ON THE BORDER
Heaven in Europe is when the policemen are English, the mechanics are German, the cooks are French, the lovers are Italian and everything is run by the Swiss. Hell is when the police are German, the mechanics are French, the cooks are English, the lovers are Swiss and everything is run by the Italians. Anonymous.
On the map, the red line that marks the border between Italy and Switzerland seems absurd. It ripples east to south, then north, then east again, then swerves abruptly west-- a ribbon spooled out at random by a playful cartographer. When you drive north out of Milan on the A9 across the green flatlands of Lombardy towards the foothills of the Alps, the cartographer’s whimsy is invisible. The only indication that you are passing from Italy into Switzerland is the border crossing at Chiasso: a queue of cars and trucks, blue-uniformed Italian police on one side of ugly cement buildings, and gray-uniformed Swiss police on the other. On the Swiss side, the mountains are as steep and green as they had been in Italy, the sky the same milky blue. The fragrance of the hot, damp air of late May tastes the same. The houses, in earth tones of ochre, terracotta and raw sienna with red-tiled roofs, look the same. So do the Fiats, Volvos and Alfa-Romeos.
“There are a lot of differences,” Tim said, “and, as you can imagine, some are deep. You just have to live here for awhile to see them rise up to the surface.”
There were four of us in the Toyota, my brother at the wheel, his wife Jayne, and their little grey Schnauzer, Stella in the back. They had picked me up in Milan at Malpensa airport and we were heading to their home in Lugano, a half-hour’s drive north of the border.
The city lies on the western shore of Lago di Lugano, the smallest of three narrow lakes that straddle the Italian-Swiss border, the other two being Lago di Como to the east and Lago Maggiore to the west. Jayne explained that, because of its climate, Lugano has long been a Mecca for travelers, especially the wealthy, who not only enjoy the temperate weather like the rest of us, but also the services of more than 200 private banks. Although mountains surround the lake, temperatures are mild throughout the year and the sight of palm trees undulating in the breeze gives the illusion that the city sits on the shores of the Mediterranean rather than in the shadow of the Alps. Narrow streets and shady arcades create an intimate, Italian ambiance and despite the many languages spoken by the tourists, Italian is the official language, not only in the city, but in the rest of Ticino, the southernmost canton of Switzerland.
“Normally, the population of the city is about 50,000 people,” she said. “But, as you can see, the summertime invasions have begun.”
I felt like one of the invaders, but she was referring to clusters of students with backpacks and headphones and groups of tourists with cameras. “Those pink-skinned people you see over there wearing socks with their sandals are Germans. And of course, there’s no shortage of our fellow Americans.”
“How about that guy and his girlfriend at the bus stop wearing red bikinis?”
“Oh they’re French. Without the slightest doubt.”
A Green World
Tim and Jayne live in an area of greater Lugano called Breganzona on the side of a hill, at the end of a gravel road, in an ochre-colored house surrounded by trees. In front there's an orchard with apple, plum and peach trees; in the rear, a grove of walnuts and beeches. There’s a giant fig, and also locust, pine, and chestnut. In this world of flowers and choirs of birds, the house is a large, three-story stone structure that had once been a dormitory for field workers. During the 1970’s, a group of Ticinese ex-hippies bought it and transformed it into flats. Tim and Jayne rent the top-floor flat on the south side. Their bedroom opens onto a balcony of vines and trellises, passion flowers, terracotta amphorae, a dining table, chairs, and flowerpots overflowing with petunias and geraniums. The balcony overlooks the orchard and a meadow with tall grass. Behind it, a vineyard covers the hillside and at the top of the hill, there's a forest that stretches along the valley to the south.
On the opposite side of the house, Jayne’s dance studio and my bedroom have a view of a valley and two villages on the side of the mountains. In the middle of the house, the living room, dining room and kitchen merge together under a vaulted wooden ceiling supported by massive beams. There’s also a loft that serves as a library and additional sleeping quarters for guests. A wooden bowl of green apples sits on the dining table. On an armoire, a bouquet of lilies from Jayne’s garden bursts out of a glass vase in yellow flares. On this warm afternoon in May, Jayne sprinkles coarse salt on the foccacia she is going to put into the oven, Tim types a letter at his desk and Stella dozes in the shade on the tiled floor next to a trapezoid of amber sunlight. Idyllic? Yes. But even though the trees obscure the autostrada and the metallic stream of cars and trucks that wind through the valley below, the drone of traffic occasionally rises up to the house, a reminder in this green, fragrant world that seems timeless, that the present is very much present.
Documents
In spite of jet lag, I awoke at six in the morning on my first day in Ticino to the unfamiliar clank of cowbells drifting up the hill from a small herd that grazes in the pasture below the trees. The bells, I was told told, are required by law and were my first lesson in Switzerland's well-known passion for order and control. The Swiss are notoriously impassive, so perhaps passion is the wrong word to use. But order and control are very much in evidence. Take visas, for example.
Because the engine of tourism drives a large part of the Swiss economy, the average visitor doesn’t need a visa. But I’m here to teach a couple of summer school classes at Franklin College, and the government wants to make sure that I, temporary worker, don’t attempt to remain here as permanent worker after the summer term is over in August. So before I could enter the country legally, I was first required to state-- in writing-- that I would not so much as even ask to be permitted to stay longer than my term of employment. Only then could I obtain the necessary papers from the Swiss consulate. Or rather, Franklin College had to ask for the visa for me. Evidently, the Swiss government doesn’t trust foreign workers-to-be, and I suppose that if I were to govern one of the wealthiest countries on earth, I wouldn’t trust them either. (As it turned out, within seven days of my entering the country, I also had to officially present myself in person, along with passport and visa, not only to the national government in downtown Lugano, but also to the Breganzona city hall to inform them that I was staying with my brother and his wife. And at the end of August, Tim and Jayne will have to inform city officials of my departure.)
There is a droll saying about Switzerland, and it doesn’t take the visitor long to encounter it: “In Switzerland all that is not prohibited is obligatory.”
Crossroad
Tim is the Academic Dean of Franklin College, an American school with about two hundred and fifty students, the majority of whom come here to prepare for careers in the world of international business and finance. The school offers a wide range of classes in Management, Marketing, Finance, Macro- and Micro-Economics, etc. However, since man does not live by money alone, there are also classes in French, Biology, Computer Sciences, Drawing, Art History, and the rest of the Sciences and Humanities, taught in English to a student body that is about one-third American, with the remainder coming from all over the rest of the world. Tim told me that, during the Spring semester, there were students from fifty-two countries, including Saudi Arabia, Japan, France, Turkey, Brazil, Romania, Iraq, Argentina and Afghanistan, creating a superb environment, not only for studying International Relations, but for living them. Like Switzerland, Franklin is a crossroads of cultures, and the chatter of languages in the school cafeteria, called The Grotto, is a smaller, but more concentrated version of the multiplicity of tongues you hear in downtown Lugano.
There are other similarities. Like the city, the campus is green, lush and lovely, with blue-green mountains towering in the distance. The administration building, with its shady loggia, and the adjacent Grotto and dormitories are a peach-colored stucco, with shutters and tile roofs, in appearance more Mediterranean than Alpine. The school’s parking lot also resembles the parking lots downtown, especially those of the banks; it’s full of BMW’s, Porsches, and Mercedes.
“How wealthy do one’s parents have to be to afford tuition at Franklin?” I wondered.
“Some scholarships are available,” Tim laughed, “but having lots of money certainly doesn't hurt.”
Jayne mentioned an incident that occurred one afternoon when she and Tim happened to be passing through the Quadrilatero district of Milan where Armani, Gucci, Valentino and other designers have their headquarters and main showrooms. “We were window shopping and were peeking in the windows of Cartier—not that we could afford to go in there-- when we unexpectedly bumped into a student and his girlfriend, both from Franklin. After a moment of chit-chat, we continued walking down the street. The students went into Cartier’s.”
