Visitors to Assisi

Last weekend, Lizzie, Maria, Shannon, and I took a day trip to Assisi. After a long overnight train ride, we arrived at a train station in a flat area at the bottom of Mt. Subasio. Assisi is renowned for its beauty and for its saints, St. Frances and St. Clare. We first visited a large basilica down near the train station, not technically in Assisi. It had a beautiful neoclassical facade and was very large, although the interior seemed rather plain. In the center of the Latin cross was a small stone church covered in frescoes. There was a Mass going on inside, and we figured out that this church was the first mission built by St. Frances, and thus the first by the Francescans. Not only was there a Mass going on inside, there was also a chapel filled with people praying and many confessionals throughout the church. Nuns walked through the aisles and people crossed themselves. Most of those in the church were there for religious reasons, and as a mere visitor, I felt out of place. I would encounter this feeling throughout the day, ironically, the most in situations where I was around tourists. Assisi seemed very harmonious, but in my mind, there was a subtle friction between tourists, travelers, pilgrims, and locals.

We boarded a bus and traveled past fields, vineyards, and olive groves up the hill to Assisi. As we drove, each switchback brought us vaster and ever more beautiful views of the valley below. The sun was newly risen and there were banks of clouds and mist in the distant purple hills. We disembarked in a small piazza and beheld Assisi from within. It is an incredibly picturesque city, similar to Siena but much lovelier. All the buildings are made of whitish tan stones and the roofs are all red tiles. The city is built on the slope of a hill, so many pathways through the city are actually stairs. Cars can travel in the town, but there are no roads wide enough for two cars; the precipitously vertical streets are all one-way. The city is surrounded by a high wall and contains several basilicas. Above the town on the summit of the hill (itself a foothill of Mt. Subasio) is a castle, the Rocca Maggiore. We decided to climb up to this castle to better see the fantastic view.

We followed narrow streets and stairs up, up, and up towards the summit. Once there, we were rewarded with a beautiful view of the valley and the town of Assisi. We waited a few minutes for the castle to open, then entered and began to explore. It was still in very good shape and we ascended a spiral staircase to the very top of the keep where the view was even better than at the bottom, although Assisi was blocked by the tower structure.

Here, atop a castle gazing out at a panoramic view of the Italian landscape, I was the Romantic tourist incarnate. In fact, Assisi is the ideal Romantic tourist mecca and displays all four of Buzard's criteria for the authenticity romantic tourists crave: stillness, non-utility, saturation, and picturesqueness. During my visit in late November, I found plenty of stillness and solitude throughout the town, but I suspect that Assisi is often filled with visitors in the summertime because there is a fair amount of infrastructure for it. While tourists may fill much of the area, stillness is also aided by the fact that there are many many public paths and spaces, and everywhere you look there seems to be another staircase or winding street that can provide isolation from fellow humans. As for non-utility, Assisi is a medieval hill town with walls and a castle; cars seem to have a very difficult time navigating the city and tourism seems to be the lifeblood of the economy, as all the shops seem to be selling crafts, souvenirs, or cafe food. People who actually live up there no doubt do so for the beauty of the city and do all their important economic transactions in the town near the rail road station. To add to this, the city seems entirely focused on preserving everything medieval and in fact has a huge medieval fair in May when the entire city wears medieval clothing, hides the cars, and has a huge festival. While in this respect Assisi seems more "dead" than Venice, I am not so sure that is the case because Assisi has been a site of pilgrimage for over 700 years. As such, visitors are a huge part of the town's existence and thus the preponderence of crafts and religious or decorative shops is merely akin to the preponderance of shipyards in Hong Kong or grain silos in a Midwestern small town. It has the "natural" resource of St. Frances and remains afloat using that. Also, it seems like there is much genuine agriculture in the surrounding valley and that the town tries to preserve itself from too much tourism by preventing the building of too much sprawling tourist infrastructure. While Venice is overwhelmed by kitsch everywhere, Assisi manages to keep that sort of thing confined to around the train station. There is a strong sense of aesthetic saturation everywhere in Assisi, and spiritual saturation for some. Of course, this is highly connected to the fact that Assisi is extremely picturesque. The whole place is such a perfect example of the picturesque it almost seems fake.

