Wednesday, September 15

At breakfast, we met a few more of our fellow travelers. We had a chance to talk a little with the redhead’s parents who seemed very nice. We also met the youngest couple on the group. They were a sturdy-looking, young, thirty-something. They told us that they "had planned to see Europe before they had children." I interpreted this statement completely differently from Michele and Rebecca. They both thought that the couple had had to delay their plans because they’d had children. I thought that they meant that they were planing to have a child and took the trip first. As unlikely as it sounds, my interpretation was correct. It turns out that the pair was actually newlyweds on their honeymoon. We also discovered later that this more or less guaranteed them all the best rooms in all the hotels. Maybe they weren’t newlyweds and just discovered a great way to get the best room. No, they were too nice for that. Of course, I’m not. I’m already planning to use this idea the next time Rebecca and I take a tour. .

This was our first "travel" day between cities. We had to have our bags packed and outside our hotel room’s door by 7AM so that they could be loaded on the bus. After breakfast, we needed to be on the bus by 8AM. The plan for the day was to see the sites of Milan in the morning and then head off for Verona and Venice.

It wasn’t a great plan.

The problem was getting into downtown Milan at 8AM. As I’ve said the Grand Hotel Brun was on the outskirts of the city. According to Luciana, the local guide hired to take us through Milan, about 1.7 million people commute to work each morning in Milan. They had to be at work by 8:30AM. Milan has no subway or rail transport into the city. At 8AM, we got to see about a million Italian commuters as they tried to get to work in their cars.

The only bright side was that the traffic in Italy seems much safer when it isn’t moving at all. Our bus driver, Silvano worked hard trying to find streets where the traffic was moving. We had an opportunity to drive by the giant, bronze horse again. This time it was full daylight. Unfortunately, we still couldn’t get a good look at the giant statute from the road. The horse stands at a park across from the Hippodrome. The park has a fence and trees all around it. In front, center of the park, where the horse stands, there is a stone archway and gate. The arch is about the same size as the horse. All we could see was the horses giant legs and hoofs through opening under the arch. As we moved past the gate, the tree blocked our view. I took a picture the trees, hoping a bronze snout or haunch would peak through.

As we slowly worked our way into Milan, the increasing amounts of graffiti shocked us. We had noticed it the night before on our walked, but we mow discovered that it wasn’t the neighborhood. Spray paint was everywhere. It was the worst graffiti I’d ever seen. The trend may have started in the states, but it had really caught on in Milan. The tour guide took us down streets with beautiful two hundred-year-old buildings and other streets built in the art nouveau style. Nothing was spared: not Verdi’s house, not the cardinal’s house, not even the Duomo, the cathedral itself. Paint covered the bottom six feet of almost every wall.

When we had been in Milan three years before, we hadn’t noticed any of this. It was like a plague. According to the guide, gangs of young people did the damage at night. The mayor was threatening to crack down, but, thus far, nothing had worked.

We finally arrived downtown. We got out of the bus and walked to Milan’s opera house, the famous, La Scala. We went into the building to see the wall of boxes curve around the central stage. It was instantly familiar from a number of costume dramas. It reminded my strongly of the opera house at Versailles, but this was much larger. We then went through the opera museum that it part of the opera house. I have no idea what La Scala looks like on the outside. An aluminum scaffolding complete surrounded it. They were cleaning it up for the new millennium.

One of the members of our tour group had been involved in the music world all his life and had actually toured Europe as a musician. For him, seeing La Scala was an emotional experience. At the end, he told a joke about an American tenor singing in Europe. After the tenor finished an aria in the opera he was singing, the crowd when wild and demanded that he sing it again. After he finished, the crowd demanded another encore. After the third time, the audience wanted a fourth.

"I am so flatter, but if I sing it again," the tenor told the crowd. "I won’t be able to finish the opera."

Then a voice from the crowd shouted: "You’ll sing it until you get it right!"

