Oh-ho, look! It is a blog post! How amusing!
On my last full day in Malta, I planned to go and visit the ancient walled city of Mdina (pronounced “meh-DEE-nah”), which has existed in some form or another since the Normans conquered malta in the late 11th century. But, when I arrived at the Valletta bus termina, bright and early at 10:30, I found that the bus I had intended to take had vanished from its apportioned spot, and that the bus schedule I had nabbed yesterday did not really correspond to either the official posted schedule or the schedule offered in broken English by the bus drivers when I asked. My schedule and the offical schedule both agreed that there would be a bus leaving at 12:20, so I decided to abide by the majority opinion and find some way to waste time before the bus left.
Fortunately, such an opportunity was close at hand in the upper Barrakka gardens. To explain this opportunity, though, I’m going to have to go on a bit of a diversion, so kindly indulge my ramblings. The Upper Barrakka gardens, like all of the gardens and parks in Valletta (and you’ll be hearing about the rest of them, make no mistake), are built on one of the old fortress bastions, bastions being the place where two fortress walls meet to form a corner. This area of a fortress is usually much thicker that other areas, with the result that all of the former bastions, before they were transformed into gardens, were basically tolerably large squares (as in the public-meeting-place-center-of-town-square, not the Euclidean polygon), doing nothing except taking up space. The British, after World War Two, turned them into gardens as a place for the officers to take afternoon tea or whatever.
The Barrakka Gardens fill what used to be the Bastion of St. Salvatore, an area which was more heavily fortified than usual, as it commands a sweeping view of the Grand Harbor. Only one part of the bastion is not today occupied with palms and ferns, and this is a section known as the Saluting Battery. In the Age of Sail, long before the invention of things like radios or telephones, keeping accurate time was very difficult, and it was also essential for navigation. Ships’ captains could find latitude using sextants and spherical trigonometry, but longitude was a different matter. To calculate longitude, British navigators carried with them two chronometers, highly accurate clocks which were resistant to the vicissitudes of sea travel (storms, water, cannonballs, et cetera). One of these chronometers would be set to Greenwich Mean Time, the other would be synchronized daily to local time at noon. Thus, by measuring the difference in time between the chronometers, the captain could determine his location on a map.
Because of this, it was law in all British seaports that the port admiral was required to fire a gun, at noon, in order to aid the captains in synchronizing their chronometers. It was also customary for the port to salute arriving naval ships by firing a number of guns proportional to the rank of the ship’s commanding officer. This was the purpose of the Saluting Battery on the Bastion of St. Salvatore: the firing of the noonday gun, and the firing of salutes (hence the name). The Battery performed this function from the day of British takeover in 1809, to the Second World War, when the saluting cannon were removed and anti-aircraft guns were installed. The Battery suffered heavy punishment during the war, but was renovated and returned to its former duty of the noonday gun in 2004. The firing of the gun is done punctually every midday, by members of the Maltese Army dressed in replica uniforms of the British artillery regiments who were stationed in Malta in the last half of the 19th century, and the ceremony is done with fully replicated pomp and circumstance, which makes it somewhat amusing to watch.
Waiting for the noonday gun on a sunny bench in the gardens took up most of my morning, along with suppressing my laughter at the high ceremony on the saluting batteries (see webalbum for more pictures). After the gun I walked back to the terminal and caught my bus without much further confusion. The ride inland to Mdina took us out of Valletta’s various suburb towns and through what I guess qualifies as Maltese countryside, which is mostly green fields separated by low stonework walls. The bus ended at Rabat, a suburb of Mdina, which at its best only has a little under 300 people living in it. Following Maltese tradition, the bus terminal for Rabat and Mdina is a small parking lot with a little booth to wait in and a few benches. From there it was a short stroll through a small garden-park (one of the results of being part of the British Empire is a surplus of gardens, apparently) into Mdina.
The city itself is built of the usual Maltese stone, the color of desert sand, and it gives the city a strange and ancient feel. The city is the main attraction, unless you really feel like dropping 15+ Euros at the Knights Extravaganza (some kind of movie/documentary thing) or visiting a restored palazzo which belonged for a few centuries to a Venetian merchant family and which is now a museum of nothing in particular which also forbids photography within, for whatever reason. Still, it was an enjoyable place to spend a couple hours’ walk and to eat in a café perched on the old city walls and overlooking the countryside, Valletta, and the Mediterranean.
