Great Art

south of the Alps

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approaching Venice across the lagoon

The call of the cuckoo woke me. It was comfortably warm, though still only March or early April, to the best of my rather fuzzy memory, so where could this be? Sliding back the nearest door of the van I looked out: hmm, a camp site - not the homeland, then. Nearby was my tent. Cuckoo again … gradually the little grey cells got a grip: this was across the lagoon from Venice, in the tent were Cee and her current boyfriend Wimbil (Bill, a denizen of Wimbledon), and home was several days’ driving, around 2,000 miles away.

Cee had happened to be at a loose end, and would quite like to look at places like Venice and Florence, stuffed with Great Art; Wimbil was also interested, and on the way I could maybe have a nostalgic look at an Alp or two. I would sleep in the Mitsubishi van; they would have the tent.

Leaving Orkney in a spring blizzard, the driving needed care until the central belt, where snow gave way to rain, and on we went, hour after hour through the huge boredom of that long, long bit through Englandshire: mile after mile of 70+ mph across an almost completely flat landscape, on and on, till you had the illusion that you were standing still and the other cars were drifting gradually towards you or away from you, and you lost all sense that there was a road surface down underneath, hurtling backwards at a rate that could damage you badly if things went just a tiny bit wrong.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Abingdon, where my sister Joan lived and we could stop for a night or two, my brain cells had nearly ceased to function.

I used to know this bit very well indeed, having lived in Oxford for several years and cycled all around. But now the roads were new bypasses, and I didn’t recognise where exactly we were. Obviously I could ask someone, or find a phone box and ring Joan, but in the brain death of the long drive I couldn’t remember her number, nor her address, nor even her married name. Could this be early-onset dementia? I cruised around until we came upon a recognisable part of the town, upon which everything fell into place and soon we were at Joan’s house. She wondered why I hadn’t rung earlier when we were getting near, but I hardly liked to tell her about the dementia.

Since then I’ve wondered: could one possible cause of dementia be extreme long-term boredom? Ah well, wait and see.

A couple of days in Abingdon, then via the Great Wen of London to pick up Wimbil, thence to Felixstowe and Zeebrugge, and the challenge of driving on the right in a van – on the motorbike it was a doddle, in the car, not too bad, but in the van, visibility from the wrong side was crap.    

Wheeching through the Ardennes, through Luxembourg, a bit of France, across Switzerland (my, how these little European countries flashed past), over the St Bernard Pass, suddenly we were south of the Alps, in sunshine and peach blossom. A nerve-racking hurtle from Milan to Venice, everything going 80+ mph, up tight together; if someone had a puncture a mile away we’d all crunch into mangled tin, aaarrggh.

But at last we could relax, for just across the lagoon lay Venice, the Stromness of the south, pulsing with must-see paintings; and it was quiet, apart from an aircraft lifting off from Marco Polo airport away in the distance, and the cuckoo, bird of midsummer back home.

dilapidated, beautiful

We crossed the lagoon on the hydrofoil and wandered about, soaking up the atmosphere: dilapidated, sinister, beautiful. (Only my personal feeling: others may find it romantic.) And very expensive, for tourism is a large part of what keeps it afloat so a coffee costs the tourist big bucks.

Mere words are inadequate for describing Venice. There’s nowhere like it, and you have to go there before the rising water level drowns its marvels. Apart from the vaporetti, and what the people are wearing, you could be wandering through a Canaletto painting.

I’m not sure how Cee and Wimbil spent the time, whether they got into the Accademia, where you can see European classical art up to the 19th century, if that’s the kind of thing that lights your fire.

art aficionados

Sadly, art is not the thing that hits the spot for me: I can read about it and appreciate it intellectually, and be mildly overwhelmed by the impact of the monstrous real-life size of all those famous paintings that I’ve seen reproductions of in art books; but I don’t feel it the way I see art aficionados feeling it. If the waters rose and drowned all those amazing works of art I would be only mildly regretful: after all, the thousands of reproductions in the art books would not have been drowned, only the size and texture would have been lost.

