matt.geek.nz

Our train to the Cinque Terre is late by three hours. When we take our seats, we are shortly joined by three other travellers: a large fat lady with dark glasses, wobbly underarms and a deep voice; a scary-looking tanned fellow; and a tall young girl who my wife thinks smells funny. The train eventually starts moving after the locomotive engine is replaced. It is hot and damp in the carriage, like a sauna. Opening the window doesn’t work, and closing it doesn’t either as the air conditioning is broken. The large fat lady is wiping herself off with a towel, her tanned male friend is just a dripping face, like a wet olive, and the tall young girl is pouring water onto napkins and then sticking them to her chest so they sit there as a white diamond between her chin and cleavage.

Our companions are constantly talking on the phone. They seem to have combed the Web for the most obnoxious ring-tones they could find. I fall asleep nonetheless, and have nightmares about Anne Ramsay and Throw Momma From The Train.

At Genoa an American couple get on with assigned seats so they boot momma and friend out, but it’s not much better as they are large and sweaty too. We finally arrive at Sestri Levante and thankfully our next train is no more than few minutes from departing, despite our initial delay, so we cross platforms and arrive in Levanto thirty minutes later.

It’s a short walk through town to our hotel. Levanto is nice, in a resort town kind of a way. We drop our bags off at the hotel, change into togs and head down to the beach. We have our first swim in the Mediterranean, which feels much like swimming at home but there is a noticeable density to the water, and to the throngs of people on the beach, even in the late afternoon. While lying on the sand I could have easily reached out and physically touched strangers on either side of us.

That night we have dinner at Restaurant Moresco. We order adventurously and have the seafood antipasti platter, which terrifies me as soon as it arrives. There’s salmon and swordfish and anchovy and squid but most of it I can’t identify. Then for our mains we have cuttlefish ink risotto, which is pitch black and comes with cuttlefish mouthparts strewn all through it, little blossoms of tentacles that make it look frighteningly like a Cthulhu hotpot. It is quite delicious, but we experience some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance between what we can see and what we can taste.

Back at the hotel, I watch the Holland vs Uruguay game while in bed. It is very exciting but I fall asleep in the second half when it becomes obvious that Holland is going to win and proceed to the final.

The next day we have breakfast which is fairly poor in the way that European breakfasts are. We leave the hotel and get on a boat to go to the first of the Cinque Terre villages. It’s nice out on the water, but hot. We get a preview of each of the villages as we pass them. I start to wonder how long it’s going to take to walk the track back to Monterosso, as it seems like quite a distance between all of the towns. They’re all quite different too. Monterosso is the largest, with two long promenades that make the most of the beach; Manarola and Vernazza are also down by the water, but Vernazza has a sheltered inlet and Manarola is coiled around a tiny bay with a rocky spire in the middle; Corniglia sits on a cliff, as impregnable as a citadel; and Riomaggiore is set further back from the water and funnels up into the valley behind it.

Riomaggiore is quite beautiful, with tall narrow houses arranged in terraces up the hillsides. Each house is a different colour from the next, and yet they all have the same style of window with the same green shades and shutters, which gives the village a uniformity it might not otherwise have. When we disembark at the village, there’s a bovine stampede of tourists up the central street. The village would be quite picturesque with less people and less volume, but with the number of visitors it feels like an amusement park. We immediately hate it so we walk to where the crowd has thinned out and catch our breath. We don’t yet have permits to walk from village to village (it’s a sort of national reserve) so we wander over to where we can pick them up. Rather than sticking around in Riomaggiore, which is full to bursting with shuffling herds, we buy some water (Sparkling, pah! I make this mistake at least once per holiday) and move on.

The walking track linking Riomaggiore and Manarola follows the coastline but is about fifty metres above it and carved out of the rock. In places you walk through tunnels, open to the ocean on one side, and there are huge swathes of netting holding the loose rock back. Remember those padlocks on the bridge in Rome? They’re here too, but in far greater numbers. There’s padlocks on rails, and padlocks locked to other padlocks, forming this weird mesh of symbolically interlinked relationships. Maybe it’s a reflection of the Italian dating scene.

In Manarola we eat gelato and watch kids jump off rocks. The large rock in the centre of the bay is where the bravest of the kids jump from: mostly teenage boys but also the occasional girl. Near us, two kids in togs are flirting: a blossoming young woman standing beside her bicycle, and a tanned young man in board-shorts with a stiffy.

It’s quite a hot and exhausting climb to reach Corniglia, which sits on a clifftop. When we reach the summit, we find a fountain (there seems to be a fountain in every village) and we drink from it and run it over our heads and splash it on to ourselves. At the summit we have good look around, and the views are spectacular, but unless you are looking along the coastline there is not much to see. You can look out across the blue Ligurian water, which is blue and broad and inviting in the way that seas are, but the horizon and any land on it is obscured by a haze, so that it is impossible to tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. It is instead the coast that draws your eye to either side of the view, the headlands and the villages and the tidy agricultural plots (olives, citrus trees) which colour them.

We have some pasta for lunch while looking out over the water. The pasta I have is very similar to one I make at home, a simple dish with spaghetti, chili, garlic and broccoli. The waiters treat us professionally but they can’t hide a certain jadedness that must come from serving clueless tourists wandering through their village every day.