I returned to Valletta at 3 o’clock, with the afternoon and evening still before me. I decided to tour the battlements of Valletta, taking my time and also trying to spot as many relics of the past as I could identify. I also hunted around the city for the rest of the auberges of the Knights, managing to find all of them except Italy’s (which I gather has been turned into a hotel now). I found three other gardens built into the old battlements (the British colonial government must really have had a thing for gardens), as well as some construction-work and the explanation for the closing of all of the old buildings. It seems that not only is February the best time to do renovation, but the Maltese Parliament had just passed the new budget, which included heaps of money to generally clean up and improve the city of Valletta, starting with the old historical buildings. I guess my advice then is to not go Malta any time in the next year, or you will be disappointed of all of the great buildings there.
My next day in Malta was very brief indeed. I check out of my hostel, stopped in Valletta to see the firing of the noonday gun again, then took a bus to the airport and waited for a few hours before catching my plane to Rome. Once there I headed straight for my lodging (the hostel I had stayed at previously), then went out for dinner with friends before bedding down that night. The next day was spent killing time until our plane left for Athens. We visited a couple of churches, including St. Peter in Chains, which we finally got into, before flying out of Rome at around 8pm, arriving at Athens International Airport at around 11 to be confronted by a great deal of signage in a language we couldn’t read, let alone understand.
But that’s a story for the next blog post. See you next time,
-JA
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Economicry and Philosophising
Dear Everyone,
I wish to offer my apologies for the fault in the blog updates. I wish I could say that those responsible have been sacked, but regrettably I do not possess the power to fire University of Innsbruck faculty. Basically, I finished my first post on Malta, and then got ambushed by papers and midterms from hell and of death. So the updating schedule (by which I would have finished the travel reports by yesterday) got shot down, and there's been nothing on my end.
But, it's spring break. I'm going to be travelling, but I'm only making day trips due to lack of money and almost paralyzing exhaustion. Now, my plan (ha ha) is to finish writing up February Break traveling by April 20, and then put up one, maybe two posts about where I went over break. Knowing me, this won't happen at all, but I'm going to do my damndest to make it happen.
Happy Easter everyone!
-JA
I wish to offer my apologies for the fault in the blog updates. I wish I could say that those responsible have been sacked, but regrettably I do not possess the power to fire University of Innsbruck faculty. Basically, I finished my first post on Malta, and then got ambushed by papers and midterms from hell and of death. So the updating schedule (by which I would have finished the travel reports by yesterday) got shot down, and there's been nothing on my end.
But, it's spring break. I'm going to be travelling, but I'm only making day trips due to lack of money and almost paralyzing exhaustion. Now, my plan (ha ha) is to finish writing up February Break traveling by April 20, and then put up one, maybe two posts about where I went over break. Knowing me, this won't happen at all, but I'm going to do my damndest to make it happen.
Happy Easter everyone!
-JA
Saturday, March 21, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Fourth: Malta
So, class, who can tell me about the Great Siege of Malta? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?
No?
Can anyone tell me about the Siege of Malta during World War II? Hmmmm?
No?
Can anyone here tell me what Malta is?
No, Mr. Larkin, it is not a drink commonly served in soda fountains.
Well, I see we shall have to start from the start and begin at the beginning. [puts on lecturer’s cap and gown]
Malta is a tiny, tiny island in the southern Mediterranean, about 120 square miles if you include the island of Gozo off the northern coast. It possesses a heroic and ancient past, with settlements dating back to the Neolithic Age. In fact, the island possess the world’s oldest free-standing structures: the temple complexes at Ġgantija and Ħaġar Qim, which date to between 3600 and 3200 BCE (as a bit of comparison, Stonehenge was built around 2300 BCE). These temple complexes were erected by the first settlers of Malta, who probably came from Sicily. These settlers were also the first in a long line of possessors of Malta who would be conquered by some greater power. The island became a Greek colony, then a Phoenician one, and then a Carthaginian one, and then passed into the hands of Rome after the Punic Wars. It was on Malta that, according to Acts, Saint Paul was shipwrecked during his journey to Rome, and the Maltese still commemorate the Feast of the Shipwreck every February 10th with great festivity. After the fall of the Roman empire, Malta became part of the Islamic Empire under the Aghlabid caliphate, before being conquered by the Normans in 1091. After that year, Malta flitted between various famous and obscure European potentates, from the Duchy of Swabia and the House of Hohenstaufen to the Kingdom of England, until it was seized as a permanent fief by the Kingdom of Aragon (today’s Catalonia) in 1283.