Whereas if, in some unimaginable way, music were to be lost, then I would feel bereft of much of what makes life worth living. For all it takes is a bar or two of J.S. Bach, D. Scarlatti, Chopin, Brahms, Ravel (to name but a few) and the world becomes beautiful, even the world of a hospital ward with macaroni and potato for lunch.

across the river

Florence needed a look, so away south we bowled, through Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, arriving on the outskirts of Florence around commuter time; after a bit of increasingly desperate circling we found a camp site high above the river across from the Duomo. Nearby was the Piazzale Michelangelo, with a copy of the famous David statue, which so gripped Wimbil that he copied the stance thereafter (though remaining fully clad) in any photo that he knew was being taken.

view from window of the Uffizi

Great Art is everywhere in Florence, and no doubt the bairns trundled around finding it, but I limited myself to the Uffizi, where among the famous names I rather like Sandro Botticelli, not for bland, bored madonnas holding grumpy babies, but for portraits of people who look real. I’d seen photographs of two portraits that looked real, Simonetta Vespucci (if that’s who it was) and Flora in the Primavera; both faces wore expressions I recognised from Thick Arithmetic in Stromness Academy, Simonetta having just found out that her boyfriend had been seen in a car in a dark layby with her best friend, and Flora tottering out of the dance hall the worse for home-brew; it mattered little that Simonetta was swathed in jewellery and Flora in little flowers, or that they weren’t wearing distressed jeans and anoraks, or that they’d spent a goodish time with the hairdresser, inside those gorgeous exteriors lived people that I recognised from the classroom.

Simonetta (?)

Would the original paintings give any clue about what Sandro was thinking as he painted them? It was rumoured that he fancied Simonetta (who was married). Her pouting glare looked as though she had maybe been giving Sandro a hard time, Flora as if she’d enjoyed winding him up. There were those who thought these were both the same woman, and that the rather vacant Venus floating ashore on the shell was also Simonetta, which I found incredible – quite different hair colour, quite different expressions, but that was possibly due to the camera, and the actual originals might show more similarity.

Flora

The pouting Simonetta wasn’t anywhere in the Uffizi (I should have checked - she’s in New York); flowery Flora was there, in that enormous painting of Spring, but she was surely not the same person as vacant Venus, who was also there. Not that it mattered to a non-aficionado, of course.

What was striking, wandering through the Renaissance, was that all the females were either pregnant or holding a baby on their knees, the baby usually unattractive and grumpy, the mother bored, bewildered or tired, not looking like someone who changed the nappies, wiped up the vomit, bathed the infant – but ladies who were painted would all be rich, and someone else would be doing all that messy stuff, unseen by the painter.

If you could time-travel to live whenever you liked, the Renaissance would be an interesting time for a man, but mostly boring if you were female; the same could be said for classical Greece, and in fact for any era up to the present day, when opportunities for females have expanded hugely during my own lifetime.

San Gimignano

We cruised about Tuscany a bit, visiting Siena (amusing striped cathedral, like a gigantic liquorice allsort) and San Gimignano, famed for its towers: in olden days you demonstrated your wealth and power by building a tower taller than any of your rivals’ efforts - your tower was a kind of gold-plated stretch limo. The bairns were a tad hungover and disinclined for effort, but I went up the tallest tower to admire the view: nearby the architecture and roof tiles surpassed anything to be seen at home; the middle distance was pleasant, without anything eye-catching; but away in the distance was a snow-covered range of mountains, part of the Apennines, the spine of Italy, recalling the sight of the distant Cairngorms from above the Devil’s Elbow.

big tower, distant Apennines

Some day, I thought, I would come back and investigate the Apennines – there were a lot of them and they reached twice the height of a Cairngorm. It would still be on my to-do list if I were able for it.

The problem with Tuscany is that you need a lifetime to explore it, and we couldn’t spend the rest of our lives here, so we turned north and visited friends in Rivara, near Turin, where the bairns played football in the huge garden and then caught a train in Turin to go home.

I stayed on in Rivara a few days, in the course of which Sandro and his friend who was a park ranger took me for a day in the Gran Paradiso National Park, which I’d last seen in the distance some thirty years before, from the French/Italian border above Courmayeur.

The ranger took us deep into the park to see an abandoned village with houses through whose cellars flowed the stream in which they kept their cheeses fresh; the school still had its little desks and the last lesson chalked on the blackboard. I’m not sure if I understood all the information, though the ranger spoke slowly and clearly for the foreigner, but I understood him to say that the people had used the chestnut tree for all of their fuel and much of their food, the meat coming from chamois and ibex. This early in the year these animals were down here in the valley and the noise of ibex horns clashing was all around. A memorable day, but no photos, because the whole film that I used that day turned out to be far too dark.

near Rivara

Next day I was taken a tour of the village: the cemetery – mostly niches in a wall with photos of the departed, but one big tomb with railings around it contained the Contessa, whom we had met in her castle ten years back on a previous visit; we had sat at the enormous table, highly polished and riddled with fat woodworm (unless they were bullet holes) and admired her accentless colloquial English, for she had been brought up by an Edinburgh nanny; over the great creaking door was engraved the family motto:

VINCENDUM AUT MORIENDUM

(ONE MUST CONQUER OR DIE)

Now she was in this tomb, so she had died sometime in the last decade, but, sadly, had failed to conquer, on account of having married, late in life and wearing a black velvet wedding dress, an unreliable chap wearing co-respondent shoes and a panama hat, who used up her money and quickly abandoned her, and had now sold the castle. (If I understood everything I was being told, of course.)

