Our third day in Rome was somewhat of a mish-mash, as we all had a list of sites we wanted to see, but none of them fit any particular theme. We decided that the best solution would be to take the subway to the Circus Maximus, which is located in the southern part of ancient Rome. It was Imperial Rome’s largest hippodrome, or chariot racing circuit. The sport of chariot racing had originated in ancient Greece, and the Romans adapted it with enthusiasm, as they did with so many Greek customs. Those who have seen Ben-Hur will of course remember the climactic chariot racing scene (along with the galley scene, probably the only part anyone remembers), which was staged in a very accurate replica of the Circus Maximus. In Imperial times, chariot races would be staged between four chariots: red, green, blue, and white, and each charioteer would have an enthusiastic fanbase, much as modern day sports teams do, complete with all of the swooning girls and riots that such a fanbase entails. The Circus was also the place where particularly hated criminals would be publicly executed, and thus the place where Christians would be thrown to lions and so forth.
Today hardly anything remains of the Circus; a few areas of the southwest turn have been uncovered and excavated, and a gravel path outlines where the racetrack would have run. Most of the Circus was hauled off during medieval times to act as building materials, with the only identifiable piece being the Flaminio Obelisk which was moved by Pope Sixtus V to the Piazza del Popolo in the 16th century. We walked down the track, staging a few silly stunts, and then proceeded to Santa Maria in Cosmedin, an ancient basilica from the 6th century. It was built on the Temple of Pompeiian Hercules, and heavily embellished in 782 by Byzantine Greeks fleeing the Iconoclast Controversy in the Byzantine Empire. The basilica contains the gilded skull of Saint Valentine, as well as an ancient piece of sculpture in the shape of a head with an open mouth, called la Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth). The statue was probably an ancient Roman fountain or manhole cover portraying one of the gods. According to legend, if a person puts their hand in the statue’s mouth and speaks a lie, the statue will bite that person’s hand off. Fortunately for my left hand, legend is wrong in this case.
After Santa Maria in Cosmedin, we took a meandering path back toward the Forum and Colosseum, with the eventual goal of trying St. Peter in Chains again. Our way took us through a few small and venerable basilicas, and thence behind the Forum, and stopped there to bask in the sun and gaze upon the ruins. Then we walked around the Forum and Colosseum, and to the Lateran Basilica. The basilica was originally a palace and law court built by the Laterani family in the early period of the Roman Empire. It was used after Constantine I as a conciliar building, hosting most famously the synod which condemned Donatism in 313. Eventually the palace was demolished and the basilica extended to become the official cathedral of Rome. The church also has a negative side to its history, as in order to finance its reconstruction in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Vatican revived the sale of indulgences, which drove Martin Luther to post the 95 Theses in 1517 and begin the Reformation.
The church is constructed much like St. Peter’s, with an interior of marble and gilt stone, mosaics, and frescoes. Massive statues of the apostles adorn the gigantic columns which support the roof, each statue at least twice as large as a normal person. The grandeur of the church is somewhat fitting, as it is the official seat of the Diocese of Rome (St. Peter’s being technically part of Vatican City, a different country), and we were suitably awed.
To walk to St Peter in Chains, we chose a route that went past the excavations of the Domus Aurea, the palace of the Emperor Nero. The palace, whose name translates to “House of Gold” in English, was built between 64 and 68 AD on land cleared by the fire which had devastated Rome. It was a lavish edifice, sheathed in pure white marble, decorated in frescoes and mosaics. The palace was designed for parties: of over 300 rooms, not one was designed as a bedroom. However, the palace was a politically embarrassing monument for Nero’s descendants, and it was covered over with dirt and the Baths of Titus and of Trajan.
When we arrived, we found St. Peter in Chains closed (again), and then went our separate ways. I and two others went to the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, known colloquially as the “Wedding Cake” or the “Typewriter.” It was designed in 1895 to commemorate Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of the unified Italian state, but was not completed until 1935. It generated much controversy during its construction, which entail the destruction of much of the medieval area of the Capitoline Hill. Today, the monument holds Italy’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as well as a museum commemorating the Italian Wars of Unification from 1815-71.
For the fourth day, we went south, traveling by an early train to Naples. After that, I and a friend boarded the Circumvesuviana, a train which travels from Naples, around Mount Vesuvius, and back, and which stops at the excavations of Pompeii. Pompeii was a prosperous Roman town which dominated the area until 79 AD, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the town and all its inhabitants under more than 60 feet of volcanic ash and pumice. The city was rediscovered in 1748, and has been under excavations since then. The city provides much of the basis for current historical thought on everyday life in the Roman Empire due to the remarkable level of preservation. It is not only the human bodies which have been mummified: objects of wood, such as doors, and cloth have also been fossilized by the eruption and thus preserved.
During our time there, me and Demi (my friend) spent three hours crawling over about one-fifth of the excavations, examining them without guidance from tour, book, or talking piece of plastic and trying to figure out what it was we were seeing. Of note (and these can be seen on the webalbum) were a bakery/grain mill, a tavern, and a ruined shrine to the muses. The mills, all four of them, are still intact, as are the ovens and the stone basins used to hold bread dough. The mills (the conical structure made of granite) would be powered by running water coming through the aqueducts. Grain would be dumped in the top and would trickle down and be ground between the rotating millstone and the conical base. There were at least two other bakeries which we found, but they were in lesser stages of intactness.
The tavern (the two pictures of counters with holes in them) was one of many in the city. The holes are stone vats in which wine would be stored, and cooled by the stone. It would be served to customers in pewter mugs which were chained to the counter to prevent theft. The taverns were popular places for Romans to meet, and were even frequented by the upper classes on occasion.
The final picture, the shrine, holds no particular value other than that I thought it might make a nice picture. After we left Pompeii, we made a moderately mad dash for our train back to Rome. The next morning we both arose early, though we made for different airports. I flew out of Rome International, as opposed to the two other domestic airports. I left Rome at 10:30 on a plane for Malta, but that’s a tale for another blog post (and yes, I will try to write faster, so you can all delete the incendiary emails I know you’re waiting to send me).
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Second: The First Three Days in Rome
We left Florence with the intention to go to Siena for the day, and then arrive in Rome in the evening. However, the train we were planning on taking disappeared, leaving us with no option but to head to Rome early. Our train rolled down through the beautiful Tuscan countryside, passing fields which in spring would have been filled with grain, grapes, and olives, but which now lay fallow. The ride was beautiful, if somewhat slow, and we arrived in Rome around 2:30. We disembarked and boarded the metro for our ride to the hostel. There we checked in and promptly went to sleep. We woke up around 7, and went for a walk, buying gelato on our way to St. Peter’s Square. The square still contained a large nativity scene, built around the massive obelisk in the square’s center. We walked around, admiring the floodlit facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, before walking down the Via della Consolazione to the River Tiber. Our meandering way took us up the river to Castel Sant’Angelo, an ugly fortress which functioned for centuries as the papal residence. The building, now a museum like many of Rome’s old edifices, is still surrounded by the trenches and breastworks built during the 16th century to fend off the warring French and Spanish armies which used Italy as battleground for their conflicts.
