The area of LA where my daughter and her partner live can be characterised as one of neat lawns in front of the houses and well tended cars parked on the streets. This photo from Google street view sums up the general feel of the area.
So one of the odder things which my wife and I spot as we take walks around the neighbourhood are the occasional rusty old bangers parked among the gleaming new cars. These photos, taken on a neighbourhood walkabout with our grandson a few days before we left LA, show what I mean.
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Some internet surfing has told me that the first car is a Buick Wildcat. The second I know well. It is a Jaguar E-Type which I remember admiring on the streets of London in my youth.
As I say, this habit of having cars which would look perfectly at home in a junkyard sitting on neat, clean, well tended streets appears odd to me. That being said, oddity is in the eye of the beholder, to slightly distort an old saw.
One of the oddest examples of this sub-genre of urban decor is old pickup trucks. So that my readers can understand what I’m talking about, here is a photo I took of one such pickup truck parked some ten houses down the street from my daughter’s place. I have taken it from both directions so that readers can admire its well-worn features.
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As sharp-eyed readers can see, this pickup is a Ford. Our daughter’s next-door-neighbour has instead a General Motor’s Chevrolet pickup truck.
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Normally, he also parks it on the street, but he must have been away when I took this photo, because it’s parked in his driveway.
It doesn’t finish there. On a neighbourhood walk my wife and I took the last time we were in LA on the nearby hill of Mar Vista (View of the Sea, and indeed you can see the ocean from the top of the hill), I spied another such pickup truck parked on the street. I didn’t take a photo of it, so readers will just have to take my word for it. That’s three old pickup trucks in a radius of a couple of kilometres or so.
I’m no expert on pickup trucks, but Google searches suggest to me that these are all from the 1940s or ’50s. Here are photos of particularly fine examples, the first from 1940, the second from 1950.
What on earth is going on here? Allow me to try out some hypotheses on you, dear readers.
Given the obviously poor shape these pickup trucks (and the other old bangers) are in, my first thought was that their owners were indulging in a subtle piece of Keeping Up with the Joneses retro-snobbery: “The neighbours all have the latest in swanky Teslas and what not parked in front of the house? Peuh, we have a beaten-up old pickup truck. Beat that!” Just for the hell of it, I throw in a cartoon or two on the phenomenon of Keeping Up with the Joneses.
But I’ve decided that I am probably being unfair to the good folk who live in the neighbourhood.
I then thought that the owners of the pickup trucks in particular were making a political statement about the days when certain segments of American society were “eating bitterness”, as the Chinese say. Certainly, when I see these trucks, all beaten up, worn and weary, they make me think of a passage from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
The family in the story, the Joads, had to abandon their farm in the Midwest which had become part of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. They rode out West to California in a homemade pickup truck, a cut-down 1926 Hudson Super Six sedan, to try to find work and a new life.
“The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle. The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places – this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.”
This is what that pickup truck looked like in the film made in 1940 of the book, with Henry Fonda in the lead role.
And then I immediately think of that famous photo taken by Dorothea Lange of a mother and her children in a camp for migrant agricultural workers in California, where the Joads ended up.
But I suspect this is too high-falutin’ an explanation.
My internet readings in the little world of old car collectors suggests a simpler explanation. It seems that one important strand of car collection is made up of people who, once they reach a certain age and high enough income bracket, buy old cars and trucks to relive comforting memories of their youth (adding a little bit of political spice, when America was Great or something like that). In the case of pickup trucks, it could be youthful memories of Grandpa, and maybe even of Grandma, working on the farm with the family pickup, that spurs urban boomers of LA to buy these rusty old pickup trucks and have them quietly sit in front of their house on the street. The memories could be like this photo of a farmer in Texas unloading feed for his cattle, using what looks like a pickup truck from the 1940s or ’50s.
So that’s where my thinking currently stands on this intriguing LA phenomenon. If my readers have any better explanations, I would love to hear them. Of course, the next time we are in LA, I could just go up to the neighbour and ask him – but that’s so un-English …
In my previous post, I wrote about the sad end of the earliest paleochristian basilica in Roman-era Milan, the basilica vetus or – as it later came to be called – the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. It was torn down to make way for an even more splendid – and bigger – cathedral, today’s Duomo of Milan. What is important for my story today, the basilica’s baptistery, the baptistery of San Giovanni alle Fonti, was also torn down. All that remains of it are a few ruins buried under the Duomo’s floor.
One of the most famous people to be baptised in that baptistery was Saint Augustine of Hippo. He was baptised on Easter Sunday 386 C.E., at the age of 32, by Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan. It was Ambrose who had finally persuaded Augustine to become a Christian after a lifetime of resistance. Here, we have a fresco painting of that scene by Benozzo Gozzoli from 1464, to be found in the church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano.
It is actually the woman at the back who interests us. She is Saint Monica, Augustine’s mother. She was from Rome’s North African province, from a city which today is in Algeria. Christian from an early age, she was married off young to an older man who was violent and unfaithful. To make matters worse, she had to keep house with her mother-in-law, who was as dissolute as her son. But she bore all her trials and tribulations with Christian fortitude. She had three children who survived infancy, Augustine, Navigius, and Perpetua. She wanted them all to be good Christians, and tried to set them on the path of righteousness. But from an early age, Augustine caused her much anguish. He was wayward, lazy, loose in his morals – at the age of 17, he started living with a woman by whom he had a child but whom never married – and worst of all he joined a heretical sect of Christianity. At some point during all these trials and tribulations, she went to see her local bishop and poured out her heart to him. He consoled her with the words, “the child of those tears shall never perish.” Mark those words, dear readers, we will come back to them.
But Augustine had one thing going for him: he was intelligent. After studying in Carthage, he taught rhetoric there, then moved to Rome to set up a school of rhetoric, and then moved again to Milan when he was offered a professorship in rhetoric by the Imperial court. Monica, now widowed, followed him, pushing him to give up his “concubine” (which he did), get properly married with a woman from a good family (which he nearly did), and – last but not least – become a Christian (which, as we’ve seen, he did, thanks to Saint Ambrose). Having become a Christian, Augustine gave up teaching rhetoric and decided to return home. Monica of course accompanied him, but having finally achieved her aim and with nothing left to live for, she died in Ostia while they were waiting for the ship to take them across to North Africa. We see her death depicted here, in the same church in San Gimignano and by the same artist
Not surprisingly, given her history, Monica is the patron saint of difficult marriages, disappointing children, victims of adultery or unfaithfulness, and of lapsed Catholics (I wonder if my mother ever prayed to Saint Monica à propos of my lapsed status?). From the Middle Ages on, her cult grew and spread throughout Christendom. The story of her crying her eyes out over Augustine became part of the popular stories about her. In fact, one can still buy statues of her in tears; here is a modern example: yours, courtesy of the gift shop of the Norbertine sisters, for a mere $180.
In 1768, as part of its attempts to shore up its claims over the Pacific coast of North America, the Spanish government ordered an expedition to set out from Baja California and lay stake to all of the territories lying between San Diego and Monterey. The expedition set out from San Diego in July 1769 and reached Monterey in October. They actually failed to recognise Monterey (the bay had been previously described by a Spanish navigator sailing up the coast, but they couldn’t match his descriptions with what they were seeing) and kept marching northwards, which led the expedition to its most momentous discovery in November, the huge bay of San Francisco. Somewhat astonishingly, ships from various nations had sailed past the mouth of the bay in the past without ever noticing it – the fog which commonly envelops the area has been given as the reason. Its job done, the expedition marched back to San Diego. The Franciscans who accompanied the expedition used it to lay the groundwork for a string of 21 Missions which they built over the next several decades all the way from San Diego to Sonoma just north of San Francisco. Here’s a photo of the mission church in Santa Barbara.
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But it’s not these large-scale events that interest me, it’s a small incident that happened in early August 1769 as the expedition force moved northward. On 2 August, the force arrived at the confluence of the Los Angeles river and the Arroyo Seco, very close to what is now downtown Los Angeles. The next day, the men moved on and camped a mere 4 km from where I’m writing this, at the Tongva village of Kuruvungna. The village was located close to a pair of springs which were sacred to the Tongvta people. The village has vanished, as have all the villages of the First Nations who lived in this part of California, but the springs still exist, now located in the grounds of the University High School on Texas Avenue in Los Angeles.
