Tag: Italy

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Venice: Mal De Mare

Ladies, you who find yourselves still free and unbound

            by those strings of love

            in which I and so many others are entwined.

If you long to know what this 

            Love is, who made himself Lord and God

            Not only in our, but in ancient times.

It’s a burning affliction, a vain desire

            A deceptive shadow, a wilful deceit

            for whom you forget yourself and your own good;

a breathless quest for a little pleasure

            that you never find, or if you do,

            will only cause you sorrow and ruin.

The Venetian poet Gaspara Stampa was born 500 years ago. In her lifetime she was hailed as the greatest female voice of the Italian Renaissance: a sought-after singer and performer at the accadamie, the literary salons, she was dubbed a “Sappho de’ nostril dì” (a Sappho of our days) not only but most notably by fellow poet Benedetto Varchi. Like the ancient Greek singer, Stampa too was a poet of love, of loss and recollection, and like Sappho’s, her poems were of great musicality: to be sung and performed. Her only published work, Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa, which tell of her suffering from an unhappy love affair with a noble man, appeared in 1554, six months after the aforementioned lover had announced his marriage to another woman, and six months after Gaspara Stampa’s sudden death at thirty-one.

All the fires of hell together

next to my great flame

are nothing, or little;

for where hope is gone

the soul, bound to always part,

accustoms itself to a grief that never changes.

My torment is greater

because it tastes of yesterday’s joys

thanks to hope;

and this wavering pattern 

            of joy and torment

            makes my suffering all the greater (300/231)

The book was published in a hurry – most likely to benefit from the scandal her presumed suicide caused in the Venetian society. Stampa was only thirty-one, childless and unmarried. The parish register of Santi Gervasio e Protasio recorded the cause of death as mal de mare, seasickness.

Despite the book’s instant success, Stampa soon fell into oblivion. When she was re-discovered, in the late 18th century, the literati of the early enlightenment romanticized her as the devoted, suicidal lover, or discredited her as a courtesan; in any case they belittled her work. With the honourable exception of R.M. Rilke, it was only within the last two decades that the multi-layered grandezza of Stampa’s work been rediscovered, and her name restored as a confident, idiosyncratic poet. Stampa was not (only) a female, but a feminist voice that addressed the obstacles women faced then, and half a millennium later, still do.

San Trovaso today

Weep, Ladies, and may Love weep with you, since he who hurt me does not cry.

Stampa’s legacy has too long been overshadowed by the question of her sexuality. Much energy has been put into proofing that a woman who writes as beautifully and lovingly could not have been a courtesan. But to answer this question, after 500 years, we must pose many more questions, and most importantly ask ourselves: Why do we need to know so urgently?

Like her contemporaries, Stampa wrote in the Petrarchan tradition, but undermined the patriarchal codes through female agency and sensuality. Whereas Petrarch adored his Laura from afar, Stampa lay in her lovers’ arms. Whereas Laura was voiceless, Stampa spoke as a woman to women. While Petrach’s gaze was male, Stampa did more than gaze: She lived. She lived in Venice, a city embedded in the sea.

The little fish

that only in water lives, and breathes,

expires, the moment

he exits the water.

View from Stampa’s home – where later Rilke stayed.

If the city of Venice is shaped like a fish, then Stampa’s neighbourhood, now called San Trovaso, is the gills. Indeed, water in all its forms plays a vital role in her poetry: tears, rain, fountains, waves, and, of course, the Adriatic Sea.

My life is a sea and the waves are my tears

the winds are breaths of sighs

my hope is the ship and my desires

the sail and the oars, that chase it forward.(40)

Stampa’s Venice is not the city of lavish, stuccoed palaces, but the foggy lagoon. L’umor, liquidity, represents the female, the nurturing, the all-embracing element. In its progression, from spring to sea, water symbolizes life, and in its eternal spiralling outwards, self-realisation. As pelago, the stormy sea, it stands, in Stampa’s poetry, for love, death, and oblivion.

You women who have recently embarked

upon these waters full of treachery

and full of error, love’s deep and boundless sea

where so many ships have been snapped in two,

Beware! And don’t go out too far,

or you’ll loose your chance of ever escaping;

Don’t trust in calm waters or favourable winds

that change course so quickly, as happened to me. (64)

The Lagoon

Water, like life, like love, is ungraspable. But to Stampa, a highly educated Renaissance woman, water was not bestowed with any magic or divine powers, as it was according to the hitherto popular (medieval) teachings of Natura Magica. Nature was not governed by occult celestial forces anymore, but had become explainable, calculable, comprehensible through our senses.

Wicked Woman, turn your face to me

My lord cries out, suspended from the cross,

And my blind senses fail to grasp

His angry voice that’s mingled with pure pity.(279/307)

A century before Galileo, Venice had pushed God from the pedestal as the “unmoved mover, il motore immobile already. The Venetian Republic was pioneering in natural sciences, as the long list of inventions – from double-entry book-keeping to quarantine laws to the first factory line – proves.

Philosopher and scientist Bernardino Telesio, teaching at the time at the near-by university of Padua, then the most renowned university of the Western world, postulated that the world was made up of two forces – the sun, hot, and the earth, cold. Water, he said, is the only state for us to comprehend the incomprehensible.

In the run of 310 poems that make up the collection Stampa’s identifies her lover as the nobleman and mercenary Count Collaltino di Collalto. That Stampa positioned her alter ego Anasilla as the active, desiring lover in a consumed, yet unrequited love affair with a real man, demonstrates the oxymoronic standing of women in Venetian society.

O night, to me more luminous and blessed

than the most blessed and luminous of days,

night, worthy of being praised

by the rarest geniuses, not just by me,

You alone have been the faithful minister

Of all my joys, all that was bitter

in my life you’ve rendered sweet and dear

and placed me in the arms of the man who bound me. (104)

The city was torn between a stark catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary and of Venus Anadyomene, the goddess rising from the sea, who served as the city’s icon. In the 16th century, the long tradition of eroticism in Venetian art culminated in Titian’s portraits of the Belle Veneziane, Venetian Gentlewomen with their breast exposed, or Tintoretto’s Gloria del Paradiso at the Palazzo Ducale, which alludes more to an orgy than to an angelic convention. Even altar pieces and church ceilings were peopled with saints in the throes of passion: Taunt skin over bulging muscles, as seen in the Fumiani’s ceiling painting at church San Pantaleone, or in Titian’s assumption of the Virgin Mary in the chiesa Sta Maria Assunta, where he depicted the angels flanking Virgin Mary in the throes of passion.

Arousal seemed to be the end of Venetian poetry as well, as demonstrated in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, or the obscene writings of Pietro Aretino. If Stampa wasn’t as explicit as these two superstars of the 16th century literary scene, she left no doubt:

Since every hour I learn new delights

            In love along with joys unusual,

            Ever seeing in that angelic beauty

            Some new pleasure or some new miracle.

Venice’s Virgin-Venus-dichotomy can also be expressed in numbers: For a population of 180,000, there were 138 churches, and, as an English traveller in the 17th century wrote home, 11,000 courtesans. The number of courtesans might have been exaggerated. Not all of the so-called honourable or honest Courtesans, cortigiane oneste, were listed in the “Catalogo di tutte le principali e piu honoreate cortigiane di Venezia,” a kind of telephone book for upper class men, or a travel guide for noble gentlemen from abroad. Gaspara Stampa’s name is not in the book.

Instead, Stampa likened herself to Mother Mary. On the occasion of Christmas 1548, which happened to be the time she met her lover, Count Collaltino for the first time, Stampa allegorizes her heart to the virginal womb:

It was near the day the creator

came in human form to reveal himself

when he could have stayed in his lofty domain

issuing forth from the virginal womb,

that my illustrious lord, for whom

I have scattered so many laments,

and who might have lodged in a place more sublime,

made himself a nest and refuge in my heart. (II)

In this stanza, Virgin Mary is not merely the vessel, but the a virginal creator, the single producer of God’s human form. Stampa depicts her heart as a womb that cradles however not a lover, but love per se – an important distinction: while Mary is sanctified as Mother of God, Stampa makes herself Mother Of Love: she places love above the lover.

In a reversal of traditional roles, her male lover becomes her muse, and not her Lord. While she gets to speak, to write, to act, her Count Collaltino is not given a voice. He goes down in history as Stampa’s doubtable lover.