The walk to Vernazza is an arduous one: we climb to three times the height of Corniglia before we start to descend again into Vernazza. Whereas the first few villages only have half-hour walks between them, the trek to Vernazza is one and a half hours long. Once we arrive we lose all sense of modesty, and we race down to where the town meets the ocean at the crowded seafront Piazza Marconi, and we strip down to our underpants and jump in the water. You’ll recall that togs vs. undies Fruju commercial, where togs become underpants as you walk away from the water, and vice versa? Well, I was pretty close to the water, but I felt like nothing other than a man standing in his underpants upon the crowded Italian Riviera. No one seemed to mind or notice, however, not even the six bare-chested Italian men of mixed ages who came down to the waterfront in a group, clutching bombers of Peroni while standing around menacingly and pointing at people.

By the time we leave the village we’re already dry, but we would prefer to still be cool and damp as the walk to Monterosso is the longest walk of all. There’s spectacular views along the track, but there’s quite a climb to see them. We pass funiculars and fields, and at one point I see a large rat jumping from one branch to another. I point this out to my wife and immediately regret it when she shrieks and recoils and finally whacks me on the arm for scaring her. Past the halfway point we come across an enterprising individual who has set up a lemonade stand at the summit of the walk. We buy fresh lemonade (at the outrageous price of two euros per tiny plastic cup), and while he makes our drinks he asks where we are from.

“New Zealand,” I say.

“You don’t have mafia, in New Zealand, no?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“That is good,” he says, and sighs. I wonder why he asks such a strange question and wonder whether his little lemonade stand, built into the side of the walk under dark cloth netting with a manual fruit press, is some sort of mafia penance.

As we complete our descent from the summit I am set upon by a persistent fly, so I scroll up my map into a tube and start trying to discourage it from bothering me. The result is inevitable: I lose my balance and fall from the path. Luckily the path isn’t open to a sheer drop, as some parts of the track were. It is a lesson I am lucky to have the chance to learn from, and I tolerate every insect that shows an interest in me for the remainder of the walk.

Monterosso is a lovely little village, and much bigger than the others. We wander along the promenade and visit a few shops: my wife has decided that an authentic experience needs to involve the purchase of something, and I am baffled by this as we look at the key-rings and teaspoons and other brightly coloured paraphernalia with utility secondary to their decoration. When we go to the train station and the train is delayed, we opt to have something to drink in the cafe there (which has lovely area to sit and look at the sea and the promenade) rather than return to the markets.

I do get cheated at the station. When I go to purchase my ticket, I am tired and exhausted, and when the woman asks for five euros per ticket, it doesn’t even register with me that this is vastly overpriced. After selling me the ticket, she closes the station and disappears, no doubt to buy herself a lovely dinner with my money. And when we get on the train for the short trip back to Levanto, no one bothers to check our tickets. With the office closed, some people wouldn’t have even had the chance to purchase them.

In Levanto we find a cafe that is playing the Spain vs. Germany semi-final. While watching the game, I order a hamburger as a bit of a break from all the Italian fare, but what I am given is the idea of a hamburger, a concept hamburger, an exploded hamburger: each of the ingredients is laid out on the plate, pattie, tomato, lettuce, cheese, relish, onion, but there is no bun to complete it. I suppose it is technically a hamburger, but it is a disappointment. The game is not a disappointment, however, and we are shocked and delighted when Spain wins, as this means we will be in Spain for the final. We are a little worried about what this might mean for getting into town from the airport (we would arrive on the day of the final), and worried about just how enthusiastic the Spaniards might be.

The next morning we lug our bags back up to the train station for the next leg of our journey.

Turin is on our itinerary because we have friends there.  It’s not one of those must-see destinations that’s mentioned in the same breath as Rome or Florence, but I’m glad we went. It is probably the most unaffected of all the places we visited. Besides, independent travel is great,  but it’s ten times better when you’ve got a local to show you around.

When we arrive at the airport, we are met by our friends and their young son. They’re a young professional couple like us, and T. even works in vaguely the same industry as I do, except he spends all day conducting business in Italian. It fascinates me that the world is just as busy and productive in other languages as it is in English, and that billions of dollars flow through economies under the direction of dialogue spoken in Italian and Arabic and Swahili and Malay. It makes the world seem bigger somehow.

After dropping off our bags at their apartment – a lovely modern space with large rooms and an effortless stylishness – we head into town to go to lunch, where we are to meet some friends of our hosts. T. is an accomplished but terrifying driver. He moves the car through the streets with tight turns and acceleration over any straight piece of road, no matter how small or narrow. When we pull into a carpark at our destination it feels as though I am getting out of a bucket seat in a video arcade.  Their friends arrive to join us, and they are dressed impeccably. I immediately feel self-concious in my shorts and t-shirt, but I couldn’t have dressed as nicely even if I’d been given the chance.

We have a huge lunch of hot pasta (our Italian companions eat salads, and are amused at our choice of pasta), but around us misfortune swirls.  A waitress behind us smashes a plate of glasses.  A man pulls into a park in front of the cafe and runs off on some errand, and within five minutes a warden comes and places a ticket under one of his wipers. The man returns to his car to discover it, and swears loudly in Italian.  Italians swear with their entire bodies.

In the late afternoon, after a nap, we and our hosts head back into town. Turin has a lot of plazas, and the shops are set well-back into the sides of buildings, with long arcades that are open on one-side and lined with pillars. We see a scientific forum being set up in a civic square.  There are robots and interactive experiments, and dads and sons (it proves to be almost entirely the province of males) go from display to display. In one booth, skeletal robots concertina sluggishly like animated accordions. Some teenagers are playing rock music, and I really like it because it has a sort of chugging motorik sound, and an oppressively loud bass guitar. In another part of the city, we see remains of an old roman wall, and massive churches, and buildings where only a single window from the previous building remains. The architecture has layers, and in some places is almost mosaic.