Juan Crespí, a Franciscan friar who was with the expedition, renamed the springs San Gregorio. But the new name didn’t stick. Someone in the following decades, someone with a poetic bent, saw in those two springs the eyes of Saint Monica with tears continuously welling out of them, and so they became known as the fuentes de las Lágrimas de Santa Mónica, the springs of the Tears of Saint Monica. From there, by a sort of geographical osmosis, the general area around the springs became known as Santa Mónica. So when, in 1839, the Mexican governor of Alta California gave a certain Francisco Sepúlveda II a grant of 33,000 acres of land for a rancho, a grant which included the springs, Señor Sepúlveda called his rancho San Vincente y Santa Mónica (the San Vincente part of the name presumably came from another location on the rancho).
Fast forward another thirty years, to 1872 – California was now a US State – and the Sepúlveda family sold half of the rancho’s lands to a Col. Robert Baker, a businessman with a finger in many pies. In turn, two years later, Col. Baker sold three-quarters of his part of the rancho to another businessman, John Percival Jones, who had made a fortune in silver mining out in Nevada. In 1875, the two agreed to create a new town on part of their land holdings. Again, by geographical osmosis, they decided to call the town Santa Monica (even though the springs are not part of the township). Thus started the town which is now part of the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. My wife and I are on the bus from Santa Monica as I write this, having just visited the Cayton Children’s Museum with our grandson, where great fun was had by all. The bus is passing street after street of houses, which have all been built over the 33,000 acres of the rancho of Francisco Sepúlveda II. A lot of people have made a lot of money in real estate.
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Over its lifetime, the town of Santa Monica has given its name to a variety of other things in the town. Perhaps the best known is the Santa Monica Pier, which has housed an amusement park out on the ocean’s edge since the 1920s.
Who hasn’t thrilled at the idea of travelling along Route 66? I certainly have. I’ve told my wife that one of these days, once we’ve finished visiting our daughter in LA, we’ll roar off down Route 66 all the way to Chicago. I think we’ll have to do this trip in a Corvette, a red one if possible.
And of course we’ll be listening to Nat King Cole’s “Route 66” on the radio.
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Although we’ll do the trip in the opposite direction to Nat King Cole’s lyrics: LA – San Bernadino – Barstow – Kingman – Winona – Flagstaff, Arizona – Gallup, New Mexico – Amarillo – Oklahoma City – Joplin, Missouri – Saint Louis – Chicago
“Get your kicks
On Route sixty-six”
“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.
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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.
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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.
My wife and I were recently hiking in the Vienna woods, which at one point required crossing a large open field. We were halfway across it when I was startled to see an emerald green tree on its edge. It was certainly not leaves which were making it green at this time of year. And what was strange was that all the branches were emerald green. Luckily for my sanity, the path we were taking passed close by it, so I was able to inspect the tree more closely. It turned out that all the branches of the tree were thickly covered with a bright green lichen. Foolishly, I didn’t take a photo of the tree, so I’m afraid this photo will have to do.
This vision got me thinking about lichen. They’re very modest beings for the most part, clinging closely to their rock or branch, so I’ve never given them much thought. They give us some gentle splashes of colour on our winter hikes, when all the trees are bare, wildflowers are still asleep, and the skies are grey.
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Lichens might be modest beings but they are fascinating. I’m bursting with desire to tell my readers all about them, but I already see my wife shifting around in her seat at the thought of hearing all sorts of biological details that she never wanted to hear about. So, since vibrant colour is what started this post, I’ll just focus on lichens’ connection to dyeing. Which, as readers will see in a minute, will also lead me to write about trade, a topic which I’ve written about many times in these posts.
Let me start by saying that I am really filled with admiration for our remote ancestors. They looked around their ecosystems and tried to find a use for everything that Nature offered them. I, a pampered product of an oversupplied culture, who can get anything I want from anywhere in the world with a mere click of my mouse, would never, ever dream of trying to use lichens as a dye. But our ancestors did, particularly those who lived in ecosystems which did not support a huge amount of biodiversity and so didn’t have that many plants or animals to exploit.
Most of them used lichens as dye sources in the easiest way. They collected them, simmered them in boiling water, waited a while for the lichen to leach out the colour, then added the yarns, simmered, and waited some more (I simplify, but not by much). Modern artisanal dye masters have replicated the processes, with which you can get some quite nice colourings. These photos show some of the lichens used as well as the yarns they have coloured.
But pride of place in lichen dyeing goes to the various species which give us orchil dyes. These are dyes in the red-mauve to dark purple spectrum – this photo shows the range of colours which modern artisanal masters have managed to tease out of these lichens.
Since they are the source of these lovely colours, I feel I should honour the main species of lichen from which orchil dyes are extracted. Lasallia pustulata
Unless some of my readers are passionate lichenologists, I think we can all agree that these lichens are not terribly, terribly beautiful. But by the wonders of biochemistry, they can deliver us lovely dyes. Beauty out of the beasts, as it were.
Anyway, the process to extract orchil dyes is much more complex than the simple boil-it-up-and-dunk-the-yarn-in-it process which I just described. One has to crush the lichen in a solution of ammonia and keep the mix well oxygenated for several weeks. The ammonia slowly reacts with chemicals in the lichens, with the product of these reactions being the purple dye. This effect of ammonia was discovered a long, long time ago, at least in Roman times and very probably before. And in those days the source of the ammonia was … stale urine. Yes, the lichen was steeped in stale urine.
Again, I’m just filled with amazement. How on earth did our ancestors figure this one out? I try imagining scenarios of how someone stumbled across this urine effect by accident – because it had to be by accident. The only thing I can think of is this. Did readers know that in the olden days people used stale urine to “dry clean” their clothes? – ammonia, it seems, is a good stain remover. I came across this … err … interesting procedure when I randomly found myself reading an article about a house which had been excavated in Pompeii. It was a fullery, owned by a fellow called Stephanus. Since the photos of the ruins themselves are not very interesting, I throw in here a reconstruction which some enterprising soul has made.
Readers with good eyes can see the various baths where cloth was fulled. In addition to fulling cloth, Stephanus (or rather his slaves) was dry-cleaning clothes with urine. Given my childish sense of humour (I already see my wife rolling her eyes at this point), I was delighted to read that Stephanus had vases placed in the lane on which the fullery abutted, into which (presumably male) passers-by were invited to pee; I wonder if they ever demanded a payment for their liquid contribution to Stephanus’s business? As for the cleaning itself, this was carried out by some poor bastards whom Stephanus had bought in Pompeii’s slave market. They had to stomp on the urine-soaked clothes for hours. For some reason, another fuller in Pompeii, Veranius Hypsaeus, thought that this operation was a good subject for a fresco in his workshop.
I can’t think of a worse job (well, if I thought hard enough about it, I probably could). But some sources I read brightly informed me that the urine was good for the skin of the feet – a small consolation … And just in case any readers are asking themselves, after the stomping session the clothes were washed in water, to rid them of the smell of urine.
Anyway, my theory is that one day, somewhere, someone used a urine-dry-clean on some clothes which had been dyed with orchil-creating lichens in the traditional way (boil-yarn-and-lichen-and-water-together). For some reason, they left the clothes stewing in the urine for a while – perhaps they were called off to some emergency somewhere and didn’t come back for a week or two – and saw to their astonishment that the clothes had turned purple. It’s a wild guess but it satisfies my fervid imagination.
Orchil really delivers quite a lovely colour. But even more important, that colour is purple. At the time, the best purple dye on the market was Tyrian purple. It was extracted from the gland of a number of shellfish, and it took a huge number of molluscs to extract modest amounts of dye. So readers can understand that it was a very expensive dye. Which meant that only the upper crust could afford it, and eventually in the period of the Roman Empire it was decreed that only the Emperor and his family could wear clothes dyed with Tyrian purple. Unfortunately, the statues we have of Roman Emperors have all lost the colouring they used to have. Luckily, though, we have a coloured picture of one Emperor, Justinian, in the mosaics of the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. As readers can see, his cloak (and even maybe his shoes?) do indeed seem to be purple.
