{review} lucia on holiday

Guy Fraser-Sampson Lucia on Holiday (2012)

 

It is a brave writer indeed who would take up the challenge of adding to E. F. Benson's canonical 'Mapp & Lucia' series. Fraser-Sampson is up to the task - tonally he carries it off exceptionally well, and the element of over-the-top mayhem is never far from the scene. It is almost as cruel as the originals. As pastiche it is excellent. Fraser-Sampson's Georgie is a particular delight, but then Georgie has always been my favourite ("He crossed his legs and shot out his cuffs perfectly at the same time, and was disappointed that nobody appeared to notice"). 

Fraser-Sampson takes Lucia at co. to an Italian lake resort on the eve of the 1929 financial collapse. There is some nice use of near-contemporary events - the thoroughly irritating Gabriele d’Annunzio is beautifully done:

Amelia had no time for any of this and was prone to interject ‘Pah!’ or ‘Balderdash!’ into other people’s statements, and she seemed to have quite decided views on Italian politics which, while Lucia knew nothing of such matters, were clearly at variance with d’Annunzio’s. She was pro-Mussolini because he had made the trains run on time. D’Annunzio was anti-Mussolini because Mussolini had tried to kill him by throwing him out of a window. When this fact had been made clear, the party gathered around the dinner table in the saloon had fallen silent, clearly weighing the pros and cons of each position, and most siding mentally with Mussolini on the grounds of justifiable homicide.

There are some wonderful scenes involving hashish and Georgie's quite unwarranted reputation as a Lothario to either sex:

Francesco brought an ashtray over to the balcony table, and leant close to place it beside him, so close that Georgie could clearly smell his perfume. He wondered if it might be one of those new French colognes, and what it might be like to wear a daring cologne himself rather than just boring old toilet water.
‘I did enjoy your recital with Miss Bracely, sir,’ his valet murmured respectfully. ‘I had no idea you were such a talented pianist in addition to your painting skills.’
‘Thank you,’ Georgie replied awkwardly into Francesco’s shirt front. He found his heart was suddenly beating more quickly, doubtless as a result of his agitation.
‘Tell me, sir,’ Francesco enquired softly. ‘You are clearly such a sensitive gentleman. Do you possess any other particular ... artistic tastes?’
This at least was an easy question to answer. ‘Why, yes,’ Georgie said brightly. ‘How clever of you to guess. Actually, do you know, I’m very fond of needlepoint.’
Francesco moved away and said, ‘Indeed, sir’ as he gently closed the French window.

Rating: Decent entertainment. I love the originals and am deeply suspicious of sequels, but Lucia fans are in quite safe hands here.

 

{review} lamberto, lambero, lamberto

Gianni Rodari Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto (1978; English translation 2011 of C'era due volte il barone Lamerto)

I had to read this after I saw Marg's enthusiastic review. This book was such fun.

The aged and infirm Baron Lamberto, owner of 24 banks, possessor of 24 illnesses and "the world’s greatest chamomile collection", takes a tip from a fakir and employs a group of people to speak his name over and over and over, continuously 24 hours a day -- growing mysterious younger, fitter and handsomer in the process. But will his miraculous renaissance be hijacked by his greedy heir and a gang of Red Brigade-style bandits?

This book is wonderful and witty. The language (translation by Antony Shugaar) is gorgeous and I desperately want to read it in Italian, though being appallingly lazy I probably won't. Preferably, I'd like to read it again during a lovely holiday in the Italian Lakes region.

"We should also speak to Signora Zanzi about the way she draws out the second syllable of Lamberto, and then clips off the third and final syllable. She sounds like a sheep bleating—be-e-e-eh, be-e-e-eh—and we can’t have that." …
"I’ll attend to it, My Lord. If I may venture to do so, I shall also ask Signor Bergamini to be a little less emphatic in the way he punctuates each of the three syllables. There is, if I may say so, the faintest reminiscence of a soccer cheer: Lam-ber-to! Lam-ber-to!"

Rating: 5/5.

If you liked this... something somewhere between Andrew Kaufmann's The Tiny Wife {REVIEW} and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

 

{review} the medici conspiracy

Peter Watson & Cecilia Todeschini The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums (2007)

I might still be laughing over this book, if the blatant turning of a blind eye by major museums to the provenance of antiquities was not so serious.  It is a cross-over book; sort of popular non-fiction, I suppose. I read it because I read a few blogs about looting (for example, looting matters) and because I am hopeful that we are witnessing a cultural shift in practices. Hopefully.

The core of this book is the story of the attempt to unravel the back-story of the "Euphronios vase". In 1972 the Metropolitan Museum in New York purchased the "Euphronios krater" for a million dollars. This was, at that time, an unparalleled sum for an ancient Greek vase.