I am reminded of how the hard lines you see on maps are more like membranes through which ideas and culture pass: this city looks closer to French and German cities, which it is geographically closer to than Rome. This is something obvious I guess, but perhaps not to a visitor from an island nation.

After wandering around for a while, we stop in Piazza Vitoria Venetto, and have a cocktail at Bianco just before sun sets. We are told how the piazza fills up with Italian youths from about midnight onwards, who, contrary to the myth of European restraint, get drunk and cause all sorts of trouble. As the sun sets we cross the river Po via a bridge which is lined with deep purple flowers.  We go to a little cafe for dinner, which was a favourite haunt of our hosts in their university days. It is modest but good food. We are tired, so we have a single course and a beer and then leave, even though it is a Saturday night, driving back through brightly lit streets filled with music and neon colours.

The next morning we go to Caffe Silvano for breakfast. I have an espresso and a brioche, and my wife has hot chocolate which is exactly that: hot, melted chocolate in a cup.  Then we go to Eataly, which is an amazing supermarket, and a Turin attraction in its  own right.  It’s similar to Moore Wilsons, but five times the size. It has restaurants and a book store, an entire five shelves devoted to varieties of bacon and ham, an entire room for not just cheeses but specifically parmesan cheeses, and whole sub-stores for fresh pasta, fresh pizza, wine, and beer.  I look hard for New Zealand products but there are none. It has all the best quality Italian food, and the occasional spanish ham or French wine. As a rule I hate supermarkets – it’s impossible to shake the feeling of being a rat in a maze, of being someone’s research – but I love this supermarket. As we leave, I see a voiceless child in a pram holding a letter A in his hand. I suppose we all have to start somewhere.

Later on that day we drive up into the hills around Turin to have lunch with F.’s extended family: their parents, and their uncle, aunt and great-aunt. The aunt is in a bathing suit, and the great-aunt in a wheelchair, she has Alzheimers, but is well cared for and loved by her children. Our hosts have a beautiful home on top of hill overlooking Piemonte, and we eat outside in the sun at a long table under a shady tree.  They serve us the most amazing dishes from the region, including carne cruda, which is minced meat, served blood red and raw, seasoned with lemon and garlic.  There’s also couscous and tzatziki, pinot grigio, and melon and proscuitto.  There’s tripe with tomato, which I’m brave enough to try but not to have much of. They tell us about a local restaurant which holds a tripe festival every year: a hundred dishes, all tripe, served in different ways. They’re a lot more enthusiastic about the tripe than we are: all of it is eaten, and the serving dish scraped clean. We discuss politics and history and art, the sort of conversation people have in films. A large labrador lies under the table, and a soccer net in the corner of the back yard, a ball resting against the net where F.’s young son has kicked it.

After lunch F.’s uncle takes us to Superga, a local church which sits on one of the highest hills around Turin.  We climb the cupola and look out into the valley.  It’s spectacular, but the heat haze prevents us from seeing too far. We are told in halting English (F.’s uncle’s English is not great, but our Italian is far worse) that in winter, once the snow has fallen and the sky is clear, the visibility is much better.  We join a tour to see the mausoleum of Italy’s delinquent royal family: the Savoys.  The shared tomb is resplendent with gold and marble, but it is housed beneath the church, carved into the rock, so when you touch the walls they are cold and wet. It’s like being in a cave. Upstairs there’s a room with a painting of every Pope since the first. They look pretty humourless. Our tour guide only speaks Italian so we have the interesting experience of being on a tour without knowing the language.  We take cues from the things pointed to and the occasional recognised word, but for the most part we have no idea what she’s talking about. I was able to infer, however, that the Savoys have a long and detailed history.

Outside the church we see the memorial to the Grande Torino, a local soccer team famous throughout Italy, who crashed into the hill here on a return flight home.  Forty more metres and they would have cleared both the hill the church. There’s a black and white photograph at the memorial with all of the soccer players’ young faces. It happened fifty years ago, yet they’re younger than any of us.

When we get home that night, we are so full from lunch that we eat nothing but proscuitto and melon and some steak.  T. and I talk music. He’s into metal, and tries hard to sell me on some tartan and safety-pin punk and some post-Pantera sludge. I told him to look up Deerhunter. I’m not sure it was a successful exchange.

In the morning my wife and I get up and walk into Turin. F. and T. are working, so we have the day to ourselves. Turin turns out to be a very beautiful city on a weekday, and has more of a sense of an industrious, modern city than Rome does. There were a lot of lingerers and hustlers in Rome, but there are barely any here. Instead the streets are packed with professional looking Italians and everyone moves with purpose. We have lunch at Otto Etre Quarti, which is beside Piazza Solferino.  We have pasta outside on the terrace, but we regret not eating inside, as it is very hot.

We pick up our train tickets for the next day and the ticket man sells them to us with a wink.  The heat increases throughout the afternoon, and when my wife insists on shopping for bags and I can’t overcome my aversion to the bags or the heat.  We then go to get gelato to cool down, and we walk down to waterfront finding ourselves back at the bridge that we had crossed two nights before. It’s fairly late in the afternoon, and I insist on taking an alternate route back. We pass through the student quarter, which unfortunately smells of alcohol filtered through humans and puddled in gutters.