Heaven Minus Donuts
In an attempt to offer a wide range of classes in subjects other than Business and Finance for the summer term, Doug Ansel, Franklin’s Director of External Affairs, came up with the idea of offering a painting course in watercolor entitled, Hermann Hesse’s Ticino, named after the great German novelist, who was not only a citizen of Lugano, but also a painter. Unfortunately, the class did not attract enough students, so it was cancelled. But the other class I had been asked to teach, Photography: On Location in Europe, had attracted five students, the minimum. The brochure publicizing Franklin’s classes had explained that, since the college did not have a darkroom, the students would be shooting color film, and that they were expected to pay for developing and printing their photographs at a commercial developer. Given that forewarning, I was surprised when, on entering the classroom, before I was even able to lay my camera and books on the table and introduce myself, a young woman, obviously upset, confronted me.
“Professor Keating, could you tell us how much it costs to develop film in Switzerland? I mean like I’ve been here in Lugano only two days and things are like so expensive and already I’ve spent tons of money and I’m afraid that I’m not going to be able to stay here much longer and I think that maybe I’ll have to drop the class unless there’s some cheap way to develop my film or something.”
As it later became apparent, money was merely the tip of an iceberg of problems for Ellyn, who came from Los Angeles. For the moment, I calmed her down, explaining that yes, Switzerland was costly, but there were several possibilities for developing film and that, if she'd take a seat and be patient, I'd explain.
Before getting into the matter of cameras and film developing however, I wanted the students to introduce themselves and to tell us their impressions of Switzerland, Lugano and Franklin.
Ashley was 18 years old and had just graduated from high school in Connecticut. For her, Franklin College was love at first sight: “I mean, the Grotto is truly awesome. Like, you can drink beer with your meals. Or you can even just sit there and drink beer anytime you feel like it.”
Jeremy, also an 18-year-old recent high school graduate, agreed with the awesomeness of the Grotto, but complained that there was “a major problem in Lugano. There aren’t any Dunkin’ Donuts here. I’ve only been here three days and already I can’t wait to get back to Dallas.”
As for Tiffany, also 18, Lugano was cool, but “hey, nothing’s as cool as New York.”
The remaining student, a lovely young woman, probably in her mid-twenties, but who seemed older, blushed and explained, with an accent I couldn’t place, that she had already attended Franklin for one semester, and that she liked it very much. Her name was Helena and she had come from Estonia. When I asked if anyone knew where Estonia was, there was blank-faced silence.
So this was my class: five students, four of whom were from the U.S. of A. on their first visits to Europe and one from a country that, from the young Americans’ experience, might just as well have been on another planet. Their knowledge of 35 mm. SLR cameras ranged from Ellyn, who said that she had read the manual three times and still couldn’t figure out how to make her camera work, to Helena, who showed me a handful of very competent snapshots. Jeremy had taken a photography class in high school and had some experience in the darkroom, but had never worked in color. Tiffany had used her camera but “mostly for taking pictures of friends.” As for Ashley, she had taken “some photographs, but never with this camera, so could you please show me how to make it work?”
For the next two hours, we talked about lenses and film speeds and other basics. By the end of the class, they all had gotten a basic grasp of the mechanics of a camera, and we had all come to know each other a little. I gave them their assignments for the course: no less than five photographs of each of the following subjects: People, Interiors, Landscape (both urban and natural) and Still Life on the subject of Food. Also, they had to turn in a list of the goals they wished to accomplish in the course. And finally, they had to keep a journal with at least three entries per week on the subject of Photography as an Art and a Craft.
Although the other Americans rolled their eyes when Ellyn asked yet another question about expenses, Helena listened to her as attentively as I did. As they filed out of the room I thought, too bad there are not more students from the rest of the world taking the course, but at least this group seems bright and eager. The real question is, are they here in Europe to study or to party?
His Satanic Majesty
Our photography class took its first field trip of the summer session with students from Clarice Zdanski’s art history class. Clarice drove the school’s van north on the autostrada to the Gotthard Pass in the German-speaking part of Switzerland while some of her male students pressed me for information about her. “Is she really that tough?” Felipe, a Brazilian student wanted to know.
“I don’t know much about her except that she’s a flautist and a very good painter, as well as an art historian,” I said. “Rumor has it that she also competes in triathlons-- swimming, running, cycling. So check out the package and add it up: she’s funny, smart, athletic and good-looking. My guess is, yeah, she probably is just as tough as she seems.”
Our destination, the Gotthard Pass, rises nearly 7,000 feet above the level of the distant Mediterranean, and is the watershed for both the Rhine and the Rhône rivers. There were no trees at this elevation and snow still covered parts of the mountainsides. I was glad that the wind wasn't blowing, because even in the sun, it was chilly and bleak. There was a wide meadow at the summit, a parking lot with food and souvenir stands, a few houses, a small church and a museum dedicated to the story of the construction of the pass, a legendary event in Swiss history.
The story goes like this: Constructing a bridge over one of the most treacherous chasms of the Gotthard had been an insurmountable problem for the early Swiss. (Actually, they weren't even really Swiss, in the modern sense of the word, because the unity of northern and southern parts of the country didn't occur until the 18th century, and would not have happened without constructing this particular bridge which allowed Ticino and the northern German- and French-speaking cantons to be linked by road and rail.) So how did they manage to build it?
Any Swiss schoolchild knows the answer: they made a deal with the Devil. His Malignity promised to insure construction of the bridge on the condition that he would possess the soul of the first living creature to cross over it. The Swiss, always shrewd, accepted. And when the bridge had been built, instead of sending a human across it, the Swiss got the better of the Devil by sending a goat instead. The enraged demon hurled a gigantic boulder at them. You can still see it at the bottom of the gorge. It's about the size of a house and, according to the museum’s slide show, has a Swiss flag proudly planted on top of it.
Among other things, the story reveals how many Swiss see themselves, especially in relation to money: If one is clever, it’s possible make a deal with the Devil and not have to pay the bill. Knowing this story makes it easier to understand how offended and bewildered the Swiss became after the rest of the world insisted that they had a responsibility to repay money they had received in deals with Hitler’s Third Reich.
Buñuel in the Mountains
The museum features an educational and well-presented display of the history of Switzerland from the point of view of the importance of the Gotthard Pass. Dioramas, maps, color photographs and mannequins in period costumes give a professional and scholarly view of Switzerland's heroic past.
Switzerland present is another story, however, and as Clarice and I left the museum, it announced itself in the form of a series of deafening explosions, which echoed through the mountains, followed by the sound of rifle and machine-gun fire. A revolution? In Switzerland? No, only the Swiss Army on maneuvers. Nevertheless we both knew the meaning of the words “friendly fire,” so the walk across the parking lot was a little unnerving. We found a few of our students near a food stand that sold beer and bratwurst. Next to the stand were several benches and tables and some men setting up floodlights and tripods for a photo shoot. Tiffany pointed at a white van with a Milan license plate. “There's a model in there,” she said. “She's changing her clothes.” Indeed, I saw a lovely pair of legs waving out the side door of the van as the model wriggled into whatever she was wriggling into.
In a few moments she emerged, thin and waif-like. She tottered across the stones and dirt of the parking lot on four-inch stiletto heels towards one of the picnic tables, dressed in a thin, almost transparent, leaf-colored skirt, sunglasses and a black jacket to keep her from freezing. A hairdresser and makeup artist fluttered and fussed over her. She turned away from us and one of the crew rearranged her bosom while the photographer, skinny and slope-shouldered with a cigarette dangling from his lips, Bogart style, tinkered with his camera as a small crowd of curious tourists gawked. When the model saw me with my camera, she flashed a dazzling smile and waved. I waved back and tried to set up a composition with her and the technicians and a mysterious-looking guy seated at table with his back to me dressed in a black jacket and hood, looking like Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Meanwhile, Felipe and another guy from Clarice's class were hanging out next to me, hoping, they said, that when the model took off her jacket, she wouldn't be wearing anything underneath.
