Italy – the heart thrills

THREE DAYS IN VERONA

Milan, 12 February 2026

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went on a quick three-day trip to Verona. We’d made a lightning visit there a few years ago, when we had a couple of hours to wait at the station for our train connection. I have no memory of that visit other than standing in front of a balcony purported to be the one where Juliet stood while talking to Romeo (“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” etc.) and wondering what on earth the fuss was about – as far as we could tell, 90% of the tourists flocking to Verona had come to see this.

This time, we were determined to keep completely away from anything related to the two “star-cross’d lovers”, and we succeeded admirably. I have to say, we were greatly aided in this by relying on an old and well-thumbed guidebook of the Touring Club Italiano, which my parents-in-law had bought way back when.

It had been published in 1958, long, long before the current instagram- and TikTok-fuelled hysteria about Romeo and Juliet, and so had not a word to say about them. For the first two days, we faithfully followed the two itineraries suggested in the guide, while we spent the third day visiting a couple of art museums.

So, “let us go and make our visit”, as T.S. Eliot intoned.

Since our Flixbus from Milan arrived at around lunchtime, we actually started proceedings by going to lunch – always good to start a visit on a full stomach! My wife had identified a trattoria that looked interesting, the Osteria A Le Petarine, at the far end of the old city. To work up an appetite, we walked up there. That took us through Porta Borsari, an ancient city gate that started life as the main gate in the city’s ancient Roman walls.

We continued up corso Porta Borsari, the old decumanus maximus of Roman Verona, and now a pleasant pedestrianised street.

After a few dog legs through the narrow streets of the old town, we finally arrived at the trattoria.

My wife was not persuaded by her choice, but I had an excellent Pastisada de caval, a dish of horse meat stew laid on a bed of polenta.

After lunch, we headed over to our hotel, dropped off our bags, and sallied forth on our first itinerary. This took us first to piazza delle Erbe, which has been the centre of Verona’s civic life since Roman times, when this was the forum.

It’s unfortunate that the square has been invaded by stalls selling tourist tat. It’s difficult to get a clear view of the square now.

The itinerary instructed us to next take a small street leading off the square, which took us to the Arche Scaligere, the tombs of the Della Scala family, which was Verona’s most famous family, ruling the city in the Middle Ages.

The itinerary then led us to Santa Anastasia, the first of four churches we were to visit. We would have visited a few more churches, but they were closed the day we tried to visit them (I think my wife was quite relieved by that; it is possible to have too much of a good thing).

Santa Anastasia’s facade, the first part of the church we saw, was nothing to write home about, and in fact I later read that it was never completed (a problem in Italy which I’ve complained about in an earlier post).

The inside was a different story: tall, airy, and with a ceiling painted with a vegetation motif. It quite put a bounce in my step to see all that exuberance on the ceiling.

Of the internal details, there were a couple of frescoes and paintings by Worthy Artists, but the one that caught my eye was these two holy water fonts. I’ve never seen any fonts quite like these.

The itinerary next took us to the Duomo. It was early evening by now, so our visit was hampered by a lack of light. Whether it was that or simply that there wasn’t much to see in the Duomo, I have only vague memories of it. Nevertheless, I’ll throw in a few photos from the internet.
The exterior:

A view of the inside:

The one detail that caught my attention, this semicircular choir screen that encloses the presbytery:

After which, we decided to call it a day (or rather night since by now it was pitch black) for our sightseeing.

But we weren’t ready for bed yet! My wife had got us tickets to a show where a dance troupe danced to Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps.

The music was lovely, the dancing rather less so. Nevertheless, it was a very pleasant end to the day.

The next day saw us pick up the second itinerary a few streets away from our hotel. The first stop was the church of San Fermo Maggiore.

It’s actually two churches in one. The lower church is the oldest. Its low ceiling gave the space an intimate feeling.

The most interesting detail was the frescoes which decorated many of the pillars. My wife and I agreed that this 11th Century fresco, of the Baptism of Christ, was the most remarkable.

But I also liked this fresco from the same period, of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the baby Jesus.

We also agreed that this modern sculpture, of the Annunciation, was wonderful.