We descended from the castle and walked through the town to arrive at the Basilica of St. Frances. It is a large church and monastery/convent complex built into the hillside, and is beautifully proportioned on the outside. It is actually two churches, one on top of the other. Inside the upper church, it is clearly Gothic with ribbed ceilings and stained glass. The ribs of the ceiling branch out from the massive columns like water from a fountain, and the walls throughout the upper church are covered with frescoes by Giotto. The transepts and apse are enclosed by the most exquisite woodwork, ornate Gothic choir seats. Going down some stairs in the transepts, one comes to a huge courtyard for the monastery.

The lower church is also fantastically beautiful. The ceilings are arched and covered in frescoes of stars on a blue background. There are multitudes of frescoes down here too, and many smaller stained glass windows. Down some more stairs is the tomb of St. Frances. It is in a simple stone chapel and is a simple sepulcher. There were many people praying in here. Some of St. Frances's relics were contained in a nearby room.

The signs outside the church prohibit taking pictures and request silence and respect, but tourists inside were openly talking and taking pictures all over the place. There were even people walking up to St. Frances's tomb and taking pictures of it with their cell phones. This was a sacred space for religious people, and yet some were abusing their privilege of being there, as if this site of pilgrimage were an amusement park. There was a gift shop in the courtyard with art books and religious things, but also postcards and souvenirs. I wondered how the monks viewed the tourists and the irreligious people just seeing sights. I thought the presence of tour groups, souvenirs, and disrespectful behavior nearly destroyed the sacred nature of the place. Nevertheless, the power of the place won over the annoyance of tourists, and that church is the most beautiful and wonderful church I have ever seen in my life.

After exiting the church, we split up for a bit. I went back up to the castle where some rowdy American high school students bothered by antitourist appreciation of the place and caused me to go to the far tower at the end of a long wall, which actually had a better view. After this we visited the Basilica of St. Clare, which was rather plain except for an elaborate marble monument in the crypt. There were some relics down there, and an odd tomb for the saint, with a wax model of St. Clare on top of the coffin. We wandered around the city a bit and noticed an escalator to take tourists from a bus parking lot up a small hill to the city gate. I found it patently ridiculous and demeaning to the place.

We decided to descend the hill to find another church Lizzie wanted to see. We went down a paved pedestrian path through olive groves and little stone chapels and houses. We were alone on the path except for a local man and his white dog that kept rushing into the groves playing and sniffing things. It was so picturesque and so wonderful. I felt like I walked into a scene on the label of an olive oil bottle. We leisurely took our time and enjoyed the scenery, but as we neared the bottom we saw a tour group descending behind us and the romantic magic of the place was destroyed. Assisi is clearly meant to be enjoyed by the romantic tourist, so I do not understand at all why anyone would want to come in a tour group. The church Lizzie wanted to see turned out to be a convent (cool but not notable after the rest of Assisi) and was surrounded by tourists lazing about.

We decided to walk to a bus stop at the very bottom of the hill and thus get off the beaten path. It was a beautiful walk. We passed olive groves, vineyards, and fallow fields as the terrain leveled out, and I found the spot where my postcard picture was taken (albiet without sunflowers). Assisi was beaufiul up on the hill, especially in the light of the setting sun. Sadly, we passed a few tourists walking on the same road, but I actually felt a little better because I didn't feel like I was trespassing into somebody's front yard; I was commonplace and just an annoying fact of life. We caught the bus and made it back to the trainstation in time for our long ride back to San Servolo.

Whispers of Rome

"Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, "See! this our fathers did for us." For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in the walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity." -John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture

If the vestiges of the past whisper to the present, then in Rome the murmurs of millennia combine into a roar that overwhelms the present and pulls it into the timelessness of the Eternal City. I have recently visited Rome for the first time, and can attest to the incredible nostalgia of the place. It seems as if every piazza, almost every building is saturated with stories from a thousand lost ages, from the ancient Romans to the Popes, Barbarians to Mussolini. Yet while all these ages whisper to the modern traveler, none has such a powerful or profound voice as the echo of ancient Rome.

Emerging from the Roman Metro, I was taken aback to see the mass of the Colosseum before me, casually towering over a street and souvenir stands. Nearby was the worn but intact Arch of Constantine and the ruins of the Roman forum. I could see the Palatine Hill and broken temples. The emotions of seeing such things, and of later entering the Colosseum and the Forum, were overpowering and difficult to describe. The stories and history I had learned -William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Cicero, Pompey, Cato, Romulus and Remus, the Rape of the Sabine Women, Nero, Caligula, Augustus, Gladiator- it all happened in the same space I now occupied. It was here that so much of modern civilization began, where critical decisions were made that affected the course of history for a millennium, where once the world found its center.