Bellini at the Accademia

Apparently, Stampa never hoped for a child. In her time, pregnancy was a life-threatening state for a woman. Aware of the high risk of death during childbirth, women wrote their will with every pregnancy – starting at an early age and writing many wills in the run of their fertile years. Stampa never wrote a testament – her poetry is testimony enough of her suffering:

I burned, I wept, I sang, I weep, I burn

I sing, I’ll weep, I’ll burn, I’ll always sing

(till death or time or fortune dissolve my wit,

my eyes and heart, my style, my tears and fire. (XXVI)

Stampa’s poems are of an extraordinary passion – rivalling Rumi in his heart break, and yet, her suffering does not lead to spiritual delivery or heavenly assumption. Her suffering is immediate, physical, existential.

Those hot tears and those sighs that you see me

          expelling so forcefully they could bring

the storm-tossed sea to a sudden halt

when it’s at its wildest and most violent. (58)

Detail at S Pantaleone

In a mercantile society like the Republic of Venice everything was purchasable. Art, faith, and love were business like any other, in form of commissioned art, sacral art, arranged marriages and prostitution.

Prostitution was regarded a source of income for the city. The courtesans’ taxes filled the city’s coffers, and, with tourism already a major economic driver, their fame and the prospect of sexual adeventures attracted noblemen from all over Europe. Besides, the image of the honest or honourable courtesan, a beautiful, sophisticated, and independent woman, served Vencie well flaunting the legendary personal liberties the city supposedly afforded her citizens through everlasting peace and democracy.

The courtesans’ social standing differed wildly from that of the lowly prostitute. Courtesans were highly educated, polyglot, trained musicians and fashion-trendsetters – often charging for their services (conversation, music, or sex) separately. Honest courtesans were unaffordable but for the highest echelons of Venetian circles and more often than not hailed from wealthy families themselves, the mother acting as go-between for her daughter. Forming part of intellectual circles, and often hosting salons themselves, they were well-known socialites, performers, poets, and musicians in their own right.

Tintoretto at Scuola Grande di San Rocco

Although in earlier centuries prostitution had been heavily regulated, the city administration changed its policy in the 16th century due to a rise of homosexuality within the population. Considering female prostitution the lesser evil of the two, they started actively supporting brothels. At the Ponte delle Tette (Bridge of tits) prostitutes were decreed to advertise themselves bare-breasted, a sight believed to convert young men to heterosexuality.

Homosexuality was not the only thing on the upswing in the 16th century. So were book publishing and vernacular literature. The rising number of independent printers and publishers made literature easily accessible, also for those traditionally barred from education: women.

Oh Love, what strange and wonderful fits:

one sole thing, one beauty alone,

can give me life and deprive me of wits (Rime 28)

Titian at Sta Maria Assunta in Canareggio district

While social mobility and personal freedom in a mercantile democracy were indeed greater than in the aristocratic or feudal city states, women were excluded from politics and public life. Only men were citizens; only men bore arms; only men could be lords or kings. Women were subject to their fathers, then to their husbands or – since the costly dowry system afforded even in patrician families only the first-born daughter to get married – a convent. Sumptuary laws explicitly regulated women’s outfit, from hairdo to jewellery and clothes, precisely indicating their marital status. A woman was but a daughter, a wife, a nun.

Love, how can you put up with this? While you insist

On my fidelity

I’m left with no mercy-

No, without life, myself in the balance! (310)

While men were famously granted great liberties in Venetian society, women were expected to live in taciturn chastity. In fact, the entire system relied on women’s chastity. A household would only be continued if men could rely on the legitimacy of their offspring; A man had to be sure of his daughter’s chastity to transfer her to another man’s household. As property, women were not worthy of erudition.

Stampa was lucky as were few Venetian women. Born into a well-off bourgeoise family, after her father’s death, she and her sister received the same education and training as her brother. It was her mother who made sure of it. In her salon in Santi Gervasio e Protasio, which was frequented by leading artists and intellectuals, Stampa was early on introduced into the artistic circles of Venice. Later, she became a member of several other literary salons, accademie, where she was praised for the beauty of her voice. An acclaimed singer and influential socialite she was high in demand by various writers and composers who hoped to gain fame and access to higher echelons if she interpreted their works.

Titian Fresco at Fondamento Tedesco, now Accademia dell’ arte

Apart from some but by no means all convents, the demi-monde was hence the only place for women to achieve erudition and self-realisation. Outside the restrictions of society, as courtesans, they could live in economic independence at least for their working years.

It was however a freedom that came with precarity: Exposed to sexually transmittable diseases, to scorn and contempt, to rape and violence. With no set of laws to protect them, they were at the mercy of a protector, a wealthy man, who might change his taste in women any day. If as lovers they were desired, as wives they didn’t qualify – something hasn’t changed, at least not until Pretty Woman.

My destiny is harsh, but harsher still

Is that of my Count; he flees me

I follow him; other men consume themselves for me,

I  can’t look at other beauties.

I hate the one who loves me, and love him who scorns me

If he submits to me, my heart protests

While I submit to the one who gives me no hope

To such strange taste have I educated my soul (310)

Lagoon

Count Collaltino famously married someone else, but Stampa didn’t die from a broken heart as the romantically inclined would like it. Her alter ego Anasilla indulges in her suffering, but then finds herself a new lover in whose arms she lies in the final poems of the collection.  Poem 57 reveals an astonishingly ambivalent picture of her adoration:

Why do they wear themselves out.

Painting you on canvas, sculpting you from marble

All those who made a name of themselves in this art

Like splendid Buonarotti, or Titian?

When I have sculpted you openly and plainly just as you are

In every piece of my heart and my mind

So your image will never fade

Whether you’re near or far.

But maybe you would like to be depicted

As loyal and gracious, which I how you appear

In all your acts and dealings with others.

Whereas, alas, I can hardly tell you

I carry you around just as I see you

A little inconsistent and disdainful. (206)

Recent research has revealed that many of the love poems believed to be addressed to Count Collaltino, where in fact directed towards Giovanni della Casa, whom she tried to flatter by calling him count. Della Casa had recently published “Il Galateo”, a popular and influential book on formal etiquette and good manners. Indeed, Stampa’s writing was to a much greater extent geared towards improving her social standing, expressing the hope of being embraced by society and not by a specific, single man. She demanded the standing of a man, not a man.

It is probably in this sense that one must read her solidarity when she warns other women — and probably courtesans — of the moody waters of the lagoon: that the moments of equality were short and limited to soirées at the accademie.

At various occasions Stampa addresses her bassezza, her lower social standing (Egli è nobile, e bel, tu brutta, et vile/ egli larghi, tu hai li cieli avari: he is noble and handsome, you are ugly and base, with him the sky is wide open, for you depressing) and it is through talent and wit and erudition that she in her poems puts herself on par with Vergil, Petrarch, and Sappho. As Rilke would later put it, she earned her gravitas, dignity, through her passion for the infinito – the infinity of her suffering, but not from a broken heart, but from a broken world – a blurred distinction in both poets.

Stampa’s mental health was reported to become increasingly fragile, and short before her sudden death, she suffered a nervous breakdown, or, as it would be called today, a burn-out.

Love has made me like one who lives in flame.

To the world I’m some new salamander;

Nor less strange than that eternal creature

That lives and dies, its nest and pyre the same. (206)

Despite the overwhelming beauty and passion of her writing, Stampa’s emancipation and continuous self-empowerment, her breaking into a male dominated world, her trying to advance in society by her own merits, was probably the most outrageous aspect of her work, and still is. As a woman writing for women, Stampa championed women’s rights. In her poems, she overcame the irresolvable dichotomy with which women are confronted to this day: She was Venus and virgin, lover and beloved, fire and water. And most likely, she was a courtesan, a most honourable profession.

For lack of evidence, the question whether Stampa was a courtesan or not remains unresolved. But if there is a lesson to be learned from her poetry than it is that the answer to this question is irrelevant. Gaspara Stampa died early, unmarried, and childless, in or from a world where carving out a room for one’s own was a matter of life and death.

Sund set in San Trovaso
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Austria: All Quiet on the Southern Front

On the mountain top, two salamanders are making love. They are of the Alpine species, entirely dressed in black, including their large protruding eyes and their grinning, fleshy mouths. That and the fact that they are changing position so quickly, twirling each other’s bodies around, rubbing their heads against each other, entangling their long tails, holding on to each other with such fiery passion, make it impossible to tell them apart, male from female, or friend from foe: one could easily take their love making for a struggle for life and death, for they are not on a flowery meadow, but inside an old war trench.