The normal iconography is something along these lines: an angel – obvious because of its wings – on one side, announcing the message, and the Virgin Mary, modestly attired and sitting or standing, reading a book, on the other (I’ve chosen the Annunciation by Pinturicchio as my example).

But here you have what looks like two young women, adolescent girls almost, one, the angel, whispering the message to the other, the Virgin Mary. In case any readers are interested, it is by the South Tyrolian sculptor Hermann Josef Runggaldier.

We then climbed the stairs to the upper church. After the intimacy of the lower church, the space felt majestic.

The most remarkable aspect of this church was its wooden ceiling.

It was built in the first half of the 1300s and by some miracle it has survived until now (I think with melancholy of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, whose centuries-old forest of oak logs in its ceiling caught fire back in 2019 and nearly burned the whole cathedral down).

This funerary monument for Niccolò Brenzoni, from the early 1400s, was also arresting.

The itinerary now took us to the River Adige, which encloses the old town in a large hairpin bend.

It had us cross the river and walk along its bank. We got to admire the church of Santa Anastasia and its campanile from the back, much nicer than from the front.

We passed the old Roman bridge, much remodeled over the centuries (and partially destroyed by the Germans, who blew it up when they retreated out of Verona in 1945).

We passed the old Roman theatre which had been carved into the side of the hills running alongside the river. It has been turned into a modern outdoor theater.

But this is what it looked like to us as we walked past it, some mouldering walls with houses built on top of it.

The skyline was now dominated by the church San Giorgio in Braida, which sits next to the river.

Alas! A visit was not possible because the church was closed. No matter! We admired the view of the Duomo across the river.

And since we were beginning to feel a bit peckish, my wife used this pause to find another trattoria in the vicinity where we could have lunch. She discovered the Osteria A La Carega, located down a small road which we took just after we had recrossed the Adige.

We shared a pasta e fagioli as a first, after which I had a trippa alla Parmigiana while my wife chose a cotechino con puré. Delicious!

Nourished and refreshed, we picked up the itinerary again. It now took us to piazza Bra, a large square along one side of which stands what is probably Verona’s most well-known monument, the ancient Roman amphitheatre.

We couldn’t actually see much of the amphitheatre since workers were busily getting it ready for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games. The square itself is very pleasant, with a row of cafes along one side (mostly tourist traps, unfortunately)

And with a little garden in the middle (we see the wall of the amphitheatre on the left).

The itinerary now took us back to the river. We skirted the Castelvecchio (we would be visiting its art museum tomorrow) and admired the view of the ponte Scaligero over the River Adige, behind the castle.

As we discovered the next day at the art museum, it was a view that had been painted by Bernardo Bellotto in about 1745.

Little seems to have changed in the intervening centuries.

The itinerary drew us along the river and then through a maze of little streets to the church of San Zeno. As we entered into the piazza, this was the view that greeted us.

In particular, the main door was fantastic (although you only see it from inside the church). It is made up of 48 bronze tiles, produced in the 11th and 12th Centuries.

Each tile represents a story about Jesus or, more rarely, Saint Zeno. Here are close-ups of a couple of the tiles, just to whet readers’ appetite. From left to right, they represent the washing of the disciples’ feet by Jesus, and the Last Supper.

The interior was light and airy.

There was a hodgepodge of frescoes on the walls, all very pleasant.

But the fresco that really caught my eye was a giant St. Christopher.

It was nice to see this gentle giant again after my sightings of him in one of our hikes in Austria last summer. No doubt he was there to greet pilgrims from Central Europe who had come over the Brenner Pass and walked down the valley of the Adige River, on their way to Rome or Jerusalem.

Our visit to San Zeno brought us to the end of the second itinerary. We celebrated with a nice cup of tea in a bar across from the church, and then slowly made our way back to our hotel.

On our final day in Verona, we visited two museums, both dedicated to Veronese artists. We started with the museum in Castelvecchio, which was once the castle of the Della Vecchia family.

The collection goes from the Middle Ages to the 18th Century. My wife and I both agreed that the statuary from the Middle Ages was the most interesting. Here is a sample:

A most expressive St. Catherine

I’ve never seen a Medieval statue look at you in that way!