The Euphronios Krater, c. 515 BC: 

Sleep and Death carry off the body of 

the dead warrior Sarpedon (source)

From the moment this vase appeared in the Met., a cloud hovered: where did this astonishingly well-preserved (and restored) vase come from? How did it make its way to the Met.? How many pockets were lined along the way? Which country had lost an apparently unrecorded part of its cultural heritage? Was it a fake?

'New' really good quality, previously unknown Greek vases most certainly are either fake or have come from illegal excavations. Most of the best examples of ancient Greek vases do not come from Greece, but were export wares to the Greek vase-loving Etruscans in Italy (just north of Rome). These people were buried in underground tombs carved from the soft stone of the region and they were buried with rich grave offerings including many Greek pots. One question we ask when a vase like this turns us is, what else might have come from a tomb which had contained such a splendid item?

Etruscan tomb at Cerveteri (source)

Etruscan wall-painting at Tarquinia ('Tomb of the Leopards'; source)

If an ancient object is taken from its original context in an illegal excavation, it is likely that all knowledge of this original context will be lost forever. We lose incredibly important information about the ancient culture when we lose the find spot of an object. We lose the ability to get as close to the ancient possessor of the object as we can get without actually being able to speak to them.

There are other couple of consequences: if the Met. is prepared to cough up a record price for an antiquity, the ripples are felt throughout the antiquities trade. A price like this encourages further illegal excavation; it encourages fakes; and it brings in a nice big fat commission to the middle men in their protected warehouses in Switzerland and to the auction houses. As the authors note, a new record for an antiquity with a dubious provenance quickly overcomes any moral impediment to the sale of further items.

From the Met.'s dodgy vase, the scene shifts to the purchasing practices of the John Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. The Italian government's painstaking work in building a case against the Getty curator Marian True is carefully laid out. True and the Getty were placed in an unfortunate position when a warehouse full of antiquities were discovered in the Geneva Free Port in 1995. The warehouse was associated with Giacomo Medici, an antiquities trader who had also been associated with the journey of the Met.'s vase to New York.

In the warehouse, authorities found a hugely detailed record of what had passed through Medici's hands, and this record included 1000s of polaroids showing the same antiquities in various states from fresh from the earth from their illegal excavation to partially restored to - unfortunately for certain museums - in their display cases.

The charges against True have been dropped by the Italian government but not before they had made their point that all future trade in antiquities illegally excavated from Italian soil would be pursued with a vengeance. A number of museums have since decided to return (sometimes as face-saving 'loans') items of dubious provenance, and it is likely that more will follow.

The authors build up a convincing picture of how the trade works and how it is possible to get around things like the 1970 UNESCO agreement (Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970) that should protect new discoveries.

I thought it most interesting to see how auction houses (not necessarily unwittingly) participate in the laundering of antiquities: although bidding on your own lot is forbidden, your own shell company might buy it and the dodgy antiquity will then effectively be laundered - passed back to you with a pile of legitimate paperwork to go with it and thus assist in its sale onwards. Another trick is to provide a fake provenance that ensures that the antiquity was apparently in an obscure private collection somewhere before 1970.

This is all fascinating (could have done with more images of the antiquities though) but this book is completely let down by its stereotyped players. I may be exaggerated a trifle, but almost all of the good guys (those trying to stop the trade or reclaim their country's lost patrimony) are short, jovial, witty, ebullient and dress with the style of Italians (even if they are Greek). They possess "a slightly academic temperament".

All the bad guys (tomb-robbers, middle-men, dealers) have lank hair but are tall, virile, dressed in leather, sweaty (no wonder) and/or closet homosexuals. They don't wear seatbelts. The bad girls use hair dye and fly to their philandering spouses' rescues with briefcases of cash.

The writing style is a form of modern sensationalism that one recognises from The Da Vinci Code. There are a lot of italics, just in case you don't get the point of things. The spelling is variable (Basle/Basel). There are some sentences which really ought to have been edited out, including my favourite: "Not everyone agrees with [X] in his judgments... but his... sheer resoluteness, has a certain magnificence."

I kept waiting for a self-flagellating albino to appear on the scene.

Bad writing and overcooked dramatics aside, this book is important because it offers a popular look at a really important issue - and one that is even more pertinent in the wake of the looting from, e.g., the Cairo Museum during the riots or the situation in Libya at the moment. What will happen to these stolen antiquities? You might think that the items are too well known to ever be passed on the antiquities market. However there are always people willing to acquire items of dubious provenance for their private collections. This book makes it clear, furthermore, that the curators of public collections are not immune to similar corner cutting when the collecting bug strikes.

You'll never look at a Greek vase in a museum in the same way again.

Rating: points for issue-raising; demerits for writing style, um 7/10?