Then, in the thunder of the cannon fire, with the smell of gunpowder from the mortars and machine-guns floating across the meadow to mingle with the woody fragrance of the bratwurst sizzling on the grill, and the loudspeaker from the food stand blaring a neo-disco polka with the chorus, "It's ree-lee good in Holl-ee-wood," the model took off her jacket, adjusted her sunglasses and began a series of pouts for the camera. She turned out to be wearing a black strapless blouse and the young guys' expectant grins evaporated. So I photographed the photographer photographing her, then turned away towards the restaurant next to the museum thinking that we were all characters in a film by Luis Buñuel.
Later, as we drove back to Lugano, I asked Felipe if he had enjoyed the museum. “It was cool, professor” he said, “but sometimes I think it’s hard for museums to compete with reality.”
Bob, Chuck and Federico in Montreux
On a gray and cloudy Friday in late June, Tim, Jayne, Stella and I drove up to Montreux in the French-speaking part of Switzerland to see Bob Dylan open the annual summer Jazz Festival. We arrived at the city in late afternoon in a pounding rainstorm and after checking into the hotel, phoned for a taxi to take us downtown. The Miles Davis auditorium is part of the enormous Stravinsky music complex on the lakefront, but it’s a relatively small venue with seating for only a couple of thousand people. We had to stand in a queue for an hour or so, then spend the whole concert in the mosh pit, but we were no more than fifteen feet from Dylan. Dressed in a silver gray suit with a cowboy-style string bow tie and white boots, he looked fit and healthy, and you would not have known that he had been near death in a hospital a year previously within a breath or two of, as he said, "meeting Elvis." His band played a range of songs from Mr. Tambourine Man to Cold Irons Bound with relentless intensity. He traded licks with Larry Campbell, the lead guitarist, as he shuffled and boogied around the stage, flirting with some woman at the rail in front of us. I thought of Federico Fellini and imagined him enjoying Dylan sing,
They’re selling postcards of the hanging,
They’re painting the passports brown,
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors,
The circus is in town
while capering around the stage in an imitation of Chuck Berry, at one point even doing a credible Duck Walk. Meanwhile, in the audience two people fainted from the heat and had to be rescued by the medical staff, I nearly got into a fight with a German Peter Fonda look-alike who tried to elbow his and his girlfriend's way closer to the stage, and at the end, we all staggered out, Dylan and the band included, drenched in sweat. Definitely a memorable concert. Made us want to go home and play some Dylan tunes.
Loneliness
Monday morning, early July. Ellyn, on the edge of tears, visited me in my office before class. Many of the students had traveled to Venice over the weekend and, according to her, had enjoyed themselves. But for her, the trip had been a disaster. Rain had fallen during most of the weekend and she had had a fight with her room mate. She was certain that her photographs were not going to turn out well, and, as usual, things had cost too much. But the real problem, she said, was that she was lonely and homesick.
“I can’t make any friends here at Franklin because I don’t smoke and drink and party like everybody else. I’m so lonely I just cry myself to sleep at night and I miss my brother and sisters and my cat so much that I want to go home on the next plane.”
We talked for awhile and I mentioned that she spoke a lot about herself and her problems. Perhaps, I suggested, talking about yourself too much tends to push other people away. I also pointed out that her camera was a versatile instrument that could be used to look at her problems from a different point of view. I told her a poem by Mary Oliver, which ends with the words:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over, announcing your place
in the family of things.
She listened thoughtfully to the poem and allowed that perhaps it might be a good idea to be more attentive to the world around her and did I really think that she could be more curious about things if she were required to photograph them?
“We’ll see. Just give it a try,” I urged, but I didn’t have a lot of confidence that it would work.
The Past in the Present
An Alpine rainstorm visited us during the night bringing thunder, lightning and a fierce wind that hissed through the house whipping the curtains and banging the shutters. In the morning, Clarice and I met at Franklin to gather our students for a field trip across the border to Brescia to visit a new museum devoted to art from Imperial Rome, early Christianity and the Renaissance. The remnants of last night’s wind scoured the skies so we could see the Alps as we drove across the immense green valley that extends eastward across northern Italy almost all the way to Trieste. The wind helped to keep the temperature down, which made the two-hour drive on a hot, July morning more pleasant than it might have been.
This area is the most productive in Italy, both industrially and agriculturally and reminded me of northern Illinois: a landscape of fields, small towns, and drab architecture. Although the suburbs of Brescia looked dull and unimaginative, the old center of town was pretty, in spite of the Mussolini-style architecture of the Piazza Vittoriale. The city had been an important trading center since the days of the Roman Republic, and today it honors its past by restoring Roman ruins and by installing in the museum, the bronze sculptures and weapons, mosaic walls and floors, columns and portrait busts that a team of archaeologists digs out of the ground. Although there were some fairly interesting examples of Christian art, the highlight of the museum was a life-sized bronze of the winged Minerva. I had never before seen a bronze of such size and quality, and neither had Clarice.
But the biggest surprise of all caught us unexpectedly as we strolled through the streets in search of a restaurant. As we emerged from the shadow of a narrow passageway, there suddenly appeared the partially restored façade of the ancient Roman Tempio Capitolino. Columns and pediment towered over the street, and off to one side, the remains of the old Forum baked in the sunlight just as they have done for the past two thousand years. What a pleasant-- and imposing-- surprise to encounter such a magnificent ruin while ambling down a modern street full of cars, motorbikes and stylish men and women on their way to lunch, nearly all of them talking on cell phones.
Most of this spectacle—from museum to ancient ruin to modern restaurant-- seemed to be lost on the students. I thought perhaps this was only my impression, but Clarice agreed. They are polite and intelligent and often funny, but also vacantly uncurious about the world around them and therefore bored a lot of the time. Perhaps the actual world doesn’t measure up to the one they’re used to seeing on television.
In spite of this, we ate well at an inexpensive osteria before finding our way back to the van. The wind had died down, so the return trip was hot, but at least we had had enough sense to leave early enough to avoid the traffic jams that invariably occur around Milan during rush hour.
Emperor Jesus
During the drive back to Switzerland, I thought about the early Christian art we had just seen and about Roman Imperial power and its transition into Christian Imperial power. In 313 C.E., after three hundred years of intermittent and largely ineffectual persecutions, Christianity became legal in the Empire. By the end of the century it had become its official religion. The Christians then began their own persecutions-- of pagans, unbelievers, Jews and, of course, each other. I didn’t know if it was ironic or not that they found it convenient to portray Jesus in precisely the same way that the pagan Romans had pictured the emperors, namely, wearing a golden crown and the royal purple, holding orb and scepter and seated on the imperial throne. When the Romans crucified Jesus, they were said to have nailed a derisive abbreviation on the cross above his head: INRI—Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. The joke turned out to be on them. Little did they know that within four centuries the Christians would manage to transform the humble carpenter from Galilee into nothing less than the Emperor of the whole Universe. But these thoughts of the past faded as we pulled off the autostrada into Lugano. The van rolled through the gates of Franklin College just after six o’clock, leaving plenty of time, as Ashley said, “for us to get ready to go downtown to the discos tonight.”
Art and Money
From the point of view of an American artist, one of the most curious contrasts between Switzerland and the USA is the role that the banks play in Switzerland’s cultural life. A few days ago, I took my students to an exhibition entitled, Pages of Italian Photography, 1900-1998, at the Galleria Gottardo in downtown Lugano. There were several surprises, the first of which was that, with the exception of Tina Modotti and Ugo Mulas, I did not recognize the works of any of the one hundred photographers on display. Even more humbling, the quality of the images was stunning.