Note, too, the two fellows to Justinian’s right. They were high-level courtiers and were generously allowed to have a broad purple stripe in their cloak. Ah, the complexities of sumptuary regulations …
In this world of strict social hierarchies, orchil allowed society’s wannabes to swan around in purple clothes, aping the manners of their social superiors (it also allowed dyers to use orchil as an initial, or “bottom”, dye, and then use much smaller amounts of the eye-wateringly expensive Tyrian purple to finish the job – and no doubt sell the cloth as 100% dyed with Tyrian purple).
With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the use of orchil dyes, along with the knowledge of how to make them, pretty much disappeared in Europe. One place where that was not the case was Florence. In the Middle Ages, the city was a major textiles manufacturing centre. Raw wool, and later raw silk, came into the city from all over Europe and beyond, it was processed into cloth – which meant among other things dyeing the yarn – and then the finished cloth was exported all over Europe and beyond. Here we have a photo of Florentine dyers at work.
Florence’s famous banking system, created by the Medici and other families, was basically created to finance this international trade in textiles. Here we have Florentine bankers working at their banco.
In the 1100s, one of the men working in Florence’s textile industry, a certain Alemanno, rediscovered the techniques of making and using orchil dyes. Quite how he did this is a matter of speculation; business trips to the Levant are invoked, or to the Balearic Islands. Or maybe the techniques hadn’t actually disappeared completely in Italy; he just knew a good business opportunity when he saw one and exploited it effectively. However he did it, Alemanno built a fortune on the purple cloth he made, and his descendants, the Rucellai, became Florentine grandees in the succeeding generations. The family name reflected the original source of their wealth; it is thought to be derived from oricello, the Italian name for the dye (which might in turn be derived from the Italian name for urine, orina). By the 1300s, their wealth and status got them a side chapel in the basilica di Santa Maria Novella. The original frescoes are sadly deteriorated, but there is a rather nice statue of a Madonna with Child by Nino Pisani on the altar.
By the time the 1400s rolled around, Giovanni Rucellai was the head of the family. While he continued to make money hand over fist from the textile business, like all good Florentines of this golden age he was also a patron of the arts. He paid for the completion of the façade of the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella.
And finally he commissioned his tomb, a small-scale copy of the so-called edicule in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (any reader interested in comparing the two can do no worse than go to this link).
As befits a Great Man, someone – his heirs, no doubt – commissioned a posthumous portrait of him (note the façade of the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella and his tomb in the background).
By then, the world was about to change for the worse for Florence and the Mediterranean world in general. A few years after Giovanni’s death, the Portuguese finally reached the Cape of Good Hope, and then a few years after that they crossed the Indian Ocean and reached India, while Christopher Columbus, in an effort to beat the Portuguese to the Indies, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and stumbled across the Americas. Trade patterns were to change profoundly, with the trade and use of orchil-producing lichens being one modest part of those changes.
Already things were changing when Giovanni was born, in 1403. The year before, a Frenchman by the name of Jean de Béthencourt was conquering the Canary Islands in the name of the King of Spain.
Like all conquistadors, he might have been in it for the glory but he was definitely in it for his own personal gain. One of the things he made his money with was orchil-producing lichens, creating a monopoly, controlled by him of course, in the lichen harvesting business. It was not easy harvesting the lichens. They grew close to the sea, and once the easy bunches had been picked the only source left was lichens growing on the sea cliffs. This photo shows a bunch of Rocella tinctoria hanging over a cliff edge.
To get to these lichen, harvesters had to dangle precariously on ropes over cliff edges, hoping no doubt that sudden strong gusts of wind wouldn’t blow them off, and trying not to look into the abyss below.
As readers can imagine, it was only slaves or other poor sods who did this work.
Jean had the harvested lichen shipped back to his domains in Normandy, where there happened to be a village which specialised in textile manufacturing. With the Canarian lichen, the village’s manufacturers were now able to dye their cloth purple; clearly, the secret – if it ever really was a secret – of using urine to make orchil dye was out. The village grew into a prosperous little town on the back of the dye (and let’s not forget the urine), in recognition of which it is now called Grainville-la-Tinturière, or Grainville-the-Dyer (the village is also twinned with two towns in the Canary Islands in recognition of its historic ties to these islands). As far as I can make out, there seems to be absolutely nothing left of the textile industry in the town, so I shall just throw in a photo of an old postcard of the place.
About 50 years later, in 1456, as the Portuguese crept down the coast of western Africa, they discovered and took over the islands of Cabo Verde. There, too, the same orchil-producing lichens clung to sea cliffs, and there, too, poor bastards hung precariously over the cliff edges to harvest them. In this case, the lichens were shipped back to Lisbon, for onward export to Antwerp and other places. I throw in photos of Lisbon and Antwerp, respectively, in this general period.
As the Portuguese kept creeping down the coast of western Africa, they discovered another source of orchil-producing lichens in Angola, although there – luckily for the harvesters – the lichens grew on trees and were easier to harvest. This photo is from a completely different part of the world, but it gives a good idea of what Angolan harvesters were faced with.
All this meant that for several centuries large quantities of orchil-producing lichens poured into Europe from European colonies. In the meantime, as the science of chemistry progressed, there were improvements to the manufacturing process which led to the production of better dyes. All was going swimmingly until a young English chemist called Henry Perkin kick-started the artificial dye industry by serendipitously creating a completely new dye, which he called mauveine, from coal tar residues. I’ve covered this story in my post on Indigo dye and insert again here the photo I used of this beautiful dye. That discovery was the death knell of the natural dye industry: artificial dyes were more colour fast, light fast and cheaper. And so making orchil from lichen, and dyeing with lichens more generally, pretty much disappeared. Which actually is probably a good thing. Lichens grow very slowly, so the dye business was decimating them. I never thought I would say this, but for once I’m grateful to chemicals made from fossil fuels. Without them, who knows what would have been the status of lichens today? As it is, they are under threat. Lichens are very sensitive to pollution (one of their modern uses is as indicators of pollution levels), and a good number of species are on the IUCN’s list of endangered species.
So, – ooh, this is hard for me to say – three cheers for the organic chemicals industry!
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. But for reasons that I cannot explain, I have procrastinated. Nevertheless, I have finally got myself to put pen to paper and get to work.
The germ for the post was planted several years ago during a hike my wife and I were taking along the edges of Lake Como. We dropped into a café to have ourselves a cappuccino. There, on a shelf, the café owner had lovingly placed a long row of bottles of gin, all of them some strange colour: pastel yellow, blue, or even – I think – pink. I say “I think”, because the memory of it all is somewhat fuzzy now. At the time, I took a photo of that row of bottles to show to my readers – as I say, I thought immediately of writing a post about gin – but somewhere along the line I decided to delete it, convincing myself I would never get around to writing the post. This photo, which I created with a bit of photoshopping, will have to stand in for that initial vision of mine.
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All those coloured gins startled me. I have since read on the internet that this is the latest fad in gin making – or perhaps, to put it a little more cynically, the latest way for gin makers to differentiate themselves from their competitors. As one internet entry puts it, “coloured gins are having a moment, the latest phase in the great craft gin revival. You can now choose from a whole spectrum, including pink grapefruit gin, Amalfi lemon gin the colour of a pale sunrise, bitter orange gin like alcoholic marmalade and lavender gins that change colour on contact with tonic. But the most popular is violet.”
I dislike to think of myself as a traditionalist, I’ve always been suspicious of tradition, but hello! coloured gin! what is the world coming to?! I am firmly of the opinion that gin should be a colourless liquid to which you add things to enhance its basic taste and possibly – just possibly – add colour.
Talking of gin’s basic taste, I think we all know that this primarily comes from the addition of juniper berries, from juniper trees like this beautiful example.
Juniper is after all in the drink’s name. The ancestor of British gin is Flemish/Dutch jenever. Jenever making was brought to England by traders or by English soldiers returning from fighting in the Low Countries. Linguistic laziness eventually shortened jenever to gin. But my surfing has shown me that today’s gin makers add other “botanicals” to their gin, to distinguish it from everyone else’s. Citrus “notes” seem to be important, imparted by the addition of the peels of lemon, or bitter orange, or lime, or grapefruit. Then small amounts of all manner of spices can be added: anise, fennel, caraway, coriander, licorice, orris, longan, baobab, savory, angelica, cardamom, grains of paradise, cubeb, cinnamon, cassia, nutmeg, almond, saffron … the mind whirls in front of this veritable cornucopia of spices.