On out last night with our hosts we eat pizza from a local takeaway joint, and it’s good.  Italians make great pizza with three or four ingredients: kiwis seem to favour pizzas that have a dozen ingredients and taste terrible.

First thing in the morning we drop off F.’s young son at the kindergarten, which is on the second floor of a building in the middle of town.  We are then ourselves dropped off at the train station. And then I am overcome with bathroom panic: the sense of needing to go without have a place to go to. I rush around the station for a good ten minutes, unable to find a bathroom. I finally find one but it has turnstiles, and I have no money, so there is a a rush to get money out of an ATM (by now I am grimacing), and then to find somewhere to change it into coins to be used for the turnstile (and now I am whimpering). The relief, when it comes, is entire.

Unfortunately, our situation swings from a total rush to a slough of despond when our train is delayed by three hours. It is hot both in the train and on the platform – we shift from one to the other half a dozen times – and when the train finally pulls out of the station, we are already sweaty Antipodean wretches.

We recently got back from Europe.  I took quite a few notes but most of them haven’t made it to the posting stage yet.  Here’s one of our destinations at least. I’m hoping to get around to doing the rest.

Thank the gods for Roman fountains. The oppressive summer heat has tourists like us scurrying about like cockroaches along the shaded sides of outsized buildings, doors, and churches. In a few spots, Roman columns form thermal zebra crossings, and we leap from one black band to another. The nasoni, which spring up all over the city like oases – a simple metal nozzle, a grinning gargoyle, or the mouth of a lion – are an idea that could only work in Europe and could never work in New Zealand. A drinking fountain in Wellington: you couldn’t trust a kiwi not to drunkenly piss in it.

The taxi journey from the airport into the centre of Rome is surprisingly quiet. We arrive on a holiday, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, and many Romans are off work and out of the city. Our driver uses the quiet streets to practice his rally driving: it is disorientating enough to be driven on the wrong side, but actually frightening to be shanghaied around corners, our heads bumping up against the roof while Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ bubbles away on the radio.

At our B&B we are shown our room and offered beer and wine.  Our host, who is very nice, is the spitting image of Kevin Pollak, except Italian and better presented in neatly pressed black shirt and trousers. I keep expecting him to break into a Christopher Walken impersonation. Sometimes he almost seems to.

‘What time would you like breakfast?’ he asks, ’8? 9? 10? 11?’

’8am please,’ I say.

He shakes his head and turns his palms up.

’8 is impossible.’

In the afternoon we go in search of a tour office, and walk all the way past Termini, but it is closed beause of the holiday. We wander back via Piazza Barbarini and visit Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, which has a crypt underneath the church where the bones of dead monks are arranged in baroque patterns on the walls and ceilings. It is a grotesque sight, a surreal memento mori that should smell more like death than it does. The church itself is quite beautiful also, with painted alcoves and monks praying with elderly worshippers.  We hurry back past the Trevi fountain; the Pantheon, whose facade is marred with restoration scaffolding; and Piazza Navona. We have dinner at Trattoria De Luigi and it is very filling and delicious. It is the first and almost the last time in Rome that we have both a first and second course: I don’t know how Italians manage it. My wife has zucchini flowers stuffed with mozzarella and anchovies and then a mushroom pasta. I have herb orechiette, followed by veal. Later, after booking some walking tours on the internet, we fall asleep with full bellies, but ambulances race loudly and noisily through the night with their sirens blaring, waking us.

The next day, we sleep in until lunchtime, finally catching up on the sleep we lost on the long flight over. We head back towards Piazza Navona, quickly eating a margherita pizza along the way, to find our guide. When we find her, she makes us wear little radios, so that we can hear her voice above the noise of the crowds and the other guides. Piazza Navona is pretty, but the interior of the Pantheon is beautiful, with a massive dome and a large oculus which lets a raw beam of light down into the interior, giving every sculpture and relief a new interplay of light and shadow with every passing moment. As we leave, my wife is ahead of me, and I see an Italian man touch her bum as he pushes past her: she does not complain, assuming it was me I guess, but she was too far ahead for me to defend her honour.

The Trevi Fountain is crowded. We are told that if we sit with our backs to the fountain and throw a single coin over our shoulder we will come back to Rome. I check my wallet, but I am too cheap to waste a euro on superstition. Instead we buy gelato, and the girl who serves us looks at me strangely. I only figure out later that it is because I am still wearing the bright blue earpiece from the radio, like a middle-aged courier or car salesman with a bluetooth headset.

The tour continues past palaces and public offices, until we reach the wedding cake, which I find ugly but my wife doesn’t, and then the Forum, which is the ruins of one of the oldest excavated parts of Rome, and the former centre of Roman public life. It is hot amongst the stones and dust, and in places only the suggestion of civilization remains, stones stacked one upon the other, a solitary pillar, a collapsed wall, an arch, a smooth-eyed stone face glaring out from under an eave. Little wooden displays are erected at angles in front of vistas: here is how all of this once looked.  The reputed tomb of Julius Caesar is a dim stack of sandy blocks under a wooden roof.

The colosseum is enormous, and at the angle that we approach it from it looks sheared, as though sliced open diagonally with an axe. Inside, the actual colosseum floor is peeled back to reveal the remains of dungeons and former animal cages underneath. I am disappointed because I had visions of myself kneeling in the dust and running the sand of the colosseum through my fingers. Instead we circle the upper floors, looking down into the colosseum’s interior and trying to visualise some of the spectacles that have been described to us: the colosseum flooded for the re-enactment of naval battles, the balletic slaughter of men and animals.