The next day we took on Ancient Rome, which lies in the southeast of the city. Our first stop was, naturally, the Colosseum. The Colosseum was built between 72 and 80 AD, and was begun by the emperor Flavius Vespasianus, and it was known to the ancient Romans not as the Colosseum but as the Flavian Amphitheater, a name which belied the slaughter that took place within. The Colosseum usually hosted games for a certain period of time, usually 100 days, twice per year, with an off-season in between to recruit and train new gladiators. Contrary to popular belief, Christians were not thrown to the lions here; that happened in the Circus Maximus. The Colosseum was a place for combat, between gladiators, between animals, or between hunters and their prey. The Roman Empire spared no expense in stocking the Colosseum, and beasts from every corner of the known world were butchered there: tigers and elephants from India; lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, zebras and hyenas from Africa; wolves, boars, and wild elk from Germany and Gaul.
The structure gradually fell into disrepair after the fall of the Roman Empire. Citizens of Rome removed its marble and limestone for their houses and churches and, more importantly, the iron clamps build into the pillars to prevent collapse due to earthquake, which they melted down to forge into weapons. The Colosseum is basically built of bricks, with marble or limestone cladding to give it the appearance of being far grander. With only its brick and mortar remaining, the structure collapsed into its current state due to earthquake. We entered the Colosseum below the area where the emperor and his guests would have sat during the games, then traversing one quarter of the elliptical perimeter before climbing to the second floor, where we walked around the entirety of the building.
After we left the Colosseum, we walked north a bit, trying to get to the Church of St. Peter in Chains. The church has two claims to fame: it possesses what are supposedly the chains worn by Peter during his imprisonment, and also the tomb of Pope Julius II [check this, and add a bit of history], which has Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses. The church was closed when we arrived, so we turned around and headed for the Forum.
We entered the Forum at the base of the Palatine Hill, upon which the Palace of Domitian resided (and still resides today, if in ruins). Domitian, a somewhat unbalanced emperor with a tendency toward obsession and paranoia, built the palace in 92, 4 years before his assassination. The palace was according to contemporary accounts a masterpiece of architecture:
“Awesome and vast is the edifice, distinguished not by a hundred columns but by as many as could shoulder the gods and the sky if Atlas were let off. The Thunderer’s [quite possibly a reference to Augustus] palace next door gapes at it and the gods rejoice that you are lodged in a like abode […]: so great extends the structure and the sweep of the far-flung hall, more expansive than that of an open plain, embracing much enclosed sky and lesser only than its master.”
Thus spoke the poet Statius of the palace.
The entire Palatine Hill is covered in buildings, both above and below ground, and the Palace of Domitian is only the topmost. Archeologists have discovered and excavated the palaces of Augustus and Tiberius as well, and are currently preparing for another excavation campaign. After walking through the ruins of the dwellings of both Domitian and Augustus (the latter being far better preserved due to being underground for a long period of time, we walked down, past the Arch of Titus, and into the Forum proper. Several buildings of the Forum are particularly well-preserved: the Courts of Maxentius built shortly before the reign of Constantine in the 4th century AD and whose roofs aided Michelangelo in his design of St. Peter’s Basilica; a temple to Romulus and Remus which possesses the original bronze doors and locks it was built with in the ; and a crematorium where the body of Julius Caesar was burned. Of the reconstructions, the Curia (the building where the Roman senate met) is perhaps the best, as it contains nearly all of the original material. We left the forum by passing near, if not quite under, the Arch of Septimus Severus, one of the last of the Roman emperors.
The next day we set to the Vatican Museums in quite the same fashion with which we accomplished the Uffizi. Of the many galleries that we walked through, the best in my opinion were the art galleries, both antique and modern, which contain among other things Raphael’s massive Transfiguration, paintings of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, and several works by Matisse and Dali; the old papal apartments which contain Raphael’s School of Athens and other famous frescoes; and of course the Sistine chapel, which was very crowded and not very visitor-friendly (no photographs of any kind allowed). Regrettably, the galleries containing the Museums’ collection of Roman sculpture (including well-known works such as the Discus Thrower by Myron, the Laocoon, and the statue of the she-wolf nursing the infant Romulus and Remus) were closed.
After the Vatican Museums, our next stop was naturally St. Peter’s Basilica. This building is huge. The interior is easily massive enough to contain several modern-day churches insides its walls adorned with sculpture, gold, and painting. While entry to the basilica was free, entry to the treasury and old sacristy, which contain a goodly deal of treasures and artifacts, as well as the dome (which can be ascended in a manner similar to the Florentine Duomo), was not thus cutting our visit much shorter than it might have been. After a brief journey through the crypt below we left and crossed the Tiber, our goal now being to see some of the sights in central Rome.
Our first stop was the Pantheon. Originally built as a temple to all of the Roman gods in 126 AD (hence the name) it was later converted into a church. In it are buried Italian heroes such as the kings Victor Emmanuel II (the first king of the unified Italian state) and Umberto I (his son and successor), as well as famous painters such as Raphael and Carracci, as well as the composer Corelli. The building is famous for its dome, which is half a meter longer in diameter than the dome of St. Peter’s, and which inspired the Renaissance obsession with domes. The height from the floor to the oculus in the top of the dome is 43.2 meters, the same as the dome’s diameter, thus allowing the interior chamber to accommodate a perfect sphere. After the Pantheon we proceeded to the Trevi Fountain. The fountain was built in 1453 on the site of an ancient intersection of 3 aqueducts (today only one remains), and embellished heavily from 1751-62. The massive facade depicts the Tritons (Roman sea-spirits) guiding the chariot of Oceanus (the god of the seas and oceans).
As we left it began to rain, which was followed by dozens of street merchants emerging to try and sell us umbrellas. We walked to the Spanish Steps, an large and elaborately adorned staircase which used to lead to the Spanish Embassy (now a library) and which are now a popular location for pictures, con artists, and vendors. As the rain began to come down more heavily we made our way to the Piazza del Populo, a large square in the northern area of downtown Rome. It is know for the two church which flank the Via del Corso as it enters the Piazza, churches which are also nearly exact copies of one another, with only small differences in dome and bell-tower to tell them apart. As the rain began to let up and the street merchants exchanged their umbrellas for postcards (“20 postcards 1 Euro please”) and trinkets, we walked back to our hostel.
The next day we took on Ancient Rome, which lies in the southeast of the city. Our first stop was, naturally, the Colosseum. The Colosseum was built between 72 and 80 AD, and was begun by the emperor Flavius Vespasianus, and it was known to the ancient Romans not as the Colosseum but as the Flavian Amphitheater, a name which belied the slaughter that took place within. The Colosseum usually hosted games for a certain period of time, usually 100 days, twice per year, with an off-season in between to recruit and train new gladiators. Contrary to popular belief, Christians were not thrown to the lions here; that happened in the Circus Maximus. The Colosseum was a place for combat, between gladiators, between animals, or between hunters and their prey. The Roman Empire spared no expense in stocking the Colosseum, and beasts from every corner of the known world were butchered there: tigers and elephants from India; lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, zebras and hyenas from Africa; wolves, boars, and wild elk from Germany and Gaul.
