Author: Abellio

I like writing, but I’ve spent most of my life writing about things that don’t particularly interest me. Finally, as I neared the age of 60, I decided to change that. I wanted to write about things that interested me. What really interests me is beauty. So I’ve focused this blog on beautiful things. I could be writing about a formally beautiful object in a museum. But it could also be something sitting quietly on a shelf. Or it could be just a fleeting view that's caught my eye, or a momentary splash of colour-on-colour at the turn of the road. Or it could be a piece of music I've just heard. Or a piece of poetry. Or food. And I’m sure I’ve missed things. But I’ll also write about interesting things that I hear or read about. Isn't there a beauty about things pleasing to the mind? I started just writing, but my wife quickly persuaded me to include photos. I tried it and I liked it. So my posts are now a mix of words and pictures, most of which I find on the internet. What else about me? When I first started this blog, my wife and I lived in Beijing where I was head of the regional office of the UN Agency I worked for. So at the beginning I wrote a lot about things Chinese. Then we moved to Bangkok, where again I headed up my Agency's regional office. So for a period I wrote about Thailand and South-East Asia more generally. But we had lived in Austria for many years before moving to China, and anyway we both come from Europe my wife is Italian while I'm half English, half French - so I often write about things European. Now I'm retired and we've moved back to Europe, so I suppose I will be writing a lot more about the Old Continent, interspersed with posts we have gone to visit. What else? We have two grown children, who had already left the nest when we moved to China, but they still figure from time to time in my posts. I’ll let my readers figure out more about me from reading what I've written. As these readers will discover, I really like trees. So I chose a tree - an apple tree, painted by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt - as my gravatar. And I chose Abellio as my name because he is the Celtic God of the apple tree. I hope you enjoy my posts. http://ipaintingsforsale.com/UploadPic/Gustav Klimt/big/Apple Tree I.jpg

PANTALEON

Vienna, 18 June 2025

It’s summer time! And summer time, for my wife and me in Vienna at least, means it’s time to go hiking around the city and beyond. And that means studying guides, electronic and hard-copy, to find new hikes for us to do. So it was that a month ago now I bought a guide to the Jakobsweg, the pilgrim routes (or at least modern versions of these; so many of the original routes have been overlain by the asphalt of large roads) that wend across Austria and eventually lead the walker (after crossing Italy or Germany and then France and Spain) to the cathedral of St. James in Compostela.

Here we have a Medieval miniature of St. James as a pilgrim on his way to Compostela – note the scallop shell on his satchel, the symbol of this pilgrimage.

Although in my mind’s eye I see the road snaking out before me over hill and dale all the way to Compostela (Google Maps tells me that the town is 2,760 km away from my living room), I’ve been looking more modestly at the stages which are not too, too far from Vienna. Specifically, I’ve been looking at the stages beyond the great monastery of Melk.

(The reason for that is simply that we’ve already walked the stages between Vienna and Melk.)

As I followed the stages in my new guide and figured out where we might stay for the night along the way, my eye was caught by the name of a village we would walk through: Sankt Pantaleon. I throw in a photo of the village which I found online. It looks like a nice, typical Austrian village.

Readers of these posts will know that I have a fondness for obscure saints whose names still pepper our landscape – although I have to say that the name Pantaleon is thin on the ground. Google Maps – once again – informs me that there are only a couple of villages in Austria which go by that name, as well as a handful of churches and streets. The same is true for France, Italy, and Spain. He has a somewhat greater presence in Greece and other Orthodox lands under the name Pantaléémon. In Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and Portugal he has hardly any presence, and in the Netherlands and the UK none at all. My wife and I will not be coming across him very often on our hikes, it seems.

What do we know of this saint? Well, not much at all, as is usually the case with these saints from the earliest centuries of Christianity. If he existed at all, he hailed from Asia Minor as most of these early saints seem to have done. His various hagiographies tell us that he was born in the late 200s AD and brought up a Christian by his mother (his father was a pagan). But he fell away from the faith when he studied medicine. He was brought back to the straight-and-narrow by an even shadowier saint, who – if I’ve understood the sub-text correctly – basically said “Jesus did better than you, by healing through faith alone”. And in fact, Pantaleon converted his pagan father after healing a blind man by invoking the name of Jesus over him.

In any event, he continued being a doctor; and he must have been a very good one, because he became the personal physician to successive Emperors. But he must also have continued dispensing care – for free – to those who needed it, which has earned him in Orthodox Christianity the delightful title of Holy Unmercenary Healer. This is an epithet that has been given to various saints who offered their medical services for free, contrary to the (still) prevailing practice by doctors of charging (often a lot) for their services. The National Health Service in the UK, which still manages (just) to offer its services free at the point of delivery, should take Pantaleon as its patron saint.

Things came to a head when Diocletian started his persecution of Christians in 305 AD. Doctors, envious of Pantaleon’s success as a court physician – and of course pissed off that he was offering his services gratis – denounced him to the Emperor. Since the latter rather appreciated Pantaleon’s skills he tried to get our hero to abjure his faith, which of course Pantaleon did not do. So the Emperor handed him over to the torturers. They subjected him to the usual menu of hideous tortures which hagiographers delighted to write up in minute detail. I won’t bother readers with even a summary of them. I’ll just throw in a photo of a relatively recent painting depicting one of his tortures, being put in a bath of molten lead (which, according to the hagiographers, immediately went cold when he stepped into it, so I’m not sure how he was meant to get out of the now-solidified lead; but I guess I’m just being picky).

I’ll also mention one other torture to which he was subjected – because it is important for later in our story – namely the nailing of his hands to his head. Ouch! In the end, it’s only when he gave his tormentors permission to cut off his head that they managed to do so.

As usual, when the veneration of relics became popular in Christianity, various relics of Saint Pantaleon popped up: a head here, an arm there, a finger bone somewhere else. More unusually, a vial of his blood ended up in the town of Ravello, near Amalfi. Like the more famous case of Saint Gennaro’s blood in Naples, which is just around the corner from Ravello, the blood in the vial liquifies once a year. Here we have a photo of that vial when it is apparently liquifying in 2022.

So popular was Saint Pantaleon that he was made one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who, from the late Middle Ages on, were invoked to help with people’s everyday problems, especially health problems. I’ve written about a number of the Holy Helpers in earlier posts, so it’s nice to be able to add to the list with this post. I guess it made a lot of sense to include Pantaleon in the group; he was a doctor after all. And in fact, he was the patron saint of doctors and midwives. He was invoked specifically in cases of cancer and tuberculosis; why those two diseases rather than any other is not clear to me. What makes perfect sense to me, however, is that he was also invoked in cases of headaches and any other pains in the head, or even mental illnesses. This photo of a panel which I stumbled across in the church of Eferding during our recent hike along the Danube – I kept the photo back for this post – shows very clearly why. The saint to the right is Pantaleon, and we can see the nail which has been hammered through his hands into his head. To a mere mortal like me it looks incredibly painful, although the sculptor has Pantaleon looking very stoic.

This story of the nail in the head has also meant that I’ve identified one more of the fourteen Holy Helpers in my painting on glass of them, which pleases me no end!

As I wrote earlier, a fair number of churches have been named after Saint Pantaleon. I will only mention one, the church of San Pantalon in Venice.

If I mention it, it’s because my wife and I checked it out during a brief trip we made recently to Venice, to visit the Biennale (architecture is the theme this year). The church’s exterior is not much to write home about. The church’s main claim to fame is its ceiling, which depicts the martyrdom and glory of Saint Pantaleon. It is indeed quite breathtaking.

It is not, as might seem at first sight, a fresco; it is a vast painting on canvas, which has then been stuck to the ceiling. Apparently, these were quite popular in Venice; quite why, I don’t know.

This mention of Venice allows me to segue smoothly from the sublime to the ridiculous. San Pantaleone (or Pantalon in Venetian dialect) was once a very popular saint in Venice. No-one has given me an explanation for this. Nevertheless I have one, born of my fervid imagination. To explain my theory, I have to jump to the countries in the southern cone of Latin America. It is a tradition there to eat gnocchi on the 29th of each month (and so the tradition is called los ñoquis del 29). It is a festive occasion, as this photo – one of many on the internet – attests.

It was also the custom – perhaps not so much now – to place some money under your plate to bring you luck and prosperity. It was the Italian immigrants to this part of the world, many of them from the Veneto region, who brought this charming tradition with them. It was based on a legend about San Pantalon (to give him his Venetian name) which made the rounds in the Veneto. Even though he lived in Asia Minor, it was said that he had once come to northern Italy on a pilgrimage. One day, the twenty-ninth day of the month, he asked some poor peasants near Venice for bread; they generously invited him to share their meagre meal. In gratitude, San Pantalon announced that they would enjoy a whole year of abundant fish catches and harvests, which was indeed the case. The custom of placing some money under one’s plate of gnocchi – a simple dish, one for poor people – on the 29th of each month is therefore intended to obtain the renewal of this prosperity once granted by the saint.

Lovely story. But what I see in this legend is that for the Venetians – whose whole livelihood, indeed whose whole State, depended completely and totally on trade – San Pantalon would have been the go-to saint: “dear San Pantalon, here’s a lovely candle for you and some money in the offerings box. I’ve also put my life’s savings in this ship going to Constantinople [=the money under the plate]. Please, please, please make it come back with mounds of fantastic stuff that I can make a fortune off.”

Whatever the reason for his popularity in Venice, in the minds of other Italians Venetians became inextricably linked with San Pantalon. And so, when Commedia dell’Arte was born in the 16th Century, one of the stock characters in the plays was Pantalone. Pantalone is basically a caricature of Venetian merchants and just to underline this fact the character is meant to speak in Venetian dialect, at least in the Italian versions of the plays. He is retired, so he’s played as a wizened old man. He’s miserly and loves his money. Despite his age, he’s a lech and a smooth talker, and makes numerous passes at women, although he is always rejected. Given the high social standing of merchants he also represents those at the top of the social order, and he feels that this allows him to meddle in the affairs of others. In sum, the character of Pantalone is entirely based on money and ego, but at every step he becomes the butt for every conceivable kind of trick. Rereading this, which is based on a composite of many descriptions I found of the character, I get the distinct impression that the rest of Italy didn’t much like the Venetians. Quite a comedown from our heroic martyr Pantaleone.

But it gets worse! To understand why, I show here a couple of depictions of what the Pantalone character typically looked like on stage. By one of those wonderful acts of serendipity, my wife and I saw the first of these depictions just yesterday at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in an exhibition they are currently holding entitled “Arcimboldo-Bassano-Breughel” (for any readers in Vienna, hurry up to see it, it finishes on 29 June!). This particular painting is by Leandro Bassano. It was one of a series that depicted the months of the year, in this case the month of February, which of course is carnival time in Italy, which was a popular time for putting on plays.

The set of characters on the far left of the painting (minus the boy and the dog) are all characters from commedia dell’arte plays. Pantalone is on the very far left. I throw in a blow-up of that part of the painting.

