Feeling fine and Florentine

“The Tuscan Frying Pan,” Florence was earning its title that day, certified in sweat dripping down the backs and sides of tourists squinting in the Piazza della Signoria, and my hair felt, again, like one of those Russian fur hats. Time for a haircut. And wouldn’t you know it, Florence is the home of my favorite barber.

I went straight for the small shop, undistracted by the Basilica di San Lorenzo where one of my favorite Italians holds wishes on his tomb, not stopping at the old friend of a hotel (taken by a different Rick Steves group, the lucky buggers), and swerving around the periodic bulges of visitors whose shoulders relaxed bit by bit with every lick of their slowly melting gelato. Visciola e fragola? Va bene.

Old Town Florence is a tourism city for sure, and the crowds used to irritate me, but working as a guide has helped me see the ways they’re doing it right (improved traffic laws, cleaning the duomo, and coordinating the many marvelous sites) and given me an increased appreciation of the place and its importance in our collective past. So now they’re not the addled brains of people in my way, they’re international minds growing in appreciation and understanding of the birthplace of the Renaissance rebirth.

But yes, at the moment, I wanted them to move. I needed that haircut. Kindly get the inferno out of my way, signore. Before I get Borgia on your ass.

I made it. The slightly cooler confines of a barbieri who’s been cutting hair here since the 1970s and his colleague with a coif like Grace Jones on an ambitious day. They greeted me with their usual dignified and affable buon giorno.

Scissors snipped, buzzer buzzed, and when the razor had scraped the edges clean I felt like a renewed man, renaissance of the scalp. ready to stand on a pedestal if I must, sling in hand, and face the future with concentration and confidence and just a hint of gel.

Back into that Tuscan sun of fame and infamy, punishing and beautiful, try to escape it but don’t forget you traveled here to see it. Down the canyons of Medici streets, past Strozzi home and Brunelleschi dome, a little slower now, a bit more strut, something lyrical in between the paces. Feeling a tad more Italian.

Florence is a pilgrimage, and I wanted to pay homage to the great ones. Architects, poets, and the family of men who led nations, and they’re just the audience for the names we know. Galileo, Ghiberti, Machiavelli, and Dante, men whose deeds echo and dance and scheme and enlighten down through the centuries.

Then over to stand in front of the tomb of perhaps the greatest artist in human history. It was just me, the cooler air, dust motes painted by stained glass light slanting down through basilica space, and the tomb of Michelangelo Buonarotti.

He looked good. I looked good. Florence looked good. Travel, now that is good. Buon viaggio a tutti.

Patagonia? Nepal? Justin Bieber?

Italy gives 18 year olds 500 euros (~$540) for “cultural activities.” Museums, monuments, or sure, Justin Bieber concerts. With youth unemployment around 40% and a political system that doesn’t seem to give a merda about them, the program seeks to connect young males (let’s be honest) to western culture, hopefully protecting them from the siren calls of extremism.

This is supposed to LESSEN extremism?

It’s an interesting tool against the dissolution threatening most of the world after generations of “more money for the few.” But I’m especially interested since I’ll be taking another couple groups of fellow travelers through Europe in a few weeks. Tour season is back, and it’s occupying my entire horizon. Okay, most of the horizon. A little part of me is aware that I’ll finish in Paris on July 1, and wants to know where I’m going after that.

Back to California for family, friendships, and teaching? Easy laundry and my own bed. Perhaps writing.

Palate cleanser. Aaaaah. Nepal.

Or… I could go back to Nepal. I loved it there, but what would I do without those schools to teach in? Post-earthquake efforts and Annapurna temptations...

Patagonia’s been on the list for awhile, but I don’t really love three consecutive winters, and I don’t think I’d have enough time to do it justice.

