Of areas, bow ties, hotels and linens

"Come and look," I said to the Celt as he was adjusting his bow tie. I had opened the window, chill notwithstanding, of the little dressing room earlier in the day for fresh air, whilst waiting for the inevitable rearrangement of my pocket square, the latest of the Celt's attempts to bring me, sartorially speaking, into the 21st-century - wearing one always makes me feel visible - I poked my head out to see what there was. What met my eyes was an enticing view over roofs and terraces towards the church, the Trinità dei Monti, that moors the Spanish Steps to the side of the Pincian hill.

We walked early that morning along the banks of the Tiber past the Ponte Rotto, a single-spanned midstream remnant of Rome's oldest stone bridge, up the steep slope of the Aventine hill towards the Basilica di Santa Sabina and the Giardino degli Aranci from whose belvedere one of the most beautiful panoramas of the city is to be seen.

The dressing room, as I call it, was merely an extension of the hall flanked on one side by closets - a space for suitcases on stands, convenient to the clothes hanging in the closets and large enough for the two of us to get in each other's way. In HGTV-speak, I should call that little space a "dressing area" much as a hall in many a fatuous program is called an "entry area," a living room a "living area" or, as I heard only yesterday, a tiny rectangle described as "formal living area," a rudimentary bathroom called a "bathroom area," a family room as a "family room area," and scraps of concrete and grass below the back door as a "patio area" and "garden area."

I'm not sure what happened with the kinds of programs where potential buyers ostensibly are looking at a formulaic three properties - one of which has, of course, already been bought - but it appears they are reading, in squeaky voice-over, a script from which "room" has been scoured and replaced by "area." I know words go in and out of fashion but what did this good old-fashioned word "room" do? Did it offend or is it that it does not sound grand enough?

So, in our tiny dressing area, the pocket-square demanded patience from both of us. If I had a preference, and seemingly fashion trumps all such whims, it would be for a regular handkerchief starched, pressed and placed square in the pocket and left alone for the rest of the day - if I wore one at all. Not so with the pocket-square which, for all its listless dishabille, seems to need an inordinate amount of attention and, maybe more importantly, is inhospitable toward reading glasses and all the other things men stow in a breast pocket.

Our hotel, steps away from the Piazza del Popolo, with a garden that climbed in terraces over the feet of the Pincio, and a bar I remembered seeing years ago in Architectural Digest, was once, allegedly, the favorite of the Russian aristocracy. There is nowadays little trace of what must have been the magnificence of that time, except perhaps in the architecture, now unrelentingly white. Yet the hotel has all the luxury of contemporary minimalism without the feeling of diminishment that much modern design and decoration can bring to old interiors.

Perhaps it's a peculiarly Italian sensibility, this skill in giving simplicity the air, if not the fact, of well-tailored luxury. Not so, I felt, about one hotel in London - Europe's first grand hotel it is claimed -redecorated with a "signature look" by one of London's finest, where we took tea with an Atlanta friend and her children, that had suffered the same application of contemporary drabs and whites in a not-quite-minimalist obliteration of its grand past that compared, albeit cursorily, to our hotel in Rome, appeared heavy-handed if not downright oppressive. Perhaps such a comparison is wrong, for the difference is not only one of wit - a quality the Italians have in spades when it comes to aesthetics - but in weather. London's often lowering skies and grey light can suck the life out of white, whereas Rome's frequently blue skies and golden light can make even the drabbest white sparkle with vitality.

My favorite white in the whole of Rome was that of the linen sheets at the hotel - neither the first nor the last linen sheets we'd sleep between while in Italy - heavy, thick and beautifully ironed. Cool, soft to the touch, they'd appear each day, a miracle of crisp uncreased cloth draping shy of the floor and as inviting as a long drink of cold, fresh water in the heat of summer.

In Rome

Chestnuts roasting by an open fire ..... Happy Christmas

Whoa!