Entering the Forum, the stones I walked on may have been the very stones walked on by Emperors and countless ancient Romans. I walked in the same space as they did, at any rate, and followed the route of the Via Sacra all the way to the Miliarum Aureum, the ancient pillar that once marked the center of the Roman Empire and had the distances to the great Roman cities inscribed in bronze. Beside it towered the Arch of Septimus Severus, memorializing his conquest of Mesopotamia (now utterly irrelevant in an Iraq of Americans, insurgents, Islam, and nation building). Surrounding it were all the glories that were ancient Rome. To my right stood the Temple of Saturn, with proud columns and entablature lacking steps leading up to it, or temple behind. Behind me, the Temple of Concord was no more, and for the temple of Vespian all that remained were three proud pillars supporting the corner of a building long since collapsed. Before spread the great forum of Rome, the old forum that served the Republic. One could see the podium from which orators would speak to the masses and past that was the old Senate building, still standing! (it had been converted into a church for a millennium after the fall of the Western Empire) The curia had seen better days, however. It was a humble looking brick structure, seemingly fit only for a barn. Entering it was a disappointment, it had a high ceiling, but it seemed small and utterly quotidian. And yet this was not always the case; in the corners, in a few spots here and there one could see the original tiles of the Roman Senate chambers, consisting of the finest marble still gorgeous after centuries of decay and covering by church whitewash. Though this particular building had been reconstructed by Caesar when the Senate lost its power, that spot had seen the speeches of Cicero, of Cato, and of countless other patricians lost now to the romance of the Roman myth. Not too far from the Curia was the temple of Julius Caesar, once proudly decorated with the prows of ships from the battle of Actium where Octavian battled Mark Antony and Cleopatra for control of the East. The base of the temple remains, and, in a chamber opened up by archaeologists, there is the pyre upon which Caesar was cremated and by which Mark Antony gave his famous speech. Just past this is the utterly destroyed Arch of Augustus and the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. Part of the curved wall of the temple remains with the decorative columns, evoking a vision of the structure's ancient glory. This building housed the eternal flame of Rome, now long extinguished. The sacred alter is now open to rain and wind and that holy of holys is now plainly visible to passerby.

I ascended the Palatine Hill, the hill where Romulus supposedly built his settlement and the home of a plethora of Imperial and patrician palaces; in fact, their abundance here led to the word palace. I reached the summit through a series of elaborate staircases, pavilillions, alcoves, and artificial grottoes, arriving in a vast and beautiful garden overlooking the dusty Forum. Everywhere were bits and pieces of the ancient glory of the Imperial palaces. In one place I overheard a tour guide talking; the grassy field surrounded by crumbling walls was once the throne room of Caligula, who sat upon a golden throne and wore a crown decorated with images of himself. Now it is a campo. Most powerful are the little bits of marble tile scattered throughout the weeds, reminders that the park-like grasslands of the Palatine were once fabulous halls of ultimate power, wealth, and intrigue.

The Romans built their buildings to last (their ruins still exist after centuries and more would remain if they hadn't been looted for building materials) as monuments to their glory and their power. Aqueducts and roads built by the Romans are still in use throughout their old empire, yet in the heart of their Empire, their creations are superseded by the creations of modernity, the highway cutting through their forum or the contemporary glory of the Victor Emmanuel monument. In many ways the Romans built according to the way espoused by Ruskin; their works were made to last, and in many ways, the works of their hands are held sacred by we moderns who fence them off and restore them as best we can. And yet, despite their best intentions, their civilization mutated and faded and most of their works with it.

That is why the Roman ruins are the most powerful of the voices of Rome. The barbarians were not proud, and the Papacy and medieval churches remain, but the ancient Romans were mighty and are utterly gone. There is Romantic power in their fall, which is written upon every weathered stone they left for their descendants. It is as if they say to us "As you are now, we once were. As we are now, you too shall be" Their ruins allow us access to the sublime, allow us to reach past the physical decay of time and almost touch the ancients, forming a circular bond of common humanity, but ultimately pull us back to the harsh reality that they are long dead and their works lie in tatters. The Romans were great and we remember them, but time has made them irrelevant.

