SavocaWeb

2004-04-22 Sun at Last

I’m sitting towards the rear of our charter bus on the way from Treviso to Ravenna. We all were a little bummed about not getting into Tadao Ando’s tension-and-parabola Bennetton factory (note to self: make reservations), but we have little to complain about. After three weeks of pretty solid rain and grey skies, the past three sunny days have put everyone in a good mood.

It’s also put everyone to sleep. We’ve had a fast paced week running from one church to another, studying Palladio, Alberti, Scarpa, and more. Still, it’s hard to imagine tiring of massive villas, gold leaf, marble, frescoes, and every other glorious product of Italy’s upper crust – never you mind that their wealth came from dancing on the backs of the poor.

The bus ride is pleasant. The sun is beating on my bare shoulders. Over the slumbering form of Travis across the aisle, the view of a pastoral Italian landscape is broken only by the rhythm of telephone poles, dancing by to the beat of the Celtic music on my iPod.

The idyllic scene, with fields of green and brown, and farmhouses roofed with Martian-red shingles, gives way to a wide, shallow marsh. We pass under a highway overpass and encounter a commercial industrial area. Two large, concrete parabolic shells are grown over with weeds as they stand guard over buildings, marvels of engineering seemingly unappreciated.

The glare of the sun that put everyone to sleep wakes everyone up as the bus rounds a bend. Yawns, idle chatter, crinkling of plastic bags, and the sound of Ponti eating her old, yellow apple break the silence.

Sun. So much more than light. As Carlo Scarpa’s work points out, light and shadow – and all factors associated with them – have everything to do with the experience of space and the mood of the user. Tadao Ando points out the importance of the sun… without visual access to the sky, humans become temporally distracted, and disconnected from the natural environment.

The sun’s relationship to the environment, Bill McDonough preaches, is crucial. Sun is heat, sun is light, it is energy, it is income, it is life.

To think, all the Beatles had to say was: “Here Comes the Sun.”

2004-04-16 The Italian Automobile

As I’m sitting on a bus, I probably have little personal experience upon which to base an analysis of Italians and their driving. However, this journal is as much about observation as it is about experience.

By American standards, cars – as with just about anything here – are quite tiny. More so than any other is probably the Smart Car, a joint project between Mercedes and Swatch. With a cabin just barely large enough for two, the car also has no apparent front or back end… it’s just a little capsule on wheels.

Yet, with cars as small as they are, the people who own them use them for everything. I’ve seen people sleeping in Puntos, eating in Minis, reading the paper in Pandas.

Still, considering the way loitering is as popular as soccer, perhaps it’s more of the Italian love affair with the street. Instead of Americans, who are only concerned with getting from Point A to Point B, Italians are content simply to enjoy the ride.

The Tomb of Caecilia

This is the tomb of Caecilia Mattela, perhaps the neice of one of the Roman Emperors. In the middle ages, military added crenelations and used the tomb as a fortress. This is seen through an arch at the Circus of Maxentius, just outside of the city walls.

The Circus, Through Timothy

The gatehouse of the Circus of Maxentius, as seen from knee level. The Circus is outside the city gates, and was reserved for a more upper class crowd. One of the most pleasing landscapes I’ve encountered thus far. The clouds in the Nature gallery were taken not far from this picture.

2004-04-14 Circus of Maxentius

A view of the Circus of Maxentius. Taken from the far side of the racetrack. The spina – the middle “spine” of the race track, still exists in pieces. About ten feet wide, starts in the middle left of the picture and trails off where my classmates stand.

2004-04-14 In Pace (At Peace/Alone)

I sit on a porous, rocky curb. From behind wafts the smell of fresh cut grass. The drone of a weedwhacker on the hill competes with cars speeding down the road outside the wall. People shuffle by, the pebbles making a racket beneath their feet. Behind me, a monolithic, beige, concrete block hovers over a monument to 335 dead Italians in absolute silence.