There was a plastic chute on the side of La Scala, peaking out from the scaffolding. We had seen these chutes all over Milan. They were used to carry the waste from remodeling down to garbage bins and trucks below. They were usually brightly colors, in yellow or orange plastic. I have never seen anything similar in American, though it makes perfect sense for taking waste down from a multi-story building. Maybe we have them but not in such bright noticeable colors.

From the opera house, we walked to the Galleria, a hundred year old covered shopping mall close by. Rebecca and I were surprised because we’d actually stumbled across the same Galleria in our explorations of Milan three years before. We discovered from the tour guide that this Galleria was—or claims to be— the first covered shopping mall in Europe, the forerunner of all the malls the have sprung up across America. In its time, it’s glass arched roofs were copied in other major European cities. No trend is as new was we think. The Galleria is in the shape of a giant cross with the two crossing aisles of expensive shops facing each other across a broad walking area. The sides are three or four stories tall. Above the shops on the first floor are offices. The high-arched glass ceiling connects the facing buildings. The open center of the cross forms a small plaza.

Like so much of Milan, bombing during the war destroyed the glass roof of the Galleria. Since the city had beautifully replaced it. The La Scala opera house also had a bomb destroy its original roof and ceiling. One reason that Milan doesn’t have as large number of old buildings is that so much of it was destroyed during the bombing of World War II. Unlike cities to the south, Milan was an industrial hub and therefore a more serious target.

In the Galleria, there are some beautiful mosaics on the walls and floors. One of them is a coat of arms that features a large bull. This particular mosaic is famous because it is supposed to be good luck if you can spin around on one foot, counter-clock wise, a full turn while standing with your heel on the bull’s balls. The tradition got started because the local bourse or stock market is nearby and the traders would take a spin on the bull’s balls for good luck.

Well, this was something that I had to do. I took off my rubber-soled shoes and practiced, with Michele’s coaching before taking the position. It was more difficult that it looked and not only because I am so uncoordinated. In tiles of the bull’s balls, the thousands of spinners have left a deep indentation. I was trying to spin with my heel in a little crater. Still, I think I made it most of the way around. Michele was doubtful.

Rebecca then took a turn. She didn’t take off her shoes and spun easily around. Rebecca was blessed with both grace and good luck. I am so jealous.

While we were spinning, most of the tour group had lined up to use the bathrooms as the McDonald’s in the Galleria. The tour guides were always careful to point out the free bathrooms we were passing and leave the group time to use them. Of course, this always meant lines at the women’s bathrooms. The line left me time to observe that McDonald’s in Italy are just like McDonald’s here. They were promoting Disney’s Mulan, which had apparently recently opened there. The only major difference was that this McDonald’s had an expresso and pastry bar set up with it. Even Seattle, the American home of expresso and Starbuck’s, doesn’t have McDonald’s that advanced.

From the Galleria, we when to see the local Duomo which stands in a large piazza right off one of the arms of the Galleria. The walls of the Duomo are lined with huge, three story stained glass windows. Each window has dozens of frames, each with a different picture. The windows were preserved during the war because they were removed and stored under the building. Taking them down and putting them up again is an amazing feat. Each window tells bible stories. They are medieval comic books, designed for an illiterate population. I’ve looked at many stained glass windows in churches and never noticed this before. Are they all like this? One window showed the story of Christ. The first frame shows the angel visiting Mary. The next shows the angel visiting Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin. The baby is born in frame three. Frame four shows the family fleeing for Egypt.

I was struck by the fact that I wouldn’t have noticed the story without being told. More, I realize, that unlike so many modern American, I know the story. At least I learned some of my people’s cultural, religious heritage. Unfortunately, the tradition was broken with my daughter who knows very little of the Christian tradition that the people of Milan spent hundreds of years capturing in glass. Many are slowly forgetting this art and its meaning, but it is also still being preserved for the few. I suspect it will outlast our current pagan age.