I met a traveler from an antique land
who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage stands, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Shelly, Ozymandias

Longing and the Death of Venice

The response was nearly always the same when I used to tell people I would be spending the semester in Venice. The person would express incredulity, congratulate me on how lucky I was, and then sigh and wish that he or she was going to Venice. What is it about Venice that can create such universal longing, that always couples the mention of its name with a sigh or glimmer in the eyes? Much of it has to do with the specifics of the Venetian myth (the beauty, exoticism, etc), but a good part of the longing for Venice is due to its decline. The addition of death and decay to the myth of Venice transforms it into the object of an impossible longing.

The original myth crafted by the Serenissima and the Venetians themselves was a civic image of purity, power, and magnificence (represented by the Virgin, the Lion, and the Doge). Successful militarily, economically, and artistically, this idealized Republic was a source of envy among the city states of Italy and of pride among the Venetians. It was beautiful and exotic, a magical city in the sea. Due to the courtesans and the Carnival, it was renowned as a place of liberation (sexual and otherwise). Representative of this early myth, Thomas Coryat wrote in Coryat’s Crudities that Venice “yeeldeth the most glorious and heavenly shew as did even ravish me both with delight and admiration”, and that it was “the fairest Lady, yea, the richest Paragon and Queene of Christiandom”.

Although the myth was always appealing, it would not conjure up the depths of longing that it does today until the time of the Romantics. After the 16^th century, Venice began its long decline, culminating in conquest by Napoleon in 1797. It was at that time that the old Venice died and the new Venice began to exist as a dying vestige of the past, however beautiful it may be.

As a place that had passed its prime and was in the process of slowly dying, Venice was intensely fascinating to the Romantic mindset. Long symbolized as a woman, Venice was now the dying beauty, which was, in the words of Edgar Allen Poe, “unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world”. Having died, the old Venice could no longer change, but would live on as its Myth in the same way the genius of a poetess was viewed to be preserved only through death. “The white rose of death is more beautiful than her sister, for she recalls life and makes it more desirable and rare,” –Nightwatch of Bonaventuia, 1804. In this way, the Myth of Venice passed from that of a living city to that of nostalgia; the entire city became a backward-looking souvenir of its history and ‘essence’.

Yet Venice is not entirely dead. “…Silent rows the songless gondolier; her palaces are crumbling to the shore, and music meets not always now the ear: those days are gone, but Beauty still is here…” writes Byron in Childe Harold. Although much of the Venetian Myth has been lost through the vicissitudes of history, some yet remains –but it is ephemeral because the city is constantly dying. It is caught between the fixed past of ancient glories and a prophesized future of oblivion; the vestigial present is fleeting and if you wish to catch a glimpse of the Venetian Myth you must do it now.

See Venice before its gone –this is the phrase that describes the modern Venice, and has probably been the case since the 1797. And yet at no other time in history has it carried as much meaning as now. Venice increasingly becomes a monument and museum to its Myth; a simulacrum of authenticity that slowly destroys itself. The declining birthrate and migration from the city are depopulating Venice of Venetians, and the ultimate rise in sea levels from global warming ultimately damns Venice, if not in this century than the next. Venice is an endangered species, a crisis, and thus entirely ephemeral and object of intense longing. As common wisdom proclaims, “You want most what you can’t have.”

The death and decay of the city also transform the nature of the longings that can exist within it, adding a sickly element to, say, the desire for sexual freedom or aesthetic enlightenment. When Venice began to decline, the darker parts of its history became prominent –torture, debauchery, assassinations, the secrets of The Ten- and everything began to have a sordid side. Nowhere is this new nature of longing more evident than in Death in Venice. Aschenbach travels to Venice in search of inspiration, to fulfill a vague longing with no obvious object. He finds wonder and beauty, present in the city but most prominently in a young Polish boy, forever out of his reach even as he sinks to deeper and deeper levels of perversion. The external decay and sickness of Venice is internalized within him; as Venice fell from majesty to a plague-infested shell so too Aschenbach falls from austere fame to disgrace and death. Like the granting of a wish by a jinni, the fulfillment of a longing in Venice cannot be actualized in a way free of the inherent decay of the city.

Though the myth of Venice has appealed to travelers from the beginning, it is with the decline of Venice and the advent of Romanticism that Longing for Venice became what it is today. The myth has become nostalgia, impossible to ever reach, and the city itself seems to become more and more ethereal with the passing of destructive time. This temporal decay not only transformed longing for Venice, but also longings in Venice, tainting them. We long for Venice not only because of its beauty, or its exoticism, but also because of its ongoing death.

