The adventure began when I got my new travel agent, Isser, to book the flight. I had been recommended Isser by a friend who told me the great thing about this guy was that he worked out of his home and could be contacted at any time. Sunday morning at six a.m., need a ticket to Paraguay, want to rent a houseboat in Kalistan, call Isser. Fine. I called him, and he got to work, reserving several tickets for me and juggling for a better price. A week before we were supposed to go, he finally says that he’s not going to be able to get anything cheaper than what he had with Luftansa, so I pay for the tickets and wait for them to come. And wait. We’re supposed to leave on Friday, but I don’t have the tickets on Tuesday. I phone Isser and he says, "Ah yes, Doctor Paul, I have sent them by express parcel post to your office." I explain that this is a bad idea, since that means they could be lost in the university mail room for a week. They should be sent to my house. He promises to correct this. Wednesday, still no tickets. I phone him: "Ah yes, Doctor Paul, I have arranged for a special courier riding a jet-bike to rescue the tickets from the mail room and transport them to your house in the next five minutes."
Thursday, no tickets. I phone: "Ah yes, Doctor Paul, I have hired the space shuttle to fly them to your home; the should re-enter the atmosphere outside your house in the next fifteen minutes." Miraculously, they do, and we’re off the next morning.
Now, this is a long flight: some ten hours to Frankfurt, and another two to Florence. So I was a bit worried getting on the plane. Like you, I’ve been reading in the newspapers about "air rage" incidents. This happens when some hapless passenger on an airline loses it and attacks flight attendants, tries to open outside doors, leads all the passengers in the Macarena, etc. Why does this happen? I believe it is because of the contrast between how air travel is advertised and actually experienced. In airline ads, passengers luxuriate in huge, comfy chairs; they watch first-run movies on individual video display terminals; they are served platter of lobster, caviar, champagne, cocktails, and designer drugs by super-model attendants, dressed in skimpy uniforms, whose flashing eyes and coyly licked lips give promise of hours of in-flight fellatio.
Then you actually get on the plane and are herded like beef cattle into seats that are narrower than your shoes and that are so close to the seat in front of you that your knees are by your ears for the whole flight. The mouth-breathing passenger on one side of you will weight 400 lbs. and will ooze over the armrest, like a raw liver shoved into a shot glass, onto your flesh. On your other side will be a maniacal child (deep into Ritalin withdrawal) playing a shouting game with a friend sitting twenty rows ahead. Behind you will be a baby with an ear infection. Occasionally during the endless flight a lumpy and snarly attendant will throw you a miniature bag of peanuts. For some $10 you can rent a pair of headphones that seems to be part of a child’s toy stethoscope and attempt to watch a Steven Guttenberg movie on a 15 inch TV screen that is over 200 ft away. If, by some miracle, you can actually follow the film, the captain will cut into the audio during the climactic scene to make a very important announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. If you look out the windows on the right side of the plane, you can see the tops of clouds. Under those clouds and totally obscured from sight are featureless prairie grasslands." No wonder people lose it.
Well, Luftansa was actually pretty durn good. Talk about Germanic efficiency. The Fraulein attendants even managed to keep a class of private school boys from going berserk by threatening to confiscate the Walkman of the first one of them who spoke out of turn. You’ve never seen such cowed and quiet teenagers. They’re all going to grow up to me sexual masochists with a preference for Germanic mistresses wearing blue uniforms. The food was not bad and they sure didn’t stint with the booze. In fact, everything ran on a precise schedule to the point that it was actually a bit irritating:
-Fraulein: Would you like cognac or Irish cream?
-Me: Nothing, thanks.
-Fraulein: But we are offering cognac and Irish cream.
-Me: I’m fine, really.
-Fraulein: I’ll give you the cognac.
-Me: I don’t want anything.
-Fraulein: Please do not make me call the captain. Here is your cognac.
-Me: Fine. Could I have a glass of water with this?
-Fraulein: It is not yet time for water.
-Me: When can I have water?
-Fraulein: At water time.
Now, Germans are famous for their efficiency, and the airline Luftansa certainly demonstrated that, but this is a facade that the Germans put on for foreigners. In their own country, they are hapless nitwits and slobs. Frankfurt airport is one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been in my life (and I have been to Saskatoon). At 10am, it’s full of Germans sitting in tacky airport bars with names like "Beerlift," gnawing on greasy sausages, drinking uber-pints of beer (before changing into their pilots’ uniforms), and staring off into space.
