2007 Italy tour
Created | Updated Jun 3, 2023
Greetings from <italy
Jul 10, 2007
Im in the middle of a ten-day concert tour of Italy with the Dedham Choral Society. (Just call me Paolo. Just dont expect to see any apostophes, as I cant find them on this Italian keyboard).
I will have many stories to tell when I get back to the safety of my own computer. Stories such as:
--The lost luggage (Not mine, thankfully, but for eight of our singers there was no joy at the baggage retrieval section)
--The tour bus that was too big to fit the narrow, long steep road up to our hotel.
--Bank cards that refused to yield any cash, badly needed cash
----------------------------------------------------
Posted Jul 21, 2007 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
This is a reply to this Posting Posting 12
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Sounds like a plan, Pierce. ok
In the meantime, here's what I've transcribed from my daily journal so far:
DEDHAM CHORAL SOCIETY TOUR OF ITALY, 2007
[This is a transcription of my journal from the trip]
Thursday, July 5, 2007
I was way too prepared. My two suitcases were fully packed a day ahead of time, with copies of all the important documents (passport photocopies, emergency contact lists, even the packing list itself) in each bag, as well as nestled somewhere on my person as I walked out the front door today at noon. The plane wouldn’t leave until 5:30, but I wanted to be at Logan early.
Naturally, being too organized almost guarantees that the things you couldn’t
have anticipated will start to go wrong. So, I got to Logan three hours early, arriving in the boarding pass line just as the printer for baggage labels broke down. Twenty minutes went by, with none of the staff knowing how to fix it. By now the line was very long. The staff began writing the baggage labels by hand.
We got to the plane on time, enjoyed a smooth flight to Paris Airport, and from Paris to Rome. Air France impressed with its absolutely delectable food.
Friday, July 6, 2007
We walked off the plane at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport with high hopes for the rest of our trip. We didn’t yet realize that the label-printer snafu at Logan would come back to haunt us. Most of us got our luggage and waited with Theri, our local tour guide, by the exit. However, 8 of us waited in vain at the luggage carousel. Hours went by. The eight Luggage-deprived passengers went to file lost baggage claims. While they were doing that, I went to a nearby Bancomat ATM machine to get my first supply of Euros.
The baggage snafu pushed us off-schedule by at least two hours. We had no idea that things would get even worse as we got into our bus and were driven to our hotel. On the plus side, our tour group had given us an economical hotel with a beautiful view of the Vatican. Beautiful views have a downside, however: they usually require that you be on a hill or an upper floor. So, when we got off the bus near our hotel, we discovered that (a.) the bus was too long to drive up the narrow road to the hotel, (b.) the hotel didn’t have shuttle buses, and (c.) we were two hours late for our first walking tour of Rome, so we needed to get ourselves and our luggage up to the hotel pronto so we could check in. Mamma Mia! We walked up the hill. We checked in. We walked back down to the bus.
Our tour group had found an excellent and knowledgable tour guide for our
first walking tour of Rome. Her name was Gabriela, an expert on antiquities who had written many books and taught at a nearby college. She was also a comedienne, or so she thought. Some of us soon wearied of her barbed humor about the unreliability of Italian men. Mercifully, we were given enough time to grab a bite of lunch at one of the cafes in the area. Then, back to the bus for another long walk up to the hotel.
By now, some of us had not slept in 36 hours, and we somehow had to stay awake long enough to have our first group dinner of the tour. Like our hotel, the secluded little restaurant we were directed to was nowhere near the spot where the bus dropped us off. This meant another long walk, past the Piazza Navone, with its statue of Hercules. All that walking had given some of us hearty appetites. Could we satisfy them while battling extreme fatigue? The restaurant turned out to be a major test for us. First we had appetizers, bits of toast topped with prosciuto or melted cheese. Half an hour later, plates of pasta appeared. Then another half hour elapsed, followed by salad. Then beef with potatoes, and finally tiramisu. There was no insomnia for any of us at our hotel that night!
