Travelogue 1184 – 28 May
The Day’s Battle

Most days are some sort of battle. Who you fight, how desperate the struggle, these things may change. On the rare day, there is no adversary at all, and you drift through the day like a prelude to Paradise. Yesterday was not that day. The adversary was obvious, and a common one for us gentle fools in the Netherlands: the weather.

I want to say we were lashed by the weather. It’s such a wonderfully dramatic, Victorian phrase, and in this case it’s entirely apt. It was a day that the girls and I were obliged to be on the bicycles for hours. The girls had after-school activities at all ends of the city. And the winds and the rain were relentless.

We were as ready as we could have been. Rain suits were on, and warm clothes underneath. But there is an undeniable power in Nature that demands your submission. The day was a record of the weather, more than of our achievements. Most of the time, the rain was a gentle one, but it would not let up. And the wind had its own rules, rising and falling in its own unpredictable rhythm, driving the rain into our faces, and pushing against us as we pedalled. Occasionally, the two forces combined, rain intensifying just as the wind blew. Occasionally, the wind played with our wheels, making us wind along our paths unsteadily.

I feared for our safety on the roads. I feared we would catch cold. I feared that the girls would be miserable.

And all this trouble we undergo during the modern age, with the wonderful technology at our disposal, the light and effective rain suits, the strong bicycles with treads on the tires designed for weather, the smooth and quick roads, and the warm and dry interiors.

No wonder the ancients perceived angry gods behind the weather and tried to propitiate them. No wonder Renaissance engineers prayed for success. Even in Italy, the wind and the rain would have made imperious demands on the people. I think of the labours of the Renaissance’s Hercules, one Michelangelo Buonarotti.

Travelogue 1183 – 24 May
The Neighbourhood Church
Part Two

Domenico Ghirlandaio, the painter of the Saint Jerome set opposite Botticelli’s Saint Augustine in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence, was a favourite of the Vespucci family, who were prominent in the neighbourhood. The Vespucci family funded Ghirlandaio’s projects in the church, including the Last Supper in the Refectory, the Saint Jerome, and the frescos he completed with his brother in the small chapel built by the Vespucci, the Madonna of Mercy and the Pietà. The Madonna of Mercy is an early piece, dating to 1474 or so. Mother Mary stands on a small pedestal with her arms extended in a gesture of protection, while members of the Vespucci family kneel below her praying. Closest to her is a boy or young man who would eventually become the most famous member of the Vespucci clan, although his fame lay a quarter of a century in the future. At the moment, the prestige of the family was upheld by his grandfather, who served as chancellor for the republic. He probably died just before this fresco was painted, and the boy’s branch of the family languished a bit under the tutelage of his wayward father, Nastagio, who was a notary and probably a drunk. Nastagio’s brother, Giorgio Antonio, was put together a bit better. Giorgio Antonio became a Dominican friar and a well-known humanist scholar, who was a friend of Marsilio Ficino’s, and he took responsibility for young Amerigo’s education. When another uncle was sent on a diplomatic mission to Paris, to the court of Louis X1, he invited young Amerigo along, and thus began Amerigo’s travels.

There is a medallion on the floor in the Vespucci chapel, a memorial for Amerigo. I cannot find conclusive testimony that he is actually buried there. In fact, it seems more likely that he was buried in Seville. In his will, he requested to be buried in Spain, in his wife’s family’s plot. The sense of mystery that attends Amerigo in death seems to gently match the mystery in his life. There is a surprising amount we don’t know about the Navigator. We can’t even be sure he took all the four trips to America that tradition has credited him with. The letter that sparked German mapmakers, Ringmann and Waldseemüller, to lend Amerigo’s name to the New World has proven to be a fake, probably put together by an unscrupulous Florentine publisher to boost sales. It’s quite possible that Uncle Giorgio Antonio took an active role in promoting Amerigo’s reputation. He was a dabbler in cartography himself, and could have been in touch with Waldseemüller. It might just be the right time to remind ourselves that America was from the start a story of family pride and fake news.

Travelogue 1182 – 17 May
The Neighbourhood Church
Part One

On our second day in Florence, we visited Botticelli at the Ognissanti church. The Renaissance painter is buried there, in the church of the neighbourhood where he was born. The church looked different then. What we see now is a Baroque, sixteenth-century renovation. But something of the original layout remains, and Botticelli himself contributed to its décor during his day. A fresco of Saint Augustine was commissioned by the Vespucci family, which Vasari tells us was intended for the entry to the choir but was moved to its current position in 1564. It hangs in the nave, opposite a commission executed at the same time by competitor Domenico Ghirlandaio, a depiction of Saint Jerome. The two saints were contemporaries, as were their portraitists, and in fact Botticelli seems to have wanted to reference Jerome in his portrait of Augustine. The clock behind Augustine points to the hour of compline, and he holds a hand to his breast and looks up with a rapt expression. He has heard the voice of his friend Jerome, who at that moment, faraway from Augustine, had just died. Jerome visited him before moving on, whispering to him, “You might as soon enclose the ocean in a bottle as comprehend the blessed nature of the saints.”

