The mention in my last post of a possible road trip down Route 66 has made me start thinking again about a road trip my wife and I did long, long ago – in 1979, to be precise – when were young and foolish and in grad school in the US. It was the Spring break, so about this time of the year, and we decided to do something crazy, namely drive down to New Orleans to visit the city. So I hired a car in Boston, where I was at school, drove down to Baltimore, where she was at school, and then off we drove, down the Interstate Highway 80 towards New Orleans.
As I said, we were young and foolish and hadn’t realised just how far it was to New Orleans – the US is just such a damned big country. Google Maps tells me it’s 1,800 km from Baltimore – and that’s just one way, and I would have had to drive another 650 km back to Boston. In the hours that passed as we drove mile after mile down the highway, we did some calculations and came to the conclusion that no sooner had we arrived in New Orleans that we would have to turn around and drive back. By this time, we had already spent one night in a cheap motel off the highway somewhere. Time to revise our plans.
The signs indicated that we were coming to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“You leave the Pennsylvania station ’bout a quarter to four
Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer
Then to have your ham and eggs in Carolina
When you hear the whistle blowing eight to the bar
Then you know that Tennessee is not very far
Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rolling
Whoo, whoo, Chattanooga, there you are
There’s gonna be a certain party at the station
In satin and lace, I used to call funny face
She’s gonna cry until I tell her that I’ll never roam
So, Chattanooga choo choo, won’t you choo choo me home?”
But I digress.
As Chattanooga got ever closer, a rapid decision was made. Instead of keeping going, we would take a left at Chattanooga and drive clear across the state of Georgia.
Georgia … that’s Ray Charles …
“Georgia, Georgia The whole day through (the whole day through) Just an old sweet song Keeps Georgia on my mind (Georgia on my mind)
I said Georgia Georgia A song of you (a song of you) Comes as sweet and clear As moonlight through the pines
Other arms reach out to me Other eyes smile tenderly Still in peaceful dreams I see The road leads back to you”
I digress.
We would spend the night in Atlanta, we agreed, and then go on down the coast, to a place called Savannah.
So it was that a day later we found ourselves driving into the old centre of Savannah. We had no idea what to expect, we had never heard of Savannah until we decided to turn left at Chattanooga. What we found was magic.
The city was founded in 1733, and the old town, the so-called historic district, has kept the layout of the original town plan, with a grid of streets; the potential monotony is broken up by some 20 squares sprinkled throughout the grid. This old map gives an idea of what it looks like.
But what makes the historic district especially enchanting is the houses that were built along its streets during the 18th and 19th centuries by wealthy merchants, in a variety of styles: Gothic, Victorian, and Greek Revival. I throw in here a gallery of photos.
I could have put a whole bunch more photos, but I think readers should go and look for themselves.
And the cherry on the cake is the Spanish moss hanging down from all the trees along the streets. I find Spanish moss so … exotic, is the only word I can think of to describe it.
We spent several days in Savannah and the surrounding area. Then it was time to move on; like this singer, we were left with lovely memories which we’ve carried inside of us all our lives.
Our trip wasn’t quite over. On our way back to Baltimore, we passed through Charleston, South Carolina.
The older part of the city is actually quite eye-catching, but after our visit to Savannah it was just … nice.
Then it was a time to be getting back to Baltimore. I dropped off my wife, and then raced back up to Boston to be on time for the resumption of classes. All told, we drove a little under 4,000 km. Like I said, the US is a big country.
“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”, everything changes, everything is transformed. My wife intones this popular Italian saying, half jokingly, every time we come across something that has changed since we last passed this way. It seems to be happening more and more frequently now, I suppose a sign that we have clocked up decades of memories and experiences on which to draw on as we move inexorably towards the exit door (cue to my wife rolling her eyes at this latest meditation of mine on the transience of all life).
In any event, I was forcefully reminded of this saying a few weeks ago when an urban walk of ours led us past one of Milan’s earliest churches, the so-called paleochristian basilicas built before the fall of the western Roman Empire. I did what I exhort all my readers to do when a church hoves into view; I popped in to have a look around. Aïe! How much had changed since this church was first built in the 380s CE: “tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”. In a somewhat melancholy mood, I returned home and started researching the fate of Milan’s other paleochristian basilicas.
I need to give a bit of context here. Many people think that Rome was the only capital of the Roman Empire. This, as any Milanese will proudly tell you, is not so. In 286 CE, after the Roman Empire was carved into two, Milan became the capital of the western part and remained so for a little over 100 years, until 402 CE, when the capital was moved again, this time to Ravenna. There aren’t of course any pictures from that period, so I’ll throw in here a reconstruction of Milan (then known as Mediolanum) in about 300 CE.
Readers will make out the white rectangle of the forum, the circus along the edge of the city walls, to which was attached the imperial palace complex (so that the Emperor could step out into the Imperial box without leaving the palace grounds and mix with the hoi polloi), and the amphitheatre down to readers’ left. Just to get down among the hoi polloi, here’s another reconstruction of a typical day in the forum.
And in a rush of enthusiasm, I throw in another reconstruction of the hoi polloi doing their shopping along the cardo, the north-south street that passed through all fora in the Roman Empire.
In any event, Mediolanum now being the capital city, it was here, in 313 CE, that the two Emperors, Constantine and Liceus, promulgated what has come to be called the edict of Milan, which allowed the free exercise of religion throughout the Empire. While the edict formally covered all religions, it was actually aimed primarily at Christianity. The result was that Christians could finally come out of the shadows and worship freely (we’ll skip over the fact that a mere seventy years later, in 380 CE, Christians imposed their religion on everyone else in the Empire, with all other religions being forced (back) into the shadows).
Among other things, the edict of Milan meant that Christians could finally stop meeting in secret in people’s houses and build their own places of worship. They were quick to take advantage of this new-found freedom. In Milan alone, and focusing just on the big churches, within a year of the promulgation of the edict the city had its first Christian basilica. In the photo below, we have a reconstruction, in the top right, of that first basilica, while the building at the bottom left, which had been a temple dedicated to the Goddess Minerva, was converted into another basilica, which some 30 years later was knocked down to make space for a much larger church.
By the time St. Ambrose became bishop of Milan in 374 CE, the city had added two more basilicas to the list. During his tenure, St. Ambrose ordered the construction of another four basilicas, I suppose to cater to all the newly-minted Christians now that Christianity had become the State religion. And not to be outdone by St. Ambrose, the imperial household decided to build their own basilica. So by 402 CE, the year that Milan stopped being the capital of the western Roman Empire, the city had another five basilicas on the rolls. The construction of basilicas went on even after Milan’s demotion as capital, with two more basilicas being built before the final collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE.
Of course, churches continued to be built in Milan in the centuries thereafter. But I want to focus on these eleven earliest, paleochristian, churches to show that indeed “all changes, all is transformed”.
Let me first give readers a framework for these tides of change. Any of us with the minutest interest in history will know that over the arc of history we humans have been repeatedly subjected to the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Death, Famine, War, and Conquest. Here is Albrecht Dürer’s take on these four horsemen; I leave it to the readers to work out which horseman is which.
But buildings have also been subject to their own horsemen of the apocalypse. Two they share with us: War and Conquest, whole cities having been wiped out by both – and not just centuries ago. Here is a photo of Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped on it.
A third has been Fire, a frequent companion of War and Conquest (Dresden is an eloquent memorial to that), but also a horseman that can strike alone. It, too, has wiped out whole cities. The Great Fire of London stands out in my mind, although many other cities have been laid low by fire.
Since my subject is churches, readers should note Old Saint Paul’s burning fiercely (and that is London Bridge that we see, although it is not “falling down, falling down”, as the nursery rhyme has it).
For religious buildings in particular, I would add a fourth horseman of the apocalypse: Fanaticism, religious or otherwise. These buildings are particularly targeted, both by the mobs and by the State, as symbols of the Religious Other or of Religious Obscurantism. Here we have the Dutch Protestants smashing up one of their Catholic churches.
While here we have the French Revolutionaries being even more thorough in their destruction of a church (the church of Saint-Barthélemy), in the name of the Cult of Reason.
But buildings are also victims to the horsemen’s running dogs, to use a Maoist turn of phrase – which gives me an excuse to throw in an example from 1971 of Maoist propaganda posters: compelling art, if nothing else. The phrase at the bottom reads, I am told: “People of the world unite to defeat the American invaders and their running dogs!”
These running dogs are less extreme but no less harmful forces which have disappeared buildings (to borrow a term from the violent rule in Chile and Argentina by right-wing Army putschists back in the 1970s – I wish to show myself being even-handed in my comments of Left and Right).
One is Urban Improvement. Buildings which have had the bad luck to be in the way of some Big Man’s vision of A New City, or just the municipal government’s decision to have a wider avenue for more cars, have been unceremoniously torn down.
Another running dog is Impoverishment; buildings put up when their owners had money then slowly rot and collapse when their descendants have fallen on hard times and can’t maintain them any more. Closely related has been the running dog of Indifference. The descendants have simply preferred to spend their money, inherited or otherwise, in other ways than on maintaining old buildings.
Finally, and often most damagingly for religious buildings, there is Changes in Taste. A building considered beautiful when it was put up is thought, several centuries later, to be ugly, or embarrassingly old-fashioned, or both. It absolutely needs a make-over! Closely related, again mostly for religious buildings, is Showing Off: the desire by the rich and powerful to preen their social feathers by paying for the addition of extra elements such as chapels to existing venerable structures, often to the aesthetic detriment of the whole.
So how have our eleven basilicas fared in the face of their four horsemen of the apocalypse and the five lesser running dogs? Before answering that, I think it is time to give a name to these eleven churches, to make this more personal. We have:
The basilica vetus (the old basilica), built in 314 CE, later renamed the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore;
The basilica nova (the new basilica), built in about 350 CE, later renamed the basilica of Santa Tecla;
The basilica portiana (the Portian basilica), built in the first half of the 4th Century CE, later renamed the basilica of San Vittore al Corpo;
The basilica trium magorum (basilica of the three Wise Men), built around 344 CE, later renamed the basilica of Sant’Eustorgio;
The basilica prophetarum (basilica of the Prophets), built in the late 370s CE, later renamed the basilica of San Dionigi;
The basilica martyrum (basilica of the Martyrs), built in the early 380s CE, later renamed the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio;
The basilica apostolorum (basilica of the Apostles), also built in the early 380s, later renamed the basilica of San Nazaro in Brolo;
The basilica virginum (basilica of the Virgins), built in the 380s-390s CE, later renamed the basilica of San Simpliciano;
The basilica palatina (the Palatine basilica), built in the 390s-410s, later renamed the basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore;
The basilica evangeliorum (basilica of the Evangelists), built in the first half of the 5th Century CE, later renamed the basilica of San Giovanni in Conca;
The basilica sancti Calimerii (basilica of Saint Calimerius), also built in the first half of the 5th Century CE, which kept the Italianised name of Santo Calimero.
Well, the first thing to say is that within no more than 150 years of being built, the eleven original buildings were all razed to the ground by the horseman of War, in the form of Attila the Hun. As part of his rampage through northern Italy in 451-452 CE, his army besieged Milan, broke through its defensive walls, and laid the city to waste. Of course, no-one at the time recorded this momentous event pictorially, so I throw in here a re-construction of the Huns looking suitably menacing under the walls of a city.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, prior to arriving beneath the walls of Milan, Attila had completely destroyed the city of Aquileia. He moved on from there and meted out the same fate to the city of Padova. He richly deserved his nickname the Scourge of God. Aquileia never recovered, but Milan (and Padova) did. Among other things, the basilicas were rebuilt.
Alas! A mere 90 years later, in 538 CE, the horseman of War came galloping over the horizon again, this time in the form of an army of Ostrogoths and Burgundians under the command of a certain Uraiah. Once again, the city was besieged, the walls were eventually pierced, and the city was razed. Worse, all the male citizens were killed and all the female citizens handed over as slaves to the Burgundians, as payment for their part in the siege. Again, no-one at the time recorded these hideous events pictorially, but there is a painting in the basilica di Sant’Eustorgio from the 17th Century which formally is about the Massacre of the Innocents but is thought to actually be about the massacre of the Milanese by the Ostrogoths and Burgundians.
Not surprisingly, it took Milan much longer to recover from this devastation, several centuries actually. But it did, and the basilicas were once again rebuilt.
Next on the scene was the horseman of Fire. In 1071 and 1075 CE, Milan suffered two devastating fires which burned down whole swathes of the city, much of whose houses were close-packed and built of wood. We have here a picture from an illuminated manuscript of a town going up in flames.
In the ensuing conflagrations, the basilicas of San Lorenzo Maggiore, in 1071, and, in 1075, San Nazaro in Brolo and Santa Tecla were badly damaged.
If I use these churches’ later names it’s that by now naming habits had changed. Churches were named after a particular saint rather than a group of saints as had been the case when these churches were first built – “tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”.