In 1530, Malta was sold to the Order of the Knights of Saint John the Baptist, also known as the Hospitallers, the last of the Crusading Orders, who had in 1522 been expelled from their fortress-island of Rhodes by the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire. The Knights of St. John took over the island and turned it into a fortress like Rhodes, and proceeded to use the island as a base of operations in attacks against Ottoman trade and settlements. The Order’s conflict with the Ottoman Empire culminated in the Great Siege of 1565, when an Ottoman army of about 36,000 troops supported by around 12,000 laborers and slaves besieged the Knights in their strongholds on Malta. At that point, the Knights numbered no more than 550, as their order had been decimated not only by their defeat in 1559 at the Battle of Djerba, but also by the Wars of Religion in Germany and by Henry VIII of England’s declaration of separation from the Catholic Church, events which almost totally abolished the German and English forces of the Order. To support themselves in the Siege, the Order conscripted all of the male Maltese population into the army, and were also supported by small reinforcements of soldiers from Spain and Italy, as well as a number of adventurers who came to Malta seeking glory and loot. The defenders numbered, in total, somewhere between 6,100 and 8,500 men. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, given both the scarcity of extant accounts of the Siege, and also given the chroniclers’ habit of exaggerating the numbers of the Ottomans and reducing the number of the defenders so as to add to the sense of danger and drama.
The Siege began on May 18th of 1565, and battle quite literally did not cease until Spanish reinforcements arrived on September 8th. Historians have described the Siege as the last, dying gasp of crusading spirit, as it not only marked the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, but also the last battle where the Knights of St. John, or indeed any military-religious order, participated. After the Siege, the Order built the citadel of Valletta, named after the Grandmaster of the Order at the time of the Siege, Jean Parisot de la Valette. This city and all of its fortifications and building still stands, in very nearly the same form as it did when it was built in the 1570s, and is today the capital of Malta.
The island slipped out of history for the next 200 years, until the Napoleonic Wars, when it was captured by the French and then by the British, who added it to the Empire following the war. It remain a colonial possession under the British until 1974, and was during World War II assaulted by the German and Italian air forces. In 2004 Malta joined the EU, and adopted the Euro in 2008.
Maltese culture is, as one might expect, a mish-mash resulting from many centuries of foreign possession. The official languages are English and Maltese, a patois of about 70% Arabic and 30% Italian, and Italian is also widely understood and spoken. The food has been strongly influenced by North Africa and the Middle East, favoring spicier dishes with an emphasis on rice as the grain of choice rather than wheat. The Maltese are 99% Catholic, with only a very, very small Protestant community making up the difference, and religion is a deeply rooted part of daily life. The island is chock full of places to go, see, and experience, and my three full days there were not nearly enough for it all.
I arrived in Malta at 12:40pm via the International Airport in the middle of the island. The Airport is about the same size as South Bend’s, and one of the first clues I had to the size of the island was the fact that the airport and its runways took up a noticeable portion of my map. The airport, like so many of its European kindred, is located far away from civilization, in this case 25 minutes by bus. The Maltese buses deserve recognition for being quite possibly the most unique form of transportation on the European continent. They are nearly all 50-60 years old, relics that once served the United Kingdom and which were moved to Malta during its time as a British possession. The buses now sport bright orange and white paint, and the interiors are plastered with religious postcards and icons, while rosaries take the place of fuzzy dice in the adornment of the rear-view mirrors. The buses are also quite cheap, and one can travel the length and breadth of the island for 50 cents.