Christ on the cross

I’ve never seen such a suffering Christ!

A Sant’Anna Metterza, a formalised composition where the Virgin Mary, holding baby Jesus, sits on the lap of her mother, St. Anne.

I’ve always found this such an improbable situation: what grown woman would ever sit on the lap of her mother!? But it was a popular subject. Famously, Leonardo da Vinci painted a version.

The equestrian statue of Cangrande Della Scala, the greatest of the Della Scala family.

From the broad smile on his face, Cangrande must have been a very merry fellow.

After the visit, it was time for lunch. We chose a restaurant near Castelvecchio, but unfortunately it turned out to be a tourist trap, so I won’t bother to report on what we ate. We then walked back up to the Piazza delle Erbe; the second museum we visited, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti, was installed in the old Palazzo della Ragione, which gives on the square.

It covered the 19th and the first part of the 20th Centuries. To be frank, there wasn’t much in the collection that struck me. This statue, of a young woman wearing a hat typical of the 1920s, was one of the few pieces that caught my attention.

Otherwise, a couple of paintings which showed views of the city from the top of the hills above the old Roman theatre made me regret that our old guidebook hadn’t included an itinerary taking us up into those hills. Here is a view of the city from the top of those hills.

With that, our visit to Verona was over. We walked down another of the city’s very pleasant pedestrianised streets, via Mazzini, which runs from piazza delle Erbe to piazza Bra.

And then on down Corso Porta Nuova, a broad avenue running through the newer part of the city.

And so back to the bus stop to take our Flixbus back to Milan.

SEAPLANES OVER LAKE COMO

Sori, 31 January 2026

One of the gentler walks my wife and I take from Como is one which takes us along the lakeside all the way to Cernobbio. We choose it when one (or both) of us are feeling tired or have a pain somewhere in our ageing bodies or when it’s really too cold to venture higher up on the hills around the lake.

We start at the train station of Como Lago (which is a charming rinky-dink little station with an entrance in Liberty style, much nicer than the rather grim main station at Como).

We walk along Como’s newly developed lake front (which will look very nice when the newly-planted trees have grown).

We pass the town’s war memorial (which I must confess I find rather brutalist).

We pass the soccer stadium which is home to the town’s home team, Como 1907 (which looks quite nice in this aerial view, although all we see are the forbidding outer walls).

We pass the site of the Aero Club Como, which offers scenic flights around the lake in seaplanes.

We then walk along a walkway that hugs the lakeside and takes us past a series of neoclassical villas giving onto the lake.

The walkway ends at a busy main road. We walk along the road, with lovely views across the lake to our right.

The road brings us to the old village of Tavernola (now a drab suburb of Como), where we branch off along a long straight road that passes the Liberty-style villa Bernasconi, once the property of a rich manufacturer of silk and now a museum.

After which we finally arrive in Cernobbio.

At this time of the year, when it’s too cold to eat a picnic outside, we’ll often treat ourselves to lunch at the Osteria del Beuc.

The last time I was there, I had a magnificent osso buco with risotto.

One of the pleasures of the section of the walk along the busy main road (apart from getting to nod hello to a mouldering statue of St. John Nepomuk down by the water’s edge) is watching the seaplanes from Aero Club Como taking off and landing.

I’m very fond of these seaplanes. There’s something quite beautiful about these little planes skimming across the water, their engines at full throttle, finally rising off the water surface and soaring up, up, up

and then banking to fly along the lake, the drone of their engines bouncing off the hills (I love the noise of prop engines, so much nicer than the ear-splitting whine of jet engines).

During the years between World Wars I and II, the use of seaplanes flourished: the “airfields” were free, compared to the high cost of building airfields on land. Various commercial lines were established, giving rise to some wonderful poster art.

Things changed dramatically after the Second World War. Many of the military airfields which had been built during the war were no longer needed and could be turned over to civilian use. Suddenly, land-based airfields were available cheap, and so the main competitive advantage of seaplanes disappeared. On top of that, land-based planes were much less affected by weather (even small waves could halt seaplane flights) and they flew faster (the aerodynamics of seaplanes are poorer). The result was a swift decline in the use of seaplanes, which are now squeezed into a few niche uses, like aerial firefighting, access to undeveloped or roadless areas which have numerous lakes, air transport around archipelagos …

… as well, of course, as the offering of scenic flights over dramatic lakes.