Once again, the Milanese rose to the challenge and rebuilt the burnt basilicas. But – “tutto cambia”, etc. – building styles had evolved in the intervening centuries. The churches were now being rebuilt in the Romanesque style. Here is a reconstruction of Santa Tecla from around this time. As readers can see, the basilicas all probably looked very much like the basilicas in Ravenna, with beautiful mosaics running along the walls. Given my predilection for early Christian mosaics, I personally grieve that Milan has lost nearly all of these mosaics.
A mere 90 years after these devastating fires, in 1161, the horseman of War came riding again, this time in the form of Frederick Barbarossa (Red Beard), Holy Roman Emperor. As we shall see, he also brought with him the horseman of Fire.
He had already laid siege to the city two years earlier, had starved its populace into submission, and had forced them to accept humiliating terms. Once Frederick was gone, the Milanese had quickly reneged on the terms and taken up arms again. This time, Barbarossa was determined to grind Milan’s face into the dirt. In this, he was actively supported by the nearby cities of Lodi, Novara, Como, Cremona, and Vercelli, whose citizens were both afraid of, and jealous of, Milan’s growing power; they had allied themselves with Barbarossa in the hope that he would cut Milan down to size. Once again, the city was besieged, and once again its citizens were starved into submission. Here, in a 19th century imagining, we have the consuls of Milan coming before Barbarossa begging for mercy.
But this time, not only did Frederick impose even more humiliating terms on the Milanese, he had his allies burn Milan to the ground, with each allied city being responsible for one district (very methodical …). But he decreed one exemption, the places of worship – he was a Christian, after all. So our basilicas more or less got through this one unscathed (more or less because some of them do seem to have got badly singed).
The basilicas now got a break from the horseman of War for 800 years, but the running dogs got to work. Because of them, four basilicas never made it down to us. Two, Santa Tecla and Santa Maria Maggiore (which were very close to each other), fell victim to the running dog of Urban Improvement, in this case in the form of a desire by the City Fathers to build in their place a much bigger and more splendid cathedral, the current Duomo of Milan (the centuries-long story of its construction is the subject of an earlier post). For reasons which will become apparent in a minute, I choose a photo of a painting of the Duomo as it was in 1819.
Sant Maria Maggiore was completely destroyed. A very small part of Santa Tecla survived as part of the shops that crowded in on the Duomo (those shops we see on the left of the painting), but that finally also disappeared after the running dog of Urban Improvement came along again in 1865, when the city fathers decided that there was a need for a grand, and large, piazza in front of the Duomo. The buildings in the painting above were all torn down to make the grand – but rather barren – piazza that we have today.
Source
Two other basilicas fell victim to the double whammy of, first, the horseman of Fanaticism, and then the running dog of Urban Improvement. Fanaticism led to the monasteries which had become attached to the basilicas being closed down and to the monks who had looked after them being kicked out. This was done by Emperor Joseph II of Austria (Milan was in Austrian hands at this time) in the name of bringing the Catholic Church to heel and modernising it. Urban improvement took different forms. In the case of the basilica of San Dionigi, it meant that church and monastery completely disappeared as all its lands were turned into a very pleasant public park which is still with us today, the giardini Indro Montanelli.
In the case of the basilica of San Giovanni in Conca, Urban Improvement meant a widening of streets and a mad plan, dreamed up after World War II, to drive a new avenue right through the old city centre. The church being in the way, it was unceremoniously torn down. The new avenue was never built (luckily for us; by my calculations it would have gone right through where our apartment building is). But by then it was too late for the church. All that’s left of it is this miserable-looking ruin sitting forlornly in the middle of a busy road.
Source
At this point, I’m reminded of the American children’s counting-out rhyme “Ten Little Injuns”, whose first couple of lines go like this:
Ten little Injuns standin’ in a line,
One toddled home and then there were nine;
Nine little Injuns swingin’ on a gate,
One tumbled off and then there were eight.
And it goes on until there are no little injuns left.
To paraphrase the song:
Eleven basilicas built way back when,
Two were eaten up and then there were nine.
Nine basilicas still around,
Two were in the way and then there were seven.
So seven of Milan’s original eleven paleochristian basilicas have managed to stagger on into our modern age. But … “tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”! None of them look anything like the original Roman-era basilicas. Not all of them even look like the Romanesque churches that replaced them after the disasters of Attila, the Ostrogoths, Barbarossa, and various fires. And even if they appear Romanesque, what we see today is someone’s guess as to what the Romanesque versions of the churches looked like. Let’s look at them one by one.
I start with the basilica di Sant’Ambrogio because it is a mere 10 minutes’ walk from where my wife and I live in Milan, and we often go by it on our various walks. It is also the one that at first glance seems to have changed the least since its rebuilding in the Romanesque style in the 1090s CE. And even in the Romanesque rebuild we see the ghost of the original Roman basilica; the 11th Century builders scrupulously maintained the original building’s floor plan. Here we have some photos of this delightful building. This first shot shows how the church is seen from the road in front of it.
As readers can see, the façade of the church is obscured by some building whose immediate purpose is not clear. The visitor first has to enter this building to enter the church proper. It turns out to be an enclosed courtyard, or – to give it its Latin name – atrium.
It’s interesting that this atrium has come down to us. When the original Roman basilica was built, the atrium had a precise function. At some point during the Liturgy, the catechumens, people who were not “full” Christians yet because they had not yet been baptised, had to file out into the atrium because they were not allowed to be present for the full Liturgy. By the time the church was rebuilt in Romanesque style, this function was meaningless because by then all Christians were baptised at birth. Luckily, it was decided to keep it and use it instead to hold various meetings. So this very early Christian architectural element has managed to make it down to us.
The interior shows the clean, simple lines of the Romanesque style.
In this last photo, readers can glimpse the magnificent mosaic in the apse. Here is a closer look at it – because of the ciborium over the high altar, it’s difficult to get a clean view.
It was originally laid down in the 8th Century, some three centuries after the disaster of the Ostrogoths. From a century later comes the main altar, a magnificent piece of Carolingian goldsmithing.
The ciborium under which the altar sits is equally magnificent, but readers will have to go and visit Sant’Ambrogio to hear about it. I want instead to take readers to a small side chapel, San Vittore in Ciel d’Oro, where some even earlier mosaics, laid down between the sacks of the city by the Huns and the Ostrogoths, by some miracle managed to survive. We see here the cupola of this little chapel, with its mosaic field of gold surrounding a portrait of Saint Victor.
Sharp-eyed readers will have noted that the walls below the cupola carry mosaics of some serious-looking fellows dressed in togas. These are various saints and early martyrs. I show one of these, the mosaic of Saint Ambrose, because contrary to the others it is said to be an actual likeness of the saint, the oldest in existence.
Yes indeed, the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio doesn’t seem to have changed terribly much since its Romanesque incarnation. But alas! It has changed. Because a mere 80 years ago the horseman of War came riding back to Milan in the form of massive bombing raids during World War II. The first of these was on the night of 24/25 October of 1942. There was a second such raid in mid-February of 1943. The climax was four nights in August. These were all raids which, like the infamous bombing raid on Dresden in 1945, a photo of which I give above, deliberately tried to burn the city down by creating a fire storm. Luckily, by the 20th Century there wasn’t that much wood left in Milan’s buildings so a fire storm wasn’t started. Nevertheless, 50% of the city’s buildings were destroyed or damaged. And one of the buildings which was badly damaged was Sant’Ambrogio.
Restorers did a good job after the war in putting the basilica back together again, but you can tell that much of the brickwork is new, as are many of the tesserae in that magnificent mosaic in the apse.
“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”.
Normally, we would next look at the basilica of San Lorenzo. It’s even closer to our apartment in Milan, a mere five minutes’ walk away, and we go by it very often on our way down to Milan’s canals. In fact, we go by it so often that I wrote a whole post about it a few years back, so I will refer readers back to that post.
Logically, the next basilica to consider is the basilica of Sant’Eustorgio. I say logically because there is now a park, il parco delle Basiliche (or, to give it its new name, parco Giovanni Paolo II), which runs between San Lorenzo and Sant’Eustorgio (a park whose creation was much helped by the bombing during World War II; the houses standing on what is now the park were so badly damaged that it was decided to simply tear them all down and create a park in their place). When you enter the park at its northern end, you have this wonderful sight of the venerable pile of San Lorenzo behind you. But very, very little of what we see comes from the original Roman-era basilica, and even from the Romanesque version.
Then the walk southwards through the park brings you to Sant’Eustorgio, which stands at the southern end of the park. There’s no striking view of the church from the park itself, so it’s best to make one’s way round to the front, where one is confronted with this view.
The first thing one notices are the accretions on the church’s side. Unfortunately, the church has suffered badly from the running dog of Showing Off: chapels have been added to the side of the original Romanesque church, paid for by rich Milanese families who wanted to add lustre to their family name. They may be quite pretty in and of themselves; indeed, there is a very lovely one at the back of the church which has been the subject of a previous post of mine. But they have destroyed the original harmony of the church.
The second thing to notice is the façade. It looks quite original, but actually it is the result of a restoration carried out in the mid-1860s. The restoration was certainly done in the spirit of what we know Romanesque façades looked like in northern Italy from the few original examples still with us, but it’s unknown what the original façade of Sant’Eustorgio actually looked like. When all is said and done, though, it was probably better to carry out this restoration than not – this is what the façade looked like prior to the restoration.
It was the subject of a sensitive restoration in the late 19th Century, where the restorers simply stripped away the Baroque and Neoclassical accretions and tried to bring the structure back as closely as possible to its Romanesque forms. Of course, the Romanesque builders would never have left the church as naked as it is now, they would have covered everything with frescoes. But those are pretty much all gone. As readers can see in the photo above (especially visible on the columns), the restoration brought to light a few shards of the original frescoes. But of the original mosaics which must have graced the Roman-era basilica, nada, all gone.
“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”.
There is one curious artefact in the basilica, and it is this:
“This” is claimed to be the sarcophagus of the Three Wise Men (“We three kings of Orient”, as the well-loved Christmas carol goes). It is fundamental to the basilica’s foundational story. It is said that Eustorgius went to Constantinople when the Milanese chose him to be their bishop, to obtain the approval of the Emperor. Not only did the Emperor approve the choice, but he also gave Eustorgius this enormous sarcophagus which contained the relics of the Three Wise Men, to take back to Milan. Eustorgius’s original idea was to place the relics in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. But the poor oxen which were pulling the cart on which this humongously heavy sarcophagus had been placed “inexplicably” came to a stop where the basilica is now and refused to go any further. Given the weight of the sarcophagus, I think the oxen’s refusal to move another hoof is perfectly explicable, but Eustorgius took this to be a divine sign that a new basilica should be built on this spot to house the relics. Thus was the original Roman-era basilica built.
If I tell this little story, it is because in the succeeding centuries those relics made the basilica famous, attracting flocks of pilgrims (and their money, the cynical me thinks to himself). Which allows me to highlight one of the side-effects of the passage of the horsemen of War and Conquest: looting. In this case, the looting took place during the burning to the ground of Milan by Frederick Barbarossa. One of Barbarossa’s principal advisors during this campaign was Rainald von Dassel, who also happened to be the Archbishop of Cologne. He carried the relics off as war booty to grace his cathedral in Cologne, where they were brought in with much pomp and subsequently housed in this magnificent reliquary (made by Nicolas de Verdun, who also made a magnificent altarpiece housed in the Abbey church of Klosterneuberg near Vienna, which I’ve written about in an earlier post).
For centuries, the religious leaders of Sant’Eustorgio pleaded to have their relics back, but successive archbishops of Cologne turned a deaf ear. It was only in 1903, after a cardinal brokered a deal, that a small portion of the relics were given back.
I shall quickly pass through the fate of the remaining four basilicas.
For the basilica of San Simpliciano, I refer readers to a post I’ve already written about it. Suffice to say that it went through the same treatment as Sant’Eustorgio: accretions of chapels in a completely different style, a restyling of the whole church in baroque and neoclassical style, and then a restoration – this time in the 20th Century – trying to bring it back to its essential Romanesque simplicity. I throw in a photo of the exterior and interior.
The best thing in this church is the painting in the apse; you can just see it in the photo. Any readers who are interested in that painting should go to my post on San Simpliciano, where I tell its story.
It was a visit to the basilica of San Nazaro in Brolo that started me on this post. Its Romanesque version endured the same fate as Sant’Eustorgio and San Simpliciano: remodelling and remodelling and remodelling of the interior with each successive Change in Taste (that running dog really ran wild here), followed by a stripping back during the late 20th Century to the original simple lines. But in addition, the running dog of Showing Off really sunk its teeth into the church’s structure. During the Renaissance, a family from Milan’s elites decided to attach their mausoleum to the church. And they didn’t just attach it to the side of the church, like a chapel. They attached it to the façade! So the poor church has permanently lost its façade, its place being taken by a square building housing the tombs of this elite family. To enter the church, one has to pass through the mausoleum.
It’s all very well to say that the Mausoleum was designed and built by Bramantino, it’s still a terrible desecration of the church!
As for the basilica of Santo Calimero, it is a poster child to bad restoration. Like the others, its Romanesque version went through various remodellings as tastes changed. It was then “restored” in the late 19th Century into someone’s idea of Romanesque, which is more pre-Raphaelite than anything else. In great distress, I throw in a photo of the mosaic that was laid down in the apse.
