Paris in the springtime

A few quick pics from a recent trip. All the usual fabs: climbing the stairs of the Eiffel Tower; meandering through the neighborhood of the Marais, where Tom lived in 7th grade; terrific food; the Louvre; Notre Dame; more good food.

Atop the Eiffel Tower

Near Notre Dame


Tom and Ben at Notre Dame

Ben and Sarah at the Louvre

Ben's amazing appetizer at L'Ardoise, a Slow Food recommended restaurant near Place de la Concorde

Ben atop the Eiffel Tower

Tower flashing - really!

Scooby Doo - or his cousin - at the Louvre

With Caravaggio, at the Louvre

Just back from Switzerland, still missing Rome

Medieval church, with tower and Baroque facade

from Sarah's notebook - January 2, 2009

Switzerland for Christmas – almost like a stretch in the US, only everyone speaks French: supermarkets, SUVs, malls. The huge supermarkets gleaming with products. I came home with oatmeal, peanut butter, crackers… maple syrup, even! An entire wall of yogurt. Ellen told us she couldn’t park illegally even for a minute, or she’d get a ticket. That’s Europe, she said. Not Italy, we answered, where cars cram into every available spot, even corners, blocking pedestrians – you have to walk detours around them or wedge yourself through, if you can.

I miss Rome, horribly. My niece Anouk gave us a calendar for Christmas she made with photos from her October visit. The photo for January is a view from our roof at night. It’s a bit fuzzy and distorted, giving it an impressionistic air, all the more charming. I sit and stare at it, here in foggy, freezing Torino.

How to describe it? No way. I’ll just spend my life trying to get back there. How – when it all seems a cliché? Even though it’s not, people really live there and live their crazy lives there, as they have for thousands of years. The lemons hang ripening over the high walls of the convent along one of Rome’s oldest streets: Clivo di Scauro. Follow it under the Arco di Dolabella (my guidebook says, built in 10 BC) to the church of Santi Giovanni i Paulo, wealthy brothers, converts to Christianity, who were martyred after they gave away their possessions to the poor. Rising above the massive tufa blocks of a Roman temple is one of Rome’s characteristic medieval bellow towers: seven stories of brick, with colored glass disks embedded here and there. At each level, a narrow pair of Romanesque arches. Beside the tower a Baroque façade to the 4th century church inside. And below it all, an excavated Roman street, complete with houses, shops, and temples.

Back on the street you pass under several narrow brick archways. You’re walking on Roman paving stones now, diamond shaped and worked by feet and carts and cars for centuries. In the rain they can be slippery, treacherous. Still headed downhill, off the rise of Celimontana, the street arrives at another small open area, filled with flowering bushes and green. In the center, a grassy island contains a bust of Mother Teresa and over the weeks you see nuns from all over the world in her distinctive white habit, trimmed in blue – here are the Roman headquarters of her order.

Olive trees line the road now – one day a woman is picking them into a normal 21st century plastic bag. Through the trees you spot the southern end of the Palatine Hill, the posh district of ancient Rome, across a busy avenue below. Another church rises up a lovely flight of stairs on your left. It has a portico and courtyard you can glimpse from the street. There’s more traffic here than on the Clivo di Scauro above – though still not much by Roman standards – and you have to be careful, hug the edge of the street, as there are naturally no sidewalks.

Cutting down a grassy slope brings you out at an unidentified triumphal arch, fenced off, which gathers trash week by week, until one day you pass and spot that it’s been cleaned out, only to begin gathering its plastic bottles and discarded slippers anew. You’ve emerged now from your idyll to one of Rome’s most massive and chaotic intersections: two huge avenues, eight or more lanes of traffic. Two crosswalks get you 2/3rds of the way across, but the last requires a dash through Rome’s famous traffic; somehow the planners have stranded pedestrians midway.

But the Circo Massimo is to your right – site of chariot races and source of our word, circus – the western side of the Palatine rises above it: here is the emperor’s palace, where he could watch the races without leaving home. Arches, ruins, but still visible the outlines of this excess and wealth.


