Tuesday October 27, 2015
Partly Sunny 70°F/21°C in Roma
Partly Sunny 82°F/ 28°C in Rancho Santa Margarita
Buongiorno,
To borrow a Mark Twain quote from the home page of my website www.mikebotula.com... “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry,
and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these
accounts.”
I heartily second that motion, Sam! Travel has definitely changed for
the better my personal
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| Bridge of Sighs Venezia |
outlook on the world. I’ve also watched changes in the
outlooks of my fellow landsmen after they’ve been on the road to destinations far
away. Travel has certainly broadened my son’s outlook. Michael went to London in
his twenties, met a pretty girl from Rome, and not only is still there, but
applying for citizenship. Laura and her family made him feel welcome, taught
him Italian, and a few days ago he called me and asked “dear old dad” to FedEx
him his birth certificate to complete his Italian citizenship application. (I kind of figured this might happen when he
came home from his “holiday” showed his mom and I a picture of Laura, packed
the rest of his clothes and went right back to Rome). Now I see more of him
when I travel to Rome myself.
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| Michael, Laura, MikeBo in Selci |
The first time I landed at Fiumicino International, a whole new world
was waiting for me. Now, on each succeeding touchdown I feel more like I’m
coming home again. The city has really grown on me, especially after my last
visit, when I moved into my own little studio apartment and became part of a
new neighborhood. In August when Michael and I drove past my old apartment
building in Mostacciano, I asked him to check with my former landlord on any
vacancies when I come back the next time. With each visit, Michael and Laura
introduce me to new places and new people all over Italy. On the last trip, in
2013, we went to Pompeii, Napoli and Firenze (Florence). The trip to Florence
introduced me to the wonderful world of high speed train service. Roma to
Firenze in an hour-and-a half, then to walk the streets where the Medici’s presided
at the dawn of the Renaissance. We
toured the Uffizzi, the stupendous
art gallery that was once the corporate world headquarters of La Famiglia de Medici and walked across il Ponte Vecchio, a 14th century Florentine
slaughterhouse that is now one of Europe’s most famous
market places for gold
and silver artifacts and jewelry. We toured il
Duomo, the famous cathedral, where I bought several watercolors to adorn
the walls of my home back in California.
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| Ponte Vecchio Firenze |
I learned to get around town on Rome’s modern Metro, and unscrambled the
mysteries of the Atac transit system’s network of bus lines. I went to the
market on my own, weighed and tagged my produce for the checker, and bagged my
own groceries while transacting all of my business in Euros. ATM’s in Rome work
just like the ones in San Francisco, and so do our credit cards. Travelers
checks are almost a mere curiosity these days. And spending Euros has long
ended the madness of changing your money into a different currency each time
you cross a national boundary. Among my souvenirs is a collection of Deutschemarks, Francs, Austrian Schillings,
Guilders and Lira, a reminder of post war European travels.
My first overseas adventure was in 1975 when my wife and I went to
Germany for a month. We stayed with my Air Force pilot kid brother Packy and
his then-fiancé Sue. It was the first overseas journey for both Donna and I –
LAX to Frankfurt in a Lufthansa Boeing 707 with an hour stopover in Amsterdam.
It was in Germany that I learned my first lesson in overseas travel – wherever you go on your first trip, if at
all possible, make sure you have a good friend who lives there to be your guide. Packy and Sue were terrific hosts and tour
guides. We started in Frankfurt and spent ten days on the road all through Austria
and Bavaria, including a weekend in Mϋnchen
for Oktoberfest, and
Berchtesgaden where we hiked and visited Hitler’s retreat and the teahouse
he built for his first lady, Eva
Braun. (Everytime I see shots of Der Fϋhrer
strutting along at his mountaintop lair on The
History Channel, I tell everyone within earshot that Hey! I had a couple of beers
right where Hitler’s walking!) By the end of our second week, I was ready
to move there. As we traveled with Packy and Sue, we found our hotels at
random. Around 3 in the afternoon we’d start looking at the front windows of
the gӓsthausen or pensionen along the
highway. If we saw a sign that read zimmer
frei, and it looked OK to us, we’d pull in and check it out. The rooms were
always clean and cozy and frϋstϋck was
always served first thing in der stϋbe.
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| Kehlstein Haus in the Day! |
The following year, I was sent on assignment to Guatemala…just a few
weeks after the catastrophic 1976 earthquake, that dwarfed LA’s Big One, the 1971 Sylmar quake. That’s
where I learned to pay attention to the local advice for staying healthy in a
strange land, and became famous on our return flight for being the only
journalist on the press plane not to become a victim
of the traveler’s Green Apple Quickstep. (Jimmy Carter
called it Montezuma’s Revenge). A few
years after that, I went back to Germany as a guest of the U.S. Air Force to
cover Reforger, one of the annual Fall
NATO war games. That trip gave me the opportunity to visit East Berlin while it
was still firmly behind the Iron Curtain, and, I got to go because I was the
only person in the newsroom with a passport. That is my second bit of travel
advice. You gotta have a passport. If all goes well my son will have two, US
and Italian.
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| Guatemala 1976 |
In between my last trip to Germany and my first trip to Rome, all of my
adventures were domestic. That is if you call traveling all over California and
the rest of the United States on assignments, business trips and vacations with
side trips to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. In all, I have made four trips
to Rome, staying longer each time. My love affair with the Eternal City got its
start way back in high school in Morris Diamond’s Latin class. We spent the
first year translating Julius Caesar’s Commentarii
de Bello Gallico, his account of his campaigns in Gaul from Latin into
English. It was Mr. Diamond who
inadvertently taught me my own first rule of foreign travel – learn to understand at least a little of the
language in the country you are traveling to. The second rule is at least teach yourself to count in the
language of the country you are going to. Since my third rule,
and my son the tour guide’s first bit of
advice to his tour customers is if your
waiter gives you a menu that is translated into four languages beside English,
get up and run for the exit. It’s a tourist trap!