It’s a pity that Bassano put Pantalone half out of the painting, but you can make out his sartorial particularities – red doublet and hose, slippers, a black cloak, a black hat, and a sword. And of course a mask. You can see these much better in this painting by an unknown artist in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris.

This painting, on the other hand, by the French painter François Bunel the younger, from the late 16th Century, shows what a figure of mockery Pantalone was.

It’s actually quite pertinent that I chose depictions by French artists of old Pantalone, because commedia dell’arte took the rest of Europe by storm. Every country had their shows, with the names of the characters modified to fit local ears: in German our foolish old man stayed as Pantalone, but in French he became Pantalon and in English Pantaloon. So well-known was he that even Shakespeare, in his famous monologue in As You Like It about the seven ages of man, mentions him as the sixth age:

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered Pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank …

In both Britain and France, that “youthful hose” was eventually given the character’s name: “pantaloon” on one side of the Channel, “pantalon” on the other. Even though this type of clothing (“covers the lower part of the body from the waist to the feet, consisting of two cylinder-shaped parts, one for each leg, that are joined at the top”, as one dictionary definition has it) has gone through considerable redesign over the centuries, the French have kept their name for it, and the North Americans have kept the English form of the name, although under the shortened form of “pants” (the British quite quickly opted for “trousers” instead as their name for this type of fashion statement). So in many parts of the world our heroic martyr has been debased to a vulgar piece of clothing. But it gets even worse! Because another piece of clothing, which covers our private parts, has become called “underpants”. Poor Pantaleon, from this:

to this:

PHOTO ALBUM OF A HIKE

Vienna, 8 June 2025

My wife and I recently completed a four-day hike around the Danube, in the reaches of the river some 20 km upstream from Linz. We started in the village of Ottensheim, made our way to Eferding and then to Aschach, ending the hike in the village of Sankt Martin. I can’t resist inserting here a composite photo I’ve created of the hike.

As readers can see, we wandered rather drunkenly along the Danube.

The wonderful thing about hiking is that you move slowly across the landscape, which allows you to notice things which you probably wouldn’t notice on a bike, let alone a car. I give my readers here a taste of what my wife and I came across – quite serendipitously – as we slowly crossed this Danubian landscape.

Thursday

We arrive in Ottensheim, which sits on the Danube river, in the early afternoon. We take advantage of our early arrival to go for a walk on the high lands behind the town. Here is the view of the Danube which greets us at the top. You can see the hydroelectric dam spanning the river. We’ll be passing that dam tomorrow.

We have pizza at the place we’re staying the night, down by the river’s bank. We chat with the staff, all Neapolitans, who all left Naples because of a lack of opportunities there. A story we’ve heard so many times. Such a tragedy for Naples, this steady draining away of their youth.

Friday

We’re greeted at the exit of the hotel by this strange painting on the wall of a house.

Not sure what happened to the mermaid’s nose …

We’re waiting to board the ferry, which will carry us over to the other bank.

While waiting, we spy a statue of St. Johann Nepomuk, protector of those who cross streams and rivers, so common in this part of the world. This statue is coloured, though, which is rare.

The view from the ferry’s deck, looking upstream. The hydroelectric dam is in the far distance.

We can also see a peek of Ottensheim’s local castle in that last photo. We get a better view as we start walking along the river’s bank.

Its recent history has been quite eventful. Owned by a British family in the 1930s, it was confiscated by the Nazis at the beginning of the war. They used it as a forestry office for the Wermacht. After the war, the Soviets, who occupied that side of the Danube, used it as a barracks. After they left in 1955, when Austria got back its independence, the castle reverted to its pre-war owners. By then it was in a pretty sad state, but its owners didn’t have the money to restore it. It was only in 1988, when the castle was sold to a group of families with deeper pockets, that the castle could be restored. It is still in private hands.

Yellow irises blooming along the water’s edge, the first of many wildflowers we will be seeing on this hike.

Close by, a memorial on the side of the path.

It commemorates the nearly 30,000 people murdered through poisoning with carbon monoxide by the Nazi regime in nearby Hartheim castle, between May 1940 and December 1944. Once their bodies had been cremated the ashes were brought to this spot and dumped into the Danube. Until September 1941, it was a “euthanasia” centre, where 8,000 physically and mentally handicapped people, almost all from Bavaria and Austria, were murdered. After Hitler closed down the Nazis’ euthanasia programme (because of protests from the Roman Catholic Church in Germany), the centre quickly “pivoted” to become a centre for the killing of inmates from nearby concentrations camps, primarily Mauthausen or its satellite camps, who were too sick or injured to work any longer. By December 1944, they had murdered a further 12,000 people, most of them Soviet Prisoners of War.

Wildflowers by the side of the path

Outside a fire station, an intriguing monument to firemen and women, as well as to officers of the Austrian river authority.

An old farmhouse on the edge of the road.

Eferding, the end point of today’s hike, with the parish church’s bell tower dominating the town.

A photo of Eferding’s castle, taken by slipping my iPhone through the big gates that barred entry.

The castle is still owned by the Starhemberg family, who inherited it and the lands that came with it in 1559. Interesting family. They’ve been involved in Austrian politics for the last 1,000 years or so. The latest (in)famous member of the family was Ernst Rüdiger Prince von Stahremberg, who was born in 1899 in the castle and died in 1956 in Voralberg. He was a right-wing politician with great admiration for Mussolini’s fascism. He served in Austria’s right-wing governments from 1930 until 1936. Although fascistic, he really disliked the Nazis and made his dislike very public, so after the Anschluss of 1938 he fled to Switzerland to avoid vengeful retaliation by the Nazis (and perhaps also to protect his wife, who was Jewish). At the beginning of World War II, he served in some capacity in the British and Free French Air Forces, but he resigned in disgust after the UK and the US allied themselves with the Soviet Union in 1941 – he viewed communism and Nazism as equally evil. Thereafter, he and his wife left for Argentina; not unnaturally, he felt a great affinity with the politics of Juan Peron. In 1956, after Peron had been ousted by the army, he travelled to Austria for an extended visit, no doubt to explore the possibility of coming back. He was staying at a spa in Schruns (the bell tower of whose parish church I had so admired last year). During a walk, he was photographed by a journalist who worked at a communist newspaper. In a rage, he attacked the journalist with his walking stick, but this triggered a cardiac arrest and he died there on the pavement.

Turning my back on the Stahremberg castle, a view of Eferding’s main square

with its maypole still standing

and a magnificent copper beach at the far end.

Eferding’s parish church

with its beautifully carved pulpit (although not as beautiful as the one my wife and I saw in Traunkirchen several years ago)

and the tombstone of some long dead knight.

A Lichtenstein-like mural on the wall of a ruined house

An amusing ad for a shop offering orthopaedic services.

And so to dinner and bed.

Saturday

We start the day by walking over the rich farmland around Eferding. We pass these multicoloured rows of lettuces.

We go past a garden whose owner must be an amateur sculptor with a fondness for using scrap metal.

Nearby, beauty among the garbage.

We begin to climb a steep ridge. We pass a shrine on the side of the road.

Shrines are common throughout Austria, but I notice that in this region shrines – like this one – have an eye painted on them. I suppose it represents God, the “All-Seeing Eye”. But I find it rather unnerving: “You can’t hide from me, I can see everything that you do” – just like Big Brother in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.

A chapel at the top of the ridge.

A spray of daisies on the side of the road.

We plunge into the woods.

A view over the plain around Eferding.

We come down the ridge and pass the small airfield – literally, in this case – of a gliding club.

We have been watching the gliders soaring over us all morning; my iPhone, alas, cannot capture their ethereal beauty.

We look back at the ridge we walked along, with a castle ruin sitting on it.

We stop for lunch in the village of Pupping, finding a bench in the parish church’s garden to sit on. I, of course, cannot pass up the opportunity of visiting the church after lunch. I find a mix of old and new.

A statue of St. Wolfgang, who, it is said, died at the altar of the (original) church in 994 CE.

A statue of St. Christopher, looking less than pleased with having to carry the Child Jesus.

Four carved door lintels, displaying the symbols of the four Evangelists: clockwise from the top left, the lion of St. Mark (you have to look hard to see the lion’s face), the ox of St. Luke, the angel of St. Matthew, and the eagle of St. John.

It takes me a while to understand that Luke’s angel is represented by an eye – the eye again …

Rather pleasant stained-glass windows.

We continue the hike towards our end point today, Aschach, on the Danube. Quite by chance, our route takes us past a war cemetery.

It has the look and feel of the German war cemeteries which my wife and I had visited on the Western Front: tall oak trees, shading a lawn, in which are planted stone crosses.

But actually, although the cemetery is looked after by the German association for war graves (hence the look), none of the soldiers buried there are Austrian or German. And none of the dead who are commemorated fell on the frontline; they were all prisoners of war who died in a POW camp which the Austro-Hungarians built close by for use during the First World War. They were mainly Italians

with their memorial

and Serbians

with theirs.

After the Second World War, the Soviets put up a memorial to their POWs who had been murdered in Mauthausen and other nearby concentration camps.

Of course, the thousands of murdered Soviet POWs didn’t get an individual grave, their names were not even inscribed on a monument. But some Russian family had come and attached a photo of one Soviet prisoner to a stone cross, with the epitaph “We remember, we love, we grieve. The grandchildren”.

We walk on to Aschach.

Sunday

We start the day by once again crossing the Danube, but this time using a bridge rather than on a ferry.

Some purple irises catch my eye as we walked along the river bank.

We climb up to the high lands overlooking the river, past fields of wheat studded with corn flowers and daisies.

We enter the woods.

The path eventually leads us off the high lands and down to a stream at the bottom of a valley. We start following the stream towards its source. At first, the stream cheerfully burbles along.

But soon the stream bed becomes rough as stones from above have tumbled down, and the water jumps around.

The path mimics the roughness of the stream.

Once we reach the high lands, the stream quietens down, the path likewise.

We pass meadows along the stream’s banks. Some have been turned into lawns.

Here, another anonymous sculptor has turned a tree trunk into a whimsical totem pole.

One of the meadows is carpeted in pink flowers.

Finally, we leave the stream and climb up onto a ridge. An alpine pasture falls away to our right. It is impossibly green.

We pass through Sankt Martin and start walking along a main road. This is the only way to our hotel. We pass a building site, where a riot of poppies grow: beauty clothing the ugliness.

We reach the hotel. Our hike is finished.

NORFOLK ISLAND PINE

Sori, 15 May 2025
updated 21 November 2025

For some time now, I’ve been intrigued by this tree, which I see fairly regularly in gardens at our seaside place in Liguria. I see this particular example when we walk along the main road that runs through the village.

While another one, along the road to Recco, has long caught my eye.

I find the tree’s rigorous symmetry very pleasant to the eye, while the upward tilt of its fronds is most arresting – it looks like a pine tree growing upside down.