The structure gradually fell into disrepair after the fall of the Roman Empire. Citizens of Rome removed its marble and limestone for their houses and churches and, more importantly, the iron clamps build into the pillars to prevent collapse due to earthquake, which they melted down to forge into weapons. The Colosseum is basically built of bricks, with marble or limestone cladding to give it the appearance of being far grander. With only its brick and mortar remaining, the structure collapsed into its current state due to earthquake. We entered the Colosseum below the area where the emperor and his guests would have sat during the games, then traversing one quarter of the elliptical perimeter before climbing to the second floor, where we walked around the entirety of the building.
After we left the Colosseum, we walked north a bit, trying to get to the Church of St. Peter in Chains. The church has two claims to fame: it possesses what are supposedly the chains worn by Peter during his imprisonment, and also the tomb of Pope Julius II [check this, and add a bit of history], which has Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses. The church was closed when we arrived, so we turned around and headed for the Forum.
We entered the Forum at the base of the Palatine Hill, upon which the Palace of Domitian resided (and still resides today, if in ruins). Domitian, a somewhat unbalanced emperor with a tendency toward obsession and paranoia, built the palace in 92, 4 years before his assassination. The palace was according to contemporary accounts a masterpiece of architecture:
“Awesome and vast is the edifice, distinguished not by a hundred columns but by as many as could shoulder the gods and the sky if Atlas were let off. The Thunderer’s [quite possibly a reference to Augustus] palace next door gapes at it and the gods rejoice that you are lodged in a like abode […]: so great extends the structure and the sweep of the far-flung hall, more expansive than that of an open plain, embracing much enclosed sky and lesser only than its master.”
Thus spoke the poet Statius of the palace.
The entire Palatine Hill is covered in buildings, both above and below ground, and the Palace of Domitian is only the topmost. Archeologists have discovered and excavated the palaces of Augustus and Tiberius as well, and are currently preparing for another excavation campaign. After walking through the ruins of the dwellings of both Domitian and Augustus (the latter being far better preserved due to being underground for a long period of time, we walked down, past the Arch of Titus, and into the Forum proper. Several buildings of the Forum are particularly well-preserved: the Courts of Maxentius built shortly before the reign of Constantine in the 4th century AD and whose roofs aided Michelangelo in his design of St. Peter’s Basilica; a temple to Romulus and Remus which possesses the original bronze doors and locks it was built with in the ; and a crematorium where the body of Julius Caesar was burned. Of the reconstructions, the Curia (the building where the Roman senate met) is perhaps the best, as it contains nearly all of the original material. We left the forum by passing near, if not quite under, the Arch of Septimus Severus, one of the last of the Roman emperors.
The next day we set to the Vatican Museums in quite the same fashion with which we accomplished the Uffizi. Of the many galleries that we walked through, the best in my opinion were the art galleries, both antique and modern, which contain among other things Raphael’s massive Transfiguration, paintings of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, and several works by Matisse and Dali; the old papal apartments which contain Raphael’s School of Athens and other famous frescoes; and of course the Sistine chapel, which was very crowded and not very visitor-friendly (no photographs of any kind allowed). Regrettably, the galleries containing the Museums’ collection of Roman sculpture (including well-known works such as the Discus Thrower by Myron, the Laocoon, and the statue of the she-wolf nursing the infant Romulus and Remus) were closed.
After the Vatican Museums, our next stop was naturally St. Peter’s Basilica. This building is huge. The interior is easily massive enough to contain several modern-day churches insides its walls adorned with sculpture, gold, and painting. While entry to the basilica was free, entry to the treasury and old sacristy, which contain a goodly deal of treasures and artifacts, as well as the dome (which can be ascended in a manner similar to the Florentine Duomo), was not thus cutting our visit much shorter than it might have been. After a brief journey through the crypt below we left and crossed the Tiber, our goal now being to see some of the sights in central Rome.
Our first stop was the Pantheon. Originally built as a temple to all of the Roman gods in 126 AD (hence the name) it was later converted into a church. In it are buried Italian heroes such as the kings Victor Emmanuel II (the first king of the unified Italian state) and Umberto I (his son and successor), as well as famous painters such as Raphael and Carracci, as well as the composer Corelli. The building is famous for its dome, which is half a meter longer in diameter than the dome of St. Peter’s, and which inspired the Renaissance obsession with domes. The height from the floor to the oculus in the top of the dome is 43.2 meters, the same as the dome’s diameter, thus allowing the interior chamber to accommodate a perfect sphere. After the Pantheon we proceeded to the Trevi Fountain. The fountain was built in 1453 on the site of an ancient intersection of 3 aqueducts (today only one remains), and embellished heavily from 1751-62. The massive facade depicts the Tritons (Roman sea-spirits) guiding the chariot of Oceanus (the god of the seas and oceans).
As we left it began to rain, which was followed by dozens of street merchants emerging to try and sell us umbrellas. We walked to the Spanish Steps, an large and elaborately adorned staircase which used to lead to the Spanish Embassy (now a library) and which are now a popular location for pictures, con artists, and vendors. As the rain began to come down more heavily we made our way to the Piazza del Populo, a large square in the northern area of downtown Rome. It is know for the two church which flank the Via del Corso as it enters the Piazza, churches which are also nearly exact copies of one another, with only small differences in dome and bell-tower to tell them apart. As the rain began to let up and the street merchants exchanged their umbrellas for postcards (“20 postcards 1 Euro please”) and trinkets, we walked back to our hostel.
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the First: Florence
As you might have known (although you probably didn’t), students at the University of Innsbruck have the entire month of February as winter break. Naturally, for we in the Innsbruck Program, this length of time off means but one thing: travel like crazy. On or around January 29th (our first day of break) all of the students in the program scattered to the four points of the compass and the four in between. This month, we (though not necessarily me) will be traveling from Dublin to Cairo, Athens to Paris, Rome to Berlin. This post and the eight following it will describe my own hectic travels, which lasted 23 days and which took me in a great loop through Italy, Malta, and Greece.
My itinerary, as it finally resolved itself (sometimes in a panicky and last-minute manner), worked out so:
January 29th to February 1st: Florence, Italy
February 1st to February 6th: Rome, Italy
February 6th to February 9th: the island of Malta
February 9th to February 10th: back in Rome
February 10th to February 16th: Athens, Greece
February 16th to February 17th: 18 hours of hectic traveling trying to get back to Innsbruck
February 18th to February 20th: Vienna
In this blog, I shall record my experiences, observations, and petty witticisms, and in general chronicle what I have dubbed the Great Continental Gallivant.
Pictures are, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words at least, and I have at least a thousand pictures for your. You will find them at picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten . If you’ve never been to this site before, it contains all of the pictures I have taken in Europe, as well as some from back in the States. It would behoove you to bookmark the site or otherwise make note of it, because I will be referencing it constantly during the course of these entries.
And now, without any more gilding the lily and with no further ado, I shall begin with Florence, the gem of Tuscany and center of the Renaissance. Florence rose to power during the 14th century as a center of banking and trade, helped by the powerful Medici family, who, in addition to being fabulously, obscenely wealthy, were great patrons of the arts, sciences, and learning.
