What is she looking at?

Notes from our recent Italy trip.

I posted earlier about this surprising bit of statuary on a wall of a building in Siena. Here is why I think she is there.

To understand this, though, I think you need to understand the Contrades of Siena. Contrada means district in Italian, but in Siena it has an especially long and deep meaning, dating from the twelfth century. They were originally organized for defensive purposes. There are currently seventeen contrades in Siena. Each has a coat of arms, a patron saint, a museum, a fountain, and a very long tradition. The contrades are the participants in the famous Palio de Siena, a twice annual horse race in the campo (civic square).

The contrada for the neighborhood, in question is Bruco or the Caterpillar. You can see that from an emblem on the same wall:
Across the street, though, is a fountain. It is a curious site, actually built under a street, within a brick arch. It has a statue of this guy brandishing a sword. So this is who the topless you lady in the frieze is looking at. I am not sure what it means. The fountain is likely the fountain of a contrada. The statue in the fountain is likely a hero of the contrada. But, I don't know whether these are the Bruco contrada or a neighboring contrada. I don't know whether the young lady in the frieze is making fun of, or honoring the hero under the road.

- J

Sensibilities

Notes from our recent Italy trip.

This frieze was on the side of our little B&B, Bed and Breakfast San Francesco in Siena, Italy. I liked it very much. It was startling at first. You have to understand that this was on a busy, but not fashionable street a bit out of the center of town. (I have a guess as to the reason for this particular location, but that is speculation for another post.) It is not a place one would look for public art. The curtains are real, but the figure is of stone.

If this were in America, of course, it would cause a scandal. The morality police would be in uproar. "This is a neighborhood! Think of the children!" We encountered a good deal of public art in Italy, and much of it in neighborhoods. We found it in big cities, towns, and little villages, in ecclesiastical settings and secular settings. Some of it would have been regarded as considerably more salacious by certain members of American society than this example. Most of it was a good deal older.


The other remarkable thing about the public art is that it was unmolested, even in forgotten or neglected areas. Its not that Italy was free of vandalism. We saw plenty of tagging and other forms of graffiti. We did not see graffiti on art. We did not see art that was obviously by vandalism. I don't know whether it is through forbearance of vandals or a quicker civic response to vandalism, but I suspect the former.

I don't think that public depiction of the body is necessarily more acceptable in Italy (although it may be, I don't know). I think depiction of anything in the context of art has a different meaning in Italy than in the US. Art in Italy, and in Europe, in general is deeply embedded in many aspects of culture; in religion, in civic life, in history and national mythology. I think subjects that would otherwise be controversial, even in Europe, get a pass when it is in the context of Art. In America we are surrounded by creative visual images, mostly "commercial art". Arguably the average American sees more of it in a day than the average European. The American street or public place is a jumble of colorful images and graphic design. But it is ephemera. It is not considered capital A Art.

In America, capital A Art is now treated with suspicion. This started in the eighties, when the conservative movement found it convenient to demonize art as a part of "liberal elitism". In the eighties art and music programs disappeared from public schools. But, even before this, public art was mainly "good for you". It separated a middle class person from a working class person. In America, sports teams are for binding a community together.

- J

Village Time

Notes from our recent Italy trip.



We stayed for a week in the village of Soriano nel Cimino not far from Viterbo in the Lazio region of Italy. This was a charming medieval town built on the side of Monte Cimino. Life in Soriano was synchronized by three interlocked time systems, that of commerce, the church, and politics. Village businesses were open from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM, closed from 1:00 to 4:00, and then open again from 4:00 to 7:30 PM. They were closed on Thursday afternoon and on Sundays. Church bells announced services at 7:30 every morning, announced the midday, and vespers in the evening. When the Communists were in power in the town council (as they were during our visit) a whistle blew at 8:00 AM, noon(ish), and 5:00 PM, except on Sunday. The whistle was very loud, so that it could be heard in the surrounding farms and fields. The noon whistle awaited the end of the church bells before it sounded.

I grew up in a town with a noon whistle, so the sound of it brought back a wave of nostalgia. Indeed, now that I think about it, our town had constrained commercial hours (though not as constrained as Soriano) and lots of church bells.

When the town was open there was a palpable energy to the commercial district. People went from shop to shop with purpose. Cars hunted for parking spaces. You could feel the bustle. This energy, of course, is contagious, and makes one feel that these are successful businesses and puts one in a mood to buy.

I felt that if the same amount of commercial activity were spread over the normal American commercial day, the town would feel sleepy. There would be no energy. One would feel this was a dying business district.

