Arrivederci

(Nello stile di Goodnight, Moon)

Goodbye Bologna.

Goodbye Vespas and tiny cars.
Goodbye Bulmer's at the bar.

Goodbye street parties while I'm in bed.
Goodbye dreadlocks on students' heads.

Goodbye self-important profs.
Goodbye roommate's smoker's cough.

Goodbye Torre Azinelli's steps.
Goodbye my sweet Bombocrep.

Goodbye Osteria dell'Orsa.
Goodbye ruins beneath Salaborsa.

Goodbye Independenza, Zamboni, Ugo Bassi.
Goodbye Cafè Paris- stay classy!

Goodbye roommate's psychotic ragazza.
Goodbye Neptune in the piazza.


Goodbye Europe.

Goodbye London and your rain.
Goodbye bizarre parades in Spain.

Goodbye screaming soccer fans.
Goodbye warm baguettes in France.


Goodbye Alhambra and the Moors.
Goodbye Westminster's cluttered floors.


Goodbye Shakespeare on the Thames.
Au revoir Paris- je t'aime.

Goodbye Louvre, goodbye Versailles.
Goodbye Granada and London Eye.

Adios, español, que no hablo.
Goodbye plates of escargot.

Goodbye euros, pounds, and pence.
Goodbye metric system- good riddance!

Goodbye BCSP.

Goodbye Ricci, wife, and Ray.
Goodbye Hotel Holiday.

Goodbye Lillo, goodbye Danielle.
Goodbye "Chi è?" when I ring the bell. 


Goodbye Botta, goodbye Dodd.
Goodbye Benevolo, art history god.

Goodbye forty-five-cent caffe.
Goodbye Malcontenti 3. 


Goodbye Cornellians, see you in fall.
Goodbye amici, miss you all.


Goodbye Italy.

Goodbye high mountains between flat lands.
Goodbye speaking with our hands.

Goodbye Ravenna's blocky faces.
Goodbye prosciutto on a regular basis.


Goodbye Parma and your cheese.
Goodbye Neopolitans and Veronese.


Goodbye to all five Cinque Terre.
Goodbye hostels in monasteries.


Goodbye tiny coffee drinks.
Goodbye relatives who eat like kings.


Goodbye gelato, goodbye gelato,
Goodbye gelato, goodbye gelato. 


Goodbye immigration hassles.
Goodbye ruins, goodbye castles.


Goodbye Romans trapped in soot.

Goodbye stivale, goodbye boot.

Goodbye cities in their muri.
Arrivederci Italia, e forza azzurri!

What part of "JAY NAY PAH PAH FRANCE-AY?" don't you understand?

The evening of Saturday the 5th I arrived in Paris and met my Cornell friend Emily (last seen on this blog in March) at the station.  We took the Metro to my hostel near the Bastille and got some crepes.  I think my roommate at the hostel (for that night, I had to change rooms every day) was native Chinese, and he didn't speak English very well, so the next morning rather than saying "Have a nice trip" he uttered the far more epic "Good luck on your quest."  Thank you, fellow traveler, and may the wind ride on the heels of your steed.

I met up with Emily we went for a walking tour of the city.  The first thing of interest she showed me was the Pompidou, a hideous building in an otherwise quaint neighborhood whose gimmick is that all of its infrastructure (water, heating, escalators, etc) is visible from the outside.  That sounds cool on paper, but...

Dear Europe: Stop building things.  You lost your touch with the Industrial Revolution and now you look ridiculous.  The same is true for most of your art.

Next we went to the Tuileries (twee-luh-ree, not too-ler-eez), the expansive gardens near the Louvre.  The line for the Louvre was the single longest queue for anything I've ever seen (first Sundays of the month are free admission), so I postponed that for a later date and went to see Monet's water lily paintings at the nearby Orangeries museum.  (Yes, Monet is industrial-era.  I said most art.)

Our next three stops were more or less Paris's greatest hits.  We've got the Arc de Triomphe...

...followed by Notre Dame...

(Tourists are allowed in while Mass is being said.  I found it very awkward.)

...and finally the Eiffel Tower.  It was much, much larger than I imagined and is quite the engineering feat.

We also stopped by a noted English-language bookstore called Shakespeare and Co, which has a very cozy upper floor from which you can't buy the books but are free to browse, write at their typewriter, play their piano, or sleep in their bed.  My grandfather would never leave if he ever visited.