Florence is of course best known for its role in the Renaissance, where it played host to the creation and invention of so many classic treasures of that time: the dome built on a large scale, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and many other Renaissance artists, too many to be enumerate here.
I traveled to Florence with five friends. We would remain together throughout most of Italy, and I would rejoin three of them for my time in Greece. We had originally planned to leave for Florence very early indeed, departing Innsbruck at 5:30 am and arriving in Florence in the early afternoon. The night before we abandoned that option in favor of taking slower, cheaper trains. Thus we left Innsbruck at 11 am on January 29th, traveling first to Brenner, a town close to the Austrian-Italian border. The ride to Brenner was itself noteworthy, since the rail line wends its way through a deep alpine valley, past small villages and under massive bridges. The morning was bright and clear, and the countryside was stunning. At Brenner, we changed trains and boarded one heading south to Bologna. Those hours were spent in reading, napping, and occasional conversation. The train was quite empty until we reached Trent, about 4 hours into the journey, when it filled with the evening’s commuters heading home to Bologna.
After arriving in Bologna, we changed to our final train heading to Florence, arriving in that city at around 10pm. We trudged through the mostly empty streets to the hostel where we stayed at, which proved to be quite comfortable: our room was an apartment with extra beds, with a balcony providing a nice view of the street behind us. After a rather late dinner, we retired and went to bed.
The next day was an exercise in speedy tourism. We arose at 7am and were out of the door by 8, heading to the Uffizi, Florence’s massive art gallery, well known for its Medieval and Early Renaissance collections, with such works as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera being among its most noteworthy. The museums building was originally an office complex for the Medicis in the 16th century hence its name (Uffizio being the Italian for ‘office’), but it soon took on the role of an art gallery, first holding the Medici’s private collections, and later transforming into a museum proper. We saw it in 2 and a half hours, which if you’ve ever been there is no mean feat. It perhaps helped that none of us were particularly interested in looking at galleries full of medieval Catholic art (and after a while most of the works started to blend together).
After we exited the Uffizi, blinking in the morning sun, we went to the Duomo, the local nickname for Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. The Duomo was originally built in the 14th century, but the dome which gives the cathedral its name was not built until the early 15th, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi determined how to construct a dome of the magnitude required without that dome collapsing under its own weight: he supported the dome independently of the roof, and built it of much lighter brick, as opposed to the three kinds of marble used to build the rest of the church.
Since the dome contains passages leading up to its cupola, it was only natural that some ingenious and anonymous Florentine conceived the idea of using the climb to the top as a tourist attraction. Our ascent to the top took us through sets of spiral staircases leading up to a high balcony just beneath the curve of the dome, where we could look down on the people inside the cathedral and view the frescoes painted underneath the dome. After that, we climbed up inside the dome itself, between the outside layer of stone and tile and the inside layer of bricks. The view from the cupola, or rather the small balcony around the cupola, was spectacular as promised, giving us a 360 view of the city and the surrounding countryside.
After we had gotten down from the dome, we entered the cathedral proper. The inside was cavernous, although compared to sights I would see later in my trip, it was only moderate inside. Of particular note are the frescoes on the interior walls, commemorating those buried inside the cathedral.
We left the Duomo and walked north to the Accademia gallery, which house Michelangelo’s David. Although the Accademia is a respectable art gallery in itself, the David is naturally the main attraction, which has the unfortunate effect of eclipsing everything else in the gallery, and of making you wonder why you paid 10 Euros to see just one thing.
We then made our way slowly to the Ponte Vecchio, the “Old Bridge” over the river Arno. The bridge is lined with buildings, erected there when it was customary to build shops and businesses along a bridge. Today the shops all house jewelry stores in a vast and sparkly multitude, with a few open places where people can look out over the brown, sluggish expanse of the Arno River. We took the time to stroll down it, before walking along the river and onto another bridge, this one more conventional. We paused there for awhile, taking pictures and basking in the early afternoon sun, before returning to our hostel to join the rest of the Florentines in a siesta.
Dinner we had in a small, hole-in-the-wall trattoria near our hostel. It was moderately priced, and quite good, and I feasted on tortellini in a meat and cheese sauce, a carpaccio of arugula and beef, and naturally bread, olive oil, and vinegar, all washed down with the house wine. We returned to the hostel, packed, and went to bed.
My itinerary, as it finally resolved itself (sometimes in a panicky and last-minute manner), worked out so:
January 29th to February 1st: Florence, Italy
February 1st to February 6th: Rome, Italy
February 6th to February 9th: the island of Malta
February 9th to February 10th: back in Rome
February 10th to February 16th: Athens, Greece
February 16th to February 17th: 18 hours of hectic traveling trying to get back to Innsbruck
February 18th to February 20th: Vienna
In this blog, I shall record my experiences, observations, and petty witticisms, and in general chronicle what I have dubbed the Great Continental Gallivant.
Pictures are, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words at least, and I have at least a thousand pictures for your. You will find them at picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten . If you’ve never been to this site before, it contains all of the pictures I have taken in Europe, as well as some from back in the States. It would behoove you to bookmark the site or otherwise make note of it, because I will be referencing it constantly during the course of these entries.
And now, without any more gilding the lily and with no further ado, I shall begin with Florence, the gem of Tuscany and center of the Renaissance. Florence rose to power during the 14th century as a center of banking and trade, helped by the powerful Medici family, who, in addition to being fabulously, obscenely wealthy, were great patrons of the arts, sciences, and learning.
Florence is of course best known for its role in the Renaissance, where it played host to the creation and invention of so many classic treasures of that time: the dome built on a large scale, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and many other Renaissance artists, too many to be enumerate here.
I traveled to Florence with five friends. We would remain together throughout most of Italy, and I would rejoin three of them for my time in Greece. We had originally planned to leave for Florence very early indeed, departing Innsbruck at 5:30 am and arriving in Florence in the early afternoon. The night before we abandoned that option in favor of taking slower, cheaper trains. Thus we left Innsbruck at 11 am on January 29th, traveling first to Brenner, a town close to the Austrian-Italian border. The ride to Brenner was itself noteworthy, since the rail line wends its way through a deep alpine valley, past small villages and under massive bridges. The morning was bright and clear, and the countryside was stunning. At Brenner, we changed trains and boarded one heading south to Bologna. Those hours were spent in reading, napping, and occasional conversation. The train was quite empty until we reached Trent, about 4 hours into the journey, when it filled with the evening’s commuters heading home to Bologna.
After arriving in Bologna, we changed to our final train heading to Florence, arriving in that city at around 10pm. We trudged through the mostly empty streets to the hostel where we stayed at, which proved to be quite comfortable: our room was an apartment with extra beds, with a balcony providing a nice view of the street behind us. After a rather late dinner, we retired and went to bed.