I found I rather liked village time. We fell in sync with it rather easily. There is a very communal feeling to it. People of my village are starting work now. People are going to services now. I must remember to get my provisions because tomorrow is Sunday and nobody will be working.

The modern world has become increasingly Las-Vegas-ed. Public clocks are hard to find. Everything is open all the time. There is no distinction among the hours. People work flexible hours (which often means all hours) Even watches are becoming rarer as people use the clocks on more private devices: PDA's and cell phones.

It is good there are still places where people keep village hours.

- J

The Personality of Places

Notes from our recent Italy trip.

Do places have a nature that outlasts or influences the people who occupy them? I have had this impression in the past. I certainly felt this visiting the Uffizi Galleries in Florence recently. Uffizi, of course means "offices", reflecting their past as the center of the Medici bureaucracy. We felt that the ghost of the bureaucrats must influence the way the facility is run.



The Uffizi is a very beautiful museum. The long corridors on the second floor, filled with statuary and bathed in a soft Tuscan light, are unforgettable by themselves and the rooms off the corridor are filled with a succession of masterpieces. One could spend days and weeks there.

But, the staff of the museum has the bureaucrat's tendency to hold on to information for the sole purpose of holding it over patrons. We rented the taped tour from an officious young woman who took our passports in exchange. There was no explanation on how to start, but we assumed we would be able to figure it out from signage. We found no clear signs. We looked around us. Everyone that rented the tour was in the same quandary as us. It did not matter the nationality. The Italians were as puzzled as we were. Eventually we did figure out that the tour was keyed to room numbers and learned how to find some, but not all, room numbers. During our visit we were chewed out by museum staff for a number of offenses, all entirely unintentional. We tried to go down the up staircase, though the prohibition was not clearly stated in Italian or English. We tried this because the signage at the down staircase implied it lead directly to an exit, bypassing other exhibits. We were yelled at in the cafe for standing in the wrong place, although we could not see why.

In the end, the art was worth the bureaucracy, but it was a bit maddening.


- J

Image from Wiki Commons and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License

When in Italy, do press the red button

Notes from our Italian vacation.

The train had stopped at our destination, Orte. We stood bewildered in front of the door looking frantically for a way to open it. People were piling up behind us. Finally, someone from behind reach around and turned a red lever and the door opened. The lever was right in front of us, but we did not see it.

A similar thing happened when we tried to leave a B&B in Siena. The B&B shared an entrance with some private residences and had a complicated system of locks on the door. We stared at it for minutes, ignoring the red button in the middle. Only when it was clear there was nothing else that could activate the mechanism did we dare press the red button.

The buttons on Italian buses to indicate your stop are red. So are the push-bars on public doors. Basically, Italians appear to mark a control red to call attention to it, not to warn people away from it. So conditioned were we to the US convention that controls marked red are for emergency use only that we struggled for some time just to be able to see them.

- J

The John "Chuck" Erreca Rest Stop

If I am driving from LA to the Bay Area I always stop at the John "Chuck" Erreca Rest Stop. I am not a drive-straight-through kind of person. I like to take a break. This particular rest stop has always been clean and well maintained and it is at a good interval from other potential stops. But, mainly it has an amazing ice cream vending machine. As far as I know it is the only rest stop with this particular type of machine.

The machine doesn't look out of the ordinary from a distance. It occupies an ordinary space in the vending machine kiosk. There is a glass window in the middle the same as other machines of the type. The only thing unusual is that you would expect to see a display of the wares through the glass and in this case it is empty. Otherwise it appears to be a completely modern vending machine. But, its not. It is a device worthy of Rube Goldberg. It would be at home next to the fortune telling machine at an old fashioned carnival. When you put in your money and make your selection things begin to whir. A door flips open inside the machine revealing the inside of an icebox. The icebox has a number of cardboard boxes with their tops torn off. Then, more whirring. A vacuum hose trolleys out, positions itself above a box, then drops. The hose starts to suck until it has attached itself to an ice cream bar. Then it lifts its prize and drops it down a chute in front. I have never seen it fail. I always get an It's It. An It's It has the shape of a squat cylinder. All the other products are roughly rectangular. They have differing weights and weight distributions. Yet, the machine handles them all. The machine apparently even responds to empty cartons appropriately.

The interesting thing is what an anachronism this machine is: a completely modern payment system with a delivery system that is from another era. A modern engineering approach would standardize the product size and shape and minimize the moving parts involved. Cardboard boxes would be out in favor of metal guides with more precise dimensions. The freezer door would be always open. A modern design would be completely uninteresting.