Up till now, my half-hearted attempts to identify it have been a failure. However, my wife recently discovered a plant identification service on our iPhone cameras. You take a photo of a plant and you will be told what the plant’s name is – not every time, I’ve discovered, but often enough to make such searches rewarding. I promptly trained my camera on the mystery tree and after a few goes it gave me a name: Norfolk Island pine. A couple of independent searches on “Norfolk Island Pine” confirmed the identification (one always has to beware false positives!).

Unsurprisingly, given its name, these independent searches also informed me that this tree hails from Norfolk Island, a dot of an island in the South Pacific Ocean. Although the tree has close-ish relatives in New Caledonia, the only place in the world where it is endemic is on this tiny island in the middle of nowhere. Norfolk Island is really very remote. It is pretty much equidistant between New Zealand to the south and New Caledonia to the north, with about 760 km of open water in either direction. And there’s double that distance between the island and the closest point in Australia, the country which oversees it.

The first Europeans to set eyes on the island were on James Cook’s ship during his second voyage to the South Pacific. I’ll quote what Cook had to say about the island in the published journal of this voyage.

“We continued to stretch to W. S. W. till the 10th [October 1774], when, at day-break, we discovered land bearing S. W., which on a nearer approach we found to be an island of good height, and five leagues in circuit. I named it Norfolk Isle, in honour of the noble family of Howard. … After dinner, a party of us embarked in two boats, and landed on the island, without any difficulty, … We found it uninhabited, and were undoubtedly the first that ever set foot on it.”

Cook was wrong about this. Archaeological surveys on the island have shown that Polynesians had already reached the island and lived there, but for some unknown reason they had all upped sticks and left several centuries before Cook hove to on the horizon.

Cook continues:

“We observed many trees and plants common at New Zealand; and, in particular, the flax plant, which is rather more luxuriant here than in any part of that country; but the chief produce is a sort of spruce pine, which grows in great abundance, and to a large size, many of the trees being as thick, breast high, as two men could fathom, and exceedingly straight and tall. … “

Cook wrote a bit more about the tree in a variation of his Journal (quite what variation this is I have not managed to ascertain – perhaps his handwritten journal?)

“[The tree] is of a different sort to those in New Caledonia and also to those in New Zealand, and for Masts, Yards &ca [it is] superior to both. We cut down one of the Smallest trees we could find and Cut a length of the uper end to make a Topgt Mast or Yard. My Carpenter tells me that the wood is exactly of the same nature as the Quebeck Pines”.

Luckily for the Norfolk Island pine, Cook was also wrong about the tree’s utility in the manufacture of masts, yards and spars. Quite quickly, it was found not to be resilient enough for the purpose, so initial plans to harvest the trees were abandoned. I say luckily, because if the wood had indeed been good for the task, I’m sure all the island’s pines would have been cut down by now.

As it is, the “great abundance” of Norfolk Island pines which Cook saw has been greatly reduced over the last 250 years. The UK government turned the island into a penal settlement for some 55 years, and the convicts cut down trees for their own use as well as to clear land for agriculture. Then, in 1856, the UK government relocated part of the population of Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island because Pitcairn was getting too small for its growing population. After the grimness of the island’s use as a prison, this puts it in a rather romantic light: Pitcairn islanders were descendants of the mutineers on the Bounty and their Tahitian partners. I remember vividly the film “Mutiny on the Bounty”, where Marlon Brando plays the role of Lieutenant Fletcher Christian.

(the earlier version with Clark Gable in the role was not so good, in my humble opinion)

To these romantic new residents were added a few more people, people who jumped ship from visiting whalers or other ships which passed. All these new residents unromantically continued cutting down trees to clear land for agriculture. The trees also had to start competing with other, foreign species brought to the island. As late as the 1950s, some bright spark had the idea of turning Norfolk Island pines into plywood. A batch was exported to Sydney, and excellent results were reported of the trial plywood produced. Luckily, someone with some sense realised that this was not a sustainable business and the idea was dropped.

As a result of all this mismanagement of the island’s pines over the centuries, the stands have gradually shrunk, with the last remaining stands of any size now protected in a national park, on land which is too steep or rocky to farm.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has classified the species as “vulnerable”.

Someone – maybe several people – along the way also realised that this handsome tree had potential in the horticultural trade. Quite quickly, it entered that global trade in plants which I’ve written about earlier. From a purely selfish point of view, that was lucky for me, because otherwise I would never have seen this handsome tree on the Ligurian coast. I see no reason why I would ever visit Norfolk Island – I’m not the type to take part in a mutiny and I’ll never, thank God, work on a whaler (not a complete impossibility; some of my ancestors did).

Already by the late 19th Century, the tree had moved out of its native habitat. It seems to have been a popular tree to plant near shore lines because of its high tolerance to salt and humidity, as well as its ability to grow in sandy soil. It also always grows straight regardless of prevailing winds. Here’s a nice example from the city of Napier in New Zealand, where a row of Norfolk Island pines was planted along the sea front in 1890, to create the Marine Parade.

This particular photo was taken in the 1930s and later coloured by hand. The trees are still there, although recent articles say the trees are getting to the end of their lives and need replacing.

And then, in ways that probably no-one has studied, and probably never will (who cares about the history of a plant?), it reached the piece of Ligurian coast where my wife and I spend time, a trip of 18,300 km as the crow, or perhaps better the albatross, flies (nearly half the Earth’s circumference).

I don’t know how long the trees have been here. They are quite tall but Norfolk Island pines grow slowly. From information I’ve managed to glean from the internet, I’m guessing that these particular specimens are fifty or so years old, which means they would have been planted around the time I first started coming to this Ligurian village. With a bit of luck, they’ll see me to my grave.

A LITTLE TRIP IN CENTRAL ITALY

Milan, 2 May 2025

As in the case of my previous post, the little trip my wife and I recently undertook in central Italy was kicked off by an article in the Guardian which I read some four-five months ago now (although quite how I got to it I can no longer remember; the article is more than three years’ old). The article was about a fresco by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca depicting Mary pregnant with Jesus.

It was such a different depiction of Mary when pregnant. The only paintings I know of where we see her pregnant are depictions of the Visitation, the story in the New Testament where Mary goes to meet Elizabeth and both women are pregnant. Here is a nice example of the genre, by Rogier Van der Weyden, where it is clear that both women are pregnant; in many versions of the Visitation, you would be hard put to see that the two are “with child”, as they used to say.

But Piero della Francesca has Mary alone, not doing anything in particular, just resting her hand on her belly. Such a natural pose! I remember vividly my wife doing exactly the same when she was pregnant with our two children.

Charmed by this fresco, I immediately proposed to my wife that we go to see it. She said she was all for it as long as we got some hiking in too. The fresco is held in a village called Monterchi, on the borders of Tuscany. Once I discovered that we would need to get to Monterchi via Arezzo, I proposed that we also visit Arezzo – I had visited the town fifty years ago, my wife never. And then I saw that one of the earlier stages of the Via di Francesco, the Way of Francis, several stages of which we hiked back in October 2023, passed through Citerna, a village across from Monterchi. So then we decided to walk from Citerna to Sansepolcro. Then late in the planning, we discovered that there was going to be a “once in a lifetime” exhibition of Caravaggio, my favourite painter, in Rome. My wife eventually persuaded me that we should tack on a quick visit to Rome, which allowed for an extra day’s hike to Città di Castello, followed by a two-day stay in Perugia (again, visited by me fifty years ago and by my wife never), with a final quick visit to Rome just for the exhibition.

What follows are notes on our little expedition.

Arezzo (population: 99,000)

After taking a Flixbus down to Florence, we rolled in to Arezzo train station in the early afternoon.

I have to confess that I have no idea why I decided to go to Arezzo fifty years ago. I have but one memory of the place: going to a cafe for lunch and being served by a man with a fascinating face, the type of face I see in Caravaggio’s paintings; the lunch was good, too, as I recall. But I remember nothing of what I visited. A bit embarrassing, really.

What we found was a very pleasant old town, built up a slope towards the cathedral.

Here’s a photo of one of the busier streets.

I very nearly missed the town’s artistic highlight, the frescoes in the cappella maggiore in the Church of Saint Francis, by Piero della Francesca (him again; not surprising, really, he was from this part of Tuscany). On the day we set aside to visit Arezzo, the chapel was closed. No problem, we said, we’ll see it tomorrow morning before our bus leaves for Monterchi. Next morning, we were at the church when it opened, but disaster! we were informed that you had to book your visit online, and there were no spaces left. My wife, excellent negotiator that she is, managed to persuade the ladies at the ticket desk to at least allow me in. So I went in and relayed photos to my wife outside via WhatsApp. These photos, scraped from the web, are frankly much better than the ones I took.

Other highlights in Arezzo:

The Piazza Grande

The crucifix by Cimabue in the church of Saint Dominic

The figurines at the entrance of the church of Santa Maria della Pieve depicting the months of the year.

This photo makes it easier to appreciate these delightful little figurines – we see well the depictions of the months of January and February.

Monterchi (pop: 1,700)

The bus dropped us off at the foot of the village, built like so many villages around here on the top of a hill.

We climbed up and over to the other side of the hill, to the old village school, which had been turned into a little museum just for Piero della Francesca’s fresco of the pregnant Madonna. I won’t repeat the photo I inserted earlier. I throw in instead a photo of a reconstruction of what the fresco originally looked like, with Mary in a tent of some sort.

It is indeed a lovely representation of pregnancy. I can understand why pregnant women in past centuries would flock to the chapel which contained it, to pray for a safe and easy birth.

Citerna (pop: 3,400)

After the visit to the museum, my wife and I walked to Citerna, sitting on the top of a high hill on the other side of the valley from Monterchi.

It was a short hike, some 2 km, but steep: the route suggested by Google Maps took us pretty much straight up the hill. What we found at the top was a sleepy little village most of whose residents were old – the fate of so many of Italy’s villages. Internet had informed me that the local church contained a statue by Donatello, although I was warned it was difficult to visit. And so it proved. The church was locked, but there was a note on the door with a phone number to call to arrange a visit. My wife called, but the man who responded told her he was in Ravenna; tomorrow morning, he said, he would be there at 9.45 – or maybe later, he wasn’t sure. Since we were planning to be on the road by 9.00, that was that. The only other thing of note in the village was splendid views of the valley which we would be hiking across the next day.

There was also a stone tablet set in a wall which got me all excited.

It commemorates the fact that Garibaldi and his beloved wife Anita stayed here in July 1849. Theirs was an impossibly romantic story. They met in 1839 in Brazil; Garibaldi was fighting in a number of wars of independence in Latin America. The way my history teacher told the story in my O-level history class (the only thing I really remember of the part of the curriculum on Italian unification), Anita was washing clothes in the river. Garibaldi spotted her through his telescope from the bridge of his ship. He immediately got his sailors to row him over to her. When he reached her he declared to her – in Italian – “you must be mine!” She was already married but somehow or other the husband was dispensed with and they got married. When Garibaldi came back to Italy in 1848 to fight in the various popular uprisings taking place there, she followed him. She was with him in Rome in 1849, when he was defending the short-lived Roman Republic. Together, they escaped as the Republic collapsed in June. Their aim was to get to Venice, but they were being pursued by at least three armies and navies: the French, Austrian, and papal forces. It was during this flight towards Venice that the pair spent a – presumably hurried – night in Citerna. Tragically, Anita died, probably of malaria, in Garibaldi’s arms, near Ravenna in early August. I throw in a photo of the pair.