At the gate to the flight to Florence there was a booth with two, twenty-something German guards sitting in it. Both had lank, dirty hair, poorly fitting uniforms, and looks of complete despondency on their faces. Studies in Teutonic melancholy, they didn’t even look at us as we approached them. Not certain if they were just there for decoration or what, Karen and I kept walking and it was only when we were almost past them that one of them finally managed to lift himself from his torpor long enough to say, "Passports, bitte." We gave him the passports and he took them in slow motion. He opened them as though they were death warrants, and after a minute of glassy-eyed inspection, summoned the strength to stamp them. He slid them back to us and fixed his gaze once more into the distance. As K and I walked around the booth, the guards grunted a few words to each other. As a one-time student of German, I offer this translation:
-Fritz: I wish I were dead.
-Dieter: I too wish I were dead.
-Fritz: I will kill myself slowly with cigarets and sausage.
-Dieter: I will kill myself by never washing my hair.
-Fritz: It is good to be German.
-Dieter: Ya. It is good.
And Germans can be disorganized: when they opened the gate to our connecting flight we went down a flight of stairs to find, not a plane, but a bus. Hello? Didn’t I buy a PLANE ticket to Florence? The bus then drove across the airport tarmac to a small plane which took forever to board. Why? Because they had entry doors at the front AND back of the plane. A good idea, right? Not if no one is checking the seat assignments. Figure, at least half of the people who entered the plane by the back door had seats in the front of the plane and vice versa. The result was chaos in the plane aisle as people at each end of the plane tried to push their way to the other end while other people were trying to stow their luggage. All this while the dulcet tones of the soothing German language came over the p.a. system: "Schnell! Schnell ! Raus!"
A short flight and we were in Italy. Armed with knowledge off the web, I knew that you had to go into the airport departures building and go upstairs to the bar to buy bus tickets. This I did, no prob, which leads me to one of my helpful travel hints: faking foreign languages. Now, understand, I am bad at languages. Always have been. So I’ve developed my own system for getting by in other countries. Here it goes.
Step one: Learn the language’s hesitation device, that is the sound which is the equivalent of "um" or "uh" in the target language. With just this tool you can fake an entire conversation. I fooled people in Japan into thinking I was fluent because I knew the hesitation device, "ano." I would stutter, draw out an "ano" and whoever I was speaking to would fill in the words I was, apparently, stumbling over. Works brilliantly. Except in Italian. Why? There is no hesitation device in Italian. Italians never pause, ever, when they are speaking.
Step two: To hell with grammar. Grammar is for losers and novelists. In day-to-day conversation it is a time-wasting luxury. Why say, "I would like two tickets for the next bus please" when you can strip it down to nouns and numbers: "Bus, tickets, two." It works fine.
Step three: Memorize a few key phrases. You will need to know the following in the target language:
"Hello"
"Please"
"Thank you"
"Excuse me"
"Where is the liquor store?"
And, if you are traveling with your wife, "Please don’t kill me; take the woman."
That’s it: fifteen minutes of study and you can fake any language in the world.
A short public bus ride and we’re in downtown Florence. A short walk, and we were at the Hotel Perseo, a place that we discovered on the web. Gentlemen, I gotta tell you, when we found this place, our hearts sank. It looked like the set of an early Roman Polanski movie: one of those films in which a gormless American checks into a seedy European apartment and then goes slowly insane as dwarves and demonic circus performers lurk outside his room. One of the reasons the hotel looked so odd is because it is almost impossible for anyone to get permission to build new buildings in downtown Florence. As a result, old building are internally divided into weird subsections. So, one five-floor building might contain two floors of hotel, a chicken slaughterhouse, a daycare for senile adults, a private apartment, and a government office. Go figure.
As it turns out, the hotel (which occupied the top two floors) was fine – minimalist, a bit noisy, but fine, once you got over the horror of riding in an elevator made of bits of glass and tape.
Once we checked in, it was out in the streets to explore the city. The first thing you notice in Florence are the hordes of people. The next thing you notice is the traffic.