I took one bus on a jouncing ride through the countryside to the Valletta bus terminal, then changed buses and went to the suburb of Sliema, which was were my hostel was located. However, the hostel’s reception desk was closed due to renovations and my room key, which was supposed to be located in an envelope on the front desk was nowhere in sight. I was informed that the reception would be open the next morning, and so I checked in to a cheap (35 Euros per night) hotel for that night, and resolved to apply at the hostel again the next morning. Regrettably, the delay meant that I had wasted two hours which I had expected to use for sight-seeing, derailing my plans a little. I had intended to spend my arrival day in Valletta, going to museums and inspecting fortresses, then go inland to the cities of Mdina and Vittoriosa on the second day, then to the island of Gozo on the third day. I scratched my plans Gozo, and decided to go for a long walk along Marsamxett Harbor to clear my mind and calm my nerves. The day was absolutely stunning, 73 degrees Fahrenheit with a breeze coming off the Mediterranean and nary a cloud in the sky. My walk, however, took twice as long as I expected, since Marsamxett Harbor is filled with inlets and marinas along which my path wended, and I arrived in Valletta as the sun was beginning to set. I walked through the city a little, out to the western point of the peninsula, on which crouches the indomitable form of Fort St. Elmo, a relic from the days of the Great Siege, when it was defended for 34 days against relentless Ottoman assault, completely cut off from the rest of the defenders and under unceasing bombardment from cannons which catapulted 300-pound stone balls into the fortifications. Today, part of the fort functions as the Maltese police academy, while the rest houses the War Museum and is usually open to the public. However, as I learned after speaking to a few construction workers, January and February are traditionally months for upgrades and repairs to the historical buildings, and as such both fort and museum were closed to the public. I finished up the evening with a quick dinner in a café, where I rice which had been baked in a cheese crust.
The next day I checked out early and made for my hostel, where I found the reception desk open, and the owner somewhat mystified as to my absence yesterday. Still, everything got sorted out in the end, and I hopped a bus back to Valletta, ready to take in some museums. The first one I went to was St. John’s Co-Cathedral, a church with a dull, sober exterior built in 1571. The plain facade, undecorated with ornaments or sculpture, looks just like all of the buildings around it, with nothing to distinguish it as a cathedral. The interior, however, is decorated in the most lavish exhibition of the Baroque: gilding, frescoes on the ceiling, and gleaming marble in a rainbow of colors. The floor is decorated with marble version of the coats of arms of famous Knights of St. John, embellished with heraldic records of their accomplishments. The church holds ten side chapels, each originally built by knights of a specific nationality. The Order was divided into eight langues (French for ‘tongues’): Italy, Castile, Aragon, Provence, France, Germany, England, and Auvergne. Each langue maintained its own chapel, each own dominated with a massive oil painting of that langue’s patron saint.
In addition to all of the finery which I was now coming to expect of churches in Southern Europe, the Co-Cathedral also has a museum. The museum is housed in the former oratory, which was during the time of the Knights a place for meditation and prayer as well as an office building. The crown jewel of the museum is The Beheading of John the Baptist, painted by Caravaggio during his novitiate in the Order. While he completed the painting just after being adopted into the order (it is in fact signed “Fra Michelangelo Carvaggio”, and is the only signed Caravaggio in existence), he was expelled two weeks later after dueling and seriously wounding another knight. The Order took care to confiscate all of the work he had done while in Malta, and as a result, the museum holds a painting of St. Jerome as well as a small collection of sketches.
Further in are the museum’s collection of sacred artifacts, from the times of the knights: vestments, monstrances, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts. Much of the former treasure is now gone, carried off during Napoleon’s occupation of the island, but what remains is nonetheless impressive: chasubles embroidered with pounds and pounds of silver and gold thread, depicting scenes from the New Testaments and Last Judgments galore; a cross-shaped reliquary four feet high, cast from solid gold and embellished with precious stones and platinum, which still holds a relic purporting to be the hand of John the Baptist; massive illuminated pulpit bibles, each spanning four feet across when opened and painted with pigments concocted from gold leaf and powdered gems; huge tapestries depicting famous episodes of the Order and from Scripture; and of course the portrait gallery, containing portraits of all Grandmasters of the Order from about 1600 to 1798 and the portrait of the last Grandmaster, Ferdinand von Hompech zu Bolheim, a German from the Catholic Duchy of Württemberg.