That the exhibition was sponsored by the Banca del Gottardo, and the gallery located in the same building as the bank itself, was not unusual in American terms. That such support of the arts is mandated by Swiss law was another story. Tim couldn’t give me an exact figure, but he said that a percentage of a bank’s profits had to be spent on the support of Art and Culture. “Some banks have large collections of paintings and sculptures (usually by Swiss artists;) some renovate historic buildings, (usually their own, of course), while others sponsor art exhibitions or music festivals.”
Whether the banks resent this arrangement or not, I can’t say, but my guess is, why would they? Banks being banks, they need all the good publicity they can get.
Crowd Control
The banks certainly get a hefty dose of publicity during the month of July when they sponsor the annual Lugano Jazz Festival.
Imagine a canopied stage crowded with amplifiers, lights, microphones and television cameras stretching more than a hundred feet from one side of the Piazza della Riforma to the other, and all around it, buildings illuminated by white, blue and pink lights. Red and pink geraniums garland nearly every balcony, and many residents of the buildings sit on the balconies or in their open windows in the phosphorescent glow of the lights to hear the music and to enjoy the soothing breeze off the lake. The piazza and the restaurants and cafes that line it are packed with jazz fans. The few hundred chairs that are set up in front of the stage are filled and the majority of the crowd has to stand, but no one seems to mind. Refreshment stands, emblazoned with the logo of the biggest bank in Switzerland, sell beer, wine and sodas. It is hot on the final night of the festival, and drinks sell briskly, but the crowd is respectful and attentive to the music and-- this being Switzerland--orderly.
Tim and I missed the first two sets, arriving well after ten o’clock. As we stood in the crowd at the far end of the piazza, deciding on how to get closer to the stage, we met Vanessa Pirandello, the Admissions Counselor at Franklin College. We had seen her at the festival the night before, when we had enjoyed a long, introspective set by the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim from a vantage point close to the stage on the south side of the piazza where the crowd had thinned out. It seemed like a good idea to check out the same area tonight, so the three of us made our way gradually through the crush and eventually found a spot near a barricade that separated the standing part of the crowd from those who were seated.
Work crews moved drum sets, pianos and other instruments around the stage while the television cameramen checked their equipment. A half hour later, Ray Brown and his sidemen, Geoff Keezer and Gregory Hutchinson ambled onstage, took their places in the spotlights and treated us to forty-five minutes of pure jazz bliss. I’ve always loved Ray Brown, not only for his thoughtful, lyrical playing, but for the quality of the musicians he attracts to play with him. Tonight was no exception. Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get any better, Dee Dee Bridgewater joined the group and made the night even more memorable. At the end of the set the crowd erupted in prolonged applause and cheers.
Lugano, South America
The festival could have ended then, and many of us, basking in the glow of the Brown-Bridgewater aura would have been content, but the final act was still to come. At two a.m., four percussionists--drums and congas, bongos and timbales-- began the beat. Then four trumpeters filed onstage to join in. After a few minutes of turning up the temperature, four saxophonists entered from the wings, and then it was the turn of four trombone players to add to the sizzle. Most of the people in the seated section were on their feet dancing and clapping with the rest of us when the Venezuelan singer Oscar D’León bounded onstage and took the microphone. From then on the sixteen-piece orchestra turned the piazza in Lugano into a plaza in Caracas. Towards the end of the show, when he sang his mega-hit, Me Voy Pa’ Cali, D’León invited the women of the audience to come up to dance at the front of the stage, and that’s how the festival finally ended, at 3:30 a.m., with the crowd dancing, the sound of the horns and drums blasting the last meringue into the night and Oscar D’León smiling broadly and contentedly as he opened his arms to accept the roar of applause for the state of grace he had bestowed upon us.
As Tim and I walked Vanessa home through the quiet streets, a squad car passed and at that moment I realized that it was only the second time that night we had seen the police. The lack of police presence was something I had noticed many times during the past few weeks of living in Switzerland. In the United States, a free concert that attracted several thousand people, especially one in which alcohol was plentiful, would have been watched by dozens of police. But here, they were almost non-existent. In some ways the Swiss sense of order can be onerous. On the other hand, Vanessa had been willing—and unafraid—to walk home all by herself.
A Citizen of the World
Where are you from? is a common question among travelers. Usually the answers are straightforward: I’m from Munich, or I’m from Macondo. Vanessa had a different answer; or rather, no answer at all. I had met her shortly after my arrival in Switzerland at a little restaurant in Ponte Tresa, just across the border in Italy, where every Friday night after the week’s work was finished, Tim and Jayne would convene an informal gathering of Franklin faculty and staff for pizza. She was in her late twenties and very pretty. She mentioned that she had just returned to Lugano from visiting her parents in Nice, so I assumed that she was French. However, we were chatting in Spanish, which she spoke faultlessly, and then we switched to English, which she spoke like a native. Like the rest of us, she ordered her dinner in Italian. I later discovered that she was also fluent in German. And in Mandarin. And, needless to say, in French.
As someone who speaks Spanish fairly well and struggles with French and Italian, whose German is less than primitive and Mandarin non-existent, I was greatly impressed by Vanessa’s fluency in six different languages. So perhaps I should not have been surprised at her reaction when I asked her where she was from. She thought for a long while and then replied, “I don’t think there’s an answer to that question.”
At the time, I thought that perhaps she was merely being coy, but during the following weeks as we became friends, I realized that in her case, my question, which implied nationality and location, was absurd. If your grandfather is Chinese and your mother is German; if your father is Italian and if the two languages you speak as a child at home are German and Italian and if, because of your father’s work as an airlines official, you grow up in a dozen different countries all over the world in which the schools you attend all offer their classes in French; if you later live in England to learn English, in China to learn Chinese, and in Spain to learn Spanish, what would be your answer to the traveler’s question?
God Bless the Child
Gray skies on a Monday morning, with lightning and the distant growl of thunder. By the time Tim and I had gotten to our offices at Franklin, the rain had begun to fall. Sitting next to the open window listening to the whisper of the rain as I prepare my classes has been one of the unexpected pleasures of teaching here.
As I expected, Ellyn appeared and also, as I feared, the news wasn’t good. Her weekend trip to Vienna had been nearly as awful as last weekend’s to Venice. She hadn’t gotten along with her travelling companion, Austria was nearly as costly as Switzerland, and she was now convinced more than ever that she should pack her clothes and head back to California. Fearing the worst, I asked how her photographs had turned out. “Actually, a lot better than I expected,” she said.
They were a lot better than I had expected as well, and with a great sense of relief, I fanned the prints out on the desk and began to point out their strengths to her. She had a good eye for color and had evidently gotten comfortable with her camera because the exposures were fine. Like the rest of the students, however, she had problems with composition.
One of the biggest difficulties of a photography class is: how do you teach the student to “see photographically,” that is, to see things not in isolation, but in relation to everything else? Jeremy, for example, had taken a photograph of a little boy feeding popcorn to some ducks on the lake. But he had been so intent on the boy that he didn’t notice a tree in the background, and it was only when the print came back from the lab that he saw that the tree he hadn’t noticed now looked like it was growing out of the little boy’s head.
In spite of their compositional problems however, the students were doing very well. They were beginning to become more aware of what was happening around them, Helena in particular. If Ellyn was a problem, Helena was joy. The snapshots she showed me on the first day were not flukes: she has a terrific eye. What I enjoy most about her is that she listens. The other students act like they’re listening, but it’s only partial; there’s always resistance. They’re smart shoppers and they want to be convinced of the merits of the product or they’re not going to buy it. But Helena is hungry; she listens to what I suggest. Not only that, she actually does it. Consequently, her photos are strong: good color, sharp focus when she wants it, good composition, inquisitive mind, the works. At this rate, it won’t be long before she’ll have absorbed everything and I’ll have little else to tell her. Meanwhile, she’s an excellent role model for the rest of the class, especially for Ellyn.