Back in Citerna, we also came across this amusing sculpture.

Made of scrap metal, it commemorates the pilgrims who pass through Citerna, walking the Via di Francesco on their way to Assisi. It was the route we would be taking the next day, although we would be walking it in the opposite direction, to Sansepolcro.

Sansepolcro (pop: 15,000)

We made our way down the hill from Citerna and then started making our way across the valley which lay between us and Sansepolcro. We were taking small roads across the valley which wound their way across flat fields.

From time to time, we passed groups of pilgrims walking the other way, otherwise we had the road to ourselves. 15 km later we arrived at Sansepolcro.

Having dropped off our rucksacks, we went off to explore. In truth, there wasn’t much to explore, but we did go and see the town’s crown jewel, its municipal museum, which contains this lovely polyptich painted by Piero della Francesca.

I’ve always loved these depictions of Mary as the Madonna of Mercy, where she is gathering up a group of faithful into the folds of her cloak. If I had lived in the Renaissance – and if I had been very rich – I would have commissioned a Madonna of Mercy, with my wife and I, along with our two children, their partners, and their children, all gathered under her cloak.

The museum also contained this magnificent Resurrection by Piero della Francesca.

There is a heart-warming story about this fresco. Aldous Huxley had visited Sansepolcro to see this fresco, and in an essay he wrote in the 1920s he described it as “the greatest picture in the world”. In the summer of 1944, as Allied troops were advancing up Italy, the Royal Horse Artillery took up positions to shell Sansepolcro according to orders received. Suddenly, a Lieutenant, by the name of Anthony Clarke, remembered reading that essay as a teenager. Fearing that the shelling could destroy the fresco, he ordered the men to cease fire. Luckily for him, the Germans had already evacuated the town, so the Allied troops could capture it without losses.

The rest of the museum was so-so, although I was much struck by a very strange fresco tucked away in a back room.

It is meant to represent the Holy Trinity, although this three-headed person looks more monstrous than holy.

Città di Castello (pop: 38,000)

The next day, we made a 10 km hike southwards to Città di Castello. We weren’t following a pilgrim trail, just a route suggested by one of the hiking apps we use. The first half was very pleasant, taking us along back roads and tracks through fields. The second half was less so, having us walk along a busy road and then through what seemed like the interminable suburbs of the town itself.

Once we had found our lodgings and dropped off our rucksacks, we sallied out to see what we could find. As in the case of Sansepolcro, there really wasn’t much to find. But we did discover – to our surprise, I have to admit – that Città di Castello was the birthplace of a fairly well known modern Italian artist by the name of Alberto Burri, and that, with the blessings of the municipality, he had set up a museum containing an extensive collection of his works. The Green Michelin Guide, my go-to source for all things cultural to visit, gave the museum two stars. Well, what the hell, we said, why not.

Well, I can’t say I was super excited by his work. He used materials like tar, iron, plastic, wood, earth, and glue to create his pieces, which I suppose would be defined as abstract art. A site I read had this to say about him: “Alberto Burri was an Italian painter, among the most important of the 20th Century. His techniques anticipated movements like arte povera and nuovo realismo.” The only work in the museum which I could have lived with is this one.

After our visit to the museum, we wended our way to the town’s main drag to have an Aperol Spritz, but not before coming across this wonderful stone tablet set in the wall of the old municipal building.

It was an excellent example of a style of lapidary declamation that I often come across in Italy: wordy, pompous, and often – to me, anyway – incomprehensible, mostly because no punctuation is ever used. Below is my best guess at a translation of what the Socialists of Città di Castello were trying to say back in 1911:

“From the red dawn of the International to the victorious outbreak of proletarian forces, neither persecution nor honours bent the proud soul of Andrea Costa away from the socialist ideals of workers’ rights. Supporter, apostle, in the square, in prison, in parliament.

In the name of he who was the symbol of the noblest faith, the Internationalist group of Città di Castello, dispersed in the lands of exile by violent blasts, remember, honor.

The Socialists”

Perugia (pop: 162,000)

We took a creaky old train, much painted over by graffiti, to Ponte San Giovanni at the foot of Perugia and then a bus up to Perugia itself, high up on the hilltops. The weather had turned and we reached our hotel in the midst of a downpour.

My only memory of Perugia from my previous visit of 50 years ago is a very vague one. It has to do with a museum, the national gallery of Umbria, but has nothing to do with any of the pieces in that museum. My memory synapses just stored away my pleasure at the halls’ minimalist style: undecorated white walls, relatively few well spaced paintings on these walls, uncluttered floors with only the occasional bench to sit on. It is a style that my wife and I have adopted all our lives – although I have sometimes weakened, seeing lovely, and relatively cheap, things to hang on the wall; but my wife has kept me on the straight and narrow. I must admit, it is a strange memory of Perugia to have carried with me all these decades. For instance, I have no memory of the town’s topography. Over the millennia, Perugia has spread over a series of hilltops and their connecting crests, so there are a lot of fairly steep ascents and descents involved in visiting the town. My wife, on her first visit to Perugia, was charmed by this form of urban development and took several photos to record it.

To help the locals (and maybe tourists) to tackle the town’s steep slopes, the municipality has installed escalators at various points. This one passes through the bowels of a fortress built by a pope to keep the Perugians in line.

They rather reminded us of the Central-Mid Levels escalator in Hong Kong – although that one was considerably longer.

The municipality has also rather cleverly readapted an old viaduct and made it into a walkway.

Talking of the national gallery of Umbria, it was a pleasure to (re)visit it. It houses a wonderful, huge crucifix by “the Master of Saint Francis”.

In general, its Medieval and early Renaissance collections are lovely.

The rest of the town delivered a few more pleasurable encounters:

The fontana maggiore place in the town’s main piazza, mainly for its sculpted panels.

The panels were carved by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano (we weren’t actually looking at the originals, which are now housed in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria). The panels depict the months of the year, various allegorical figures, and some other subjects. I show the two panels which cover the months of our two birthdays.

The ornate interior of the abbey church of San Pietro

Rome (pop: 2,760,000)

We took the Flixbus down to Rome, which left us off at Tiburtina station. From there, without even bothering to put down our bags at the hotel, we took the subway to Palazzo Barberini where the Caravaggio exhibition was being held.

It was a wonderful exhibition. Some of the pieces I had already seen “in the flesh”, like this painting, Judith Beheading Holofernes, held in Palazzo Barberini’s own collection.

Others I had only seen in my book of Caravaggio’s paintings. For instance, this one, The Taking of Christ, which currently resides in the National Gallery of Ireland (it was rediscovered a mere thirty years ago!).

And this one, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, from Naples, is now considered to be Caravaggio’s last painting.

In both, one can see self-portraits of Caravaggio, at the back of the crowds, peering over people’s shoulders.

With that, all our visits on this little trip were now over. But not, alas, our adventures, or rather misadventures in this case. On the subway trip back to the hotel, my wallet was picked from my pocket. The money was the least of things. Gone were the credit and debit cards, my residence permit for Austria, my driver’s license, and few other odds and ends.

Back home

We took the bus back to our seaside place. All the way, I was seething inside over my wallet. I decided I should put a curse on the thief. I should do like the ancients, who wrote their curses on thin sheets of lead, rolled them up, and consigned them to a sacred place. The example I give here is one of 130 curse tablets that were discovered at the bottom of what was during Roman times a sacred spring in Bath, in the UK.

I don’t know what particular curse this tablet has scratched on it, but one of the 130 has this to say about the theft of a ring:

“So long as someone, whether slave or free, keeps silent or knows anything about it, may he be accursed in his blood and eyes and every limb, and even have all his intestines quite eaten away if he has stolen the ring or been privy to the theft.”

Hmm, that sounds like a good curse. But actually, I know an even better one, a really hideous one. I won’t say what it is because then it wouldn’t work anymore. I don’t need a sheet of lead, a sheet of paper will do, and I will consign it to one of those offerings boxes they have in churches. Let the thief suffer the torments of hell, for ever and ever and ever!

ALEXANDERS

Milan, 23 April 2025

It was an article in the Guardian that started me off on this post. The writer was describing an expedition of his into the countryside in Kent to go foraging. He mentioned having seen dandelion, common sorrel, lady’s smock, stinging nettle, goosegrass, reedmace … plants I have never eaten; in fact, apart from dandelion and stinging nettle, I’ve never even heard of them. The writer goes on:

“Further along the hedge, the large glossy leaves of alexanders stand in ragged clumps above the dull, wintered sward; yet another superb edible and the main reason for my visit. This plant, most likely introduced by the Romans, comes from the Mediterranean where it was once known as Petroselinum Alexandrium – the parsley of Alexandria. Like many members of the carrot tribe, they present a huge amount of culinary potential – all parts of the plant can be eaten, offering complex floral flavours and harmonising notes of bittersweet. The root is particularly delicious, something akin to a fragrant parsnip once roasted. … I get to work harvesting a few alexander crowns, the burgeoning flower stems still sheathed in soft green leaves. Later I’ll roast them with feta and sun-dried tomatoes, returning the unmistakable smell of spring fare to the kitchen.”

I have to admit to also never having heard of alexanders, let alone eaten it. In the face of such ignorance, I might have moved on to another article in the Guardian were it not for the fact that something in the article’s description – the mention of a Mediterranean origin perhaps? – intrigued me, and I decided to investigate.

The first thing I did was to pull up some photos of this plant, because I had no idea what it looked like. Here’s a nice example of what I found.

As I studied this and other photos, I said to myself “hang on a minute, I think I’ve seen this plant recently. Wasn’t it at some point half choking the path on that last hike we did?” This was in Liguria, when my wife and I were taking the high path which snakes along the contours of the hills between Sori (where we have our apartment) and Recco (where we were going to eat focaccia al formaggio). As always, I turned to my go-to source, Wikipedia, for further information. I was not disappointed.

Let me start with a map of the plant’s current distribution.

It seems that it can be found throughout Italy and Greece, as well as much of the UK and Ireland. Otherwise, it is more of a coastal plant. So there is a good chance that what I saw on that walk was alexanders. There is some discussion as to whether, as suggested by the writer of the Guardian article, this is a Mediterranean plant which was brought to the UK and elsewhere in Northern Europe (the Romans being a popular possible vector as far as the UK is concerned) or whether it is actually native to all the places in Europe where it is currently found.

I’ll leave that question to the experts to hash out. What caught my eye in the Wikipedia entry instead was a sentence: “Inland [in the UK], it is often found close to the sites of medieval monastery gardens and other historical places such as castles.” And suddenly, a vision of Brother Cadfael working his herb garden floated up in my mind’s eye. For any readers who might not be familiar with Brother Cadfael, he is the main character in twenty books set in a Benedictine monastery in Shrewsbury, England. The stories take place between the years 1135 and 1145, and have Cadfael solving all sorts of murders and other Medieval mayhem. He is also the monastery’s herbalist, making up medicines for sick monks, using herbs he grows in the monastery’s herb garden where he grows the plants he needs to make up his potions. I throw in a photo of the cover of the 20th book in the series, where he seems to be in his herb garden.