The next day was an exercise in speedy tourism. We arose at 7am and were out of the door by 8, heading to the Uffizi, Florence’s massive art gallery, well known for its Medieval and Early Renaissance collections, with such works as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera being among its most noteworthy. The museums building was originally an office complex for the Medicis in the 16th century hence its name (Uffizio being the Italian for ‘office’), but it soon took on the role of an art gallery, first holding the Medici’s private collections, and later transforming into a museum proper. We saw it in 2 and a half hours, which if you’ve ever been there is no mean feat. It perhaps helped that none of us were particularly interested in looking at galleries full of medieval Catholic art (and after a while most of the works started to blend together).
After we exited the Uffizi, blinking in the morning sun, we went to the Duomo, the local nickname for Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. The Duomo was originally built in the 14th century, but the dome which gives the cathedral its name was not built until the early 15th, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi determined how to construct a dome of the magnitude required without that dome collapsing under its own weight: he supported the dome independently of the roof, and built it of much lighter brick, as opposed to the three kinds of marble used to build the rest of the church.
Since the dome contains passages leading up to its cupola, it was only natural that some ingenious and anonymous Florentine conceived the idea of using the climb to the top as a tourist attraction. Our ascent to the top took us through sets of spiral staircases leading up to a high balcony just beneath the curve of the dome, where we could look down on the people inside the cathedral and view the frescoes painted underneath the dome. After that, we climbed up inside the dome itself, between the outside layer of stone and tile and the inside layer of bricks. The view from the cupola, or rather the small balcony around the cupola, was spectacular as promised, giving us a 360 view of the city and the surrounding countryside.
After we had gotten down from the dome, we entered the cathedral proper. The inside was cavernous, although compared to sights I would see later in my trip, it was only moderate inside. Of particular note are the frescoes on the interior walls, commemorating those buried inside the cathedral.
We left the Duomo and walked north to the Accademia gallery, which house Michelangelo’s David. Although the Accademia is a respectable art gallery in itself, the David is naturally the main attraction, which has the unfortunate effect of eclipsing everything else in the gallery, and of making you wonder why you paid 10 Euros to see just one thing.
We then made our way slowly to the Ponte Vecchio, the “Old Bridge” over the river Arno. The bridge is lined with buildings, erected there when it was customary to build shops and businesses along a bridge. Today the shops all house jewelry stores in a vast and sparkly multitude, with a few open places where people can look out over the brown, sluggish expanse of the Arno River. We took the time to stroll down it, before walking along the river and onto another bridge, this one more conventional. We paused there for awhile, taking pictures and basking in the early afternoon sun, before returning to our hostel to join the rest of the Florentines in a siesta.
Dinner we had in a small, hole-in-the-wall trattoria near our hostel. It was moderately priced, and quite good, and I feasted on tortellini in a meat and cheese sauce, a carpaccio of arugula and beef, and naturally bread, olive oil, and vinegar, all washed down with the house wine. We returned to the hostel, packed, and went to bed.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Thoughts on the inauguration
On this occasion, and in light of the past year, let us contemplate the words of Commander Susan Ivanova:
"It taught us that we have to create the future, or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for each other, because if we don't, who will? And that strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely of places. Mostly, though, it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings, even for people like us."
And let us continue with an excerpt from the works of William Blake:
America a Prophecy
02 The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave
03 their stations;
04 The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
05 The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
06 Reviving shake. inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
07 Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;
08 Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field;
09 Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
10 Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
11 Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
12 Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open
13 And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
14 They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
15 Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
16 And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
17 For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
"It taught us that we have to create the future, or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for each other, because if we don't, who will? And that strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely of places. Mostly, though, it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings, even for people like us."
And let us continue with an excerpt from the works of William Blake:
America a Prophecy
02 The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave
03 their stations;
04 The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
05 The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
06 Reviving shake. inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
07 Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;
08 Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field;
09 Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
10 Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
11 Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
12 Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open
13 And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
14 They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
15 Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
16 And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
17 For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Further notes of my descent into silliness
Some people had problems finding the latest waste of time I put on the webalbum, so here's the exact link: http://picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten/PhilosophyCartoons#
You probably won't get all the jokes unless you can recognize philosophers based on images the internet has rendered up to me, but I hope that you'll find it amusing enough to not begrudge the few seconds you invested in it.
-JA
You probably won't get all the jokes unless you can recognize philosophers based on images the internet has rendered up to me, but I hope that you'll find it amusing enough to not begrudge the few seconds you invested in it.
-JA
Friday, January 9, 2009
The End of the Grand Christmas Romp
Isn’t it wonderful how punctual I am?
Anyway, in blog time, me and the family had just left for Salzburg. The train ride was uneventful, as we passed through the farmlands of Bavaria on a cloudy, windy day that was about to get a lot worse. We disembarked in Salzburg and walked into the Old City, about 15 minutes from the train station. Our first stop was the Mirabell Palace, built in the 18th century by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Wolf-Dietrich, for his mistress (Wolf-Dietrich was evidently a very naughty person). If you’ve seen “The Sound of Music”, the “Do Re Me” song finishes in the gardens of the Mirabell Palace, which we walked through. Unfortunately, it being the depths of winter, all vegetation and foliage was gone, and the bulk of the gardens, excepting a few perimeter paths, was chained off, presumably to keep stupid American tourists from trying to reenact “The Sound of Music.” We got a few good pictures of the High Citadel of Salzburg (it’s the huge castle in the webalbum photos) from the palace, before leaving the palace gardens and walking along the River Salzach, crossing it at the Müllnersteg footbridge, where I took a group photo (the 3rd picture in the webalbum).
We then climbed up Mönchsberg, one of the two small mountains that surround the Old City. Mönchsberg is basically shaped like a curved loaf of bread: it has sheer cliffs pretty much everywhere except on one end, which was where we climbed it. The mountain is driven through and through with tunnels, dug through the ages, beginning sometime around the 14th century. We climbed up an asphalt road which runs along the top of Mönchsberg, accessing all of the houses built there. Eventually we left the road to climb up a set of stairs before crossing a wooden bridge and going under an ancient gate, part of a medieval fortress (which is still very much in existence) protecting one of the two routes of access to the Citadel. Then our path took us up to the top of Mönchsberg, past some very pretty overlooks of the Old City, before going underneath the city wall, a massive edifice built in 1488 and still standing. The wall begins on the top of Mönchsberg, in a small castle, and circles around the Old City before coming to rest at the Citadel. We crossed through the wall and continued our walk, past houses and more small fortifications, before halting below the Citadel. We took some pictures, then proceeded by steep alleys into the Old City.
We wandered some time in the Christkindlmarkt, and ran into many of my fellow students, who were also spending the day in the city. Dad bought glühwein from the Lions’ Club booth, much to the consternation of Rose (who seems to think that glühwein is the root of all evils in the world) The Salzburg Christkindlmarkt is a well organized and long-established affair, with convenient maps of the three areas where the booths were set up, detailing each vendor and what they sold. By this time, the day was dwindling, the sky was overcast, and a bitter wind was blowing, so we took refuge in Café Tomaselli. The café was built in the early 18th century, and was one of the (then) new “Viennese coffeehouses”, and was something of a local curiosity when it was established. The interior was quite crowded but we found a table, and restored our strength with cakes, hot chocolate, and Café Tomasellium, a drink made from strong Turkish coffee, amaretto, and cream, garnished with whipped cream and toasted almonds. Afterwards, we crossed the river and climbed up Salzburg’s other mountain, the Kapuzinerberg. Kapuzinerberg is not nearly as developed as Mönchsberg, and is frequented by campers and hikers. We didn’t go very far, stopping at a Franciscan monastery perched on the side of the mountain (if you look at the webalbum, I took two pictures of a tan brick building surrounded by trees. That’s the monastery). After that, we walked back to the train station to find our train delayed, but only by 5 minutes. We traveled back to Munich in pitch darkness, ate in the Munich train station, and returned to our room quite thoroughly exhausted.