We had planned so much to do in London and Manchester - not the least of which was to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum's The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 and, nostalgically for me, in Manchester look at one the best collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings anywhere, paintings I'd not seen, outside of books, for many a long year. So much planned and commensurately such a disappointment in having to cancel - not on a whim, but out of necessity. A disappointment heralded by the PA's reaction on his first look at my MRI films. "Whoa!" he said, with awe in his voice, "I've never seen anything like this." It confirmed, I suppose, what we already knew, but had gone unspoken, about having to cancel the vacation - this after an epidural, the onset of "dropped foot" in both legs, and a return, despite the epidural, of the worst sciatic pain I'd ever had, followed by a fall flat on my back in the shower, and the fact that I was in a wheelchair. I thought "whoa!" was a fair reaction to what he saw. 

So, an unplanned break from blogging having ensued, as has surgery and physical therapy (ongoing) I'm now able to totter, with the use of a cane, to my desk and sit for a while, fogged a little from the medication, and wonder what I'm going to write about. I have read so much the last four weeks but somehow don't want to turn this post into a "what I read this summer" grade school essay but, nonetheless, when you're flat on your back for a couple of weeks there's not much else to do but read.

I mentioned a few weeks ago how I'd finally come round to e-books and was quite enthusiastic about them. I still am enthusiastic but, much as with p-books, e-books are a mixed bag in terms of design, typography and proof-reading or the lack thereof. Many e-books are poorly typeset, with total disregard for basic typographic principles – more "widows" and "orphans" than a Dickens' novel, captions cut adrift from the illustrations they describe, letter-spacing choppy at best. This might be excusable in the free e-books, on the basis that one is getting what one has paid for, but the same problems regularly arise in commercial e-books, too.

Paradoxically, at the same time as they appear to flout the basic good manners of typography, many e-books also seem locked into a "print" mindset, and fail to take advantage of the potential of the new online medium. Like the online shelter magazines I discussed here, they seem to designed by people whose training is in print, and not in web design. Both e-books and e-magazines are designed - though "design" in this context implies intent - to resemble their print counterparts. And that, to me, is the intrinsic flaw. Why, given the capabilities of digital linkages, am I still having to turn the digital page, and in the case of e-books why are the illustrations bundled together in sections as one would find with a print book? As I say, e-books and e-magazines, as I experience them, are designed by people who were trained in the limitations of print - limitations that do not, or should not, exist in e-design. The nearest I have come in my search for what I think an e-magazine should or could be is Flipboard.

So, what did I read this summer?

A terrific read, the top of my list, despite the fact that because of medication I found it hard to concentrate for long, is Rome by Robert Hughes - a book not yet published in the United States - a highly personal account of the city of Rome from its founding to its present-day cultural destitution. A quotation from the last chapter gives a good sampling of what you might expect from this book - a quotation, I think, that pretty well sums up the cultural meagerness of the present day, and not just in Italy.

"..... It has got worse since the sixties with the colossal, steamrollering, mind-obliterating power of TV - whose Italian forms are amongst the worst in the world. The cultural IQ of the Italian nation, if one can speak of such a thing, has dropped considerably and the culprit seems to be television, as it is in other countries. What is the point of fostering elites that few care about? It bestows no political advantage. In the wholly upfront culture of football, 'reality' shows and celebrity games, a culture of pure distraction, it is no longer embarrassing to admit that Donatello, like the temperature of the polar ice-cap or the insect population of the Amazon, is one of those things about which you, as a good molto tipico Italian and nice enough guy, do not personally give a rat's ass."

William Shawcross' Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography, my first e-book, led me to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother at Clarence House, by John Cornforth, a book about the history of the house itself and the role of the Queen Mother as art collector; thence to Christopher Hussey's Clarence House published in 1949 to commemorate the then-newly-married Princess Elizabeth and Duke of Edinburgh setting up home together at Clarence House in rooms formal and sparsely, if comfortably, furnished, with:

"Many gifts made to Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip at their wedding consisted in furniture of the second half of the eighteenth century. This was fortunate, for English cabinet-making and design reached their zenith during the reign of George the Third, in the hands of Robert Adam, Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and the consummate craftsmen who executed their designs. These designs, moreover, were inter-related by a continuous though changing trend of development. Consequently a definite stylistic unity is given by the furniture to the rooms of Clarence House. These, though built during the Regency, are essentially late Georgian in character, with the spacious simplicity that suits furniture produced during that epoch."