Its hard to believe that I made my first trip to Rome in 2005. Looking
back now we worked hard to get ready for the trip. I checked my passport to make sure it was
current, and Monica applied for hers in plenty of time before liftoff. I signed
up for an Italian language class through the Italian Cultural Center in
Sacramento. Our teacher, Patrizia Cinquini Cerruti, is a native Italian who
operates a successful travel service specializing in tours to Italy. Her
textbook Buon Viaggio, A Travelers Guide
to Italian Language and Culture is a great primer for travelers. If you
live in the Sacramento area, I heartily recommend it. One huge difference in
the travel landscape between my first trip to Europe and my first trip to Italy
is the currency. Italy is now one of 28 members of the European Union. No more
fumbling with deutschemarks, Austrian schillings, lira, guilders or francs. No
sir! Sole currency for just about every nation in Europe is the Euro! Britain
and the Pound Sterling being the sole holdout!
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| Inside the Coliseum |
On the trip I just came back from, Michael and Laura once again took me
on new adventures, one of which was another high speed train trip on Italo to Venezia, fabled Venice, the
longest surviving
republic in history – over a thousand years. We spent two
long holiday weeks at Laura’s family’s mountain retreat in Selci in Sabina… and
explored a number of Medieval fortress villages nearby: Tolfa, Bagnoregio, Rochettine
and a host of others. We returned to one of my particular favorites, the 12th
century Benedictine abbey at Farfa, also in Sabina. I went to work with my tour
guide son and revisited Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius, joined a group going through
the catacombs and toured the crypts of the Dominican Church in Rome where the
monks of old decorated several of the crypts with the bones of other monks who
had predeceased the artists. That’s where I was welcomed back to Roma by the
lovely Alba, the manager of the museum gift shop. We also took a short Metro
trip to Ostia Antica, Imperial Rome’s ancient seaport. And, when we returned to Galleria Borghese, Michael was leading our tour. He amazed me yet
again with his knowledge of art and his grasp of Italian history. He’s on a
first name basis with just about all of the ancient Roman emperors. Then, just
before I left Rome to come back to the states, I flew to Amsterdam on a very
sentimental journey.
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| Morning Traffic in Venezia |
Joan and I had been steadies right
after we both graduated from high school. I was from Riverhead. She was from
Westhampton. Our romance lasted until she trundled off to New York
University
on a full scholarship and it wasn’t too long after that, we went our separate
ways. But we managed to stay in touch over the years, and now, in both our Golden Years, she was living in
Amsterdam and I had moved from New York ultimately settling in California. So,
as I made plans for my latest Rome trip, I called Joan and made a date to fly
up to Amsterdam and take her to dinner for old time’s sakes. An Easy Jet
non-stop put me practically on her doorstep. At her suggestion, I booked into
the Wilhelmina and was given the keys to a fourth floor room, which I found at
the top of an excruciatingly long, winding stairwell.
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| 2 BR w/canal view Amsterdam |
After a short walk to Joan’s apartment, and a reunion chat over coffee,
we decided that since neither one of us could walk around like we used to, she
called a cab and we headed off for a boat tour of the canals of Amsterdam. It
was a preview for me of our upcoming trip to Venice.
Amsterdam, especially the older sections on the canals is quite
charming, and there is a lot of history there. After all, my birthplace, New
York was once Nieu Amsterdam almost 400 years ago. And I could just visualize
the early Dutch governer of Nieu Amsterdam, Pieter Stuyvesant clomping around Manhattan on his
wooden leg growling out his distress that the British had just told him he was
being evicted. But, the canal boat ride gave Joan and I the perfect opportunity
to catch up on old times. At one point, we reminisced about the different
directions our lives had taken us and we realized that we had six marriages between
us. (At the end of seven innings, the
score is 4 to 2 with Joan leading Mike by two!) We had already passed the
Van Gogh Museum and the national treasure, The Rijksmuseum.
But Amsterdam also
has a lot of other museums which might interest you: Museum of
Bags and Purses, popularly referred to as the Coach Museum; Foam Photography Museum; Diamond Museum; Bijbels
Museum which boasts the oldest Bible
printed in the Netherlands-the 1477 Delftse Bijbel; The KattenKabinet,
an art museum devoted to works depicting cats; Verzetsmuseum, the Dutch
Resistance Museum, tells the story of the Dutch people between 1940 and 1945 in
World War II. The city also boasts the Cheese Museum and the everpopular
Marijuana Museum. There is also the Anne Frank Museum which radiates a certain
solemnity which could be felt even at a distance as our tour boat passed by. As
our boat pulled back into its pier we agreed that a boat tour was a great way
to spend a first-date-in-over-a-half-century
kind of afternoon. And, it reminded us of another boat ride we took long ago as
we explored New York City together – our 25 cent ride on the Staten Island
Ferry past the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and back to Battery Park.
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| Joan and Mike Again! |
After another day of catching up,
Joan called a cab for me and I headed back to Schipol to catch my Easy Jet
return flight to Rome and our next adventure – our Italo high speed train ride to Venezia. But that is a tale to be
told another time. Halloween is right around the corner and I have a story of
my own to tell about that before we travel to Venice.
Ciao,
MikeBo
© By Mike Botula 2015
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