Which leaves the basilica San Vittore al Corpo. Well, there it wasn’t a question of remodelling. When the church, in a rather pitiful state it has to be said, was handed over to the Olivetans in 1507, they decided to simply tear down the whole building and rebuild it in the “modern” style. They also completely turned it around, with the choir where the entry used to be and the entry where the choir used to be. So it’s difficult to say that anything of the original church has remained. It is therefore with great sadness that I insert a photo of the church’s hideous façade and of its equally hideous interior.
“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”. My wife is indeed right (as always). We cannot freeze things as they used to be, much as I sometimes would like to. We just have to be grateful that some of the wonderful things our ancestors created have come down to us in not too bad a shape and can only fervently hope that they will still be there for our descendants to admire in 2,000 years’ time.
It rained the day we visited Petra. Not a huge amount, just a sprinkle. But it was enough to keep the skies covered and the temperatures moderate. This was the one time in my life that I’ve been pleased to have rain when I visited somewhere. It was the last days of May, and my wife and I had been worried that we would be visiting the site under a burning sun.
We entered the site through the Siq, that long, long gash in the mountains.
my photo
We followed its meanderings, hopping out of the way of the electric vehicles ferrying tourists back and forth, all the while craning our necks backwards to look at the walls of rock soaring above us.
my wife’s photo
And so we came to the end of the Siq and found ourselves in front of the Khazneh, the Treasury, the building that “is” Petra. It was a gradual unfolding, as we exited from the narrowness of the Siq.
My wife’s photoMy wife’s photoMy wife’s photo
It wasn’t actually a treasury. That’s what the local Bedouins believed. They thought there was treasure hidden in that urn on the very top of the rotunda, as witnessed by the pockmarks on it caused by Bedouins firing at it to try to break it open – a waste of time and bullets since the urn is solid sandstone. In reality, it was a mausoleum for the Nabatean king Aretas IV Philopatris (“friend of his people”, which probably means he wasn’t their friend at all). We have – possibly – a likeness of this friend of the people on one of his coins.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the New Testament will be interested to know that Aretas’s daughter married Herod Antipas, and it was the latter’s decision to divorce her and marry his stepbrother’s wife Herodias that eventually led to the beheading of John the Baptist. Here’s Caravaggio’s take on this execution.
I actually first came across the Treasury in the Tintin album “Coke en Stock”. For reasons which are too convoluted to explain, Tintin, with Captain Haddock in tow, is crossing the fictional Middle Eastern country of Khemed on horseback to get to the Red Sea. On the way, they pass through a narrow gorge. The relevant page from the album recounts the rest of the incident.
my photomy photo
As I say, the story is highly convoluted, and I invite curious readers to go back to the original album to understand who is who and what is going on. Let’s just focus on the Treasury (although I have to say, I’ve always asked myself what that lady was saying to Captain Haddock).
When I read the album, I had no idea that this was the Treasury in Petra. Neither it nor Petra itself is mentioned by name. Captain Haddock says it is a Roman temple, and that is all we are told. It was only years later, when I happened to see a guidebook on Petra, that I realised where Hergé had got his inspiration. Here is one of the many, many guidebooks on Petra with the Treasury on its cover.
The official photos of the plaza in front of the Treasury normally have few if any people. But as my wife’s photo above shows, when we there it was like a souk, although a very modern one. Large crowds of tourists were milling around, taking photos, taking selfies, reading guide books, listening to guides they had rented, or chattering among themselves, before they moved on to the next ruin. In the middle of all this, and rather getting in the way, camels and donkeys waited patiently, with the local Bedouins hawking a ride on them down to the rest of the ruins. Other Bedouins called out from the cliffs above, inviting tourists to climb up and have a drink. Others still manned the stalls lining the side of the canyon which brought us all to the rest of Petra, selling tourist tat.
I noticed that getting one’s eyes lined with kohl was a popular offering when we were there, with all the Bedouins – men and women – heavily eyelined in kohl to advertise the service.
We ignored the tourist tat and the calls to climb onto a camel, or donkey, or horse, and walked down the Street of Facades, the canyon leading away from the Treasury with buildings cut into the canyon walls.
We finally made it to the path leading to the Monastery and then slowly made our way up the long, long – 850-steps-long – climb, part of a steady stream of tourists struggling upwards in panting silence (thank God for the cloud cover!).
My photo
As we climbed we had to squeeze our way through yet more tourist stalls jammed onto the narrow path, with their Bedouin owners loudly advertising their wares.
We finally emerged onto the plaza abutting the Monastery.
It was of course never a monastery, although quite what it was is not clear. Experts’ best guess is that it was dedicated to the cult of the deified King Obodas I. Once again, we can possibly get an idea of what he looked like through his coinage.
Obodas’s people deified him because he was a Mighty Kicker of Ass. He gave the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus, who ruled over Judea, a severe drubbing near the Sea of Galilee, from which Alexander barely managed to escape alive (I’ve mentioned Alexander before; he was the High Priest who was pelted by the faithful with citrons). Then a few years later, after the Seleucid king, Antiochus XII Dionysus, had invaded the Nabatean kingdom, Obodas attacked his army. Antiochus was killed and the remains of his army perished miserably in the desert.
After a well-deserved rest and drink, we joined the stream of tourists going back down, now skipping along and chattering as they went. Once back down to the Colonnaded Street, we headed up onto the hillside to the north, to have a view down on the site.
My photo
Looking at all these dusty ruins, it’s difficult to understand what Petra looked like when it was a living, thriving city, so I have resorted to showing a reconstruction.
At the very top of the photo, in the middle, one can just make out the Treasury. Coming down the canyon from the Treasury, we have the royal tombs to the right and the theatre to the left. We are looking down at the red roofs of the Colonnaded Street, with the colonnades finishing at the Temenos Gate. The path to the Monastery, which is not visible here, is off at the bottom right of the photo.
The water in the stream running along the Colonnaded Street is ridiculously blue, like a swimming pool. I wonder how much water there even was in that stream bed. Water was a precious resource in Petra, and its citizens had created a complex network of dams, reservoirs, cisterns, and basins, the whole connected by some 200 km of channels and pipes, to collect, store, and distribute the little amount of rain which fell in the environs.
In its heyday, this network was able to support a population of some 20-30,000 people, about the same size as the small town of Wadi Musa situated on the edge of Petra, where we stayed the night. Not large by today’s standards, but populations were much, much smaller back then.
There was also an important transient population – of both man and beast – to supply water to, for Petra’s importance – and wealth – came from it being at the crossroads of important trade routes.
From Yemen in the south came frankincense and myrrh, those precious incenses so desired for religious ceremonies throughout the Middle East and beyond. It’s no coincidence that in his Gospel, Matthew has the Three Wise Men bringing frankincense and myrrh, along with gold, as presents fit for Christ the King.
The goods moved west to Gaza, or north to Damascus and then west to the coast of what is now Lebanon, from whence they were shipped across the Mediterranean. The Nabateans welcomed all these traders who crossed their kingdom and offered them protection, shelter, and water – for a price. And that price paid for all the buildings and infrastructure in Petra.
Nearly all gone now. The earthquake of 363 CE did massive damage, changes in trade routes did the rest. Once sailors understood how to sail the monsoons in the Arabian Sea, ships from India could sail up the Red Sea and transit through Alexandria, cutting out the Nabateans, while Palmyra to the north drew away much of the rest of the east-west trade. By the time of the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634 CE, Petra had been forgotten. Sic transit gloria mundi.
We slowly made our way back to the Siq and left the site. Tomorrow, we were on our way to Amman, where I was going to give a training course on green industry policies.
In our wanderings across the Austrian landscape, my wife and I have from time to time come across villages (or, in the case of Vienna, districts) called Sankt Veit. Here’s one such village in the region of Salzburg.
In the past, there has been no more than a flicker in my subconscious as some neurones somewhere registered the name. But the last time it happened, a neurone or two formulated the question, “who was this Sankt Veit?”, a question which led me to my usual desultory surfing of the web. The conclusion has been this post, which can be added to my various past posts on obscure saints whose names pepper the Austrian landscape and end up being our companions on our hikes across it.
Sankt Veit was originally Saint Vitus, a martyr from the late 3rd Century-early 4th Century. His story – or rather his hagiography – is quickly told. He was born in the far west of Sicily, in the town of Mazara del Vallo (and so, of course, in his italianised form San Vito, he is the town’s patron saint). I’ve never been there, but judging from photos on the web it has a nice central piazza.
In any event, Vitus’s mother died when he was a child. The times being what they were, his father wasn’t going to bring him up. Instead, he delegated this task to a nanny, Crescenzia, and a teacher, Modestus. Unbeknownst to him, the pair were Christians and converted Vitus when he was 12. Even though just a young lad, Vitus was of course very holy and began performing miracles. One such miracle took place in a locality near Catania on the eastern side of the island. Quite what he was doing there when he lived in the far west of the island isn’t explained. In any event, he met some shepherds who were in a frenzy because some dogs had torn a child to pieces. Vitus called the dogs over, had them hand over the remains of the child, and then brought the child back to life. This story explains why it’s common for him to be depicted with dogs. We see him here, for instance, on a capital in the church which was built on the site where Vitus met the shepherds, bringing those wild dogs to heel.
I presume being a Christian was a big no-no at the time, because when Vitus’s father found out, he had the three of them arrested and brought before the local judge, who ordered Vitus to recant. When Vitus refused, the judge invited his father to punish him severely, which he was glad to do, beating him to within an inch of his life. Still Vitus refused to recant. So his father imprisoned all three of them. At this point, an angel intervened and got them out of jail. Whereupon they fled, taking a ship to the ancient Roman province of Lucania, which more or less corresponds to today’s Italian region of Basilicata. There, all three continued their work of proselytism, with Vitus continuing to cure people.
Vitus’s fame as a healer grew to the point where the Emperor Diocletian up in Rome heard about him. We have here a bust of Diocletian. I must say, he looks rather grim, which fits nicely with the rest of the story.
It so happened that Diocletian’s son was possessed by a demon. Diocletian had Vitus and his two companions brought to Rome, where he implored Vitus to cure his son. This Vitus did, but the only reward he got was a demand from Diocletian that the three of them give up their faith (the ingratitude of it! but what could you expect from a pagan?). Vitus of course refused, so then started all those grisly tortures which hagiographers love to pile onto martyrs: see the tortures inflicted on Saint Blaise, Saint Florian, and Saint Pancras. First, Diocletian had Vitus and his two companions thrown into cauldrons of boiling pitch, which gave painters and sculptors of later centuries a very satisfying subject to work on.
But they remained unharmed! So then Diocletian had them thrown to the lions. But these ferocious beasts suddenly became meek and mild, licking Vitus’s feet!
But even though their bodies were close to breaking they survived! And so angels carried them off back to Lucania, where they died.
The End.
I won’t bother readers with a secondary complicated story of a princess who some four centuries after Vitus’s death was involved in carrying his remains from Lucania to San Polignano a Mare, some 30 km south of Bari, on the other side of Italy. I rather suspect that the story was a complete fabrication which nevertheless allowed the monks of a monastery in San Polignano to claim that they had the saint’s relics. This encouraged a vigorous relics-based tourism from which the monastery no doubt profited. The monastery has gone through many rebuilds in the intervening centuries, but it is still a rather arresting building, at least from a distance.
Whatever the truth is about the historical Vitus, assuming he even existed, the fact is that his veneration spread rapidly in Sicily and southern Italy. And then, once the great craze for relics started in the 3rd Century or so, his relics started circulating in Europe. In the 490s, Pope Gelasius I mentions a reliquary of Saint Vitus in the chapel of a deaconry dedicated to him in Rome. In 756, Fulrad, one of the great Abbots of the Abbey of Saint-Denis in what is now the outskirts of Paris, brought relics of St. Vitus to the Basilica there. This is what the abbey church looks like now, after its gothic makeover in the 12th Century.
About a century later, in 836, these relics were presented to Abbot Warin of Corvey on the river Weser. Founded in 822, this was the first Benedictine monastery in Saxony. It later became a princely Imperial Abbey in the political crazy quilt that was the Holy Roman Empire. The abbey has survived the vicissitudes of time, and is an imposing set of buildings. And Saint Vitus is still the patron saint of the abbey today.
The abbey of Corvey played a very important role in the Christianisation of eastern and northern Germany. Monks fanned out from the mother house, and to help along in their missionary work they took with them parts of the relics of Saint Vitus, thus also spreading the veneration of the saint throughout the German lands.
The same proselytising impetus brought Saint Vitus to the Slav lands, where he became extremely popular. It’s been theorised that this is because the German Sankt Veit was translated as Sveti Vid, which sounded very similar to Svetovid, the name of the Slav god of abundance and war.