I also learned that the Duomo could contain forty thousand people. This was the population of Milan when the building was started. In other words, the cathedral could contain the entire population. Everyone could attend services together. It was truly the Duomo, the House. Not only was it the house of God, but the House of the whole city.

It must have been strange to have the whole town together like that. If you were there during a major holy day, you would know that everyone you knew was in the building with you, at the same time. You would know that they were seeing and hearing is the same as what you are seeing and hearing. Your whole town was together at the same time. I have often thought about the strangeness of mass media because it allows so many people to experience the same thing at the same time. However, the real strangeness of mass media is that we experience the same thing, but we don’t do it together. We do it separately in our separate houses. Americans never gather together in the big House, but is that good or bad?

Luciana led our group out of the Duomo and down the back of the church. There were young people dressed in bright modern outfits passing out free samples of yogurt drink. It was cool and delicious. Especially since Milan was so warm and humid. It was nice to get back to the air conditioning of the bus. We said good-bye to Luciana, our local guide and gave her a tip as we got on. Again, Rebecca and I sat up front, across from Enzo, the regular tour guide, and in front of Mom and Michele.

The next leg of the trip took us to Verona. Along the way, we passed many mysterious castles and cathedrals, tiny towns of old ornate buildings off in the distance. One of the reasons that they were mysterious was that they apparently weren’t interesting enough to elicit any commentary from our guide. Perhaps those who grow up in Italy and continuously travel around it naturally take all the history for granted. It is very different from the United States where the most interesting sights are natural. If there was a two hundred year old castle anywhere, it would elicit lots of comment.

At one point on the car ride, the air smelled of cheese. We initially thought that someone on the bus had opened a package of some stinky cheese. It was forbidden to eat or drink on the bus, but since the tour guide and driver both violated that rule, no one else took it too seriously either. I was looking around for the culprit, with the hopes that he or she woould would share when we passed a large modern factory building. It said, "Il Burro Formaggio" on the side. This doesn’t mean, "sick donkey shape," as you might think. It means, "The Butter Cheese." The smell was a bit too strong. You couldn’t call it delicious, but it was certainly intriguing. I had to wonder what "butter cheese" tasted like. Unfortunately, I never saw it on the rest of the trip.

Meanwhile, a little drama was unfolding in the front seat. I mentioned earlier that the youngest person on the trip was a twenty-something redhead with her parents. Well, on the previous day’s journey to Cuomo and Lugano, the redhead didn’t sit back with her parents, but up in front with the tour guide discussing getting an extra room. Later in the trip, she’d moved down to the seat across from the driver. She seemed to be flirting with him, although he was twice her age. Today, she was back in the front, across from the driver, but see was wearing noticeably less clothing. Her hair had come down. She lounged across her seat and on the floor. This didn’t seem like the wisest behavior. Driving in Italy takes total concentration. Distractions like our redhead probably accounted for most of the fatalities.

We stopped for lunch at an Autogrill. Autogrills are these restaurants that have the franchise for the Italian highway system. They include a sandwich shop, a cafeteria, and a shop that you have to wind all the way through in order to get out of the building. We had heard that they were good, but this was our first experience. It was excellent. Both Rebecca and I got the prepared salad which included anchovies, olives, and big balls of fresh mozzarella cheese. It was very large but we both easily finished it. Yum!

One interesting feature of many Autogrills—including this one—is that the restaurant is built over the highway so that it is accessible from both sides of the road. If you don’t realize this, you can exit on the wrong side. You’ll end up in a parking lot, just like the one you left. Only this parking lot won’t have your car, or in our case, your bus. Fortunately, we got every one back in bus. Still, it would have been nice if the tour guide warned us. I almost wonder if he wanted to get us all back after lunch.