By contrast, Ghirlandaio’s Jerome, set now across the nave, is captured in a more prosaic moment. He is doing his work, writing in his study, stealing a look at us as we watch him translate the Bible into Latin. The two portraits clearly belong together, their divergences minor in comparison to their kinship. The time is written all over them, even, I feel, to the year, given the fast pace of Renaissance development. The two artists would work together again some five years later in another church, this time in Rome, in the Sistine Chapel.

The church is also Botticelli’s burial place. He never lived anywhere but Florence, and never even left the neighbourhood, moving only around the corner from his birthplace near the Ognissanto. It is only fitting that he lies there, a simple medallion in the floor of one of the church chapels memorialising him and his family. Since he did not use the name “Botticelli”, his family name of Filipepi being the name on the plaque, a small portrait of him has been placed on a small easel beside the marker, an image based on a self-portrait in one of his works, an addition to the scene that seems both touching and trivializing. Based on the very little I know, I believe he would have taken it in the best spirit.

There isn’t much to know about Botticelli. He quickly fell into obscurity after his death. Even in his old age, he had been left behind. Painting had moved on quickly from the techniques and styles of his youth. He persisted in his art, but his mood shifted. He was more serious; he was more devout. He turned his eye from mythological themes to Gospel themes. He turned to more sombre colours, and his compositions became more Gothic, in perspective and in figure.

When the demagogic friar Savonarola took over the city, Botticelli became an enthusiastic follower. He believed in the prophecies, and he believed in the calls to purge. Some say he threw his own paintings into the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497. Vasari, a Medici courtier through and through, never forgave Botticelli for his betrayal of the great family, writing about him years later as though he were a bit of a clown. The biography is brief and dismissive. Writing half a century later, Vasari says the great painter died in penury.

Travelogue 1181 – 11 May
Up With the Birds

It is a hot one. Not a cloud in the sky. I keep going, despite the sweat and the glare. It is hotter here in Rotterdam than it was in Tuscany. But I need the run. I have a 5K coming up, and I must keep up the routine. I ran almost every day I was in Italy.

The first Italian run was some time before six in the morning. Light was just dawning over the hills in the east; the first light of the day was just striking the waters of the Arno. I felt like the sun was about to rise on a secluded little valley, which, I suppose is not a completely false impression. That the valley hosts one of the world’s great heritage sites is circumstantial. It is history.

It was May Day weekend in Florence, and there was something special about being out on the streets. Everything was so quiet. I ran a loop between two of the bridges. At that hour, I was one of only two people on the Ponte Vecchio. The famous views up and down the river were unimpeded and glorious.

So few people were out, the sounds of spring rose above the river, into the air of the city, the rush of the river itself with the songs of the birds, and I ran on, starting and finishing on the east side of the centre, where two ancient towers are left to stand watch, the Torre della Zecca and the Torre di San Niccolò. The Zecca used to be a mint in the Middle Ages, producing the famous florins that ruled medieval trade. Now it stands anonymously in a traffic circle, no public sign to name it or acknowledge its age. It is an artefact of history, something both obvious and mysterious.

The stillness in the city is modern. It is an anomaly. I doubt that Mariano Filipepi’s son, in 65 years in Florence, experienced a quiet morning. I imagine the medieval Florence a cacophony, once the slightest light had dawned. And Alessandro was a worker; I imagine him up with the birds and into the workshop.

Travelogue 1180 – 30 April
Workers

A couple of artists have been on my mind, a couple of hard-working artists. I’ve been reading the famous letters of one. One passage stood out. He’s about twenty-seven, and he has gone on a trip to see the country of a favourite artist. “I did go to Courrières last winter,” he writes, “I went on a walking tour in the Pas-de-Calais …. I had just ten francs in my pocket and because I had started out by taking the train, that was soon gone, and as I was on the road for a week, it was rather a gruelling trip. Anyway, I saw Courrières and the outside of M. Jules Breton’s studio.” He was too shy to knock on the door.

He continues on his trip. “I earned a few crusts here and there en route in exchange for a picture or a drawing or two I had in my bag. But when my ten francs ran out I tried to bivouac in the open the last three nights….” My body aches just reading it.