After I exited the cathedral it was only a short walk to the Palace of the Grandmasters. The Palace was constructed in the 1570s and served as the residence of the Grandmasters of the Order until their demise in 1798, and as the residence of the British colonial governor until Maltese independence in 1974, when part of it was designated as the Presidential Residence, while the rest (the former chambers of the Grandmasters and several halls on the ground floor) were converted into the State Museum and Armory, respectively. To enter the Palace, one proceeds through a tunnel-like gate past two guards-of-honor and into the Royal Albert Gardens (named after Prince Albert of England, and part of a late 19th century British project to beautify Valletta by installing public gardens in the old fortifications. More on that later). There you buy your tickets, either for the State Museum or the Armory (reasonably inexpensive at 4 Euros with student ID, and the price covers the invaluable addition of an audioguide for the Armory). As Italy had quite exhausted my enthusiasm for frescoed Baroque rooms (which is all the State Museum really consists of) I went to the Armory, which is housed in the former refectory halls of the Palace. It consists of two chambers, one devoted to armor, the other to weapons. I’ll not spend an undue amount of time disgorging all of the information I learned there, but the pictures are up on the webalbum and they have captions to explain them. I will only remark that the Armory’s collection pales in comparison to the Waffenkammer in Vienna, but I’ll get to that further on down the road.
After leaving the Armory the time of day was approaching 3 pm. I boarded a bus for Vittoriosa, one of the oldest cities in Malta and the location of the old headquarters of the Knights of St. John. This was the city besieged by the Ottomans during the Great Siege of 1565. At that point, Malta was very sparsely inhabited indeed, with only two places that were really inhabited: the citadel of Mdina and the Three Cities (Borgo, L’Isola, and Bormla). The Three Cities held the headquarters of the Knights of St. John, located in Fort Saint Angelo, a looming castle built of the same tan stone as everything else on the island, and they bore the full brunt of the Ottoman assault: constant bombardment by the artillery which enfiladed them on literally every side, and daily onslaughts of tens of thousands of soldiers, drawn from every corner of the Ottoman Empire, from Greece to Hungary to Persia to Arabia Felix. The siege was a grueling, gory affair which lasted for more than a hundred days, from June to September of 1565.
While the Knights were in the end victorious, the Three Cities lay in varying states of ruin, from the complete desolation of L’Isola to the relative stability of Borgo. The Knights decided to build a completely new fortress-city to house their order against the possibility of another siege like that of 1565. That city was Valletta, and it became the capitol of Malta.
The Three Cities were rechristened respectively Vittoriosa, Senglea, and Cospicua, and dwindled in importance as the business of the Knights moved across the Grand Harbor to Valletta. Now they serve as undiscovered relics of Malta’s past.
The Vittoriosa bus terminal (like all other Maltese bus terminals, nothing more than a parking lot with a closed ticket kiosk) is located right across from the main entrance to the city: the Gate of Provence, so named because it was defended by those Knights who were from Provence. All of the Three Cities’ defenses were so divided, with those areas which were likely to come under heavy assault staffed with Knights whose langues were robust in number. Now, the Provencal Gate stands much as it did during the 16th century, a sloping barrier about 40 feet tall and more than a hundred feet thick at its base. The narrow, barely two-lane street that passes through the Gate of Provence winds its way under the sober and judgmental facades of buildings which have survived for over 600 years until emptying into Victory Square in the center of the town.
I spent my time wandering among alleys shadowed by the sunset, looking up landmarks and buildings. The most famous part of Vittoriosa is Fort Saint Angelo, the oldest part of the defenses of the Knights. It is built on a man-made island, connected to Vittoriosa by a small footbridge and a narrow stone aqueduct, and is, like the rest of the defenses, built of the tan Maltese stone. It was also closed, and apparently had been so for over a year due to massive renovations. The fort was closed to the public for a long time, before an attempt was made in the 1970s to turn it into a resort hotel. That venture failed miserably, leaving behind a half-constructed swimming pool and a great deal of structural damage. The current work on the fort is being done with the eventual goal of opening the entire structure to the public as a museum commemorating the Knights of St. John and the Great Siege of 1565.
After I left Vittoriosa, I went straight for my hostel, turning in early in anticipation of a long day in the morning.
No?
Can anyone tell me about the Siege of Malta during World War II? Hmmmm?
No?
Can anyone here tell me what Malta is?
No, Mr. Larkin, it is not a drink commonly served in soda fountains.