In the late 1940s, 1947 I’m guessing, My parents took what was probably one of the last long-distance seaplane flights offered by BOAC, which ran between Sydney and Southampton. They boarded at Karachi and stopped off at Bahrain, Cairo, Augusta in Sicily, and Marseilles, before arriving in Southampton.

The scene of their arrival in Southampton would have looked something like this.

Once, in a moment of madness, as we watched a seaplane gracefully lift off Lake Como, I excitedly suggested to my wife that we take one of the scenic flights offered by the Aereo Club. A check of the prices soon put paid to that idea. Ah well, another experience of my parents which I will never share.

IL QUARTO STATO

Milan, 14 January 2026

There is an expression in Italian which goes like this: “Whoever does X on the first of the year will do X for the whole of the year”, where X can be anything you would like to do (or should do) throughout the year. Well, it wasn’t the first the year, but it was pretty close when my wife and I visited an art exhibition, hopefully a herald of many more visits to art exhibitions during 2026 .

The exhibition in question, at Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, was not one of those blockbuster affairs covering an incredibly famous artist and attracting droves of visitors. It centred on the Italian artist Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, who was born in 1868 and died in 1907. Here is a self-portrait of the man, a painting which greeted us when we stepped into the first room of the exhibition.

I will perfectly understand if any of my readers confess to never having heard of this artist. I had never heard of him before I came to Italy, and I was to live in Italy quite a number of years before I came across him. If he is known at all, it is because of one, magnificent, painting. It was in the exhibition, but at the very end. So let me first show my readers a selection of his works that my wife and I passed as we wandered along through the exhibition. The paintings were hung in more or less chronological order, so we could appreciate how his style developed over the years.

An old man, a certain Signore Giuseppe Giani, staring out at us solemnly.

Executed in 1891, the painting’s formal title is “Il Mediatore”, which I think would be translated as broker or agent. Not sure what Signor Giani would have brokered: land deals, perhaps? Very classical in its execution, I would say.

“Panni al Sole”, Washing in the Sun, painted a few years later, in 1894-5, when Pellizza was intensively exploring Divisionism, Italy’s response to Pointillism.

Those predominantly yellow hues in the painting remind me of an exhibition of Dutch pointillists which my wife and I saw a few years ago in Vienna. Unfortunately, although Pellizza used divisionism in all of his paintings from this moment on, he didn’t follow the more modern painters of the age. His subjects always tended to the sucrose. The exhibition notes called this style Symbolism. Maybe they were full of symbolism, but I couldn’t get away from the chocolate-box feeling of his paintings. Here we have “Speranze Deluse”, Dashed Hopes, painted in 1894, so at the same time as “Panni al Sole”.

And here we have a series of three paintings , all titled “l’Amore nella Vita”, Love in Life, painted between 1901 and 1903.

The summer of young love, the autumn of middle-aged love, the winter of old love. As I say, rather sucrose – although as a person who is now an oldie I gazed at the old love and saw something I suppose we oldies all fear, the loss of the partner of a lifetime and the loneliness of the last years.

After all the sugar, it was relief to find this painting in the next room, a sober rendition of snow, from 1905-06.

Turning around, this painting from 1904 had me pause. It is of the rising sun, at that moment when it appears over the horizon in a flash of brilliance. I feel Pellizza captured that moment very well (and by the way, his divisionist style is very noticeable in the sun’s rays).

And so we moved on to the exhibition’s last painting, completed in 1901, the majestic “Quarto Stato”, The Fourth Estate.

A small photo like this doesn’t do justice to the original, which is 3m high by 5.5m wide. Nevertheless, it will have to do. The painting showcases workers marching, calmly and confidently, for their rights and into a bright future. The title takes up the idea that the proletariat which the Industrial Revolution created had become a fourth estate, adding to the three estates of aristocracy, clergy, and bourgeoisie which existed in pre-revolutionary France.