Sveti Vid certainly became very popular in Prague after king Henry I of Germany gifted to Wenceslaus, Duke of Bohemia, the bones of one of Saint Vitus’s hands in 925. As a result, he became patron saint of Prague’s cathedral. To this hand was added Vitus’s head in 1355, when Charles, King of Bohemia (the Dukes had traded up to Kings in 1212) became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. He filched it from a church in Pavia – the town “belonged” to the Holy Roman Emperors at that time (in turn, the head had been brought to Pavia in 755 by the Longobard King Astulfus, God knows where from; I’m sure many PhDs have been written about the European trade in relics). This same Charles IV, by the way, was the man behind Prague cathedral’s Gothic makeover, which is more or less the version of the cathedral that we see today.
Relics don’t carry the same weight these days – at least, they don’t with me – but some of the reliquaries that were made to house relics are wonderful works of gold and silversmithing. Here’s one such reliquary holding a relic of Saint Vitus from the Treasury of the Cathedral. The artist even gave the young man a dimple in his chin!
Quite why Saint Vitus was plucked out from among all the martyrs of the early church and became so popular is not clear to me. Nevertheless, something in the stories and legends that accreted to his person got him connected to diseases where convulsive, uncoordinated movements were part of the symptoms. Thus, he became the go-to saint when you had epilepsy, chorea, and ergotism, all illnesses giving rise to uncoordinated movements. Chorea especially gives rise to rapid, jerky movements in the face, hands and feet, and so it was often called Saint Vitus’s dance. He was also your saint when you had been bitten by rabid or venomous animals, a fate which can also lead to convulsions. Somewhat more randomly, it seems to me, his intercession was also invoked in cases of bedwetting.
His connection to cases of uncoordinated, jerky movements also led him to be invoked in the strange European phenomenon of dancing mania. Although the first episodes were recorded in the 8th century and occurred intermittently in the succeeding centuries, there was an enormous increase in incidences between the 14th and 17th centuries, after which it disappeared abruptly. I’m not sure dancing mania is really such a good term. Dancing requires music, while here people were just hopping and writhing around. The phenomenon involved groups of people, sometimes numbering in the thousands, who went on “dancing” sometimes for days on end, until they collapsed from exhaustion or injuries. The condition was often considered a curse sent by Saint Vitus, and was therefore also, somewhat confusingly, called St. Vitus’s Dance. Victims of dancing mania often made their way to places dedicated to the saint, who was prayed to in an effort to end the “dancing”. Here, we have a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of women overtaken by dancing mania being taken to a church.
Not surprisingly, outbreaks often started around the time of the feast of Saint Vitus, on 15th June.
Even today, there is no consensus about what was going on here. It is speculated to have been a mass psychogenic illness, also known as epidemic hysteria, in which physical symptoms with no known physical cause affect a group of people, as a form of social influence. But what started off these bouts of epidemic hysteria? To my mind, the most reasonable suggestion that has been made is that people started “dancing” when their stress levels, induced by chronic poverty and political instability, got too high – although why, then, did the phenomenon abruptly disappear in the 17th Century? People were just as stressed in the succeeding centuries. Mystery …
Of course, people at the time had no idea how to stop an outbreak of dancing mania once it caught hold – other than praying to Saint Vitus. One possible remedy that was tried was music – in the drawing above, one can see a couple of men playing bagpipes. It was theorised that music would get people to channel their chaotic flailing around into a regular rhythm and so bring them down from their hysterical high. The type of music was important; as one writer put it, “lively, shrill tunes, played on trumpets and fifes, excited the dancers; soft, calm harmonies, graduated from fast to slow, high to low, prove efficacious for the cure” (one unintended side-effect of playing music, though, was that sometimes onlookers would now join in, swelling the numbers dancing). It’s not really relevant, but I thought this would be a good place to throw in a wonderful painting (by Pieter Bruegel the Elder again) of peasants dancing.
In the south of Italy, dancing mania was known as tarantism (because it was believed to be caused by the bite of a poisonous spider, the tarantula – confusingly, not a member of the well-known family of tarantulas). The music used there to tame the dancers was thus called the tarantella, which in the intervening centuries has become a well-known musical export from Italy. Many twee paintings of people dancing the tarantella have been produced, normally in a Neapolitan context, like this one.
But back to Saint Vitus after this interesting digression into phenomena of mass hysteria!
In the 14th Century, largely because of the shocks caused by the Black Death, Germans in the Rhineland created a collection of fourteen saints called the Nothelfer, or Helpers in times of need; their formal name in English is the Holy Helpers. Basically, these fourteen saints were tasked with helping people with all the ills they suffered from. We’ve already seen what Saint Vitus was meant to help you with. Another of the Holy Helpers which I’ve dealt with in a previous post, Saint Blaise, was to help with any illnesses of the throat. Staying with the head, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was charged with illnesses of the tongue, Saint Ciriac of Rome with illnesses of the eye, Saint Acacius with migraines, Saint Denis with normal headaches, Saint Barbara with fevers, and Saint Giles with mental illnesses (and with nightmares, I suppose by extension of his powers over mental illnesses). Moving to other parts of the body, Saint Elmo was invoked in cases of stomach and intestinal illnesses and Saint George when it came to diseases of the skin. Saint Margaret of Antioch was prayed to when backaches were the problem and when childbirth was looming (this was by extension, I suppose, since many pregnant women suffer from backaches). Meanwhile, Saint Pantaleon was the go-to saint when cancers and consumptive diseases were the problem.
But requests for help from our fourteen Holy Helpers didn’t stop there. They were also invoked to prevent risks to life and limb caused by events in the outside world. You prayed to Saint Barbara to avoid a sudden and violent death at work. When travel was necessary, you prayed to Saint Christopher to avoid the many dangers of travelling. I suppose by extension you also prayed to him to avoid the plague – a sensible thing; we all saw during Covid how plagues spread through travel. For good measure, terror of the plague being great, you also prayed to Saint Giles to avoid the plague. Storms and lightning must have been a common problem because you also prayed to Saint Christopher to avoid the consequences of storms (a good extension of his powers since storms are a common enough danger when travelling), to Saint Vitus to avoid both storms and lightning (a sensible combination) and to Saint Barbara to avoid lightning. Fire, too, must have been an ever-present threat when houses were made primarily of wood, because two of the saints looked after the risk of fire for you: Saint Barbara (by extension, no doubt, of her protective powers against lightning) and Saint Eustace. Interestingly enough, Saint Eustace was also the saint to go to for protection from family discord – this must have been quite a common problem if it warranted a Holy Helper. And of course, since this was a time when the great majority of people were peasants, and since much of their wealth was tied up in livestock and domestic animals, no less than five of the Holy Helpers could be invoked to protect these animals: Saint Blaise, Saint Elmo, Saint George, Saint Pantaleon, as well as our friend Saint Vitus. In fact, in the small Italian town of San Gregorio Magno in the province of Salerno, there is still an annual festival when people come with their animals and go round the local church of St. Vitus three times, followed – given the saint’s connection to dogs – by dog owners with their dogs. We have here goats doing the rounds.
But the help requested from the Holy Helpers didn’t end there. People were profoundly Christian and specifically believed in the afterlife, where depending on how good or bad you had been in this life you would either go to heaven or to hell. Here is a mosaic from the church on the island of Torcello in the Venice Lagoon of the Last Judgement, where parishioners could see just what would happen to them if they were judged to be bad.
And it was for all eternity! So it was incredibly important to end up on the right side of Divine Judgement. The Holy Helpers were duly invoked to help here. You prayed to Saints Barbara and Catherine of Alexandria to avoid a sudden death (i.e, one where you had not confessed your sins and received extreme unction). You prayed to Saint Giles to make a good confession: generally a desirable thing, but especially desirable just before you died. You prayed to Saint Ciriac of Rome to avoid temptation on your death-bed, which would indeed be a very ill-judged moment to give in to temptation since you might not have time to confess (but who on their death-bed would have the energy to be tempted, I ask myself?). You also prayed to Saint Ciriac as well as to Saint Denis to avoid demonic possession. I suspect in Saint Ciriac’s case this was as an extension of his powers to protect you from diseases of the eye (the eye could be an entry point for the devil, the Evil Eye) while in Saint Denis’s case, I see it as an extension of his powers to prevent headaches (I mean, when I’ve had bad headaches it’s often felt as if some small monster was pounding on the insides of my head). Saint Barbara of Antioch, meanwhile, was invoked for escape from the clutches of devils in general. Finally, you prayed to Saint Eustace to prevent you ending up in the eternal fires of Hell, a very natural extension, it seems to me, of his powers to protect people from fires in the terrestrial realm.
So there you have, in a nutshell, the fears that wracked the great majority of Europeans in the 14th and later centuries. The idea of a bevvy of saints who could help you with all the trials and tribulations of life proved to be so popular that it spread rapidly from its point of origin in the Rhineland to the rest of Europe, with local additions and subtractions from the basic list. Here is a collection of statuettes of the fourteen Holy Helpers from a chapel in Baden-Württemberg, where centuries ago you could have gone and asked the relevant saint, or saints, for help with your problems.
However, all I can say is, thank God for modern medicine, and thank God for governments which enact (and hopefully enforce) laws to protect us, and thank God for insurance companies which can cushion us from the risks of everyday life – as long as we read the fine print. As for fears of Hell, all I can say is, thank God Europe is dechristianising – although the fear of death is still there, in a different form, but still there.
Let me end this post with some examples of well-known people who have been named after Saint Vitus.
For Vitus, I tried to find a well-known Roman who was called that but failed to find one. So I choose Vitus Bering.
Bering was a Dane but spent most of his working life in the Russian Imperial Navy. His explorations in the northern Pacific Ocean gave us the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, and Bering Island (on which he died and was buried).
For Vito, I choose the very famous fictional character Vito Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando in the film The Godfather.
I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Mario Puzo, who wrote the book on which the film is based, chose the name Vito for his character. As readers can imagine, it is a popular name in Sicily since Saint Vitus hailed from there (assuming, of course, that he ever really existed).
For Veit, I had difficulties finding someone who was really, really famous. So I choose Veit Bach, for the simple reason that he founded the Bach family, one of the most important musical families in history. There is no portrait of him, so I choose instead a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, who was his great-great grandson.
I also choose Veit Bach because he was a victim of Europe’s religious wars. He was a Protestant who lived in the Kingdom of Hungary, then ruled by the staunchly Catholic Hapsburgs. Religious persecution drove him to relocate his family to the Protestant state of Thuringia. He will contrast neatly with another personage I will mention in a second.
For Vid, I had even more difficulties finding someone who is even modestly famous. For lack of anything better, I choose Petar Vid Gvozdanović, a Croatian who was born at a time when Croatia was part of the Hapsburg Empire.
He joined the army, where his name was Germanified to Peter Vitus Quosdanovich, and he fought in the Seven Years’ War, then the War of the Bavarian Succession, then the Austro-Turkish war, rising steadily through the ranks. By the time the wars with the French revolutionaries started, he was a major-general and had been made a baron. After successfully fighting the French on their northern frontiers, he was made Field Marshall Lieutenant and sent to Italy to fight Napoleon. Alas! Napoleon was his nemesis, beating him repeatedly and leaving his reputation in tatters. After his final defeat at the battle of Rivoli, he was “retired”; he does look a little mournful in his photo.
The name game doesn’t end there! At some point during the invasions of Italy by the Germanic Longobards, the Latin name Vitus got inextricably mixed up with the Longobard name Wito or Wido and was transmuted into the name Guido. The French turned that into Guy, today pronounced very much like the Indian clarified butter ghee. The Normans brought the name with them when they invaded England, but its pronunciation over the centuries changed to the same as “buy” or “hi!” or “lie”. So now we have three more variants!
For Guido, I choose Guido Reni, a baroque painter from Italy. Here is a self portrait.
He is a Famous Author, and as a result I have never read any of his stuff. If any of my readers are curious to read him, Wikipedia informs me that his first published story, “Boule de Suif”, or “The Dumpling”, is often considered his most famous work. I welcome anyone who has read it to tell me what it’s like. Who knows, one day, at the next pandemic-induced lockdown, I might get around to read it.
For the English Guy, I choose Guy Fawkes. He, like Veit Bach, was a victim of Europe’s religious wars, although his situation was the mirror image of Veit Bach’s: he was a Catholic in a Protestant kingdom. He was also definitely more militant than Bach was in his response. He was one of the main conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, where the plan was to blow up King James I and the House of Lords. His role was to light the fuse which would set off the barrels of gunpowder which the conspirators had stashed away under the House of Lords. He was caught red-handed at the last minute, tortured, and hanged, drawn, and quartered. He is the third to the right in this contemporary engraving of eight of the thirteen conspirators (he was also known as Guido, because he had fought many years on the continent in Spanish armies).
Ever since, on 5th November, the day Guy Fawkes was caught, big bonfires are burned all over the UK on which are perched effigies, originally of the Pope but later of Guy Fawkes, and nowadays of just about any public figure whom the bonfire-makers dislike (in case readers don’t recognise her, it’s Margaret Thatcher in the photo).
So there we have it. I’ve taken my readers through quite a wander of things related to Vitus – sometimes rather remotely. And now my wife and I can wander over the Austrian landscape in our hikes, knowing that the next time we come across a village called Sankt Veit or a church dedicated to Sankt Veit we’ll be able to say “Ah yes! Remember that post?”