We lose track of time and due to meet with another tour group, we race back through the city, via backstreets and alleys, to meet our second guide. This slightly smaller group has been gracious enough to wait five minutes past the appointed time. We almost missed them.

Our guide takes us via the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary, and then through Piazza Mattei with a beautfiul little fountain, and into the Jewish ghetto. The sights are more impressionistic: a red parrot in a dim window, Jewish Italian women lined up in deck chairs in front of a church.  We continue past Rome’s main synagogue and into a street where roman columns and a medieval arch form the Portico D’Ottavia, a crumbling mix of old and new.

We cross a bridge to Tiber Island. The bridge’s lampposts are covered with padlocks, which are clipped to the ornate metallic bases. Apparently this is a symbol of eternal love: couples fix their engraved padlocks to the bridge and cast the key into the Tiber. But we are told that the lovers have confused this bridge with the Ponte Milvio, much further north, where the tradition started.  I wonder which eternity all those lovers have chained themselves to.

In Trastevere, we find the Chiesa di Santa Cecilia. We stand in the back of the church and listen to nuns singing; it is extraordinarily beautiful and this agnostic’s heart is moved. Trastevere itself is very lively, with the feel of a market lost in time. We see a woman selling budgies, and a man with a huge growth on his face talking to his friend, much like an ordinary person who doesn’t have a huge growth on his face would. After a walk back across the river through the expensive-looking Piazza Farnese with its massive palace, we are cast loose in the Campo de Fiori. It is dusk and the tables lining the square are all replete with hungry diners. Teenagers sit at the base of a large statue of Giordano Bruno, contemplating their place in an infinite universe.

We eat dinner at the Teatro Di Pompeo, but we immediately regret not going back to the hotel to change first because I am very sweaty, and hot food (pasta with lentils) does not help. Four classical musicians come into the restaurant with their instruments in cases, they are English and German but speak perfect Italian. One stands and slaps the waiter on the shoulder, declaring that he must see what the food is in the kitchen, and he follows the waiter to find the chef. Later on they drunkenly joke to themselves in loud voices: ‘What is that you’ve got in your arsehole?’ It’s a punchline with a setup that is not obvious to us.

We do not get very good service because it is a classy restaurant and we look like sweaty proles and our Italian is bad, though the coffee I order is magical. I have an espresso, and an impeccably dressed Italian gentleman brings it to me with a white napkin. The way he hands it to me, I can tell that he is very proud of the coffee he had made.  And he had every right to be: it was quite simply the best coffee I’d ever had, like a liquid coffee bean suspended in a state of being both bitter and silken.

We have a bad night’s sleep (not coffee-related), but rise early as we intend to go to the Vatican. We had arranged another tour, which meant we could skip the queue.  As we approach the tour entrance, passing priests with stiff white collars sitting in cafes, we could see that we had done the right thing: the standard non-tour-group queue snakes around the side of the Vatican wall for hundreds of metres.

In the unairconditioned tour office some middle-aged Australians are arguing about whether it was worth going on the tour: the men are sweaty and irritable, they’d seen the queues and were quickly losing interest. The women were insisting that this was ‘a once in a lifetime opportunity’, and that ‘you can’t come all this way and not go to the Vatican.’

Our lovely guide Rosa leads us to the tour group entrance, which has a queue, but only of about fifty metres. Once inside we delay seeing hundreds of priceless treasures to spend an hour looking at a information kiosk that displays detailed information on the hundreds of priceless treasures that we are about to see. When we begin the tour the crowds are thick and glacial.

In the Sistine Chapel, where there is standing room only, herds of tourists chat to themselves, the hubbub rising and falling with each forceful shush from the guards. I hear what sounds like pissing on marble and I turn around to see a woman obliviously spilling water from her drinking bottle on to the priceless mosaic floor. After noticing that she has done this, she takes a tissue from her handbag, drops it on the floor and rubs it with her foot half-heartedly. Directly above her, Michelangelo’s God creates Adam with a touch of his finger.

Moments later we are outside St Peter’s Basilica, and the Australian woman who earlier said that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity says ‘Where’s the Sistene Chapel?

‘We just went through it,’ Rosa says.

‘Really?’ says the woman in disbelief.

‘Yes!’

‘That’s not what I expected at all,’ says the woman, ‘I thought there would be sixteen rooms and there was only one.’

‘No, no,’ says Rosa, ‘it is Sistene, not sixteen. Sistene Chapel.’

Would it be elitist to expect people to sit a short exam before visiting some of these places?  You could thin out the crowd by 90% that way. Remove the 90% of people that are simply crossing a destination off a list they’d read in an inflight magazine, and let in the 10% that can tell their Sistene Chapels from sixteen chapels. I suspect, however, that the Pope might not appreciate the drop in revenue.

St Peter’s Basillica is massive, beautiful, and oppressive. Before we enter, Rosa is stopped and questioned by a guard and asked for her papers. Once the guard is satisfied, she explains to us that another guide has complained about her for vindictive, personal reasons. “Some people are crazy, ” she says. I wonder what this is about: a stolen lover, a broken heart?

In the Basilica itself, I see a statue of St Peter (people touch his feet for luck: he has a very smooth foot), and Michelangelo’s Pieta, which is astonishing.

Before coming to Rome, I wondered whether Rome and the Vatican would test my irreligiousness. The Vatican did not, with its throng of people and ostentiousness: most of the real treasures are pagan sculptures or inspired by pagan art. If anything tested me it was the sound of the nuns singing in the deserted Chiesa di Santa Cecilia.

