Profiles in excess tourism in Florence. The subjects of the double portraits are said to be the Duke and Duchess of Urbino circa 1475, but the dates of marriage, death and ascension to to the dukedom make that impossible (interesting history and analysis of the art at https://tinyurl.com/2vvt3tdu). The museum was so crowded it wore down our old bodies. I really wanted to see the Caravaggios but we had to get out of the herd.
Oh, and the Duomo was closed.
Home now, a day late. The flight from London to Chicago was way behind schedule and, until you have flown on an A380, you have no idea how very long it takes to get 460 passengers' luggage onto the carousel. Spent the night at an airport hotel and arrived home yesterday.
We will have to look at pictures of Italy for a bit, not too much of a hardship. This is a view from the nave of the Siena Duomo looking toward the altar seen in Friday's post. I get a sense of the enormity, solemnity and overstated grandeur of the place.
The nave of the Siena Duomo. I know something about Western art history but I'm no expert. Something here is sliding between the baroque and rococo but I couldn't define where the line falls. In any event, the visual effects are overwhelming. The church construction was begun in the 13th and 14th Centuries, and it is mind-boggling to consider the architectural and engineering skill. The decoration developed over the following centuries. It is impossible for even an interested tourist to take it all in.
As mentioned, lots of flying today. May get some photo editing done on the long London - Chicago segment but I don't know when I'll get my next post up.
Last day of leg wearying, joint aching tourism. We do okay walking around on vacation but Tuscany is full of settled mini-mountains, built that way, I suppose, for defensive purposes. 10,500 step day yesterday, which may be a modern personal record. What the health app on my phone does not record without consulting the altimeter is the hill climbing, many days 300 - 400 feet / 90 - 120 meters. We've had enough.
On our final day here we visited the Siena Duomo, which is an architectural and artistic spectacle. The central dome over the nave invites visitors with a supple enough neck to contemplate heaven. I got the shot because my camera has an articulating LED screen.
Drive back to Bologna today and spend the night at an airport hotel. Tomorrow it's BLQ - LHR - ORD - STL, 11 hours of flying and 5 hours of airport transfers, gods of the air willing. We are ready to go home.
Day trip to Florence yesterday. I'll spare you the details of how bad a job Google Maps did on the tiny, twisted streets of the city center and how lost we got just trying to find parking. Anyway, I really wanted to go to the Galleria degli Ufizzi.It was as crowded as the Louvre in mid-summer or the Metropolitan in New York during Christmas week. Arguably not worth the effort.
I remember the other time I saw Botticelli's Birth of Venus here, perhaps 25 years ago. I don't remember the season but the place wasn't crowded. I stood in rapture for a long time in front of this work until a guard jabbered at me in Italian because an Asian tour group couldn't see through/around tall me. At some point this gets so tiring that I can't absorb any more.
Apologies to Frances Mayes' wonderful book, but we have been driving around Tuscany for a couple of days looking for the quintessential view and the light has been just dreadful. Dull, hazy, formless. The landscape shots I took are unusable. After climbing uphill about 125 meters from the parking lot to to the central piazza in Montepulciano, I had to satisfy myself with some strange entertainment. A German video crew had these two young women race around a corner and then collapse. I couldn't make any sense of it. The tourist sitting on a bench wasn't interested at all.
Seen in the small Tuscan hill town of Pienza. Must be the original Model 1.
Didn't make it that far yesterday, with the effect of warm, humid weather and lots of hills on old muscles and joints. Will try for Montalcino and Montepulciano today. Had some fabulous Nobile di Montepulciano with dinner last night. Tuscan cuisine is not for the faint of heart.
Okay, admit it. We are old. Pretty healthy but not in top physical condition. We did well enough in Bologna, which is flat, but Siena is all hills. 10,000 steps today, up and down, a lot for me, and my legs feel like putty. Not quite like this when we got back to the hotel (he is obviously young and strong, but maybe having a bad day) but it's got us thinking about maybe river cruises for future travel.
This was found in the Museo Civico on Il Campo, the central public space of Siena. We could not find anything to explain it. I'd share some of my naproxen with him. We plan an easier day today, driving toward Montepulciano and Orvieto. Might buy some wine.
Two hour drive today from Bologna to Siena, braving the speed demons of the autostrada. We are staying in a place we were perhaps 20 years ago in an 18th Century mansion, the Villa Sacciapensiere, on the hills north of the city. This is the view just before sunset from one of the terraces. Day trips around Tuscany for the next several days.