POSTSCRIPT
A week or so after writing this post, my wife and I went down to the Dorotheum auction house for tea and a nose around to see what was new. In a small section they have devoted to religious art, I came across this painting on glass.
My photo
It was a painting of the fourteen Holy Helpers plus God the Father with the Holy Ghost, Mary with the Baby Jesus, and Jesus with his cross. I can’t figure out who is who except in a few cases. The young man at the very bottom holding a palm must be St. Vitus; he’s always depicted as a boy. The bishop holding a candle must be St. Blaise (see my post about him to understand the meaning of the candle). The fellow with a baby on his shoulder must be St. Christopher. After that, I’m a bit lost. I leave it to my readers to figure out the rest.
The painting was being sold with a companion piece depicting the Last Judgement.
My photo
Somewhat more succinct than the mosaic in Torcello, it nevertheless passes on the vital message: “if you’re bad, you burn”.
I had to have them! So I forked out the €166 being requested, and they now hang proudly on our wall, on either side of another painting on glass I bought several years ago of God the Father blessing all and sundry.
I don’t understand it, my wife and I have not yet received our invitation to attend King Charles III’s coronation in Westminster Abbey! It’s taking place very soon, on 6 May!
Source
This is a huge problem, because I won’t get a chance to surreptitiously inspect the Cosmatesque pavement laid in front of the Abbey’s High Altar while the assembled Archbishops drone their way through the coronation liturgy.
The fact is, the pavement is covered up almost all the time, to protect it. It’s only during a coronation or other exceptional events that it is uncovered. In fact, the last time it was uncovered was when William and Kate were married in the Abbey back in 2011 (another event to which my wife and I were not invited; have they mislaid our address, I wonder?)
Why my anxiety to inspect the pavement? Well, the Abbey’s Cosmatesque pavement is quite remarkable, simply because it really shouldn’t be there. One finds this style of pavement primarily in and around Rome, where it was developed from the end of the 11th Century to the 13th Century by a number of families of artisans, the most well-known of which were the Cosmati, who have given their name to the style. As a rule, Cosmatesque pavements have white or light-coloured marbles for background, into which have been inlaid triangles, squares, parallelograms, and circles of darker stones. These are surrounded by ribbons of mosaic composed of coloured and gold-glass tesseræ. The result are lovely geometrical designs of swirling colours over the floor. Here are some of the best examples that have come down to us.
The artisans laying down these pavements recycled much of the stones they used from the copious ancient Roman ruins that still littered Rome and its environs; the circles in particular were sliced off columns that couldn’t be used as columns any more. The artisans would dig through old ruins, looking for marble to salvage (with one of their side businesses being selling off the statues which they came across during their digs). This painting by Canaletto is from many centuries later, and it just shows people visiting the ruins in Rome rather than digging into them, but it gives a nice impression of what it must have been like to live with all those ruins around one.
The sources I’ve read talk airily about examples of Cosmatesque work also existing north of the Alps, although the only example they ever cite is Westminster Abbey. I haven’t been able to find a single other example of Cosmatesque pavement outside of the Roman heartlands, not even in the north of Italy (if any readers know of examples outside Italy, please let me know). So the presence of a Cosmatesque pavement in Westminster Abbey is indeed pretty remarkable. How come there is this one isolated example north of the Alps?
The answer to that question lies in the history of Westminster Abbey. The Abbey has always had a special relationship with the English (and later, British) crown, ever since King Edward the Confessor in the 1040s established his royal palace by the banks of the river Thames west of the city of London and decided to re-endow and greatly enlarge a small Benedictine monastery already located there. This included building the first cathedral, the “west minster” (as opposed to the “east minster”, St. Paul’s cathedral, in the city of London). Here, we have a scene from the Bayeux tapestry, showing the funeral procession of Edward the Confessor, bringing him to his cathedral where he was buried.
Thereafter, the English kings patronised the abbey and its cathedral, with all the coronations of English (and then British) monarchs from 1066 onwards (bar two) taking place in the cathedral.
Presumably as a reflection of its special royal status, in the period we’re interested in, namely the second half of the 13th Century, the Abbot reported directly to the papacy and not to any local bishop as would normally have been the case. This meant that it was the Pope who approved the choice of abbot made by Westminster’s monks. Which explains why, in 1258, a certain Richard de Ware, whom the monks of Westminster had chosen as their new abbot, travelled down to Rome to obtain the necessary papal approval. It just so happened that the pope and his court were residing in the town of Agnani, some 60 km south-east of Rome, when Richard arrived (for a while, it was a popular place for Popes to spend their summers). So Richard made his way there. He of course visited the cathedral in Agnani, where he was captivated by its Cosmatesque pavement. I deliberately left this pavement out from the examples I gave above so that I could show it here in all its splendour and imagine Richard de Ware’s feelings when he set eyes on it. The first photo shows the pavement in the main church, the second the pavement in the crypt.
It seems that Richard lusted after this pavement: “I must have it in my abbey church!”, I can hear him cry (in Latin) to the assistants who travelled with him (ever since the beginning of time, Important People have had what the Italians call portaborse, or bag carriers, to accompany them wherever they go).
Richard was probably encouraged to have these lustful thoughts because Westminster Abbey was in the middle of a total makeover. In 1245, England’s king, Henry III, had launched a rebuilding programme of the cathedral, adopting the-then ultramodern Gothic style. I presume that when Richard got back from Agnani, he persuaded Henry that a Cosmatesque pavement in front of the high altar was de rigeur if the cathedral was to be fully at the architectural cutting edge. But it took another ten years for the pavement to be laid. Work on the cathedral’s makeover proceeded fitfully; Henry was always chronically short of funds, and he was constantly at war with his Barons (at one point, he was even their prisoner). But finally, in 1268, after Richard got a team of artisans headed by a certain Odoricus to come from Rome to do the work, the pavement in front of the high altar was finished.
If I’ve repeated the photo of Westminster Abbey’s pavement, it’s to allow readers to compare it better to the pavement in the cathedral of Agnani and the other Roman and Lazian examples which I gave earlier. One fundamental difference jumps out: in Westminster, the background stone – the stone in which the rest of the stones are inlaid – is dark while in the Roman and Lazian examples it is white. I have to say, personally I feel that the Abbey’s pavement suffers from this change in background colour. A white background allows the geometric patterns and swirls to stand out much more effectively. The only reason I’ve found in my readings for this change of colour is that the white Carrara marble used in Italy suffers in damp climates – and heaven knows the UK is damp! But maybe English tastes were anyway for dark stone. Certainly the stone used – Purbeck marble, which comes from a quarry near Bournemouth in Dorset – was popular in English church architecture; it’s to be found in virtually all of the cathedrals in the south of England. Here, we have quarriers of Purbeck marble from 150 or so years ago.
Considering now the design of the pavement, I can assure readers that there is a meaning to the way it was laid out. Cutting through all the symbolic froth, it evokes a sacred centre of the world, what the Ancient Greeks called the omphalion, the navel of the world, which in turn is at the centre of the universe. And it is on that omphalion in the centre of Westminster Abbey’s pavement that the clergy will place coronation chair on which Charles will sit to be crowned, as they have for all the English and British monarchs (bar two, as I said earlier) who have come before him. I show here a photo of the previous coronation, of Queen Elizabeth II – as readers will note, the pavement was covered up that time.
There’s more heavy symbolism to the pavement’s design, alluded to by the Latin inscription which ran around it but of which very little is left today. Luckily, several hundred years ago, someone transcribed it while it was still legible. It said (translated from the original Latin):
In the year of Christ one thousand two hundred and twelve plus sixty minus four, the third King Henry, the city [of London, presumably], Odoricus [the head of the crew which laid the pavement] and the abbot [Richard de Ware] put these porphyry stones together. If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile; a hedge [lives for] three years, add dogs and horses and men, stags and ravens, eagles, enormous whales, the world: each one following triples the years of the one before.
According to scholars who have spent many hours parsing this gobbledygook, it shows that the pavement was meant to symbolise not only the world and the universe, but also to predict the number of years to its end. Very reminiscent of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”!
The stones set into the dark Purbeck marble tell us another story, a story of trade, one of the many which I have recounted in these posts. Looking at the Westminster pavement, we can trace a story of a trade in stones across the Roman Empire, the breakdown of that trade as the Roman Empire collapsed, and – as Europe developed economically – its replacement by a European trade in stones. To appreciate these trade flows, readers have to know that the pavement we see today in the Abbey is not exactly the original. Three limited restorations have been carried out over the ages – one in the mid-17th Century, one at the turn of the 18th Century, and a final one in the mid-19th Century – where some of the original stones, worn or lost, were replaced by other stones.
In the original parts of the pavement, purple and green porphyry are the most abundant inlaid stones. Purple porphyry was the “imperial” stone in the Roman and Byzantine Empires (purple being the imperial colour), and it could only be used in connection with the Emperors and their closest family.
That’s why, for instance, the sculpture of the four Tetrarchs (who between them reigned over the Roman Empire in the late 290s, early 300s AD), which today is set into the corner of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, is made with porphyry.
This stone is found in only one set of quarries, located in Egypt’s harsh Eastern Desert. The Romans, and the Byzantines after them, mined it there and transported it all over the Empire. This is a photo of the mountain that the Romans called Mons Porphyris, with remains of the Roman mining town in the foreground.
When the Byzantines lost control of Egypt to the Arabs in the 7th Century, they lost access to porphyry. Thereafter, they were forced to recycle the porphyry already scattered around the Empire.
The green porphyry, on the other hand, originally came from quarries in the Greek Peloponnese.
This stone too was traded all over the Empire, a trade that sputtered to a halt after the 5th Century AD as the Empire began to fall apart. The location of the quarries was forgotten and they were only recently rediscovered.
Surprisingly, given the highly symbolic nature of the pavement, porphyry was not used in the central roundel, where the monarchs are crowned. Instead, an alabaster stone was used.
The precise provenance of this alabaster (also used in several other places in the pavement) is not known, but in all probability it was mined somewhere in what is now Turkey but what was in Roman times called Asia Minor.
Odoricus and his crew used a few other stones in minor quantities: africano, a red and black marble breccia, which was also quarried in Asia Minor near what is today Izmir; breccia corallina, a breccia of white marble in a coral-pink matrix, also quarried in Asia Minor, but in what used to be the ancient kingdom of Bythinia; and gabbro, another stone that was quarried in Egypt’s Eastern Desert.
By the time the Westminster pavement was laid down, the trade in these stones had been dead for some 800 years. So contemporary trade was not their source. Just as the stones in the Cosmatesque pavements in Rome were extracted from the Roman ruins scattered around the city, they could have come as spolia from England’s sparse Roman ruins. But Richard de Ware left us a message which suggests that Rome was the source. His grave (which lies on the north side of the pavement) once carried an inscription, which read (in Latin): “Abbot Richard de Ware, who rests here, now bears those stones which he himself bore hither from the City”, in this case the Eternal City, Rome. I can’t believe that Richard’s entourage personally carried the stones back from Rome, like bags of swag slung over their shoulders. I take the inscription to mean that when he got Odoricus and his crew to come from Rome, they brought with them the necessary stones, excavated from the Roman ruins in and around the city.
Interestingly enough, one stone which is common in Rome’s Cosmatesque pavements, but which for some reason Odoricus brought very little of, is giallo antico, a yellow limestone. Here is a nice example of a Cosmatesque use of this stone, in a roundel in the church of San Benedetto in Piscinula.
The few pieces of this stone in the Westminster pavement have been supplemented by an English stone, Tadcaster limestone from North Yorkshire.
Fast-forward 3½-4 Centuries, to when repairs needed to be carried out to the pavement, and the picture had changed. Stones were being traded once again across Europe. And so, to fill in pieces of missing purple porphyry, ammonitico rosso from the Alps near Verona was used, as was rouge royale, a red limestone from the area around Dinant in Belgium. Any missing green porphyry was substituted either by verde genova, which comes from the mountains lying between Piedmont and Liguria, or verde di Prato, which is mined on the Tuscan side of the Appenines. Where dark-coloured stones needed replacing, a couple of black/grey-black limestones from Belgium were used.
So many interesting things to ponder on! Medieval symbolism, international trade through the ages, political ties between England and Rome in the Middle Ages, and who knows what else! But I can’t do any of this pondering if my wife and I don’t get invited to Charles’s coronation! What can I do to unhook an invite? What favours owed to me can I call in? Let me check my list of contacts for Important Persons whom I can importune to help me get invites. Two measly invites is all I’m looking for!
STOP THE PRESSES! I have just learned that for a limited period just after the coronation, tours are being offered of Westminster Abbey which will include visiting the pavement (shoeless, of course). Unfortunately, all the tickets are already sold out. Who can I buy tickets from, no doubt at highly inflated prices?
If there’s one thing that will always depress me when I see them, it’s those tall industrial chimneys belching out white clouds of steam (sometimes tinged a faint orange by the oxides of nitrogen they can contain, depending on which way the sun is shining). Here’s a typical example of the genre, this one a frequent sight on our hikes upstream of Vienna – it belongs to a power plant.