As for my problem child and her mountain of attention-getting woes, she told me she’s going to take one last shot at her summer abroad. “This coming weekend I’m going to Interlaken by myself. I’m going to go white water rafting and maybe even parasailing. Like I’m totally afraid of heights, but I’m going to do it anyway. If I don’t have a good time, then I’m going home.”
Dog Days
The hot summer days have settled into a pleasant routine. The sun rises over the vineyard on the hill as Jayne drives Tim and me to Franklin shortly after eight in the morning. The ten-minute trip offers an amusing cross section of a part of Ticino. Our favorite spot is Pig Street. It’s not actually called that; Tim and Jayne named so because of a small farm located on the south side of the road where a dozen pigs in their muddy sty are having breakfast as we drive past. This wouldn’t seem unusual if we were out in the country, but there’s a large apartment building right across the street and homes all over the immediate vicinity, including a gas station, a grocery store and an electric power plant. In the United States, where strip malls rule, this urban-rural arrangement has largely been zoned out of existence. But I find that apartment houses side-by-side with open fields and farmers cutting hay or feeding pigs is one of the things that makes Ticino so livable.
Then there’s the dog that supposedly stands up on its front legs when it pees. It’s a little, white, male mutt on its morning stroll with its owner, a middle-aged woman. Although we see the animal nearly every morning, I haven’t yet witnessed him perform what Tim and Jayne assure me is the canine equivalent of a hand-stand while he answers nature’s call. But I have no reason to doubt them, so I take on faith their word about this extraordinary feat.
After we arrive at the campus, I prepare the day’s class in my office while Tim attends to the myriad problems of being the Academic Dean. At the top of his list this week is finding a new French and German teacher. He also has to meet with a guest speaker, who will be giving a lecture later in the afternoon on the economic situation in Asia as part of Franklin College’s summer lecture program on international economic affairs. If Tim is not tied up with meetings or appointments, we have lunch together in the Grotto—usually a salad, some pasta and a glass of Pinot Grigio.
Our time together here at Franklin is a luxury for both of us. It also fulfills a dream that we have shared for many years—to work together, although neither imagined that he would be my boss. After lunch, he returns to his office, and I walk downtown to draw in my sketchbook or work on a series of photographs of reflections in store windows. Around five o’clock I catch a bus near the Lake. It takes me up the long, steep hill to Breganzona, where home is only a ten-minute walk from the bus stop.
The house bakes in the afternoon heat, but there’s shade on the terrace, and when Tim comes home, that’s where we sit with glasses of prosecco, talking about the events of the day. Jayne has spent the morning weeding the vegetable garden and picking a basket of lettuce, radishes, onions and cucumbers for tonight’s salad. In the afternoon, she took Stella to the veterinarian, met with the secretary of the International Organization of Women and then went shopping for a salmon for dinner. Our guests tonight are Patrick, (Tim’s and my brother,) and his friend, Kathy, who have been travelling in Italy. It’s twilight when we finally pull our chairs up to the table on the terrace, and hours later, after we have listened to and laughed at Pat and Kathy’s travel adventures, a waning moon rises over the vineyard. None of us want to go to bed. Finally we surrender to the inevitable, and as I fall asleep I find myself wondering whether it would be possible to train Stella to stand up on her front legs.
The Renaissance in Present Tense
Clarice and I drive a van full of our students across the border to visit Castiglione Olana, a little village in the forests of northern Italy. The place calls itself the Tuscany of Lombardy because nearly five hundred years ago at the beginning of the Renaissance, a local boy who became a bishop and then a cardinal decided to build a palace in his hometown that would rival those of Florence, Sienna and other Tuscan cities. He didn't quite succeed, but he didn’t miss by much. Ambition, then and now, has its virtues: for the past several years, the village has turned his palace into a museum and has been restoring the building and grounds, the frescoes and furniture, (including the cardinal's four-poster bed). They've also restored the church, a beautiful example of Gothic-Lombard architecture, which sits on the other side of the village at the top of a hill so that you have to approach it from below along a cobblestone, tree-shaded street, then through a crumbling brick archway into the church grounds. Both the church and the adjoining baptistery have some splendid frescoes by Masolino, who is famous for his paintings in the Brancacci chapel in Florence. Getting him to come up into the mountains of Lombardy to paint the church must have been quite a coup for the cardinal. Actually, the whole enterprise was unusual, because it's hard to see how the village would have been any less off the beaten path during the Renaissance than it is today.
How much all of this impresses the students is difficult to say. As far as Clarice and I are concerned, their moods seem to alternate between curiosity and boredom without much in between. But then they can surprise you with an insightful comment that shows they really were paying attention. (Or equally, they blurt out some inanity that makes you wonder why they are wasting their--and our--time.) In spite of this, both of us have grown fond of them, and I suppose that, as exasperating as they can be, it’s as unwise to underestimate the curiosity of a student as it was unwise to underestimate the vanity of a Renaissance cardinal.
One Who Talks, One Who is Quiet
At ten a.m. the windows were wide open as the day began to simmer in the heat. Ellyn burst into the office in a rush of enthusiasm. “Professor Keating, you won’t believe it, but I had the most incredible weekend of my entire life. I did everything I said I was going to do and it was totally awesome, especially parasailing. My parents are going to be so proud of me. Wait till you see my photographs.”
With great delight she showed me her photos the following day after she had picked them up at the lab. The subjects were routine-- a swan in the water, a village church with mountains in the background, a withered rose with a bug on it—but the compositions had improved and they revealed a new interest in her surroundings that I had hoped for. One photograph in particular stood out. It showed a pair of feet in hiking boots and above them the horizon from several hundred feet above the ground. It was this photo that she was the most proud of: she had taken it of herself while she was parasailing.
Jeremy, Ashley and Tiffany were all doing well in the class, with neither the difficulties of Ellyn nor the imagination of Helena. Their photos showed a fairly wide range of interests photographed competently. The spark of something unusual appeared occasionally in their work, and they all were accomplishing the goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the course. Despite my earlier misgivings, they appeared to have been able to combine study and discotheques after all.
I found Helena to be very intriguing. She had little interest in partying with the others and seemed unusually mature for her age. Her photographs continued to improve, but that had more to do with her own inner discipline than with what I was able to tell her. She was enigmatically reserved and quiet, but her photographs spoke eloquently, especially ones that she took of the Lake during the long, Swiss twilights.
Dante’s Devils
The summer session flies past, half over now, moving much faster than I had expected. My class continues to take field trips with Clarice’s, which is enjoyable, not only because she knows a lot, and I learn from her, but also because, having an Italian license, she drives while I, the navigator, sit next to her with the maps. Being the chauffeur is no small task: the van seats fifteen people, so it's about the size of a delivery truck. It's also hard to see out the back window, so even in the best of situations, it's a difficult vehicle to park.
On one of our field trips across the border, for example, we tried parking in an underground garage and didn't discover until after we had purchased the ticket and descended the ramp that the van's roof was too high to pass under the ceiling of the garage. There was no sign to warn us of the height limit, a sign that would have been commonplace in the U.S. Luckily we didn't get wedged in, but six cars behind us had to back up so that Clarice could reverse ourselves up the ramp far enough to turn the van around and get out of there. It took her five minutes of maneuvering back and forth to manage this, but she did it without once losing her cool.
Equally surprising, not one driver in any of the other cars honked his horn. As we crept out of the tunnel into the sunlight, we all gazed at each other in amazement, because in Italy, the horn is as basic to driving a car as a steering wheel or a gas pedal.