Saturday, July 7
Hope springs eternal. Today the tide would turn in our favor. The hotel’s Continental Breakfast did not offer much choice: bread and jam, two types of cold cereal, and a little cheese and ham, plus coffee. The coffee was good and strong, though. And this was a low-cost hotel, which was helping to make the tour affordable for us.
At 8:30 a.m., we walked down the hill to our bus (again!), to be shuttled to the Colosseum for a tour of the ruins of ancient Rome. Half of us had Gabriela again, but I was in the lucky group led by the charming Paolo. We had to wear electronic devices so we could hear Paolo while we toured the first and second floors of the Colosseum. Warned by my fellow touristers that I needed a hat, I purchased a nice blue visored
Cap that said “Roma” at a kiosk outside the Colosseum. Paolo led us through the Capitoline Hill area, and down the excavated path to the Roman Forum. He even treated us to a rendition of Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech by Shakespeare. This should have been the end of his obligation to us, but we liked him a lot, and persuaded him to point us toward the Pantheon. On the way, he showed us a cluster of magnificent buildings (still in use as government office buildings) designed by Michelangelo.
A few blocks later, we came to the Pantheon, which was in immaculate condition despite being about 2,000 years old. Once a Roman temple, the Pantheon was now a Christian church. It has the form of an inverted bowl, with just an open round skylight at the top of the dome. The statues of ancient Roman deities and VIP’s sit side by side with Renaissance Christian paintings. Visiting choral groups are allowed to sing one song, as a Russian group was doing when we came in. Some of us had hoped to sing “Amazing Grace,” but not enough of us had brought our music.
Coming out of the Pantheon, we split up into smaller groups. The group I was in ate at a nearby restaurant that had been recommended by someone’s brother-in-law. As a restaurant, it deserved high grades: good service, exemplary table linens, good food. The prices were a bit high, I thought: salmon pasta was 13 Euros. The mixed salad was 6 Euros.We took the #64 bus back to the hill where our hotel was. One member of our group had an artificial leg, which made walking up the hill a torment. We flagged down a taxi for him.
(to be continued)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted Jul 23, 2007 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
This is a reply to this Posting Posting 17
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The food in the Borghese cafe is yummy. I ate a plate of sliced tomatoes with a lump of mozzarella cheese, and some little pie-like pastries drool . The image on my desktop is the fountain at the Borghese.wow
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted Jul 24, 2007 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
This is a reply to this Posting Posting 19
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But it wasn't just any old sliced tomatoes and mozzarella. It was the freshest tomatoes and the freshest mozzarella, that melted in your mouth drool
The restaurants I ate in ran the gamut, but they never served canned vegetables. Even a cheap, 3-Euro cheese and spinach sandwich (in Florence) was delicious.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted Jul 25, 2007 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
This is a reply to this Posting Posting 23
Previous Posting
Here's the next instalment in my critique of the tour:
I had a few hours to kill before our evening concert, so I asked the concierge if the hotel had a laundry. The answer was no, but he helpfully told of a Laundromat not far away, across from a Farmacia. Naturally, it would have to be at the bottom of the hill. So, I walked down the hill (again) with a bundle of laundry, spent 8 Euros getting it washed, and walked back up the hill to hang it up in my room. Happily, by now the tour organizers had rounded up a shuttle bus to take us down the hill, and thence to the Chiesa Valdese di Roma (Valdesian Church of Rome) for the first concert of our tour.
We rehearsed in the church. Things went well. We walked a block or two to a restaurant for our supper. Service was leisurely, meaning a lengthy wait for the salad course, and another lengthy wait for the pasta course, which turned out to be lasagna.
Our schedule was tight, and we had to leave before the tiramisu arrived. Then, back to the church, where we changed into our concert attire (black tuxedo pants, white shirts, black ties, and cummerbunds for the men, black skirts and white blouses for the women). Our audience was not large, but our 9 nonsinging members helped to make it seem larger. There were also a couple dozen people who were waiting for a bus in front of the church. They listened at the back of the church for quite a while, until their bus arrived.