In the evening my friends took me out, together with the whole extended family, to eat at a restaurant, where my hosts ordered the main dish, telling me that since I lived on an island I obviously liked frutti di mare; in the seconds that it took me to (a) realise this was seafood, a thing I detest beyond all other types of nosh, and (b) arrive at a polite way to express this in Italian, it was too late, and the octopus tentacles were on their way. Though managing to stuff these shiny worms with their predatory suckers into my mouth, I could not swallow them, and sat with bulging cheeks, speaking through lips tightly pursed to block the escape of the imprisoned frutti; fortunately they were talking so animatedly among themselves that speech was not called for, and presently I managed a visit to the loo where I unloaded the burden.

On the road again I made a leisurely way up the Val d’Aosta, heading for Courmayeur and Entrèves where there was now a tunnel under Mont Blanc to Chamonix. Leisurely, because there were many alluring side-valleys worth exploring. But I soon realised it was too early in the year, the snow too deep, the little roads impassable, so, pressing on to Entrèves, I entered the tunnel.

The last time I’d been hereabouts was thirty years before, at a time when there was no tunnel, and I’d been walking on the glaciers and rocks above where the tunnel now existed. They’d drilled simultaneously from the French and Italian sides, and when they met, somewhere in the middle, the error was less than 13 cm, an impressive feat.

Mont Blanc from tunnel entrance

In the tunnel I was very aware of the huge mass of Mont Blanc sitting up above, and the tunnel was very long (over 7 miles) … and very empty … no other traffic … nothing at all … and now it was going down, and you couldn’t see where it ended … still no other traffic, on this, the major road link between Italy and France, why? there had been a lot of notices about speed and not overtaking or turning around, was there something I’d missed, had Mont Blanc come crashing through the roof? … still no other traffic … why?

I found I was sweating. It was taking too long. It couldn’t take this long, could it? The ancient lizard-brain had gone into red-alert mode and was mucking about with time, slowing it down, like when you have an accident. Had it seen something that I hadn’t? Where were the other cars? Still going downhill, still no visible exit.
It couldn’t have taken that long, 7 miles at between 30 and 45 mph (the minimum and maximum speeds permitted), say ten minutes, possibly the longest ten minutes I’ve ever lived through. A speck of daylight appeared, grew larger, the exit, Chamonix, phew.

I was puzzled at the level of unease I'd been feeling, though if things go wrong a tunnel is obviously a bad place to be. But quite how bad became clear only many years later, in 1999, when a lorry carrying margarine and flour went on fire half-way through the tunnel, and the fire services were beaten back by black toxic smoke and heat; it took over two days to put the fire out, the temperature rose to 1000^oC and 39 people died.

North of the Alps now, I’d escaped from all that wall-to-wall sunshine and peach-blossom; in fact it was dreich, and the farther north the dreicher it got; one camp site was deep in snow. I suppose I must have got the ferry back from Zeebrugge to Felixstowe but it’s a complete blank in my memory, and so is the rest of the way home …

Unless that was the time I went to visit an aged (90+) aunt in Devon and got mauled by her Alsatian, after which a gliding course at Husbands Bosworth, near Leicester: a gripping experience sailing noiselessly over Bosworth Field (Richard III vs Henry VII, 1485), looking for the little cumulus clouds that meant lift; my instructor, Reg, who had flown Spitfires, could find lift where none should be – it was rumoured that he switched on an electric fire in his hearth to generate a secret column of rising hot air that only he could find; there were tales of reaching Didcot power station which would lift you to a height where you could ride the wave generated by the mountains of Wales far away to the west: a whole fascinating new dimension, from whose allure, after a week, I tore free and drove north overnight, stopped at dawn for breakfast on the A68 at the top of the Soutra, there was Edinburgh, where I’d been to University, where the early years of marriage had flitted past, on north through Perth, where I’d been to school, up the A9 past those horizontal slagheap Munros that I never sewed up, past the snow-covered Cairngorms, which the sight of the Apennines had brought to mind ...

big hair, distant Cairngorms

... through Inverness, past the layby where I’d been diverted by the sight of the mountains of the west and failed to go the rest of the way to Ulan Bator, on and on, whole pieces of my life rolling by, till the trees gave way to bleak moorland and loch, and Scrabster, to wait for a space on the Ola for the Pentland Firth and Stromness. Was all that on the same journey that I’d started in the March blizzard? The memory is none too reliable, but it’s sure that the last bit was in a blizzard. In May.

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