The next day we repacked, checked out, and took our train to Innsbruck. The day was wonderfully clear and sunny, giving everyone a beautiful view of the Alps from our compartment window. We got to the hotel in fine spirits, if a bit exhausted from lugging our baggage through Innsbruck and then up a steep and narrow lane (25 minutes all told). But the hotel more than satisfied everyone, and after we were all settled (the family in the hotel room, me back in my dorm) we toured through Innsbruck’s Old City and shopped around at the Christkindlmarkt, which was half-closed already, it being Christmas Eve. We made our plans for the evening, and then returned to our rooms.
We went to the English vigil mass at the Jesuit Church, a building of singular Baroque magnificence located in the heart of the Theological Faculty buildings. The mass was short, there being only around 30 people there, but not bad, and afterwards we hurried through the deserted streets of the Old City to our dinner reservations at the Weinhaus Happ, a hotel and restaurant located in the center of the Old City. The dinner was excellent, consisting of a carpaccio of squid and prosciutto ham for the appetizer, cream of arugula soup, salad, and our choice of roast beef or broiled carp for the main course, followed by a chestnut pastry, cookies, and a hot eggnog punch for dessert, all washed down with champaign and wines (riesling for Mom, and a rather dry red for me and dad). After the dinner was over, we went to bed stuffed to the proverbial gills.
The next day I walked to the hotel, and we exchanged presents, before taking a bus to visit my host family, the Gschliessers, in the town of Völs, about 15 minutes from Innsbruck. I don’t think I’ve explained the host family part of the Innsbruck program yet, and I have, then I’ll explain it again regardless. Every student is assigned a local family as host family, in order to help them get accustomed to the city and to make them more at home. Students regularly visit their families (I, for example, visit mine every Sunday for dinner) and the system is a very good one. We ate a sumptuous Christmas dinner with the Gschliessers: turkey, potatoes, salad, and all manner of good things. After dinner, barely able to move, we visited their church and the nativity scene therein, a very detailed piece of work. Then it was back to Innsbruck to walk through the city, shop a little, and then to bed.
The next morning it was decided that the family would take a later train to Munich, in order to have more time to see the city and bask in the beauty of the Alps. We visited the Cathedral, and saw the Jesuit Church in more detail, as well as the Christkindlmarkt, where we ate kirchl (see two blog posts ago for a description of this dish) and drank hot chocolate. Then we retrieved our luggage from the hotel and arrived at the train station to find the train over 80 minutes delayed. The delays increased as we waited on the platform, shivering in the crisp chill of the winter afternoon, until finally the train’s final destination was changed due to the delay. Fortunately, there was another train that we could take, but we ended up waiting over two and a half hours for it. The new train was on time, everyone got on board in plenty of time, and I waved them off as the train pulled out of the station. I walked back to my dorm, chilled through, and drank a good deal of tea to ward off the cold. I went to bed, and began my Christmas break, which can very easily be described as: great sloth interrupted by bouts of diligence.
Now the final month of term has started, and we’re all preparing for final exams and presentations in our classes, though the start has been slow due to one professor being quite ill and the other absent, although that will change next week as our noses meet a particularly spiky grindstone.
My pictures of the Christmas romp are up on the webalbum at
http://picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten , as well as a particularly amusing waste of time which I made earlier this morning. Enjoy!
-JA
Anyway, in blog time, me and the family had just left for Salzburg. The train ride was uneventful, as we passed through the farmlands of Bavaria on a cloudy, windy day that was about to get a lot worse. We disembarked in Salzburg and walked into the Old City, about 15 minutes from the train station. Our first stop was the Mirabell Palace, built in the 18th century by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Wolf-Dietrich, for his mistress (Wolf-Dietrich was evidently a very naughty person). If you’ve seen “The Sound of Music”, the “Do Re Me” song finishes in the gardens of the Mirabell Palace, which we walked through. Unfortunately, it being the depths of winter, all vegetation and foliage was gone, and the bulk of the gardens, excepting a few perimeter paths, was chained off, presumably to keep stupid American tourists from trying to reenact “The Sound of Music.” We got a few good pictures of the High Citadel of Salzburg (it’s the huge castle in the webalbum photos) from the palace, before leaving the palace gardens and walking along the River Salzach, crossing it at the Müllnersteg footbridge, where I took a group photo (the 3rd picture in the webalbum).
We then climbed up Mönchsberg, one of the two small mountains that surround the Old City. Mönchsberg is basically shaped like a curved loaf of bread: it has sheer cliffs pretty much everywhere except on one end, which was where we climbed it. The mountain is driven through and through with tunnels, dug through the ages, beginning sometime around the 14th century. We climbed up an asphalt road which runs along the top of Mönchsberg, accessing all of the houses built there. Eventually we left the road to climb up a set of stairs before crossing a wooden bridge and going under an ancient gate, part of a medieval fortress (which is still very much in existence) protecting one of the two routes of access to the Citadel. Then our path took us up to the top of Mönchsberg, past some very pretty overlooks of the Old City, before going underneath the city wall, a massive edifice built in 1488 and still standing. The wall begins on the top of Mönchsberg, in a small castle, and circles around the Old City before coming to rest at the Citadel. We crossed through the wall and continued our walk, past houses and more small fortifications, before halting below the Citadel. We took some pictures, then proceeded by steep alleys into the Old City.
We wandered some time in the Christkindlmarkt, and ran into many of my fellow students, who were also spending the day in the city. Dad bought glühwein from the Lions’ Club booth, much to the consternation of Rose (who seems to think that glühwein is the root of all evils in the world) The Salzburg Christkindlmarkt is a well organized and long-established affair, with convenient maps of the three areas where the booths were set up, detailing each vendor and what they sold. By this time, the day was dwindling, the sky was overcast, and a bitter wind was blowing, so we took refuge in Café Tomaselli. The café was built in the early 18th century, and was one of the (then) new “Viennese coffeehouses”, and was something of a local curiosity when it was established. The interior was quite crowded but we found a table, and restored our strength with cakes, hot chocolate, and Café Tomasellium, a drink made from strong Turkish coffee, amaretto, and cream, garnished with whipped cream and toasted almonds. Afterwards, we crossed the river and climbed up Salzburg’s other mountain, the Kapuzinerberg. Kapuzinerberg is not nearly as developed as Mönchsberg, and is frequented by campers and hikers. We didn’t go very far, stopping at a Franciscan monastery perched on the side of the mountain (if you look at the webalbum, I took two pictures of a tan brick building surrounded by trees. That’s the monastery). After that, we walked back to the train station to find our train delayed, but only by 5 minutes. We traveled back to Munich in pitch darkness, ate in the Munich train station, and returned to our room quite thoroughly exhausted.