Well, I see we shall have to start from the start and begin at the beginning. [puts on lecturer’s cap and gown]
Malta is a tiny, tiny island in the southern Mediterranean, about 120 square miles if you include the island of Gozo off the northern coast. It possesses a heroic and ancient past, with settlements dating back to the Neolithic Age. In fact, the island possess the world’s oldest free-standing structures: the temple complexes at Ġgantija and Ħaġar Qim, which date to between 3600 and 3200 BCE (as a bit of comparison, Stonehenge was built around 2300 BCE). These temple complexes were erected by the first settlers of Malta, who probably came from Sicily. These settlers were also the first in a long line of possessors of Malta who would be conquered by some greater power. The island became a Greek colony, then a Phoenician one, and then a Carthaginian one, and then passed into the hands of Rome after the Punic Wars. It was on Malta that, according to Acts, Saint Paul was shipwrecked during his journey to Rome, and the Maltese still commemorate the Feast of the Shipwreck every February 10th with great festivity. After the fall of the Roman empire, Malta became part of the Islamic Empire under the Aghlabid caliphate, before being conquered by the Normans in 1091. After that year, Malta flitted between various famous and obscure European potentates, from the Duchy of Swabia and the House of Hohenstaufen to the Kingdom of England, until it was seized as a permanent fief by the Kingdom of Aragon (today’s Catalonia) in 1283.
In 1530, Malta was sold to the Order of the Knights of Saint John the Baptist, also known as the Hospitallers, the last of the Crusading Orders, who had in 1522 been expelled from their fortress-island of Rhodes by the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire. The Knights of St. John took over the island and turned it into a fortress like Rhodes, and proceeded to use the island as a base of operations in attacks against Ottoman trade and settlements. The Order’s conflict with the Ottoman Empire culminated in the Great Siege of 1565, when an Ottoman army of about 36,000 troops supported by around 12,000 laborers and slaves besieged the Knights in their strongholds on Malta. At that point, the Knights numbered no more than 550, as their order had been decimated not only by their defeat in 1559 at the Battle of Djerba, but also by the Wars of Religion in Germany and by Henry VIII of England’s declaration of separation from the Catholic Church, events which almost totally abolished the German and English forces of the Order. To support themselves in the Siege, the Order conscripted all of the male Maltese population into the army, and were also supported by small reinforcements of soldiers from Spain and Italy, as well as a number of adventurers who came to Malta seeking glory and loot. The defenders numbered, in total, somewhere between 6,100 and 8,500 men. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, given both the scarcity of extant accounts of the Siege, and also given the chroniclers’ habit of exaggerating the numbers of the Ottomans and reducing the number of the defenders so as to add to the sense of danger and drama.
The Siege began on May 18th of 1565, and battle quite literally did not cease until Spanish reinforcements arrived on September 8th. Historians have described the Siege as the last, dying gasp of crusading spirit, as it not only marked the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, but also the last battle where the Knights of St. John, or indeed any military-religious order, participated. After the Siege, the Order built the citadel of Valletta, named after the Grandmaster of the Order at the time of the Siege, Jean Parisot de la Valette. This city and all of its fortifications and building still stands, in very nearly the same form as it did when it was built in the 1570s, and is today the capital of Malta.
The island slipped out of history for the next 200 years, until the Napoleonic Wars, when it was captured by the French and then by the British, who added it to the Empire following the war. It remain a colonial possession under the British until 1974, and was during World War II assaulted by the German and Italian air forces. In 2004 Malta joined the EU, and adopted the Euro in 2008.
Maltese culture is, as one might expect, a mish-mash resulting from many centuries of foreign possession. The official languages are English and Maltese, a patois of about 70% Arabic and 30% Italian, and Italian is also widely understood and spoken. The food has been strongly influenced by North Africa and the Middle East, favoring spicier dishes with an emphasis on rice as the grain of choice rather than wheat. The Maltese are 99% Catholic, with only a very, very small Protestant community making up the difference, and religion is a deeply rooted part of daily life. The island is chock full of places to go, see, and experience, and my three full days there were not nearly enough for it all.
I arrived in Malta at 12:40pm via the International Airport in the middle of the island. The Airport is about the same size as South Bend’s, and one of the first clues I had to the size of the island was the fact that the airport and its runways took up a noticeable portion of my map. The airport, like so many of its European kindred, is located far away from civilization, in this case 25 minutes by bus. The Maltese buses deserve recognition for being quite possibly the most unique form of transportation on the European continent. They are nearly all 50-60 years old, relics that once served the United Kingdom and which were moved to Malta during its time as a British possession. The buses now sport bright orange and white paint, and the interiors are plastered with religious postcards and icons, while rosaries take the place of fuzzy dice in the adornment of the rear-view mirrors. The buses are also quite cheap, and one can travel the length and breadth of the island for 50 cents.