And it doesn’t finish there. Even pine needles and cones can be added, or frankincense! Of course, which extra “botanicals” are added are closely guarded secrets.
I wouldn’t want readers to think I am a frequent drinker of gin – unlike the late Queen Elizabeth, who was, I was somewhat astonished to learn, still knocking back two gin-based drinks daily in her nineties: a gin and Dubonnet with lots of ice before lunch, and a dry martini after it.
Several sources
I will just have a gin and tonic from time to time, when the fancy takes me – and when the ingredients are available. Harking back to my earlier harrumphing, readers will see that a G&T is satisfactorily colourless.
I am glad to see that I am in good company in my fondness for G&T. Philip Larkin, a poet whom I greatly admire, was an aficionado. We have him here nursing a G&T.
He once wrote to his lover: “life is very narrow without glasses OF GIN AND TONIC”. Note the capital letters and the plural “glasses” – he imbibed considerably more gin and tonic than I do. He even devoted several lines of one of his poems, Sympathy in White Major, to the making of a gin and tonic:
When I drop four cubes of ice
Chimingly in a glass, and add
Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,
And let a ten-ounce tonic void
In foaming gulps until it smothers
Everything else up to the edge,
I lift the lot in private pledge:
He devoted his life to others.
But in my mind the G&T is also firmly anchored to the colonial period of India, where it was particularly popular among the British colonialists. I’ve read that their excuse for quaffing large amounts of G&T was to ingest quinine as a prophylactic against malaria – tonic water contains quinine. Malaria was certainly a problem in India – my father contracted it while a colonialist in India – but I’ve also read that actually this can only have been an excuse, because there isn’t enough quinine in tonic water to work as a prophylactic. In any event, I throw in a photo of two British colonialists languidly seated and being fanned by an Indian servant. On the table, one can make out what seems to be a glass of G&T.
Although I am now firmly in the G&T camp, my gin drinking habit didn’t start there. I began knocking back gin when I was 17, maybe even 16 – yes, it was easier to get served in pubs when I was young – and my gin drink of choice was what I remember being called a gin and lime, although the proper name for this drink seems to be a gimlet. Again, I am pleased to know that I was in good company. Gimlets play a not insignificant role in Raymond Chandler’s book “The Long Goodbye”.
Early on in the story, the hero, or maybe we should call him the anti-hero, the “hard-boiled” detective Philip Marlowe, meets a friend, who happens to be British, in a bar:
We sat in a corner of the bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”
My British grandmother often had a bottle, but not for making gimlets; I don’t remember her ever drinking anything stronger than a dry sherry. She would make lime drinks for us grandchildren, adding water to a generous portion of Rose’s Lime Juice. Yes, I have very fond memories of that cordial. My reading tells me, though, that today’s mixologists (strange word …) pooh-pooh on Rose’s Lime Juice in its modern form, considering it far sweeter than the Lime Cordial made by the original Mr. Rose. As a result, there is a cottage industry in the production of lime cordials considered to be closer to the Real Thing, and the gimlets made with these revisited cordials are claimed to taste much better. If ever I end up in some bar offering one of these alternative lime cordials, I might try a gimlet. Otherwise, I’ll stick with my G&T, thank you.
Chandler’s tales of Marlowe are great, by the way. If any of my readers have never dipped into them, I highly recommend they pick up a copy. And of course, a good number of his books have been turned into films over the decades. Liam Neeson is the latest well-known actor to play Marlowe, but there have been a number of others before him: Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, Robert Montgomery. But to my mind by far the best Marlowe was Humphrey Bogart, who back in 1946 played him in “The Big Sleep”.
It was also Bogart who, in “Casablanca”, after Ingrid Bergman has entered his nightclub, talked to him, and left, utters the anguished phrase: “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
Marlowe’s friend in “The Long Goodbye” says gimlets beat martinis hollow. I wouldn’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a martini. But I’m sure James Bond – who must be the best known martini drinker in the world – would have disagreed. Here, turning to films again, we have Sean Connery, the greatest of all the James Bonds (at least that’s what I think), preparing himself a martini.
Mind you, I don’t think Bond’s martini is quite the Real Thing, which I read should be a mix of gin and dry vermouth – the precise ratio is of course a source of heated debate in certain mixological circles but the current consensus seems to be around 5 parts gin to one part vermouth. The two should be poured onto ice cubes, stirred not shaken, strained into a chilled cocktail glass, and served with a green olive or twist of lemon peel as garnish.
In his book “Casino Royale”, however, Ian Fleming has Bond ordering another kind of dry martini at the bar in the casino:
‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?’
Sounds like a bit of a Frankenstein martini, if you ask me. And Bond’s well known comment “shaken, not stirred” has mixologists shaking their head in disapproval; it should be the other way around. I’m sure that other famous martini drinker, the late Queen, would have pursed her lips in disapproval, even though, as we know since the 2012 London Olympics, she and Bond were BFFs.
This mention of the House of Windsor lets me segue smoothly to another gin-based drink which I have also never tried, a fruit-based punch using Pimm’s No. 1 Cup as the base. To make it, get a bottle of Pimm’s No. 1 Cup.
This is basically gin in which a whole lot of herbs and some citrus have been macerated; quite what herbs and citrus we are talking about is – of course, as usual – a closely guarded secret. Pour a slug of this potion into a jug, add a generous portion of lemonade, and then bung in sliced and diced vegetables and fruit; which vegetables and fruit exactly is up to you, but I’ve seen mention of cucumbers and celery on the vegetable side and orange and strawberries on the fruit side. The end result will look something like this.
This seems to be quite a posh drink. For instance, we see here King Charles, at a time when he was still a young Prince Charles, gulping down a Pimm’s at a polo game – note polo game, not a football game or rugby game or some other game which we normal mortals take part in or watch.
Following suit from the Royals, the other race goers deck themselves out in their finest, the ladies with those ridiculous hats English women love to wear, the gents in morning suits, which are equally ridiculous.
It’s also very popular at the Henley Royal Regatta, where anyone who is anyone wears a blazer (I think to signal that they belong to a boat club somewhere).
Although not quite in the same posh league these days, Pimm’s is also quaffed in large quantities at Wimbledon. Just because I find him very simpatico, I throw in a photo of Stanley Tucci at Wimbledon clutching his Pimm’s.
I think readers will get the general idea from what I have written above that gin is a very respectable drink these days. Which was certainly not the case a mere three hundred years ago. In the early 1700s, the British government decided – as an anti-French move (so what’s new…) – to greatly increase import duties on French brandy. At the same time, it made it much, much easier for people to get into the business of making gin: it broke the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers on the making of spirits, it reduced taxes on the distillation of spirits, and it revoked the need for a license to make spirits. Add to this the fact that this was a period which saw a drop in the prices of barley – used to make the mash, which was then distilled to obtain the spirits – which very much helped to make the final product cheap. Add also to this the fact that there was a general rise in salaries (from absolutely wretched to slightly less so) and a concomitant general drop in food prices, which meant that the poor had somewhat more disposable income to spend on liquor. Add all of that up and you have the makings of a perfect storm. Thousands of people all over the country got themselves a pot still and started making gin. This is a pretty simple type of pot still.
Many of these new gin makers opened gin-shops to sell their rot-gut. Here, we have a print of a gin shop made towards the end of the 1700s (note that it’s all women and one child; commentators of the time were particularly exercised that this was not just a problem with men).
Many others simply made it at home in their kitchen for their personal consumption.
And rot-gut it was! Pot stills produced a very coarse product, and some pretty awful things were added to make it more palatable. Turpentine was one, to give the stuff “woody notes”. Sulphuric acid was another, although luckily the acid didn’t distill over with the ethanol; it merely reacted with it to form diethyl ether, which added a sweetish taste to the product.
The awful taste didn’t seem to matter very much. People, especially the poor, began drinking huge amounts of gin. What came to be known as the Gin Craze had started. Quite soon, the authorities realised they had a serious social problem on their hands as drunkenness and disorderly behaviour – especially among the poor and involving women as much as men – became endemic. William Hogarth’s print, “Gin Lane”, gives an idea of how the governing classes saw the problem.
By 1736, the Middlesex Magistrates had this to say: “It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years … it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.”