A Strike and a Storm, or, The Simultaneous Triumph and Defeat of the Touristic Similacrum

We awoke in our hostel in the cold early morning hours and readied ourselves for the short train trip to Pisa. Upon checking out, we discovered that the weather was rainy (an unheeded omen of things to come) and walked to the train station, where we received a shock. Sciopero!! Most of the trains were canceled and there was no one working at the information or ticket counters. Since Pisa was a local destination, there were no trains going there and, of course, we couldn't ask anyone about our options at the empty information office. Ma dai!

We thought we might be able to get a bus, so we looked around for the bus station. We were all tired and so a little on the edge and kept getting pointed in all kinds of directions. Eventually, we found the appropriate bus station but the ride to Pisa would cost 6 euro and take 3 hours. None of us liked this, but Lizzie, Caylen, Shannon, and I decided to go to Pisa and Sara and Natalie would take a eurostar train back to Venice (these never go on strike). We separated, and I boarded the bus in the rain.

After an agonizingly long bus ride through a rainy Tuscany (which, in places, was very pretty), a switchover at Lucca, and a teasing glimpse of the Leaning Tower over a huge wall, we arrived at the Pisa bus stop. We went through an ordeal figuring out transportation back, eventually deciding on the reliable but slow buses, and set out.

It was cold and windy. The sky was an oppressive grey and the quiet was ominous. I had heard that Pisa was ugly, but I didn’t think so. It wasn't as picturesque as other towns I've seen, but it was nice, especially by the Arno. It was cool to see the same river we saw yesterday in Florence. Here the landscape was fairly flat and the cityscape much more laid back than in Florence. The wind picked up drastically as we crossed the bridge and it blew my hood off my head about five times and nearly knocked me over. After a bit more walking, we went through an opening in a big wall and I saw the entirety of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

My touristic longing was at once satisfied and necessarily disappointed. Satisfied, as I was seeing the postcard image brought to life, dissatisfied as it was thus necessarily an imperfect mirror to my vague expectations. This is especially so because of its particular touristic nature. The Leaning Tower, to me at least, has always been an Attraction as opposed to a Jewel. A Jewel has intrinsic value that can be augmented by touristic brouhaha, but that would be a worthy place/object if it was experienced only by oneself. One goes to the Uffizi in Florence to see the art, creations beautiful in and of themselves, and, although there is a hubub about Florence, these works would retain their value. An attraction is an attraction because its "pull" is especially divorced from its inherent nature. Why is a giant ball of string worth seeing? It has nothing to do with the string itself, but the abstract relationships to other things: "world's biggest ---". This simulacral idea is what does the drawing, and so almost anything on earth can be an Attraction. It is true that there is an element of the simulacral to all things, so there is more of a spectrum of Attractionness than an opposition of Jewel versus Attraction. At the opposite ends of this spectrum are things one walks away from with a sense of awe, understanding, or betterment, and on the other things that one walks away from with a check on a list, some subtle disquiet, and an empty space in one's pocket.

Although a beautiful leaning tower is somewhat inherently interesting, I have already seen leaning towers: they are a dime a dozen in Venice, a city that has a plethora of other inspiring jewels and attractions. Pisa has but one. Why is it that Pisa is renowned for a leaning tower and not Venice? It is because the otherwise ordinary (for Italy) town of Pisa was clever, advertised well, and created a similacral myth of the Leaning Tower as an icon of Romanticism, incredulity, and "wow!" It created a desire in people to touch the icon, and by touching the icon of the tower touch whatever it was it was supposed to mean. An attraction always leaves one disappointed, because one goes there without understanding what it is he wants to see.

The attraction of this Attraction is strong. Although knowing full well that the Leaning Tower was more or less a tourist trap, I impulsively refused to turn back to Venice, despite the obstacles, and went forwards through rain and claustrophobia and confusion to appease the longing to "see the Leaning Tower", to please the mass of people back home who view the world as a checklist of places to "do" rather that a poem of experiences waiting to be written. I would go to the tower, take the infamous picture of me "holding up the tower", climb to the top, and go back. I would be a tourist.