Or I could finally attend to the gaping hole in my travel experience. The sine qua non of passport satisfaction. The filthy crown jewel of international experience. That is, I could go to India. July, possibly arriving just before the monsoon starts, experiencing the infamous heat and skin-crawling pre-wash stick of those last broiling days, then rinsed clean by the falling water of the Indian Ocean, refreshing the colors and transforming the thirsty landscape.

Or...well...or anything else on earth, more or less. With no romantic artery to rupture, the veins of my connections are elastic, and they say it’s all an oyster now.

So? Where should I go from Paris on July 1?

The Wizard of Oz and I

(This will make much more sense after part one, here.)

Outside Il Mago's shop, in Orvieto

An eruption of sound, light, and motion, as the world below my eyes kicked into life, overlapping music box jangles and blinking lights. I’d come to see the Wizard of Oz, tucked away in a side street of hilltop Orvieto, Italy, and now that same gruff wizard was standing beside me, lights reflected in his glasses and smile.

“This carousel is in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris. The oldest in the city, from 1879.” Looking at his tiny faithful reproduction, I could imagine the generations of children that have sat and shrieked on the original Parisian horses.

“Here is a ride from Coney Island, in your country.” The little roller coaster car rose to the top and slid down the track, tiny wooden figures throwing their arms up in an unaging joyous thrill. His artisan finger worked down the row. “This is the ice skating rink from Toronto. The ferris wheel of London. The tea cups of Disney.” We moved among the world’s remembrances, sharing each one whether we’d ever seen it or not. Each tiny world, handmade by this artisan.

“When I was a boy, I knew what I wanted to be.” My assumption was beginning when he filled in the answer. “A cowboy!” He watched my grins over his bifocals for a moment before continuing. “I wanted to so much, that I did it, I ran away! I left my home and started towards Texas." Let that moment linger. "My mother caught me ten seconds down the road, gave me two big slaps, and brought me home. So instead of running away to be a Texas cowboy, I began to make things."

Orvieto is the sort of town where doing
things the old way makes sense.

Together we looked out over the delicate wooden toyscape of figures and memories. On the corner of his desk, beside the antique cash register, I noticed a familiar book. Seeing my glance, he picked it up. “Yes, Rick Steves. I am in his book. He came here and liked my work. Other companies want me in their books too, but they want money. It’s a commercial. Advertising. I am in Rick’s book because he liked what I do, so he put me in. That’s it. But I haven’t seen him in years.”

I told him Rick was my boss, that I was a guide, and that I’d learned of the toy shop in the current edition of the book. There was a hint of melancholy in the Wizard’s voice when he repeated “I haven’t seen him in years.” I assured him that even if Rick doesn’t have time, someone from the company comes around at least once a year to make sure we still believe in our recommendations, so we still appreciate his work. But there was something else.

Rick Steves and the Mago di Oz have something in common. Both are among the rare few who have created exactly the career they wanted. My eyes returned to one of the Wizard’s handpainted signs. Make your reality like your dreams, and your dreams into your reality. These two men have done that, and I can only imagine they recognized something in each other.

Nothing against minions, but compared
to the 12th century Moor's Tower,
they seem a tad chintsy

I was feeling a peaceful sense of satisfaction and happiness in the presence of this gentle man when the door opened to admit a woman and her son, from one of the bigger bus tours that feed people through Europe’s Express Lane. Her hand held the cheap plastic Pixar balloon he’d wanted for a moment, and neither greeted Il Mago as they entered his space. I watched him monitor them with the same tolerant caution he’d initially shown me, and was thinking how nerve wracking it must be to have unknown entities always lumbering among your treasures, cheap balloons bonking into handmade zeppelins, when the woman took out her phone and lifted its little factory eye.

“No photo!” The Wizard’s snarl was instantaneous and sharp. Blunt force reminder at an Italian volume. “No photo!”

How does one bring the fragile lightness of childhood into the tenacious heaviness of adulthood? Not easily, I thought, as I watched mother and son endure that awkward pause to save face before fleeing the shop. But it’s only appropriate for a wizard to be a little scary. Booming voices and flaring flames of castigation, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, with his gentle love of a gentler life.