The mountain peak, Kleiner Pal, constitutes the border between Austria and Italy. During WWI, it was part of the frontline, where the two armies of the new Republic of Italy and the old Austro-Hungarian Empire held each other in a tight grip, from May 1915 till the end of the war in November 1918, without ever changing the frontline, without having any effect on the outcome of WWI, but at the tremendous cost of the lives of almost a million soldiers. Austrians, Italians, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and many more unknown soldiers, now lie buried at the various Heldenfriedhöfe, or under the eternal ice of the Alpine glaciers.

Boundary stone between Italy and Austria today

Before WWI, the so-called Karnische Alpen, a mountain ridge between Italy and Austria, were a popular hiking destination, as it is now again. The terrain is steep and demanding, the mountain tops a challenge for the experienced hikers and climbers. In the peaceful tranquillity of high peaks and (seemingly) pristine ice-blue lakes it is hard to imagine the smoke and rumble of mortars, of shooting and shelling from a century ago. And yet, trekking by the exuberant pink shrubs of blooming Alpine roses, along the well-maintained hiking paths, one frequently comes across dilapidated garrisons, trenches, or dug out caves that once functioned as barracks, as shelters, as loopholes, or as storage spaces. The hiking paths, now called Friedenswege – trails of peace – were in fact trodden into the steep terrain as a military supply line, where horses pulled ammunition, food, and equipment to the trenches on the top. Until the horses died from cold and hunger, and were replaced by cable cars, quickly built by night, often under hostile fire. From then on, only soldiers marched along the paths.

This Southern stretch of the Alps was one of the most brutal and inhuman battlefields of modern European history. Covered with snow for three quarters of the year, sometimes more, it is a terrain so tricky and precarious that one third of the soldiers there died not from enemy attacks, but from natural causes: avalanches and mountain slides, and the freezing cold that brought pneumonia or kidney inflammation.

Kleiner Pal shrouded in clouds

“Any soldier’s worth less than an animal.”

Infantry soldier Karl Außenhofer wrote into his diary (published in 2016). A Tyrolean, he felt home in the mountains, but he suffered from malnutrition – by 1918, the average weight of the Austrian soldiers was 55kg – and inadequate outfits. Uniforms were of a heavy fabric that, once wet, dried slowly; with Italian attacks imminent, the soldiers at the frontline were ordered to sleep with their clothes on.

“Undressed for the first time in three months tonight. Couldn’t sleep from the pleasure…” Karl Außenhofer wrote. The soldiers were also ordered not to scratch their itches, to prevent infections and skin diseases. In vain.

The Habsburg monarchy had not been prepared for a war. Their weaponry was technically outdated. The turn of the century had brought technical innovations – industrialization and motorization – but outside its glamorous capital Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still an agricultural economy, a Catholic, authoritarian monarchy, stuck in the past. Yet, Emperor Franz Joseph had rushed into the war in megalomania and bloodlust. The assassination of Arc-duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serb was a mere pretence to declare war on Serbia. The Vielvölkerstaat – the multi-ethnic empire – had long been troubled by rising tensions among the many peoples of the vast, sprawling empire. Now, the Kaiser wanted to deal with nationalistic, emancipatory tendencies once and for all in a short hit-and-run attack on a minor South Eastern neighbour.

Heldenfriedhof – war cemetery in Kötschach Mauthen near the Kleine Pal: A Czech, a Hungarian and two unknown soldiers share a grave.

“I caught lice from the Galicians,” Außenhofer wrote in his diary.

Ironically, in the trenches the different nationalities were for once united. But even in the face of death the tensions didn’t subside. Too long had prejudices been instilled into the minds of the “Austrians,” resulting in a social and economic gradient from the German speaking West to Slavic speaking East. Galicia, the utmost Eastern province, what is now Poland and Ukraine, was at the bottom of the scale. The discrimination of the Tschuschen – a pejorative term for Slavs sadly used to this day in Austria – continued in the military and was so harsh, that even Außenhofer felt pity when he wrote on July 17th 1915: “These poor Galicians don’t have shelter to lie down, poor devils, today it’s cold like midwinter, it’s raining so everyone gets wet to their skin.”

Vienna had tragically misjudged the Russians, who had vowed to support Serbia, and misjudged French loyalty towards Russia. Now their only elite regiments, the Tyrolean Standschützen, were involved in the unexpected heavy battle in the East, where they suffered great losses in a relatively flat terrain. Even though the monarchy had been able to draw 3.35million men at their general mobilization in July 1914, a year into the war, they were already lacking men. Then, in May 1915, Italy attacked from the South.

trenches at the Kleine Pal

The Italians sent their elite regiment, trained for the Alpine battle field, the Alpini, who now faced on the Austrian army of mainly Czechs and Hungarians: young men who often hadn’t seen a mountain in their lives before, and whose military training was as rudimentary as their equipment. Not surprisingly, the desertion rate was as high as the death rate, and at one point all white handkerchiefs were confiscated and exchanged for colourful ones.

Außenhofer, whose morale was also declining in the run of the war, did however not approve of the Czech deserters. A learned Austrian, the soldierly values of patriotism, duty, obedience, and bravery were deeply ingrained in his thinking – planted especially by the strict Catholic school system that was run military-style and featured physical and humiliating punishment. Disease and cowardly death were regarded as weaknesses, as failures. The brutality of war made Außenhofer even more detached.

“Today another mis-hap. A Standschütz took the cable car from Corvosa to Stern; when entering the station, his head was ripped off. Went to the Gasthaus at night, always full of people there.”

Natural border

The Gasthaus, the inn, Außenhofer mentions in his diary, is the Gasthaus Löwe in Galtür, which, by the way, is still operating to this day. Gasthaus Löwe was, like other inns, pensions, or hotels, where soldiers were accommodated when not serving at the front line. Ernest Hemingway, too, mentioned the Gasthaus Löwe in his short story “An Alpine Idyll.”

The American writer had arrived at the frontline in the final year of the war, in 1918, as a volunteer orderly for the Italian Red Cross, apparently in search of adventures, both amorous and heroic. His story about two Americans on a skiing trip doesn’t cast a favourable light on the Tyroleans. Hemmingway calls them beasts – but who wouldn’t, given a plot that involves a widower using the frozen corpse of his recently deceased wife as a hanger for his lamp? Who wouldn’t, given the merciless brutality of the war? But Hemingway only arrived at the very end of the war, and maybe the village people he describes were so callous and detached because they had been tested by hunger and loss of loved ones for four long years. For Austrians, the war was not an adventure.

View from the Kleine Pal

But, maybe, Hemingway had a point. The archaic societies of the inaccessible Alpine valleys were notoriously taciturn and rough, a demeanor that seems to come with the rawness of the scenery. Tyroleans were incomprehensible to the Viennese as well, both in their dialects and manners, and so held considerable exotic attraction, as was the case for Austrian writer Robert Musil, also stationed at the Gasthaus Löwe.

End of July. A fly dies: Worldwar, he wrote in his diary on July 28 1914, the day of the declaration of war. Like most upper-class men in the monarchy, Musil had attended military school and therefor held the title of officer. He immediately signed up for the front – albeit benefiting from an officer’s privileges: better pay, better accommodation, better food rations.

War. On the mountain top. In the valley peaceful like a summer holiday. Behind the barriers of the patrols one walks like a tourist, he wrote in 1915. The combination of the overwhelming beauty of the Alps and the adventure of war must have made for an intoxicating cocktail. Or was it rather his love affair with a certain “Gretel” from the village that impressed Musil, whose experience at the front differed so wildly from that of an infantry soldier. Yet, the ongoing cross-fires soon wore him out.

Big projectiles, not too high above our own posts, their sound making the air swell into a rumbling, a roaring with a metallic timbre. So it happened yesterday at Monte Carbonile, when the Italians were firing from the Cima Manderiolo to the Pizzo di Vezzeno, and the Panorotta above us to the Italians. It made the impression of an eery uproar within nature. The rocks were rumbling and roaring. The feeling of an evil futility.

A Griffon Vulture crossing the border to Italy.

Musil survived and went on to become a major European writer. He was however one of the very few writers dispatched as soldiers to the front. Contrary to other nations, who lost a whole generation of writers on the battlefields, the monarchy was aware of the importance of artists to boost morale within the population. Two institutions were established for writers to dodge the draft: the Military Archive, and the Pressehauptquartier, the military press headquarters, the latter a euphemism for propaganda, where acclaimed writers like Stefan Zweig, R.M. Rilke, or Hugo von Hofmannsthal eked out their lives. In safe distance from the front, and with varying degree of enthusiasm, they fabricated their eulogies.