Initially, the painting was ignored. The Italian bourgeois, the ones who went to exhibitions and bought paintings, were turned off by a painting with such obvious socialist connotations. It stayed in the family’s possession. Then, in the early 1920s, at a time when Milan’s municipal government was strongly left-leaning, the government raised money to buy it. It was hung in Milan’s castle, the Castello Sforzesco, for all the world to see. Then, during the Fascist period, when Socialism was a dirty word, it was quietly rolled up and consigned to the castle’s basement, only to be fished out after the war and hung again, this time in Milan’s main municipal office. After which, it became very popular in left-leaning circles. Bernardo Bertolucci, for instance, in his film Novecento, which is a study of the agricultural working class in northern Italy over the first fifty years or so of the 20th Century, used a close-up of the painting as a backdrop for the film’s opening credits

while the painting itself acted as a background to the film’s poster.

Others on the left used the painting as a template to create their own images. Here is one, a group of people celebrating May 1st. They hold a red flag and have obviously copied the Quarto Stato in their composition.

There have also been less serious uses of Quarto Stato. Dylan Dog, for instance, an iconic horror-mystery comics series very popular in Italy, used Quarto Stato’s composition many times over on its covers. Here is one from 1991.

It’s even been used in publicity. Here is an ad for Lavazza coffee from 2000.

I’m not sure what Pellizza would have thought of these trivialisations of his painting. He was a sincere Socialist. But I suppose all publicity is good publicity.

Just to finish Pellizza’s story. His wife – she is the model for the woman with the baby in the foreground of the painting – died in childbirth in 1907, together with the child. Soon after, Pellizza’s father died. In anguish, Pellizza committed suicide; he was just shy of his 39th birthday. Who knows what paintings he might have gone on to produce?

I’ve seen that Volpedo, the little town where he was born and where he spent much of his time, is quite easy to get to from Milan. One day, when the weather is warmer, I will try to persuade my wife to go there. It’s been crowned as one of Italy’s Most Beautiful Villages. I’m sure we can also find a nice hike to do in the surrounding hills.

In the meantime, we need to keep a weather eye out for other interesting art exhibitions to get us through the cold months.

SPINY PUMPKIN

Florence, 21 November 2025

A week or so ago, my wife and I were doing a gentle hike on Lake Como. We’ve both been a bit under the weather, so a hike with none of the brutal climbs required of many of the hikes around Lake Como were just what we needed. We had also done a few other, rougher hikes along the lake in the previous days and had discovered to our dismay that heavy rains back in late September had made a number of them impassable. So as I say, a nice gentle hike along a well-kept path was just what we needed. For any of my readers who might want to know which hike we did, it was the “Via Verde”, which runs between the villages of Moltrasio and Laglio (and is not to be confused with the rival “Green Way”, which runs further north along the same shoreline of the lake). Here is a photo of the typical view one enjoys along this path at this time of the year.

Towards the end, we were walking into the village of Carate Urio when we came across a table set up along the path and on which were placed two crates holding a dozen or so of these strange-looking vegetables – or were they fruits?

My wife trained her iPhone camera on one of these vegetables (or fruits?) and promptly identified it. In Italian, it is called “zucca spinosa”, or spiny pumpkin. They were certainly spiny, but the relationship to pumpkins wasn’t immediately obvious. And being a pumpkin, it’s sort of both a fruit and vegetable: botanically a fruit but culinarily a vegetable given the way it is eaten (as we shall see in a minute). For the purposes of this post, I will henceforth refer to it as a vegetable.

Different parts of the world have different names for this vegetable. It’s called chayote in the US. Here we have a lady from Louisiana showing off two of them (although, reflecting that State’s French heritage, they are often called mirlitons there, as they are in nearby Haiti).

The Americans have actually just borrowed the Spanish name for the vegetable; we’ll come back to the Spanish name in a minute.

It’s called chocho or chuchu or some variant thereof in places as varied as Mauritius, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and Jamaica. This is thought to be the Pidgin English version of chayote. Here we have a farmer in Assam with his crop of chocho.

