaggiore almost unspoiled by the outside world, the
sunset behind the Ponte Vecchio, the echoes in the wind of faint yet
many voices in the streets of Florence as night time fell, that same
echo finding its way through the winding side streets of Venice, on
Gondolas, flickering through the candles as we ate dinner in one of
the ristorante's. Venice like nothing else, sinking into the lagoon,
its culture hijacked by tourism and re-enacted carnival, something
false was in the air, yet the majesty of what used to be and what
should be somehow overpowered this. I didn’t ride a Gondola because
the magic wasn’t there, the guys offering the canal trips were
sprinkling glitter on dust instead of being true to their profession
and to their own culture.. Either way Venice was wonderful, on the
first day happening upon a guy sitting on the steps of a church
playing Elizabethan ballads on guitar was surreal. He looked like
he’d come from another time and his soul poured through the music,
it was genuine, really beauty. The final night, tired, no, exhausted
finding our way back to the station we overheard trickles of Vivaldi
blagged our way into a Classical music concert; how we managed it I
don’t know, but wow! We went inside and took our seats, the music
echoing across the room, the splendour of every painting on every
wall, the way the light touched it in that moment making it special
and different the moments and moment-less that followed every stroke
of the cello, every murmour of the harpsichord... every statue
standing the test of its own structure and every melodic note of the
violin weaving and seeping through the grandeur of the surroundings
it found itself in.
We left the following day, ears buzzing, eyes in crazy vision,
"Train wheels runnin' through the back of my memory", magic restored
if only for a few days before becoming part of the deceived once
more...
"...someday
everything is going to be different when I paint my masterpiece".
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