Christopher Hussey, the erstwhile editor of Country Life, wrote a beautiful and poetic description (some might call it purple prose) of the Sitting Room and it's worth quoting it full.

"The most attractive room in the house is undoubtedly Princess Elizabeth's Sitting Room..... There are two lofty windows in the long wall and a wider one in the end opposite the entrance, the strong light from which is diffused my white muslin curtains. For the walls Her Royal Highness specified aquamarine, a delicate pale blue with a hint of green in it. This is carried up into the ceiling cove, which should, in general, be the same colour as the walls, and thereby emphasizes their height. The mouldings dividing the walls into compartments appear to be early twentieth century, but those of the chair-rail and skirting give evidence of being original. The original chimney-piece of white marble and ormulu has been moved to provide a second fireplace in the Drawing Room, the original chimney-piece it closely matches. Its place has been taken by one of carved pine, re-assembled from members found in store at Kensington Palace. Its entablature, crisply carved in high relief with festoons of flowers in the rococo taste, sets its date fairly easily in the time of George II who occupied Kensington for most of his reign (1727-1760). The window curtains, of patterned damask, match the walls. The magnificent modern Chinese carpet of self-coloured wool, textured with an over-all pattern of conventional flowers in relief, is considerably lighter in tone and contributes to the effect of diffused lightness which is perhaps the outstanding impression given by the room.

"The impression might be imaginatively described as catching the sensation of an early morning in September, when the sky is of a pale cloudless blue, but when the sun is still veiled by a thin haze and the lawn is silvered with dew. At that hour, in the freshness of the dawn, when the cool light vibrates in refraction from an infinity of tiny prisms on gossamers and flower-petals, the scene sings with soft, clear, colour. But in the margins, among the stems of trees that still cast long shadows over the lawn, the light is stained to deeper tones by the green canopies above, except where through a chink some ray falls on a still pool, a dew-dropped twig, or golden cache of fallen leaves.

"The components of this fanciful picture have close analogies in the colours assembled in the Princess's room. The phloxes and hollyhocks of a late summer garden are always reminiscent of chintz, a covering material of which it is said she is fond. The pattern chosen here for sofa and easy chairs incorporates pink and white hollyhocks against the same misty blue as the walls. The cut-glass chandelier, of late eighteenth-century design, has a skeleton of old gilded bronze from which hang the festoons and cascades of drops catching and concentrating the sunlight. The oval Chippendale mirror above the fireplace, with rococo carved and gilt wood frame, is the craftsman's version of the sylvan pool, while in each wall-light of gilded and carved wood he has actually portrayed a pair of doves, whose song we might add to the scenic analogy."

At the bottom of my list, an e-book, The Age of Comfort by Joan DeJean - and this is not a criticism of the author's writing style or the content of the book - was maddening in its lack of proof-reading, its seemingly random underlining of certain sentences and paragraphs, and its occasional instruction to "see color illustration" of which I could fine none. I had the distinct impression that there had been a rush to e-publish, the detriment of quality being beside the point. It is this book that has caused my wariness of buying e-books. Nonetheless, the book is a good and interesting read - the author's premise being that there was a particular moment in 18th century Paris when comfort, rather than grandeur, became the priority and thereby transformed architecture and interiors up to the present day - but what began to dominate the author's account of that transformation was my reaction to the careless typesetting mentioned above.