The Valdesian is one of the few Protestant churches in Rome. It has stained glass windows arranged in three levels along the side walls of the sanctuary. The ceiling overhead is flat, not vaulted, giving the interior a boxy shape, not unlike Boston's Symphony Hall.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
For some of us, singing for a Catholic Mass at Saint Peter's Basilica was the most anticipated part of the tour. We were scheduled for a 12:15 p.m. Mass today, which meant being on the bus by 9:15 a.m., so we could drive to the Vatican parking garage and stand in the hot sun until being admitted at 10:30. The line we were in was long and slow-moving. We had been told that Vatican security was extremely strict. Bring nothing but your music, we were told. Not even money. Not even our hotel room keys.
The immensity of Saint Peter's does not dawn on you at first. Being intensely focused on the performance we were about to give, we didn't realize that five other Masses would be going on in other parts of the basilica simultaneously. During the Mass (which was conducted in Italian), I didn't understand more than 5% of what the priest was saying. A Vatican organist gave our conductor the cues to stand up and sing. We sang two American traditional hymns ("Amazing Grace" and "Wondrous Love"), Mozart's "Ave Verum," and Vianna's "Exultate Justi"). The Mass ended at 1:05. We filed out, past alcoves and recesses where other services were going on.
Back to the hotel we went to change for the afternoon's excursion to the Borghese Museum. Now that we had shuttle buses to negotiate the hill for us, the hotel didn't seem like such a bad deal. However, the shuttle bus could only carry half of us, so this meant two trips. Our reservation at the Borghese was for 3:00, which meant being back at the bottom of the hill at 2:00. What we gained by the convenience of the shuttle bus, we lost by not having time for lunch.
The Borghese Museum is thought by many to be among the most beautiful museums in the world. It has many paintings depicting the Madonna and Child, a
fitting theme for a group that had sung at Saint Peter's just a few hours earlier.
Unfortunately, art (even great art) does not fill your belly. It took several trips up and down the stairs to find the museum's café. When I did find it, my search was rewarded with a plate of tomato slices and a large mound of mozzarelola cheese, and a few pie-like tarts.
Monday, July 9, 2007
We had been pressed for time at every point of our tour so far, but today seemed the worst ever, as we needed to check out of our hotel, pick up box breakfasts (but no coffee!!) by 6:30 a.m., and be on the bus by 7:00. Then we were off to the Vatican Museums for the morning. Other people were lined up at the front door when we got there. The line seemed to run on for miles. Our reservation was for 8:00 a.m ., and we barely made it.
I was lucky enough to be in Paolo's group again when we began our tour. We were given headphone sets, though mine only worked intermittently.Various rooms held ancient Greek and Roman statues. Further on, we were led through a hallway lined with huge tapestries, and then a room full of period maps. Finally, we arrived in the Sistine Chapel, where we were allowed 30 to spend minutes. Silence was required in the Chapel, but large numbers of people were there, and every so often a rrecorded voice would demand silence in six or seven different languages. The ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel are sublime in their depiction of pink and golden flesh against a sky-blue background.
I hated to leave after the 30 minutes were up, but Paolo was required to give us a more in-depth tour of Saint Peter's than we had had the day before. We learned that Saint Peter's is the largest church in Christendom, and that it houses the bodies of earlier popes, plus religious relics, and that it sits atop an earlier church that was built on the spot where Saint Peter was crucified by the Romans.
We said goodbye to Paolo and emerged from Saint Peters. Across the street from the Vatican entrance is the former residence of Pope Paul VI, which has been converted to a gift shop. Around the corner is a self-service restaurant with acceptable coffee and enough food to keep us going until lunch.
We met at the obelisk in Saint Peter's Square, and were led to our bus for the trip to Perugia. We stopped for lunch at a self-service restaurant that straddled the highway.
Our hotel in Perugia is designed with a jazz motif. The lowest level, which houses most of the dining areas, has laid out the design of an enormous piano keyboard on the floor in the Internet room. There are musical notes on the room keys as well as the walls in the guest rooms.