Like everywhere in Italy, there are a bunch of big, ornate and mostly rococo Catholic churches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rococo), in Bologna. The most grand is Basilca of San Petronio, (whoever he was), the patron saint of the city, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Petronio,_Bologna . It is far bigger than the official metropolitan cathedral. In terms of interior volume, and it is the sixth largest church in Europe.
We ended up in Bologna by chance because air fares from London were cheaper than flying into Florence. I'm glad we came. Definitely worth a visit and OMG you eat well here.
We made it, drooping with jet lag. Quick pic for now. Had a marvelous dinner of a regional specialty dish, tortellini al ragu, and then found this around the corner.
The joint British Airways - American Airlines Club Whoopee at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. Hard to believe, but there seem to be eight BA and AA flights from here to London this evening. Long layover at Heathrow on Wednesday. We will be touching down there about the time after this post goes up.
An old photo illustrating tonight's transport. London is not our final destination, just a connection point. The Latin quote is from the opening of Virgil's Aeneid, which some &^$%& Jesuits made me read in high school: driven to Italy by fate. Well, in our case, more driven by British Airways.
We reach our landing place tomorrow night. Weird Al provides a theme song for the city we're heading to - https://youtu.be/hikh0d0q7HA?si=MdO517fWpjuFlNhM We expect to eat well.
We took the kid to the art fair. Her attention was, um, selective. She did, however, enjoy a ride on an Audi. It is one of the major sponsors of the fair, which may say something of its type of visitor.
The Saint Louis Art Fair is taking place this weekend. It's big, taking up several city blocks in the suburb of Clayton. That's become a second downtown, modern, sleek and sanitary. The fair is hard to photograph since it is very crowded on a beautiful weekend like this. What got my eye was a plaza leading to a parking garage. The design is unusual if nothing else.
There is a delightful band of waterlogged vagabonds calling itself The Flotsam River Circus, http://www.rivercircus.com/about.html . They have spent the summer floating down the Mighty Mississippi, mooring their rickety barge/stage at the river towns from Minneapolis-St. Paul on south, performing a wacky mix of music, comedy and acrobatics. Their last stop of the season is here this weekend.
This late-summer night was perfect, even if the cobblestone levee was rough. We took granddaughter Ellie who declared it the best circus she had ever seen. For locals, it is repeated tonight and tomorrow at 6. Free, but donations are very appropriate. It's located on the river just north of Eads Bridge, with nearby parking in Laclede's Landing.
Perhaps how an artist feels after the work of Paint Louis is done. It's photography geek stuff, but I like how the formal elements in this one turned out. Dark, sharp, cool but active against warm, round and passive. Horizontal wall top against the vertical smokestacks. They are across the Mississippi in Illinois so they're pretty big.
There are a number of things going on around town this weekend so I hope to have something fresh to show. Midweek we blow off on another adventure.
Hieronymus Bosch on a particularly bad trip, or maybe a contemporary painter off anti-psychotics. I've mentioned that some of the Paint Louis wall art reminds me of particular artists. This one makes me think of Francis Bacon, https://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings . You see his work in all the big museums. I find it deeply disturbing and walk by quickly.
Only a few non-Americans would recognize this face and mayby not many of us. It is the engraved portrait of Benjamin Franklin that appears on the US $100 bill. Maybe you've seen a movie showing a briefcase packed full of Bens. I like the artistic embellishments. They remind me of the style of one of my favorite painters, James Rosenquist.
I went back to the flood wall yesterday afternoon. Monday was the Labor Day national holiday (nowadays sometimes a bitter irony) and Paint Louis was officially to run through the afternoon. Almost everything had been wrapped up by the time I arrived. Without crowds, I could cruise up and down, looking for what caught my eye.
An awful lot of it to my old eyes was, as usual, elaborate, illegible tagging. A new trend seems to be block capital letters, three to six to them, that might be initials or acronyms but never with an explanation. Lost on me. A few sections had strong imagery, some blunt, some subtle. That's what I stopped to record.
And this one? Well, this is the United States.
Another section of the flood wall at Paint Louis. I'm not sure what the scarlet pipes are for. Maybe something to do with a natural gas pipeline, but that's a guess. They fit nicely with the new paint job and the cloudless sky.
Preparing a section of wall for this year's work at Paint Louis. The top of the flood wall is several feet / well over a meter from the top of the roller. Since the wall goes on for more than 3 miles / 5 km, it's hard to imagine the volume of paint used on the whole project. Hot work, too, in the harsh sun. Still quite warm here.
First image from Paint Louis 2023, the 27th year for the event. Artists come from all over the world on our Labor Day long weekend to redecorate a 3.5 mile / 5.6 km stretch of the Mississippi River flood wall any way they wish. It was just getting started yesterday and continues through the Monday holiday.