Already in 1734, the story of one Judith Defour had shocked the nation – or at least the superior Sort of People. Judith had taken her two year old daughter out of the workhouse, where she had placed her earlier, for a visit of a few hours, and had met up with her friend Sukey. The court records document what followed:
“On Sunday night we took the child into the fields, and stripp’d it, and ty’d a linen handkerchief hard about its neck to keep it from crying, and then laid it in a Ditch. And after that, we went together and sold the coat and stay for a shilling, and the petticoat and stockings for a groat. We parted the money, and join’d for a quartern of gin.”
The little girl died in the ditch. Defour was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, and hanged at Tyburn (note the grandstands; this was spectacle indeed).
The public outrage over this story forced Parliament to act. Over the next fifteen years, various laws were passed which eventually brought gin drinking under control.
It’s hard not to read about the Gin Craze and think about today’s opioid crisis, or the crack epidemic of the 1980s, or the many previous epidemics of heroin, amphetamines, morphine, and on and on. Different chemicals, same problem: the desire – the need – to dull the pain of living, and a ready supply of cheap chemicals to do it.
And on that sombre note, I will finally crack open a bottle of – colourless – craft gin someone gave us, aromatised – so the label informs me – with juniper of course, but also orange peel, cardamom, angelica root, coriander, ginger, cinnamon, and maybe a few other things, and, more or less in Larkin’s words:
I’ll drop four cubes of ice / Chimingly in a glass, and add / Three goes of gin, a lemon slice, / And let a ten-ounce tonic void / In foaming gulps until it smothers / Everything else up to the edge. / And then I’ll lift the lot and ask myself:
“Am I a superior Sort of Person or an inferior Sort of Person?”
At the end of October, my wife and I did a two-day hike from Gubbio to Assisi, along the Via di San Francesco. As the trail’s name suggests, it centres around the life and times of St. Francis of Assisi. As befits any saint from the Middle Ages, he was the protagonist of a great number of stories, many of which became the subject of the late 13th Century frescoes painted in Assisi and elsewhere after his death in 1226. I will choose some of these to illustrate stories which took place in the localities linked by the trail.
to the north of Assisi, the trail starts at La Verna, where Francis received the stigmata.
As for the southern portion of the trail, it starts in Rome, where Francis went a number of times to keep his movement on the right side of the Church authorities – this fresco depicts his critical first meeting with Pope Innocent III, to receive the pope’s blessing for his nascent movement.
It goes on to Rieti, where Francis came many times. His last visit was shortly before his death, to have an operation on his eyes – he had become nearly blind (the operation failed, alas).
Nearby, while resting and preparing for his operation, he worked on his Canticle of the Sun:
“Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.”
He goes on to praise “Sister Moon”, “Brother Wind”, “Sister Water”, “Brother Fire”, “Sister Mother Earth”. He completed the last verse on “Sister Bodily Death” as he lay dying in Assisi soon after.
In nearby Greccio, he created the first living crèche, using locals as the actors in the drama. It was his way of telling the Christmas story to rural folk, who couldn’t understand the Latin in which the story was normally told.
And it, too, of course ends in Assisi, where Francis’s spiritual journey began and ended. Of the many stories about him that happen in the town, I choose two:
His renunciation of his father and family, stripping himself naked in the town’s piazza and giving his clothes back to his father;
And then there is the tiny church of Porziuncola down in the valley below the town, which Francis had rebuilt and where he loved to spend time. Here is an artist’s rendering of what it looked like in his day. Those two rows of little huts are where the friars stayed.
It was in that church – chapel, really – that Francis heard the priest read out from the Gospel of Matthew the passage where Christ sends his disciples far and wide to proclaim the Good News, with the following instructions: “You received without charge, give without charge. Provide yourselves with no gold or silver, not even with coppers for your purses, with no haversack for the journey or spare tunic or footwear or a staff, for the labourer deserves his keep.” Then and there, he decided that he and his followers would do the same. Thus was born the order of mendicant friars which was to take his name, the Franciscan Order.
Funnily enough, this momentous decision doesn’t feature in any of the frescoes about him – at least, none that I have found. But other stories involving Porziuncola have been the subject of frescoes. I choose three:
His welcoming of Clare when she ran away from her family to join Francis’s movement and eventually established the Order of Poor Clares;
After our two days of hiking, my wife and I spent a day in Assisi. Alas, I can’t say that I liked the town in its modern guise. It’s just a tourist trap, crowded, full of shops selling tourist tat and restaurants selling overpriced food.
Francis would have been horrified at all these shops pushing tourists to consume – and in his name at that. I rather think – I hope – that like Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem he would have gone after all these sellers of tat. Turning once again to Matthew: “Jesus then went into the Temple and drove out all those who were selling and buying there; he upset the tables of the money-changers and the seats of the dove-sellers. He said to them, ‘According to scripture, my house will be called a house of prayer; but you are turning it into a bandits’ den.'” I throw in a painting by El Greco of Jesus wielding the whip in the Temple, one that always comes to my mind when I see these shops in places that are supposed to be havens of religion.
But even the basilica of St. Francis, which one reaches after braving the tourist shops and overpriced restaurants, disappointed me. Yes, it is full of art whose creation supposedly kick-started the Italian Renaissance, and I’ve used many of its frescoes above as illustrations. But I was struck by something I read. In his testament, Francis had specified where he wanted to be buried in Assisi. It was at the far end of the town, its lower end. It was here that convicts were executed and the town’s lepers and other outcasts congregated. Its noisome reputation led to the area being called the “collis Inferni”, the hill of Hell. Francis had often spent time on that hill, ministering to the wretched who eked out a living there. It was of a piece with his beliefs to want to be put to rest in a humble grave among the lowest of the low. Yet, the Church authorities, actively supported by the Franciscan Order’s hierarchy, were having none of that. It was decreed that a splendid basilica would rise on the collis Inferni, turning it into the “collis Paradisi”, the hill of Paradise.
Poor Francis must have been spinning in his coffin when he was finally interred in that basilica, four years after he died. It was a betrayal of everything he stood for.
As for Porziuncola, that humble chapel so beloved by Francis, Pope Pius V in the 16th Century ordered a huge church to be built, Santa Maria degli Angeli.
The ostensible reason for building the church was to better control the flow of pilgrims. The guide books are at pains to point out the bareness of the interior of this mastodontic church, as proof of its respect for Francis’s vows to Lady Poverty. But, standing on the square in front of the church, it is difficult not to see this as one more example of the Church authorities glorifying themselves. I’m certain that Francis would have been horrified.
As I’ve said in an earlier post, I am a great admirer of Francis – not the religious side of him; as I’ve said in another post, I am an atheist and have been since I fell off the straight-and-narrow as a student at University. But his turning away from the material side of life – a core part of the Rule he wrote for his friars being that they should own nothing – makes him truly a man for our times.
I hardly ever allow my professional work to leak into my posts, but today will be different; I suppose it’s because I’m writing this post in Kyoto where I am giving my annual course to university students on precisely this: how we can build a society that has a much smaller footprint. What I tell my students is that after working for 45 years in the environmental field, I have become convinced that our excessive consumption is literally destroying our planet. Look at these photos taken by Peter Menzel. He travelled to different countries and invited households whom he met to put everything they owned out on the street in front of where they lived. This photo is of a family somewhere in North America, a place with one of the highest levels of per capita consumption in the world.
This is all worrying enough. But what’s even more worrying is that people who live in less developed countries, whose levels of ownership and consumption of stuff are still modest, like South Africa
they want to have the same levels of consumption as the richer countries.
That impulse is perfectly understandable. But it cannot be. We cannot all consume at the levels of that North American family, or even of that Japanese family. We must heed Francis’s call to adopt a life shorn of stuff. We must – we must – reduce our levels of consumption, or else we will face an ecological catastrophe. Here, too, Francis is a man for our times because of his views on Nature. Unlike most of his contemporaries, and indeed unlike most of humanity even today, he saw the rest of Nature as equal to us humans. His Canticle to the Sun is an ode to Nature, as relevant today as it was when he wrote it 800 years ago. Of course, his reverence of Nature sprang from his reverence of God – if God created Nature, his argument went, we should revere Nature as God’s work. My position is rather different. Whether we like it or not, we are an intimate part of the world’s biosphere, and if it dies we die. Yet, because of our huge levels of consumption, growing ever huger with every passing year, we are ripping our biosphere apart, one result being that the Earth is losing species at rates which have not been seen in the last 10 million years. Francis, I’m sure, would have been appalled. If we go on like this, we are going towards a general collapse of the world’s ecosystems, which will sweep away our civilisations – for all our cleverness, we will not survive breakdowns in our biological life-support systems.