Somewhere between the two extremes, and in no particular order, are: State of Wonder, by Anne Patchett - a beautifully written story of a "research scientist with a Minnesota-based pharmaceutical company, sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor ..." not, in my opinion, the spellbinder the book cover promised and I labored at it for quite a while. I think I should read it again for I admit I did not give it my best, falling asleep as frequently as I did when reading it; Doctored Evidence, the first of a number of Donna Leon's books I've enjoyed over the past weeks - marvelous evocations of Venice and the Italian political scene as experienced by her humane Commissario Guido Brunetti; The Man from St. Petersburg, by Ken Follett - I knew by the end of the first chapter this book was not for me but because it was a gift I persevered, again between bouts of nodding off, but neither the tale nor its characters enthralled me; Edward VII, Christopher Hibbert's biography (e-book) of Queen Victoria's eldest son, who despite his appalling childhood and lack of training in the job of monarchy, became a well-respected king, a loving father and grandfather; The Aspern Papers by Henry James, which I have yet to finish (and to be honest, doubt if I ever shall); Jane Austen's Persuasion (free from iBooks) which I assume needs no further description, and, finally, the newly-published and excellent Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy, by John Julius Norwich - a very good read and an acute history of a line of rulers, spiritual and temporal, that began with St Peter and ends, thus far, with Benedict XVI. Actually an e-book which has got me through many a long dark hour when I awoke in the middle of the night and didn't want to wake the Celt by switching on the bedside light. I'm enjoying John Julius Norwich's book so much, obtusely perhaps, am going to buy the print version. And, I'll read it again from beginning to end.

So... what are you reading?

Photographs of Princess Elizabeth's Sitting Room and her Drawing Room from Clarence House, Christopher Hussey, Country Life Limited, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1949. No photographer's name given in the book.

Photographs of the Queen Mother's Sitting Room and her Drawing Room by Mark Fiennes, from Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at Clarence House, John Cornforth, Michael Joseph London in association with The Royal Collection, London 1996.

If, by chance,

you had a map of Rome to hand, and if you had the inclination, you could see quite how far we walked that day, the wettest of Christmas Days: from our hotel atop of the Pincian Hill, by the Villa Borghese, to the peak of the Janiculum and down the other flank. Easily written, those few words - from the top on one hill to the top of another but, as I say, if you had a map ...

That morning, rather than take the Spanish Steps, we turned left and descended the hill along the Via Veneto, one of the main characters in La Dolce Vita, to the Piazza Barbarini with its Fountain of the Triton. There's a thrill to walking in a city that makes itself known in great baroque crescendos - and there are many such amid the slow marching bands of tourists like, and yet very unlike, yourselves - when passing by the small, closed-for-the-day shops selling pork, fowl, pasta, each with its wares neatly covered in sheets of white paper, a corner is turned and there, its pool rimmed by camera-wielding barbarian paparazzi, stands the diva of all fountains, the Trevi, reduced to being a mere backdrop to photographs of proudly smiling children, wives, husbands, boyfriends, et al. That there might be a place reserved in hell, it seems to me, for the inventor of the phone camera - not mine, you understand, just everyone else's - appealed at that moment to my sense of justice.

From there,  over the cobblestones, surely the most cruel surface for tired feet, via the monstrous Victor Emmanuel II monument, to the the Forum where, wielding umbrellas, we walked its sodden paths towards the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine and, eventually, rounding the Palatine Hill with the Circus Maximus to our left we headed off in search of Bramante's Tempietto. We passed the beautiful sixth-century church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, with its simple twelfth-century Romanesque campanile bell tower and portico, reading too late that the crowds in the portico were there likely not for a service but for the Bocca della Verità in which, famously, Gregory Peck did not lose his hand whilst losing his head to Audrey Hepburn, yet with the Temple of Hercules, its neighbor the temple of Fortuna Virile and the remnant of the Theatre of Marcellus in view, it was hard to notice anything else - even the traffic swirling around the puddled lawn where they stood.

Across the Tiber, swift, swollen, and snuff-colored, to the tiny Isola Tiberina with its church and orphanage, then the Cestio Bridge, to Trastevere where we began what became a gruelingly wet climb towards the summit of the Janiculum hill.