No, the Wizard of Oz doesn’t let you take photos. But when a reminder of the texture of childhood is on offer, photos are not what you want anyway.

The Wizard did allow me one photo.
(Photo credit: some woman who did not take out her phone.)

The Wizard of Oz is Italian

The Wizard of Oz doesn’t let you take pictures. Looking around his close-shouldered toyscape of fragile wooden forms and clustered vintage artefacts, that was understandable. Besides, I already had enough photos from outside, Orvieto, back in normal Italy.

The walls of Orvieto

Out there, looking through a lens brings the whole world more into focus, reminding me to notice the textures of the quotidian, and aiding a more deliberate examination of our scrambling world. But in Il Mago’s workshop I didn’t need that precision, in his world I was better served by the flitting fancy of a childlike eye, overthrowing the diligence of inspection for the relaxation of entertainment.

Around, above, and behind me, colors clustered and shapes lurked in delicate extravagance. Art nouveau iconography lounged in evening wear behind nostalgic paraphernalia in pajamas, stained glass butterflies hovered above Betty Boop’s Route 66 diner, and a parade of metal giraffes and jugglers was on their eternal way to childhood’s circus. Hot air balloons drifted up among Spitfires and B-12 bombers held en route to battles uncountable. Cowboys and Indians with stagecoaches to match, while the flappers and mobsters surrounded stylish cars in a sudden sense of speakeasy jazz.

No photos in Oz, but Ippolito Scalza's
Pietá is too beautiful not to share.

Such was the cacophonic harmony of an unexpected piece of this world, created by that man, who watched me from under alert eyebrows like foxholes. There was something of a residual frown on his face, until he saw the smile on mine. Then he approached, real casual like. Was there a wisp of the masked diffidence one might find in an unapologetic adult who was once a teased child? I couldn’t be sure.

“Let me know if you have any questions.” He offered, smooth but stern as old wood.

“Thank you,” I answered, and for a moment he watched while I gazed. “But truth be told, I’m not even sure what questions to ask.”

Maybe not all passion is easily shared, but the Mago’s is. His artisanal fingers pointed here and there as he explained that he finds some of the pieces by careful search through trusted sources, but that he makes most of them himself. That alone was impressive, in our modern age of Made in China stamps and supply chains redolent with karmic consequences that may last even longer than the plastic we buy and throw away.

Tragedy! Crisis! Death! Don't read
such things, cara Nonna.

My brain wanted to walk down those familiar penal paths of today’s dire adulthood, but from his basics beginning, “They come from me”, he quickly transcended to a more dreamlike place, where his various mottos, handpainted on slats of wood, were the rules of the game: “Make your reality like your dreams, and your dreams into your reality.”

Maybe it sounds better in Italian, but in that place, it made perfect sense to me. I was nodding to the notion, but that didn’t seem to be the reaction he was looking for. “Put your dreams into your reality,” he encouraged me, and swept his hand at the array of silent creations. I had weeks of tour-work still to go, and putting one of his pieces of art into a backpack would be empirical blasphemy, but it didn’t seem like a sales pitch.

“Reach out and touch your dreams!” He was enthusiastic, expectant, and I felt like I was failing a test. “Reach out! Touch the dreams!” Reach out and touch? Was there a button hidden among the delicate arms and fragile beams? Feeling lame, my finger reached out, unsure whether to go left or right, so plodded straight ahead until it landed, just for a moment, right on the...

(Oops, late for work. See you tomorrow.)

Was Mussolini really that bad?