Now, Italians have a reputation for being terrible drivers. This is nonsense. How can you call any race that is capable of bringing together 100 miniature cars, three huge buses, and a thousand vespas into an seven-street intersection without traffic lights all at the same time and at breakneck speed without anyone dying be considered bad drivers? These people are clearly the best drivers in the world. And no one can deny that the Italians are the best parkers in the world. Bar none. Okay, they have an advantage: most of their cars are smaller than the door of my 1981 Monte Carlo. I mean, these people happily stuff a family of six into a car that a single Shriner would drive in a parade. But even given that advantage, you have to be impressed when a stretch of street contains twenty parked cars, all of them so close to the one in front that there is literally no room for a pedestrian to squeeze between them to get to the street. How do they get them in? How do they get them out? Are they just props? Is this a fence to keep pedestrians off the street?
Now, what are the annoying things about Italians? Well, they all smoke. All of them. Even children. They study it in school, right after the multiplication table. Their parents buy them packages of chewing-gum flavored ciggies decorated with smiling cartoon characters. Muppets on the Italian version of Sesame Street regularly light up and sometimes sing songs about the joys of smoking and drinking espresso. Ernie and Bert turn to the camera and ask questions like, "If Ernie smokes three cigarets, gives one to Big Bird, and five to his friend Tomizo the Tumor, how many will be left in the pack?" Parents in Italy actually get worried if their kids don’t smoke:
-Mama: Giovanni has his report card. He is doing well in most subjects.
-Papa: But not...?
-Mama: (hushed voice) He is failing smoking.
-Papa: (anguished) But we are family of great smokers! His uncle Lorenzo was on the pro tour!
-Mama: I know. He is deeply ashamed and promises to try harder.
-Papa: I will sell our very small car and hire him a smoking tutor. Damn the cost!
When you ask for a table at a restaurants the maitre ‘d will ask, "Smoking or heavy smoking?"
And all Italians talk constantly on cell phones. I thought this was a North American form of madness. No sir. We’re pikers when it comes to cell phone use compared to the Italians. Gypsy beggars in Italian town squares have cell phones. They call across the piazza to other Gypsy beggars: "Rosa? How are you? I have enough change for a dog biscuit! Want some?" Nuns hang them from their rosaries. The week after we were in Italy a law was passed making helmet wearing mandatory for scooter drivers. This created huge outrage. Why? Because you can’t use a cell phone when you have a helmet on. I am not making that up.
And there is the matter of inefficiency. It did not occur where I thought it would; public transportation, for example, was efficient and punctual. I guess we have Il Duce to thank for that. No, it showed up in weird places. For example, every morning when I took my shower, there would be two short power black outs. The first one would last maybe five seconds, the next one around 20. It didn’t matter if I showered at 7am or 9am, those blackouts always caught me (and never Karen, even if she showered first) in the shower. How is that possible? Obviously the Italian government pays some guy to sit in a booth somewhere (another floor of the same building?) to monitor the shower activity of certain randomly selected tourists and throw power blackouts their way. This strikes me as a waste of manpower.
It also showed up in labor relations. When we were in Italy the ground crews at the Rome and Milan airports went on strike; something about a new regulation prohibiting them from smoking while handling jet fuel. The staff the Uffizi, the biggest and most important art gallery in the city (perhaps the country) decided to kick everyone out of the building for an hour while we were there to hold a staff meeting. They didn’t bother trying to figure out how they would let people back in, so we had to improvise: we pushed our way past some terrified Japanese tourists while waving our arms and shouting important-sounding Pig Latin: "Ovemay oobergay!" Worked like a charm.
Not that you really have to go into the galleries to see Renaissance art in Florence. Much of the art is public. The city is full of huge statues of naked figures, most of them male and most of them displaying what Hollywood calls "the full frontal." Common Florentine expressions between friends include "meet me under the penis" and "see you at the penis!"
Indeed, the United Nations says that 60% of the world’s recognized art treasures are in Italy. Half of those are in Florence. So, figure, 30% of the must-see art for the whole world is in this one town. On top of that there are myriad architectural wonders. How is this possible? Well, imagine a town that is dominated by several (two to five, depending on the century) extremely wealthy families. Now, I’m not talking keep-the-change-pizza-delivery-guy rich; I’m talking Bill-Gates rich. I’m talking let’s-buy-Uncle-Stephano-the-papacy rich. Now imagine that the most important thing in these families’ lives was showing up the other families by building bigger palaces, funding bigger churches, buying more art by greater artists, etc. Now imagine that this family rivalry went on in one town for centuries. So, back in the 14th....
-Cosimo Medici: The stinking Paza family have had the basilica entirely covered with gold and the inside painted by Boticelli. This is done to disgrace me.
-Lady Medici: What will we do to restore our family’s honor?
