I think I left off my European travel tales with Harsha heading for Mumbai and me flying off to Rome where I met my girlfriend Julie for our 9-day Italian escapade. Almost everything went off without a hitch. Flights were on time, drivers were where they were supposed to be, the hotel was lovely, our guide was wonderful, and the food, ah, my taste buds and hips will never be the same (but my hips weren’t doing so well when I first got to Europe anyway).
The sole hitch was a struggle at the Rome airport trying to find the right baggage claim area after I deplaned. Seems once you are in the wrong place in the Rome airport, it is a convoluted, circuitous, confusing process to get to the right place. After 45 minutes of asking directions and getting different answers and misreading signs (which make no sense in any language), my frustration had built to a crescendo that finally burst when I asked a policeman for help and instantly started blubbering. I felt like a child lost at a shopping mall looking desperately for a parent. My only solace was not being the only passenger trying to find the right baggage claim location (even Italians can’t make sense of the signs). Organization, Italian style!
Shortly after being reunited with my luggage I was in Roma and hungering for pasta, pizza, and pomodoro!
Without question, Rome is my favorite European city. Most of Italy is a tourist’s dream come true. It is the best of everything: ornate churches, opulent palaces, villas filled with antiquities, art, and sculpture for as far as the eye can see. There is also rolling countryside, greenery, mountains, a shoreline dotted with picturesque villages, incredible dining, charming shops, and palatial museums adorned with stunning décor and art work created by artisans endowed by the Divine. Of course, we went to all the traditional places and I am pleased to report that it was perfect with relatively tame crowds all around.
Visually, there is so much to take in it becomes instantly overwhelming. There are moments of breathlessness mixed with astonishment and wonder. In particular I am still surprised at my reaction every time I see Michelangelo’s Pieta at the Vatican, plus the Vatican is without question one of the most gorgeous buildings in the world. Michelangelo’s Pieta is mesmerizing and haunting, an achievement of sheer genius and passion. But it is all astounding. This time I was surprised to find out that all the “paintings” in the Vatican I’ve stared at during previous visits weren’t paintings at all; rather, they are elaborate, unexplainably complex, intricate tile masterpieces. We finished our Vatican visit with the spellbinding, enthralling beauty of the Sistine Chapel. Viewing the ceiling and walls painted by Michelangelo can be a painful experience as you linger over the art work towering overhead with your neck stretched and wrenched back and upward for way too long so you can take it all in.
When all is said done, all of the art and architecture of Rome are not about the Catholic church, but rather a living testament of the soul’s need to express itself through diverse mediums and arduous endeavor. No wonder all roads lead to Rome; it is truly a Mecca for anyone with eyes hungry to see unparalleled parts of exquisite European beauty prefaced by a torturous, complex history.
After Rome, Julie and I went to Milan for the penultimate part of our trip to Italy: Opening night at La Scala to see Placido Domingo singing the title role in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. Milan is a lovely city, but it is really just a city with some fabulous shopping for the too thin and too extravagant crowd that also happens to have a mind-blowing massive cathedral (I know, not exactly unusual for Italy). But what it does have that no other city in the world has is La Scala, the pinnacle of opera houses where the who’s who of operatic talent has graced its stage. I couldn’t believe it. Adding to the drama of the moment was the delivery of the tickets I bought almost six months earlier: They didn’t show up until the night before the performance. I thought I was going to faint! When that anxiety ended it was all well worth it. The performances were ardent and the musical quality pure and thundering. I felt blessed and humbled by the experience.
From Milan we traveled to Florence which is yet another scenic, idyllic, art-endowed city with the Pitti Palace, Boboli Gardens, and the Arno River cradled by adobe colored buildings with classic tiled roofs and lush grape-vined hillsides spanning the horizon. Uffizi Gallery was certainly the high point with Botticelli’s numerous breathtaking pieces a prime reason to visit and marvel!
As you already know, the last part of my almost two-month journey was the global calamity caused by that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland spewing its pent-up fury and bowels in a rolling mushroom cloud of environmental and commercial destruction. Every day from April 15th on, when almost all the airplanes in Europe were grounded and hundreds of thousands of people were stranded, we had no idea what we would do. I was working hard on trying to be very Zen about the whole thing, but mostly I was just being a nervous wreck who wanted to come home.
To make a long story short, I wrote this partly on the plane from Rome to London (that left on time and landed on time) and while waiting for the plane to Seattle that also left and landed on time. As I complete this, I am finally at home in my own bed. I can’t believe it. I am flabbergasted and filled with relief.
Of course, I will be hitting the ground running in no time (Vancouver, Toronto, and San Francisco, here I come!) but it has been one of my best trips ever in so many ways, yet, when all is said and done, there is no place like home!