The scale of the church forces you to think about divinity: you can’t ignore it. It is either the truth, or the biggest compounding of lies in all of history: the whole of the Vatican is founded on one of these two things. And what I got the sense of was not holiness or grace, but more its opposite, that nothing is real and that everything is permitted, and that the world is made up of storytellers and listeners and followers, and that stories are interlinked, and contagious, and that when you weave yourself or others into a narrative you weave yourself into the thread of history – whether its a great history or a minor history – and the Vatican is like a giant knot through which millions of threads run: either the knot at the centre, or a tangled birds’-nest of lies that distorts everything else around it.

That night we have dinner, and sit next to a noisy professor and his daughter and her friend, and the professor is very smug about the fact he lives and works in Rome, and that he is dining with two young women. Later on two strange men with thick grey hair and pageboy haircuts sit next to us. I wonder if they are gypsys, but my wife thinks they are transvestites.

The next morning, we make a booking to visit the Galleria Borghese.  We walk along the Tiber River on the northern edge of the city centre, and then cross through Piazza del Popolo where a hustler attempts to give my wife flowers. We climb up steps to the Terrazza del Pincio look back down over Rome.  We continue to make our way through the park until we find the Galleria.  We collect our tickets and eat lunch in the park, purchasing sandwiches from a stall vendor. The sandwiches are terrible, with stale bread. This would be our worst meal in Rome.

The Borghese Gallery itself is amazing: every room contains something astonishing. Because it is a private collection it is arranged very differently from a public gallery: artists aren’t grouped logically, it’s all about what looks good together. Every surface of every room, including the ceilings, is painted beautifully with amazing frescos. Some things draw your eye more than others. I wasn’t familiar with all the artists, but I would find out later that most of my favourites were masterpieces, even if I wasn’t aware they were at the time: Bellini’s Apollo & Daphne and The Rape of Proserpina, Titian’s Sacred & Profane Love, Messina’s Portrait of a Man. Carravaggio’s quite trendy these days but I did love his paintings: they all look lit by candles.

We walk back through the park, stopping to watch Italian youths splash each other in a fountain, and then wander all the way back to Piazza Navona to find the Gelateria del Teatro, which has the best gelato we would taste in Italy. I started to order my gelato in Italian, but the server said, ‘Please, you can order in English.’ I’ve been told that people appreciate it when you attempt to speak their language, but all the Italians I’ve spoken to, including this server, look positively relieved when I drop my clumsy Italian and speak in English. My mangled pronunciation must be really offensive.

Afterwards we find a place to watch the Holland vs Brazil game, and we find a little osteria where we eat bruschetta and enjoy the match. Amazingly, Holland wins.  The Italians are excited but not as enthusiastic as the tourists, who order more drinks when the final minute is up.

Our final dinner in Rome is in a little restaurant off Piazza Napoli, which has only three or four tables, and is run by a beautiful Italian woman and her chef husband. I have hand-made pasta with bacon, mushroom and truffle, followed by beef in a chianti wine sauce with a lime and walnut flan, and then a white chocolate mousse with Baileys. My wife has truffle ravioli followed by pork and then a rich chocolate cake with a gooey centre. While we eat dinner, a bulldog and two shih-tzus sat in the street and amuse us.  A mother comes past pushing her baby in a pram and our beautiful Italian maitre’d races out and picks it up and raises it up in her arms, cooing maternally. She then sits on the footpath, composed and elegant in the gutter, with the baby in her arms and the dogs at her feet, while the baby’s mother sits unconcerned at a nearby table, drinking a glass of soothing Roman water. The summer heat lingers in the alleys long after the sun has gone.

Two days ago I asked this question on Twitter: What are the best three volumes of poetry published in New Zealand in the last five years? And when asked to define ‘best’ I said ‘Most remarkable, most inventive most new. On the front line, but not avant-garde.’  My motivation was to pull together a manageable snapshot of where New Zealand poetry was at, not necessarily from what was critically acclaimed or award-winning but from what my peers were actually reading.  I bought everything that was suggested, including some Billy Collins which was a left-field and ineligible recommendation, but which may be useful as a contrast.

I’m not completely inexperienced with poetry. I’ve kept one eye on the world of verse over the years, and like most readers of it I’ve made my own attempts. I had some of it up online a few years ago (it’s long gone now), which Michelle Leggott, who was looking after the NZEPC at the time, was kind enough to seek out and link to. I was probably lucky because it was in the net’s early days and there wasn’t a lot of web-based poetry out there.

My own skills as a poet were shamanistic, and although I knew the difference between a villanelle and a sestina, or a dactyl and an anapæst, at the time I was writing with my ear, trying to find metre that sounded incantatory and musical, and putting words together in an order, that when optimally arranged, would vibrate with energy like magic rocks. Mostly I couldn’t explain why something I wrote worked, but I absolutely knew when it did. I wrote free verse because that’s what everyone else was doing. And if I’m honest, a lot of it was catharsis too.

When I began reading poetry as a youngster, my approach was very straightforward and rational. I asked of the poem ‘What does this mean?’ and with a lot of 19th century and earlier stuff it would simply unpack itself when enough mental energy was applied, cohering into layers of meaning, and its heart would be revealed to be either allegorical, a nest of metaphors or merely a labyrinthine folly. I imagine that for a lot of people, this is how they expect poetry to work: they expect it to be like a tricky cryptic crossword puzzle, and if they could figure out a few simple rules and use a bit of lateral thinking they could unpick the meaning of each line by applying the right rules at the right time.