If you liked this… I want to read the Jason Felch & Ralph Frammolino's Chasing Aphrodite. The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum (2011), a further exposé of the Getty Museum. 

{review} lisa st aubin de terán

Lisa St Aubin de Terán The Slow Train to Milan (1983)

Lisa St Aubin de Terán Off The Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict (1989)

  

It's nearly ten years now since I left Italy, and three full years since I left the Andes, but strangers still come up to me sometimes in Paris, or London, or Caracas. And they say,

'You were one of the four, weren't you?'

And I know what they mean, and sometimes I nod, and sometimes I don't any more, but inside, I always think, 'We weren't really four, there were five of us: César, Otto, Elías and me, and the slow train to Milan.' And the slow train was the slide rule of our existence, often our raison d'être. Our exile was aimless without it. I wonder if we would have survived the waiting, the tension and the failure, but for the luxury of moving on. (The Slow Train to Milan)

To say that Lisa St Aubin de Terán has led an interesting life is somewhat of an understatement. She has run away from home in London at age 16 to marry an exiled Venezualan aristocrat who turned out to be a violent schizophrenic who basically imprisoned her and her baby on a sugar plantation in the Andes; she lived on the run with a group of dissidents who funded their activities by robbing banks; she devoted a decade to restoring a villa in Tuscany; she spent a lot of time wearing ball-gowns from bygone eras as day-wear and travelling with trunks; and she has spent, it seems, a lifetime on trains. (source)

From her life on the rails she has produced a memoir and what might be termed an "autobiographical fiction" (thank you Wikipedia). Both are well worth reading in their own right/s, but together I thought they rounded each other out delightfully.

Terán writes beautifully and she has a real eye - and affection - for the countryside, especially that of Italy from Tuscany northwards. She also had a wonderful eye for characterisation, as in her description of her [fictional] husband-to-be César. One assumes that anyone but a romantic 16 year old would run a mile from him. For example, when the narrator wants to go away without him we read,

I couldn't tell if César minded or not, he seemed quite emotionless. He said that he would be all right anyway because he had the washing to do. He had just discovered the automatic washing-machine, and it was giving him endless pleasure. He often stood over my mother while she did the weekly wash, and sometimes he would ask if he could have a go. He himself had a habit of changing his clothes from head to foot twice a day and then having everything laundered at a proper laundry.

The narrator's [fictional] mother is also delightfully evoked. At the young couple's wedding,

...we discovered that we had no ring.

'Never mind,' César said, 'one day you shall have lovely rings.'

But it seemed that we specifically needed one then and there. Luckily my mother came to the rescue. She said that she had a stock of wedding rings in her bag that she carried round for sentimental reasons.

'If I were you,' she said, pointing to a platinum and white-gold one, 'I would have that one. Andrew gave it to me in 1947, and it was easily my best marriage.'

The Slow Train to Milan is a wonderfully crazy novel that you think (and sometimes hope) is too unlikely to have any basis in reality. When one turns to Off the Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict, the source of the novel is obvious. There is much to love about Off the Rails, one of the quirkiest memoirs I have read, but if I had to narrow down two highlights they would be, first, that this book, while it covers train journeys in other countries too, is primarily a love-letter to northern Italy. The descriptions of the Italian places and people are filled with such affection: "I... had Italianitis, that strange, chronic, often acute, and sometimes fatal disease that ties the victim to a love of Italy."

Second, I was very taken by how Terán interpreted her affair with rail travel as a sort of cathartic response to the troubles in her life (and there are many troubles):

Now I found myself in a phase of manic restlessness in which I used the railways like an emergency extension of my own nervous system. For this, I chose the line from Bologna to Brindisi, travelling backwards and forwards, occasionally taking a day of so off in Brindisi, for the best part of three weeks. The two-year-old Alexander travelled with me, with his monosyllabic vocabulary, his teddy bear, his luggage, and his own, younger, passion for trains.

Looking back, that time that I spent literally on the rails may appear to be the nearest I ever came to going off them.

I found these two books very appealing. In part this may be because my own love affair with Italy began, back in 1992, with two months travelling the country on trains (I think that if I'd read Terán back then I'd have never left home!). But, mostly, I think Terán's appeal lies in her beautiful writing and the honesty with which she presents her many ill-fated adventures.

Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.' (Off the Rails)

Rating: 8/10.

If you liked these... for some reason I keep thinking about Jan Morris, another writer who brings such love to the journey.

 

{wishlist}

Begging to join the groaning shelves this week:

David Watkin's (2009)

The Roman Forum

This encapsulates a dilemma: 

buy a book or put the money towards 

GOING THERE AGAIN.

I've enjoyed the Wonders of the World series 

(e.g. The Parthenon, The Alhambra, etc.).