“Victories, only victories; you never read of defeats,” infantry soldier Außenhofer wrote in his diary. He never experienced any heroic victories the field newspapers reported. Miraculously, Außenhofer survived the war, unlike nine million soldiers, unlike the emperor, who had passed away in 1916, and unlike the once proud Austro-Hungarian Empire, which disintegrated in 1918.

In local folklore, a salamander, is associated both with rain and fire, and the sky above the Kleine Pal is indeed growing heavy with dark clouds that threaten to bring both. But for the love-drunk salamanders, the trenches are deserted now. The Kleine Pal has become an Open Air Museum, where tourists can inspect the posts, the trenches, the caves, and even the old, rusty cable cars. But the museum, which is free of charge and not supervised, is scarcely frequented. The hike-up is steep and hazardous, so the signs at the bottom of the mountain warn, and should only be attempted in proper hiking gear and in perfect weather conditions. High up, seven Griffon Vultures are circling. Once hunted into extinction, they are a thriving, re-introduced species. Some Alpine swallows are plunging and rising, a marmot whistles in the distance. These are the only sounds. No rumbling, no roaring of rocks. Descending on the other side, one will be in Italy. No passport is required.

Friedenswanderweg with the Friedensglocke – the Peace Bell
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Italy: A View of Paradise

At last, after a long losing streak, the tables are turning. For three years of soaring unemployment, of closed shopfronts, deserted beaches, and soup kitchens, the future looked bleak. Now the golden sun sparkles on the turquoise waters of Lake Lugano again, the trees don’t shiver, but sway dreamily in the early summer’s breeze. Once again everything seems possible. Once again, the people of Campione d’Italia are gambling for high stakes.

Campione d’Italia is a little Italian town located at Swiss Lake Lugano. With stunning mountain views and clear waters, cypresses and palm trees, and dolce fa niente, the Italian enclave is indeed a piece of Italy in the middle of Switzerland. The name goes back to medieval landlord, Campione, who left his estates to a monastery in Milan. A Papal State that remained Italian when the Helvetic Protestants took their oath, Campione was for decades spoilt for success.

The rise of Campione started in 1917, during WWI, when with the sole purpose of spying on foreign diplomats, a gambling licence was granted to Campione to open a casino. After the war, the Casino di Campione was closed again, and the town fell back into provincial slumber, but in the 1930s, Mussolini, recognizing its strategic importance in the middle of neutral Switzerland, not only added “d’Italia” to the former name “Campione” in an imperialistic gesture, but he reopened the Casino. Tax-exempted, all profits were to go to “Campione d’Italia”.

The Casino soon became a hot spot of international intelligence. The US Office of Strategic Services – the precursor of the CIA – opened an office there, and, with diplomats of all sides rubbing shoulders at Roulette and Black Jack, the little town saw a fair share of secret service intrigue and 007. After the war, when Italy lay shattered in ruins and ashes, Campione d’Italia kept prospering.

The Casino provided jobs to a quarter of the 2000 locals, and a steady inflow of foreign currency. With the roulette’s wheel turning until 6am, nightlife was vibrant, with concerts and music festivals all year round. Restaurants, hotels, gyms, and boat clubs and upscale boutiques were flourishing as international High Society and VIP’s promenaded along the lido, the lakefront.

Campione had the best of both worlds. With Italian verve, it outshone luxurious, but staid Lugano on the other side of the lake. Cappuccino was ordered in Italian, but paid in with Swiss Franken. Telephone numbers were Swiss, as were car plates, and insurance policies. From rubbish collection to schools, municipal services were reliably provided by Switzerland, and paid for by the Casino. With gambling prohibited across the border, fortune smiled on Campione. Money kept rolling in and Champagne bottles kept popping, real estate prices soared.

But the rich didn’t flock to Campione simply for the fun.  With a moderate income tax, no inheritance tax at all, nor gift tax or VAT Campione d’Italia was a tax haven.

Then Campione started pushing its luck.

In 2007, Casino was rebuilt. At the cost of more than 100 million Euro, Swiss star architect Mario Botta designed a block-shaped 36,000 square metre colossus that offered 56 tables and 1,000 slot machines to 3,100 gamblers at a time. Sitting at the lakefront, the ochre monster dwarfs the old town up the steep slope behind it. Instead of Italian charm or Swiss understatement, the Casino di Campione d’Italia oozes Sowjet megalomania.

The redesigning came at a bad time. The same year, new Italian laws allowed for gambling machines in bars and café, stealing Campione its unique selling point. Then Switzerland unexpectedly permitted gambling and soon three casinos opened near-by, one of them in elegant Lugano on the other side of the lake. Then, unforeseen online gambling became a thing. And really no one in Campione had thought about the possibility of the Swiss Franken gaining in strength against the Euro. Relying on Swiss services, Campione started amassing enormous debts.

So the unlucky streak began. When the Casino failed to come up with the maintenance costs of its high-priced municipality, one after the other, the city offices, the nursery schools closed down. The mayor resigned, and clerks were left waiting for months for their pay checks in offices they had no fuel to heat.

When finally, in 2018, the Casino declared bankruptcy and closed for good, the boutiques first lowered their prices, then the scrollbars. The gyms shut their doors, then the bars. Then the restaurants closed, and the soup kitchens opened.

But then things got worse. In 2000, after long legal battles, Campione was forced to join the European Union, an unwanted “Brexit al contrario.” Italy finally revoked Campione’s old tax exemptions. From one day to the other, people of Campione had to report to Como in Lombardy, crossing EU borders to get new car plates, telephone numbers, even to collect their amazon parcels, which were now delivered by Italian postal services. They realized with horror that no one in Campione had a tobacco license. For each package of cigarettes, they had to cross borders into Switzerland now.

Just when it looked as if couldn’t get any worse for Campione, the Corona virus spread over Europe, holding Lombardy in a tight grip. Cross border traffic between Switzerland and Italy came to a halt, bus service was suspended. The only way to get to Como was now to walk to the Italian border, and to quarantine.

Rien ne va plus.

“S-O-S. Campione is dead.” A banner the local Lion’s club had mounted on the lido read. People now had to rely on meagre Italian unemployment cheques, others went without pay. Debts to Switzerland counted 175 Million Franks. Neighbouring Swiss communities helped their suddenly impoverished neighbours with warm food and clothes. But while some felt desperate, it was a moment of catharsis to others.

“If you eat too much caviar, you will get sick,” the starred chef Baptiste Fournier said in an interview with the BBC. He saw a new beginning, a chance to re-organize the economic system, become independent from a single employer, or from another country. There is, after all, much more to Campione d’Italia than Baccara and Black Jack.

There are palm trees softly rocking in the breeze, there is the sweet scent of the ancient cypress trees in the ear. Red kites are whistling as they cross the cerulean sky, and flocks of black-headed gulls come sailing in to rest on the calm, turquoise waters. A group of old men are playing cards by the lake front. One of them, turned away from the group, is singing the old Italian song Volare, flying, in the delicate falsetto of old age. He looks across the lake, to Paradiso, Lugano’s cosmopolitan lakefront, the elegant lido against a backdrop of high mountains.

Then, luck turned.

This June, a court in Milan approved a refinance plan. By the end of the year the Casino is scheduled to reopen, people are re-employed, restaurants re-opened. The sun shines on Campione again, and again Campione d’Italia is counting on Fortuna. The ball is rolling.

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Italy: Exile

“There should be a history of this Italy, a history outside the framework of time, confining that which is changeless and eternal, in other words, a mythology. This Italy has gone its way in darkness and silence, like the earth, a sequence of recurrent seasons and misadventures. Every outside influence has broken over it like a wave, without leaving a trace.”

In 1935, the anti-fascist activist Carlo Levi was arrested by the Mussolini administration in his hometown Turin in Northern Italy and exiled to Lucania, today’s Basilicata -region, the instep of the Italian boot. He spent a year in the two villages Grassano and Aliano among the poverty stricken peasants. After the war, he published his memories in his book, “Christ stopped in Eboli”, which turned into an immediate best seller – and led to social reforms.

Lucania was an impoverished province deep in the South, far from Rome. A barren landscape jagged with ravines and steep gorges, dented by barren peaks, freezing in winter and suffocating in summer, when Malaria was buzzing in the air. A hostile place, so outlandish, it was barely part of Italy, barely part of Europe, and, as Levi was to find out, barely part of this world.  