- J

Asilomar

My wife and I were burned out of a planned vacation in the hills above San Diego, so, as consolation, we rented a room for a couple of nights at Asilomar.

The Asilomar Conference Center is perched on the dunes at the end of the Monterey Peninsula. It is a beautiful and peaceful place. They will rent rooms non-conference visitors (they call us leisure guests) when space is available.



The grounds and several of the main buildings were designed by Julia Morgan early in the last century as a YWCA camp. Many of her buildings survive. Our room was in one of these. We have come to prefer these "historic" Arts and Craft-style buildings. The rooms are simple and spare often with board-and-batten paneling. The have been kept decorated compatibly with the Arts and Crafts architecture. They have no phones nor internet. Each of the buildings has a common room with a fireplace and comfortable chairs for reading. They are a perfect place to slow down. Unaccountably, the historic rooms are cheaper than "modern"ones.


We used to go to Asilomar once or twice a year but it has been seven years since we last visited. I can report that the grace of the architecture and the beauty of the coast are undiminished. There are many deer, probably more than is healthy. They have become quite tame. The fungus that was killing many of the Monterey Pines seven years ago has apparently been contained. There were many woodpeckers with their brilliant red caps.


Breakfasts are in the great hall at big round tables for ten. Conference guests are seated with their fellow conferees and leisure guests are seated with leisure guests. I happened to mention that we would bring the kids often when they were young. Another guest responded, "but what would they do?" I was a bit taken aback by the question, although looking around at a dining room full of serious adults I understood its origin. I answered, indicating the beach, the rocks, the tide pools, the rolling landscape, the ping pong and pool tables in the main building, and the proximity to the Monterey Aquarium. There is a small secluded, intermittently heated pool in one corner of the grounds that my daughter loved. I mean to verify this with my kids, but I like to think that my kids remember the place fondly.


- J

Going out and coming back

It is a funny thing that, when walking, I will notice different things going out and coming back the same route. It is sometimes as if on the return trip I am seeing them as if for the first time. It surprises me that it is when walking, because, walking, one has a 360 degree view. I wonder if it does not have to do with attention. Going out is a different activity from coming back and it would not be surprising that the mind would tune to different things.

This afternoon I accompanied my wife K to Berkeley for her class and decided to walk up Claremont Blvd towards Grizzly Peak. Going out I saw the remains of a fawn by the side of the road. I saw evidence of several abandoned water projects in the creek bed that the road follows. I saw evidence of the Oakland Hills fire from a dozen years ago. Coming back I saw a jerry-rigged chute covered in black cloth for sending down construction debris from a building site high above the valley floor. The black cloth was obviously meant to disguise it. It looked like a gold rush scene. I would have seen none of these things driving the same route.

After this, I took some time to assay old haunts in Elmwood and upper Rockridge. The trio of South Berkeley bakeries, Bread Garden, Nabalom, and La Farine are all still there and appear to be doing well. Curiously, the smells of Bread Garden and Nabalom were as I remembered and as they were 25 years ago, they were quite distinct. The laundromat where we sent Best Man D on the eve of our wedding was still there and the same as ever (some bachelor party...). Armanino Court is just as it always was, except its sign has been changed to designate it as a "private street". Rockridge north of Claremont seemed thriving, but the hardware store in Elmwood is boarded up and gives the sense that the neighborhood is struggling.

- J

Berkeley Public Library

My wife, K, has a class in Berkeley every other Saturday. Yesterday, I accompanied her. While she was in class I did a few errands and walked around old haunts. I walked up to the Rose Garden, a little shabby this time of year, but nice. I got a cookie at the Virginia Bakery. It is amazing to find it still in business, substantially the same as thirty years ago.

When I tired of walking I grabbed my computer from my car and headed over to the Berkeley Public Library on Shattuck. I remembered this place as a sanctuary, but I knew it had undergone some serious renovation work. I found it better than ever. It was busy but quiet. Many of the public libraries I have visited in recent years are always busy, but not quiet. They are multimedia community centers. This is a natural evolution and BPL, in the lee of the University is probably a bit behind the times. This is still a book-oriented place and has the rhythm of reading.

The main reference room is large and open with a lot of light. I sat down, opened my Ibook, and a dialog box said "You are not in range of your preferred wireless network. Would you like to join the BPL network". I clicked "yes" and was in.

- J