After checking into our hotel, we rode to the center of perugia and had a tour of the square, after which we were turned loose for supper. At the top of the hill in the main square, you can see the mountains in the distance, and several other hill towns a few miles away. Perugia has depended on a wall for most of its history, as have the other towns we saw. The nearest of them had a substantial wall, which the tour guide informed us was the "new wall," built in the 13th century. The "old wall" was put up in the 3 rd century.
The tour guide told us to try some of the local perugian food at restaurants on the Via Rocchi, a narrow, steep road surrounded by stone buildings that had probably been there for centuries, if not millennia. I sat at an outdoor table for bean-and-barley soup and a simple sandwich. (Later, another tour member told me I had chosen a place famous for its food and jazz performances. Who knew?)
Being a hill town, Perugia is laid out on many levels. To facilitate getting around, a series of escalators leads upwards from the bus station. The bus was to pick us up at the station at 9:00 p.m. While we waited, we listened to a free jazz concert at the back of the parking lot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After we left Perugia we went through Umbria, making a stop in Assissi, which like Perugia was a hill town. I remember going down into the bowels of the church where Saint Francis's relics were kept. They proudly displayed an ancient shirt that he wore. From the church we went to the top of the hill, where there were three more churches. One was the Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore, a rather simple church where we were to give a concert that evening. A second was the church of Catherine of Siena. The third was the Temple of Minerva, built in the first century A.D., which currently houses a church, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, built in 1539 and renovated in Baroque style in the 17th century. I enjoyed a leisurely meal in a restaurant, getting quite fond of putting olive oil and vinegar on my salad. I also was able to buy some toothpaste. Because my ATM card had been canceled by my bank (due to thieves in the Rome airport who made off with the PIN number and a copy of the chip on the card), I had to watch every penny. Our concert went well.
After it was over, we entered Tuscany. We travelled to a hotel in Bagni di Lucca, where we barely had time to freshen up before rehearsing for a concert that we were to give that night. The concert was a joint effort with an Italian gospel choir. Their repertoire was a hoot, consisting of a fair number of 1970s American pop songs.
The next day we did some sightseeing in Lucca, which was protected by a huge wall. Our tour guides showed us the palace where Napoleon's sister lived when she ruled the city. (Yes, eventually Napoleon was able to get into the city.) There was still some resentment of Napoleon's sister, because she tore down some residential areas next to the palace which were interfering with her view. Some friends and I climbed to the top of the wall, which had a lovely walking/jogging track. There were also some benches and shade trees, which were handy, as it was fairly hot. We met in the town square, where we saw a statue of Puccini.
After leaving Lucca we to Florence. It was an exceptionally hot day, well over 100 degrees F. Florence is the birthplace of opera. Two of the first operas to be written were jointly performed at the Pitti Palace, at the wedding of Maria de medici to Henri IV of france in 1600. The entertainment used portions of two composers' operatic versions of the Orfeo myth. Caccini's version was the first opera ever to be published. [His daughter Francesca became the world's first opera star, as well as composer of operas in her own right.] There are some amazing art museums there, too. Dante's statue is to the left of a major church, and a replica of Michelangelo's David is further down. I like Michelangelo because when he became wealthy and could afford a better workshop, he still spent most of his time in the grubby old one. If a great artist can get away with grubby quarters, there's hope for the rest of us. A third statue is that of Hercules by Bandinelli, whom Michelangelo dissed by comparing to a sack of potatoes. On a church in the square you can the high water mark form the 1966 flood of the Arno River. We spent some quality time in the uffizi gallery, where we were able to see the original David, the Birth of Venus, and many other great works.
Some of my fellow tourists went up to the top of the Duomo, but I didn't feel like climbing a lot of stairs, especially as one had to wait in a long line before even being admitted. It was hot enough that the gelato vendors were doing a good business.