-Cosimo Medici: I will have Da Vinci design a public bathroom three acres in size that will contain fountains made of diamond and I will hire Michelango to paint portraits of the Pazzas on the toilet paper. I will have Vaspucci paint the inside of the dome of the Duomo with a ruby-encrusted vision of hell in which can be seen the Pazza family burning for their sins. I will fund an order of Domican monks in perpetuity on the condition that at least one monk be praying for the damnation of the Pazzas ever minute of every day until the end of time. I will buy Uncle Stephano the papacy so that he can excommunicate the Pazzas. He needs a hobby anyway. And in the square right across from the pathetic 2-acre Pazza palace, I will have a huge statue of me erected standing naked so that every day the Pazzas will be forced to see my penis.
-Lady Medici: Same old same old.
You think I’m exaggerating? Let me tell you a true story: the Medici family (the richest of the Florentine Renaissance families) had numerous buildings in Florence but their main crib was the Palazo a Piti, the "small palace." Small. Yeah. Right. Tiny. Don’t know what you do about storage space. In fact, the garden shed for this "little" palace is bigger than my home. This place is actually bigger than the Florence airport. It’s visible from outer space. Not only is it huge, but it is chock full of architectural wonders and art masterpieces. The ceiling of one of the main rooms alone contains enough statuary, gold leaf, and fine painting to pay of the accumulated Third World debt. That’s the ceiling, mind you; never mind what’s on the walls. This "small palace" is so big that an entire staff of servants was necessary just to make candles to light the thing. Anyway, that’s not the rich part. Here’s the rich part: many of the Medici family spent their working days at the Uffizi, the office building (now art gallery) due north, maybe a mile, across the bridge called the Ponte Vecchio from the palace. So what do the Medicis do? They build a corridor, a hallway, one flight up, all the way from their palazo, through the town, across the bridge, and into the Uffizi. They build a mile-long hallway to work. Think about that; think about waking up one morning and saying, "Honey, I’m tired of going downstairs and riding through the street to work. Let’s build a hallway to the office! It’s only a mile...." They hired a guy called Vasari to build this thing and, when some of the neighboring landowners object to the project, they simply built around them. So now the Medici can stroll to their jobs without having to go outside, without having to go downstairs. But hey, that could become a pretty boring walk every day; what can they do to liven it up? Hell, they stock every inch of wallspace with masterpieces by the greatest painters of all time. Not a bad commute. That’s how rich these people were.
We did not spend the entire week in Florence. On Monday most of the must-see attractions in the city were closed, so we decided to take a trip with our friends Patsy and Helen to San Gimignano. Now, San Gimignano is this perfect, walled, late medieval hilltop village. The whole thing looks like the set of Chef-Boy-R-Dee commercial. Quite spectacular. It is famous for its towers. Some 13 still exist: imposing things that offer spectacular views of the Tuscan landscape. Apparently back in the Renaissance the city contained some 70 towers. Since this is not a large town, I figure that virtually every private dwelling in the town had its own tower some 500 years ago. Why? So the locals could spy on and, when necessary, shoot their neighbours. That’s right: a small town, in which everyone’s home is his battle tower. I mean, imagine if the houses on your block were very close together, separated only be narrow alleys, and each house had a ten-story tower on it, and every day someone in the family would spend the day in that tower watching his neighbours: "Hey! There’s Smith. He looks like he’s going to Safeway. Since he lent me his lawnmower, I’ll let him pass. But here comes that Jones bastard! His kid’s ball when on my lawn last night. Prepare the boiling oil!" Must have made getting around town a real challenge.
San Gimignano also has a couple of saints. My favourite is Santa Fina. A ten-year old girl of a poor but proud mother back in the late middle ages, Fina was sent one day to the well. On the way back, some young swain gave her an orange. She brought it home and her mother chewed her out for accepting it. Fina immediately repented, then lay down on the floor of the kitchen to pray for forgiveness. She did not get up for five years. There are contemporary pictures showing her with mice running over her body. She died and the church made her the patron saint of really, really obedient children.
While in San Gimignano I ate the single best cookie of my life. I will never forget that cookie. If I were a poet, I would write an epic poem of that cookie. When I’m on my death bed and someone asks me if I have any regrets, I’ll say, yes, two: I once owned a cat, and I should have had another cookie in San Gimignano.
On the other hand, I had a bun which was advertised as a local speciality. It was perhaps the hardest, most unpalatable piece of baking I’ve ever had. I believe it’s traditional to the town because in the Renaissance home-owners would throw these things from their towers at neighbours they wanted to kill.