Coffee in, coffee out is a phrase that always brings to mind the mother of an old friend who made the Celt and me as much part of her extended Jewish family as her own children - at least, because of her warmth and pleasure at seeing us, that's how it felt. Well, coffee in it was on a cold, dripping cafe terrace, and coffee out in the tiniest of toilets and the first where I noticed what became an Italian phenomenon, a toilet pot without a seat - not that one could have sat if one tried.

There are moments in Rome when the past, not intrusively, is as real as the day. Walking across the square towards the twelfth-century basilica, Santa Maria in Trastevere, we entered to find the nave flanked with spolia columns, and filled with tables at which sat much of the local community lunching, glumly it seemed to me, and listening to a much-applauded ancient priest, a cardinal I think, propped upright by a younger co-worker. An event as old as the church, perhaps, with deep roots in the community - no echo this of Saturnalia with its licensed overturning of social order but more a confirmation, Janus-like, that so it once was, so shall it be.

The facade of Santa Maria in Trastevere is covered with or, rather, built of spolia - irregular blocks of stone with fragmentary inscriptions - an absolute delight of Roman lettering which since I came home has led me to Nicolete Gray's A History of Lettering on my bookshelves.

Taking a short flight of steps we began the climb up the Janiculum Hill to find the Tempietto which, on reaching the plateau with its Baroque fountain-termination of an aqueduct built by the emperor Trajan, and the Garibaldi memorial, was not to be found and indeed was not mentioned by a single sign. We did find it, eventually, as we turned from the view of Rome beneath us - a column or two, part of the drum, just visible behind a narrow, locked iron-gated entrance to the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio. We had to kneel to photograph the little temple and no bad thing, perhaps, on Christmas Day, to kneel at the place where St Peter was crucified. I wish that gate had been unlocked, but I had seen, however imperfectly, one of the two Roman buildings, each separated by fifteen hundred years and many a sodden kilometer, I'd looked forward to visiting.  

Back down the hill we went, past the Villa Farnesini and on over the Tiber, back through the Piazza Navone and the Via della Scrofa to the Spanish Steps, and up to the hotel and a long, hot soak, and a deep, chilled Manhattan.

That evening, Christmas night, we ate an excellent dinner, accompanied by a seagull on the window ledge near our table - an enormous bird watching all that went on in the restaurant and waiting to be fed under the barely-opened window - at the Hassler Villa Medici hotel. The view from the restaurant out over the city to the Basilica was magnificent, especially when viewed while eating the most surprising item on the menu, Christmas pudding!

Photograph of Santa Maria in Trastevere from here. Cannot think why we did not photograph it ourselves. All other photographs by the Celt! 

The ancient world, pink fur cuffs, rain and writing

Rose and I discussed it on Saturday over tea in the National Portrait Gallery's Portrait Restaurant, this sometime inability to write anything of satisfaction. The view, by the way, from the restaurant, out over Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall past Lutyens' Cenotaph, Horse Guards Parade, and Inigo Jones' Banqueting Hall where King Charles lost his head after Rubens painted the ceiling, to the clock tower, usually and quite wrongly called Big Ben, at the Palace of Westminster, is pretty grand but not dramatic enough to detract from the conversation-stopping tower of sandwiches, cakes, scones, creme brulee, clotted cream and jams, delivered to the table for the delectation of the Celt and the lady, our blind date, dressed in the finest of navy blue bracketed with pink fur cuffs. I nibbled a crumb or two whilst the three of us got to be very comfortable at the table in front of the window - I'd like to say a window streaming with the setting sun but actually is was just rain.

It seems the Celt and I cannot walk by St James's Park without it beginning to rain. There had been a New Year's Day parade that day in central London so our taxi driver, unable to take us near the National Portrait Gallery, dropped us at the end of Downing Street and we scurried in increasingly heavier rain, eventually squelching our way around the Thomas Lawrence exhibition - an agreeably sized presentation of brilliantly alive portraits of the Regency period.

