29 May 2013, Mantova, Italia

29 May 2013

Mantova, Italia

Our trip is now in, somewhat, full swing.

We flew from Los Angeles to Zurich, non-stop, in business class. It was cushy and comfy. We were pampered. Life was good.

From Zurich we flew to Milan's Malpensa Airport and spent the night in the Sheraton Hotel which is on-site and has a view of the tall and snow covered Swiss Alps. It rained over night and we awoke to even snowier Alps.

From Malpensa Airport we boarded a train to Milan. Upon arrival and during our ninety minute lay-over we stepped outside for lunch at a sidewalk cafe in the sunshine under the tall plane trees which were in full bloom with new born spring leaves, baby-soft and brilliant green.

We boarded another train to Mantova (Mantua) and two hours later we arrived to our station and walked a dozen short streets to our inn.

Where we are staying is not a hotel. It is a converted set of apartments down a narrow crooked street. Our unit is on the second floor. It has a bedroom, a sitting room, a small kitchen set-up, and is extremely quiet and extremely comfortable with modern decor and ancient wood beams all painted white. The host, Cristina, is a warm and welcoming presence. Just the thing one wants after a two day journey.

Mantova is almost a small island. It projects into a small lake and is surrounded by water on three sides. The fourth side, the one sort of connected to the mainland, has a river slicing across and under it.

The small, historic and ancient city center--our part--is a cluster of buildings dating from the twelfth to the seventeenth-Century. It is so darn Renaissance, as if it were an effective urban planning project in a sixteenth-Century style. 

Today was a market day. Not much food. Lots of clothing and household stuff. Not much of interest to locals. Yet it was taken as an opportunity for the locals to dress up, stroll and visit. There is a traditional look here. The locals dress in the manner of my old Italian music teachers. Men, portly, in sports coat, tie and vest. Women in below-the-knee wool skirts and nice tops and sweaters buttoned to the neck. The women walked slowly, arm in arm. Grandchildren were doted on. Sweet gossip was exchanged. The pace is slow--andante-- and the people, the old and the young, are expressive and passionate.

We sat in a sidewalk cafe having breakfast and witnessed the goings on.

Breakfast is small. It is not a meal of significance. An expresso. A thumb-sized sandwich. A pinkie-sized sweet. That is all.

Style-wise, architecturally, the town is all of a piece. Nothing modern. At least, nothing that seems of the twentieth-Century, though the plumbing and electrical amenities are quite up-to-date.

All of the streets--narrow and crooked--are cobble stone. Not the neat and tidy flat pavers. The cobble stones are stones. Fist-sized, round and uneven. A challenge for cars, bicycles and for recently broken feet.

The center piece--the highlight--of Mantova is the Palazzo Ducale. We will visit it tomorrow.

Mantova was ruled for four-hundred years by one family: the Gonzagas. Imagine that. The U.S.A. has existed for two-hundred and twenty-five-ish years. We have had forty-some presidents. Mantova had only Gonzagas and the power passed from father to son for four-hundred years.

If one is powerful, I suppose, one needs a large house. The Gonzagas had a palace. It had, about, one hundred and forty rooms, still does.  Of interest to me are two musical issues. The first one involves Claudio Monteverdi who worked here for the Gonzagas in 1600. Monteverdi is considered to have invented the "opera" here in Mantova.

Before Monteverdi, music was considered perfect and beautifully constructed if it was simple and spare: one voice singing a simple melody with an accompaniment that stayed in the background. But Monteverdi was a modern guy. His sensibility was progressive. In his mind, the style was too simple. Why have just one voice? Why not two? Or more? Not just one line. Make it several. Beef up the accompaniment. Add some drama. Make it compelling. Throw in stories to illustrate and examine the great issues of the day, (which were the same then as they are now: power struggles, fidelity, deceit, consequences, etc).   Keep music from being pretty background stuff. Make it relevant and brain-feeding.