Florence was our last destination in Italy. We flew from Florence back to Boston, with a connecting flight in Germany
Jul 10, 2007
Im in the middle of a ten-day concert tour of Italy with the Dedham Choral Society. (Just call me Paolo. Just dont expect to see any apostophes, as I cant find them on this Italian keyboard).
I will have many stories to tell when I get back to the safety of my own computer. Stories such as:
--The lost luggage (Not mine, thankfully, but for eight of our singers there was no joy at the baggage retrieval section)
--The tour bus that was too big to fit the narrow, long steep road up to our hotel.
--Bank cards that refused to yield any cash, badly needed cash
----------------------------------------------------
Posted Jul 21, 2007 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
This is a reply to this Posting Posting 12
Previous PostingNext Posting
Sounds like a plan, Pierce. ok
In the meantime, here's what I've transcribed from my daily journal so far:
DEDHAM CHORAL SOCIETY TOUR OF ITALY, 2007
[This is a transcription of my journal from the trip]
Thursday, July 5, 2007
I was way too prepared. My two suitcases were fully packed a day ahead of time, with copies of all the important documents (passport photocopies, emergency contact lists, even the packing list itself) in each bag, as well as nestled somewhere on my person as I walked out the front door today at noon. The plane wouldn’t leave until 5:30, but I wanted to be at Logan early.
Naturally, being too organized almost guarantees that the things you couldn’t
have anticipated will start to go wrong. So, I got to Logan three hours early, arriving in the boarding pass line just as the printer for baggage labels broke down. Twenty minutes went by, with none of the staff knowing how to fix it. By now the line was very long. The staff began writing the baggage labels by hand.
We got to the plane on time, enjoyed a smooth flight to Paris Airport, and from Paris to Rome. Air France impressed with its absolutely delectable food.
Friday, July 6, 2007
We walked off the plane at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport with high hopes for the rest of our trip. We didn’t yet realize that the label-printer snafu at Logan would come back to haunt us. Most of us got our luggage and waited with Theri, our local tour guide, by the exit. However, 8 of us waited in vain at the luggage carousel. Hours went by. The eight Luggage-deprived passengers went to file lost baggage claims. While they were doing that, I went to a nearby Bancomat ATM machine to get my first supply of Euros.
The baggage snafu pushed us off-schedule by at least two hours. We had no idea that things would get even worse as we got into our bus and were driven to our hotel. On the plus side, our tour group had given us an economical hotel with a beautiful view of the Vatican. Beautiful views have a downside, however: they usually require that you be on a hill or an upper floor. So, when we got off the bus near our hotel, we discovered that (a.) the bus was too long to drive up the narrow road to the hotel, (b.) the hotel didn’t have shuttle buses, and (c.) we were two hours late for our first walking tour of Rome, so we needed to get ourselves and our luggage up to the hotel pronto so we could check in. Mamma Mia! We walked up the hill. We checked in. We walked back down to the bus.
Our tour group had found an excellent and knowledgable tour guide for our
first walking tour of Rome. Her name was Gabriela, an expert on antiquities who had written many books and taught at a nearby college. She was also a comedienne, or so she thought. Some of us soon wearied of her barbed humor about the unreliability of Italian men. Mercifully, we were given enough time to grab a bite of lunch at one of the cafes in the area. Then, back to the bus for another long walk up to the hotel.
By now, some of us had not slept in 36 hours, and we somehow had to stay awake long enough to have our first group dinner of the tour. Like our hotel, the secluded little restaurant we were directed to was nowhere near the spot where the bus dropped us off. This meant another long walk, past the Piazza Navone, with its statue of Hercules. All that walking had given some of us hearty appetites. Could we satisfy them while battling extreme fatigue? The restaurant turned out to be a major test for us. First we had appetizers, bits of toast topped with prosciuto or melted cheese. Half an hour later, plates of pasta appeared. Then another half hour elapsed, followed by salad. Then beef with potatoes, and finally tiramisu. There was no insomnia for any of us at our hotel that night!