And finally Francis is a man for our times because he felt closest to the poor, the outcasts, the lowest of the low. Today, we live in a world riven by inequalities. In the photos above, I showed one type of inequality, the inequality between countries. Seemingly, this type of inequality is narrowing, but only to be replaced by a much more insidious inequality, the inequality between the citizens of these countries. Already rich individuals are getting ever richer at the expense of everyone else and don’t care anymore about their fellow citizens. We have to change that. We must – we must – pay more attention to the greater societal good rather than to our own individual desires. Frankly, this is not – as was the case for Francis – a disinterested decision, an “act of love for our fellow men”; it is very self-interested. If we don’t look after those who have been left behind, they will eventually come for us with their pitchforks.
And this should not be an average. Every one of us should have this level of consumption, from the Bezoses and Musks of this world to the homeless that haunt our streets.
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.
It was an exploded view of a hamburger which I saw recently at a fast food joint while my wife was getting coffees that set me off. The hamburger was separated, accordion-like, so that each of its ingredients was clearly separated from the others while still being part of a recognisable whole. I just managed to take a photo before the subway arrived – a bit wonky, given I was in a hurry.
my photo
This exploded hamburger got me asking myself: “How many of the ingredients in that most American, most iconic, of hamburgers, McDonald’s Big Mac, originated in the US?”. Here is a photo of this deliciously yummy – but frightfully-bad-for-you – fast food offering.
Of course, I’m sure that many if not most of the ingredients which are used in a Big Mac sold in the US are grown or raised there, but how many of them originally came from the North American continent in the distant past?
The answer, dear reader, is none. Not a single one of its main ingredients, or even of its not-so-main ingredients, originated in the North American continent.
In case any readers don’t believe me, here is a list of the Big Mac’s ingredients, courtesy of MacDonald’s website. We are informed that the Big Mac contains:
two beef patties
pasteurised process American cheese
shredded lettuce
minced onions
pickle slices
Big Mac sauce
three slices of sesame-seed bun
Now let’s see where all the foodstuffs behind these ingredients came from. Let’s start with the beef patties, which surely – with the bread – are the heart of a hamburger; the rest are just add-ons.
The cattle which give us the beef patties were originally domesticated from the wild auroch in about 8,500 BCE, somewhere in the Levant and/or central Anatolia and/or Western Iran (aurochs were domesticated once more, possibly twice more, but the cattle MacDonald’s use almost certainly come from that first domestication event). Aurochs were hunted by our Cro-Magnon ancestors, who left us beautiful paintings of these beasts on the walls of caves like Lascaux.
Alas, they are now extinct, the last one having perished in 1627 in the Jaktorów forest in Poland. All that’s left are some miserable skeletons in museums.
There is a minor, but important ingredient that goes along with the patties, and that is black pepper, which MacDonald’s tells us that their patties are grilled with. The black pepper vine is native to South and South-East Asia and it was there that farmers began to intentionally grow the vine to harvest its crop. We see it here in the wild.
The domestication of cattle not only led to the patties but also to dairy products, so it’s fitting to deal next with the “pasteurised process American cheese” in the Big Mac.
Source
I don’t know what readers think, but these slices of stuff don’t look like any cheese I’ve ever seen. Nevertheless, McDonald’s assures us that it is actually 60% cheese – 51% cheddar and 9% other, unspecified, cheese. The remaining 40% includes various other milk-related products – whey powder, butter, milk protein – as well as water and of course various other crap – sorry, food additives – which act as emulsifiers, anti-caking agents, colourants, and Lord knows what else. We’ll ignore all those horrors and focus on the milk-related products.
It makes sense to think that the domestication of aurochs – and of the other two main dairy animals, sheep and goats – pretty quickly led our ancestors to exploit their milk as well as their meat. And in fact, our earliest archaeological evidence of dairying is lipid residue in prehistoric pottery found in Southwest Asia, dated to the seventh millennium BCE. This all suggests that once again the Middle East – broadly defined – was the point of origin of all the cow milk-related products – cheese, whey, butter – in that slice of pasteurized process American cheese. To celebrate all these milk products, I throw in various photos. the first is of a farmer’s wife milking a cow. I remember this from my childhood. My French grandmother would send me to the nearby farm with a small jug, which the lady would fill, milking her cow in front of me in the barn.
The third photo celebrates Little Miss Muffet who was eating curds and whey, with curds being the first step in cheese production, before that pesky spider frightened her away.
McDonald’s tells us it uses iceberg lettuce, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter which variety of lettuce they use because all lettuces descend from the same domestication event. We have the ancient Egyptians to thank for first cultivating the lettuce, with the earliest evidence of its cultivation being from about 2700 BCE. Here is a photo of what the first domesticated lettuces looked like (those plants to the left).
I should hastily explain that apart from eating lettuce, the ancient Egyptians believed the plant to be the sacred to Min, the god of reproduction; I don’t think I need to point him out in the photo. The Egyptians thought lettuce helped the god “perform the sexual act untiringly”, because it stood straight and tall and when cut it oozed a semen-like latex. (I wonder if some echo of these beliefs explains why my wife’s maternal grandfather liked to eat a head of lettuce every day?) In any event, as readers can see the ancient lettuce looked quite different from modern lettuces; we have to thank the patient work of countless generations of farmers for that.
We can now turn our attention to the minced onion.
There is no general agreement about where the onion was first domesticated. Many experts think the domestication event took place in Central Asia, but there are partisans for Iran and western Pakistan. As to when it was domesticated, traces of onions have been recovered from Bronze Age settlements in China dated to 5000 BCE, so domestication must have occurred quite a good deal earlier. I throw in a photo of a wild onion plant, although not the plant which was domesticated; it’s not clear to experts which onion plant was.
The wild plant is native to the Himalayan foothills, with a range that stretches from western India all the way to China, but it was the Indians who domesticated it, by at least 3000 BCE. As an example of the Himalayan foothills, I throw in here a picture of a rope bridge across the Alaknanda River near Srinagar in Kashmir, from the late 18th/early 19th Centuries.
This picture is actually a plate in a six-volume book entitled Oriental Scenery, but I have an aquarelle of exactly the same scene, which I picked up at the Dorotheum auction house for a pittance.
But back to the topic in hand. Of course, it’s not just cucumbers we need here, we also need vinegar to pickle them (pickling is also possible with salt and other things, but MacDonald’s lists vinegar as one of the ingredients for its pickle slices). The first documented evidence of the deliberate making of vinegar (rather than an alcoholic beverage spoiling and turning into vinegar) was in Mesopotamia, in about 3000 BCE. Not surprisingly, the earliest evidence of pickling in vinegar has also been found in Mesopotamia, from around 2400 BCE, with archaeological evidence of cucumbers in particular being pickled there from 2030 BCE.
We now have to tackle the special Big Mac sauce, which I think readers will agree – or at least those who will admit to having eaten a Big Mac – is the clou of this fast food offering. Let’s be frank, without that yummy, finger-lickin’ly-delicious sauce the Big Mac would be rather bland.
Of course, MacDonald’s keeps the precise recipe a closely guarded secret, a commercial tactic which I’ve commented on before, and their bald list of ingredients doesn’t really tell you how exactly the sauce is put together. Luckily, however, litres of electronic ink have been spilled all over the internet detailing people’s attempts to recreate the sauce, and these give us the basic “design” of the sauce. It is just a mix of mayonnaise and “sweet relish”.
The mayo part gives us a number of new ingredients to consider: egg yolks, oil, and mustard (as part of a “spice mix”). Vinegar is of course also required to make mayonnaise, but we have already covered that. As for the sweet relish part, that’s just our friend pickled cucumber with sugar added. So all we need to consider is the sugar which is added as sweetener. (In all this, I am ignoring the evil food additives which MacDonald’s throws into the mix, to emulsify and thicken and make even sweeter and preserve and firm up and, and, and …).