Monteverdi worked for the Gonzagas. He wrote Orfeo, the opera, for them. It was performed in the Palazzo. (We saw Orfeo, in a dazzling production in Berlin last October). And he composed and performed music for the Gonzaga court on select Fridays in the Palazzo in it's Hall of Mirrors which, long unknown, was recently discovered during a renovation when a wall was knocked down and the old room was found.

The other musical issue for me is the production of Verdi's Rigoletto which was filmed in the Palazzo three years ago.

It was filmed in real time. That is to say, Zubin Mehta conducted the orchestra in the Bibbiana Teatro two blocks from the Palazzo while, the singers (Placido Domingo) sang their roles in costume as if on-stage, but in this instance their stage was the Palazzo. They sang their roles--with the orchestra playing in their discrete ear-pieces--while moving from room to room, through corridors and down the streets of town. All the while the hand-held cameras followed them.

I saw it on television three years ago. It was exciting and I was attracted to the Palazzo and to the town. And I am thrilled to be here.

Rigoletto tells the story of a court jester, a buffoon with a sharp wit sometimes, too sharp. He has offended. He has few allies. He is the butt of jokes. What makes him serious though is his daughter and he is an over protective father. His daughter meanwhile is seduced and has ran away. Rigoletto, hasn't any sympathizers in the Duke's court. He is outraged over his daughter's antics. He seeks revenge. And his revenge does not go well as it is his daughter who ends up slain. 

Rigoletto is based on the Gonzaga court. But Verdi's original idea came from a Victor Hugo story about intrigue in the French royal court. But the Verdi's publishers thought it was too provocative to make the opera about a recent French ruler so soon after the French Revolution and Napoleon, etc. So Verdi looked for a ruler no longer in power. The Gonzaga's of Mantova were perfect. They were not royal. They had been out of power for over a century. They were not a hot button issue. Mantova was a tiny place without national ramifications.  The Gonzagas were ripe for the picking as they had become extinct as rulers around 1707.

The current town's people all seem to have a story to share about the Rigoletto television production from three years ago. It was made over several months during a the summer. Mantova was hot. There were mosquitos. The town, apparently below sea-level was sweltering and humid. The singers's make-up ran.

Tomorrow we will tour the Gonzaga's Palazzo Ducale's 140 rooms. Maybe we will sense the presences of Monteverdi and Rigoletto.

Marlow (and Wes)
29 May 2013
Mantova, Italy
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Trondheim, Norway: 24 December 2012

24 December 2012

Today was a great day.
After a turbulent, stormy night in the Norwegian Sea we arrived in Trondheim on Christmas Eve. It was a frosty arrival. Icy, windy, sunless. Perfect Christmas climate. I loved it. I walked from ship to hotel while the others took a taxi.

Earlier in the week, we learned that Norway closes for business on Christmas day and the days just before and just after. Our hotel, the Britannia, may be the only hotel open for the three days of our stay. But restaurants are all closed. Entirely closed.

This afternoon we went to visited the Nidaros Cathedral for the four o'clock mass. We walked on snowy sidewalks in twilight to the church gates. Between the gates and the sanctuary door is the cemetery.  The dates are from many centuries ago. Tall elliptical gravestones. Candlelit. The oldest stones atilt. Tall, leafless trees overhead.  Resting in an undulating flat grassy field. Against a twilight sky, hazy blue,  illuminated by a half-moon.

We passed through the Romanesque doorway into the church. It is magnificent. A long expansive space with a tall rectangular tower near it's center. It is enormous. With gothic vaulting that thrills the eyes.  It is all so perfect in form and line.

The space was filled. The people looked joyous. Dressed well. Many children. People in traditional dress. A man with black shoes with silver buckles, white cable knit socks up to his knees where a red braided tassel was tied.  Black wool breeches from his knees up. A white collarless starched shirt under a colorful knit vest in red, buttoned up to his clavicle. Finally, a wool coat, white, snowy, fine, with two vertical rows of silver buttons and elegant, discrete ornamental stitching.