The vast land lies confined under a heavy, billowing sky. Nature is not an all-embracing source of life here, but a grim, heart-breaking beauty, a moody goddess that demands sacrifice and worship. Packs of wolves and wild boars patrol the valleys, claim their territory in moonlit nights. The villages sit on the hill tops, dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape. Little stone houses huddled together, leaning into the mountain, to hide from the winds: the burning Scirocco that brings the Sahara heat, and the cold storms from the North, that bring the rains. But rains don’t fall in Lucania. They pour down in violent torrents. Until the end of the last century, landslides regularly took with them whatever was in their way – trees, the peasants’ humble stone huts, the little country churches – and left swamps that housed the dreaded mosquitoes.

Levi, then 33 years old, a doctor by training and painter by vocation, was appalled by the living conditions of the peasants. Paralysed by malnutrition, malaria, and various other consuming diseases, they stoically lived on a meagre diet of dark bread with the occasional crushed tomato or a thin slice of sausage. The soil didn’t yield much. The land is fit for olive trees, not wheat, as the peasants were to cultivate, and the goats, the peasants’ only source of revenue, were heavily taxed by the Mussolini regime. Most farmers couldn’t afford their goats anymore and had to kill them. Whether as small-scale farmers or working the fields of the rich landowners in a quasi-feudal system, the peasants barely managed to feed their children. Their life was a struggle, but a struggle they were willing to keep up, for centuries, or rather: since time began.

I was struck by the peasants’ build: they are short and swarthy with round heads, large eyes, and thin lips. Their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any of the other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types. They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and history has swept over them without effect.

The Lucanians had been living here since 500 BC, working their fields, which they rarely owned. Foreign powers passed through the land on their conquering sprees, the Langobards, the Byzantines, the Saracens, the Swabians, for whom Lucania was only of strategic importance. After the Italian unification in 1961, landownership passed, not to the peasants, but to local aristocracy, or Northern investors, or international companies. But no one ever settled here. They all stayed in their far away palaces in the big cities, and the peasants were left on their own.

Lucanians themselves dreamed of a promised land. Lucania was their homeland, but they wished for another place where they could leave all their hunger and misery behind. They dreamed of America.

When Levi arrived, more men had emigrated to New York than remained in the villages. But many would return after a few years and pick up their previous peasants’ life right where they had left it. Lucanians were, quite literally, inseparable from their land.

Their footprints mark the ancient paths, crossing clearest mountain springs, of which every gurgle transports the voice of the ancestors, a song that sweetens the memories. Hidden in the shadowy shrubs the paths climb uphill to where rusty windmills chew time. Here dreams are made of dust and innocence, and days are uncertain, provisional, and turn to ash in the cry of thunderstorms, in the hurling of landslides, in the growling of earthquakes. Here, where the imaginary is engraved in the sandstone, only the rough fingers of the peasants can decipher what the furious winds have written, her children, in the darkness of Earth.

This is the beginning of Vito Ballava con le Streghe, (Vito danced with the witches), a traditional tale of Lucania. (translated by wanderwarbler from Mimmo Sammartino’s book). It beautifully explains how the peasants’ self-awareness, their identification is entangled, or dependant on their land. Each being is inseparable from the nature that surrounds them: like a leaf to a tree, the peasant belongs to Lucania, like a falcon to the sky. There is no boundary between the world of humans, animals, and spirits. Everything is ensouled. Everything is – not symbolically, but actually – divine.

Like a drop of water in the steady flowing river, the peasant was not individual, but part of a community – a community of peasants, villagers, humans, living beings, of the material world, or the spiritual world. Where everything is connected, acts upon each other, the lines are blurred – between dream and awakening, between yesterday and tomorrow is blurred. Or like Carlo Levi expressed it: They live submerged in a world that rolls independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land can conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature.

Because of this pagan view of the world, Levi called his book: Christ stopped at Eboli. Eboli is the last train station before entering Lucania from the North. Jesus Christ, so the peasants say, never came to Lucania. They meant that in their misery they were forgotten even by God. But it also meant that despite the village chapels scattered all over the land, and numerous catholic festivities, the teachings of the Catholic church had never entered their minds. The peasants didn’t believe in free will, and pursuit of happiness, or some personal holiness. They believed in the eternal rule of an ever repeating cycle of nature, where everything is determined before.

Destiny is already written in stone for everyone, so the peasants say.

Stoically, the Lucanians accepted their fate, a fate that is not compassionate or partisan, nor merciful. A fate needed to be faced in patience and silence.

Of what use are words? None. What can you do? Nothing.

What was strictly separated though, was the world of men from that of women. While the man were working the fields, it was the women who peopled the village during the day.

They seemed to me all alike, with their faces framed by a veil folded several times and falling over their shoulders, pale cotton blouses, wide, dark bell-shaped skirts that went halfway down their legs, and high boots. They stood erect with the stately posture of those accustomed to balancing heavy weights on their heads and their faces had an expression of promitive solemnity.

Of course Lucania was, like the rest of the world, a patriarchal society. Decisions were made my men, and women were married off in their teens, with or without their consent. In the course of their lives women bore dozens, or more, of children, running the risk of maternal death, running the risk of still birth. Children they had to care for on their own, children they often had to bury when they were babies, toddlers, or before they reached their teenage years.

Levi was fascinated by these women, who looked so brittle and old, but were impossibly strong; illiterate and yet so wise. In reality, these women were witches.  

It’s from here, these mountain ridges hammered into the sky, that angels and witches spread their wings, following the falcons, princes of the highest peaks, at the uncertain border between wakefulness and sleep. (from Vito ballava con le streghe)

In the reality of the night, of the world of dreams, women cast themselves from the mountain peaks and fly with the falcons. They dance and sing. They heal and cast spells with magic words. They fabricate love potions to get any lover they want. And they always want lovers.

Men in Lucania had to be alert. Women could smuggle their love potions into the glass of red wine they served at dinner. These love potions were concocted from menstrual blood, impossible to detect in a glass of red wine.

Men had to make sure they were never alone with a woman other than their wife. Love, or sexual attraction, was considered such a powerful natural force no amount of will-power could resist it. A man and a woman together always resulted in love making. And many children. And gnomes.

The gnomes were little airy creature, capricious and frisky, who liked to play tricks on the people, like tickling the feet of those sleeping, pulling sheets off their beds, throwing sand into people’s eyes, making the laundry fall off the line into the dirt. They hid things in the out-of-the way places. They were innocent little sprites. Little rascals. They were the souls of the children who died before they were baptized.

But of course, the world of gnomes, witches and invincible love was just another exile. In a world, where women where kept from material power, had their wings cut by patriarchy and Catholicism, it was this other world of magic and spirituality where they would hold the reins.

Maybe this could be said of Lucania as a whole: Where love and happiness were second to survival, magic was a dream come true.

Against his promises, Carlo Levi never returned to Lucania after his exile had ended. Back to Turin, he picked up his life from before: that of a political and social activist. “Christ Stopped at Eboli” was published 1945 and raised the popular awareness of the plight of the South. Funds of the Marshal Plan were channelled into Southern Italy. The swamps were drained and Malaria eradicated, and land reforms came into effect.

After the war Lucania was renamed Basilicata. It is a quiet place. The people still call themselves Lucanians. At night, the witches are still flying.

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Naples: Pulcinella

There’s a strange guy hanging out in the streets of Naples. A jokester with a big round belly, dressed in white with a cone-shaped sugar loaf hat. His face half hidden underneath a black, beaked mask, he splurges on Spaghetti and slurps red wine from the bottle. He waggles when he walks, like a nine month-pregnant woman, and when he sings, it’s with a screeching falsetto voice. He’s everywhere, depicted on posters and advertisements, modelled from lava stone or carved from wood by the puppet-makers in the old part of town. He is Pulcinella, the symbol and personification of Naples.

Pulcinella is both a peasant and an urbanite, both a stranger and a local. He’s clever and naïve, mischievous and loyal. Old but immortal, he’s both a woman and a man, both human and bird. In his unbound laughter lies sadness, behind his bird’s mask the unfaltering determination to face the troubles and the hard times. His eyes tell the story of oppression, of marginalisation, and prejudice. 

As ungraspable as Pulcinella is, his life is well documented. In the 1797 book “Entertainment for Children” (Divertimento per Li Ragazzi) the late baroque painters father and son Tiepolo depicted the life of Pulcinella from his birth to beyond his many deaths:

Pulcinella hatched from a giant egg. Legend has is that was an egg incidentally fertilized by the severed testicles cut off a young boy – his father trained the boy as a castrato, a falsetto singer, a wide spread art form in 16th and 17th century-Europe. Pulcinella’s birdlike nativity could well be a baroque version of the ancient Greek creation myth, which goes like this:

In the beginning, when there was nothing but empty darkness, there was but a bird with black wings named Nyx. With the wind, Nyx laid a golden egg and out of it rose Eros, the god of love. One half of the egg shell rose into the air and became the sky, the other one became the Earth. Then Eros made them fall in love.