FAO to the left and Circo Massimo in front, from the Palatine Hill

Directly in front of you, the 1970s excrescence of the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization, where Tom worked for three and a half month and where Ben and I are heading for our Italian class, to use the free internet, to rent DVDs and books from the staff coop library, to visit the travel agency, to have lunch with Tom on the rooftop terrace with views across the city taking in all we’ve just walked through, plus the Terme di Caracalla, the public baths, to the south, the Colloseum, bell towers, church domes, including, across the city, the dome of St. Peter’s, and in the center of it all, disparaged by Romans and tourists alike, the Vittoriana, the Typewriter, the Wedding Cake, which celebrates the glorious 1870 unification of Italy. Rome.

Fourth Day in Turin, Missing Rome

Partial view from our kitchen and living room

from Sarah's notebook, December 19, 1998

Two solid days of rain and clouds and cold. Then on the third day, yesterday, I wake in the darkness, make coffee, go to the bedroom to give Tom his cup, hang out and plan the day a bit. I go back to the kitchen after the sun has come up and discover, all across the back side of the apartment – 180 degrees – a view of snow-covered mountains. Glistening. Sparkly pink in the early light. We try to photograph it, but it’s impossible to capture.

In the afternoon, when Ben and I return from a meeting with the preside of the international public school we hope he’ll get into, we sit on the balcony and gape. The sun is warm enough we can luxuriate in just our sweaters. The sun makes me drowsy and I go catch a quick nap on the couch, the very top of one of the mountains visible even from my prone position. Then it’s back out to see the orange glow of the sunset.

We are blessed with views this trip. Because of the height (and the money that buys the height, of course) – if we were one floor lower we would not see the mountains. As it is, a skyscraper is going up right smack in the middle of our view, one of only two in the city, it seems. Wrapped in protective plastic, it’s ick. But it feels mighty ungracious to complain of this one inch that’s blocked, out of 20. My mouth stood open all afternoon in astonishment.

Funny, though, of course it made me think of our view in Rome, though it’s nothing like it. The intimacy of the centuries in that city. The medieval church towers still rise above the surrounding structures. There’s a jumble, but not an erasure, not a crowding, in our old neighborhood, at least: Monti and Celio. And other parts of the old centro.


Turin from across the River Po

Tom says Turin is like living on Via Corso in Rome, all up-scale shops. And some streets are. But there are side streets with funky boutiques, even if they are too expensive for us as well. Via Garibaldi, the pedestrian street, is like the Corso of Rome – Unfortunate, as it’s the most convenient way for us to walk. But we can find the hidden treasures, I know. Ben and I spotted a medieval church tower almost lost behind a Baroque façade. And who knows what’s inside. But the overall effect of the colonnaded streets and avenues is very appealing here, the 1882 cafes, the pharmacies since 1912 with their Art Nouveau wooden cabinets and trim. The chocolate shops. The piazzas. The mountains.

Sunrise reflected off the mountains

Favorite Uses of English in Italy

Bar-Cafes:


Willy Bar

New Personal Bar

Good Times Bar

Sorry Bar

Diplomatic Cafeteria

and all-time winner of EveryDayIsPizzaDay prize for best cafe name: Ham & You



Other Items:


Foxy Toilet Paper

Stuffer Yogurt

Fatina Snack Peanuts (which we pronounce Fat in a Snack)



Of course, we can't possibly complain, as we mangle and lay waste to the beautiful Italian language on a daily basis. Tom asked an attendant in Ben's school, "Can you go to the bathroom?" and I told the cheese vendor at the stall in the market on our street that I would buy his mozarella on "the last time" (rather than the next time, as I intended). Apocalypse, anyone?