The vegetable is called choko in Cantonese (am I wrong in thinking that this ultimately derives from chocho?), which later became the name used in Australia and New Zealand thanks to the Cantonese who emigrated there in the 19th Century. Here we have an Australian proudly showing off the chokos growing in his garden (note that his variety is without spines).

Meanwhile, in the islands of the eastern Caribbean, the vegetable is called christophine or christophene. Here we have early risers in a market in the island of Martinique searching for their choice christophenes.

There are more names used for this spiny pumpkin, but the ones I’ve cited give us an indication of where it originally came from. It is one of those foodstuffs which make up the great Columbian exchange: that massive movement of foodstuffs, people and diseases which occurred after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Americas. I’ve mentioned this exchange several times already in these posts, when writing about the prickly pear, the Jerusalem artichoke, vanilla, and turkeys. And now I can add to the list the spiny pumpkin, or christophene (which reflects the connection to Christopher Columbus), or chayote, which is a Spanish transliteration of the Nahuatl name chayohtli. In fact, modern studies indicate that the chayote was first cultivated in Mesoamerica, between southern Mexico (in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz) and Honduras, with the most genetic diversity being present in both Mexico and Guatemala. Here, we have a field of chayote in Mexico.

Just to finish my elongated riff on names, another name for the vegetable which is used in Guatemala and El Salvador is güisquil or huisquil, which is derived from another Nahuatl name for it, huitzli. Here we have a Guatemalan singing the praises of the güisquil.

But to come back to my wife and me, standing in front of that table on the Via Verde. The vegetables’ anonymous grower was offering them for free to passers-by. I was hesitant, but my wife was bolder. She reminded me that we were having some old friends over for dinner the next day, why not try the spiny pumpkins out on them? But we don’t know how to prepare them, I objected. My wife waved off that objection, immediately doing a search on the internet. Hey presto, she found what sounded like a pretty easy recipe, explained in a video by a lady from Calabria in southern Italy, who mentioned in passing that the spiny pumpkin was particularly popular in her region – readers should note this link of the spiny pumpkin to Calabria, as we shall come back to it in a minute. My doubts brushed aside, we picked up five of these little spiny pumpkins and loaded them up in our rucksacks.

The next day, preparations started early. As recommended by the Calabrian lady, I peeled the pumpkins with a potato peeler – the spines were a little annoying but no more than that. Then I opened them up to take out the stone, after which I cut the halves into thin slices. Then I could start on the other two ingredients, tomatoes and onions. I divided up six large tomatoes, and sliced up one small onion (the recipe called for more but I’m not a fan of onions). At which point, I handed over to my wife, who threw all the ingredients into a big bowl, added the herbs, salt, and oil, and mixed everything up thoroughly. At the right moment, she ladled the mix out into a pan and put it into the oven for 40 minutes at 180 degrees Centigrade. I throw in a photo of what the result looked like – this is actually from the Calabrian lady’s video; we forgot to take a photo since we were so busy with preparations of the dinner.

Because what we had prepared was a side dish. The main course, the pièce de resistance, was cotechino with lentils and mashed potatoes. Like that, if the side dish turned out to be a disaster, we still had the main dish to fall back on. Luckily, it all turned out well. When I carried in the side dish, I explained the whole back-story. None of our guests – three Italians and one American – had ever heard of zucche spinose (in the case of the Italians) or chayote (in the case of the American). We all tried the dish with a little trepidation, but luckily it tasted really good. To me, the spiny pumpkins tasted like a cross between zucchini and cucumber. They went well with the tomatoes.

We didn’t finish the dish, so my wife froze the remains. When we get back from Florence where we are at the moment (to see an exhibition on Fra’ Angelico), we’ll try it out on our son too.

I fear we’ll never make the dish again, unless our anonymous grower on Lake Como is kind enough to make next year’s crop available to passers-by, because you cannot grow spiny pumpkins in the north of Italy (except, as we have seen, in Lake Como’s microclimate). As a result, northern Italians have no culinary experience with it – which is why our three Italian guests, all from Milan, had never heard of it. Of course, we could travel down to Calabria. Because, I discovered, Calabria is a “hot spot” for the growth and consumption in Italy of the spiny pumpkin. This is a consequence of one of the many individual rivulets that made up the giant global flow of plants out of the Americas after the continent’s accidental discovery by Columbus. When, in 1502, the Spaniards took over the Kingdom of Naples, of which Calabria was part, they carried the spiny pumpkin from their new dominions in Mesoamerica to their new dominions in southern Italy. And the plant took particular root in Calabria.