In the children’s book, Pulcinella was raised both on the countryside and in the city. He liked to play, and he loved to fly: Pulcinella can be seen swinging on a trapeze, and walking the tightrope. He’s playing shuttlecock, or Badminton, which was called volano back then – Italian for flying. An act, by the way, associated with falling in love.

Oh, how Pulcinella loved to play… To play, being free from restrictions and inhibition, an activity completely unproductive, but joyful, improvisational, and imaginative. Play, so psychology teaches us, is the basis of all civilisation, and so is Pulcinella most basically Neapolitan. Ludere is the Latin word for to play – and Pulcinella was playful and ludicrous, just like the city.

No wonder that high-flying Pulcinella fell in love, and married, and had many children. And of course he travelled the world and lived through many adventures. He worked as a barber, a carpenter, a tailor and an artist. He got arrested, imprisoned and pardoned. He fell ill, he died not one but many gruesome deaths and was resurrected.

In the story of Pulcinella it is impossible not to see the parallels with ancient myths as they were told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis – a book so fundamental to Greek and Roman culture – but also with the bible. Pulcinella has in fact been compared to Jesus, most notably by the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot. While likening Pulcinella to Jesus might not go down so well in radically catholic city like Naples, it is however save to say that Pulcinella speaks on a subconscious level, tells of the constant changing and transformation of life, and radiates the fascination and charisma of Jesus Christ.

Without doubt, Pulcinella is older than Naples. Pulcinella gave birth to Naples, he is Naples and everyone who has ever lived here.

While the myth is eternal, the figure Pulcinella is ascribed to a certain Silvio Fiorillo, an actor and playwright, who lived in the 17th century, when Naples suffered under the yoke of the Spanish empire, taxes were exorbitant. Fiorillo created a character with a rebel heart, a defiant servant by the name of Policinella, or Policenello, or Policiniela, or Pulcinello, or Pulcinella – depending on the edition and source. All names share a conspicuous resemblance to the Italian pulcino, chick.

Yet, Fiorillo, didn’t invent Pulicinella. Rather, he condensed many myths and lores of his times into this one secondary character in his book of 1632, La Lucilla Costante. Soon, cheeky Pulcinella became a favourite character of the Commedia dell’ Arte, the travelling theatre companies of baroque Italy.

The Commedia dell’Arte itself stems from ancient times, namely from the Oscan Plays. Oscan was the language of the native people who settled in what is nowadays called Campania and Basilicata, the instep of the Italian boot. Later, under the Greeks and Romans, these plays were called Atellean Commedies or Atellean Farces. These highly improvised plays, intermitted by song and dance, were not performed in amphitheatres, but entertained their audiences on marketplaces or town squares, little farces that dealt with everyday problems. The noise and bustle at these gatherings didn’t allow the spoken word to travel far, so the actors had to rely on body language and wore costumes and masks that accentuated their traits. These masks were well-defined stereotypes, such as the clownish Maccus, the gluttonous Buccus, or hump-backed Dossennus among others –  characters who would later turn into the well-known and popular characters of the Commedia Dell’ Arte.

Probably blending the clown Maccus and the eternally hungry Buccus, Fiorillo dressed his Pulcinella in the loose white clothes that were associated with the people of Acerra, a little town not far from Naples. Acerra was known for frequent floodings and swamps which bestowed on the Acerrans Malaria , and bad odors. The little city had been founded in the early centuries AD by the Nasamoni, descendents of the dark-skinned soldiers from Northern Africa. The venerated black Saints and black Madonne of the region are still vestige of this early black Italian people. But Acerra was also known for its fertile soils and the Acerran produce: fresh fruit and vegetables sold by the Parulani, the grocers, in the big city, in Naples.

Today still, in the Neapolitan dialect, a Parulano is not only a green grocer, but a person who talks and behaves in a rustic manner, in every sense of the word. The phrase Parulano chi fa la Zeza, (Zeza meaning Lucretia, Pulcinella’s girl-friend) describes a very feminine man, and the Fare il Ballo di Parulano tellingly means cross-dressing, a man in woman’s clothes. 

Pulcinella was at the peak of his fame at the end of the 18th century. In her heydays, the city of Naples was the biggest city of the world, the pulsating capital of the Kingdom of Naples, center of art and erudition. Artists, poets, musicians and scholars flocked to the city. The aristocracy indulged in games and gambling, and Pergolesi, the composer of spiritual music, wrote the Pulcinella suite.

But also, Italy was under attack by the French under Napoleon, the Enlightenment a veritable threat to the kingdoms and states on the Italian peninsula. A strategy of defence was needed, a figure of identification, of unification. A nation had to be created, and who better for the job than Pulcinella, who had hatched from an egg like Eros, resurrected like Jesus Christ? Someone who meant everything and embraced everyone.

Italy was unified in 1861, and Naples degraded to an insignificant city at the outskirts of Europe. The South soon became the poor and unloved sibling or the rich, industrial North, where cities like Milan and Turin garnered fame and money in fashion and automobile industry. Southern Italians were dubbed the “Africans of Italy”, and this was not meant as a compliment.

It must not be forgotten, that the original Pulcinella, was in fact in an immigrant, a person of color, shamed and ridiculed for their origins. A character who transcended myths and beliefs, gender and categorization, who turns struggle into game, hobble into dance, ridicule into laughter. A character just like Naples, a city whose pure mentioning evokes chaos, poverty, and gangsterism, a dance at the foot of a furious fire-spitting volcano. A city buried under ashes and resurrected. Old and immortal.

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Naples: The Siren, the Queen and the Poetess

PARTHENOPE

Legend has it, that the South Italian city of Naples, built so precariously close to the furious volcano Vesuvio, stands where once the dead body of the Siren Parthenope had been washed ashore. Lovesick, the sweet-voiced maiden had drowned herself in the waves. In Naples, not even the Sirenes are immortal.

MARIA CAROLINA

The teenage princess was appalled. At the court of Vienna, Maria Carolina, second youngest daughter of the empress of Austria, had been educated in contemporary erudition. She spoke five languages. She knew how to dance, to fence, to ride and act with confidence. But now her mother Maria Theresia, the matriarch who led both her empire and her family with an iron fist, wed her off to Ferdinand, King of Naples.

Everybody knew that King Ferdinand of Naples was an illiterate fool. The only language he mastered was Neapolitan, the language of the street. He was dubbed the Re Lazzarone, the king of the mob. On top he was ugly. He had no manners. He liked to kill fenced animals and call it hunting. He grabbed his concubines by their private parts. He shat where he ate.

Maria Carolina begged her mother to let her stay in Vienna. She cried. She screamed. She held on to her favorite sister, Maria Antonia. In vain. The empress was adamant. Off she sent her daughter to the Mediterranean Sea.

Sailboat in the Gulf of Naples

King Ferdinand had ascended the thrown at the age of eight, and the decision to keep him uneducated was a political one. His father, King Carlos of Spain, didn’t want him to be a strong leader, but rather a compliant place holder. The state business was run behind closed doors by a council reporting to the Spanish court – a council that dutifully taxed Italian lands to finance the Spanish wars. An innocuous sixteen-year old virgin from Vienna was deemed the perfect queen for this kingdom at the outskirts of Europe.

Cobble Stoned Street

The immediate consumption of her marriage upon her arrival in Naples was probably the most painful, but not the only shock Maria Carolina had to endure. The Southern sun was scorching and the Royal Spanish etiquette as stiffling and serious as the cobble-stoned city was noisy and chaotic. On top, Maria Carolina discovered that the kingdom was rundown, held in a tight grip by organized crime, by a corrupt clergy and a decadent aristocracy. The treasury was nearly depleted. The military was at the brink of collapse. Diseases ravaged through the filthy streets and the poor were starving. To her husband their misery was entertainment. In front of the Royal Palace he had a scaffolding erected, decorated with live animals and food, the so called Albero della Cugagna. From his window he rejoiced at the sight of the poor fighting each other to the blood, often killing each other over a pig, a hen or a loaf of bread. The young Queen was appalled. But not disheartened, she was after all a trained queen.

Discounted Baby Jesus

Maria Carolina dutifully bore heirs to the king (18 in the 20 years to come), the first son Francesco opening her the doors to the council. She taught her husband to read and write. She established charitable institutions for the impoverished. She championed the arts. She planned workers’ residencies. Soon, Maria Carolina took over the reins of the kingdom and proved herself a capable politician and a strong-willed leader.