The next day we repacked, checked out, and took our train to Innsbruck. The day was wonderfully clear and sunny, giving everyone a beautiful view of the Alps from our compartment window. We got to the hotel in fine spirits, if a bit exhausted from lugging our baggage through Innsbruck and then up a steep and narrow lane (25 minutes all told). But the hotel more than satisfied everyone, and after we were all settled (the family in the hotel room, me back in my dorm) we toured through Innsbruck’s Old City and shopped around at the Christkindlmarkt, which was half-closed already, it being Christmas Eve. We made our plans for the evening, and then returned to our rooms.
We went to the English vigil mass at the Jesuit Church, a building of singular Baroque magnificence located in the heart of the Theological Faculty buildings. The mass was short, there being only around 30 people there, but not bad, and afterwards we hurried through the deserted streets of the Old City to our dinner reservations at the Weinhaus Happ, a hotel and restaurant located in the center of the Old City. The dinner was excellent, consisting of a carpaccio of squid and prosciutto ham for the appetizer, cream of arugula soup, salad, and our choice of roast beef or broiled carp for the main course, followed by a chestnut pastry, cookies, and a hot eggnog punch for dessert, all washed down with champaign and wines (riesling for Mom, and a rather dry red for me and dad). After the dinner was over, we went to bed stuffed to the proverbial gills.
The next day I walked to the hotel, and we exchanged presents, before taking a bus to visit my host family, the Gschliessers, in the town of Völs, about 15 minutes from Innsbruck. I don’t think I’ve explained the host family part of the Innsbruck program yet, and I have, then I’ll explain it again regardless. Every student is assigned a local family as host family, in order to help them get accustomed to the city and to make them more at home. Students regularly visit their families (I, for example, visit mine every Sunday for dinner) and the system is a very good one. We ate a sumptuous Christmas dinner with the Gschliessers: turkey, potatoes, salad, and all manner of good things. After dinner, barely able to move, we visited their church and the nativity scene therein, a very detailed piece of work. Then it was back to Innsbruck to walk through the city, shop a little, and then to bed.
The next morning it was decided that the family would take a later train to Munich, in order to have more time to see the city and bask in the beauty of the Alps. We visited the Cathedral, and saw the Jesuit Church in more detail, as well as the Christkindlmarkt, where we ate kirchl (see two blog posts ago for a description of this dish) and drank hot chocolate. Then we retrieved our luggage from the hotel and arrived at the train station to find the train over 80 minutes delayed. The delays increased as we waited on the platform, shivering in the crisp chill of the winter afternoon, until finally the train’s final destination was changed due to the delay. Fortunately, there was another train that we could take, but we ended up waiting over two and a half hours for it. The new train was on time, everyone got on board in plenty of time, and I waved them off as the train pulled out of the station. I walked back to my dorm, chilled through, and drank a good deal of tea to ward off the cold. I went to bed, and began my Christmas break, which can very easily be described as: great sloth interrupted by bouts of diligence.
Now the final month of term has started, and we’re all preparing for final exams and presentations in our classes, though the start has been slow due to one professor being quite ill and the other absent, although that will change next week as our noses meet a particularly spiky grindstone.
My pictures of the Christmas romp are up on the webalbum at
http://picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten , as well as a particularly amusing waste of time which I made earlier this morning. Enjoy!
-JA
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
5 "Days" in Munich
Writing from memory is always a pain in the ass. Events get jumbled and twisted, continuity is snarled and blurred in a haze of good cheer, embarrassment, and time, and the whole course of the history being written is changed in the recollection. Still, since I was too lazy or occupied to write down events as they happened in Munich, I’ll have to settle for this solution instead. I’m going to condense the events of the 20th, 21st, and 22nd into one entry. This will cover all of my time in Munich. Then, there will be another entry, probably quite short, covering our day trip to Salzburg on the 23rd, and then a third entry for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day (the 26th of December for Americans and other aliens).
I arrived in Munich about 15 minutes delayed for one reason or another (European train conductors never tell you the reason for any delay, but personally I blame a combination of weather and Italians) to find my family waiting for me in the train station. Their hotel room wasn’t ready, so they had decided to come and wait for me their, which was a good thing because the hotel didn’t have much to speak of in the way of a lobby. We ate a quick lunch at the airport, dining on kebaps. These sandwiches, which have nothing to do with shish-kabob, are the German/Austrian equivalent of a hamburger, and arrived in Europe thanks to the wave of Turkish immigration in the 1990s. A kebap is a sandwich composed of a kaiser roll, or equivalent bun product, stuffed with roasted sliced lamb or turkey, yogurt sauce, onions, lettuce, and tomatoes. It’s not all that good for you, but satisfying in the same way that a McDonald’s hamburger is satisfying (that is, up until about 2 hours after the fact).
We proceeded to the hotel under a threatening sky which was probably the tail end of the snowstorm I had experienced coming out of Austria. Bavaria, the region of Germany where Munich is located, is primarily plains and forests, with a few mountains in the south called the Bavarian Alps. The storm, it seemed, had been trapped by the true Austrian Alps, and so left Munich with rain, damp, and cold. After settling into the room, I, Mom, and Hannah went for a walk to the Munich Christkindlmarkt, which proved hideously overcrowded. We stopped for a few pictures before heading back to the hotel. That night we had dinner with an old colleague of Dad’s, Thomas Pruegl, and his family, who served us one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten: dumplings in beef broth, roast pork and more dumplings (but of a different variety), and cabbage salad. We went home that night tired and stuffed to the gills.
The next morning we breakfasted at the hotel, under the watchful eyes of the breakfast chef/waitress person, a severe woman with an unending flow of sarcasm (in several languages) who soon garnered the nickname of “Frau Harrumph” from me and my sisters. Then it was time for mass at the cathedral, and then for a walk around the city center. The Christkindlmarkt was just starting up when we arrived, so we walked through the Rathaus, the “town hall” of Munich, although it was quite grand and gothic, looking more like a cathedral than anything else. Afterwards (at around 1:30) we embarked for the Alte Pinakothek, one of Munich’s three famous art museums. The Alte Pinakothek (which is mostly untranslatable, but which means something like “Collection of Old Paintings”) houses works from the late Middle Ages through the 18th Century; the Neue Pinakothek (“Collection of New Paintings”) is devoted to the 19th Century, and the Pinakothek der Moderne (“Collection of Paintings of the Modern Artists) has 20th Century works. We only saw the Alte, which houses no particularly famous work, but many minor works by famous painters (Rubens, Dürer, Raphael, and Da Vinci) as well as a particularly expansive collection of 17th and 18th century art, especially from France and the Netherlands.
