Soccer Boy, Local Residents in the Square
5. Hanging out in Campo San Giovanni (Venice)
Another ordinary-sounding moment that was one of those times where you feel very in tune with your surroundings and the heart of a place. Sid and I tried to go to an old church very far up in the north end of the city -- San Giovanni e Paolo -- only to arrive at siesta and find it closed for the next hour and a half. Undaunted and with no real agenda, we sat down in the square (campo) there to wait.
Most social life in Venice
revolves around the campo, and we got a good glimpse into
this phenomenon that day as we sat sipping our Camparis
at an outdoor cafe. The waiter who served us brought our
drinks and then left his post to play a very long round
of soccer with an amazingly agile four year old dressed
in banana yellow. When business interfered another waiter
took a turn, and one by one the whole restaurant seemed
to take a hand in keeping the local kids amused. Two
other small boys hit a ball off the brick wall of the
church as kids must have for the last eight hundred
years. Couples strolling through called out a familiar
Ciao to everyone else in the square. No one hurried.
Everyone smiled. It was so much fun to watch I couldn't
even really bring myself to write the postcards I'd set
out to finish.
Eiffel Tower From Below
6. Seeing the Eiffel Tower (Paris)
A cliché, I suppose, but it still astounded me, especially once I saw it up close. It looks almost as you would imagine from seeing pictures except that it's so infinitely bigger -- no French-ified Space Needle, this. (It looks like it could tuck the Space Needle away in its pocket.) At night, you walk towards it down a long parkway and soon are standing under its immense lower arches, towering over you, glinting like a copper penny, absolutely dwarfing everyone, bathed in light.
Then you cross the river and get a sense of it from a little further away, and perspective returns. Then you take creative pictures of it using your camera's light meter. :)
The courtyard at San Marco
7. Touring Museo San Marco (Florence)
Two discoveries on this trip about museums and me: one, I can't do museums when I'm tired, and two, I like them best when they're small and somewhat focused. Museo San Marco was one of the best. A former monastery now devoted to the works of Fra Angelico, it's set up so that the visitor wanders from cell to cell, stooping through tiny doors to view the sugary-pastel frescos meant to inspire the monks in meditation. You round corners of staircases to be knocked off your feet by a masterpieces you've seen your whole life in books, like the famous Annunciation. Nothing I'd ever seen prepared me for the way these colors glow in person. I bought a postcard, knowing it would never do it justice, and finally left to go sit, blinking and stunned, in the sun, thinking back on this oasis.
San Lorenzo Church
8. Il Sotterraneo (Florence)
In the bottom of one of the Medici chapels in Florence is a small doorway that appears to go nowhere, guarded by a quiet man in a blue blazer. If you're very lucky and have one of the rare books that talks about this, you know to go ask for an extra ticket at the front desk and then hand it to this man, who will usher you down into what has to be one of the greatest art sights in the entire world - Michelangelo's Sotterraneo, a small cavern where the artist hid for three days during a revolt, in fear of his life, and decorated the walls with sketches.
Feet, eyes, figures, the face of God, the nose of a horse, a knee, an angel who appears to be holding a baseball bat (?), swoops, lines, and scribbles. All in one tiny chamber.
I had this wonder all to myself for nearly a half hour, while hundreds of people passed through the crypt overhead. I couldn't leave.