It’s all that grey concrete that does it, often topped with garish red and white stripes to keep planes from flying into them. Just so ugly! And so damned tall that you can’t ignore them!! So in your face!!! They just drain any brightness and colour out of the surrounding landscape. I almost think that the older designs of brick chimneys were nicer on the eye. They were less high for one thing, and – at least in some models – took the form of long thin cones, which are considerably more elegant than mere cylinders. But that black smoke which they routinely belched out! Like in this British painting from about 1830.
The fact that someone actually painted all that black muck shows how our sensitivities have changed in the last fifty years or so. When the artist painted this, black smoke was a thing to be celebrated, it meant the economy was growing. Now, we think instead that the company’s top managers should be in jail for allowing it to happen.
But back to today’s industrial chimneys. Among all the gloom they have brought to my life, there have been two bright shafts of light over the years, caused by chimneys which I’ve actually enjoyed looking at. The first of these is a chimney in Vienna which belongs to a waste incinerator.
Wonderful piece of work! The design, both of the chimney as well as the rest of the facility, is due to an Austrian artist by the name of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. His normal output looks like this.
I’m sure readers can see the relation between this type of work and his chimney design.
The incinerator has been originally built in the late 1960s, but needed extensive repairs after a fire broke out in 1987. I was told that the mayor of Vienna brought Hundertwasser in to redesign the facades of the facility as well as the chimney, because the local community was up in arms about the city fathers’ plan to continue having a working incinerator in their neighbourhood. Hundertwasser, who was quite an environmentalist, was only persuaded to accept the commission when he was promised that the most up-to-date emissions abatement technology would be installed – and in fact the chimney hardly ever gives off anything. I must say I’m quite glad Hundertwasser accepted the commission, because he created what must be the jauntiest waste incinerator in the world. It makes you almost want to work there (almost …)
It was the second sighting, that of the chimney of another waste incinerator on the outskirts of Milan, which moved me to write this post, although it has taken me nearly nine months to get around to it. Last April, after the success of the hike my wife and I did from Milan to Monza, I decided to do a similar hike in another direction. I chose the direction pretty much at random, which meant, among other things, that there was one stretch where we had to walk along a very busy road with trucks thundering by and no space on the edge of the road for us to walk on. My wife regularly reminds me of this walk whenever I suggest doing a hike sight unseen around the edges of Milan … In any event, it was on this grim stretch of road that we stumbled across the waste incinerator. Its chimney immediately caught my attention. It had been painted a most extraordinary colour, a sort of shimmering, silvery grey blue, merging, but not quite, with the surrounding sky. It was really lovely to look at. I took several photos of it between the thundering trucks. I’m not sure any of them do justice to the chimney’s colour but I throw in the best one.
my photo
By one of those extraordinary coincidences that make one believe that there is some order after all in the chaos of the universe, this chimney happens to have been painted by another Austrian artist! Jorrit Tornquist is his name; his Wikipedia entry informs me that he is a color theorist and color consultant (no doubt it was in this latter role that he was called in by Milan’s waste management company to paint the chimney). As an artist, he does works like this.
Again, readers can surely see the relation between this type of work and the chimney.
As I say, these are the only two industrial chimneys which have ever brought some happiness into my life. But writing this post has moved me to search the Internet to see what other painted industrial chimneys await me and my wife on hikes we might one day do around the world. Here’s what I found, in no particular order.
A chimney at the sewage works in Milwaukee, where the art is actually part of the city’s water management system. The chimney is normally blue-coloured but turns red when heavy rain is forecast, warning people to reduce their water use so that the city’s drains are not overwhelmed.
An old chimney in Mount Vernon, Virginia, now hosting two graceful tulips.
I finish with a chimney which happens to be in Milan! It’s the chimney of the old factory where the Italian amaro, or bitter, Fernet Branca used to be produced.
This particular bitter was first formulated in 1845 in Milan. It is made by steeping 27 herbs and other ingredients in alcohol. Which herbs and ingredients are used is of course a tightly-held secret, a pesky problem I have already come across for these kinds of drinks. But apparently at least some of the herbs are pictured on the chimney, so perhaps a close reading of the chimney will lead me to figure out what herbs are used in this drink.
As readers have no doubt understood, I am planning to view this chimney. It can be the object of one of the urban walks my wife and I will take this winter. I’ve already checked on Google Maps to see how to get there, and I’m happy to report that we will not need to walk along busy roads with trucks thundering by. I’m going to have to wait for the right moment in which to casually suggest to my wife that we go for this walk, without spilling the beans about what we are going to see – and of course I will have to reassure her about the absence of busy roads with thundering trucks.
Nearly a month ago, when my wife and I were walking through the local town of Nervi, I happened to notice this banner strung across the street.
my photo
It was an invitation to all and sundry to come and admire the camellia which were flowering in the gardens of the Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in the Genoese suburb of Pegli.
We filed this invite away for possible future use, but it was only a week or so ago that we got around to going. What we discovered was more than just a bunch of camellia in flower – although we did also find that. It turns out that the villa’s gardens, which were laid out in the first half of the 1840s, are quite famous. They were the brainchild of the Marquess Ignazio Pallavicini and were designed for him by a certain Michele Canzio. This Michele Canzio was a man of the arts: an architect, an interior designer, and – important for our story – a set designer for Genova’s opera house, the Carlo Fenice theatre. The garden he designed for Ignazio Pallavicini was composed of a series of theatre sets made up of little lakes, streams, waterfalls, various buildings of one sort or another, garden furnishings, rare plants, all inserted into general greenery. In fact, a visit to the gardens was quite openly a theatrical event, with visitors invited to wind their way up the steep hill behind the villa through gardens divided into a Prologue and Background followed by three Acts. Each of these in turn were sub-divided into a number of Scenes, with each section and sub-section having a title. So we have:
Prologue and Background
– The Gothic Avenue
– The Classical Avenue
Act I: The Return to Nature
– Scene I: The Hermitage
– Scene II; The Amusement Park
– Scene III: The Old Lake
– Scene IV: The Spring
Act II: The Recovery of History
– Scene I: The Chapel of the Virgin Mary
– Scene II: The Swiss Hut
– Scene III: The Condottiere’s Castle
– Scene IV: The Condottiere’s Mausoleum
Act III: Catharsis
– Scene I: The Inferno
– Scene II: The Large Lake
– Scene III: The Gardens of Flora
– Scene IV: Remembrance
Looking at all that, I have a sense of being trapped in a rather bad knock-off of a Wagnerian opera, with some knight errant wandering the forests of Mittel Europe searching for his Loved One. But what I feel doesn’t matter. It’s what people at the time felt that matters. They loved it. When it opened to the public (for a fee), it was an instant success. It became the centre-piece of a broader plan by Marquess Pallavicini to turn Pegli from a sleepy little fishing village on the far outskirts of Genova into a smart seaside resort where the Great and the Good from all over Europe could come to spend their winters (and later their summers). The Marquess used his political muscle (he was a Senator in the newly-formed Kingdom of Italy) to make sure that the railway being built out from Genova westwards had a stop at Pegli, donating part of his land for the station buildings as well as for an upscale hotel to house the Great and the Good who would be arriving by train and for a smart new municipal building from which the new, modern municipality he was promoting could be run. Other Genoese aristocratic families which had summer villas in the area knew a good thing when they saw it and had their villas turned into luxurious hotels. And the Great and the Good came: the hereditary princes of the German Empire, various members of Italy’s House of Savoy, various literati such as George Sand, Alfred de Musset, August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Arrigo Boito, among others. All these Great and Good visited the gardens at Villa Durazzo Pallavicini, and where they went so did Europe’s bourgeoisie.
By now readers might be getting a little impatient and asking themselves what these gardens looked like. Let me answer them by showing a series of postcards from the turn of the century. Wonderful things, postcards. People loved to show the folk back home where they had been, and tourist spots like the gardens of the Villa Durazzo Pallavicini were more than glad to oblige. My wife has a large collection of postcards sent by her parents, grandparents, and their friends over the decades, and it’s lovely to sit down of a winter evening and browse through them. But I digress. Here are postcards of the gardens:
Oh, and perhaps I should add a photo of the camellias, which was what brought us to the gardens originally (although this is not a postcard, since it would seem that postcard makers didn’t see the interest in having postcards of the camellias).
As this photo suggests, we came a little too late, many of the camellias being past their prime. Quite how the camellias fitted into Canzio’s grand operatic scheme is not clear to me, but we can let that pass.
Would I recommend to readers to visit the gardens? I’m not sure I would. It’s not just that the highly artificial nature of the gardens does not chime with modern sensibilities (at least, it doesn’t chime with mine). It’s also that the gardens have suffered heavily from Genova’s modernization over the last century. To explain what I mean, I have to take up the story of Pegli from where I left off a few paragraphs ago.
Marquess Pallavicini wanted to turn Pegli into a smart seaside resort, and as we have seen for a while this plan was successful, as this poster from the turn of the century suggests.
But in the late 19th-early 20th Century, Genova, which we see in the far distance in this poster, was spreading like a cancer along the coast and up the valleys behind it – it was the only way the city could expand in this region where the steep hills drop precipitously into the sea. To show what I mean, here is a map of what Genova looks like today. It’s expanded up and down the coast, swallowing up places like Pegli, and sent tendrils of urbanisation up into the valleys behind.
By 1926, Genova had reached Pegli and gobbled it up. Pegli as a distinct municipality was no more.
Like all modern cities, Genova was also pushing to industrialize, and it was industrializing on the side towards Pegli. In 1915, just before Italy entered the First World War, this was the view the visitor would have had looking towards the villa.
Source
We have the villa standing proud on the edge of the hill, with the gardens climbing the hill behind it. In front of it are orange trees, vineyards, and other fields, all the property of Marquess Pallavicini and his heirs. A decade or so later, we have this large cotton mill down by the rail tracks, with the villa in the middle distance partially blotted out by the belching industrial chimney. There were even bigger industrial plants to the right of this photo. One in particular became a very large steel plant.
By this time, the Great and the Good had packed their bags and were spending their winters and summers elsewhere along the Ligurian coast, or on the adjoining coast in France, the Côte d’Azur. Pegli had just become a grimy suburb of Genova. I suspect that Pallavicini’s heirs saw which way the wind was blowing, because the last owner of the villa and its gardens donated them to the city of Genova in 1928. But at least she did so with the provision that the villa be allocated to some cultural use and that the gardens be kept open to the public (Genova more or less honoured the bargain; one part of the villa has become a museum and the gardens were kept open until the 1960s – more on that in a minute).
The pace of modernization quickened after World War II. And here, to continue the story, I switch back to our visit of the gardens. We had passed through the Prologue and Background and had started onto Act I when we started hearing a low roar, which got stronger and stronger as we progressed. At some point, we reached a Belvedere where we got a beautiful, close-up view of –– the A10 motorway, which runs from Genova to Ventimiglia. This section of the motorway was built in the 1960s.
The construction of the tunnel so badly damaged the gardens that they were closed until 1992, when they were reopened to the public after a decade of restoration. Even today, much of Act I of the gardens is blighted by the continuous roar from the motorway.
When we had climbed higher, reaching the end of Act I, we began to get splendid views over the sea –– and onto the runway of Genova’s airport.
As the photo shows, the runway is built on the sea, a consequence of the fact, which I’ve already mentioned, that Genova lies at the foot of steep hills that drop straight into the sea – there is no nice flat space nearby where a runway could be built. After some back and forth, it was decided to build the airport and its runway to the west of Genova, I suspect because this part of the city had already been blighted by industrialization and no-one would complain too much about it. Luckily, the day we visited the gardens no planes landed or took off – Covid-19 induced no doubt – but I presume that on a normal day the noise of planes taking off would add to the noise from the motorway.
On we climbed, and as we got the end of Act II, and the highest point of the gardens, we could enjoy a new view across the valley running alongside the gardens –– to a series of oil tanks planted on the hill on the other side of the valley. They were painted a sickly green, no doubt to claim they were environmentally-friendly. Unsurprisingly, but unfortunately for me, no-one seems to have posted a photo of these oil tanks taken from the gardens, so the best I can do is to show another satellite photo from Google Maps.
The tanks are that group of circles, and to locate the gardens please follow the motorway as it punches its way through the hill.
The presence of oil tanks there are the consequence of another decision, taken in the early 1960s, to have Genova’s oil terminal built close to the airport (so another pleasant sight from the gardens must no doubt be the periodic arrival of oil tankers coming in to offload their cargo). The oil pipelines snake over the hills from the terminal to these tanks, where the oil is stored prior to further onward delivery to the north of Italy.
After enjoying these sights, we wended our way down through Act III of the gardens and on down to the exit. When we arrived back at the villa we went out on its ample terrace to admire the view –– and got a close-up of people’s clothes drying on their balconies. In the 1960s and ’70s, those pleasant fields of orange trees, vineyards and other crops which used to lie at the foot of the villa, and which I show above in that postcard from 1915, had been cemented over to make way for cheap housing. Here we have a view of that housing, and at the end of the avenue we can see the villa.