We took our places. The choir began. Boys and men singing. The organ played. It filled the room with quaking sound. The program followed the format of a traditional mass. Singing. Standing. Sitting. Sermon. Etc. Etc. Until the Hallelujah Chorus. The tremendous bells began to chime, heard throughout the town. The people rose and filed out into the Christmasy ambiance of Norway winter.

We had lowered our expectations for food. Then back at the hotel, the staff surprised us. They showed us to an elegant dining room built in the eighteen-nineties. Chandeliers. White roses. Candles. Red walls. Glossy black tall wooden doors. I felt I had fallen into a Christmas scene in a Bergman film. We were each presented with a plate of various foods. Salmon. Cheese. Potato salad. Cold poached turkey. And a bottle of Spanish wine from Catalunya. Afterwards, there was a triple-tier of cookies. All variations on butter cookies. And delicious coffee. The hotel presented all this to us as a gift. It was all very wonderful. The stuff of sweet dreams. Which I will now lay down to.

Marlow and Wes
The Brittania Hotel
Trondheim, Norway
24 December 2012
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Norwegian Sea: 16 December 2012

I am sitting in a room full of easy chairs and small tables all bolted or chained to the floor. On my right is a wall with five windows. On my left, another wall with five windows. In front of me are ten windows. One floor up is the same set-up done slightly smaller. Outside the windows is the Norwegian Sea and islands and fjords. We are on the MS Lofoten, the smallest and oldest ship in the Hurtigruten fleet.

We boarded the ship near midnight in Bergen. Our room is in the top class, in the category of the largest rooms. However, by hotel standards--by any standards--it is a tiny space. Two narrow bunks fold down from the wall, one atop the other. Our tiny bathroom has a smaller-than-a-phone-booth shower, a toilet and a heated floor. (I love the heated floor.) We have a port hole window, but it is sealed with an iron cap for the winter season, lest a storm push the sea through the glass and soak the room.  We are in the lower half of the ship--about ten feet above the water line--but it is only a short one-minute walk upstairs to all of the lounges and decks.

Compared to today's enormous cruise ships, the Lofoten, is like a bathtub toy. Quaint. Old-fashioned. The interior is done in gleaming wood and shiny brass. The lounges are living rooms.  Large enough if you want to be alone. Small enough if you want to chat with fellow travelers. Fellow adventurers. The winter voyages have few passengers on-board. Each has a compelling reason for making the journey into darkness and cold.  Here, the sun rises at ten a.m. and it set's near two p.m. Our sleeping and waking is not governed by the sun's rise and fall. As we go far north into the Arctic Circle the days will get shorter.

The daily temperature is in the twenties.  I am exhilarated by the cold. I saw an exhibit about walruses. Their skin is thick and dense like several straw mats combined. My clothing is similarly insulating. Patagonia Capilene long-johns. Fleece-lined jeans. Waterproof ski pants. Up top, a long sleeve shirt. Fleece vest.  Down sweater. And a heavy hooded parka. I can stand comfortably on deck--in the howling wind, in the frigid air, watching moonlight shine on the sea and stars shine in the sky--for a long time, comfortably.

We made this trip, in part, to experience the Lofoten, the Grande Dame of it's fleet and the last of it's type.  Forty-eight years old. With it's original diesel engine. With only one-hundred and fifty-three "bunks" it is fairly small. More than several Lofotens would fit into the space of a Princess Cruise ship.  For one-hundred and ten years this shipping company has had a goevernment contract to connect the coastal Norwegian cities. It delivers passengers, cargo and mail to the thirty-four ports on it's route. It stops at half of the ports on it's way north to the Arctic Circle. And stops at the other ports on it's way down south to Bergen. It's round trip takes eleven days.

It begins it's journey in Bergen, which is Norway's second largest city. Population about four-hundred thousand. It's last stop is Kirkenes in the Arctic Circle, a stones throw from Russia. We will exit the ship in Tromsø, two days short of Kirkenes.

Here is what runs through my head as I stand on deck, my fingers ashiver as they type, on the blackberry, these words.........