Of course, ask ‘What does this mean?’ of a poet and they’ll become politician, happy to talk in circles but never answering the question directly, because a) it has no meaning, b) it has meaning, but they’re afraid it’ll lose its magic and capacity for interpretation or c) they’re a fraud.  And I say fraudulence without expecting any public executions here, the fraud is all part of it.  Poetry is chicanery, right?  Beautiful lies and suggestive whispers.  The greatness, if there is any, is what takes place in your head, and the stuff on the page is all carefully arranged to support that belief, which is all in turn supported by marketing and public readings and hagiographies.  But there’s an awful lot of skill in that arrangement of words, a lot of refinement and agony (have you tried to write a poem?), and an extraordinary amount of effort goes into its publication.  I don’t think any less of poets for the posturing.

The poem itself, maybe we ask too much of it when we ask for meaning. Maybe it lacks meaning like a gout of flame from a factory lacks meaning, or to borrow a recent recycled metaphor of Bill Manhire’s, it lacks meaning like a bolt of lightning lacks meaning. The poem is simply a phenomenon, the glow of otherwise dead and decaying materials: foxfire. The words here came together in this way in a sort of happy accident: look at the fireworks, look at the pretty colours.

If a poem has meaning these days it can be buried so deep and within so much obfuscation that if you go looking for it you’ll miss everything else that the poem has to offer. It’s like sailing from Spain to find El Dorado while ignoring the wonders of a vast ocean or a new continent.  But when it lacks meaning, when you’re wandering blind through the poem without a frame of reference, you’ve got nothing to distinguish between a tapir and a capybara: they’re both amazing creatures but if you’re a stranger in a strange land the subtle differences are lost on you. And are you really seeing an amazing new thing, or are you hallucinating and seeing something that doesn’t really exist at all?  Reader: “I loved that part in Poem X where you talked about the Lockerbie disaster.” Poet: “The what disaster?” The poem isn’t the most efficient or reliable method for the transference of information.

I think a 21st century audience has been inured to ambiguity, but not by poetry. Personally, the work of David Lynch and perhaps more unexpectedly, television like Lost, has taught people, and certainly me, to suspend their instincts to search for a neat and satisfying explanation for everything.  Lost made me angry a lot of the time but it was almost entirely made up of scenes where you didn’t know all the details, something strange was happening and there was a pervasive sense of drama. That sounds to me a lot like the experience of reading a modern poem. And although the instincts to comprehend and make sense of your surroundings are suspended to protect yourself from frustration, they are still there, aching to be satisfied.  For this reason I suspect that people are more often attracted to lines and phrases and fragments in modern poetry, rather than the work entire, in the same way that some scenes are memorable and some aren’t.

Once upon a time, poets knew their forms and their feet and they spent their careers breaking the rules and forging new work in free verse, so do the young poets start with the forms or do they begin from free verse and prose poems, as their immediate predecessors have done all the groundwork and shown the way?  Are the forms then just curiosities?  Is there a disconnect, when most writers are fifty to a hundred years ahead of what most casual poetry readers would choose to read?

When I look at what’s being written now, I lack an understanding of its values, of what makes a great modern poem.  ‘True to itself,’ is what I expect an cultured reader would say, ‘consistent with the rules it sets out.’  But maybe the days of great poems are over: maybe the last one was Howl, or The Wasteland. Maybe those are the poems where ordinary people lost interest: they’re great works but they’re pretty abstract. And I don’t see a lot of accessible discussion out there about poetry’s relevance or worth: it’s all dressed in a language that I can’t be bothered to pretend to understand.  Poetry occupies full halves of our literary journals, creeps its way into the margins of our newspapers and magazines, but to the average reader: is it all that interesting? Or is it something the just hangs around because it’s always been there: a familiar and quirky friend, like the bird calls on National Radio?

I should say that I don’t accept that poetry isn’t for the masses.  You can argue about whether hip hop is or isn’t poetry in the truest sense but what it does show is that there is a broad and massive appetite for wordplay, and for that most unfashionable of devices: rhyme. And you can’t inflict a poetry-reciting Bill Murray on a construction crew if you think it’s not going to mean something to them, because if it’s not, what it is is a sort of cynical sideshow: look at the working class men and their glassy uncomprehending stares, isn’t it hilarious.  But my rather miserable belief is this: the most exciting thing to happen in poetry in the last fifty years, for most people, was a Scotsman eulogising a chubby, cheery homosexual in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and that was a poem from the 1930s.

I should also say that I believe that poetry, being, for whatever reason, hitched to the world of deconstructionist academia and English departments, was in mortal danger of disappearing up its own bumhole some time around the middle of last century.  And a lot of poetry would still appear to reside there, somewhere in the tangled loops of the lower bowel, immobile and dense with no one to look at except beady-eyed academic spelunkers with nothing better to write a thesis on. This isn’t a new or uninformed idea: as early as 1944 the fictitious Ern Malley had his poetry published as Modernist genius, despite it being the creation of a pair of cynical pranksters. Postmodernism hasn’t helped, and when a poem is so obtuse and sparse and fragmented, how can an editor or publisher go on anything other than sound, shock and consistency: and how well the poet in question inhabits the poet’s mantle?