Inauguration Day at a Torino 11-year-old's birthday party

We watched the inauguration on CNN on the large TV in the living room. It came via their internet cable, as the Sky satellite dish was malfunctioning. So there were frequent stutters and misses both in the picture and the sound. Moreover, a dozen or more Italian 10-year-olds were rioting through the place. At the very moment that Elizabeth Alexander began her lovely poem the kids brought out their noisemakers and began blowing – in celebration of the birthday boy, the inauguration, or for the sheer joy of making the loudest noise possible.

Read the account of the whole evening at my other blog here: http://sarahbrowning.blogspot.com/2009/01/inauguration-day-in-torino.html

A few notes from my journal of the past month

Second day in Torino (12/16/08):

All of Day One it rained. And was dark. Ben and I bought fruit and salad things and cheese, salami, and bread at the outdoor market downstairs in front of our house. We unpacked. A geometer came by to measure our apartment and declare it large enough for our little family, and thus hasten our Family Reunification Visa. In fact, the apartment’s immensity continues to confound us, as we turn into a bathroom or livingroom instead of the kitchen. We rode the little toy Metro to Tom’s office and checked our email, bought train tickets to Switzerland for Christmas. We had a drink in a bar/café. We shopped at a supermarket called Crai, but managed not to cry this time over laundry detergent, the single most frustrating product in Italy. We checked each other once again for lice.

We watched Italian television, a version of Deal or No Deal that we could follow. A dubbed Fred Astaire movie with no dancing. We’ve been promised better weather.

Our third apartment in four months and I am beginning to understand the rhythm: It takes a week or so to get used to a place, to find its pattern, discover what’s missing. Here: bedside lamps, salt and pepper shakers, kitchen garbage can, an espresso maker that doesn’t express itself all over the stove. We are making our way, slowly.

Our last night in Rome, mid-December:

It’s been raining steadily and sometimes torrentially for five days. We went out last night to try to eat at a restaurant in our old neighborhood where we had had a terrific meal on our first night in Rome. But we didn’t know the name and arrived at 8:30 pm, the worst time to try to eat without a reservation on a Friday night. The owner couldn’t seat us until 10:15, so we went to Pepito’s for pizza instead.

After dinner, we walked across the massively swollen Tiber under a full moon rimmed by a thin halo of cloud. The raging water covered the sidewalks of the quais on either side, engulfed trees halfway up their flailing trunks, and came to within 10 feet or so of the arch of the bridge. Eve says barges had gotten stuck under the bridge by Castel St. Angelo – it was in the New York Times.

Having started out on foot, we decided to walk home under the auspicious full moon, including a detour up the quiet, demure Aventino holl where Tom and I stayed on our first visit to Rome in 2007. I was directing us toward a little park of orange trees with a marvelous view across the city, but sadly the gate was locked. So we had just another beautiful walk through nighttime Rome, a fitting farewell. It was midnight when we got home. Tom extracted a splinter from Ben’s finger (Ben had leapt into the air in Aventino to swat the spine of a plant that was jutting out from a raised garden above our heads, a plant that turned out to be a cactus. “One of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, Ben said) and we fell into bed.

Assisi and Spello, early December:

View from Rocha Magiore

Assisi rooftops

Tom was in DC for job interviews and Ben and I went to Assisi, home of St. Francis of Assisi, and the equally lovely neighboring hill town of Spello for the weekend with Eve and Nigel and their girls. On day one, in Assisi, we visited a medieval castle, Rocha Magiore: serveral towers to climb, a long low-vaulted passageway, very narrow, that the kids along not knowing where it went, the excitement of it sheer length and mystery. Ben says it’s his favorite thing in Italy so far. He’s sorry Tom’s not here to share it with him. He wants to visit every room, every tower, every corridor, to be sure not one spot is missed. The views from the towers are spectacular, churches and towers on hillsides across the valley. We see the jumbled town of Assisi and the Basillica below.