I have to say, I’m extremely fond of the Cadfael stories. As the photo intimates, I have all twenty of the series. I’m not so fond of the TV show starring Derek Jacobi as Cadfael. Normally, I’m a great fan of his, but this show didn’t really grip me.

In any event, I throw in here a painting by Fra Angelico showing monks at work on their garden.

I don’t know if Cadfael would have grown alexanders in his herb garden. The plant was mostly grown to eat, but Wikipedia does say that it also had therapeutic uses. So I’m happy to think that his herb garden would have contained alexanders.

Another sentence in the Wikipedia entry caught my eye: “It was once highly valued in northern Europe as an early vegetable: one of the few fresh plants that can be eaten in February or March”. If it was so highly valued, what happened? Well, it seems that in the 18th Century (or maybe even in the century before that) it lost out to celery. John Evelyn (whom I’ve had cause to mention in an earlier post) had this to say in his book Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets [Salads] published in 1699: “Sellery … was formerly a stranger with us (nor very long since in Italy) [It] is a hot and more generous sort of Macedonian Persley [Macedonian parsley being another name for alexanders] … and for its high and grateful Taste is ever plac’d in the middle of the Grand Sallet, at our Great Men’s tables, and Praetors feasts, as the Grace of the whole Board”. The Wikipedia entry confirms (in slightly more sober language) this similarity in taste between alexanders and celery, at least as far as the leaves are concerned: “the young foliage is intermediate in flavour between celery and parsley”.

And so, abandoned by monk and lord of the castle, domesticated alexanders went feral, spreading out from the old monastic and aristocratic herb and vegetable gardens into the surrounding countryside. I suppose in the UK in particular the tidy plantings of alexanders in monastic gardens were victim of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, which left behind only a few ruins like this one, of Byland Abbey in Yorkshire.

(I chose this particular ruin because it happens to be down the road from my old school; I did some very basic archaeological mapping there but don’t remember ever seeing any alexanders).

Is there any chance of seeing alexanders back on our plates? Well, Wikipedia holds out some hope: “It … has found some renewed use in exotic “foraged” food recipes and restaurants.” A first, timid step to its journey back onto supermarket shelves next to celery, perhaps. Maybe I should forage it and try it. But the Guardian article does contain a warning: “care must be taken with identification … [nearby] hemlock water dropwort is growing in great profusion. This deadly relative and a half-hearted imposter of alexanders is easy to distinguish with experience … but surviving long enough to gain such confidence requires a little care”. That makes me gulp. Right now, I think I’ll just take photos of the plant, like this one I took recently on a hike on the Monte di Portofino starting from San Rocco.

BREAD

Sori, Easter Sunday 2025

I suppose every person on this planet will rave about a foodstuff made from the grain which got domesticated in their corner of the planet. I’ve seen Chinese and Japanese go misty-eyed about various rice-based foodstuffs.

I’m sure Central Americans do the same for foodstuffs made with maize.

Or Africans for foodstuffs made with sorghum.

Because my roots are in Europe, where wheat reigns supreme, I go dreamy about foodstuffs made with wheat, a grass that was domesticated in the Middle East. And I go very dreamy about one particular foodstuff made with wheat: bread.

Aaah, that wonderful smell that emanates from local bakeries!

I remember still the delicious scents that wafted out of a bakery in Edinburgh, where I was a student in the early 1970s. It was halfway between my halls of residence and the hall where I was rehearsing plays with the university’s drama society. I would whizz by that bakery on my moped, passing through this cloud of deliciousness.

And the wonderful smell that will greet you as you step into a local bakery’s shop and are confronted by rows of freshly baked loaves!

And the delicious taste as you sink your teeth into a loaf still warm from the oven!

And even when the bread is cold the wonderful taste it will have after you’ve used it to mop up the sauce on your plate.

Or the way it will heighten the taste of a hunk of cheese.

Or of the butter and marmalade you’ve spread onto it.

Mm, yes, bread … (I should note in passing that my heightened appreciation of bread comes from the fact that I eat little of it now – the diet, you know …)

It seems that we have the Ancient Egyptians to thank for these sensory wonders. It is the leavening of bread with yeast that gives bread that very special smell and taste.

And leavening is a discovery the Ancient Egyptians stumbled across. Quite how they did so is a matter of lively debate, at least in certain circles. The theory I most approve of (although no-one is asking for my approval) suggests a serendipitous cross-over from beer making. The making of beer was (and of course still is) another yeast-aided process working on a mash of grains from another grass domesticated in the Middle East, in this case barley. The theory goes that some Ancient Egyptian involved in the making of both unleavened flatbread and beer accidentally splashed some of the beer’s yeast-laden froth (which goes by the delightful name of barm) onto some dough they had prepared. Then for some reason they left the dough to rest for a while (maybe it was evening). When they came back, they saw that the dough had risen. Instead of throwing it away as spoilt, they baked it anyway (maybe supplies of food were limited and they were hungry), and they saw what a marvel resulted.

It can’t have been that simple, there must have been a lot of tinkering after that first leavening of bread, but this story satisfies my fervid imagination. Here, we have small models showing the making of bread, which Ancient Egyptians placed in a tomb, presumably to ensure that the dead person would get to eat bread in the afterlife.

Here we have a similar set of small models from another tomb, showing the brewing of beer.

And here we have some real Ancient Egyptian bread loaves found as grave goods.

I grant you they don’t look terribly edible, but they have been sitting in a grave for several thousands of years after all.

At some point, someone – yet again an Ancient Egyptian, I’m thinking – came up with the idea of keeping back a piece of the leavened dough to inoculate the next batch of unleavened dough. And at some other point, I’m guessing also in Ancient Egypt, leavened dough got contaminated with lactic acid bacteria. Maybe the bacteria were on the hands of the people kneading the dough; they had picked them up touching milk products. Or maybe another pathway came into play. However the contamination occurred, it led to the creation of sourdough; it is these bacteria that give sourdough bread its characteristic sour taste. And so nearly all the pieces were in place for the making of sourdough bread for the next five millennia or so – because until the middle of the 19th Century sourdough bread dominated bread making with wheat.

The last piece of the puzzle was the baking oven. It seems that we have the Ancient Greeks to thank for that. What they came up with must have looked quite similar to the wood-fed ovens which any self-respecting pizzeria will install today.

The cupola shape of these ovens concentrates the heat radiating from the bricks onto the oven’s centre, making it more efficient (and thereby lessening the chore for our ancestors of having to go out to collect wood). And progress in oven-building meant that large ovens could be built, in which multiple loaves could be baked at the same time. Thus was born the profession of the baker (which, among many other things, eventually led centuries later to that delightfully ridiculous nursery rhyme “Rub-a-dub-dub, three maids in a tub, And who do you think were there? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, And all of them gone to the fair”).

The Ancient Greeks seem also to have taught the uncouth Romans to eat leavened wheat bread. In fairness to the Romans, they weren’t really that different from anyone else in this uncouthness. Originally, they baked flatbread with their grains, or simply ate them in gruel like our Neolithic ancestors had done – but also like many, mostly poor, people have done ever since. I don’t claim to be poor, but the only way I eat oats – another of the grasses domesticated in the Middle East – is as a viscous gruel known to all and sundry as porridge.

And the Italians have what is now a chi-chi dish, zuppa di farro, which originally was just a gruel made with grains of spelt, an early form of wheat which has now all but disappeared.

However, once introduced to the joys of leavened wheat bread, the Romans got into it with a vengeance. And of course evidence of this new enthusiasm of theirs came to light in the ruins of Pompeii, in the form of now burnt loaves of bread abandoned in the town’s bakeries as Mount Vesuvius erupted and the workers ran for their lives.

Perhaps it had already happened elsewhere, but certainly in Rome class reared its ugly head in the matter of bread eating: bread made with the most refined, and so costly, wheat flour, was eaten by the rich, while the poor made do with bread made with poorly sifted whole wheat flour or even a mix of wheat flour and the flour of other grains like barley or oats. That translated into a colour bar: the crumb of the most expensive bread was white while that of the least expensive bread was various shades of brown.

It’s ironic, really, that the rich were eating the nutritionally poorest bread … But at least they were eating other things which could make up for the loss of nutrition in their expensive bread. The poor, on the other hand, had little but bread to eat. Which is why already from the times of the late Republic the Roman governing class was handing out free or subsidised wheat to the poor in Rome, to keep them happy – and politically passive. The Roman poet Juvenal decried this in one of his Satires: “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People abdicated their duties; for the People who once handed out military command, high civil office, legions – everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses” (it’s a comment that George Orwell updated in his novel 1984 when he described “the Proles”: “Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”)

Fast forward another thousand years or so and we are in Europe’s Middle Ages. The rich were still eating white bread and the poor brown-to-black bread, and bread was still the most important part of the poor’s diet. So nothing much had changed. But if I pause here, it’s because of a very interesting habit we find in rich households regarding tableware. Basically, bread was not just a food, it was also used as a plate. A round piece of, often stale, bread was cut from a large loaf – hence the English name of this tableware, trencher, from the French “trancher”, to cut. The food was ladled onto the trencher, which would absorb any juice or gravy. The illustration below shows trenchers being prepared. It comes from “Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry”, a prayer book put together during the first half of the 1400s for the said Duke, who we see sitting at the table.

Once the food had been eaten, the trencher, now softened, was cut up and also eaten.

I find this a wonderful way of eating bread. It’s sad that trenchers began to be made of metal or wood, later to be replaced by the plates we are all familiar with today. The only culture that I know of which uses bread in this way is that of the Ethiopian Highlands, where the food is placed on injera, made with flour from the local grain, teff (although, as this photo shows, nowadays the injera is in turn placed on a plate).

Injera is also used as the utensils to pick up the food.

But back to the bread trencher, where there was a similar relation between rich and poor as there had been in Rome over free supplies of bread. If the harvests had been good, if food in the household was plentiful, if the lady of the house was feeling generous or pious, rather than being eaten the used trencher could instead be given to the poor for them to eat. Or it could be fed to the dogs (which is what the Duc de Berry’s servants seem to be doing in the bottom right-hand corner of the illustration). I suppose when supplies were tight and household ate their own trenchers, the poor were just left to starve.

Bread had now also taken on strong religious overtones in Christian lands, because of the role which bread played in the Last Supper. Many are the paintings of the Last Supper, probably the most famous being the fresco by Leonardo da Vinci. But I won’t show a photo of that fresco. It’s too well known, and anyway you can hardly see anything, it’s in such a bad state of conservation. I’ll throw in a painting by Caravaggio instead, and not of the Last Supper but of the Supper at Emmaus. As recounted in St. Luke’s Gospel (in the King James Version):

And, behold, two of them went that same day [the day of the resurrection] to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. … And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went: and he made as though he would have gone further. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them. And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.