Back to Florence....The guide books say that the main perils of Florence are pickpockets and crowds. I saw no sign of pickpocket activity; indeed, the city struck me as remarkably safe and clean. There are crowds, oh yes, mainly of tourists. Most of the tourists are Italian.
No, the gravest danger of Florence is the shoe stores. Florence is, like, one of the women’s fashion capitals of the world, and every third store front is an incredibly expensive shoe store. Why is this a danger? Because I was traveling with my wife. Worse: at time I was walking around in the company of THREE women. That meant that every twenty feet or so I was jerked backwards like a bad dog on a leash so that the women folk could gawk at the shoes. My arm was almost dislocated. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the shoes had been shoes that someone could actually buy, but NO, these were $600 shoes. This fact alone endangered my sanity. Why is it that women will spend more time looking at clothing items that they can’t possibly afford or couldn’t possibly wear than at practical, affordable clothes? I asked Karen and she said it was so they could get good ideas and then try to find cheaper versions. Uh huh. Right. Hey, next time I go to buy a car, I’ll spend a lot of time studying the $200,000 BMW Roadster, then I’ll take those ideas and look at the cars I can afford, like the 1981 Gremlin. That will make me feel a whole lot better. Yessir, if I just slap a BMW logo on the front of this baby and affect a British accent, I’m gonna pass as Pierce Brosnan.
On the upside, every fourth store in Florence is a women’s underwear store. Now, gentlemen, let us face the facts: there is no spoken sentence more dispiriting, more likely to crush a good mood, more likely to ruin a day, than a wife’s "I just want to go in here for a minute" when it is uttered outside of an underwear store. You know what’s coming next: the chair. That’s right: every women’s clothing store in the world has one ratty chair, shoved up against the wall somewhere, where you, the man, the crushingly demoralized man, get to sit while your wife wastes precious hours of living time looking at bras. Heaven help us if two husbands are in the store at the same time because then there will be blood on the floor, hair on the walls, as they fight each other to the death for the right to slump in that chair. That’s because the alternative to the chair is even more unthinkable: following your wife around the store and being asked questions about girdles.
So the next time your wife wants to take you underwear shopping say, "Fine, but only in Florence," because the underwear stores there are different. They are small, they are filled with posters and mannequins that would be used as sexual aids in Canada, and the underwear they sell is all – how shall I put this? – designed with men in mind. As far as I can tell, every Italian woman in Florence, from the traffic cop to the charwoman, must be decked out like a Victoria Secret’s model under her uniform, cause the Florentines don’t make baggy, beige undies. Gentlemen, we’re talking frills, we’re talking vents, we’re talking THONGS. I think Karen got a bit tired of me suggesting that we check out another underwear store.
Between the underwear stores, the shoe stores, and various other clothing stores, the Italians are a pretty well dressed bunch. The local police uniforms were designed (no joke) by Pucci. Who designed the Vancouver police uniforms? Bullwinkle? So even the Italian cops looks cool and stylish. But the street style is not vulgar; it’s subtle. You have to be attuned to notice things like the fact that the construction worker over there, the guy with the gut hanging over his belt, is wearing tailored chinos; or the crazy guy on the bus, talking to himself as snot runs down his face, is wearing $300 shoes. Tres cool.
And what about food? Hey, everyone loves Italian food, and no one loves it more than the Italians. There are hundreds and hundreds of restaurants in Florence and, as far as I can tell, they all serve only Italian food. That’s it. Imagine if every restaurant in Canada only served Canadian food: poutine, grilled cheese sandwiches, butter tarts, and beer. That’s sort of what it’s like, only (praise Allah) the Italian food is infinitely better. And the approach to food is different there. Here, if I go to an expensive Italian restaurant, the menu will feature things like "Radicchio gnocchi in a butternut squash reduction with squid-ink risotto and pan-seared organically raised chicken tenders." In the best restaurants in Florence, the menu will often say things like "pasta with sauce." There is no desire to surprise; the art is in preparing things that are absolutely fresh in as classic a manner as possible. Take pizza, for instance. Here, the kids make me order from the local Domino’s. What do you get? A perfectly round pizza piled an inch thick with a dozen toppings that all come in one of two flavors: salty or fatty. I don’t care how much crap you order, it will taste bland. Now, order a pizza in Florence. It is delivered by a guy on a scooter (too cool), it is oddly shaped, and it has almost nothing on it: a smear of sauce, a dusting of cheese, and a sprinkle of the other toppings. But when you bite into it you realize that this is the best pizza that you’ll ever have because all the parts, the handmade crust, home-stewed sauce, the olives, and proscuitto, are perfectly fresh, perfectly chosen to compliment each other. Quality, not quantity.