After lunch, we continued to Verona, to see "Juliet’s balcony." Verona was, of course, the site of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Some smart entrepreneur found a balcony there and pegged it as Juliet’s and tourists have been flocking to it every since. Of course, there is a little historical background for Shakespeare’s play. There was a feud, not only in Verona, but in all of northern Europe, especially in Florence, between two prominent families, the Guelfs and the Gibberlines. It was this same feud that led to Dante of Dante’s Inferno to be expulsed from Florence. Most of the characters in the Inferno are his enemies in this particular feud.

After a drive through the city—"There’s the coliseum. There’s the cathedral."—we were dropped off where we had a short walk to Juliet’s balcony. The balcony is in a cute stone courtyard. We entered it through a stone archway. Well, it would be cute if it wasn’t completely jammed with tourist. This is the first :"tourist crush" of our trip. We could have gone into Juliet’s house and walked up to the balcony after paying appropriate fees, but the crush was too irritating.

The most attractive feature of this courtyard is the graffiti. However, unlike the graffiti of Milan, these are the love notes left by all the couples who have visited the balcony. I didn’t have the appropriate markers to leave my own "Gary loves Rebecca" note. This was the low point of the trip. I tried to use a ballpoint pen to scratch my name over Phillips on a "Rebecca and Phillip" but it didn’t work. Rebecca claimed that she didn’t even know a Phillip. Well, actually she didn’t deny it. She just laughed when I asked.

Of course, it was early afternoon, so most of the shops of Verona were closed. Most Italian stores are small shops. They usually close for lunch between twelve noon and three or three-thirty. It is impossible to time a trip around Italy without running into whole towns that they have closed for the afternoon. They open again and then stay open until seven or so at night. .

Fortunately, the department stores usually stay open. It was fortunate in this case because the toilet location identified by Enzo—as a he took us to the balcony and left us—was in a department store up the street. After walking toward the town and seeing nothing else of interest, our little group—Mom, Michele, Rebecca and I—headed back to the department store. The department store’s bathroom was on the second floor, in the children’s department. Actually, the store was smart because they didn’t have separate male and female bathrooms.

There are many fascinating things about Italian bathrooms. I will share many of their secrets with you in the course of my story. However, the first is the high degree of automation that you find in them. In America, you see automatic flushing devices in high-volume areas such as airports or sports stadiums. In Italy, virtually every pubic toilet is fully flush automated. And it is not just the toilets. The water comes on without turning a knob. The hot air dryers come on just by putting your hands under them. In one bathroom, even the soap dispenser was automatic, squirting soap when it sensed a nearby hand. If Italian factories were as well automated as their bathrooms, they would be a industrial powerhouse. Instead, Italy is a tourism powerhouse and their bathrooms get the automation.

I actually got to the bathroom before the women. The merchandise didn’t distract me, so I was out before everyone else even got there. I spent my time waiting looking at the children’s books. I discovered two things. First, I read Italian at about the first grade level. Second, all the Italians children’s books—at least the ones in this store—came from the United States. To be fair, these weren’t just books, but activity books with pop-up scenes, games and so on. Actually, I found myself thinking that it would be a lot more fun to learn Italian playing with children’s books than the typical language tapes that I buy.

We got back onto the bus and headed back toward Venice, our destination for the night.

All the Italian highways are toll roads. This means that drivers have stop at tollbooths as they get on and off to pay. Our tour bus, however, never had to stop. It had a more sophisticated system. There was a magnetic card system in the front window. It communicated to the toll both our billing information as the bus drove on and off. Buses and cars with these systems use a special lane. Special arrows at the tollgate indicate the special lanes. As they drive through, at about fifteen miles and hour, the system on the bus talked electronically to the system in the tollbooth and the gate magically opens.

