The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean

Italians were full of compliments, even here at the edge of Slovenia. The Spanish were too restrained to praise, the French too envious and uncertain, the Corsicans too proud. For the more generous and extrovert Italians, praise was normal, words cost nothing, so the flow of daily life was eased. I had lost an important ticket in Venice. At first the ticket collector mildly scolded me by clucking, but when I said, “I am a cretin—I am really stupid,” he said, “No, no—it is usual to lose a ticket, don’t be hard on yourself.”

Trieste was once the noble port of Austria, and it still looked to me like Vienna-by-the-Sea. The city still had those gray Hapsburg buildings, every one of them looking like the headquarters of an insurance company (and that included the Church of St. Anthony the Thaumaturgist), sloping up from the port, in austere and forbidding terraces. The structures of Trieste have big flat faces. It is a city of apartments and suites, not private houses, nor any small stucco dwellings on backstreets. No chickens, hardly any cats; all the dogs on leashes, like its sister cities in northern Europe, composed of seriousness and gloom and the fragrance of sticky pastries. It is the city closely documented in the novels of Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, the ultimate account of a man trying to give up smoking, and Senility, the story of an infatuation. Svevo’s friend James Joyce urged Svevo to call the latter book As a Man Grows Older.

Venice is magic, the loveliest city in the world, because it has entirely displaced its islands with palaces and villas and churches. It is man-made, but a work of genius, sparkling in its own lagoon, floating on its dreamy reflection, with the shapeliest bridges and the last perfect skyline on earth: just domes and spires and tiled roofs. It is one color, the mellowest stone. There is no sign of land, no earth at all, only water traffic and canals. Everyone knows this, and yet no one is prepared for it, and so the enchantment is overwhelming. The fear you feel is the fear of being bewitched and helpless. Its visitors gape at it, speechless with admiration, hardly believing such splendor can shine forth from such slimy stones.
Language cannot do justice to Venice and nothing can detract from its beauty. It floods regularly; its marble is damaged and decayed, its paintings rot, it has stinking corners. Its canals are green, some of it looks poisonous, it is littered, it teems with rats which not even the masses of Venetian cats can cope with. The graffiti on ancient walls and on church pillars—I noted Berlusconi is Doing Harm and Berlusconi is the Assassin of Democracy—is almost incidental. People still live in Venice, children play in its backstreets, where families turn the cranks of pasta machines, men congregate to smoke, women scorch tomatoes. In the alleys beggar women cradle their children and hold signs: Please Help My Family—Ex-Yugoslavia. Even the fact that Venice is actually sinking, and might one day be destroyed if not disappear altogether, gives it an air of fragility and drama, a passionate mortality.

In Spain I had reached the conclusion that a country’s pornography reveals an inner state and gives clues to a society’s unconscious: its predilections and compulsions. What sells as pornography in one country would be laughed at in another. I happened to be in Ancona, but Italian pornography was pretty much the same all over the country. There were also unambiguous advertisements in Italy, such as the lovely woman appearing to fellate a penis-shaped fudgicle (motto: “Me and my Magnum!”). But what did this Italian obsession with sodomy and bestiality indicate? It was not a delicate subject but it was a delicate question.

The priest got off at Crotone; a quarreling couple and an old woman took his place in my compartment. As soon as we drew out of Crotone a nun ambushed us, passing out holy cards: the Virgin on one side, a calendar of holy days on the reverse. I accidentally dropped my card and before I could retrieve it the old woman pounced and snatched it up, then brought it to her mouth and kissed it, in a kind of greedy veneration. She looked up at me and handed it over—reproachfully, I thought. I kept the card as a bookmark in Frankenstein and for weeks afterward, whenever I came across it, I thought of that old woman rescuing it from the indignity of a train floor and planting a kiss on it as a way of propitiating the Madonna. I saw stranger manifestations of religion in this trip but I remembered that gesture for its passion.