Nevertheless, the incident illustrated a continual problem for drivers in Italy: traffic signs are often non-existent, or ambiguous even if they do exist. There may or may not be signs to warn you of low clearances, or there may be signs that tell you how to get to your destination from one direction. but not from another. There may even be signs that are mutually contradictory as, for example, two that we saw at an intersection in Milan: both said ONE WAY, and both had arrows pointing at each other: > <.
Most Italians respond to incongruities like these with a shrug. Clarice has lived in Milan for nearly twenty years, so I suppose she’s gotten used to it as well, but for foreigners like me, driving in Italy can seem like being condemned to one of the lower circles of Dante’s Inferno.
Normal Chaos
We had intended to take the train for a field trip to Milan, but the rumor of a strike by engineers prompted us to use the van instead. Transportation strikes seem to occur in Italy all of the time, but they actually happen most often in the summer when strikes are most likely to inconvenience the greatest number of people. From the workers’ point of view, this is understandable enough: it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. As far as I can tell, this logic is entirely reasonable to the average Italian, who is willing to accept a level of disorder that a Swiss finds maddeningly incomprehensible. North of the border, trains run on time; in Italy they may run on time or not at all. Italians seem to accept such inconveniences with the same good-natured indifference they accept non-existent or confusing traffic signs: it’s just a normal part of the normal chaos of normal life. But strikes drive everybody else crazy, especially passengers, and since neither Clarice nor I wanted to find ourselves stranded in Milan with a bunch of irate students, we found ourselves once again in the van, headed south to the border. Rather than attempt the impossible, that is, to find a parking place in downtown Milan, we parked the van instead at a subway station on the outskirts of the city and caught a subway train that took us to the piazza directly in front of the Duomo.
Palaces of Power
Even if you’ve seen Gothic cathedrals before, the Duomo can come as a shock, so it was gratifying to see the students in various stages of slack-jawed wonder. For once it seemed the word “awesome” really meant something. It’s not just that the massive marble structure rises up out of the earth like a white mountain, but that the patterns of light and shadow, sculpted by intricate surface details, are so delicately crafted that the building looks like a gigantic hallucination. The visionary effect becomes even more pronounced after you take the elevator up to the roof. There you can see up close in all their lavish detail, the gargoyles and saints you viewed at a distance from below.
Why, one wonders, did the builders spend so much time and effort crafting intricate sculptures, the details of which would be lost to viewers at street level? Other than the fun of creating hallucinogenic patterns of light and shadow, the answer, I think, has to do with love, especially love of stone and the love of the crafts of building and stone carving. Alan Watts used to reject the notion that Americans were materialists because, he said, materialism is the love of materials and when is the last time you’ve seen anything made in plastic, assembly-line America that looked as if it had been made by someone who loved materials? With the Duomo such a question never arises; the builders and sculptors who created it were materialists in the best sense of the word.
As interesting as these speculations may have been, the roof of the Duomo was clearly not the place to ponder them. The temperature was in the 90’s and the sun reflecting off the white marble turned the roof into an oven. We descended, splashed water on ourselves from the fountain on the shady side of the cathedral and then walked across the blazing piazza to catch a streetcar to our next destination. I don’t remember the name of the church, and I don’t think anyone else, other than Clarice, remembered either. It’s not that the church was undistinguished. It was just that we were all hot, tired and thirsty. So after a brief visit, we retired to a bar around the corner and waited for a bus to take us to the main purpose of our visit to Milan, the Sforza castle.
Although the Castello Sforzesco stays open as a museum and also as a venue for musical and theatrical events, the city of Milan had recently restored some of the walls and battlements and was offering guided tours. The tours did not begin until 5:30, so while waiting, we visited the museum and walked around the grounds. If the Duomo was massive, the castle was no less so, albeit for purposes other than spiritual. During the late Middle Ages, after decades of bloody conflict with other warlords, the Sforza family emerged as the leading power in this part of northern Italy and southern Switzerland, ruling not only Milan and a large part of Lombardy, but also Ticino. They built this forbidding structure as a fortress and refuge against their enemies, of which there were many, and also, needless to say, as a monument to their own ambition and pride. In that respect, Ludovico Sforza, who lured Leonardo da Vinci from Florence to design weapons and fortifications for him, was a typical Renaissance tyrant, except that, according to one commentator, he probably poisoned only one of his relatives. The ruthlessness of both his predecessors and his descendants still seeps out of the russet stone walls of the castle more than half a millennia after his death.
From the battlements you can see the Duomo in the distance, glowing in the late afternoon sunlight, a monument to another kind of power. It seemed to me that the people who are running Milan and the rest of Italy today are probably not much different than the ones who ran the show five hundred years ago. Another thought came to mind, from the film The Third Man. Orson Wells, as Harry Lime, the villain, remarks sarcastically that, yes the Medici, the Sforza, the Gonzaga and the rest of the Renaissance princes were bloodthirsty thieves, but at least they bequeathed to us the Renaissance, Boticelli, Petrarch and Michelangelo. What, he demanded, is the legacy of the Swiss? The coo-coo clock.
Two Sides of Order
The Swiss may be obsessively orderly, but on the positive side, they have also been able to unite four different language-speaking cultures into a unity that has, for the past few centuries, managed to live in peace. Considering the bloody and violent past of the rest of Europe, this is an extraordinary achievement, and one that could serve as an example for a lot of places in our world’s bloody and violent present.
On the other hand, when Clarice and I and the students drove back from our field trip to Milan, we arrived in Lugano after dark and found ourselves, after we had pulled off the autostrada, in a long queue of cars. Flashing blue lights, squad cars, a police roadblock. When we had finally inched our way to the head of the line, the police merely shined flashlights on the van’s wheels and then let us pass. None of us had the slightest idea of why we had been stopped. Later, I mentioned the incident to Jayne.
“They were just checking your tires,” she replied.
“Really? What in the world for?”
“To see whether there was enough tread on them,” she said.
I thought she was kidding, but no. She told me that several months ago, Tim had parked their Toyota in downtown Lugano and when he returned from an errand, found on the windshield what he thought was a parking ticket. It turned out to be a citation for having insufficient tread on the tires. ”We not only had to buy new tires,” she said, “but we also had to pay the fine. One hundred francs.”
Three Photographers
The Franklin College art department has two videotapes about photographers in its collection. Last week we saw one about the life and works of the most socially committed photographer I can think of after Dorthea Lange, W. Eugene Smith. Today we looked at the works of probably the most notorious photographer of women, Helmut Newton. An interesting contrast, to say the least, and I insisted that the students devote a lot of space in their journals to comparing the two.
Meanwhile, Ellyn had good news. “Professor Keating, you will never, but never guess what happened. Well first of all, I’m going back to Interlaken this weekend even though I’ve already been there, and second is, the reason I’m going is that a lot of the other students are going too because they saw the photo I took of my feet and they decided that they wanted to try parasailing.”
“So you’re going along as a kind of… guide?”
“Yeah, they asked me to. Isn’t that cool?”
Bread and Wine
On Monday of the last week of July we took the last field trip of the summer session to have a look at what Clarice assured us would be one of the most unusual works of art we’ve ever seen. We drove out of Lugano about 8:30, crossed the border at Stabio and headed west along the base of the mountains towards the Varallo valley and a religious site called Sacro Monte. On the way we stopped in the town of Gattinara to visit a winery. The students were excited about the visit because they thought they would be able to tank up on some free wine, but we warned them that this place, the Cantina Sociale, was a cooperative, owned and operated by a group of grape growers, that it was a for-profit operation and that the growers weren’t running a free bar. Besides, by the time we got there it would be only 10 o’clock in the morning.
As it turned out, our host, Vincenzio, a short, amiable gentleman in his eighties was only too happy to pour us as much wine as we cared to drink. “I helped found this place sixty years ago,” he said, “and I can do whatever I feel like.”