Of course, this system works great and would work even better if people weren’t such idiots. The problems arise when someone without the special system. They get into these lanes and the gate doesn’t open. Of course, since other cars, trucks and buses have come in the lane behind them, the stuck cars can’t back out. The result is an interesting, new high-tech form of gridlock. ‘

We got stuck in one of these lane, blocked by a non-digitized car. We were several vehicles back, almost at the entrance to the lane. Unfortunately, there were other vehicles behind us so we couldn’t back up. Of course, because this is Italy, this situation requires a lot of yelling and gesturing between cars. The cars behind the trap cars are yelling at him. Meanwhile, the driver of the trapped car is trying to convince the cars behind him to back up so he can get out of the special lane. The cars behind him are trying to convince the cars behind them to back up. Unfortunately, buses and trucks really couldn’t communicate too well with the vehicles behind them. Additionally, new vehicles arrived all the time to continue the clog.

I had just about resolved myself to the fact that we would spend the rest of the trip in this tollbooth lane. Then Sylvan was able to get the bus backed up enough that he could veer into the adjoining lane and we were free!

Of course, most of the passengers didn’t get to see this little episode from seats in the back. Rebecca and I had front row seats since we were in the front of the bus. However, they weren’t the most comfortable seats. Since they were in the front row, they had seatbelts. This wasn’t too bad of an idea, but the seatbelts were contained in these huge, plastic canisters that sat on top of the seat. The belts retracted into these canisters when not in use, but they were so big, that you actually couldn’t sit on the seat unless you were wearing the seat belt. When you had it one, the canister sat on your hip. Not comfortable, but out of the way. These Italian designers obviously figured that this was a exceedingly clever way to get you actually to wear the seat belt instead of just sitting on it. Very clever. Very sadistic.

Most cars in Italy are tiny. Interestingly enough, they all have English names. English must sound exotic and modern to the Italians. The words chosen don’t sound like car names. "Fire," "Young," "Panda," and "Cleo" are common models. Volkswagen calls their small bus a "Italwagon" which sound English, but I guess could also be German. The funniest car was the "Smart." It looks like someone cut a regular small car off behind the front seat. I saw them give away a "Smart" on an Italian television game show. I wondered if they invited the contestant back to win the rest of the car on the next show.

Since we were sitting across from Enzo, I had the opportunity to start up little discussions with him in hopes of learning a little about the country. Unfortunately, mostly what I learned was how unhappy Enzo was with the government. He didn’t like Italy’s government. He liked the European Union even less. He didn’t care for all the communists. (Italy has the largest Communist Party in Europe. Many city majors are communists.) One of Enzo’s complaints was that the government only helped people who didn’t deserve it. Apparently, the was a recent problem with a riot of African blacks living somewhere in the south and, instead of going to jail, the government gave the black housing. Enzo wasn’t happy about that.

Enzo also was unhappy about the fall of the iron curtain. He thought that it brought all kinds of undesirables into the country. Interestingly enough, he blamed the Pope for the fall of the iron curtain. I didn’t ask him how the Pope caused the fall of the iron curtain. He probably could have explained it, but I guess I really didn’t want to know.

Somehow, this led to a discussion about how Italy isn’t really a country, but a group of separate communities. He explained how he was born in Rome, but moved into the hills thirty-five miles south. Everyone there calls him a foreigner because he is from Rome. Everyone in his village calls him "the stranger." Of course, everyone else in that village grew up together.

Enzo thought that the reason that he wasn’t rich was because he was too honest. He didn’t think that, at his age, he should still be working. He considered the fact that he was working a sign of his failure. He said that he’d had chances at wealth, but, alas, he was too honest. I didn’t want to argue his view about how we acquire wealth. At the end of our conversation, it was clear that our tour guide was a bitter, bitter man.

Finally, we arrive at a big parking lot for Venice. Actually, Venice may be the only city that has its own parking lot, that is, one parking lot, for the whole city. Since cars, or buses for that matter, can’t get into Venice directly, they have to park somewhere while people are visiting. From the parking lot, we catch the motor boat that takes us to the hotel. Souvenir stands or, as Michele likes to call them, gee-gaw shops surrounded the entire area like animals drinking at a pond.