{review} rome & a villa

Eleanor Clark Rome and a Villa (first edn. 1950; revised edn. 1992)

Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, near Rome, is well worth visiting, especially if you also squeeze in a trip to a more modern take on the lust for civilised country living and visit the Villa d'Este with its unbelievably beautiful water gardens. Italian gardens are a particular shade of green which seems resistant to the seasons; even in winter, when I visited, these gardens were spectacular. Water features were very important to the ancient Romans and turn up on both small, large and enormous gardens. Hadrian's Villa, the emperor's bolt-hole from the Roman rat race, easily qualifies as ginormous. Built for the Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from AD 117-138, this villa is astounding.

Eleanor Clark (1913-1996) went to Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. She planned to write a novel. Instead she fell under the spell of the city and her surrounds and produced the most idiosyncratic account of the world she discovered that I have read. Her description of a meander through Hadrian's Villa lies at the core of her book: it is a deeply personal interpretation of what she saw as she wandered (and doesn't stand up too well to hard-nosed archaeological analysis) and she perfectly captures the bewildering maze of buildings in the complex as she tries to link what she sees with what she knows about Hadrian and his egomaniacal project: "the sick screaming I." 

Built up around the chapter on the villa are Clark's impressions of Rome as she makes her way about the city. Clark's Rome is one dealing with the aftermath of fascism and standing on the cusp of the la dolce vita. In sometimes a mere paragraph she pins down a building, a curiosity, a custom, a saint, a martyr, a prince, a staircase, an icon, a genius (Raphael: "Died aged thirty-seven, of overwork."), ruins, cats, gardens, law and order, whatever captures her skilled eye in "the great assault of Rome... total and terrible." There are also chapters on the pilgrims at Holy Year celebrations (1950; and revisited by Clark in 1975), the Pyramid of Cestius and the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (where Keats and Shelley have grave monuments), Roman poetry and Rome's take on Sicilian banditry, among other things. 

Piranesi - Pyramid of Cestius

The sheer jumbledness of this offering can be off-putting and I experienced a few moments of "not another list" irritation. Yet Rome is jumbled and Rome is irritating. But if you let yourself wander, forget your schedules (and don't write that novel!), you'll agree with Clark that in Rome, "You walk close to your dreams." 

Rating: 7/10.

If you liked this... bear in mind that it lacks almost all practical application as a travel guide. In this category I would also include such delightful early 20th century travelogues as those by E.V. Lucas in his series 'A Wanderer in...' (sc. Florence; Venice; Rome; etc.).  These seem to be available as e-books about the place.

Keat's grave monument in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome

{review} daisy miller

Henry James Daisy Miller (1878).

 

'Here comes my sister!' cried the child, in a moment. 'She's an American girl.'

Poor naïve Daisy Miller, who comes to a bad end after trying to shake up the good ol' Anglo-European mores of Vevey and Rome with her youthful and loose American ways: "She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect." 

This novella is a beautifully written, albeit not cheery read. James perfectly captures the young Americans' voices:

...Randolph... continued to supply information with regard to his own family... 'My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe.'

Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial rewards. But Randolph immediately added, 'My father's in Schenectady. He's got a big business. My father's rich, you bet.'

The descriptions of Rome make me long to be back there:

It seemed to him that Rome had never been so lovely as just then. He stood looking off at the enchanting harmony of line and colour that remotely encircles the city, inhaling the softly humid odours and feeling the freshness of the year and the antiquity of the place reaffirm themselves in mysterious interfusion.

 

 

And oh such an apt death for the young American social martyr, catching malaria ('Roman fever') while sitting at the foot of the great cross in the Colosseum (one can't do this nowadays; allegedly one can't catch malaria in Rome either) and being buried in that most beautiful of resting places, the Protestant Cemetery (with Keats and a few bits and pieces of Shelley).

Photos by the author, Feb. 2010 (Top: Colosseum; Bottom: Protestant Cemetery)

Rating: 9/10.

If you liked this... I'm going to read more Henry James. But I don't think I liked Portrait of a Lady. Oh dear. Maybe The Golden Bowl. And do read that Edith Wharton short story 'Roman Fever' (I read it in That Kind of Women: Stories from the Left Bank and Beyond, edd. B. Adams & T. Tate; Virago, 1991).

{lit link}

I love this comment from

Stuck In A Book

about The Enchanted April:

"How the cousin of Katherine Mansfield 

and sister-in-law of Bertrand Russell 

wrote such a happy, warm novel 

is anybody's guess".

Read his review here.

In February I saw the original 'castle',

Castello Brown at Portofino. 

Sadly, it was closed (when it should 
have been open; but that's Italy). 
The garden was greatly over-run.

Photo: Author 2010.