Despite my misgivings about Tiffany and a couple of the others, the students behaved themselves and even turned down a taste of the Cantina’s grappa. “What a surprise,” Clarice muttered. “At least they seem to have learned something at Franklin, even if it’s only some prudence about drinking wine in the morning.”
“Yeah, either that or they’re still hung over from last night.”
After a tour of the cellars, which looked as if they had been in use for a lot longer than sixty years, we bought several bottles of vino rosso from Vincenzio and got back on the road. We stopped at a market along the way to buy some bread, cheese, fruit and a corkscrew for a picnic lunch and continued driving along the river deeper into the Varallo valley.
Simulacrum
As the name indicates, Sacro Monte perches on the side of a mountain. It has been holy from at least the latter part of the 15th century, when a monk, who had recently returned from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, had a vision. Like many believers, he thought it would be a good idea for everyone in northern Italy to visit the Holy Land, but since the journey was long, dangerous and expensive, why not bring the Holy Land to Italy instead? He commissioned artists to create a series of dioramas, that is, to combine architecture, painting and sculpture in such a way that life-sized stucco sculptures of Mary or John the Baptist placed in rooms painted to look like the palace of Pontius Pilate, or the banks of the river Jordan, would give viewers the illusion that they were actually present in one of the scenes of the New Testament. Over the next four centuries, an untold number of craftsmen labored to make this vision a reality, and today forty-three separate chapels remain on the mountainside, each containing what was intended to be the most dramatic experience a believer could get of the Holy Land with out actually having to go there.
Unfortunately, an enterprise like this requires a lot of maintenance, and the years have not been kind. Perhaps the Varallo diocese is not very wealthy, or perhaps the tourist trade has fallen off. (There was only one tour bus and a handful of cars when we were there.) Whatever the case, the dioramas have suffered: some sculptures are missing fingers and toes, and a patina of dust has settled over everything, giving the rooms the look of a surreal attic. Worse yet, in many cases, the adhesive the craftsmen used to attach the horsehair beards and wigs to the sculptures has decomposed, so that now Jesus and some of the apostles have beards on only half of their chins; the other half just hangs there like ratty pieces of fur, waiting to fall off.
On one level, Sacro Monte would be easy to make fun of because it feels like a creepy, spiritualized Disneyland. Yet to my surprise it moved me. In spite of their current decrepitude, the scenes are exceedingly well crafted. Like the Duomo, it is obvious that the construction of the dioramas was a labor of love. Long ago, in the days when they were new, when the paint was fresh and bright and the garments newly tailored, before the dust and moths and cobwebs settled in, before the place became a melancholy ruin-- and long before films and television put ordinary people in touch with life-like images-- these scenes of the life of Christ must have seemed miraculous. Doubtless, part of the magic was the subdued light and the animated realism of the scenes. The palace of Herod, for example, contains no less than twenty figures, including soldiers in full armor, courtiers in splendid gowns, dwarves, a mastiff, and a palace chamberlain with an enormous goiter.
Most importantly, realism helped to dramatize the suffering of a humble carpenter. Here I found myself, an unbeliever, most intrigued. The dioramas have nothing to do with Imperial Christianity-- Jesus, Ruler of The Universe. They simply dramatize a life of suffering. As such, they reminded me of how essential myths are to our lives, essential because they give meaning to our suffering. In the case of the New Testament, the story is that suffering here and now on earth will be rewarded by beatific bliss in the afterlife.
But whose suffering? one wonders. For most of its history, the Christian religion has created a museum of horrors: inquisitions, tortures and pogroms, dungeon, fire and sword, heretics and witches dragged to the stake, the persecution of unbelievers, the Crusades against the infidels and the slaughter of uncountable Jews and Muslims, as well as the native peoples of every continent on earth. According to Christians, it is they themselves who have been persecuted and, as Christians, they alone who merit the beatific vision for all eternity. But who speaks for the victims of Christianity? The Protestant churches are mute. So is the Vatican. The statues of Sacro Monte say nothing.
The Court Jester
The court jester arrived yesterday evening. Today is the final day of classes, the day of exams, term papers, grades and good-byes. It didn’t seem like six weeks could pass so quickly, but pass they did, and the last day brings with it an ache of sadness. There had been a storm during the night, and the little yellow-edged leaves that blew in through the open window and clustered on the floor at the foot of the bed when I woke up this morning gave a poignant warning that the summer was coming to an end.
Yesterday evening, my students presented an exhibition of the photographs they had taken during the summer session. A crowd of professors, administrative staff and students gathered in the art studio to sip wine, munch on snacks, (including the terrific foccacia that Jayne had baked,), and examine the photographs on display. The subject matter of the photos ranged from Jeremy’s zany self-portrait, composed of a dozen body parts collaged together, to Helena’s mysterious nighttime photo of Lake Lugano: dark sky, dark trees and the golden blur of lights from a boat on dark water.
Several dozen people attended the exhibition and all--with one exception--complimented the students on their work. The students, of course, were delighted. And I was proud of them and of the effort they had put into the class and the exhibition.
The single exception arrived after the reception was over. Everyone had left except Tim and Jayne-- and Vanessa, who had just returned from Rome and who had also arrived late. We were packing up the dishes and dumping the wine bottles, napkins and other debris into the trash, when a well-dressed man with white straggly hair and a scruffy beard entered the room. Tim introduced him, in English, as Tomasso Coppola, the president of an exclusive private school in Lugano. Then Tim left with Jayne to fetch the car. Speaking in Italian, Coppola questioned me about the photos. I answered in English, with Vanessa translating. In his opinion, he told us, there were merely two or three photos in the entire exhibition that were "imaginative" and therefore worthy of serious consideration. All the rest he dismissed with a wave of his hand as being pedestrian and beneath his interest. "Not terribly successful," as he put it.
“There’s more than one way to define success,” I countered.
“Take the photos of this student, for example. Six weeks ago this young woman came to the class barely knowing one part of a camera from another. She was lonely and homesick and unable to make friends. She not only learned to use the camera, she also learned to use it as an instrument of curiosity about the world. These photographs of an insect on a rose and church steeples and a swan on water may look pedestrian to you, but they represent a great change in her perception of herself and of what she thought was a indifferent world. On that level, I think her photos are very successful."
He ignored me and asked Vanessa if she was Italian. She hesitated, but his mind was already made up. "So what are you doing here with all these Swiss?" he demanded. And then as he turned to leave, he snapped at me, “And how come you've been here for all this time and still don't know how to speak Italian?"
At this moment, Tim and Jayne arrived with the car. We drove to a restaurant on the Italian side of the border and didn't think about Coppola again until later at dinner. Tim thought his appearance had been pure theatre. "Why did this guy show up, anyway, Michele? Everything was over, finished. The set had been struck, the audience had gone home, the curtains closed and the janitors sweeping up and here comes Coppola, the critic. On top of that he attacks you in Italian, your weak spot."
I thought, well of course, he’s the actor whose function it is to poke fun at the court's pretensions. As the photography teacher, I happened to be the king in this particular comedy and he had simply lifted up the hem of my robe and observed, "hmm, the king's bare feet are looking a little musty today, aren't they?"
We all thought this was funny, but Vanessa said, "Funny, yes, but he was still condescending and rude. I should have answered him: ‘You're Italian, what are YOU doing here with all these Swiss?’"
Anniversaries
It’s 6:00 on a darkening Saturday evening. Every window in the house is open to catch the breeze. Grey clouds tumble in the sky above the vineyard on the hill, thunder rumbles in the valley and from here at my writing desk in the bedroom, I can hear the sound of raindrops spattering on the trees. Tim plays Long Black Veil on the new guitar his son Jake gave to him on Thursday when Jake arrived here from New York for a visit. Stella is on the floor at their feet gnawing on what’s left of a tennis ball and Jayne irons a blue dress to wear to the party we’re supposed to attend later this evening.