But we can’t go to Calabria just to eat spiny pumpkin! I’ll have to come up with an exciting trip full of new things that we’ve never done before if I’m ever going to persuade my wife. I have one or two things in mind. There’s the Riace Bronzes in Reggio Calabria, which we’ve never seen. There’s some old Christian mosaics in a monastery up in the Calabrian mountains, mentioned by John Julius Norwich in one of his books, which we’ve never seen. I’ve got the whole winter to come up with some more things to see and do …

TRISKELES

Milan, 6 November 2025

My wife and I were down in Sicily recently. Our daughter and her partner came over with the grandson and they decided to spend a week down in the very far south of the island, near one of Sicily’s three promontories, Capo Passero (if I mention this detail, it’s because it plays a role later). The house they rented gave directly onto the beach and our grandson spent many happy hours digging holes, making sandcastles, and braving the – relatively small – waves that broke onto the beach.

In between these sessions on the beach, we managed to get in brief visits to Noto and Syracuse, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Here’s a photo of the cathedral in Noto.

And here is one of the square in front of the cathedral in Syracuse.

It was while I was wandering the streets of Syracuse that I noticed this flag – every public building had one.

I discovered that it is the official flag of the region of Sicily (which is why I normally saw it flying along with the Italian national flag and the EU flag).

I’m a bit of a flag man – many years ago, quite soon after I started this blog, I wrote a post about what I considered to be the most elegant national flags. So of course I focused in on this flag. What really intrigued me about it was that symbol in the middle: a face from which emanate three legs bent at the knee.

I quickly established that this symbol is called a triskeles, Greek for three-legged. It was a popular symbol on coins. The earliest numismatic representation of it (from around 465 BCE) is on coins from the Greek statelet of Pamphylia, in what is now southern Turkey.

The triskeles was used in varying formats on Greek coins for several centuries thereafter, but it was most closely associated with the coins of Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse from 317 BCE, and self-proclaimed king of Sicily from 304 BCE, until his death in 289 BCE. On this coin, it is the main decoration on the reverse side of the coin, because Agathocles adopted it as a personal symbol of his reign.

Agathocles brought an important modification to the design, placing a Gorgon’s head as the central hub from which the legs emanate. He also added wings to the feet.

On this Syracusan coin, instead, it is used as the mint mark.

It seems that Agathocles chose the triskeles as his symbol because it mirrored the (roughly) triangular shape of Sicily.

The Greek name for the island was Trinacria, which means three headlands. The three headlands in question were those at the “corners” of the island: Capo Peloro, to the north of Messina, Capo Passero, all the way down south of Syracuse (and close to where we spent our little Sicilian holiday), and Capo Lilibeo, close to Marsala. The choice by Agathocles of the triskeles as his personal symbol was no doubt meant to underline his ambition – realised in the last years of his life – to be ruler of the whole of Sicily.

None of Agathocles’s heirs who were still alive when he died managed to succeed him as king of Sicily. In fact, he was formally reviled after his death, with all statues of him throughout Sicily being destroyed. Nevertheless, his triskeles continued to be used as a symbol for the island. After the Romans had turned the island into a province of its Empire, they added three ears of wheat to the Sicilian triskeles, apparently to underline the province’s role as a granary for Rome (and took the wings off the feet).

With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the use of the triskeles seems to have disappeared in Sicily. But it came roaring back in 1282, when, in what has become known as the War of Sicilian Vespers, the Sicilians rebelled against their French Angevin overlords and invited the King of Aragon to take their place. The Sicilians created a flag to carry into battle.

It was made up of the red and yellow colours of Aragon (but also the colours of the communes of Palermo and Corleone, where the revolt started) with a triskeles at its centre (where the Roman ears of wheat had disappeared and the wings brought back, but this time attached to the head).