That night we went out for French cuisine.  I ordered the escargot just so I could say I've eaten it.  It was really quite good, and definitely better than Seville's calamares con tinta.

The next day I went to Louvre by myself in the morning.  According to Dan Brown's entirely factually correct guide to Paris, the Holy Grail is buried there so I was really excited.  [SPOILER ALERT.  SORRY.]  The line was much shorter than the day before and I got in for free as a student.  I set out to find the Mona Lisa so I could report that I'd done that.  I wasn't particularly overwhelmed or underwhelmed by it; I was perfectly whelmed at an average level.  It's exactly as you've seen it in photos, and to be honest it's a far more interesting painting of a battlefield that takes up the entire opposite wall.  I remember that one of my SAT reading passages was about a visitor not understanding what's so great about the Mona Lisa, and I see her point.

Art is great and all but I've seen quite a bit of it this semester, so I spent most of my remaining time at the Louvre looking at their ancient collections.  I've seen quite a bit of that too, so I guess I don't get consistency points here.

The Louvre is truly massive, and there's no way you can see the whole thing in one day without losing interest.  I left in a few hours after seeing but a fraction of their collection.  I met Emily back at the Tuileries and we walked to Sacre Coeur, a church on a hill with a fantastic view of the city.

Back down the hill we went to Sante-Chappelle, famous for its stained-glass windows.

That ticket included access to the nearby Conciergerie, the prison where Marie Antoinette was kept, but that wasn't particularly impressive.  We capped off the day with baguettes at the geographically-misleading Gardens of Luxembourg.

MISADVENTURE: Upon getting back to the hostel and entering my new room on the fourth floor, I put my towel over the window banister to dry.  A few moments later, it was gone.  It had been blown off by the wind and fallen three stories onto a flagpole.

It was lots of fun trying to explain this to the hostel staff.  I got it back the next day after having had to dry myself with a T-shirt.  Douglas Adams would have been disappointed in the whole ordeal.

I took the regional train to Versailles the next day.  There were two massive lines here, one of which I was able to skip.  I didn't need to buy a ticket, simply flashing my Italian student visa got me in through the gate (once I reached it).  Versailles is everything I was told it was in high school: the most over-the-top luxurious estate imaginable devoted to its resident.  Louis XIV was absolutely nuts.  His luxuries had cushions and there were mirrors to reflect his reflections.

I trained back to Paris and met up with Em again to tackle the city catacombs.  She'd never done this, so she was excited too.  We entered a fairly unremarkable building to the south of the city and went down a long, tight spiral staircase.  We walked along some cold, stone corridors for a while.

That's nice and spooky.  Dark, damp, okay, I've seen it, I'm ready to go.  I'll just turn this corner up here and-

NOT GOOD.  NOT GOOD.

 

THIS IS NOT HOW BONES ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK.  PUT THEM BACK IN A PERSON.

 

 

EMILY, I KNOW THIS WAS MY IDEA, BUT SOMEHOW ALL THIS IS YOUR FAULT.

So in the 1800s there were some "leakage" problems at some of Paris's cemeteries, and by "leakage" I mean "moisture was exposing cadavers and they were spreading disease."  The OBVIOUS solution to this, of course, was to build walls out of their bones in a vast network of tunnels beneath the city.  Clearly, this was the necessary solution.  The transition from stone tunnels to bone labyrinth was truly sudden and unexpected, and the whole experience was really eerie, and it was sort of harrowing to imagine myself tripping, outstretching an arm, and lodging my fingers in someone's eye socket for balance.  We equipped our Lens of Truth (this blog post is a record-setter for geeky references) and pressed onward, and emerged three blocks away from where we started.  The creepiest part?  The office at the end checked Emily's bag before we left, and there were skulls on a nearby table.  Some people actually try to take souvenirs.

That night Em went to go see Les Miserables, but at the hostel I was roomed with two boys about my age from America and Canada who are traveling Europe for the summer.  We went out together to go see the Eiffel Tower at night.  At exactly midnight, the whole thing lights up with a sparkly light program.  Here's my artsy shot of that:

The next day I flew back to Bologna, where I find myself faced with a serious problem: I am leaving for good in two days.

Honestly, I don't mind the gap so much. It's not so bad.