Hiking in the mist

The next day, in Spello, Nigel went off hiking by himself and Eve and I took the kids for a walk. Up a paved road that turned to gravel as it climbed out of the town through olive groves. We were bundled against the cold and fog in our hats and gloves and coats, thinking we were just giving the kds a chance to run a bit and giving our own legs a good stretch. But after a bit it happened: We spotted blue sky ahead and emerged out of the dense fog into the sunshine and gazed down into the wide valley full of fog and up at the mountainsides around us. We took each other’s pictures and ate snacks and lay down in the sun and soaked it up.


Olive trees, mist, blue sky

One tiny town emerged out of the fog in the middle of the valley like a fairy castle. Snow dusted the near mountains like powdered sugar on a sweet cake. We ate chocolate.

Back in town we bundled up again, though the fog was less dense now and we could even glimpse a little bit of the fabled Umbrian views down the cobbled streets. We stopped at the central stage for the Olive Oil and Bruschetta Festival going on and listened to a hipster band as they introduced one another and noodled a bit on the accordian. A smattering of other observers stood with us. The band joked about being so pleased to be here in Spello for the Bruschetta Festival, which we took to calling Toast Fest. As he was being introduced, the lead singer threw himself to the ground and thrashed, threw his tambourine into the air.

Napoli/Naples, late November:


Napoli street shrine

An incredible city: the centro is a rabbit warren of narrow winding chaotic working class streets, many supposedly pedestrian but motorcycles and mopeds race along them, charging crowds, the drivers helmetless, with their 4-year-olds riding shotgun. The two main streets of the centro were mobbed with Italian church-visiting groups and families out for Christmas shopping or simply strolling. Many were eating on the street – sfogliattelli, a flaky pastry cone filled with sweetened ricotta flecked with orange peel and cinamon, rum-soaked dough balls topped with whipped cream and, the one we tried, nutella. We spotted a crowd eating what looked like fried dough at the county fair and asked what it was: Pizza fritta, deep-fried pizza. Warm and light, not sweet, stuffed with a mild ricotta.


Napoli's narrow streets at night

I loved the feel of the city – at this time of year there were very few non-Italian tourists and very little in general that worked hard to cater to tourists. “Compared to Napoli,” I told Ben, “Rome is like Disneyland. Let me never again complain about the dirt or chaos of Rome.” Gritty is the word the guidebooks use, and I suppose it works: trash piled everywhere, every building covered in grafitti. Some rooms of the city’s main museum, which contained all the treasures taken from Pompeii, and some taken from Rome, had explanatory notes typed on index cards on 1970s typewriters, in Italian only, of course, now faded and yellow.


Two views of the Bay of Naples from Mt Vesuvius:

The gaping maw of Vesuvius' crater, and, of course, Tom, Ben, Sarah

The Villa Borghese

Romans stroll about, smoking, or ride crazy on pedal carts – the sheer chaos of the place. Wild excess of the palazzo – every room decked in late Baroque frescoes, every niche filled with sculpture, the ancient, the Baroque, the merely kitsch. Italian Unification heroes on massive brass horses. Buses barreling down the avenues, dodging the pedal carts. The whole park is the massive grounds of the Borghese palazzo; really obscene wealth in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The equestrian grounds, the Piazza Siena, are a long oval filled with sand and some kind of fibrous fluff, wool or cotton, that keeps the sand down. At one end theater steps climb the hillside. As the sun sets, people sit on the stairs in the last rays and smoke, read newspapers. Children play baseball in the piazza, Ben joins in, it’s all Italo-American goofiness, surrounded by crumbling 17th century glory. Later, Ben rents a pedal cart that’s low to the ground, red, a go-cart almost, and races his new baseball friends down the paths, dodging giggling four-year-olds, driving each other off paths like squat chariot racers in Hollywood movies.

I go for a stroll, find myself on the edge of the park, a promenade on a steep cliff overlooking the Piazza del Popolo and the city. The sun is setting behind the dome of St. Peter’s, a military orchestra is playing something not very marshal, something quite charming, in the piazza below. The rooftops are tinged pink, and a murmuration of starlings is diving and weaving across the sky. We have decided to stay in Rome an extra two weeks.

- by Sarah