Saturday, July 7
Hope springs eternal. Today the tide would turn in our favor. The hotel’s Continental Breakfast did not offer much choice: bread and jam, two types of cold cereal, and a little cheese and ham, plus coffee. The coffee was good and strong, though. And this was a low-cost hotel, which was helping to make the tour affordable for us.
At 8:30 a.m., we walked down the hill to our bus (again!), to be shuttled to the Colosseum for a tour of the ruins of ancient Rome. Half of us had Gabriela again, but I was in the lucky group led by the charming Paolo. We had to wear electronic devices so we could hear Paolo while we toured the first and second floors of the Colosseum. Warned by my fellow touristers that I needed a hat, I purchased a nice blue visored
Cap that said “Roma” at a kiosk outside the Colosseum. Paolo led us through the Capitoline Hill area, and down the excavated path to the Roman Forum. He even treated us to a rendition of Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech by Shakespeare. This should have been the end of his obligation to us, but we liked him a lot, and persuaded him to point us toward the Pantheon. On the way, he showed us a cluster of magnificent buildings (still in use as government office buildings) designed by Michelangelo.
A few blocks later, we came to the Pantheon, which was in immaculate condition despite being about 2,000 years old. Once a Roman temple, the Pantheon was now a Christian church. It has the form of an inverted bowl, with just an open round skylight at the top of the dome. The statues of ancient Roman deities and VIP’s sit side by side with Renaissance Christian paintings. Visiting choral groups are allowed to sing one song, as a Russian group was doing when we came in. Some of us had hoped to sing “Amazing Grace,” but not enough of us had brought our music.
Coming out of the Pantheon, we split up into smaller groups. The group I was in ate at a nearby restaurant that had been recommended by someone’s brother-in-law. As a restaurant, it deserved high grades: good service, exemplary table linens, good food. The prices were a bit high, I thought: salmon pasta was 13 Euros. The mixed salad was 6 Euros.We took the #64 bus back to the hill where our hotel was. One member of our group had an artificial leg, which made walking up the hill a torment. We flagged down a taxi for him.
(to be continued)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted Jul 23, 2007 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
This is a reply to this Posting Posting 17
Previous PostingNext Posting
The food in the Borghese cafe is yummy. I ate a plate of sliced tomatoes with a lump of mozzarella cheese, and some little pie-like pastries drool . The image on my desktop is the fountain at the Borghese.wow
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted Jul 24, 2007 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
This is a reply to this Posting Posting 19
Previous PostingNext Posting
But it wasn't just any old sliced tomatoes and mozzarella. It was the freshest tomatoes and the freshest mozzarella, that melted in your mouth drool
The restaurants I ate in ran the gamut, but they never served canned vegetables. Even a cheap, 3-Euro cheese and spinach sandwich (in Florence) was delicious.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted Jul 25, 2007 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
This is a reply to this Posting Posting 23
Previous Posting
Here's the next instalment in my critique of the tour:
I had a few hours to kill before our evening concert, so I asked the concierge if the hotel had a laundry. The answer was no, but he helpfully told of a Laundromat not far away, across from a Farmacia. Naturally, it would have to be at the bottom of the hill. So, I walked down the hill (again) with a bundle of laundry, spent 8 Euros getting it washed, and walked back up the hill to hang it up in my room. Happily, by now the tour organizers had rounded up a shuttle bus to take us down the hill, and thence to the Chiesa Valdese di Roma (Valdesian Church of Rome) for the first concert of our tour.
We rehearsed in the church. Things went well. We walked a block or two to a restaurant for our supper. Service was leisurely, meaning a lengthy wait for the salad course, and another lengthy wait for the pasta course, which turned out to be lasagna.
Our schedule was tight, and we had to leave before the tiramisu arrived. Then, back to the church, where we changed into our concert attire (black tuxedo pants, white shirts, black ties, and cummerbunds for the men, black skirts and white blouses for the women). Our audience was not large, but our 9 nonsinging members helped to make it seem larger. There were also a couple dozen people who were waiting for a bus in front of the church. They listened at the back of the church for quite a while, until their bus arrived.