This is the Mausoleo delle Fosse Ardeatine. When the Nazis occupied Rome, they threatened the resistance by declaring that they would take ten lives for every German death in the city. After 32 Nazis fell to the resistance, they rounded up 335 Romans, brought them out of the city to this place, then massacred them, and threw the bodies into a Fosse (fissure/tunnel/hole).

The monument, the product of a collaboration of designers, is somber and powerful. 335 slabs give the name, age, and occupation of each martyr, and have a photo enclosed in a sculpted wreath.

Renzos, Giuseppes, Francescos. Bus drivers, police captains, generals, architects, students. 18, 20, 50, 70. Number 28: Ferdinando Agnini, a 20-year-old student. Seeing his photo on the granite memorial, imagining what was going through his head as he was brought here, nearly moved me to tears. Silvio Barbieri, a 51-year-old architect. A man who was most likely just entering the prime of his career. His life rendered worthless, cut short by hatred, greed, and fear.

What good is war?

Clouds Over Maxentius

After much rain, the clouds parted while we visited the Circus of Maxentius, just outside the gates of Rome. While most people quickly sketched and shot photos of the ruins, I happened to glance skyward and saw a photo op.

While a magician must never reveal his secrets, I have to admit this: the image was doctored just a bit. I Auto-Leveled it in Photoshop to increase the drama. It really brought out the blue in the center, as was my aim, but a pleasant side effect was the darkening of the clouds at the corners, harbingers of yet another rain storm.

Catacombs

Under the Basilica of St. Sebastian lies one of the sixty catacombs around Rome. Though the site was a Necropolis in the two centuries before, Christians buried their dead in these underground tunnels for the first few centuries AD.

This was one of the fragments on display above ground.

2004-04-10 Il Treno a Napoli (The Train to Naples)

Sitting in a fuzzy blue chair. Car two on the train to Naples. Raining, foggy, dreary. Vineyards, umbrella trees, open meadows. Run down villas, brightly colored. Slower over the bridge. Mist-shrouded mountains in the distance. Ruins of acqueducts flitting by. Industrial plant out of nowhere. Under old bridges now.

Terraced hillsides, lined with trees. Not a soul in sight. Short, gnarled trees. Asked for our tickets. Three passengers sleeping, one reading, one writing. Laughter in the next cabin. Passed by another train.

A house with an odd roof structure. Monochrome sky. Steel gray, oppressive. A perfect atmosphere for Pompeii.

Burning logs in a field. Behind a wall, landscape of horizontal lines. So fast, turbulence. Field of white tubes. Cisterns, holding tanks, chemicals.

Time for a nap.

2004-04-09 Lunch on the Via del Corso

Today, I decided to head out into the city alone. I boarded the 44 bus near our hotel to the Piazza Venezia at the heart of town. I then jumped on the 95, and took it to the end of its line, north of the border of the Old City. I decided to walk from the nearby Piazza del Popolo the entire length of the Via Del Corso, the main artery of Rome, back to its end at the Piazza Venezia.

I just stopped for lunch at a pizzeria, and forked over the extra Euro to sit at the table and write. My original plan was to grab lunch and eat while listening to the small accordion band by the Popolo, but I decided to take a load off, people watch, and write a bit between bites of spinach.

The Corso is one of the few roads in this town that runs straight for any significant length of time. I can stand out in the street and see both ends at once. Thus, tourists flock to its normalcy. I’ve mostly been photographing the natives, in order to better understand what makes an Italian, but I think someone should shoot a book called “tourists.” Foreigners madly fumbling with maps, taking pictures of the monuments, getting frustrated at the language barrier. Yesterday Tara and I merrily observed from the bus a German trying to photograph the Temple of Hercules Victor He was having a heck of a time, with his handbag stuck around his ankle. His acrobatic feats to remove it and flip it up onto the bench left us rolling in the aisles, but it happened too quickly to photograph.

I realize yet another limit of photography… some things happen faster than you can find the right lens, set up the shot, focus, and snap the shutter. Some memories are destined to be just that, photos of the mind. Luckily, the highest resolution photo cannot match the mind, whose film is 3D and records five senses instead of just one.