On June 1st my friends Kelsey, Bianca, and I flew off to London for five days.  Kelsey left for home from there on the 5th and back in April was looking for people to accompany her in England, and I quickly jumped on that trip because I had been planning to go there all semester.  Her parents had given her their hotel points for her birthday, so we got to stay in the Marriott at Gatwick Airport in big comfy hotel beds, a 40-min train ride from the city.  Our first day there was a stereotypical rainy London afternoon.  We walked from Victoria Station past Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, and Parliament and did a circuit on the London Eye, a colossal ferris wheel on the Thames that I'm sure would have offered a great view had it not been raining.

This is the London Eye, photo taken on a nicer day:

That night we had fish and chips and beer at a pub just to say we did.  It wasn't great.

We had been advised by the customs officer at the airport to do the classic double-decker bus tour, so the next day we did just that.  Our guides were great and very informative, and despite that touristy vibe I'm sure this has it really was a great way to see the city.

We got off at the Tower of London.  The Tower of London isn't really a tower, but a fortress/castle/jail on the Thames.  I approve!

Inside they had armor and such from all the monarchs that lived there and a few preserved rooms.  The Crown Jewels are also on display there.  Continuing my tendency of being in cities on really important dates, that day (June 2) was the anniversary of the Queen's coronation, and while we were on the bus we'd observed a cannon salute along the river.  Before entering the jewels' vault, we saw the end of the changing of the guards there, and watched a platoon of heavily armed guards enter the building.  While we were inside, we couldn't spot any of them.  Nice job, guys.

Our bus ticket came with a boat ride, so we took a cruise back down the Thames to the Westminster area.  Our guide was great once again.  We ate dinner (London doesn't really have a cuisine proper, so I had a giant plate of nachos), and wandered in Green Park before returning to Gatwick.

The next day we took the train to Greenwich and visited the Maritime Museum and Prime Meridian.  The museum was very interesting, and it was neat to stand on the halfway point of the world, although they could have painted any old line they wanted and we wouldn't have known.

The others wanted to visit Wimbledon in our evening, and while I don't think we ever found the actual tennis courts we had a nice time wandering the park.

The next day we went to Westminster Abbey.  I've seen a lot of churches this semester, as you know, but I was absolutely blown away by the abbey.  Somehow the Anglicans have managed to out-church the Pope.  The abbey is grand and massive with stained glass windows (Italy doesn't do the stained-glass thing so much), and there's a grave or monument to virtually every member of every royal family and every important figure in English history.  The whole church is filled to the point of clutter with statues and tombs and the effect is quite overwhelming.

On the way there we caught the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.  At least I caught it, because there was a substantial crowd and my friends are both rather short.

After putzing around on the banks of the Thames for a few hours and exploring a great nearby market, it was time for the highlight of the trip.  We had reserved tickets to see Macbeth at the Globe Theatre and we were not prepared for the production they had in store for us.  First of all, we had "groundling" tickets, which means we spent the three hours standing in the pit in front of the stage.  Over the pit was a black tarp at about shoulder-level, with holes for the audience to stick their heads through.

Before the play began, the witch-sisters central to the plot- pale-white and covered in cuts and blood for this gruesome interpretation- snuck around underneath creeping up on people and grabbing them, causing quite a commotion as people glanced under the tarp to figure out what was happening.  Throughout the play, actors descending into the trap to exit stage, bloody figures popped out of it wailing, and fake blood/urine/gore was ejected onto it.  The whole production was eerie and hilarious and absolutely amazing.  You can read a review I like here from the Official London Theatre Guide with two good photos.

The next day both my friends left, one for America and the other for Bologna.  My train to Paris was that evening, so I spent theday at the London zoo.  Most zoos are disappointing, and you end up looking for the animal in each habitat Where's-Waldo style (At the DC zoo last fall, I couldn't see the elephants in the elephant area.  How do you hide elephants?), but the animals here were quite social.

Afterwards I went to St. Pancras, the station in honor of the only saint other than St. Kidney of Lungberg to be named after an organ, and took the train through the Channel to Paris.

Pomigliano D'Arco! Pompeii! Processions! Purple people!

About two weeks ago my friends Bianca and Caroline and I went to Naples for the weekend.  The night after my last exam we took a 1AM train down the peninsula to arrive in the beachside town of Salerno where our hostel was.  Salerno is a very pleasant town with a quaint old quarter, and we stayed in a former monastery.  I was in the massive boy's dormitory all by myself for one night, and only had to share the space with one other the next two nights.

That first day we went to Naples.  Now, I've grown accustomed to Bolognese traffic patterns.  What I once viewed as reckless and dangerous I now view as efficient.  If there's space to drive your car, drive your car there.  You want to walk in the road?  Walk in the road.  Get from point A to point B by whatever means necessary, perhaps stopping for gelato along the way.  I haven't seen anyone hurt yet.