Bob and Ornella Gephardt have invited Tim, Jayne and me and many other friends to a Brazilian restaurant in downtown Lugano for dinner. We’ll not only be celebrating their 15th anniversary of living in Switzerland and their 10th anniversary of living in Lugano, but also the 200th anniversary of the founding of Ticino and the 150th anniversary of the Swiss Constitution. After dinner we’ll take a boat cruise on the lake to watch what promises to be a spectacular display of fireworks.
Despite the generosity of the Gephardt’s invitation, I find myself wanting to ditch the old folks and instead accompany Jake to the discos. I suppose that one of these days I’ll have to start acting my age but, as St. Augustine prayed when he asked for purity and virtue, “not just yet.”
Farewells
“Not knowing is not resignation. It is an opening to amazement.” Peter Brook
Eureka! On the way to school this morning, after nearly two months of waiting, I finally witnessed the little dog on Pig St. doing his thing. I don’t know what the animal’s name is, but from now on, I’m going to call him “Whitey, The Wonder Dog.”
Now that summer classes are over and the students have left, Franklin seems hollow and vacant. It’s an illusion, of course. In all of the offices, telephones ring and computers hum as the administrative staff prepares for the Fall semester, which begins at the end of August. Perhaps the sense of emptiness is just a reflection of my own feelings. I’ve enjoyed my stay here, and don’t look forward to saying goodbye to Tim and Jayne and to the wonderful people have become friends.
There was a farewell dinner last night at the home of Eva Gianini, the assistant registrar at Franklin. She and Vanessa prepared a feast of potato salad, tabouli, tomatoes and mozzarella, melon salad, roast beef and other treats for the guests, which included Tim and Jayne, Jake and his friend from France, Caroline Nerrault, Karen Ballard, Franklin’s Director of Admissions, and Doug Ansel, who was the Director of External Affairs at Franklin, but who is leaving the college for a another job. His final day is next Friday. Caroline leaves the day after tomorrow and Jake returns to Manhattan on Tuesday. I fly out of Milan Wednesday. The countdown has barely started and already I was feeling a knot of heartaches.
We enjoyed the dinner as we sat on the terrazza overlooking the lake, listening to Vanessa’s CD’s of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and watching the full moon rise over the mountains. The moon had been full when I arrived here three months ago, and it seemed to me that this full moon formed a luminous kind of closure to my visit.
When I began writing these notes, I had intended for them to reflect the experience of a foreigner living on a border, always in between, a part of Switzerland but also a part of Italy. Ambiguity and paradox, as difficult as they may be to live with, are two things that I have learned to cherish. But now, as the hours that remain until my departure tick away, I find that I understand only a little more than I did when I arrived, and the idea of summing up in words the wonder of these months seems as silly to me as the meandering red line on a map that is supposed to mark the border between one country and another.
Antipasto
In the end, one Saturday afternoon stands out in my memory. Tim, Jayne and I and Stella drove across the border into Italy to meet Corrado Molteni, a professor of Economics at Franklin who lives in Milan with his wife. After we managed to find a parking place for the car, we wandered in a couple of wrong directions before finally spotting the towers of the Duomo. We met Corrado in the Galleria near the Piazza del Duomo and then walked with him to the Ambrosiana Museum, a few blocks away. He was the only one of us who had been to the museum before, and our visit was going to be the appetizer for a lunch that would follow later with him and his wife. After that, a special dessert.
There were many treasures in the museum, including a hypnotic still life of a basket of fruit by Caravaggio. But the most surprising, and the cause of amazement from all of us, was Raphael’s preparatory drawing for his painting, The School of Athens, the monumental fresco he painted between 1509 and 1511 in Pope Julius II’s private apartment in the Vatican. The fresco, which measures some nineteen by twenty-seven feet, reveals the Renaissance fascination with the rediscovery of the ancient world: Pythagoras, Euclid, Heraclitus and other scientists, mathematicians and philosophers gather under an immense dome on a stairway, at the top of which stand Plato and Aristotle. The drawing is a chalk study, as large as the fresco, and covers a whole wall of the museum. It demonstrates convincingly how a young painter barely twenty-six years of age could have been considered the equal of Leonardo and Michelangelo. On one level it’s a multi-layered mirror into the past: through it, we in the fading years of the so-called Modern world can discover Raphael’s Renaissance, which, five-hundred years ago, was discovering the heritage of Ancient Greece. From my point of view as a painter, the work was simply dazzling, not only in its conception, but in the conviction and maturity of its execution. Some works of art are inspirational: they make you want to paint. This one is the opposite: it makes you want to throw your brushes away.
Piatto locale
After we left the Ambrosiana, we followed Corrado through the baking streets of the Quadrilatero, past the headquarters of Versace, Armani and Cartier, to a Japanese restaurant, where we met his wife. Kimiko Molteni is a native of Tokyo. She had met and married Corrado a long time ago during the many years he was an economics professor at a university in Japan. They had returned to his native Milan eight years ago, and since then, she has worked here for a Japanese importer. Although we didn’t have to remove our shoes to be seated, the restaurant was traditionally Japanese, except in one respect: playing on the sound system was music from the soundtrack of Chariots of Fire.
Dolci
When the meal was over, Corrado announced, “Time for dessert,” as he picked up the check. We left the restaurant to walk a few blocks to what turned out to be the Baggatti-Valsecchi palace, constructed during the Baroque era. Corrado’s dessert for us consisted in our being able to wander through the luxurious rooms of this palace, and to marvel at the stained glass windows, the coffered ceilings, parquet floors, Flemish lace and Persian carpets, the massive fireplaces, the alabaster staircases and balustrades, marble portrait busts, carved oak armoires and all of the other furnishings of the good life, 16th century style. Incised on the mantle of the fireplace were the words, Vivo Contento Sotto Le Grande Ale: I Live Content Under The Great Wings.
As we left, we noticed that there was an exhibition of contemporary Polish photographs in one of the anterooms of the palace, so we visited that as well. Then Corrado and Kimiko walked us back to our car and we said goodbye.
On the Border
I had begun to wonder if it were possible not to get lost in Italy, especially in the labyrinthine streets of Milan. My suspicions were confirmed: it’s not only possible, but inevitable. As we tried to find our way out of the city, I remembered a remark of William Faulkner: “The past is not dead; it’s not even past.” In this part of the world, the past is always present, from the stones we walk on, to the forbidding walls of a Renaissance fortress, to a dream of Redemption that haunts a collection of dilapidated sculptures on the side of a valley in the mountains. It simmers in tons of golden bars stained with the blood of innocent people in underground vaults in Switzerland, just as it broods in blind fury at the other end of the Mediterranean on the banks of the Jordan river.
If the past is so present, what about the present? On that Saturday afternoon, the present was the inside of Tim and Jayne’s Toyota as we drove back once again towards Switzerland. We had just visited one of the oldest cities in Europe, had eaten lunch in a Japanese restaurant with an Italian colleague who looked German, but who spoke Japanese with his wife as we ate sushi and listened to a Muzak version of the soundtrack of a British film. We had then strolled together through a palace that had been constructed nearly four centuries before we were born, to end up in an exhibition of photographs from a country in Eastern Europe that a few years ago had been behind the Iron Curtain. I thought a lot about Vanessa’s reply to my question.
The present was living day-to-day in the middle of these crossroads of times and cultures. The present was the four of us, three humans and a little dog, examining the map, shrugging our shoulders in resignation and then laughing as we drove around in circles in Como, lost in Italy once again, trying to find the road that would take us to the border. The present was a border somewhere up ahead with blue uniforms on one side and gray uniforms on the other. It was one I had crossed many times during these past months. In the end, however, it was a border I would never be able to cross.