The sight of the tower immediately shattered the touristic myth, the vague icon I had come to see. The tower was beautiful, and yes, it was leaning, but the center was also covered with scaffolding. The nebulous Tower had been brought back to physical, mundane reality. Not only was there scaffolding, there was rain and wind, something unimaginable in the touristic icon of the Leaning Tower. Little did I know that my Pisa experience would quickly deviate dramatically from the prescribed visit of the tourist.

We went inside the ticket office and saw that the next time to go up into the tower was at that moment. We quickly got tickets, stowed our stuff, and went out to climb the tower. The wind was intense, and I could see the flagpole at the top nearly falling off because the wind was pulling the flag so hard. You could see the people at the top struggle with their coats and could hear the wind whistle past it and see rain in the air. Add that to the fact that the tower is inherently tilted and now wet and slippery. The idea of climbing up there was terrifying (utterly foreign to the touristic myth of sunny skies and a "how neat" attitude).

We raced to the entrance and went inside. The interior was a lot more spacious than I expected, much more so than in the towers in Verona or Siena. In places, the stairs were worn down in the middle from all the tourists. There were walls on both sides and occasionally windows/doors. The wind was howling through the stairwell, bringing rain in when passing by openings, and that combined with the unnatural tilt of the stairs gave the sensation that the tower was swaying in the wind and was about to collapse. It was scary, but we pressed on. We reached a netted in area, thought for a moment that it was the top, then found a small spiral staircase to take us all the way up.

The gale force wind was vicious and the rain blew everywhere. I held on to the metal railing for dear life and turned around to go into the middle of the tower. The top is very interesting. There is a ring shaped “wall” that has openings in it containing the bells, like some kind of Classical gazebo or arena. In the center was a hole with a glass covering. The “interior”, though open to the sky and full of holes, was somewhat sheltered from the wind and we took some pictures here.
The police came up and prevented us from going all the way around the outer perimeter, where I have no doubt a person could have been blown off the tower in the gale force winds. I had thought about crawling around it earlier, but this was a good reason not to. Excluding the police, I was the last person off the top of the tower and as soon as we left, the tower was closed for the day for safety reasons (I am amazing we were able to go to the top in the first place –in America the place would have been closed with the first sign of raindrops). By this time, the storm was a downpour and we ran across the piazza to the Duomo, getting utterly drenched. We huddled in a large doorway, but were on the wrong side of the Duomo! We ran around the apse and were able to duck inside an open door (not the right way to enter the church, we were in the transept. We apparently had a very short time before we had to leave to catch our bus, so I quickly skimmed the church and took pictures while everyone else went to the gift shop.

It was truly a beautiful church. It had the striped style, some Moorish arches, and a big byzantine mosaic above the altar. I saw the famous pulpit, truly a masterpiece. The carving was incredibly intricate and detailed and it must have taken an insane amount of time and effort to create. There were renaissance styule peaintings on the walls and it is a legend that Galileo figured out the motions of a pendulum by watching a hanging lamp swing back and forth during Mass here. I was sad to leave the Duomo so soon, as it is one of my favorite Italian churches I have seen (but filled with way too many tourists).

I raced across the slick stone pavement, once slipping and giving myself a blood blister on my pinky finger. It continued to downpour. I made it into the gift shop even more wet and, in the most impulsive buy of my life, grabbed a tiny pewter model of the Leaning Tower and had Caylen buy it. I do not regret this, as I rather like the souveneir and will forever remind me of the Tower of Terror that is The Leaning Tower of Pisa. We walked to a close hotel and a nice concierge called a taxi for us. I took some last photos of the tower and noticed the slight curve to it as the builders realized it was leaning during construction and tried to make up for it, unsuccessfully.

We piled in the taxi and went to the bus station. It continued to downpour. Saw a man smoking under a no smoking sign –classic Italy. Caught the bus and rode to Lucca, where we had to get off and buy another one way ticket from Lucca to Florence. It continued to downpour. We had not eaten since breakfast (it was now 5) so we walked through the rain and the city to a small café where we ate and waited out our layover. It was freezing and wet and it was warm and nice in the café. There was an old man hanging out there for some reason and the TV was playing MTV in Italian. The girl working there was very hot, with olive skin and dark black hair. I got a pomodoro and mazerella Panini, then a slice of hot dog and French fry pizza, then some gelato. We talked about how tired, cold, and wet we were and what a great adventure the day was.