Rain it did too, the day we arrived in Rome - a day earlier than planned because of Heathrow being snowed under, and the day we began the first of our walks around Rome - solidly and torrentially, so heavily in fact that Bernini's great Tuscan colonnade at St Peter's Basilica, sheltering many a dripping tourist, leaked like a sieve. The ellipse in front of the Basilica, centered with a Nativity ensemble at the foot of the obelisk and furred with rain held a long, huddled line of umbrellas shambling its way to the entrance at the foot of the steps, dwarfed both by the basilica and the downpour.

We turned around, umbrella aloft, leaving to another day the path across the piazza to join the queue, and walked back past the Castel Sant'Angelo, talking about the Corridor, that papal escape route to what had been Hadrian's mausoleum, as we crossed the Tiber between Bernini's angels – each holding a symbol of Christ's agony – on eventually to the Piazza Navone with its Christmas market, finally coming to the Broken Boat fountain where we took the Spanish Steps up to the Pincian Hill and our hotel.

So, this occasional inability to write is a merely a symptom, it seems, of the process of discovering, a finding of the one drop in the rain of ideas that could become a river - what one really wants to write about, but rarely that which brings one to the keyboard - in my case, at least.

Silenus and the baby Bacchus, a sculpture I saw on St Stephen's Day in the Vatican Museum, took my breath away - such an unexpected version of the parent and child, the grouping that predates the midwinter festival celebrating the birth of a child. That so much beauty remains from the ancient world took me by surprise and that definitely is a tale for another day - a rainy day, perhaps.

Vin chaud and white lights

It's three in the morning and here I sit, glass of hot vin chaud - the spiced and brandied red wine I made earlier this evening to have with leftover boeuf bourguignon, and it finally hits me that after a more than a week of visitors, Christmas parties, finals, grading, faculty meetings, and yet one more party to come, that it is only eleven days before we set off on our winter vacation. Normally, we would take the winter vacation in New York but this year we going to Rome, a city neither of us has been to. Florence is on the itinerary as is New Year in Venice. Of all the buildings I'm going to see, Bramante's Tempietto is the one I'm most most looking forward to.

Christmas, in its own way, a festival of lights, when in the short, dark days of the northern midwinter fires were lit not only against the cold, holly and mistletoe, the greenery of the old gods, hung above doors and windows, and trees ornamented with candles. One of my most clear memories of childhood Christmases is of a card printed with a snowy coaching scene that because of its metal foil surface and a shred of embossing glinted magically in the light of the fire. The magic of that glint, the glow of fire in a dark room, the blue shadows beyond the slab of light from a window thrown across snow, has never left me. Last night at our condo holiday party the major decorations were large glass vases filled white lights and white twigs from which hung many icicles - to me the most glamouring of combinations, frost and fire. It's good sometimes to snatch a few seconds, just to appreciate how light in the dark is so essential and elemental a condition.

When, last weekend, I asked the Celt what we might serve for his sister-in-law's last-night-with-us dinner with friends he immediately said boeuf bourguignon, gratin dauphinoise and roasted asparagus with a bought-in fruit tart to follow - suggesting he'd hitherto given it a tad more thought than had I. Boeuf bourguignon it was but the odd thing is I realized I'd never made it before. I'd made the Flemish version of beef in beer, slowly stewed beef with prunes and red wine, even stroganoffed filet (the "t" is not silent in this household) with sour cream and mushrooms - in fact over the years I'd stewed a lot of beef but had never done the classic, Julia Child popularized, blogged-about and movie-starred boeuf bourguignon. Well, I made it and I can tell you honestly it was a total disappointment - until, that is, on reheating two days later and with the last minute addition of buttered mushrooms and pearl onions, it had evolved into the most salubrious of casseroles. There's a morsel, perhaps not served well by a second and third reheating, left for lunch tomorrow.

As to gratin dauphinoise, and this is where I recognize the irony of taking anti-cholesterol medication, I like it simple - well-seasoned, thinly-sliced potatoes, layered with cream and lots of garlic (none of the rub the dish with garlic nonsense) and slowly, slowly baked. Simple, subtle, and salacious.


I shall resume posts about connections, circles within circles, next week.