You can see the bread loaves Jesus is blessing on the table in front of each of them (I should note in passing that my timing here is excellent, today being Easter Sunday, the day this meeting in Emmaus would have taken place).

The formal theme of Caravaggio’s painting might be religious, but what I see in it is companionship: the Latin roots of the word “companion” are cum and panis, “together with bread”. I find it deeply satisfying that bread was considered not just a food but also a strong binder of friends.

And so we whizz on through the centuries, to stop again at the International Exposition of 1867, which was held in Paris.

It was here that Austria presented the first breads made not with sourdough but with much purer strains of yeast uncontaminated with lactic acid bacteria (later known as baker’s yeast). I will show just one of these breads, the Kaisersemmel, for the simple reason that I eat this from time to time during our sojourns in Vienna.

Many people tried the Austrians’ bread at the Exposition and liked it. Why? Because it tasted “sweet”; it didn’t have that characteristic sour taste of bread made with sourdough. This new, exciting way of making bread, the so-called Vienna Process, caught on. And so, perhaps without anyone really noticing, a fundamental shift started taking place for the peoples in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East who ate leavened wheat bread: they slowly abandoned the sourdough bread which their ancestors had eaten for thousands of years for “sweet” bread. Today, sourdough bread is a niche product.

Was the switch away from sourdough bread a tragedy? I don’t think so. But then, I like sweet bread. I’m quite partial to a Kaisersemmel, for instance, and I will kill for a warm, crusty baguette.

What was definitely a tragedy was the tinkering that went on from the mid-180Os onwards to find ways to make bread faster. “Time is money!” we are told, and never was this aphorism truer than in breadmaking. Making a loaf of sourdough bread takes 24 hours or more from start to finish. Anything to speed this up meant more loaves could be made, and sold, every 24 hours; already the Vienna Process was faster than the traditional method. This tinkering eventually led the British to invent the Chorleywood bread process in 1961. Without going into the technical details, this process can make a loaf of bread from start to finish (sliced and packaged) in about three and a half hours. It results in this hideous kind of product.

A soft, limp crumb, a miserably thin crust, a thing that you don’t need teeth to eat. Dreadful. The only thing it’s good for is to make toast, which probably explains why toast is so popular in the UK.

And so we have followed the rise – literal as well as metaphorical – of leavened wheat bread and its fall into limpness, softness, and general yuckiness. Luckily, it seems that there is a revival of Real Bread, sourdough bread. Rise (again) Sour-dough!

SAINT ERASMUS AND HIS GUTS

Milan, 18 March 2025

My wife and I recently went to an exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia, a relatively new museum in Milan which is situated right next to the Scala. The exhibition’s title, “The Genius of Milan. Crossroads of the Arts from the Cathedral Workshop to the Twentieth Century”, didn’t really reveal what the exhibition was about, and I’m not sure I had any better idea after our visit. I think it was trying to show how many non-Milanese artists had come to Milan over the centuries and flourished there, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

In any event, at some point I was suddenly transfixed by this painting, which shows in horrible, gory detail some poor guy having his entrails pulled out of him and wound around some contraption or other.

The painting’s label helpfully informed me that the poor guy in question was Saint Erasmus and he was being martyred. It was clearly a popular subject, because there was another painting just across the way about the same thing.

I’ve mentioned in past posts that early and Medieval Christians loved dreaming up horrible deaths for martyrs, but this one really took the biscuit! What sadistic mind came up with this one? And how did this particular form of torture even cross their mind?! I had, of course, to do some research.

As usual, as written up in the various pious hagiographies which appeared from at least the 5th Century onwards, St. Erasmus’s life seems to be one long muddle. So I’m going to more or less ignore these and sketch out what I think happened, not so much to Erasmus himself as to the legends which clustered around him and to the way he was portrayed in paintings.

It would seem that Erasmus started out as a local saint in the city of Formiae, a Roman port city some 90 km up the coast from Naples. Perhaps he was a bishop there. Bishop or no, there is a good chance that he was martyred in the city during Emperor Diocletian’s campaign of persecution, which ran with differing degrees of intensity from 303 AD to 313 AD. In later centuries, when relics of martyrs and saints became so important, his remains must have been reverently kept by the citizens of Formiae. Probably, too, to bolster the importance of his relics, legends about wondrous deeds performed by Erasmus began to circulate. One of these, which is important for our story, has him continuing to preach even after a thunderbolt struck the ground beside him. By the 5th Century, manuscripts also relating his nasty, vicious martyrdom at the hands of various Emperors were already circulating.

In the meantime, back in the real world, things were not going too well for Formiae. After suffering badly at the hands of the barbarians who flowed into Italy during the death throes of the western Roman Empire, it was razed to the ground in 842 AD by “Saracen” pirates who came from the sea. Its citizens ran – literally – for the hills, and that was the end of Formiae. Luckily, before the city was finally trashed, Erasmus’s precious relics were transported over the bay to nearby Gaeta, which was located on a much more defensible position, as this photo shows, and managed to hold off the pirates.

The relics are held to this day in Gaeta’s cathedral, along with the relics of four or five other saints, in a large crypt built in the early 17th Century.

In the 9th Century, when the relics were transferred from Formiae, and for a few centuries thereafter, Gaeta was a marine republic, like the ones on the Sorrentine peninsula further south, and very much in competition with them. Shipping was the backbone of the city’s prosperity, and the city’s sailors adopted Erasmus – one of Gaeta’s patron saints now that they owned his relics – as their personal patron saint. It seems that they chose him on the basis of that story I mentioned earlier, of him being unperturbed by a lightning bolt hitting the ground next to him. One of the perils which sailors ran (and still run) were violent storms. It’s not surprising that so many of the ex-votos found in churches in port cities have as their subject a sailor who was saved during a storm.

During such storms their boats could get hit by lightning. And so Erasmus became one of the patron saints of sailors. In this guise, he was often associated with the crank of a windlass. This may seem odd to readers, but windlasses were used on boats to pull up or let out an anchor or other heavy weights. The heavy weight is tied to a rope, the rope – maybe threaded through a winch – is wound around a barrel, which sailors turn using a crank (K in the diagram below).

It looks like people simplified everything by just associating the crank with Erasmus.

St. Erasmus’s connection in the minds of sailors to lightning got them to also connect him to another electrical phenomenon which sailing ships were (and still are) subject to. In brief, during thunderstorms, when high-voltage differentials are present between the clouds and the ground, oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air can get ionized around the point of any rod-like object and glow faintly blue or violet. Well, of course, sailing ships in the old days had lots of rod-like objects, like masts or spars or booms, and when conditions were right there would be a faint glow at the end of all these. Here is a print of an old sailing ship with these ghostly “flames” on the ends of its masts and spars.

And here is a modern photo of the phenomenon around a clipper ship, the Cutty Sark, moored on the Thames in London.

Well, of course, sailors knew nothing of the physics behind the phenomenon. They interpreted those little flames as meaning that St. Erasmus was protecting their ship, especially since the phenomenon often occurred before the thunder and lightning started. And so the phenomenon become known as St. Elmo’s Fire (Elmo being an Italian corruption of Erasmus).

In a parallel universe, various martyrologies continued to be published over the ages, full of the usual hideous tortures meted out to martyrs. But nothing yet about poor Erasmus’s entrails being pulled out of him. Then, in about 1260, a certain Jacobus de Voragine published his martyrology under the title The Golden Legend. His story about Erasmus recycled many of the tortures covered in previous martyrologies to which the saint had been subjected. But then, Jacobus slipped in a brand new torture. In his words (translated into English by Wynken de Worde in 1527):

“[…] the emperor […] waxed out of his wit for anger, and called with a loud voice like as he had been mad, and said: This is the devil, shall we not bring this caitiff to death? Then found he a counsel for to make a windlass, […] and they laid this holy martyr under the windlass all naked upon a table, and cut him upon his belly, and wound out his guts or bowels out of his blessed body.”

Here is how the scene was depicted in one of the early editions of the Golden Legend (in case any readers are interested, the two fellows on the left having their heads chopped off are Saints Processus and Martinian).

Now, I said at the beginning, how did this particular form of torture ever cross Jacobus’s or someone else’s mind? Well, it has been suggested – and it doesn’t sound improbable – that whoever dreamed it up found inspiration (if that’s the word) from the association of Erasmus with the crank of a windlass. Presumably they assumed that the windlass had to have something to do with his martyrdom. After all, the depictions of many martyrs have them holding the instruments of their torture. Saint Lawrence, for instance, leaning on the grill he was roasted on:

Or Saint Bartholomew carrying the knife with which he was flayed alive.

Or Saint Stephen, balancing on his head and shoulders the stones with which he was stoned to death.

But what could the torture be in Erasmus’s case? Well, what do we humans have that looks like ropes? Entrails! And so this novel form of torture was dreamed up.

Now, Jacobus’s list of tortures inflicted on poor Erasmus is really long: I count 19 in all. Many of them would have made very appropriate subjects for the gory paintings of martyrs so beloved by painters until quite recent times. And yet, the entrails being pulled out on the windlass really caught on; I have to assume it’s because that was the one torture that Jacobus had a picture of in his book. Here’s just a few examples I found on the internet.

This first version is a more sophisticated variant of the picture in The Golden Legend and had added the emperor, “waxed out of his wit for anger”, looking on.

This next version is quite similar, except that St. Erasmus’s bishop’s mitre has now been thoughtfully placed to one side.

In this next one, we’re beginning to get a bit more dramatic.

While this one, by Nicolas Poussin, has pushed the drama levels to stratospheric heights.

Other paintings, perhaps trying to avoid all the gruesomeness of these kinds of paintings, just had a thoughtful-looking Erasmus, dressed as a bishop, holding his crank around which his entrails have been tastefully wound. This next painting is an excellent example of the genre.

This focus on Erasmus’s guts and the acute pain he no doubt suffered having them drawn out had an interesting side-effect. I’ve mentioned in a previous post the Fourteen Holy Helpers who helped Medieval people deal with their physical trials and tribulations – the headaches, or the sore throats, or the epileptic fits, or … they suffered from. Well, Erasmus fit very well into this scheme of things! He was obviously the go-to Holy Helper for cases of stomach and intestinal illnesses.

I related in the postscript to a previous post that in a moment of weakness I had bought a painting on glass of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. All this research has allowed me to identify which of the Helpers in my painting is St. Erasmus. Here he is, with his crank and some of his intestines rolled around it. All this research I do does sometimes have benefits …

ARRESTING FACES

Milan, 28 February 2025

It was freezing cold in Vienna this last month we were there, far too cold for my wife and I to go hiking. So we spent our spare time visiting Vienna’s nice, warm museums. One museum we visited was the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts; I don’t think we’ve been back to it since a visit we made shortly after we arrived here, back in 1998. As the name indicates, we are actually dealing with an arts school, but it has quite a worthy collection of paintings donated to it by various aristocrats over the centuries. It has a particularly good collection of paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and it was one of these that caught my attention, St. Valentine and a Kneeling Donor, painted in 1502-1503.