The Valdesian is one of the few Protestant churches in Rome. It has stained glass windows arranged in three levels along the side walls of the sanctuary. The ceiling overhead is flat, not vaulted, giving the interior a boxy shape, not unlike Boston's Symphony Hall.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
For some of us, singing for a Catholic Mass at Saint Peter's Basilica was the most anticipated part of the tour. We were scheduled for a 12:15 p.m. Mass today, which meant being on the bus by 9:15 a.m., so we could drive to the Vatican parking garage and stand in the hot sun until being admitted at 10:30. The line we were in was long and slow-moving. We had been told that Vatican security was extremely strict. Bring nothing but your music, we were told. Not even money. Not even our hotel room keys.
The immensity of Saint Peter's does not dawn on you at first. Being intensely focused on the performance we were about to give, we didn't realize that five other Masses would be going on in other parts of the basilica simultaneously. During the Mass (which was conducted in Italian), I didn't understand more than 5% of what the priest was saying. A Vatican organist gave our conductor the cues to stand up and sing. We sang two American traditional hymns ("Amazing Grace" and "Wondrous Love"), Mozart's "Ave Verum," and Vianna's "Exultate Justi"). The Mass ended at 1:05. We filed out, past alcoves and recesses where other services were going on.
Back to the hotel we went to change for the afternoon's excursion to the Borghese Museum. Now that we had shuttle buses to negotiate the hill for us, the hotel didn't seem like such a bad deal. However, the shuttle bus could only carry half of us, so this meant two trips. Our reservation at the Borghese was for 3:00, which meant being back at the bottom of the hill at 2:00. What we gained by the convenience of the shuttle bus, we lost by not having time for lunch.
The Borghese Museum is thought by many to be among the most beautiful museums in the world. It has many paintings depicting the Madonna and Child, a
fitting theme for a group that had sung at Saint Peter's just a few hours earlier.
Unfortunately, art (even great art) does not fill your belly. It took several trips up and down the stairs to find the museum's café. When I did find it, my search was rewarded with a plate of tomato slices and a large mound of mozzarelola cheese, and a few pie-like tarts.
Monday, July 9, 2007
We had been pressed for time at every point of our tour so far, but today seemed the worst ever, as we needed to check out of our hotel, pick up box breakfasts (but no coffee!!) by 6:30 a.m., and be on the bus by 7:00. Then we were off to the Vatican Museums for the morning. Other people were lined up at the front door when we got there. The line seemed to run on for miles. Our reservation was for 8:00 a.m ., and we barely made it.
I was lucky enough to be in Paolo's group again when we began our tour. We were given headphone sets, though mine only worked intermittently.Various rooms held ancient Greek and Roman statues. Further on, we were led through a hallway lined with huge tapestries, and then a room full of period maps. Finally, we arrived in the Sistine Chapel, where we were allowed 30 to spend minutes. Silence was required in the Chapel, but large numbers of people were there, and every so often a rrecorded voice would demand silence in six or seven different languages. The ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel are sublime in their depiction of pink and golden flesh against a sky-blue background.
I hated to leave after the 30 minutes were up, but Paolo was required to give us a more in-depth tour of Saint Peter's than we had had the day before. We learned that Saint Peter's is the largest church in Christendom, and that it houses the bodies of earlier popes, plus religious relics, and that it sits atop an earlier church that was built on the spot where Saint Peter was crucified by the Romans.
We said goodbye to Paolo and emerged from Saint Peters. Across the street from the Vatican entrance is the former residence of Pope Paul VI, which has been converted to a gift shop. Around the corner is a self-service restaurant with acceptable coffee and enough food to keep us going until lunch.
We met at the obelisk in Saint Peter's Square, and were led to our bus for the trip to Perugia. We stopped for lunch at a self-service restaurant that straddled the highway.
Our hotel in Perugia is designed with a jazz motif. The lowest level, which houses most of the dining areas, has laid out the design of an enormous piano keyboard on the floor in the Internet room. There are musical notes on the room keys as well as the walls in the guest rooms.