I took one bus on a jouncing ride through the countryside to the Valletta bus terminal, then changed buses and went to the suburb of Sliema, which was were my hostel was located. However, the hostel’s reception desk was closed due to renovations and my room key, which was supposed to be located in an envelope on the front desk was nowhere in sight. I was informed that the reception would be open the next morning, and so I checked in to a cheap (35 Euros per night) hotel for that night, and resolved to apply at the hostel again the next morning. Regrettably, the delay meant that I had wasted two hours which I had expected to use for sight-seeing, derailing my plans a little. I had intended to spend my arrival day in Valletta, going to museums and inspecting fortresses, then go inland to the cities of Mdina and Vittoriosa on the second day, then to the island of Gozo on the third day. I scratched my plans Gozo, and decided to go for a long walk along Marsamxett Harbor to clear my mind and calm my nerves. The day was absolutely stunning, 73 degrees Fahrenheit with a breeze coming off the Mediterranean and nary a cloud in the sky. My walk, however, took twice as long as I expected, since Marsamxett Harbor is filled with inlets and marinas along which my path wended, and I arrived in Valletta as the sun was beginning to set. I walked through the city a little, out to the western point of the peninsula, on which crouches the indomitable form of Fort St. Elmo, a relic from the days of the Great Siege, when it was defended for 34 days against relentless Ottoman assault, completely cut off from the rest of the defenders and under unceasing bombardment from cannons which catapulted 300-pound stone balls into the fortifications. Today, part of the fort functions as the Maltese police academy, while the rest houses the War Museum and is usually open to the public. However, as I learned after speaking to a few construction workers, January and February are traditionally months for upgrades and repairs to the historical buildings, and as such both fort and museum were closed to the public. I finished up the evening with a quick dinner in a café, where I rice which had been baked in a cheese crust.
The next day I checked out early and made for my hostel, where I found the reception desk open, and the owner somewhat mystified as to my absence yesterday. Still, everything got sorted out in the end, and I hopped a bus back to Valletta, ready to take in some museums. The first one I went to was St. John’s Co-Cathedral, a church with a dull, sober exterior built in 1571. The plain facade, undecorated with ornaments or sculpture, looks just like all of the buildings around it, with nothing to distinguish it as a cathedral. The interior, however, is decorated in the most lavish exhibition of the Baroque: gilding, frescoes on the ceiling, and gleaming marble in a rainbow of colors. The floor is decorated with marble version of the coats of arms of famous Knights of St. John, embellished with heraldic records of their accomplishments. The church holds ten side chapels, each originally built by knights of a specific nationality. The Order was divided into eight langues (French for ‘tongues’): Italy, Castile, Aragon, Provence, France, Germany, England, and Auvergne. Each langue maintained its own chapel, each own dominated with a massive oil painting of that langue’s patron saint.
In addition to all of the finery which I was now coming to expect of churches in Southern Europe, the Co-Cathedral also has a museum. The museum is housed in the former oratory, which was during the time of the Knights a place for meditation and prayer as well as an office building. The crown jewel of the museum is The Beheading of John the Baptist, painted by Caravaggio during his novitiate in the Order. While he completed the painting just after being adopted into the order (it is in fact signed “Fra Michelangelo Carvaggio”, and is the only signed Caravaggio in existence), he was expelled two weeks later after dueling and seriously wounding another knight. The Order took care to confiscate all of the work he had done while in Malta, and as a result, the museum holds a painting of St. Jerome as well as a small collection of sketches.
Further in are the museum’s collection of sacred artifacts, from the times of the knights: vestments, monstrances, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts. Much of the former treasure is now gone, carried off during Napoleon’s occupation of the island, but what remains is nonetheless impressive: chasubles embroidered with pounds and pounds of silver and gold thread, depicting scenes from the New Testaments and Last Judgments galore; a cross-shaped reliquary four feet high, cast from solid gold and embellished with precious stones and platinum, which still holds a relic purporting to be the hand of John the Baptist; massive illuminated pulpit bibles, each spanning four feet across when opened and painted with pigments concocted from gold leaf and powdered gems; huge tapestries depicting famous episodes of the Order and from Scripture; and of course the portrait gallery, containing portraits of all Grandmasters of the Order from about 1600 to 1798 and the portrait of the last Grandmaster, Ferdinand von Hompech zu Bolheim, a German from the Catholic Duchy of Württemberg.