Ferdinand, Maria Carolina in the midst of their children

ELEONORA

At sixteen, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel spoke five languages plus Latin and Old Greek. The extra-ordinarily intelligent young women, a daughter of Portuguese immigrants, had published poetry that afforded her the position of head librarian to the Queen of Napples, Maria Carolina, and opened her the doors to freemason societies and the intellectual circles of Naples: the highly acclaimed Accademia dei Filateli and the Arcadia.  

Throughout history, Naples had been a center of education and art. The famous Opera house Teatro San Carlo had opened its doors in 1735 (and never closed them again). Artists like Caravaggio and Bernini, musicians like Pergolesi and Scarlatti had found a home in the bustling cobble-stoned streets. In the 13th century already, a university had been founded, and scientists and scholars taught at numerous Academias. Now, in the late 18th century, the intellectuals of Naples reflected on the writings of Voltaire. Eleonora, who corresponded with various intellectuals, was inflamed by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and Voltaire by her. “The nightingale of beautiful Italy” he called her.

Eleonora had escaped a brutal husband, whose domestic violence also resulted in the death of her infant son Francesco. Now she searched to end the outrageous inequality in the kingdom of Naples. Eleonora engaged in social reformatory projects to improve the living conditions of the lazzaroni, the lower class.

The lazzaroni themselves however, were strongly opposed to these new ideas of equality and fraternity. They were profoundly catholic and superstitious. To science they preferred the miracles in their sparkling golden churches. To reformatory ideas they preferred the gruesome Albero dell Cuccagna. They adored their King, who lived unrestrained by political correctness or etiquette. The lazzari were in fact royalists.

In her Royal Palace, which had underground tunnels to various places in the city, Queen Maria Carolina secretly approved and even collaborated with the intellectuals of the Academia, she too was with the freemasons. She too wanted reforms. But then the unspeakable happened.

In Paris, the Jacobins had put her sister Maria Antonia, now called Marie Antoinette, on the guillotine. Maria Carolina was heartbroken over her sister’s death, whom she had never seen again after she left Vienna. She vowed to revenge her death. But Paris was far away, and so the Academia became her enemy.

Eleonora was thrown into jail and Maria Carolina turned into an ardent counter-revolutionary. She, who had favoured the arts and the freemasons before, now turned Naples into a police state, mobilized the army, set up a tight spy system. On the verge of paranoia, she employed food testers and slept in a different royal apartment each night. Then things got worse.

In 1798, on his conquering spree, Napoleon Bonaparte himself appeared in the gulf of Naples and it was thanks to Maria Carolina’s long relations with England, that the legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson came to her rescue. The liaison between the captain, his young lover Lady Hamilton and the Queen led to racy rumours – where the Admiral and the Queen lovers? Or the Queen and the young beautiful Lady Hamilton? Or were the three engaged in a ménage à trois? – These rumors were of course set into the world by the French, who, reckoning that it was Maria Carolina who ran the kingdom, and not her husband, tried to ruin her popularity with the people. True or not, the badmouthing failed. If anything, the people were entertained by the royal scandals.

Inside Teatro San Carlo

Eventually though, Admiral Nelson had other wars to tend to. He and Lady Hamilton left Naples, and without her protectors Maria Carolina, had to flee Naples. Too strong was the hate between the French and the Austrian Queen of Naples, to great the fear of the guillotine. The Royal couple escaped through one of their secret underground tunnels to the harbor and boarded a ship to Sicily. Whatever was left in the treasury, they took with them.

The King and Queen had deserted their people, but still the lazzaroni stood with them. The mob had assembled in front of the Royal Palace, demanding arms to fight the French themselves. But there were no arms for them, and so their hate against the Jacobins and the Enlightenment was their only weapon in the uneven battle against the French army. The bloody street fights left the lazzaroni dead by the thousands, and it took the French two days to declare victory.

Appalled and frightened by the bloodshed around her, Eleonora and the Academia had sought refuge in the Castel San Elmo, on top of the hill overlooking Naples. Now that the battle was over and the French successful, they announced the end of the monarchy and on January 21, 1799 they declared the Repubblica Parthenopea, a Republic modelled after the French République, named after the luckless Siren.

Castel San Elmo, seen from the Palazzo Reale, the Royal Palace

Eleonora believed in education. She was convinced that with some help, the lazzaroni, who had impressed her in their faith and determination, could achieve a higher cultural level. In the Monitore Napolitano, the Republican newspaper she published on her own, she appealed to the courage of all: Because freedom cannot be loved in half… and cannot produce its effects until everyone is free. She searched for conciliation between the Republicans and the Royalists. Their catholicism, their rituals, believes and even their superstition should not be ignored, she wrote. In vain. She disapproved of the radicalism of their French Sister Republic, who was now demanding taxes from her Italian sister Republic, very much like the Spanish had done before. Already Eleonora had second thoughts about the Revolution and the Repubblica Partenopea. But soon her mind was changed again.

After the Lazzaroni’s defeat, it was the farmers of the surrounding lands that took to arms, or rather took their axes and hoes marched into the city. Their rage and violence was unparalleled, their monikers telling of their brutality: Fra Diavolo (Brother Devil), Sciabolone (Big Sword) and Panzanera (Black Belly) ravaged through the streets. Centuries of oppression erupted in ire like lava flowing from Vesuvius. “Viva Maria!” they screamed as they pillaged through Southern Italy. It was in fact the church, in the person of Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, set as vice roy by Ferdinand before he fled, who had managed to bundle the farmers’ hate against the Republicans. Again, fearing for her life, Eleonora withdrew to Castel San Elmo, imploring her French brothers and sisters for help. In vain.

In the dilapidated Royal Palace in Sicily, Maria Carolina learned the news of Cardinale Ruffo’s victory. Yet she was consternated. Why had the Cardinale promised safe conduct to the Republicans when her sister’s death on the guillotine had not yet been revenged? Consumed by hate and rage, she again called on her friends, Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton.

Admiral Nelson did a good job. Accompanied by his sweet wife he entered the port of Naples just as Eleonora and the other revolutionaries were waiting to board a ship that would bring them safely to Toulon, as Cardinale Ruffo had promised. Instead, Nelson had them all arrested. Eleonora was condemned to death, and the intellectual scene of the city wiped out.

Details of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, Museo Real di Capodimonte

Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel asked to be decapitated, a wish that was not fulfilled. One of 120 revolutionaries condemned to death in the aftermath of the Rebubblica Perthenopea, she was hanged on Market Square on August 20. The lazzaroni were waiting under the scaffolding, ready to peep under her skirt, as not even her most basic wish to tie her legs together with a belt was granted.  

“Long Live Carolina, Death to the Jacobina!” They chanted.

Six years later, in 1806, Maria Carolina had to flee Naples again. Napoleon had defeated the Austrians and crowned himself king of Italy. She travelled to Vienna, where she had to learn that in an effort to appease the French, her own grand daughter Maria Luisa was wed to no one else but Napoleon Bonaparte. Maria Carolina died in Vienna, in 1814, at the age of 64.

Legend has it, that as she stepped on the scaffolding, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel quoted Virgil, the Roman Roman poet from Naples.

Perhaps one day this will be worth remembering

Detail of Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy, Chiesa Maria del Misericordia
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Rome: The Best Of Days

The Forum Romanum. The Saturn Temple at the base of the Capitol Hill

When days were shortest and darkest, the Roman poet Catulla found them the best of days. For a week in the end of December, the law courts closed in Rome, and the schools. No business could be transacted and to commence a war was regarded impious. People offered little presents, mostly wax figurines, to the children and the poor, and decorated their homes with greeneries and lights.

The streets of Rome were governed by a general spirit of merriness. Public gambling was allowed, and foolish tricks were played. People dressed in loose, colorful gowns instead of their white togas, and wore cone shaped hats. All of them! Slaves, freedmen, citizens suddenly were indistinguishable. “Io, Saturnalia!” The crowds exclaimed.

a man with a pelleus – a felt hat

From December 17 to 24, the Saturnalia, the festivities to honor the God Saturn, were held in ancient Rome. Saturn had reigned the worlds in the Golden Age, when humans still enjoyed the earth’s bounty without having to work for it. Therefore Saturn was considered the God of agriculture and the Saturnalia were celebrated as a kind of harvest-home; by December the hard work in the fields was completed and people brought evergreens and lights into their homes.

Citizens, freedmen, slaves were indistinguishable for the week of the Saturnalia.