Egg yolks is really the story of the domestication of the chicken; this is one case where the chicken comes before the egg. The chicken was domesticated from the red junglefowl in about 6,000 BCE in Southeast Asia. There are still wild red junglefowl padding through the jungle undergrowth. They are magnificent creatures – at least, the males are.
My wife and I were lucky enough to see junglefowls, or chickens that were still quite junglefowlish, in Indonesia. Really lovely creatures.
Interestingly enough, the red junglefowl may have originally been domesticated not for food but for cockfighting. Here is a Roman mosaic of a cock fight, when the practice was already centuries old.
It was only later that chickens became a major source of eggs and later still a major source of meat – the earliest archaeological evidence of large-scale eating of chickens is only from about 400 BCE.
As for the oil which goes into the mayonnaise, recipes in different parts of MacDonald’s website list soybean oil in one place and rapeseed oil in another. I presume this simply means that the choice of oil depends on availability. Let’s start with soybean oil. Given the popularity of soy products in East Asia, I’m sure it will come as no surprise to readers to learn that it was in that part of the world that soybean plants were first domesticated. In fact, it seems to have been domesticated several times. The oldest domestication event was in China, some time between 7000 and 6000 BCE, with another domestication event in Japan some 2000 years later and yet another in Korea some 6000 years later. Here we have modern Chinese farmers bringing in the soybean harvest.
For rapeseed, on the other hand, the honour for first domestication seems to go to India, which is where the earliest evidence of domesticated rapeseed, dated at 2000 BCE, has been found. That being said, it should be pointed out that it was only very, very recently – in the 1970s, in Manitoba, Canada – that a cultivar of rapeseed was created that produced edible oil, which is really what interests us for the Big Mac special sauce. Before that, a chemical naturally present in rapeseed oil gave it a disagreeable taste, so it was only used for such things as oil for lamps. Which explains why it’s only in the last 50-some years that the European countryside has become covered with acre after monotonous acre of yellow-flowered rapeseed being grown to produce edible oil.
The mustard-spice mix is such a small part of the overall Big Mac that it doesn’t get a picture om MacDonald’s website. But mustard is an interesting plant, which I’ve written about in an earlier post. It’s a complicated plant. For starters, focusing for a minute on the seeds – which is what we are interested in from a condiments point of view – there are three types: black, brown and white seeds. Each come from different plants with their individual domestication histories.
Sources: various Amazon sites
The first two are the most common, and of these two MacDonald’s almost certainly uses brown seeds, for the simple reason that a cultivar of the plant has been developed where the seed pods don’t shatter when harvested, whereas such a cultivar doesn’t exist for black mustard (having seed pods which don’t shatter during harvesting is incredibly important; the last thing you need when you harvest a seed crop is to have the pods shatter and the precious seeds scatter all over the ground). So here is the plant Brassica juncea which was domesticated to give us brown seeds.
But it was also separately domesticated for its edible root, leaves, and stem, and it has been difficult for scientists to distinguish between these various domestication events. Nevertheless, the latest analyses suggest that the plant was first domesticated for its seeds in what is now Afghanistan, in about 2000 BCE.
All that being said, the critical point about mustard – what makes mustard powder become the fiery condiment we know today – is its mixing with liquids, often nowadays vinegar. Although the vinegar in the mayonnaise is playing another role, I have to assume that when the powdered mustard seeds are added to the mix, their fire is unleashed (my earlier post explains the biochemistry). The Ancient Romans were the first to come up with this innovation – “mustard” comes, via the French, from the Latin “mustum ardens”, fiery must. It seems that the Romans liked to use must as the liquid to set mustard seeds off.
Which brings us to the sugar in the sweet relish part of the Big Mac sauce. Here, too, there is a complication, because MacDonald’s could easily be sourcing their sugar from two quite different sources: sugar extracted from sugar cane or from sugar beet. Let’s start with sugar cane, the oldest of the two sources. Modern sugar cane is the result of an initial domestication event and then a key hybridisation event. The initial domestication event took place in New Guinea, in about 4000 BCE, when the Papuans domesticated the wild grass Saccharum robustum to create S. officinarum. This domesticate travelled west to Island Southeast Asia (mostly what we call today Indonesia), where, at some point, it hybridised with S. spontaneum, another species of the family. Without this hybridisation, sugar cane would not have become the global crop it is today because S. spontaneum gave the resultant cross high tolerance to environmental stress. We have here a rather pretty botanical painting of S. officinarum, much nicer than photos of fields of sugar cane, which are really monotonous.
One further important technical innovation took place in about 350 CE, in India. Until then, people had drunk the juice squeezed from the cane. It was the Indians who first figured out how to turn the juice into the granulated sugar we know and use today. A useless factoid: the word “sugar” derives from the Sanskrit word sharkara, which means “gravel” or “sand”.
How about sugar from beetroot? This has a much, much shorter history than any of the other ingredients considered up to now, with the exception of the edible form of rapeseed oil. It wasn’t until the 18th Century, in Prussia, that a cultivar of the beetroot was developed which contained high enough levels of sugar to make it competitive with sugar cane. This is a rare case where we know the names of the people who were responsible. It was the Prussian scientists Franz Karl Achard and Moritz Baron von Koppy and his son, although the initial impulse – and funds – for their efforts came from Frederick the Great, who wanted to develop a local source of sugar. That being said, the French really pushed the development of sugar beet. It started with Napoleon, who was looking for another source of sugar to take the place of the Caribbean cane sugar whose import into France was being blockaded by the filthy English. Here is a French sugar beet factory from 1843.
This is what sort of holds all the other ingredients together (I say sort of, because my experience with Big Macs is that, well lubricated by the Big Mac sauce, the other ingredients tend to slide out from between the bread slices onto the table or, worse, onto my trousers). Going back once again to the list of ingredients on MacDonald’s website, I can see that there are only two primary ingredients in the bun that I need to discuss, the wheat flour and the sesame seeds sprinkled over the top bun. I’ve already covered the other major ingredients, sugar and oil (soybean or rapeseed). (And of course I am once again ignoring all the filthy food additives which are also part of the recipe. I’ve also decided not to go on a rant about the fact that MacDonald’s uses wheat flour fortified with iron and various B vitamins. I will limit myself to say that if they used whole grain flour, all these micro-nutrients would still be in the flour and there would be no need for the flour producers to add them back in).
Although there are a number of different wheats, it’s almost certain that MacDonald’s uses common wheat, Triticum aestivum, to make their buns; this variety makes up about 95% of wheat produced worldwide; the remaining 5% is durum wheat. The origin story of common wheat is similar to that of cane sugar: an initial domestication, in this case of emmer wheat, followed by a hybridisation with wild goat-grass. Emmer wheat was first domesticated in about 10,000 BCE, in what is now southern Turkey, while archaeological evidence from the same general area suggests that its hybridisation with wild goat-grass had already occurred by about 6500 BCE. Here is a photo of wild emmer wheat in its natural environment.
Which brings us to our final ingredient, the sesame seeds sprinkled on top of the bun. The plant on which the seeds grow, Sesamum indicum, originated – as its scientific name indicates – in India. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Indians had domesticated the plant by at least 3500 BCE. This photo shows another side of the plant, its rather lovely flower.
So, like I said at the beginning, not one of the ingredients in that uber-American fast food product the Big Mac originated in North America. Which in a way is strange; I read somewhere that approximately 60% of the food consumed worldwide originated from the Americas. I’m guessing that the massive consumption of maize around the world is primarily responsible for that, with potatoes, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes adding to it. But actually, given the history of North America’s colonisation, it is not so strange.
When we step back and look at where all the Big Mac’s ingredients originated, we can see that the great majority of them came from somewhere between the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Over the millennia, the domesticates moved west into Europe (as well into East Asia and Africa, but it’s the movement into Europe which interests us). My sense – perhaps completely unfounded – is that much of this movement came about peacefully, in many possible ways. A farmer got hold of seeds from their neighbour and tried them out, and then other farmers got seeds from that farmer, and so on, spreading seeds in a sort of ripple effect. Or maybe seeds moved with marriages, with women (probably) bringing seeds from their village. Or maybe people picked up new seeds as they travelled to foreign places for trade or other reasons. Maybe new foodstuffs were actually part of trades: “I give you this fine bronze dagger for seeds of that new foodstuff you have there”. Or maybe foodstuffs were gifts between rulers.