I’ve heard people talk about an appreciation of poetry as something you have or you haven’t got: it’s an innate sensitivity like a psychic potential to see auras.  If that’s true then the accusation of chicanery stands, and not only that, I want heads to roll. That’s elitist bullshit. The capacity to appreciate poetry is universal, and despite its faults we can thank Four Weddings and a Funeral for proving that: that’s the way poetry should work right, that’s the end game? Accessible, moving, saying something that couldn’t be said in any other way? That’s what people would appear to want from a poem. I’m not saying I like it, but plenty of people do. But could someone write a poem like Funeral Blues today and get it published? I’m not sure. The poem has an earnestness and a sincerity and a lack of slipperiness, and that easy accessibility seems awfully old-fashioned.

I’m probably betraying a lot of ignorance here but I’m old enough to not particularly care. I’ve struggled with questions like these over the years and haven’t got a lot of answers to them, and I’ve done and passed 3rd-year papers in the stuff. Maybe someone trying to come to grips with modern poetry has the same questions. Maybe someone trying to write it isn’t quite sure what the general reader’s experience is like, and maybe they’ll get some insight. Maybe we don’t know how to talk about poetry like normal people any more.  Or maybe it’s just me that doesn’t.

My view is that poetry has an image problem. Outsiders see it as an insular world of secret signs and symbols. It’s scary. It’s not welcome in people’s homes, and forget actually reciting some in the company of others. Whether it’s deserved or not, modern poetry to some is about as popular as a fart at a dinner party, and a desire to write poetry is a character flaw, a childish, attention-seeking behaviour.  Unless you’ve got a volume in bookstores from a respectable publisher, it’s definitely not something you’d put on your CV. And open-mic readings: they’re as embarrassing and awkward as support group. In fact, for some poets, they are a support group.

If I don’t like a poem, or a collection of poems, I think I have the right to say so. There’s a collegial atmosphere around poetry in this country, sometimes its treated with kid gloves, as though it’s this wispy, airy substance that will dissipate in anything other than Goldilocks conditions. Well, that’s more likely to be a quality of the poet than the poem.  And I find it hard to believe that in a world where two polar opposites like Michel Houellebecq and Helen Fielding exist in fiction, that all poetry is going to be interesting to someone like me, or to anyone: poets must be subject to the same mutations.

So I’m going to read all this stuff that’s been recommended to me, and hopefully have my assumptions and preconceptions challenged. I may not have all the skills or smarts to read it in the way the that poet or publisher would expect, I may not be kind, and I may lack some crucial knowledge about the process of its composition (but frankly, if that’s essential to the appreciation of the work it should be written on the back cover or the foreword or the introduction), but for some reason a publisher liked the work enough to put it in book stores, and for some reason the poet put those exact words down, and in that exact order, so that’s where I’ll begin. I’ll look for music and play and I’ll look for the sublime. And I’ll probably look for meaning where I shouldn’t. But hopefully I’ll find something that I like, and maybe I’ll learn something about where New Zealand poetry is at in the process.

I am not a very good cook. Home economics was my worst class at intermediate. As a teenager in the kitchen I wouldn’t make anything more complicated than a sandwich or microwaved nachos.^[1] The one time I did try – when I had an inexplicable craving for coconut ice – I attempted to follow a recipe from the Edmonds cookbook. I managed to confuse rice (a grain) with desiccated coconut (not a grain) and get halfway through the recipe before my mother smelt the burning rice. Even when my she pointed out my error I slavishly completed the recipe: I wasn’t going to let a little thing like getting the single most crucial ingredient completely wrong get in the way of an end result.

What I managed to create – rice ice, I called it – was nasty, inedible, and dangerous. I know it was dangerous because I ate half of it (Throw it out? After all that work?) and it gave me a terrible stomach ache.

When flat rosters became a part of my life I began to get a little more adventurous, but not much. I dreaded the night that cooking was my responsibility, so I would make only the most basic of meals: spaghetti bolognese, devilled sausages, apricot chicken, beef stroganoff, which the astute among you will notice are all selections from Maggi’s wonderful range of Cook-in-the-Pot meals. I wouldn’t cook anything that wasn’t written out on the back of a sachet. It must have been a relief for my flatmates when I opted to shout them pizza instead of cook for them.

I’ve evolved from there, and can now cook a fair few things, but I mostly stick to quick and easy stuff. I like pasta and rice based meals because it’s just heating a few things up on a stovetop and throwing them together. You aren’t messing about with an oven worrying about whether things are done or not. And there’s no stocks or steamers or other rubbish to make things complicated.

So full credit to Masterchef for getting me to cook something out of my comfort zone. I’ve been watching the show since the beginning and I love it. They’re all fantastic chefs, but they’re all flawed enough to make you think: yeah, I could do that. I mean, look at Rob, he’s 30-something and he hasn’t even figured out smiling yet.

Tonight I pushed myself. I made a pork loin with apple and sage and onion stuffing, served with roast capsicum and basil, and steamed beans with brown sauce and pine nuts. And it was good. Maybe the beans were a little over-steamed, and maybe I cooked a bit too much (we’ll be eatng pork sandwiches for a week), but on the whole I think it was a success.

And I liked it. I was thinking to myself that a kitchen is a laboratory for fast failure and rapid improvement. You have a go, you mess up, you learn something, you have another go. And the next time  it’ll probably turn out okay. There’s not many other places in life that you get to fail and improve that quickly. Work projects can take weeks, or months, or even years, the stakes are much much higher, and failure’s not usually an option. But roast pork’s just 90 minutes at 220 degrees, and if you mess it up the fish and chip shop is probably still open.

I’m going to spend more time in the kitchen. There are some great lessons to be had there, I think.