What a magnificent face St. Valentine has! Not a handsome face at all, but it still had me gazing at it in fascination. A face full of character! If I were to meet this person in real life, my staring at him would probably provoke him into demanding what the hell I was looking at and to scarper before he took a swing at me. His face reminds me of the actor Walter Matthau at his most scowling.

From today’s perspective, what with the saint’s feast day of 14 February being irremediably lodged in our collective memories as the day of lovers, I think many people would be surprised by Cranach’s choice of model. They might have someone more sucrose in mind, like this painting in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome.

But that is to forget that in Cranach’s time, St. Valentine was also the saint to whom epileptics would pray, and in fact down at St. Valentine’s feet in Cranach’s painting one can see a man having an epileptic fit. Perhaps this rugged face fits better a saint who was meant to be dealing with epilepsy.

By coincidence, a few days later, at the Museum of the Lower Belvedere, I came across another painting with equally interesting faces. It is of three saints, Jerome, Leonard, and Nicholas. It is from the late 15th Century, painted by an unknown artist.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, I have a fascination for faces in art. When I visit most collections of Old Masters, after enduring a long series of paintings of classical figures prancing around in sylvan scenes or of various members of the nobility hamming it up in their best clothes, it comes as a relief for me to gaze upon portraits from times past. These are faces I can relate to, faces of people whom I could be seeing on any street corner on any day of the week, just dressed in different clothes. It reminds me that history is not some colourful story in a book but was the lived experience of people just like me.

Most of the faces I gaze on are pleasant; I look, I note, I move on. But sometimes – like St. Valentine’s – they are arresting. There is something about the face that holds my gaze, that makes me stop and look more closely, that makes me wonder what the person was like. Let me use the rest of this post to celebrate some of these arresting faces in art.

A good example is Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor. I am particularly fond of this portrait of him, by Albrecht Dürer, painted a few years after Cranach’s St. Valentine.

It’s another painting my wife and I saw as we took refuge from the cold in Vienna’s museums, this time in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

There are many other portraits of Maximilian, and in some of them he is frankly ugly, like this one of him and his family. With this side pose, his very prominent nose stands out.

Maximilian certainly looks better than many of his successors, who sported the monstrous Hapsburg jaw. It seems to have started with his grandson Charles V, who is in that last painting, bottom centre. It continued down the generations. Here is a portrait of Charles V when young.

In later life, he grew a beard, presumably to camouflage the chin.

But I don’t want to focus on ugly people, even though they are the subject of many, many paintings. So my next candidate for arresting faces is Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. Probably the most well-known portrait of him is this one in the Uffizi, in a double portrait with his wife Battista Sforza.

I prefer this portrait of him, though, where we see him together with his son Guidobaldo.

That is a really interestingly craggy face! It certainly mirrors his life, a man who was a brilliant condottiero but also a very cultured man: in the last painting, he is dressed in armour but he is reading a book, an allusion to his humanist interests. Of course, the thing most people almost immediately notice about his face is that notch at the top of his prominent nose. He lost his right eye in a joust (and probably smashed up the right side of his face in the process; he always had himself painted from the left). To be able to see better with his one remaining eye, especially when fighting, he had the top of his nose cut away. A tough, tough guy …

Staying in Italy, the next arresting face I pull up is that of Lorenzo de Medici, il Magnifico. Of the many representations that were made of him, I choose this terracotta statue, whose brooding look captures me. What dark secrets are hidden there!

Other arresting faces come from Caravaggio. It’s the faces of the secondary characters in his paintings who most draw my eye. A prime example is the Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Look at the weatherbeaten faces of those three apostles! They could truly be fishermen walking the shores of the Sea of Galilee, or indeed any shores anywhere.

Or his Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist. Look at the face of the executioner!

It’s a face which reminds me of Michelangelo’s, another arresting face.

Personally, I’ve always loved this self-portrait, where Michelangelo included himself as Nicodemus in the Deposition, a sculpture I first saw in Florence decades and decades ago on my first trip to Italy.

Michelangelo’s badly broken nose adds to the allure of his face. I read a while back that it got broken after he mocked the drawings of the artist Pietro Torrigiano, who in a rage took a swing at him.

I can’t leave Italy without including a portrait of San Carlo Borromeo, cardinal archbishop of Milan.

His large nose led the Milanese to nickname him Il Nason, Big Nose.

Readers will see that it’s all been men up to now. Indeed, it’s been very hard to find paintings of women’s faces which are arresting: beautiful yes, haughty yes, homely yes, motherly yes, careworn yes, but arresting …

After a considerable amount of searching, I came up with a few examples. This is Mary, Queen of England.

Now that is the face of a very determined woman! And determined she was. She suffered through all the travails of her father Henry VIII declaring her illegitimate, banishing her from court, and refusing to let her be with her mother when she died, and, once on the throne, she tried with all her might to bring England back into the Catholic fold.

And this is her half-sister Elizabeth I.

She, too, suffered under Henry VIII, nearly losing her head at one point, and when she was queen had to navigate tempestuous religious factional fighting. She was not a woman to be pushed around.

Perhaps I could add this self-portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi. It’s not a face that necessarily arrests me, but knowing her background – raped when she was young by another painter, tortured during his trial for rape to see if she kept to her story, having to see her rapist’s meagre two-year sentence reversed after a short prison term – I sense a steeliness in her.

I finish with the face of a peasant woman in an early painting by Van Gogh, before he went to Paris. It’s from the Potato Eaters, a really dark painting (literally).

It’s the woman on the far right that intrigues me. I show a blow-up (I’ve also lightened it a bit).

Now that’s an arresting face!

A TOUR OF CHAGALL’S STAINED GLASS WINDOWS

Vienna, 15 February 2025
Updated Sori, 10 March 2025
Updated again Vienna, 14 August 2025

My wife and I have just seen an exhibition of Marc Chagall’s paintings at the Albertina in Vienna (we’re normally not here at this time of the year, but I have to give a course on circular economy at the Central European University). I’m sure it was an excellent exhibition, although in truth what really has stayed with me is the crowds. It was just a few days before the end of the exhibition, so everyone who had been putting off going to see it had piled in. It’s really not possible to enjoy what’s on offer when you have to spend most of your time manoeuvring around other people to catch a quick glimpse of the paintings before your view is obscured by someone’s head. At least it was nice to see the original of a poster we have hanging in our apartment, although it’s depressing to think that the painting probably just sits in a bank vault in Japan most of the time (the label mentioned that it was owned by some anonymous Japanese).

In any event, one of the things I learned as I ducked and weaved through the crowds was that Chagall had, late in his career, designed a number of stained glass windows. Now that intrigued me, because I have a great love of stained glass. I should quickly qualify that statement, though. It is Medieval stained glass that I love, because of its quasi-abstract nature; it’s not the scenes which are depicted in the windows that matter, it’s the sense of being flooded in multi-coloured light. I still remember vividly the first time I saw the stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral, which my wife and I visited when we lived in Paris in the early 1980s.

I remember just as vividly the first time I saw the stained glass windows in La Sainte Chapelle in Paris, which my sister had taken me to see some ten years earlier.

I don’t find later stained glass windows nearly as interesting, because the scenes in the glass intrude too much and that feeling of being bathed in colour is lost. Just look at the stained glass in the Duomo of Milan, considered “an extraordinary testament to the history of the art of stained glass windows from the early 15th to late 20th centuries”, yet really quite boring.

So, as I say, I was intrigued by the idea that Chagall had designed stained glass windows. His love of colour and the semi-abstract flavour of much of his work suggested to me that perhaps he could do something interesting. Once back home, I began to dig a little, to see where my wife and I would have to go to see his stained glass windows. He designed stained glass windows in Europe, Israel, and the USA. I decided to knock the latter two countries off the list: one day, maybe, we can visit his windows there, but only if we happen to be in the right place at the right time. The stained glass windows in Europe were more promising. By chance, I came across a map that helpfully indicated all the places in Europe where Chagall had designed stained glass windows. Looking at that map, I came to the exciting conclusion that my wife and I could make an interesting 11-day tour of all his European stained glass windows! I will use this post to persuade my wife that this could be an excellent project for the late Spring, when the days are getting long but are not too hot yet.

We would start the tour in Milan. I was initially thinking of travelling by bus and train, as we usually do, but it would be too complicated. So car it would have to be. Our first port of call would be the church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, located in the village of Passy in Haute Savoie, in France, just on the other side of the Mont-Blanc road tunnel (looks pretty, but I would make sure we would be there after the snow was gone; I’m not driving in any snow).

According to Google Maps, it would take us a little over three hours to get there, so if we set off in the morning we could be visiting the church in the afternoon. It would actually be a good place to start the tour because the church holds the first two windows which Chagall ever designed, back in 1956-57. Truth to tell, there wouldn’t be much to see. The two windows, which are located in the baptistery, are quite nice.

However, as readers can see in this photo, which is an overview of the whole baptistery, they are really quite modest in size.

Of considerably greater interest is the ceramic “painting” on the wall – also by Chagall – of the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea.

In fact, I would say that the rest of the church is probably much more interesting, filled as it is by artworks by other major 20th Century artists: Pierre Bonnard, Fernand Léger, Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Jacques Lipchitz, just to name the ones I’m familiar with. Here is the façade, graced by a mosaic by Léger.

And here is a view of the choir, with what looks to be a magnificent tapestry.

I’m thinking that there is more than enough in this church – even if it isn’t Chagall – to keep us occupied for a couple of hours, so we should probably just spend the night in Passy and leave the next day for Zürich, our next stop on the tour.

According to Google Maps, it would take us four hours to get Zürich from Passy. We would be visiting the Fraumünster.

Chagall designed five large windows for the choir of the church between 1967 and 1970. You can see three of them in the far distance in this photo.

This photo shows the three windows up close (it’s almost impossible to get a photo of all five together since the other two are to the side of these three).

Chagall also designed a small rose window at the other end of the nave, installed in 1978.

I’m guessing that we could easily visit this church in the afternoon and then stay the night in Zürich.

On Day 3, our final destination would be Mainz, in Germany, where we would be visiting the church of Saint Stephen. It would take us a little over four hours to get there, but I’ve noticed that the route which Google Maps suggests would take us via Strasbourg. I’m thinking that we should take the occasion to make a quick detour to visit Strasbourg Cathedral.

It has some fine late Medieval stained glass windows. The rose window is especially remarkable.

We could make an early start from Zürich, plan a late morning visit to Strasbourg Cathedral, and then, after eating what would no doubt be an excellent Alsatian choucroute for lunch, we could continue on our way to Mainz in the afternoon. Once in Mainz, rather than squeezing in a hurried visit to the church of St. Stephen we could just check into the hotel and stroll around Mainz, which seems to have a very pleasant old town.

Day 4 would start bright and early, at the church of Saint Stephen.