The big excitement in loading the motor boats was getting Mom in one. Mom gets shorter as you are watching and her legs can’t be more that an foot or two long. To get into the boat, she had to step across a large gap between the dock and the pier. The gap wouldn’t have been so big except that there are all these decorative wooden pillars sticking out of the water. You see these pillars in all the pictures. Some are very pretty. They even serve a useful purpose since the boats tie up to them. However, they stand between the pier and the boats where we were loading so the boats can’t close. I don’t know why they even load there except space is at a premium and our tour probably got a discount to load in that area. Because these pillar or pilings are in the way, there is a large gap between the dock and the boat. The gap was larger than her legs could reach across.

The only solution was to throw her across and let the people in the boat catch her. For some reason, this seemed to upset Mom a little. She is getting so sensitive in her old age.

As you approach it on boat, Venice is beautiful. It looks just like a Disney park except the dirt and decay is more realistic. The buildings are all about four hundred years old. Isn’t it interesting. The further you go back in time; the prettier buildings were? You’d think that since we are richer today, we’d have nicer building. That certainly isn’t the case. Today, we do, however, have better plumbing. Ugly buildings. Hot Showers. Seems like a fair trade off to me.

Actually, the sad part about Venice is that the city is sinking. The last time Rebecca and I were here, Saint Mark’s square was under about two feet of water. We get to walk around on a series of wooden platforms that looked a lot like picnic tables. It was a lot prettier when the water is at low tide. They put in some type of system under water to cut down on the flooding, but now the water didn’t circulate in the canals as well. This led to disease, insects, and other problems. Actually, they should turn the whole city over to Disney to preserve it. If Disney can turn a swamp into Disney World, they probably have the expertise to save Venice.

Our motor boat wound through the little canals on our way to our hotel, the Splendid. The canals are like a maze, but it is a maze with a bunch of one way streams. We got caught several times behind gondolas full of tourists, but only a couple of times were we blocked by on-coming traffic. The twenty-something redhead comments on how commercial it was with all the tourists. I didn’t want to break it to her the she and we were tourists also. These other tourists had all gotten here first. If they stopped the tourists, the city really would sink.

We pulled up at a dock behind out Hotel Splendid. Fortunately, it didn’t have any of those cute little pylons so Mom didn’t fall into the water on the way out. We got our room keys, and, for the first time, got to wait for our luggage to arrive outside our door. While we are waiting, we switch rooms with Mom and Michele because our original room was a little larger. The room we traded for was smaller, but the beds are together. If Rebecca and I have to sleep in separate beds, we’d still like to be in hailing distance.

About this time, we heard about the first pick pocketing of anyone in our tour group. In the lobby, while waiting for our room keys, we heard that one of the women had had her wallet and passport stolen. She’d lost them as she wove her way through the crowd by the souvenir stands at the parking lot. She didn’t realize it until she’d look down at her purse and noticed that the zipper was open.

This story invigorated Rebecca. My wife is a very careful traveler, certain that every pedestrian is a lurking pickpocket. She is always careful about how she holds her purse even though she keeps all her real valuable—passport, airline tickets, and credit cards—in a money belt under her clothes. I am somewhat less careful, keeping everything in my wallet, but I usually keep a hand on my wallet when I am near strangers. Pickpockets in the Paris subway once accosted me in the Parisian subway. Although they stepped on my foot and tried to trip me, I never let go of my wallet. The story of a victim in our group heightened Rebecca’s sense of caution. She was now as wary as any cat.

After getting our luggage and cleaning up, we went out to see Venice at night. I found in magical. The city is made of little walkways for pedestrians with cute curved bridges over the canals. The Hotel Splendid was near San Marco’s, what we call Saint Marks square. The walkways are lined with small shops, many selling the famous Venetian glass. Most shops were filled with ornate glass goblets and pretty glass birds. One had a bunch of scary sculptures, masks, and weird animals. The walkways had plenty of tourists, but the crowd wasn’t oppressive.