After I exited the cathedral it was only a short walk to the Palace of the Grandmasters. The Palace was constructed in the 1570s and served as the residence of the Grandmasters of the Order until their demise in 1798, and as the residence of the British colonial governor until Maltese independence in 1974, when part of it was designated as the Presidential Residence, while the rest (the former chambers of the Grandmasters and several halls on the ground floor) were converted into the State Museum and Armory, respectively. To enter the Palace, one proceeds through a tunnel-like gate past two guards-of-honor and into the Royal Albert Gardens (named after Prince Albert of England, and part of a late 19th century British project to beautify Valletta by installing public gardens in the old fortifications. More on that later). There you buy your tickets, either for the State Museum or the Armory (reasonably inexpensive at 4 Euros with student ID, and the price covers the invaluable addition of an audioguide for the Armory). As Italy had quite exhausted my enthusiasm for frescoed Baroque rooms (which is all the State Museum really consists of) I went to the Armory, which is housed in the former refectory halls of the Palace. It consists of two chambers, one devoted to armor, the other to weapons. I’ll not spend an undue amount of time disgorging all of the information I learned there, but the pictures are up on the webalbum and they have captions to explain them. I will only remark that the Armory’s collection pales in comparison to the Waffenkammer in Vienna, but I’ll get to that further on down the road.
After leaving the Armory the time of day was approaching 3 pm. I boarded a bus for Vittoriosa, one of the oldest cities in Malta and the location of the old headquarters of the Knights of St. John. This was the city besieged by the Ottomans during the Great Siege of 1565. At that point, Malta was very sparsely inhabited indeed, with only two places that were really inhabited: the citadel of Mdina and the Three Cities (Borgo, L’Isola, and Bormla). The Three Cities held the headquarters of the Knights of St. John, located in Fort Saint Angelo, a looming castle built of the same tan stone as everything else on the island, and they bore the full brunt of the Ottoman assault: constant bombardment by the artillery which enfiladed them on literally every side, and daily onslaughts of tens of thousands of soldiers, drawn from every corner of the Ottoman Empire, from Greece to Hungary to Persia to Arabia Felix. The siege was a grueling, gory affair which lasted for more than a hundred days, from June to September of 1565.
While the Knights were in the end victorious, the Three Cities lay in varying states of ruin, from the complete desolation of L’Isola to the relative stability of Borgo. The Knights decided to build a completely new fortress-city to house their order against the possibility of another siege like that of 1565. That city was Valletta, and it became the capitol of Malta.
The Three Cities were rechristened respectively Vittoriosa, Senglea, and Cospicua, and dwindled in importance as the business of the Knights moved across the Grand Harbor to Valletta. Now they serve as undiscovered relics of Malta’s past.
The Vittoriosa bus terminal (like all other Maltese bus terminals, nothing more than a parking lot with a closed ticket kiosk) is located right across from the main entrance to the city: the Gate of Provence, so named because it was defended by those Knights who were from Provence. All of the Three Cities’ defenses were so divided, with those areas which were likely to come under heavy assault staffed with Knights whose langues were robust in number. Now, the Provencal Gate stands much as it did during the 16th century, a sloping barrier about 40 feet tall and more than a hundred feet thick at its base. The narrow, barely two-lane street that passes through the Gate of Provence winds its way under the sober and judgmental facades of buildings which have survived for over 600 years until emptying into Victory Square in the center of the town.
I spent my time wandering among alleys shadowed by the sunset, looking up landmarks and buildings. The most famous part of Vittoriosa is Fort Saint Angelo, the oldest part of the defenses of the Knights. It is built on a man-made island, connected to Vittoriosa by a small footbridge and a narrow stone aqueduct, and is, like the rest of the defenses, built of the tan Maltese stone. It was also closed, and apparently had been so for over a year due to massive renovations. The fort was closed to the public for a long time, before an attempt was made in the 1970s to turn it into a resort hotel. That venture failed miserably, leaving behind a half-constructed swimming pool and a great deal of structural damage. The current work on the fort is being done with the eventual goal of opening the entire structure to the public as a museum commemorating the Knights of St. John and the Great Siege of 1565.
After I left Vittoriosa, I went straight for my hostel, turning in early in anticipation of a long day in the morning.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Third: The Circus Maximus, Roman Churches, and Pompeii
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).
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).
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.
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