Chagall designed nine windows here between 1978 and 1985, the year he died (and further windows were designed after his death by Charles Marq, Chagall’s glassmaker for many of his windows, in Chagall’s style). This photo gives a sense of the blue light which visitors will find themselves bathed in (like in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris).

This photo instead is a close-up of the three windows in the choir, which show Chagall’s inimitable style.

After this bath of blue, we would drive some two and a half hours back south into France, to Sarrebourg, where we would visit the small chapelle des Cordeliers.

Chagall designed five windows for this chapel, although as readers might imagine, looking at the photo of the chapel, it is only one, very large, magnificent window that captures all the attention.

At first glance, the window seems to be made up of an enormous posy of flowers. But as a reader pointed out to me, that posy actually seems to be the Tree of Life that grew in the Garden of Eden. In fact, we see what appear to be Adam and Eve in, or maybe above, the tree. The rest of the window is full of scenes from the Bible. The other small windows designed by Chagall are on the left-hand wall.

I’m thinking that we should easily have the time after our visit to push on to Metz (an hour and a half away) and spend the night there.

The next morning (we are now on day 5), we would visit Metz cathedral.

Chagall designed three windows for the cathedral over a period of ten years, between 1958 and 1968.

But what is perhaps more interesting about the cathedral is that it is stuffed with stained glass – some 6,500 square metres of it – ranging from the 13th to the 20th centuries. I’m sure this will be an interesting place to compare Chagall’s work to earlier stained glass windows. To whet our appetites, I throw in here a photo of a window from the 13th Century.

This window instead was installed in the 16th Century (and those clearly visible figures of saints are now crowding out the colour of the glass).

There’s not just the windows to see in the cathedral, so I’m sure the visit would take up the whole morning. So I see ourselves leaving for our next destination, Rheims, in the afternoon. It would take us two hours to get there, so we would arrive in the late afternoon and be ready for a nice dinner in town (with a glass of champagne, no doubt) after checking into our hotel.

The morning of day 6 would see us visiting Rheims cathedral. The cathedral was very badly damaged during the First World War and – among other things – lost nearly all of its original stained glass windows (some had been taken down for safekeeping at the beginning of the war).

The cathedral chapter reinstalled what it could and decided to replace lost windows. The three windows designed by Chagall and installed in 1974 were part of this renewal effort.

But here, too, we would need to spend some time looking at the cathedral’s other windows, like these two rose windows (which are actually modern windows, installed in the 1930s).

The next two stops in our tour are in the south-east of England, so after visiting Rheims cathedral we would need to head over to Calais and catch Le Shuttle train over to Dover, passing through the Channel Tunnel. We would drive out of Dover to Royal Tunbridge Wells and spend the night there. I’ve read that it’s a nice place to visit, although a bit on the twee side.

The next morning (at this point, we are in day 7 of our tour), we would take a 15-minute drive to All Saints Church in the neighbouring village of Tudeley.

All twelve windows of this small church were designed by Chagall, between 1963 and 1978.

But it is the East window that stands out.

By mid morning, I reckon we would be on our way to our next destination, Chichester cathedral, which it would take us an hour and a half to reach.

Chagall designed one window in the cathedral, between 1975 and 1978.

It is quite a modest-sized window, and as far as I can tell is tucked away in a corner. The remaining windows in the cathedral don’t look particularly interesting, being mostly Victorian. There are a few other things to see. But, all in all, I think we would be finished quite quickly.

We would now need to go back to France. Looking at Google Maps, I’m thinking we should drive to Portsmouth (a mere 20-minutes’ drive from Chichester), catch a late ferry to Cherbourg, and spend the night there.

The next destination, la Chapelle du Saillant, is a full day’s drive from Cherbourg. Rather than do one long drive, though, it would be nicer to break the trip about half way. Looking at the map, I’m therefore thinking that on day 8 we could make a stop-over at Tours, on the Loire river, where we could usefully spend the afternoon visiting the cathedral.

It has some splendid Medieval stained glass windows.

Day 9 would then see us driving down to the chapelle du Saillant, a three and a half hours’ drive from Tours.

We would visit the chapel, all six of whose windows were designed by Chagall between 1978 and 1982.

But it’s only two windows which are worth seeing, the window in the choir and the occulus above the door; the other four are just grisaille.

Our visit would be quite quick, and then it would be on to the next location. By rights, if we were to really visit all the places where Chagall designed windows, that should be Moissac, near Toulouse. But the church there has only one window by Chagall and it’s really small. On top of it, Moissac would be quite a detour. So I’ve made an executive decision: our last destination on this tour would be the Marc Chagall National Museum in Nice.

That being said, Nice would be too far away to reach after our visit to the chapelle du Saillant. Looking at Google Maps, I’m thinking that we could drive to Rodez, about two and a half hours’ away, and spend the night there. We might even be able to squeeze in a visit to Rodez cathedral.

It has little Medieval glass, lost over the ages. On the other hand, it has some remarkable windows which were installed some 15 years ago.

Day 10 would bring us to Nice. That’s still a five hours’ drive from Rodez, too long a drive to then follow up with a visit to a museum. So I’m thinking that we can take our time getting there – maybe take a side trip to Avignon or Aix-en-Provence on the way – and arrive in Nice in the evening.

Which brings us to day 11 with its visit to the Marc Chagall National Museum.

The museum is actually primarily a collection of Chagall’s paintings.

But it does have four, very large, Chagall windows. They grace the museum’s auditorium.

Anyway, given that the germ for this tour was planted in an exhibition of his paintings, it would be a satisfying closure of the circle to see some of his windows against a backdrop of his paintings.

I reckon we could “do” the museum in a morning. So after a quick lunch, we could head back to our starting point in Milan. It’s a three and a half hours’ drive, manageable in an afternoon.

Well, I think this would be a very enjoyable little trip. But have I done a good enough job to persuade my wife? We shall see.

POST SCRIPTUM 10 March, 2025

Well, we’ve just come back from a weekend trip to Nice, where we visited the Chagall museum. Very beautiful! But it looks like the big trip I’ve been proposing is out. We’ll use the salami approach instead: whenever we happen to be going close to one of these windows we’ll go and visit them. Such is life …

THE GROUP OF SEVEN

Milan, 13 January 2025

My wife and I were recently listening to an article from the New York Times about an Egyptian immigrant to New York, by the name of Armia Khalil. Mr. Khalil had been an artist in Egypt. He liked to create pieces that echoed the country’s ancient artefacts. He did so using tools he had created that were similar to those used by the Ancient Egyptians themselves. Of course, when Mr. Khalil arrived in New York, with a suitcase crammed with his tools but with hardly two nickels to rub together, he didn’t have the luxury to use them; he needed a job. But he didn’t want any old job. He wanted a job that brought him close to art. So he applied over and over again for jobs as a museum guard to the city’s many museums; he reasoned that at least this would allow him rub shoulders with art all day. Finally, after six years of trying, he managed to unhook a museum guard job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Readers can read (or hear) the rest of his delightfully heart-warming story in the original New York Times article, if they can get around the paper’s firewall. If not, they can visit his WordPress blog – it gives me great pleasure to advertise a fellow WordPress blogger.

Mr. Khalil’s repeated attempts to be hired as a museum guard to get close to art brought back fond memories for me. Because I had tried to do the same many, many years ago. It was January, I was 18, I was staying with my parents in Ottawa for five months until the beginning of June, I needed to find something to do. Whenever I had spent the holidays with my parents, I had always found the time to visit Canada’s National Gallery. This is the building I used to visit, back in the early 1970s, although I see it has now moved into a sparkling new building somewhere else in Ottawa.

I found the time I spent there most soothing. I thought, why not spend my five months in Ottawa, sitting on a chair in the Gallery’s exhibition rooms and admiring the art around me? So I got myself an appointment with the head of the guards and arrived promptly for the interview. It was in a dreary, windowless office somewhere in the basement of the building. He was sitting at his desk, flanked by one of his guards. He invited me to sit down. He looked me over. Then, with great frankness, he told me why he doubted that I was right for the job. He pointed out that I was much more educated than the other guards, so had I thought about what my social interactions with them would be like? (the implication being, no doubt, that I would be awfully lonely during the working day, with no colleagues to really speak to). Did I not think, he continued, that I was far too young to get stuck in what was, at the end of the day, a pretty boring job? His basic message, I felt, was that it was best to be ignorant, probably stupid, and old before accepting a dead-end job as a museum guard. His side-kick nodded throughout this analysis, which was sad because at the end of the day his chief was talking about him. Thinking about it now, he could have been describing Mr. Bean working at the Royal National Gallery in London, in the film Bean.

My interview was terminated with a final parting shot. The chief pointed to my fashionably long hair and regretfully informed me I would have to cut it, to conform to the short-back-and-sides style sported by the (male) guards. Crestfallen, I left without a job. Unlike Mr. Khalil, I did not try other museums or art galleries in Ottawa.

It was actually just a couple of rooms in the National Gallery that I would particularly have wanted to sit in as a guard, using my time to admire the paintings. They were dedicated to the Group of Seven, a coalition of Canadian painters who came together from shortly after World War I to the early 1930s. They were looking for a style of landscape painting that was distinctly Canadian and modern. To my mind, they succeeded brilliantly, with Lawren Harris being the jewel in the crown. His iconic painting, North Shore, Lake Superior, painted in 1926, is in the National Gallery.

But he painted many other wonderful paintings. Here is a selection. This first painting, Northern Lake, is from around 1923, early on in the Group of Seven’s life.

This painting, from around 1924, is another whose subject is Lake Superior: Pic Island.

At some point in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Harris went to Canada’s far north and even to Greenland. The results of these expeditions were a long series of almost abstract paintings of great beauty. I show only three here. The first two hang on our walls in Vienna in the form of prints (I am not, alas, rich enough to be able to afford an original Lawren Harris).

This one is titled Lake and Mountains, from 1928.

And this one is Mt Lefroy from 1930.

The final painting I show from Lawren Harris is Icebergs, Davis Strait, also from 1930.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in later decades Harris veered off into abstraction. I haven’t followed him there; abstract art is not really my thing.

While I particularly admire Harris, the paintings of the other members of the Group of Seven are not be sniffed at. I give one example for each of them.

Franklin Carmichael, Wabajisik Drowned Lake, from 1929.

A.Y. Jackson, Barns, from 1926.

Frank Johnston, The Fire Ranger, from 1921.

Arthur Lismer, Pine Wrack, from 1933.

J.E.H. MacDonald, Algoma Waterfall, 1920

Frederick Varley, Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay, from 1921.

After all these years, I still don’t know if I would have enjoyed spending five months next to the paintings of this group of artists, or if I would have been bored to tears by the company of my fellow guards, or both. For any readers who might be asking themselves what I did end up doing those five months, I can reveal that I went to work for the YM/YWCA. I replaced a guy who had to go on a long sick leave, so it was a perfect fit. My job was to hand out stationary to the staff and to print the various flyers which they produced. I became a dab hand at offset printing, even if I say so myself – a skill, alas, I was never able to put to good use again.