Griante, on the western shore of Lake Como

Mussolini participated in one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. Is that it? As a tour guide, I seek a deeper understanding that one-line summaries, so went looking for Mussolini and his Italy, on the shores of Lake Como, where he met his end. (Part one here)

Back then, Italy was a newly minted country with no sense of unity or identity, and a barely functional economy. Regions didn't trade, cooperate, or even speak the same language, and there was no one around who seemed able to make much progress. Picture morning delivery traffic in Venice’s canals, truck parking in the warrens of Rome, or crossing the street in the gladiatorial arena that is Naples. All shouting mouths and no ears, not a lot of progress going on. One of the things I’ve learned about the world is that some places need a strongman to get anything done. (The phenomenon of democratically-elected pseudo-dictators in Latin America is no surprise.)

Mussolini began under legal constitutional law, made Prime Minister by the king when everyone else was frozen into inaction. They feared his movement (which had taken over the Po River Valley) and thought he’d be content with a minor position, where he could be controlled and manipulated. By the time they realized their mistake, he’d outlawed or murdered most of the opposition. Then he got to work.

Looking at rampant unemployment in places like Venice, he created industrial zones and jobs. (That this industry greatly accelerated the sinking of Venice was unforeseen.) Realizing a nation that can’t talk amongst itself can’t function very well, he imposed a standardized Italian language, and nowadays most Italians can understand each other. WWI hit Italy extra hard, despite its peripheral position, because it was an underdeveloped nation; Mussolini developed it. He built roads and rail lines, creating jobs for a desperate populace and paving the way (yes, pun intended) for Italy’s current role as an important transportation corridor for the EU.

The streets of Varenna, on the east
shore of Lake Como

A chugging diesel piece of that transportation equipment came around the bend in Mezzegra, above the sparkle of Lake Como, and forced me to step back into a bland little parking lot. When it had passed, I looked across the unremarkable street and saw the unassuming wooden cross that marks where Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were executed after being caught trying to sneak into Switzerland. It’s basically a driveway. Fancy house, gorgeous area, but still, a driveway.

Italian politics are murky these days, when refugees and immigration are putting a strain on a continent already pushed, and this country already stretched thin. In these times it’s easy for the less courageous, less compassionate sides of ourselves to say “This is ‘Their’ problem. ‘They’ are different. ‘We’ need a strong leader to resist ‘Them.’” So it’s not entirely surprising that the more racist elements of the Italian political establishment have begun invoking Mussolini.

A cemetery near where Mussolini died. Townspeople
memorialized with much more care and remembrance
than the fascist dictator.

He got stuff done and guided the nation during a time of crisis. He was also a murdering thug, from boyhood when he stabbed classmates and girlfriends, to adulthood, when he ordered the murder of an untold number. It’s tempting to call for a leader to make things go away, and let their soul pay the price, but to do so would be a grave injustice to our own humanity, and a surefire way to create a monster.

Not the sort of thing that can be solved with a simple....Mi scusi.

(And now the painful part. I somehow deleted a large chunk of photos from that part of the trip, including the walk up to Mussolini's marker. It's the sort of thing that drives a photographer, a writer, a blogger, and a tour guide insane, so I'm fourfold pissed about it, and I can't show you the photos I carefully composed of the marker, but trust me, it's not much. A waist-high wooden cross tacked to a garden wall with a little info sign and one photo each of Mussolini and Clara Petacci. The graves in a nearby cemetery for townspeople were much more loving attended to. That makes sense to me.)

I'm naked, with special guest: Benito Mussolini

Lake Como's not hard on the eyes.

“Mi scusi” is Italian for “Excuse me.” You might hear it when someone interrupts, or steps on your foot, or when the maid opens the door to your hotel room without knocking, two hours before check-out, right as you step buck naked out of the shower four feet in front of her. The words are the same, though in the last case they’ll be said with an edge of housekeeping panic that transcends linguistic boundaries.

My Best of Italy tour hadn’t even started yet and I was already learning. What else might I learn, before the 17 days were over? That it is impossible to find a gondolier in Venice who’s not a self-satisfied schmuck, but we love them anyway? Yes. That you can be in one country, politically, and another, culturally? Yes. That wine tastes good if you’re ready for it to taste good? Pretty much.