We finally caught our bus (it was so warm inside!) and got to the Florence train station –the third time there in two days. There was now one woman working at the ticket counter and the line was astronomically long. We ended up paying for a full ticket to Venice. We ran into some tourists going to Venice and gave them some advice.They were very nice and offered to have us stay with them if we ever ended up in Australia or Dubai. It was nice to be on the fancy Eurostar train after all the wet cold chaos of the day, and we rode back to Venice in the cozy comfort of our train car.

That is the end of the narrative, and the triumph of the touristic similacrum. Previously defeated by the realities of wind, storms, scaffolding, and strikes, the idea of the Romantic Leaning Tower of Pisa was replaced with a raw and adventuresome Leaning Tower of Terror. The Pisa myth held by the masses was defeated by reality, but I have created my own personal Pisa myth to replace it. The Leaning Tower is not a pile of stones tilted at an angle of 11 degrees in such and such a place. It is a test of bravery, a temple to the capricious chaos of the heavens. The tourist need not adhere to the standardized simulacra of a place, but can instead impose his own quickly formed view of a place, often incorporating the ideas of others, onto the complex reality of a physical space.

I purchased a small pewter leaning tower at the Pisa gift shop, a relic of my trip that I have brought back. Onto this pinky-sized metal cylinder I have forever inscribed my wild image of the Tower and the narrative that is Pisa. I have thus created a miniature world of the Attraction, a physical object that, while slightly interesting in and of itself, is what it is mainly though the simulacra of the story I tell.

The Sacred on the Streets: The Venetian Capitelli

To the visitor, the richness of Venetian life often lies hidden behind a Carnival mask of stereotyped images and touristic simplification. Peering behind this mask, one will begin to notice tiny details previously ignored and, if he remains observant, it will not be long before he begins to notice the street shrines spread throughout the calli, sottoportegi, and courtyards of the city. Known as the capitelli ¹, these shrines can be found nearly everywhere in Venice and in a multitude of forms, ranging from a statue of the Virgin atop a striped canal pole to a stone ba relief of a Saint hidden high up on a building. These shrines serve a number of functions, but these are all related to their primary function of extending sacred space out into the public space of the city.

In order to discuss the sociological aspects of the capitelli, it is important to gain an understanding of what they are. To do this, I set out to find and examine as many capitelli as I could. Exploring the city (primarily in Castello), I uncovered 31 shrines. This is by no means an exhaustive list (the estimated number of capitelli is over 500 ⁵), but it is enough to do some analysis of the phenomena. Most capitelli are in the form of an icon surrounding by an aedicle or niche at eye level on a wall, although stone reliefs of icons set higher up on buildings are also common. The main material for construction of the enclosure is stone (68%), which can range from a simple niche carved out of brick to an elaborate marble aedicle with pilasters, capitals, and a pediment. Wood, usually painted bright colors, is also common (29%) and a sizeable minority of stone capitelli are also protected with a wooden roof. Within the frame of a capitello lies the all-important icon. 45% of these take the form of flat colored images, which can be paintings, sketches, watercolors, or reproductions of famous works (I noticed one copy of a Byzantine altar piece). Stone or clay reliefs account for 35% of icons and statues (usually painted) account for 13%. I saw only one crucifix. Non-structural decoration of these shrines is almost obligatory, with 55% of shrines containing artificial flowers and many contained additional decoration such as lace, bows, curtains, and candles. At least 25% of capitelli had a source of illumination, either an electric light or candles.

The popularity of the aedicle style of frame is not surprising, as it common in the shrines and altars of churches. In addition to protecting the icon from the elements, an aedicle emphasizes the importance of the icon just as the decoration of an illuminated manuscript emphasized the importance of the text. This emphasis is also the reason why many capitelli are illuminated at night (light has always been a symbol of spirituality and at night it is eye-catching in a dark alley). The decorations of flowers and lace are feminine; their inclusion in the shrines may stem from the fact that the a very common icon is the Madonna, as well as from the fact that it is predominantly elderly women who now care for the shrines ¹. Beyond this, flowers have always been a symbol of fertility, beauty, and life, and their use in religious shrines is not unnatural.