That took us most of the afternoon, until about 5 o’clock. We then departed to find a restaurant that Dad had read of which served authentic Bavarian food. The search took us well over an hour, as it was quite dark and the restaurant was located in a small square off the beaten path. It was also closed, unsurprisingly, since it was a Sunday (when nearly all shops and stores are closed). We instead went to the Ratskeller, a restaurant in the basement of the Rathaus. While expensive, the food was superb if rather hard to describe. The menu was entirely in German, and contained a lot of Bavarian-dialect terms that I was unfamiliar with. Still, it turned out well, and we dined on plates of sausages, sauerkraut, tiny dumplings in a cheese sauce in Rose’s case, and Wiener Schnitzel (a cut of tender veal, pounded thin and deep fried) in Hannah’s. Stuffed to the gills again, we walked around the Christkindlmarkt for awhile and took a few pictures before returning to the hotel.
The next day a bitterly cold wind blew, rather than the drizzle of the day before. We went to the Toy Museum, which was rather unconventionally housed in an old tower, with each exhibit located in rooms off of the tight circular stairwell. It was an amusing side trip, and certainly nothing like what you’d find in the US. After the Toy Museum, we took a detour to the Asamkirche (officially the Church of St. John Nepomuk, but nicknamed Asam after the two brothers who designed and built it). While small, the church is crammed with every bit of Baroque finery that could fit: painted ceilings and walls, gold and silver ornamentation, and marble statues. Everything on the walls and ceilings that isn’t a painting is gold or silver, and my poor skill with words cannot possibly do it justice. Check out the webalbum for more pictures.
The Asamkirche was followed by a shopping expedition to the Christkindlmarkt, in which Dad tried glühwein for the first time and started a long-running joke which I’m sure will be with our family until the end of time, and in which I made a rather elementary mistake in my German and which lead to subsequent embarrassment (although, like all good mistakes, I don’t think I’m likely to repeat it in the near future). Around 4, we returned to the hotel, cold and somewhat cranky, and didn’t leave the room except for one expedition to the train station to buy some pizza. Then we bedded down for the night, determined to get a good rest for our trip to Salzburg the next day.
Next, on Cage of Monkeys: What happened in Salzburg! Strange Meetings! Long Walks! Tourists! And the Lions Club! Tune in tomorrow, same Monkey Time, same Monkey Channel!
-JA
I arrived in Munich about 15 minutes delayed for one reason or another (European train conductors never tell you the reason for any delay, but personally I blame a combination of weather and Italians) to find my family waiting for me in the train station. Their hotel room wasn’t ready, so they had decided to come and wait for me their, which was a good thing because the hotel didn’t have much to speak of in the way of a lobby. We ate a quick lunch at the airport, dining on kebaps. These sandwiches, which have nothing to do with shish-kabob, are the German/Austrian equivalent of a hamburger, and arrived in Europe thanks to the wave of Turkish immigration in the 1990s. A kebap is a sandwich composed of a kaiser roll, or equivalent bun product, stuffed with roasted sliced lamb or turkey, yogurt sauce, onions, lettuce, and tomatoes. It’s not all that good for you, but satisfying in the same way that a McDonald’s hamburger is satisfying (that is, up until about 2 hours after the fact).
We proceeded to the hotel under a threatening sky which was probably the tail end of the snowstorm I had experienced coming out of Austria. Bavaria, the region of Germany where Munich is located, is primarily plains and forests, with a few mountains in the south called the Bavarian Alps. The storm, it seemed, had been trapped by the true Austrian Alps, and so left Munich with rain, damp, and cold. After settling into the room, I, Mom, and Hannah went for a walk to the Munich Christkindlmarkt, which proved hideously overcrowded. We stopped for a few pictures before heading back to the hotel. That night we had dinner with an old colleague of Dad’s, Thomas Pruegl, and his family, who served us one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten: dumplings in beef broth, roast pork and more dumplings (but of a different variety), and cabbage salad. We went home that night tired and stuffed to the gills.
The next morning we breakfasted at the hotel, under the watchful eyes of the breakfast chef/waitress person, a severe woman with an unending flow of sarcasm (in several languages) who soon garnered the nickname of “Frau Harrumph” from me and my sisters. Then it was time for mass at the cathedral, and then for a walk around the city center. The Christkindlmarkt was just starting up when we arrived, so we walked through the Rathaus, the “town hall” of Munich, although it was quite grand and gothic, looking more like a cathedral than anything else. Afterwards (at around 1:30) we embarked for the Alte Pinakothek, one of Munich’s three famous art museums. The Alte Pinakothek (which is mostly untranslatable, but which means something like “Collection of Old Paintings”) houses works from the late Middle Ages through the 18th Century; the Neue Pinakothek (“Collection of New Paintings”) is devoted to the 19th Century, and the Pinakothek der Moderne (“Collection of Paintings of the Modern Artists) has 20th Century works. We only saw the Alte, which houses no particularly famous work, but many minor works by famous painters (Rubens, Dürer, Raphael, and Da Vinci) as well as a particularly expansive collection of 17th and 18th century art, especially from France and the Netherlands.
That took us most of the afternoon, until about 5 o’clock. We then departed to find a restaurant that Dad had read of which served authentic Bavarian food. The search took us well over an hour, as it was quite dark and the restaurant was located in a small square off the beaten path. It was also closed, unsurprisingly, since it was a Sunday (when nearly all shops and stores are closed). We instead went to the Ratskeller, a restaurant in the basement of the Rathaus. While expensive, the food was superb if rather hard to describe. The menu was entirely in German, and contained a lot of Bavarian-dialect terms that I was unfamiliar with. Still, it turned out well, and we dined on plates of sausages, sauerkraut, tiny dumplings in a cheese sauce in Rose’s case, and Wiener Schnitzel (a cut of tender veal, pounded thin and deep fried) in Hannah’s. Stuffed to the gills again, we walked around the Christkindlmarkt for awhile and took a few pictures before returning to the hotel.
The next day a bitterly cold wind blew, rather than the drizzle of the day before. We went to the Toy Museum, which was rather unconventionally housed in an old tower, with each exhibit located in rooms off of the tight circular stairwell. It was an amusing side trip, and certainly nothing like what you’d find in the US. After the Toy Museum, we took a detour to the Asamkirche (officially the Church of St. John Nepomuk, but nicknamed Asam after the two brothers who designed and built it). While small, the church is crammed with every bit of Baroque finery that could fit: painted ceilings and walls, gold and silver ornamentation, and marble statues. Everything on the walls and ceilings that isn’t a painting is gold or silver, and my poor skill with words cannot possibly do it justice. Check out the webalbum for more pictures.
The Asamkirche was followed by a shopping expedition to the Christkindlmarkt, in which Dad tried glühwein for the first time and started a long-running joke which I’m sure will be with our family until the end of time, and in which I made a rather elementary mistake in my German and which lead to subsequent embarrassment (although, like all good mistakes, I don’t think I’m likely to repeat it in the near future). Around 4, we returned to the hotel, cold and somewhat cranky, and didn’t leave the room except for one expedition to the train station to buy some pizza. Then we bedded down for the night, determined to get a good rest for our trip to Salzburg the next day.
Next, on Cage of Monkeys: What happened in Salzburg! Strange Meetings! Long Walks! Tourists! And the Lions Club! Tune in tomorrow, same Monkey Time, same Monkey Channel!
-JA
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