This artist repeats quite often his commitment to working hard. “Work” must be the most repeated verb in the collection. “So you see that I am working away hard ….”

“I saw something else during the trip,” he writes, “the weavers’ villages. The miners and the weavers still form a race somehow apart from other workers and artisans and I have much fellow-feeling for them …. And increasingly I find something touching and even pathetic in these poor humble workers ….” He wants to paint them.

Another artist was born centuries earlier in a humble section of his town, a neighbourhood called “Ognissanti”, after a thirteenth-century church there. At that time, the neighbourhood was inhabited by weavers and workers. His father had been a tanner but had become a gold-beater, which put him in contact with the artists and goldsmiths of the city.

The artist was a restless boy. Vasari says of him, “He was the son of Mariano Filipepi … who raised him very conscientiously and had him instructed in all those things usually taught to young boys during the years before they were placed in the shops. And although the boy learned everything he wanted to quite easily, he was nevertheless restless; he was never satisfied in school with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Disturbed by the boy’s whimsical mind, his father in desperation placed him with a goldsmith.” This was a fateful step. In those days, goldsmiths were close with painters, workers all, and the boy was taken by painting. Later he would add his art to the décor of the Ognissanti church itself. He never left that neighbourhood his entire life.

I hope to see the Ognissanti church myself in a few days. I will take a trip to the artist’s city.

Travelogue 1179 – 22 April
Never Sleep

I cannot sleep. My head is full of responsibilities and fear. My heart is racing. There are ideas chasing each other around the empty and resounding transit hall that is my head. Ideas about books, but also ideas about mundane challenges. The Metro is down this week between my station and the next two stations, and the day will involve at least half a dozen interchanges that would have led me through that home Metro Station. I must orchestrate the comings and goings of myself and the girls, sometimes together, sometimes separate. Even this is a puzzle beyond my powers.

In contrast to the charged atmosphere inside my mind stands the still air of the early morning. The spring dawn has not arrived. The songbirds are silent. They must be sleeping. The still air is beautiful. It is silky as ambrosia, but it is rare and dispersed as a moment without thought. I dearly love this hour before dawn, before I really wake, before I become the person who must wake. The stillness is profound; it teaches me about meditation.

As I record this, I am being stared at. There is a pink Styrofoam skull on my desk, a legacy of a play I wrote, and the eyes are turned toward me, its red irises set upon mine. The skull is pink and set with spangles because it is decorated in the style of the Day of the Dead. The play required a real skull, but I made this one suffice. It lies on its side now, among the chaotic jumble of items that have collected on my desk, lies within the tight circle of light described by my desk lamp. Its red eyes never sleep.

Travelogue 1178 – 13 April
Gracious

“Goed bezig,” they said as I passed. 

The sun had returned, and in a gracious manner: not brusquely or suddenly; not wanly, as though winter were still lurking, but just as a spring sun should, gently applying heat to the clouds, thinning them and shining through.

It had been a cool and breezy morning, perfect for marathoners. It was almost as though the sun had lent its blessing to the proud city’s event. Or maybe it was chance. I certainly gave the runners my blessing. One loop of the marathon’s course passed by the girls’ ballet school, and we stood at the side of the road and cheered for the athletes.

Spring was kind to the runners. The streets were strewn with pink petals from the cherry trees. The songbirds serenaded them in the parks. The clouds cooled them off, bestowing light, passing mists for their refreshment. The air was clement, and the sun made its entrance on the stage just as most of the runners were clearing their final kilometres.

“Is 41 kilometres a marathon? Is 39 kilometres a marathon?” Baby Jos asked. No, only 42. “Why?” Well, a competition needs to be standard, all around the world. There was no need to tell them the Pheidippides story again.

Later, I took a run myself. I ran along the road toward Schiedam, the one built along the back of the old dike. On one side were the old harbours of the River Maas. On right side was the little community of Witte Dorp, the little workers’ development, named for its white houses, built at same time as my own complex of flats.

From the dike, one must descend into the Witte Dorp. I took to one of the side streets, passing as I did a small playground. A boy was climbing on some bars. A couple who might have been the boy’s parents were sitting in their car, half in, half out, with the doors open. They were looking at their phones.

The mama saw me coming. “Goed bezig,” she said. I was past before I had processed her words. Good job, she had said. She had thought I was one of the marathoners. I probably looked like I had already run a marathon, the shape I was in, limping along, tired well before I should have been. I should have thanked her, but I was past.

I turned the corner and ran into the sun. This was spring. I felt renewed. “Goed bezig,” I said.