No “green belt” was kept between the housing and the villa. The apartment blocks come right up to the gates of the villa.
So, like I say, I don’t think I will be recommending a visit to these gardens to anyone. I feel sorry for the enthusiastic volunteers who manned (and womanned) the gardens, I respect the spending of public moneys to restore the gardens, seen as a great example of garden design from the Romantic age, but the garden’s context has been so ruined as to blight any visit to the gardens.
As my wife and I were walking down into Vernazza on our latest hike along the trail which links together the Cinque Terre, I noticed this on the steeple of the village church.
my photo
I suspect it’s a little difficult for readers to see what I mean, so I throw in this close-up photo of the steeple.
my photo
“This” is a weathervane. As I’m sure many of my readers will know, in the pre-modern world, where weather satellites didn’t exist and TV channels didn’t give you weather forecasts every hour on the hour, the function of weathervanes was to tell people which way the wind was blowing, a pretty good indicator of what the weather was going to be like. And of course peering at weathervanes went along with some of the weather-related sayings people were fond of quoting, like this one about the winds:
“When the wind is in the east, it’s good for neither man nor beast.
When the wind is in the north, the old folk should not venture forth.
When the wind is in the south, it blows the bait in the fishes’ mouth.
When the wind is in the west, it is of all the winds the best.”
I can imagine some great-great-great grandfather of mine looking up at the weathervane on the barn and saying “Aah, wind today’s from the north. Like they say, ‘old folk shouldn’t venture forth’”, no doubt using this as a good excuse to wend his way to the village pub to fritter his time (and money) away.
But weathervanes are also excellent examples of how we human beings transform functional objects into art. Take that weathervane on Vernazza’s church. If readers look again at my photo, they’ll see that the weathervane-maker turned the sail, which a weathervane needs if it is to work, into a rather pudgy angel. The things which weathervane-makers have turned the sail into, and continue to turn them into (this is by no means a dead art), are endless. I throw in here, in no particular order, some of the designs which have caught my fancy.
The eventual owners of weathervanes will often choose designs that comment on something: their profession, their beliefs, their interests, the times they live in, even the racehorses they have bet on … No doubt it was in that spirit that Pope Nicholas I, way back in the 9th century, ordered that the rooster be the emblem used on weathervanes placed on Christian churches. It seems that Pope Nicolas was harking back to a comment made by Pope Gregory the Great even further back in time, in the 6th Century. Gregory had decreed that the rooster was the most suitable emblem of Christianity, being the emblem of St Peter – he is referring to the story in the Gospel where Jesus predicted that Peter would deny him three times before the rooster crowed at dawn, here captured in a painting by Francesco Rosa in San Zachariah church in Venice.
Personally, I find this a rather strange reason to choose the rooster as an emblem on churches, referencing as it does a moment of shameful betrayal by the man who was to become the first Pope. I rather think that Popes Gregory and Nicolas were doing something which Christians had been doing since the dawn of their religion, putting a Christian gloss on what were actually thriving pagan traditions (“if you can’t beat them, join them”). For the Goths and no doubt other “barbarians”, the rooster, crowing as it does at dawn, was an emblem of the sun. What better emblem to put on churches! Wasn’t Jesus (apparently) born at the winter solstice, when the sun is reborn?
In any event, from the 9th Century on, rooster-themed weathervanes became the norm on Christian churches (which no doubt explains why, in English, another name for the weathervane is the weathercock). The oldest surviving weathervane in Europe – from the 9th Century – is a rooster which, until 1891, graced the Church of Saints Faustino and Giovita in the city of Brescia.
And the Bayeux tapestry, my favourite tapestry and one I’ve mentioned several times in these posts, clearly shows a man installing a rooster weathervane on Westminster Abbey (the scene is actually about the burial of King Edward the Confessor; I presume the nuns who made the tapestry were adding local colour).
Now, I’m sure that at this point my alert readers are saying, “Hang on a minute, why does the weathervane on that church in Vernazza have an angel and not a rooster, then?” Well, it seems that at some point the Church authorities relaxed the rooster rule somewhat. Other emblems were possible, although normally ones which were linked to the saint or saints to which the church was dedicated. In the case of the church in Vernazza, it is dedicated to Saint Margaret of Antioch. A quick zip around the Internet tells me that a weathervane emblem connected to her (completely apocryphal) life could be a dragon: one of the more dramatic moments in her life was that she was swallowed by the Devil in the form of a dragon. Dragons are popular emblems for weathervanes. Here’s a nice example.
Or the emblem could be a hammer. She is often depicted, especially in Orthodox icons, as hammering the Devil – once no doubt she had been regurgitated alive by him. My wife and I saw a great example of such an icon in a museum in Athens a few years ago (for some reason, the Orthodox call her Marina rather than Margaret).
My photo
Here’s a nice example of a hammer, although it’s put together with a saw (“hammer and saw”).
But no, we have an angel. OK, I guess angels are pretty saintly and so a good emblem for a church – as long as they look serious, like this emblem (for some reason, most of the weathervanes have the angel blowing a horn).
But no, if readers go back to my original photo, they will see that the weathervane-maker seems to have made more of a cherub. Raphael painted the most iconic of cherubs.
The example on Vernazza’s church doesn’t seem nearly as cute. As far as I can make out, the cherub there has gone to seed; a cherub who has spent rather too much of his lockdown time eating and drinking and not enough time working out in his living room.
my photo
I’m not sure how the weathervane-maker got this pretty non-religious weathervane past the parish priest. Perhaps the weathervane-maker was the parish priest. Or perhaps the parish priest was a jolly fellow who liked a good laugh. I have in mind someone like don Camillo as played by Fernandel.
The parish priest must also have calculated that his bishop would never come to this Godforsaken village during his tenure – until quite recently it was pretty difficult to get to Vernazza and the other Cinque Terre; you either walked over the hills or you took a fishing boat, neither of which I see any self-respecting bishop doing.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the backstory on this weathervane. In the meantime, I’ve gone back in my mind’s eye to see where I might have come across weathervanes in my life. Only one episode comes back to me, from my days at prep school (in British vernacular this being a boarding school for primary-school-age children). As I ascertained after a quick zip around the Internet, the school still exists. The only change I can see is that it has gone co-ed in the intervening years, an excellent thing. The school has taken over a building with venerable origins, as this picture of the main lawn attests.
But the main reason for my putting in this photo is that discrete weathervane on that small tower in the centre of the photo. I throw in here an enlargement.
It’s a rather boring weathervane, taking the shape of a flag (the first instruments used to figure out which way the wind was blowing were no doubt flags; indeed, the English word “vane” is derived from the Old English word fana, meaning flag). Nevertheless, I know that weathervane well. One year, my dormitory gave onto the roof covering the gallery (those windows we see to the left of the base of the tower). I was a naughty boy and friends with other naughty boys. We would regularly sneak out of the dormitory window at night onto that roof and go for a walk, just for the dare. Sometimes, that weathervane would be silhouetted against the moon. I see it still … aahh, the good old days!
One other memory I have of weathervanes is their figurative use in cartoons, especially political cartoons. As we all know too well, politicians are notorious for going “whichever way the wind blows” (a popular wind-related saying). Cartoonists have always had a field day with weathervanes, using them to show politicians who chop and change their opinions, “trimming their sails” to prevailing opinion (another popular wind-related saying). I remember a British cartoon mocking the British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan for acting like a weathervane over the independence of British colonies in Africa. I couldn’t find that particular one on the Internet. But political cartoonists have been busy with the weathervane metaphor in the intervening years. Here are some recent examples.
For some reason, the use of weathervanes seems to be especially popular among American cartoonists. Could it be that the extensive use of interest groups in American politics makes American politicians chop and change their opinions more frequently – and, given the pervasiveness of TV news teams, the evidence of their chopping and changing is more obviously there for everyone to see?
Politicians are of course sensitive to the charge of behaving like weathervanes. Quebecan politicians are so sensitive to the charge that the provincial Assembly has banned the use of the term, considering it a slur. I never knew politicians were quite that thin-skinned …
Well, that still leaves the mystery of my pudgy angel. Maybe, next time my wife and I are in Vernazza, I’ll drop into the church and try to find an answer.
In these times of Covid restrictions, my wife and I have been exploring hikes closer to home, hikes which allow us to more or less stay within the limits of the commune of Milan, or at least not stray too far outside of it. The latest such hike we’ve done has taken us along one of the old canals which radiate out from Milan, the Naviglio della Martesana. I fear we might have exceeded the legal limit of where we could go. In our defence, the designations of which Covid tier Milan is in has been changing from day to day, making it quite hard to know just how far we are allowed to travel outside of Milan. I trust my readers will not snitch on us!
In any event, the hike was some 30 km long, undertaken over several days, and took us from the north-east of Milan out to the river Adda, which drains lake Como. It’s not a physically challenging hike. Following a canal means no brutal climbs or descents, and the path is paved the whole way – the path is actually a bicycle path, and the only real challenge is to keep out of the way of bicyclists who race along at high speeds, their riders no doubt dreaming of fame and glory in the Tour de France or Giro d’Italia.
First, a little bit of history. Building of the canal started in 1460, under Francesco Sforza, the first of the Sforza dynasty to rule over the Duchy of Milan.
The canal took its waters from the river Adda (which at the time was the Duchy’s eastern frontier with Venice) and carried them over the flat plain that lies between the river Adda and Milan, passing various towns and crossing various rivers along the way. At first, it finished several kilometres to the north of the city, emptying into the river Seveso, but then in 1496 Francesco’s son, Galeazzo Maria, extended it with a short new canal, the Naviglio di San Marco, and joined it up with the series of canals which encircled Milan, the Cerchia dei Navigli.
Alert readers will have noticed the trace of the canal is not all that straight, it zigs and zags a bit. The topography certainly didn’t require this – there was no need to go around hills and such like. The land between the river Adda and Milan is as flat as a pancake, so by rights – to reduce construction costs – the canal should have been a straight line between river and city. But all the landowners on that flat plain wanted the canal to come their way so that they could use the water to irrigate their fields. And the towns that dotted the plain wanted the canal as a source of water and to keep their moats topped up. All these different groups brought pressure to bear on the canal’s planners, so the canal ended up winding this way and that way across the plain as those who had the most influence pulled the canal towards them. Which is just as well for me and my wife; walking along a dead straight canal would have been very monotonous.
There were also quarrels right from the start about which uses of the canal should get priority. As we’ve seen, the landowners wanted to use it for irrigation. But a good number of them also wanted to use its energy to drive watermills, as did the towns. And the landowners also wanted the canal as a means of transportation to bring their (mainly) agricultural goods to market. For their part, the rulers of Milan were more interested in the canal as a means of transportation to move goods and so promote the city’s and the Duchy’s economy. They also wanted it to be part of their defensive system against the dratted Venetians to the East. Irrigation tended to drop the level of water in the canal, which was a problem for navigation since the boats wouldn’t have enough draft as well as for the mills because the flow wouldn’t be strong enough to drive the wheels. But maintaining enough draft and a swift enough flow meant cutting back on irrigation, which was bad for the crops. Tempers flared, lawsuits were filed, and no doubt swords were drawn. In the end, though, a modus vivendi was arrived at, and from the 1580s onwards irrigation coexisted more or less peacefully with other uses of the canal’s waters.
At some point, the Milanese aristocracy discovered the delights of the countryside and many built villas along the canal, reachable by boat from their houses in town. So we have this painting from 1790 of one of these villas in Crescenzago (now on the outskirts of Milan), showing also the normal traffic along the canal.
Then the industrial revolution came along. New means of transportation competed with canals, first railways then roads. The Martesana canal steadily lost out to these upstarts and was only able to remain competitive when heavy lifting was required: sand, stone, coal, wood. Here we have one of those loads being moved along the canal (shown in the-then new medium of photography).
In the meantime, exploding populations meant that villages along the canal grew and became urbanized, as shown in this photo of the same Crescenzago which was the subject of my first painting above.
These growing villages bled into each other, smothering the farmland that once lay between them, with the ones closer to Milan being in turn submerged by the expansion of that city, eventually becoming its outer suburbs. Much of the growth around Milan was driven by the factories which established themselves on its periphery. A good number of them were located along the Martesana canal and Milan’s other canals, as this photo shows.
In 1929, the demand for road space to ease vehicle congestion in Milan (along, it must be said, with a need to deal with public health concerns) meant that the Cerchia dei Navigli was covered over, along with the Naviglio San Marco.
In the late 1950s, the authorities overseeing the canal bowed to reality and decreed that the canal would no longer be used for transportation, only irrigation. Finally, in 1968, after the municipal authorities had concluded that the covers of the Cerchia dei Navigli and the Naviglio San Marco were in danger of collapsing, they decided to simply fill these in and reroute the waters of the Martesana canal into an overflow canal. This went around the inner core of the city and emptied into the dried-up bed of the Seveso river south of the city. The authorities also decided that more space was needed for Milan’s burgeoning car population and so covered another section several kilometers long at the canal’s end and turned this into a wide avenue, via Melchiorre Gioia.