Cadenabbia, on the west side of Como is
near the town where Mussolini was shot

How about fascist dictators? Everyone-worth-listening-to agrees that Hitler was a terrible, terrible human being. Probably the worst ever. And Mussolini? Again, it’s obvious that teaming up with Hitler and sending thousands of people to the concentration camps is about as evil as humans get. Add violent political repression, oppressive morality laws, and the murders of countless political opponents and you have a pretty good grasp on Mussolini’s soul.

Is that it? Black and white? I wondered this as I hiked around Lake Como, looking for the place where the Italian dictator met his end. What would I find there? I’ve been to the parking lot in Berlin that they think is over Hitler’s bunker, now a place of oil stains and dog poop, and found it appropriate. Would I find something similar here?

In Spain you used to hear the lament "It was better against Franco." Nostalgia for the simpler days, when things worked, courtesy of the leader you hated. (Versus now, when things half-work, courtesy of leaders you scorn.) I imagine Americans would have a similar nostalgia for the Cold War if Russia weren't still so willing to destabilize the world. (Invading a sovereign nation and annexing it? That's so crass and 19th century. Nowadays we do it with Trade Agreements, Vlad.)

Sorry to interrupt you from your phones, but could I
interest you in some info about the place you crossed
the planet to see? How do you feel about Mussolini?

So when some Italians reminisce about Mussolini and say "He made the trains run on time" I figured it’s just those not-entirely-thought-out rose colored glasses for a black & white age, when enemies were obvious and tangible, and you could comfortably reassure yourself that there was nothing you could do about it.

But a good tour guide should have a deeper understanding than the average traveler, so I went looking for Mussolini, and his Italy.

What I found, and what I think it means...on Friday.

Community of strangers, on one last night in Rome

I'm developing...not traditions. Not rituals. Habits. I'm developing habits, perhaps tendencies, at different points of these current trips and travels.

Before coming home, I tend to eat my last dinner at a sub-par restaurant, invariably in a city known for its delicious cuisine. Pizza by the slice in Paris. A pasta place in Rome that waits until I sit down to begin breaking my rules. (The non-Italian hustler talking people into coming in must have been in the WC when I arrived.) After weeks of great food, I have to stumble at the finish line.

I get up on time, with eagerness in limbs not fully rested, and take a thorough shower. I've saved one entirely clean shirt, like gold by that point, an aspiration for the most pristine pre-travel hygienic state possible. I will NOT subject my neighbor to Traveler Armpit, nor arrive stinking and disheveled! Then I walk to public transit, and arrive soaked in sweat, ready to ferment for 12 transatlantic hours, wearing my soggy garb and a rueful smile at the familiarity of it all.

I also book an extra night's accommodation so that I'll have time to go over end-of-tour paperwork and processes with the other guide, only to watch them depart immediately for their next gig. So I spend a day with myself, listening to the music of my headphones and the recriminations of my head at further delaying my return to the arms that are waiting for me. And I walk. I walk past the sights I will someday show, and the sights I have not yet seen. I find a museum I should know about, and a restaurant I can comfortably forget.

With fealty to no schedule, I stop and watch the chestnut vendors, islands of desperate stillness among the casual frenzy of the crowd. I stroll the intermittent museum of city walls and subway tiles, their art that says things more modern than most masters. Feeling minimal membership with the tourist mob, I find myself harboring feelings of kinship with the vendors, milking a living from the gargantuan teat of tourism. They flick their flimsy lights and hawk their imitation purses, ready to run if they see the gray uniforms of the Guardia di Finanza, having already run from the camouflaged terror and violence of their homelands.

They have a community these men, since men they nearly always are. (What happened to their women? Where were they left?) They have formed a new edition of an ancient tradition, society's subtext of foreigners who do not pertain, but belong anyway. I find these men fascinating, annoying in their machinations and beautiful in the tragedy of their existence, maybe hopeful in the pursuit of their own salvation. I can not imagine their lives. And I assume they cannot imagine mine.