There are still more pictures from The Fringe to work in somewhere but we also have the big Japanese Festival at the botanical garden this weekend.
The September City Daily Photo theme is bottle, a broad concept. Rather than show a glass or plastic container, I chose one of our town's minor landmarks (with the major one in the picture). Vess is a local soft drink company, whose motto, seen in small print under the name, is Billion Bubble Beverage. The giant bottle rotates and is easily visible from a major highway that runs nearby. It had gotten dingy but was repainted a few years ago. The location is a down-at-the-heels area just north of the city center. Plans promoted to redevelop the area as The Bottle District never went anywhere.
City Daily Photo members around the world display their vessels at https://citydailyphoto.org/category/theme-days/ .
Interesting concept: three thirty-something men, old friends. One is a singer-songwriter who is unsure of his direction. Two old pals who are articulate and at times blunt. The former expresses himself through his music and responds to his friends' prodding. They pick apart his confused feelings and, as they say, get in his face. Psychotherapy on the cheap.
One of my faults when shooting at The Fringe is that I do more looking than listening. I did not get the name of the person who performs a show briefly described as "an immersive, participatory, one-woman show about exploring identity. Throw things! Yell stuff! Laugh! Cry!" It contains four parts, each with a different character who begins by reading from her diary. As long as the page is on The Fringe website you can read a more detailed description at https://tinyurl.com/2p9xtycr . Sure, pour a mini bottle of Jaegermeister into your water jug.
Vestals is a new play by Susie Lawrence based on the ancient Roman order of the Vestal Virgins. I won't explain the details of the order here; click the link to learn more. Six women were held in very high regard and were, in a sense, seen as preservers of the Roman state. The setting is late the 4th Century CE, when the Senate acted to cut their budget. In 382, the Christian emperor Gratian confiscated their revenues and the order disappeared shortly thereafter.
The play involves complex themes of duty, piety, male-female conflict, treachery, desire and revenge. A lot to pack into an hour.
Writer and journalist Chris Andoe performed an hour-long monologue about experiences on the gay scene from his home in Tulsa, to the larger Oklahoma City and eventually to St. Louis with detours to San Francisco and New York. Something keeps pulling him back here. His stories were at times wild and raucous, to the delight of a big audience of his fans.
I sometimes have loose associations. His pose in the second picture reminded me of Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating The Bust Of Homer, without the jewels and silken robe.
Dreamscape was performed by seven women, in small groups or ensemble, with flowing, emotionally evocative gestures. They sometimes appeared distressed, sometimes gracefully beautiful. The program description says that Dreamscape is about what we experience while we are dreaming and how those dreams affect us in our waking hours.
Times change. They always do, including in schools and on the stage. Two more scenes from the musical Bare. The first was a dance party that I assume was not held under the auspices of the school. (The Jesuits and the Archdiocese of New York would never have tolerated such things when I was young). Boys dancing with boys! Girls dancing with girls! Occasionally girls dancing with boys!
The second photo represents a dream one of the main characters had. It's the young man in the foreground in yesterday's post. He is conflicted by his desires and guilt. One of the nuns from the school appears as the Virgin Mary to comfort him and guide his decisions. She has two backup singer-dancer angels. The crowd went wild.
Bare was a full-length, two act musical, a coming of age story about young people at a Catholic high school (oh, how I can relate) with themes of authority, rebellion, alienation, and a complex web of straight, bi and gay relationships. It was also the most difficult to shoot. There was constant movement, a crowded stage with changes in color, and color LED stage lights are hell on cameras.
I only got to see the first act, an hour and twenty minutes, because I had another show to get to. This is one of my favorite photos of the festival, two young men on the edge of a gay encounter, one full of confidence, the other full of longing, indecision and guilt.
More to come.
It seems like every year Panagiotis Papavlasopoulos and Analicia Kocher produce an unusual one-act comedy that is a bit on the strange side. This year, Checking Out told the story of a woman who has inherited a low-end B&B from her sister, keeping her developmentally disabled nephew as handy man. It takes place in a isolated slice of Illinois, Jersey County, a narrow wedge of land between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. The only way out to the east and west are small ferries, giving it a remote feel. The late owner's wake on the premises and her will brings some surprises.
Ann Truka presented a one-woman show called simply Jean. Her website, https://www.anntruka.com/, summarizes the character as
a non-binary children's book author and one-hit-wonder, is trying to craft their next piece of work - but what was once a story about an androgynous puppy exploring fashion is now something much more...adult. Struggling through their writer's block, they invite the audience to join them on an insightful journey navigating family relationships and what it's like to feel different.
As you might guess, there's more to it than that. I hope Ann returns to The Fringe next year.