We are traveling north, weaving in and out of hundreds of islands and fjords. The Norwegian coast is entirely spectacular and breath-taking.  The light is crystalline. The color palette is blue, gray, slate, silver, mercury. This time of year the sun is indirect. Over the horizon. It will not come back into view until late-January. It rises at ten a.m. And it sets at two-thirty p.m. On the one hand, our magnificent scenery passes, barely seen, in moonlight and in darkness. On the other hand, our time, our pace, is out of our control. The ship travels at it's pace, not ours. We are left to sit, to think, to read. To stand on deck. Outside. In the dark. In the wind. Twenty-degrees Fahrenheit. Where the mind goes into sensory mode. Collar raised. Scarf tightened. Hat pulled low. The face chilled. The cheeks tingle. The air clear and clean. The light brilliant, crystalline.  Everything vivid. The stars seem brighter. The mountains more etched. The ocean dark, roiling and alive with power and peril. The brain tries to conjure words for the all-encompassing physical sensory experience of it, but words won't come, it is all sensation and one must simply give in to being awash in the cold and the wind and the moonlight glinting on the sea.

Marlow and Wes
16 December 2012
The Norwegian Sea

Christmas Eve

Our boat arrived in Trondheim, Norway's third largest city, this morning (Dec. 24).  We had been informed by various people that Norway "shuts down" for the Christmas Holiday, but I don't think it really sunk in until we got off the boat at 10 AM on 12/24 to a virtually deserted city.  This is not a culture of "last minute shoppers" - very few stores were even open.  The Norwegians begin their Christmas holiday celebrations in November when the special Christmas restaurant menus and concerts begin.  So I guess by the time they get to the actual date they are either well prepared or just too tired out!

Marlow decorating the lounge

Our Christmas celebration on board the MS Lofoton took place on the afternoon and evening of Dec. 23.  The ship held a holiday party where many of the passengers took part in decorating one of the lounges.

Crew of MS Lofoten

Afterwards we participated in the "Captain's Dinner" on board ship which was actually the only dinner we ate in the ship's dining room.  All our previous dinner were either at restaurants when docked at a port or assembled from grocery stores visited during the day.



Once we arrived in Trondheim we walked about the historic center where our hotel is located.

And attended a Christmas Eve service at the Nidaros Cathedral a few blocks from our hotel - together with 500+ others.

The highlight of the day came at dinner time.  Earlier in the trip we had assumed that the hotel restaurant would be open for dinner on Christmas Eve.  But several days before arriving in Trondheim we learned this was not the case.  In fact many hotels in the City are closed entirely for the week.  So the fact that our hotel was even taking guests was unusual for the City.  But having an open restaurant (or bar) was out of the question.  I even asked the Trondheim tourist agency to give me a list of open restaurants for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day but they came up with none.  I also expressed my surprise to the hotel management in an e-mail sent a few days before we arrived and they responded that they would try to come up with something.

Christmas Eve dinner

So when we checked in today they asked if we would like to have a "cold plate" for dinner that they would serve at a table in the dining room.  We were happily surprised!  We were served in a beautiful room in this historic hotel (located adjacent to the royal palace).  So instead of going without dinner which we had come to anticipate would be our fate for the evening, we ended up having a very nice meal of smoked salmon, potato and other salads.

Our plan for Christmas Day is to spend the afternoon at the hotel's spa which is supposed to consist of several saunas of various temperatures, a domed soaking pool that reminds me of the Ritz in Paris and other water features to pamper us.

Marlow and I send our very best wishes to all for a wonderful holiday!

Route of our trip

It wasn't until I looked at the route of our voyage on a map of Western Europe that I realized hope much "ground" we have covered on this trip. The blue line along the Norwegian coast in the map below represents the area we have traveled. Starting at the bottom marker for Bergen and going all the way to Tromso at the top marker. The middle marker shows Trondheim where we will be leaving the boat tomorrow.

Noon

This photo was taken at noon today. The light is so unique up above the arctic circle.

Our room

We are lucky to be in one of the four rooms on the ship that have windows. And we have two! This is the same room that Sam and Kathy stayed in during our trip north. It is larger than the room we had before.