When my eyes have seen enough, and feet have walked too much, I return to that last night of foreign home, on sheets I won't have to wash, and sleep my waiting sleep, filled with gratitude for the Home to which I can return.

On the right bus, in Florence

“The Tuscan Frying Pan” had been in fine frying form all week, but at 8:00 AM the air was the sort of warmthy and goldeny and pillowy that makes so many people write books about this place. And what a place. From our hilltop vantage point, Florence spread out before us in its honey mustard tones and terracotta tiles, just another morning in the city that birthed the Renaissance.

The outside of Florence's iconic Duomo, with its
elaborate angles and characteristic coloration.

The clear focal point of the skyline was Brunelleschi’s Dome, and the attached cathedral that gave it a reason. At the end of the 13th century, wealthy Florence had begun that massive cathedral, along the way deciding to cap it with the largest dome on Earth. The only problem was they had no idea how to do that. They could stand in the Roman Pantheon, breathless in wonder and clueless at how it was done. But they began anyway.

After a century or so of rain and snow falling straight onto where the high altar was supposed to go, a cranky goldsmith with no architectural training, having lost the competition to design the baptistry doors across the street, instead solved the problem of the roof. After a thousand years when fear, brutality, and dogmatic religion had choked off intelligence, creativity, and progress, mankind was emerging into the light again, and you can see it when you look at Brunelleschi’s dome, 80 million pounds of brick and mortar reaching 30 stories up into the virginal heavens, built by men equipped with ropes, oxen, and...I dunno...wine.

Looking down at the Duomo, I could trace the fashionable Via dei Calzaiuoli down to the cathedral’s secular rival, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, where the Medici family ruled, their arrogance and ability (and daughters) taking them from a local clan to a continental powerhouse. I knew that in the shade of the Palazzo was the Loggia dei Lanzi, the public square converted into a statue museum, where Michelangelo’s David originally stood. Glancing over a fraction I could judge where the Accademia sat, the current home of that seminal masterpiece.

And there was the Ponte Vecchio, with all its history and character, Medici Grand Dukes, Mussolini, and modern lovers all leaving their marks on a bridge so beautiful even the Nazi’s didn’t have the heart to blow it up.

And next to it, the Uffizi Gallery, where one of our excellent local guides had taken us through the centuries when mankind rediscovered beauty. With context, accessible erudition, and a passionate art-lover’s eye, he’d made me understand why The Birth of Venus is so famous, then did the same with a couple of Da Vinci’s precious few paintings and the only finished panel painting by Michelangelo.

I could see up past the Piazza della Repubblica to the neighborhood where we’d eaten a delicious Florentine meal, from the panzanella tomato and bread salad (made with the special Tuscan salt-less bread) to the savory pasta and luxurious meats that inspire so many raving chapters and satisfied belches. Then around the corner to the bar where we’d discovered that Bohemian Rhapsody goes well with chianti.

Just standing alone in front of the tomb of
arguably the greatest artist in the history of
the human species. Basilica di Santa Croce

My eye had barely made it to the Basilica di Santa Croce, where I’d stood alone and in awe before the tombs of genius, when a flurry of sharp elbows and shoving shoulders barged through. Other populous nations are joining the tourism circuit, and space is growing scarce. But my spirit was full of Florence’s beauty, so I ambled back to our bus, which sat beside the pushy people’s ride. That group? They were on a Paris-to-Rome tour too. But where I’d thought our pace was breakneck, they were doing it in half the time, just seven days.

“Seven days?!?” I asked my mentor, who had spoken with their guide. “How is that possible? What do they get to do?”

“Well, their experience of Florence? This is it. They drove here last night, stopped to take a photo, and now are driving to Rome.”

