Italy. Impressions.

ART! 


Bold and slamming, it comes and grabs and shakes you in Italy.  Magnificently lavish and astonishingly exquisite, it is far beyond anything it needs to be or even probably ought to be, and it will stretch  your capacity to comprehend its complexities and leave you dazed as you explore delicate details only as wave after wave of aftershocks reach through your newly expanding awareness.   
That’s art in Italy, that’s true, but that is the ancient 
Italian art.  The modern Italian art is 

there too and it is overpowering also.  It is the astonishing displays of graffiti, trash, noise and cigarette smoke/gas.  That grabs you too, and those memories also come home with you.

Tuscan hillsides run horizontally, marked off in vertical cypress tree metrics and with ancient farmhouses interposed on those sweeping lines together resembling sheets of music stretching into the distance.  Artists are always found seated with brushes and canvas interpreting and transcribing these melodies into another form of art.  This seems a permanent feature of Italy and perhaps is the most relaxing part of the country.

The Amalfi Coast falls, plunging desperately into the sea perhaps in despair  - or maybe rising from it in a great crescendo of triumph.  There is a road from Sorrento down to Amalfi, but that ride is a job best left to the professional bus drivers because there are a LOT of sharp curves and most of them only have one lane, as the curve tightens up, no matter which way you want to go.  Going down, sit on the right side of the bus; coming  back up, sit on the left.  And try not to look straight down.   

Venice waltzes with its sea.  Rising, falling, lifting and sometimes swirling under a little bit of the surface, and it seems to smile as it rises again. Drop by drop, lap by lap, this city carefully performs the most delicate 
fascination with death ever seen by mortal man.  And it now has its new “Veils of Venice”, those delicate stretches of gauze that now obscure 


the great architectural masterpieces of ancient art that people come from around the world to see. Now those tourists to Venice see the modern art form which lights up at night  to show advertisements for a movie or for a new product.  But that’s Italy now.

In Italy, food is another form of art.  Olive oil and wine, and pasta and tomatoes and spices and garlic and  - well, there are surprises here and there as you explore this new world of Italian food. 
 Yet there are nagging questions that you really don’t want to ask about those 
great masses of white bread and white pasta and you wonder about the nutritional value of these encounters with gastronomic glory.

I don’t plan to go back.  Italy to me, has a fatal flaw, and it is the Italians themselves. I found them  to be rude and aggressive. Their land was trashy - trashed by them -  their cities, while filled with ancient art, also presented a dirty and foul mess.  It is not like Germany or France or Austria or even Spain - it was filthy and its subway system was very limited, poorly done and dark. It was a land of endless cigarette smoke/gas, it was noisy, filled with graffiti and worst of all, the astonishing humanoid-like creatures which I at first took to be human teen-age boys, but quickly found to be reincarnate exemplars of vandals from ancient Italy.  I brought home a bruise or two from encounters with them as they knocked me and other passers-by from sidewalks during their hard-swinging and hard-kicking gleeful encounters with each other.  These are powerful memories you bring home and they don’t fade like the bruises they inflicted will.

In fairness (hopefully), I found the northern part of the country to be beautiful, peaceful,  exquisite and delicious.  The farther south I went, the more defensive I had to be and  the more distractions I found present.   The animals were more aggressive, the art less impressive, the food less tasty and the towns harder to navigate around in.  

I brought home a question too.  Why are almost all of the signs at the art shows, ruins, displays in museums, and exhibits only in Italian?  Perhaps they expect only Italians to come to visit these sights?  I doubt that America does any better in this respect, but the rest of Europe is pretty up on this issue.