And so out in the countryside, irrigation had finally won the centuries-long arguments about irrigation vs. navigation, while in Milan itself the canal had become a relic of a bygone era, slowly falling apart and becoming for all intents and purposes an open drain.
Luckily, as I’ve also mentioned in a much earlier post about an abandoned railway line, good sense eventually prevailed. Led by Milan, in the 1980s the communes through which the canal passed got their act together. They cleaned up the canal’s towpath and turned it into a cycle path, and generally encouraged their citizens to use the canal as a park. That’s where things stood when my wife and I embarked on our hike along the canal.
We started where the canal’s waters disappear under via Melchiorre Gioia.
my photo
We turned our backs on the city and started walking out towards the distant Adda river. One of the old houses which had graced the canal in its heyday greeted us. As part of the urban renewal which accompanied the upgrading of the canal in the 1980s, its owners had renovated it and painted it a welcoming yellow.
my photo
But already, hulking over this old building, we could see the blocks of flats put up during the 1960s and 70s as the city expanded outwards at breakneck speed. It was a harbinger of things to come, as we walked for kilometres through a jumble of old and abandoned, old but renewed, shining new, and new but already showing signs of wear and tear. Even though drawn in 1945, this cartoon captures beautifully the chaos of today’s urban reality which the old canal now threads its way through.
Here we have one railway bridge after another spanning the canal.
my photo
New blocks of flats giving onto the canal.
my photo
The jumble of tiny gardens which people have carved out of spaces along the canal.
my photomy photo
Industrial chimneys, relics of factories which once abutted the canal.
my photo
in the next case being recycled into a new use as a pole on which to fix transmitters of the newest means of communication, mobile phones.
my photo
Old houses which have been lucky enough to be renovated
my photomy photo
Others which are struggling against the odds.
my photo
As befits an urban backwater, and as the last photo attests, graffiti on every wall. Most of it the usual ugly, mindless initials, but some eye-catching:
– an impossibly elaborate flower turning into a person on the arch of a railway bridge
my photo
– an amusing reminder that we are walking along a bicycle path
my photo
– a swirl of brightness
my photo
– square upon square of colour
my photo
The first of the villas which used to grace the canal’s edge
my photo
once surrounded by countryside, but now hemmed in and overshadowed by ugly modernity
my photo
The walls again, but this time carriers of messages, most of the lovesick type:
– “I love you Vale”
my photo
but sometimes in a more reflective, philosophical tone, which seemed apt in this urban chaos we were walking through:
– “What a shitty life”
my photo
and a line from Bob Marley and the Wailers’ 1973 song, the aptly titled “Concrete Jungle”
my photo
Finally, on the outskirts of Milan, the first encounter with the countryside, but an encounter showing it to be beleaguered and under threat from the urban sprawl at our backs:
– An example of one of the many crumbling ruins of farmhouses which dot the Italian countryside, victims to rural flight over the last sixty years
my photo
– the use of the countryside as a place to flytip our urban wastes
my photo
We passed under the ring motorway which is effectively the border of Milan. Had we broken out of the concrete jungle? Alas not. The housing continued. We passed the broken down gate of what must once have been the water gate of a fine villa but which now gives onto an ugly, messy, nondescript yard; the villa itself has vanished.
my photo
Spanking new, neat and tidy blocks of flats, but in places which the French call quartiers dortoirs, dormitory districts, places with no shops, no amenities, nothing – just places where commuters can sleep before heading back into town to work.
my photo
But a more rural feel began to creep in.
Cottages along the waterfront.
my photo
And finally, after some 15 kilometres of walking, some real fields! With the snow-capped mountains glistening on the horizon.
my photo
One of the irrigation channels fed by the canal, the water cascading away.
My photo
The last villa we passed, and the most imposing of them all, the Villa Alari.
my photo
Its history is a metaphor for the canal’s history as a whole. It was built at the beginning of the 18th Century on a magnificent scale, as this print shows.
So magnificent was it that the Austrian Governor of Lombardy, Archduke Ferdinand, rented it over several summers and even negotiated, without success, to buy it (his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, nixed the idea, considering the asking price too high). After passing down through the Alari family and, by marriage, into a branch of the Visconti family, it was donated by its last Visconti owner in 1944 to the Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God in Milan. By then, it had lost the lands around it and with them its magnificent gardens. The Brothers first used the villa as a psychiatric hospital and then as a nursing home. In 2007, they palmed it off onto the municipality, which must be asking itself what the hell to do with the building.
Another of those large farm complexes which dot the plains of the River Po and which, like so many others, has been pretty much abandoned (it was so large it needed two photos to capture it).
my photos
In the distance, the new housing complexes of today, feeding their inhabitants to Milan via an extension of one of the city’s subway lines – one of the new forms of transportation which took the place of the canal.
One of the few remaining locks on the canal, which are sadly firmly and irrevocably shut.
my photo
One last look across a ploughed field at the mountains, closer now, their snow glistening in the sun.
my photo
And we finally arrived in Cassano d’Adda, perched on the river, where we took the train back to Milan.
As befits a mountainous country with a coolish climate, Austria has acres of forests covering its many hills and mountains. As a consequence, it once had a vibrant tradition of building in wood. Nowadays, of course, wood as a building material has been almost completely superseded by stone, brick and concrete. The only places you still see wooden buildings are in the small villages which dot the countryside, wooden barns being still quite common there. My wife and I come across them quite often on our hikes, as these photos taken on a couple of recent hikes attest.
my photomy photomy photo
I love these old barns. My French grandmother had one just like them attached to the side of her house. We went in there often because that was where the bicycles and the ping-pong table were kept. It was – to the small me – a vast, cavernous place. All sorts of weather-beaten garden tools and other odds-and-ends lurked in the shadows. There was a pile of hay – quite why I don’t know; my grandmother had no animals. But it made the barn smell of hay, into which was mixed the smell of beaten earth rising from the floor. Then one summer I arrived for the summer holidays, only to find the barn gone. My grandmother told me that it had been sagging sideways and threatening to pull the rest of the house down with it. But this perfectly rational explanation didn’t take away the desolation I felt at the disappearance of this wonderful building.
As I say, there was a time when many more buildings in this country were made of wood, especially in the mountain regions. A number of Austrian artists have captured them on their canvases. Oskar Mulley was especially assiduous in his painting of mountain huts and barns, partly or wholly made of wood.
Alas, as we all know only too well, wood burns very well. The older and drier it is, the better it burns, as we all learnt watching the roof of the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris go up in flames.
The previously common use of wood in construction in Austria and its tendency to burn well must explain why every municipality in this country, down to the smallest village it would seem, has a fire station. As an extreme example, a couple of days ago my wife and I passed through a small village on one of our hikes, which had not one
my picture
not two
my photo
but three fire stations!
my photo
And each one is bigger than the last. Are fires getting bigger in this village, I wonder, or is it that fire engines are getting bigger and need a more spacious building to house them, or (a somewhat uncharitable thought) have municipal budgets been growing?
Of course, as befits a traditionally Catholic country, Austrians have a saint whom they can invoke to protect them from fire: St. Florian. Austrians should be particularly proud of this saint since he is a native son. The annals tell us that he was born in the latter part of the 3rd Century C.E. in Lorch, near Linz, on what was then the edges of the Roman Empire – the Danube River, which flows just north of Lorch, was the frontier of that Empire. Since so many Roman army units were garrisoned along the frontier his father could have been an army officer. Florian was active, possibly also as an army officer, in St. Pölten (or Aelium Cetium, as it was then called) when one of the periodic rounds of persecution against Christians broke out. This one occurred in 303–304 C.E., under the Emperor Diocletian (the same round of persecution that put paid to St. Pancras, about whom I wrote an earlier post). Without going into the details, which are anyway of dubious validity, it is recorded that Florian was arrested as a Christian. After a trial and various tortures, he was drowned in the Danube by being thrown off a a bridge with a stone tied around his neck. Thus did he become a martyr and a saint.
Sensibly enough, Florian was initially invoked to protect people from the dangers of water. At some point, though, he was pivoted (to use that most modern of terms) and used instead to protect people from fire. My theory – for which I have absolutely no evidence – is that another saint, John of Nepomuk, about whom I’ve written in an earlier post and who died in almost exactly the same way as Florian – thrown from a bridge and drowned – won the competition for protecting people from the dangers of water, leaving Florian without a role. Well of course, one critical use of water was to put out fires, so hey presto! he became the protector from the dangers of fire.
The Austrians have not only used wood to build, they have used it to carve, and their churches (and museums) are full of wonderfully carved statues and bas-reliefs. I throw in here a couple of bas-reliefs (from southern Germany in this case) which were recently auctioned at Vienna’s Dorotheum auction house.
Naturally enough, the saints who got a place in churches tended to be people’s favourites, ones whom they prayed to regularly. Given the ever-present danger of fire, one of these is St. Florian. My wife and I came across this lovely example of a St. Florian statue during one of our hikes this Autumn, down by Neusidler See (the same hike where we picked up bagfuls of walnuts).
my photo
We see here all the typical attributes of such a statue. Florian is dressed as a Roman soldier and gripping a banner, he is holding a bucket of water, and he is thoughtfully pouring that water over a little burning house situated at his feet. Delightful! My wife and I have come across scores of such statues during our wanderings over Austria’s hills and dales. In fact, we came across a fresco of him on the wall of a house just this afternoon.
my photo
One statue of St. Florian which we haven’t seen, though, and which I have put on my bucket list stands in the town of Bad Tölz in Upper Bavaria. The statue was set up in a square, in front of the town’s tax office. Since the statue gave its back to the tax office the sculptor thought it fitting to have the saint flash his bum to the tax men, to show them what he – and the rest of the town – thought of them.
I think we can all sympathize with the citizens of Bad Tölz, especially since St. Florian’s feast day is 4th May, a few days after 30th April, which for many in the world is the deadline for turning in their income tax returns.
By extension of his duties as heavenly fireman, St. Florian is the patron saint of many trades where fire was once used: bakers, brewers, coopers (the staves which coopers used to make barrels were steamed to make them pliable), potters, forges, soap boilers (who knew that was once a profession?). He is also, naturally enough, the patron saint of chimney sweeps, which, dear readers, contrary to coopers, soap boilers, and the rest is not a profession that has disappeared – not in Austria, at least. They are alive and well and thriving here.
When my wife and I first came to Austria, we were struck by these young blokes we would see (there have also been some young ladies in recent years) walking the streets and wearing this strange outfit: black overalls with a white head covering.
Upon enquiry, we were told that they were chimney sweeps. Chimney sweeps?! Well, both my wife and I have been around the block a couple of times (I won’t admit to how many) and neither of us have any memory of our parents calling in chimney sweeps. I don’t know about my readers, but to me the term “chimney sweeps” conjures up a Dickensian vision of little boys being forced to climb down narrow chimneys by a nasty master and getting stuck and dying.
In fact, they should have died out along with the coal industry. But no, these Austrian fellows are around in large numbers and are lick-spittle clean; they don’t give the impression of ever getting within a mile of an actual chimney. What is going on here?
I don’t want to be uncharitable, but I rather get the impression that we have here a great example of a union using its political muscle to avoid extinction. The way I see it, when chimney sweeps saw that their days were numbered, they got the governments – municipal, for the most part – to pass laws requiring homeowners to have their chimneys – used for gas water heaters for the most part these days – as well as the water heaters themselves checked at least once a year by a “chimney sweep”. As a homeowner in Vienna, I have had the doubtful pleasure of having Viennese “chimney sweeps” come over, solemnly open a little trap door in the wall, perfunctorily have a look in, declare all to be well, and require to paid handsomely for this service. And on top of it all they expect a tip at Christmas! This year, I found this “service” particularly grating because just a few days before the “chimney sweep” had come around we’d had the water heater maintained by a man who spent a good deal more time on the job and got paid proportionately a good deal less. But we can’t get out of it, because if we were to have a fire – Oh St. Florian, spare us this disaster! – and if it turned out to have been due to something the chimney sweep would have checked if we had called him, then the insurance wouldn’t pay – they have you over a barrel (made by one of those coopers who have since disappeared).
Not wishing to end on this sour note, writing about chimney sweeps reminds me that in the old days, when they really did sweep chimneys out, they would have cleaned chimneys connected to those wonderful tiled stoves which they used to have here in Austria. Some places actually still have them. We came across one this summer while staying in a hotel on a hike near Innsbruck; the stove is at the back of the room in the picture.
As readers can see, they have a bench around the bottom where one can sit with one’s back against the stove wall keeping nice and warm. I understand people would even sleep on these benches. But what is really lovely about these stoves is their decoration. I throw in a few pictures of such stoves.
Once, when we were looking for an apartment in Vienna to rent, my wife and I were shown one with such a stove. For one mad moment, we thought of taking the apartment just for the stove. But good sense prevailed; it would have been too small, the children wouldn’t have had their own rooms. Sometimes, though, my wife and I reminisce about that stove we never had. Another thing on our bucket list.
the heart thrills 
_-_choir_and_altar_-_ambulatory_-_St._Peter_and_the_cock_by_Francesco_Rosa.jpg){kind=link}