I could only shake my head and take one more glance at the city where we’d taken a fascinating Renaissance walk, toured one of the best museums in the world, eaten Tuscan food in a quintessentially Florentine restaurant, sampled wine from a hole-in-the-wall down a sidestreet, helped our nervous 18 year old get his Italian haircut, shopped for souvenir paintings in the shadow of the Duomo, then taken a break in a backstreet bakery with the best “Torta della nonna” (Tuscan pine nut cake) I’d ever tasted.

Much to my chagrin, I see now that I was so focused on tour guiding that I forgot to take
my own shot of the city. But this blogger did a better job than I would have anyway.

There's something about Venice

Venice was after a quiet quarter eternity crossing Croatia and Slovenia. On the cliffs of Kotor and alleys of Piran I was stunned speechless, which was fine since there was no one there to hear my awe anyway. Perhaps my first, perhaps my worst, and nearly the only conversation was with the Australian I'd courted through the lanes of Ljubljana. Her laughing eyes had gone pensive when she asked me to help her pick out a present for her boyfriend in Prague.

“You have a boyfriend?” I asked, consternation and sad irritation.

“Well, not really a boyfriend, no. Just a guy I’m kinda into. But he’s kind of a jerk. And he’s ten years younger than I am. And he’s more into my friend than me.” And I was ready to scream.

So back into the solitary wandering of off the beaten path, until I reached Venice, and a hostel somewhere in the labyrinth of Dorsoduro, where I had just the one oddly shaped dormmate, of drooping disposition and uncertain provenance, his only utterings such indiscernible mutterings that I couldn't even listen for an accent.

"What's that, my perhaps German friend? Say again, you maybe-Englishman? Did you know I'm going insane right now? That I talk to myself, and can't quite tell when the monologue is internal or external?" I had a surplus of myself built up inside, seeds of speech sprouting despite the infertility of an absent audience, so the lasting impression I had of Venice was a labyrinth where my mind had fuzzed away from full coherence.

“Venice?” I would have said. “Sure. It’s…Venice. Yeah, you should go, just to see it. Whatever.”

But this chance to be a guide took me back there. To the Austro-Hungarian causeway, where I felt my skin prickle as the lagoon opened up before us, where boats and history swirled and breathed. I was back, with a busload of humans labeled clients but defined as friends, and I would have no time for useless wandering, no luxury for blurred brains, and any word I made was likely to be heard and noted by the alert minds of my companions. And Venice itself? It was there, present, visible in a way I hadn’t been ready to see before.

Now I had no interior fog to obscure the columned balconies of ancient homes, no haze to hide the green appeal of winding waterways, and no fugue to muffle the drifting lyrics of gondolieri somewhere around the bend. I was left, bare and aware, vulnerable to the romance of Rialto and saturated memory of San Marco, where history washes around the walls that inspired Napoleon on the echo of the campanile bells.

This job, this opportunity, is a gift. To see past places in the mindful present, new things with avid eyes, and the traces of my past wanderings from the balcony of my present.

Venice? There’s something about Venice. See you there.

Riding a theme through Europe, 3 quick photos

If I tell you a story, I’ll want to sit down. If I sit down, I’ll fall asleep. If I fall asleep, I’ll miss the next story.

So instead, I’ll take the easy way out, the modern way out, with a bit of a tap on the nose on my hurried way out, and I’ll show, not tell.

But with so many to choose from, I’ll return to an old friendly theme, whose population grows in a reliable…cycle.

Tour guide training moves to a new city, a new country, a new tour tomorrow. So for now, grazie and ciao from Rome.

Ze Germans, zey are riding zheir bicycles so fast! But not zis vun, zough,
he isht sleeping.

Ah, but mon amis, to ride ze bicycle on a night so soft, so romantique,
it would be a crime tres 'orible! We would 'ave to put you in ze Bastille!

Il Duomo a Firenze, in Italia, e molto bella, of course.
Ma anche una bicicleta puo essere molto bella, if you ask me.