The origins of many Venetian capitelli are uncertain; this is to be expected, as many are centuries old. Typical reasons for constructing a capitello were to remind a neighborhood of a particular Saint’s virtues in day to day life, to bring the parish Saint into the community, or to commemorate an event such as a miracle or tragedy ². As such, it goes without saying that some capitelli have fascinating stories behind them. One example of this is the story of the shrine inside Sottoportego di Corte Nova, located near Castello’s Chiesa di San Lazero [not photographed here]. According to Paolo Giordani’s guidebook, Venice, (paraphrased in citation 3), the shrine was established during the Plague of 1680. A neighborhood woman named Giovanna told her frightened neighbors to put their faith in the Madonna and then painted an image of Mary and some saints in the sottoportego leading to their houses. Everyone remained healthy and it was believed that the power of the Madonna prevented the plague from traveling through the sottoportego. The painted image was converted into a shrine and maintained throughout the centuries, also supposedly protecting the neighborhood from the bombs of WWI. To this day, the capitello is honored by the neighborhood every November 21, on the same day that the city as a whole honors the Virgin at the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute ³.

Although they were built mainly by neighborhoods and individuals, the construction and maintenance of the capitelli was actively encouraged by the government of the Venetian Republic, which as early as 1450 charged local patricians with the duty of overseeing them ⁴. The reasons for this were twofold. First, in age before street lamps, the nighttime candles of the capitelli provided illumination in dark areas like sotoportegos and isolated calli, and near bridges ². In fact, the government itself would sometimes send out people to light the candles of strategically located shrines ². Second, the capitelli allowed panoptic control over society by utilizing religion to maintain order throughout the secular spaces of the city ⁴. It was thought that the omnipresent icons of Saints would reduce violence and crime, and in fact, important business contracts were often signed next to a capitello so that both parties would be inclined to keep their word ⁴.

The panopticism of the capitelli is a critical manifestation of their main purpose; to bring the sacred out of the church and into everyday life. A shrine with an icon is meant to remind the viewer of the particular virtue of the Saint or religious figure depicted, as well as of virtue in general. Of the icons I have seen, the most common is the Madonna and Child (30%), followed by Saint Anthony and the Christ child (20%), and Mary or a similar-looking female Saint (20%). Only 10% of capitelli were devoted to Christ alone. Other figures included St. Joseph, John the Baptist, the Holy Family, and ensembles of Saints.

Not only is a capitello a reminder of religion, it is often thought of as a semi-sacred space in and of itself (often because the shrine was actually built to commemorate something about that particular spot) ⁴. A typical Catholic response when encountering a capitello is to cross oneself; some even chant or recite the rosary nearby ⁵. I have never encountered this, but have been fortunate enough to see a religious response to one of the larger shrines (though it could also be considered a very small chapel).

On the night before All Saints’ Day, two others and I were looking at a shrine/chapel when a man appeared with a large iron key and asked if we wanted to see inside. The interior was lit and contained a painted icon of the Madonna on an altar and some fake flowers nearby. The man said it was built in the 18^th century and dedicated to Mary at the foot of the cross. As we exited, we saw a huge crowd of parishioners enter the campo. We pressed against a wall as they filled the space around the shrine. The priest said a few words (translated and paraphrased, he said that we should always consider ourselves at the foot of the cross) and parishioners began entering the shrine to receive the Eucharist. A few people began to play guitars and everyone starting singing hymns.

Local shrines and capitelli bring religion into the community, but also brought the community together through the neighborhood “cult” of the particular icon ⁴. About one third of the capitelli I saw had offering boxes; offerings are used by the local cult for the maintenance of the capitello and for charity work. The unifying force of these shrines and local cults was never as strong as in other Italian cities because of the Venetian government’s tendency to establish city-wide rituals and the strong unifying force of St. Mark and his omnipresent lions ⁴.

Though often hiding just out of view, the capitelli reveal a fascinating aspect of Venetian cultural history that is often overlooked by visitors to the city. These little shrines help to instill a sense of community in neighborhoods and promote good behavior through panoptism, although these functions are not as strong as they once were. Most importantly, the capitelli create sacred places out in the everyday world and thus help reconcile the gap between religion and everyday life.

1. Paolo Venerando, Venetian and Italian teacher at Dante Alighieri Institute

2. Tour guide for night tour at Basilica di San Marco

3. Blog Post, Ann, “Sotoportego di Corte Nova shrine”, http://www.slowtrav.com/blog/annienc/street_shrines/

4. Muir, Edward. “The Virgin on the Street Corner: The Place of the Sacred in Italian Cities”, essay in “The Italian Renaissance: essential readings” by Paula Findlen

5. Blog Post, Greg Bryant, “Restoration Under the Radar”, http://venicenotes.blogspot.com