After twenty years, peace was concluded and the House of Aragon ruled Sicily for the next 400 years or so.

In 1848, some 600 years after that first burst of rebelliousness, and when the whole of Europe was being shaken by revolutionary outbursts, the Sicilians had another bout of rebellion and ousted their Bourbon overlords. The movement of course needed a flag, so the triskeles was rolled out again, but this time it was affixed to the red, white and green tricolour, itself created in 1789 by Italian revolutionaries copying their counterparts in France.

Alas, the revolt, and the flag, lasted only a year, until the Bourbons took back control of the island. But then, a mere ten years or so later, in 1860, when Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers disembarked in Sicily on his way to conquering the island and the boot of Italy, the Sicilian rebels dusted off this flag to fight behind. That rebellion was successful this time. Or maybe it wasn’t, because Sicily shucked off its Bourbon overlords but only to become part of the new Italian State, where national unity was strongly promoted and regional diversity quashed. So of course the triskeles disappeared from the tricolour flag.

Then, at the tail end of the Second World War and after 80 years as part of the new Italian State, separatism reared its head in Sicily. In the chaos created by the Allies’ invasion of Sicily and the collapse of the national government, the Movement for the Independence of Sicily was formed. Of course, it created its own flag which naturally enough sported a triskeles, a bright red one in this case. I’ve no idea why the separatists chose this colour for its triskeles, or the colour of the flag’s background – perhaps simply the red and yellow now traditionally seen as Sicily’s colours?

It was a strange movement, which pulled in people from the left and the right of the political spectrum but also had links with the mafia and the island’s traditional bandits. Indeed, the darker, criminal elements of the movement spawned an armed force, the Volunteer Army for the Independence of Sicily. It, too, created its own, triskeles-bearing, flag.

This “army” attacked Carabinieri barracks and made general mayhem but was eventually crushed. In the meantime, the national government bought off the separatists by promising Sicily a special autonomous status (as it did to other regions on the rim of the country: Sardinia, Val d’Aosta, and Trentino-Alto Adige).

In the decades after the War, Italy’s regions, which had been politically moribund since the country’s unification, slowly clawed back their political importance. Finally, in 1970, the country’s first regional elections took place, while in 2001 a constitutional amendment gave the regions greater say in policy-making.

With the regions’ increasing political importance came the desire to create their own flags, banners, armorial bearings, and so on. Sicily was no different. Its regional parliament approved a first flag in 1995.

Its design explicitly harked back to the flag created by the rebels in 1282 (although the colours of the background were switched around), but instead of the triskeles the region’s coat of arms was placed in the flag’s centre. This did include the triskeles but quartered it with the arms of the Normans, the Swabians, and the Aragonese, who had all been overlords of Sicily at some point.

Finally, in 2000 good sense prevailed and the regional parliament approved today’s flag with only the triskeles in the centre.

So there we are. An ancient symbol created back in the mists of time has managed to survive down through the centuries as a symbol of Sicily’s desire to shake off its overlords and now has been given a new lease of life as a symbol of – hopefully – a vibrant region in a more federalist national state.

PANTALEON

Vienna, 18 June 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to this:

NORFOLK ISLAND PINE

Sori, 15 May 2025
updated 21 November 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cook continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A LITTLE TRIP IN CENTRAL ITALY

Milan, 2 May 2025

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

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

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

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

What follows are notes on our little expedition.

Arezzo (population: 99,000)

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

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

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

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

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

Other highlights in Arezzo:

The Piazza Grande

The crucifix by Cimabue in the church of Saint Dominic

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

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

Monterchi (pop: 1,700)

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

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

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

Citerna (pop: 3,400)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sansepolcro (pop: 15,000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Città di Castello (pop: 38,000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Socialists”

Perugia (pop: 162,000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ornate interior of the abbey church of San Pietro

Rome (pop: 2,760,000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back home

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

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

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

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

ALEXANDERS

Milan, 23 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARRESTING FACES

Milan, 28 February 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is her half-sister Elizabeth I.

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

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

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

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

Now that’s an arresting face!