And the food market! We were right near one and we made it a habit to go there for lunch everyday: a panini sandwich for, like, $2. While we ate we’d walk around an gawk at some of the most beautiful cheese, meat, fish, and produce that you’ve ever seen. Not that this was without its own perils: when you go to a fruit stand in North American, you grab one of the bags they have lying around, stuff it full of a type of fruit, then give it to the vendor to weigh. Right? Well, not in Italy. On the second floor of the public market were the vegetable and fruit stands. Karen wanted some oranges so she grabbed a bag and started tossing fruit in it. Big mistake. The old woman who ran the stand freaked: started screaming something in Italian, started making diabolical gestures with her hands, gave us the evil eye, got on the cell phone to her Mafioso nephew and put a hit out on us, grabbed her bag back and made it clear that SHE was the one who touched the bags and fruit: you just point at the things you want.
Okay.
We made it a habit every day after that to return to the stand, grab a bag, and stuff as much fruit into it as possible before she could catch us. Good fun.
The other great appeal of the market was the wine vendor. Let me rephrase that: one of the great appeals of Italy is the wine. There is wine everywhere. More agricultural land in Italy is given over to the production of wine grapes than food. People (never drunk and disorderly) casually walk down the street with an open bottle. You order unpretentious house wines in restaurants and it comes in litre bottles, sometimes for the same price as bottled water. Fixed dinner menus all include a healthy smattering of wine. Some restaurants have farms in the countryside where they produce their own vintages only available in the restaurant. At the last restaurant we went to I was so impressed by the specially made house wine that I bought a bottle as we were leaving: approx. $5 for a litre and a half. But the ultimate bargain, my friends, was to be had at the market wine vendor. This dude had a basket of wine that he was selling for 2950 lire a bottle. That works out to $2.15 Canadian. I went back to visit him so many times that he would begin to wrap a bottle as soon as he saw me enter the market.
Let me repeat that price once again, just for the pleasure of typing it: $2.15.
Now, Florence actually has its own mental disorder. Its seems that in the 19th century, Maurice Stendahl made a trip to Florence and was so overcome by the beauty of the buildings, the general environs, and the art, that he went into a sort of fit and had to be hospitalized for several days. I’m going to bet that he actually just made one too may trips to my friend the wine vendor ($2.15). Anyway, since then Florence has clocked four or five people a year as victims of Stendalishmo; these people simply overload on what the city has to offer and have to be put in a rubber room for a few days. Personally, I think the crowds and noise of the city make the likelihood of this happening on a public street pretty remote, but I will tell you about one moment at which I came close to be overwhelmed.
When you enter the Uffizi, you go up a huge staircase into a second-floor hallway. The main gallery rooms all branch off this hall. But in the hall itself, ignored by most of the tourists, are a series of Roman sculptures. I’m talking the real thing: 2000-year-old busts and art pieces. Right at the top of the stairs are busts of some of the big guns of Roman history. Now, understand, I’m a Roman history buff. Love the stuff. So when I ran up the stairs and practically bumped into the emperors of Rome, I was floored. There was Augustus. He has a bland face, but in retrospect that makes a certain sort of sense: Augustus, the first and greatest of the emperors was not a warrior or artist; he was bureaucrat. A magnificent bureaucrat, but a bureaucrat nonetheless – hence the blandness. There were the three stooges: Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula. The family resemblance between these three nutbars is striking: they all have weak chins, small, prissy mouths, and strangely bulbous foreheads. Bad boys all. There were also some minor luminaries, like Hadrianus, and non-politicos, like Seneca. But the statue that stopped me, stopped me cold, was tucked away in the corner to the right as you enter the hall: Julius Caesar. Lawyer, priest, senator, ambassador, engineer, chick magnet, historian, direct lineal descendent of the goddess Venus, the greatest general (for my money) of all time, proto-Lavaman. He had a face like the blade of an axe, a face of piercing intelligence and utter, utter self-confidence. It froze me like a deer in the headlights, and before I could even register what was happening, my eyes filled with tears.
And that, friends was my best Italian moment.
Ciao, baby.
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