That the Saturnalia were held at the time of the winter solstice was not a coincidence: Sol Invictus, the invincible sun, was returning to enlighten humankind again. The migratory aspect of the sun’s trajectory and the seasons was reflected in much older myths that had Saturn down as an immigrant from Greece. As can be learned from the writings of Ovid and Virgil, Saturn was dispelled by his own father, Jupiter, an expulsion that ended the Golden Age and left humans waiting for Saturn’s return.

Until then, the Saturnalia brought a short comic relief. Social roles were reversed. In fact, slaves were not only exempted from their chores and toils, but were served by their masters, granted freedom for a week.

The Colosseum in Rome, where gladiators fought for their lives – as a sacrifice to Saturn. Wealth, Ops, only followed Lua, destruction.

While the Romans considered Saturn a liberator who brought with him wealth and peace, they also recognized his ambiguity. He was two-faced. Saturn’s wife, Ops, incorporated abundance and resources – but he also had a first wife, Lua, the goddess of destruction. It was for her that in the beginning of times, human sacrifice was offered during the Saturnalia, in form of dead gladiators. It took a hero, a shining light, to come along and end this inhuman rite, it is told. This savior was, of course, Hercules.

Hercules, the savior, through the eyes of a Pope (bronze statue at Vatican Museum.)

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Rome On Ecstasy

This month 500 years ago, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther published his 95 theses and thereby started the Protestant Reformation. He called for purification of the church, who in the run of the centuries had turned into a self-serving system of greed, nepotism and decadence. Christians should have faith in God and the Bible alone, Luther declared, and not in the army of angels and Saints, nor “immaculate” Mother Mary and least of all the Pope.

An angel fighting off vice – or killing a Protestant. Interior Chiesa San Luigi Dei Francesi, Rome

The Catholic Church stroke back: in arms (the bloodthirsty Thirty Year War broke loose) and arts. In a meticulously planned propaganda campaign (conspired at the Council of Trent 1543-63) they called for artists to flock to the eternal city and create buildings, paintings and sculptures that were so formidable and awe-inspiring they’d resurrect faith in Angels and Saints and Mother Mary, and most of all the Pope. But above all, they should instill fear of hell and punishment into an illiterate people. And so Baroque was born. Mesmerizing to this day.

Ceiling Fresco inside Villa Borghese, built around 1600 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an admirer, collector and protector of Caravaggio

The world’s biggest church was built, St. Peter’s Basilica, in honor of the first Pope. Michelango was bullied into adorning the ceiling with formidable depictions of God’s grandezza. Michelangelo grumbled – he was a sculptor, not a painter, after all – but gave in.

Caravaggio self portrait as decapitated Goliath. ( David and Goliath Vienna KHM)

By the end of the 16th century, the Church found another Michelangelo, whose realistic and detailed depictions of beheadings and other pains very much satisfied their need for intimidation. On the downside, the guy was unpredictable and prone to outbursts of violence. Worse, he was a murderer. His name was Michelangelo Merisi, but he went by the name of Caravaggio.

St. John the Baptist hugs a ram. Caravaggio 1602, at Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome

Caravaggio first rose to fame through extremely realistic depictions of delicious fruit baskets and boys. The Cardinals, whose predilection for youth was well known and documented (The insider account Il puttanismo Romano was published anonymously) went crazy for both the painter and his canvases. Caravaggio himself, however, was also leaning towards women. While he complied with the church’s demand to glorify Mother Mary, he did so by using full-busted, sensual courtesans as models, and not thin pale nuns. It was a problem with him – women in the Catholic Church of course had to be chaste. Raped, if anything, but not lascivious. Finally, they had him paint old men as dying Saints, paintings they could display in their chapels. The martyrs of St. Mathew and St. Peter were immediate block busters: The contrasts of light and dark, the depth of field, the intensity, the drama were breathtaking, and still are, 400 years later.

A busted Mother Mary steps on a snake – the model was a well known courtesan, the painting, despite commissioned by the Vatican, was finally not accepted.

The council of Trent had outlawed any worldly pleasure. Dances and carnivals were forbidden, books banned and priests were asked to spy on their parishioners. (Easy, they had to confess anyway.)

interior Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome

Art became a surrogate for bodily desires and should channel them into spirituality. Saints and martyrs were shown in the moment of rapture, in the throngs of ecstasy. Ex Stasis meant the experience of being taken outside of oneself, to where one catches a preview of heaven, the moment when one is united with the beloved, with God. A little Death, as it was later called. Or: orgasm.

Bernini redesigned St. Peter’s square

The church enlisted architects  to turn the city into the shape of a star and sculptors Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini and  Pietro da Cortona to beautify it with sculptures, fountains and staricases.

Pope Innocent X commissioned Bernini, whose sculptures were ummatched in expression and elegance, to design the famous Fountain of the four Rivers at Piazza Navona. The four rivers represented Rome also a colonial world power. Innocent X himself went down in history for his greediness – and for his even greedier sister-in-law and lover Pimpaccia. Pimpaccia was said to pull the strings behind Innocent. Their residence, Palazzo Doria Pamhilj, by coincidence at the Piazza Navona, is a vestige of their insatiable greed.

Detail of Fountain 4 Fiumini at Piazza Navona, Rome

The fountain was of course constructed on public expense – during the great famine of 1646-48 – and not surprisingly it was not met with much enthusiasm by the starving people. Riots lay in the air. Under cover of the night, protesters stuck posters on the stone blocks, so called Pasquinades:
“We do not want obelisks and fountains. It is bread that we want. Bread, Bread, Bread!”
In a spirit of Christian compassion, Pope Innocent X had the protesters spied out and arrested.
The fountain was built, but Pope Innocent X met a terrible end. While he lay on his death bed in Palazzo Dori Pamphilj, Pimpaccia robbed all his money and fled the city. His agony lasted three days, three days of ecstasy for Innocent X, 200 years for Rome. Then, the era of Baroque was over.

Splendor and Passion: Bernini’s sculptures attract tourists from around the world. At Galleria Borghese

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Rome: Watching the Sky

In ancient Rome, augury was the major kind of divination. This included watching the sky, thunder and lightning, but most importantly the auspices, watching the birds. Eagles and vultures were Jupiter’s most important messengers.

Nothing was decided without consulting an augur, a priest who could interpret the flight, the song and dance of birds. Most notoriously, Romulus and Remus settled their dispute on where to found the city of Rome by an augury. Romulus, of course, had the better auspices. He spotted more vultures than his brother Remus, which also granted the former the right to fratricide.

The she-wolf that raised Remus and Romulus against a purple, thunderous Roman sky on the Capitoline Hill, where Romulus founded Rome.

The auspices was restricted to certain species, which are hard to come across in the busy city nowadays. Like in any other coastal city, giant gulls and pigeons seem to outnumber the rest of Rome’s avian population.

A giant gull over-looking his city from the Palletino, the power center of ancient Rome.

Since the Roman Empire extended over a vast part of Northern Africa, tropical birds were imported as sought-after pets. Emperor Nero famously owned an African Gray parrot, Pontius Pilatus’ wife, Claudia, kept lovebirds in a cage, who looked not unlike the Monaco Parakeet.

A Parrocco Monaco sneaking from behind a tree in the beautiful Borghese gardens.

Today’s most flamboyant Roman bird, the gregarious Monaco Parakeet, only arrived in Rome in the early 1970ies. The striking, green parrots have since seamlessly integrated into Italian lifestyle, not causing any harm to local Wildlife, according to the Italian Wildlife Fund. These bright flying jewels color the ancient buildings, which, when built, where not as marble-white, but painted in manifold colors.

Pigeons at the Tiber at sunset, Ponte Vittorio Emanuele in the back.

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The Alps/Les Hautes Alpes: My Heart Leaps Up

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

In 1790, the English poet William’s Wordsworth visited the Alps, hiking Swiss mountain passes into Italy, and farther into France. He expressed his awe for the spectacular scenery of the Alps in a collection of poems, yet the beauty of the high mountains, and his veneration of the untamed Alpine Nature can be found in the entirety of his works.

So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive,
Would that the little Flowers were born to live,
Conscious of half the pleasure which they give;

How clear, how keen, how marvellously bright
The effluence from yon distant mountain’s head,
Which, strewn with snow smooth as the sky can shed,
Shines like another sun–on mortal sight

Praised be the Rivers, from their mountain springs
Shouting to Freedom, “Plant thy banners here!”
To harassed Piety, “Dismiss thy fear,
And in our caverns smooth thy ruffled wings!

More than 200 years later, while the world has changed completely, the Alps are still as untamed and aweinspiring.