No doubt some movement of foodstuffs also came about through aggression. For instance, there could have been forced displacement of one group of people by another carrying their own seeds. This could have been the case when farming people, bringing their foodstuffs, cereals especially, migrated into Europe from Anatolia and replaced the original hunter-gathering people there – although I’ve also read that the hunter-gatherers simply got absorbed into the new farming societies; I’ve also recently read that perhaps there were few if any hunter-gatherers left to replace because they had been wiped out by bubonic plague – a bit like what happened in the Americas. Or maybe new foodstuffs were part of the booty of conquest. If you conquered a new land, you checked out its foodstuffs and brought back what you thought could be used by your people. I can imagine that the Ancient Egyptians’ wars against the Assyrians could have been one way new foodstuffs entered Egypt. And it is often suggested that Alexander the Great’s armies came back from the East with new foodstuffs in their baggage (I mentioned something similar in my recent post on Tabasco peppers, suggesting that American soldiers fighting in Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 could have brought seeds of the Tabasco pepper back to the US).
However it happened, by the time European colonists arrived in North America, all the foodstuffs in the Big Mac were part of their agricultural baggage. Quite naturally, they brought their foodstuffs with them as well as their culinary habits. Initially, when the colonists were few and the balance of forces more even between them and the Native Americans, they were happy to try Native American food – isn’t that what Thanksgiving celebrates? But as more and more colonists arrived, they pushed aside the Native Americans and created a “little Europe”, mostly eating the foods of their homelands. It was in this context that the Big Mac was born. Basically, it was a European dish created in the USA by Americans of European heritage.
It’s a pity, I think, that not more of the foodstuffs Native Americans were eating have stayed in the American diet. Apart from anything else, it could help make American food systems more resilient in the face of climate change, since the native foodstuffs belong to the American ecosystem while the imported foodstuffs do not. But it would require a lot of work. Many of the foods that Native Americans were eating were wild – there was little farming in North America when the Europeans started arriving, the Native Americans were primarily hunter-gatherers – so the whole process of domesticating them would have to be undertaken. With modern, scientific methods, maybe that could be done faster than in the past. But it would still require time, effort – and money. Who would spend the money? But still, if you take a spin through the internet, you find a lot of people trying to recover Native American foods and dishes. How about merging the old with the new? Could we redesign the Big Mac to make it only with North American ingredients, I wonder?
My wife and I recently completed our annual hike in the Dolomites. It was, as usual, a wonderful trip. I throw in a couple of photos to give readers a taste of what we saw.
My photoMy photoMy photoMy photo
But, wonderful though it was, the hike is not the subject of this post. The subject is a flower.
It was on our last day and we were heading down back into the valley. We had passed the tree line and were walking through woods when we came across this stand of lupins, the flowers glistening blue, pink, and white in the sun.
my photo
I have to tell readers that lupins are one of my favourite flowers, especially when they grow wild like this on the side of the road. Upon seeing them, I was immediately reminded of a similar stand of lupins we drove past one summer holiday when my wife and I (the children had already flown the coop) were driving around the north of Scotland. I don’t think I took a photo, and even if I did I have no idea where it is, so this photo from the internet will have to stand in for that Scottish vision of yesteryear.
It also reminded me of an incident from a long, long time ago when I was a boy – maybe 12 years old? – at boarding school. We were on our way back by bus from an away game of cricket when I spotted, close to the roadside and not far from the turn-off to the school, a lupin or two. I decided I would try to dig one of them up and put it in the little patch of land I had been assigned to grow things in (I remember carrots but also marigolds and sweet williams). But the lupins being off school property, I had to get permission from the headmaster. He looked at me doubtfully if not downright suspiciously, but he eventually gave me permission. Thinking about it, I don’t think I would have got permission today. It required me to cross and walk along a main road for 50-100 metres. I suppose school authorities were more lackadaisical then. They trusted us students more, parents were much less likely to sue, and there were considerably less cars on the roads sixty years ago. In any event, off I went, armed with a spade, up through the little wood where we did our scouting on Sundays, crossed the road and walked along it till I reached the patch of lupins, and got to work with my spade. It was a complete washout. I hadn’t reckoned with the stone-hard ground and the plant’s very long tap root. After sweating away ineffectually for 20 minutes, I gave up and went back to the school. I just hope I didn’t fatally wound the lupin which I had targeted. In memory of this incident, I throw in a photo of lupins on the verge of a road.
Of course, lupins have been used as ornamentals in formal gardens for a long, long time. Here is a modern example, lupins in the gardens of Chatsworth House in England.
Personally, I prefer them wild: “We were born / Born to be wild / We can climb so high / I never wanna die”, as Steppenwolf sang a year or so after my futile attempt to dig up that roadside lupin.
I may find lupins beautiful, but I’m not sure that this was an emotion which stirred early inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula who domesticated Lupinus graecus some time before 2000 BC, more or less at the time of the transition to the Bronze Age. Here is a photo of L. graecus in modern Greece.
I would imagine that these Balkan inhabitants, rather than saying “wow! that’s a lovely patch of flowers” would have said something like “hmm, can this plant feed me?”, “can it cure my ills?” or maybe even (given that I’m reading a book about fungi) “can it bend my mind and let me commune with the gods?” Food seems to have been the main reason lupins were domesticated: after the flowers come the beans – not as beautiful but certainly more useful, loaded as they are with plant-based protein.
Or at least potentially more useful, because the beans are actually difficult and possibly even dangerous to eat! Unlike other beans in the legume family, they contain alkaloids which make them bitter to the taste and even toxic. Somehow, though, our early ancestors figured out that if they soaked the beans and washed them well they became edible.
And so started a habit which continues to this day throughout the Mediterranean region, the eating of brined or pickled lupin beans.
Source
I discovered through a colleague of mine who works in Egypt that eating lupin beans is very popular there, especially during the very ancient Sham el-Nessim festival, which marks the beginning of spring. Here, we have Egyptians going out for the traditional picnic, in which lupin beans play a role along with many other foodstuffs.
But my colleague, who is from the south of Italy, told me that they also eat lupin beans in her part of the world, commonly as a snack to be served with a beer, rather than peanuts as might be the case elsewhere. And Peroni beer is the go-to beer.
And you will find lupin bean eaters from Spain to Portugal, from Morocco to Algeria, from Lebanon to Israel and Palestine. And of course in Greece, the original European source of this foodstuff.
I say “European” because it wasn’t only in Europe that people figured out a way of eating lupin beans. The European lupins have a lot of distant cousins in the Americas. They got separated from each other when plate tectonics broke up the ancient continent of Laurasia and the pieces that later became North America and Europe drifted away from each other. Later still, the North American lupins migrated into South America. Which allowed the inhabitants of the high Andes in what is today Peru to domesticate their local lupin some time in 600-700 BC.
Like the Europeans, they learned to eat the beans by washing them thoroughly. The habit of eating lupin beans spread to other parts of the Americas. For instance, there were tribes in Arizona which grew and ate the beans. Eating lupin beans in the Americas nearly died out – it seems the European colonisers and their descendants weren’t particularly interested in this particular crop – but there is now a bit of a comeback. We have here a photo from a project by the Inter-American Development Bank promoting the lupin.
I could witter on at length about the other ways we have made lupins useful to us: as a green manure (like all legumes, lupins have the ability to fix nitrogen from the air), as a source of feed for farm animals (but only after scientists were able to crack the problem of producing a form of lupin with alkaloid-free beans in the 1920s and ’30s). I could also trill on about how they might be even more useful to us in the future: as an alternative to soybean as a feed (this hopefully helping to reduce deforestation rates in the Amazon, where much of the world’s soybean is now grown), as a raw material for making vegan alternatives to meat, egg, and dairy products (lupin beans contain high levels of plant-based protein). But I won’t, because in the end what I love about lupins is their beauty and not their utility (I can now confess to never having eaten a single lupin bean in my life). So I invite any readers who are interested in knowing more about the utilitarian aspects of the lupin to read this post, and I finish with another photo of beautiful lupins, this time from Prince Edward Island in Canada.
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.
the heart thrills 