Naples was a different story.  The traffic was insane, an absolute mob.  Buses were squeezing into scooter-sized openings, horns were blaring everywhere, and you had to look four different ways and then behind you before crossing a street.  The city was much more hectic and somewhat more downtrodden than anywhere else I've been and has a reputation for that.  More on that later.

We wandered a bit, looking for a particular museum we never found, and sojourned through an old, crowded part of the city.  We eventually reached the archeological museum, more or less the only thing we truly visited in Naples, which had a great collection of cool old things, which are more or less my favorite type of thing.

When I am fabulously wealthy, this is what the entrance hall to my home will look like, but with more pants.

We returned to Salerno that night.  As we walked around, we came across a fashion/talent show in the town's main square we dwelled at for a while.

The next day we took the train to Pompeii.  Anyone who's been paying attention to this blog will know already that I had a great time there.  It's simply amazing.  The entire site truly is the size of a small city, and an enormous portion of the area, I'd estimate nearly a half, have not even been excavated yet and are browned out on the map.  Visitors wander all they want through the excavated area and are free to enter a number of houses and gardens.

A few of the fossilized remains of the inhabitants are on display in various areas of the site.

Friendly dogs wander the entire site and like to latch on to groups and follow them around for a while.  I have a horrible sense of humor, so I named this one Dusty.

We left around midday and ate dinner in the town of Pompei, where our waiter was very pleased to discover that we spoke Italian.  We returned to Salerno and were relaxing in the hostel when suddenly we heard fireworks nearby.  We peeked out a window...

A PROCESSION.  I started having traumatic flashbacks of Seville.  Our hostel was right next to a church, and a parade of marchers in Renaissance garb marched by, stopped before its doors, performed a ceremony, and marched on.  Apparently we were there for some sort of regional feast day.  Luckily I was safe in the hostel and they didn't spot me, and we didn't run into them again when we went out that night.  Italian processions are less persistent than Spanish ones.

As long as we're talking about Salerno (I am, are you?) I should mention the bizarre prevalence of purple clothes in this town.  For whatever reason, lots of people in Salerno were wearing purple to the point that we would giggle every time someone violet passed.  We tried asking what the deal was but couldn't get an answer.  I wasn't going to take pictures of random strangers, but look at this storefront:

Bianca left early the next day.  Caroline and I sat on the waterfront that morning counting the purple Italians before training back to Naples to meet one of my father's second cousins, Antonio.  We met him and his nephew (my third cousin) at the station, and before taking us to their home they gave us a proper tour of Naples.  It seems that the first day, we really hadn't properly explored the city and had in fact walked through some of its less attractive neighborhoods.  In a half hour of hectic driving, they pointed out some wonderful architecture and fantastic views on the opposite side of the city we hadn't explored.  We really, really screwed up that first day.

They then brought us to their house in Pomigliano D'Arco, a town on the edge of Naples where my father's father's family is from.  A giant meal ensued, the magnitude of which was only matched by my mother's relatives in Milan.  We fished our memories for common names we both knew (their strong contacts stateside are my father's aunt Archie, who I see often enough, and a relative named Mike who my father found Antonio through), and they seemed very interested in stateside life.  Caroline had to leave then, and after the meal Antonio gave me a tour of Pomigliano and took me to the nearby town of Camposano, where my last name might come from (Antonio's mother was a Campasano so it's not his last name, but he says that in the cemetery the Campasano plot has a few names spelt "Camposano").

I met a few more relatives including his sisters and a cousin of his.  Here's a photo of Antonio, his daughters, his wife, his sister (who married nobility, and has a wonderful art collection and a massive coat of arms in her home), and myself on their roof terrace.

Also of interest is this shot, which Antonio said is of the factory where my great-grandfather worked (the grey building behind the scaffolding):

Antonio and his family also have a strong case of Italians-are-the-nicest-people-in-the-world syndrome, so after spending this whole day trucking me around, he took me up Vesuvius to see the view at night, you know, just because we could.

The niceness continued, and he and his wife drove me back to Salerno before saying farewell.

I came back to Bologna the next morning, where BCSP had its end-of-semester talent show.  I read a piece I wrote for the Lunatic (Cornell's humor magazine) freshman year which was well-received, then went home to take a break from all this traveling.

Or maybe not.  I left again the next day for a week in London and Paris.  Until next time!