After checking into our hotel, we rode to the center of perugia and had a tour of the square, after which we were turned loose for supper. At the top of the hill in the main square, you can see the mountains in the distance, and several other hill towns a few miles away. Perugia has depended on a wall for most of its history, as have the other towns we saw. The nearest of them had a substantial wall, which the tour guide informed us was the "new wall," built in the 13th century. The "old wall" was put up in the 3 rd century.
The tour guide told us to try some of the local perugian food at restaurants on the Via Rocchi, a narrow, steep road surrounded by stone buildings that had probably been there for centuries, if not millennia. I sat at an outdoor table for bean-and-barley soup and a simple sandwich. (Later, another tour member told me I had chosen a place famous for its food and jazz performances. Who knew?)
Being a hill town, Perugia is laid out on many levels. To facilitate getting around, a series of escalators leads upwards from the bus station. The bus was to pick us up at the station at 9:00 p.m. While we waited, we listened to a free jazz concert at the back of the parking lot.
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After we left Perugia we went through Umbria, making a stop in Assissi, which like Perugia was a hill town. I remember going down into the bowels of the church where Saint Francis's relics were kept. They proudly displayed an ancient shirt that he wore. From the church we went to the top of the hill, where there were three more churches. One was the Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore, a rather simple church where we were to give a concert that evening. A second was the church of Catherine of Siena. The third was the Temple of Minerva, built in the first century A.D., which currently houses a church, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, built in 1539 and renovated in Baroque style in the 17th century. I enjoyed a leisurely meal in a restaurant, getting quite fond of putting olive oil and vinegar on my salad. I also was able to buy some toothpaste. Because my ATM card had been canceled by my bank (due to thieves in the Rome airport who made off with the PIN number and a copy of the chip on the card), I had to watch every penny. Our concert went well.
After it was over, we entered Tuscany. We travelled to a hotel in Bagni di Lucca, where we barely had time to freshen up before rehearsing for a concert that we were to give that night. The concert was a joint effort with an Italian gospel choir. Their repertoire was a hoot, consisting of a fair number of 1970s American pop songs.
The next day we did some sightseeing in Lucca, which was protected by a huge wall. Our tour guides showed us the palace where Napoleon's sister lived when she ruled the city. (Yes, eventually Napoleon was able to get into the city.) There was still some resentment of Napoleon's sister, because she tore down some residential areas next to the palace which were interfering with her view. Some friends and I climbed to the top of the wall, which had a lovely walking/jogging track. There were also some benches and shade trees, which were handy, as it was fairly hot. We met in the town square, where we saw a statue of Puccini.
After leaving Lucca we to Florence. It was an exceptionally hot day, well over 100 degrees F. Florence is the birthplace of opera. Two of the first operas to be written were jointly performed at the Pitti Palace, at the wedding of Maria de medici to Henri IV of france in 1600. The entertainment used portions of two composers' operatic versions of the Orfeo myth. Caccini's version was the first opera ever to be published. [His daughter Francesca became the world's first opera star, as well as composer of operas in her own right.] There are some amazing art museums there, too. Dante's statue is to the left of a major church, and a replica of Michelangelo's David is further down. I like Michelangelo because when he became wealthy and could afford a better workshop, he still spent most of his time in the grubby old one. If a great artist can get away with grubby quarters, there's hope for the rest of us. A third statue is that of Hercules by Bandinelli, whom Michelangelo dissed by comparing to a sack of potatoes. On a church in the square you can the high water mark form the 1966 flood of the Arno River. We spent some quality time in the uffizi gallery, where we were able to see the original David, the Birth of Venus, and many other great works.
Some of my fellow tourists went up to the top of the Duomo, but I didn't feel like climbing a lot of stairs, especially as one had to wait in a long line before even being admitted. It was hot enough that the gelato vendors were doing a good business.
Florence was our last destination in Italy. We flew from Florence back to Boston, with a connecting flight in Germany
