I took a 25-day trip and for some reason kept a very lengthy journal about it, with a few sketches here and there. I don't expect this to be of any interest to anyone except a few friends, but who knows. Note, all the people shown here were drawn inaccurately from memory.

(Click on the small pictures to see them full-size.)

part 1 - part 2 - part 3

July 29-30 - So I'm going to Europe, or some easy little part of it, for almost a month - I didn't really get off to a smooth start. Walking out the door & down the block with my new big green strappy backpack - sweating buckets before I even started, the house was like an oven - I thought, where did I put my keys? Oh, in my little shoulder bag. So where did I put my little shoulder bag? In the backpack - no wait, it's in the house isn't it. I was lucky, a house-sitting friend was home & had the spare keys. So I started out again with all my belongings but with some more doubts about my ability to get by in the adult world. My next mistake was to take the subway, which is cheap and takes about 90 minutes, more than enough time, but this time it took 150 minutes. I staggered into the airport and without really thinking about it, I went and stood in line for half an hour before I realized I was probably missing my flight. Meanwhile two dozen Italian teenagers were whooping and horsing around in the line. I guess I like them more than American teenagers but that's not saying much.

The guy at the counter took pity on my insanity and got me onto the next flight - in business class. I never understood why business class wasn't called second class but now I know. It's because it's expensive and all the trappings of it are meant to remind you that you paid a lot of money & are special - so you don't want to be called second class. I got so carried away with the reclining throne and the footrest and the mini-TV and the food and the complimentary toothbrush that I forgot to get any sleep. Instead I watched Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker threaten each other in an unpleasant thriller, Panic Room. And I was already thrilled and panicked. I really didn't want to see anything from the day so far as an omen - especially not what happened earlier just before boarding:

A short, nervous, grinning woman, looking vaguely Italian and chewing gum non-stop, had brought four carry-on bags instead of two and wanted me to carry one on for her so she wouldn't get in trouble. Why hadn't she checked the bags? Because they're full of fragile things. How had she expected to deal with it? "Oh I do this all the time." Wouldn't this still leave her with 3 bags which is still too many? "I can work it out." The gum and the intense stare seemed very creepy but I put it down to my frayed nerves & had pretty much agreed to carry the bag - then I realized I was in business class & would be getting on the plane long before her. A lot of not very likely worst-case scenarios suddenly went through my mind: getting dragged off by drug dogs; the lady never getting on the plane, and the plane blows up; etc. Or just getting somehow generally fooled - her half-helpless and flaky, half-aggressive manner was a lot like some scam-artists I've known. Of course she could just be a flaky person who didn't plan ahead and didn't communicate well but had no bad intentions - just like me. But my paranoia won out and I begged off. She went to a big jolly German woman who immediately agreed. If anything bad happened, I don't know about it.

I got into Frankfurt and then Milan, with fried eyes and a vague intention to deal better with things from here on. I had spent a few hours on the plane reading my Italian lessons again and thinking I'd have no problem getting to Florence. But there was no sign of the bus to Milan Central - and the Malpensa airport didn't look anything like I remembered it - much bigger, emptier and uglier. Of course I couldn't just ask someone for information so it took me a long time to figure out that Malpensa has two terminals and I was in the other one. I hope I remember this next time.

By the time I got into Firenze it was almost eight, and when Jo & Icchio drove me up to Marcialla I was no longer noticing the world around me. I said hello to the dog & cat, got a tour of the house, we ate a lot of pasta and an omelette, then I put mosquito repellent all over myself & went to sleep.

MARCIALLA July 31 - Feeling pretty lazy. Icchio goes to her first job in the morning, comes back for lunch and goes to her second job. Jo & I ate some food & hung around the house till it started to cool down in the afternoon, then went for a walk through the village & down the hill.

Marcialla has one street, one grocery store, two banks, one church, and three restaurants - this because of the campground down the road, full of German tourists with spare cash; the grocer charges them double for everything. So there's not much to do but go out of town. The road winds around & turns into gravel going past vineyards & summer houses. You can hear cars coming in plenty of time. We were barked at by a herd of dogs & ducks behind a fence - also a loose dog followed & barked for a while, and twice it caught hares and showed them to us. We went to see the ruins of a 13th-century tower on another hill. (Marcialla has been around at least that long; its claim to fame was having been occupied by the Florentine army when Florence went to kick the ass of its rival Semifonte, twice.) Then we headed back because every step we could take was downhill which meant another step uphill later. I was pretty winded, but I think I'm already breathing easier than I did in New York.

Before we left, it was thundering & dark but it didn't rain. Lightning struck something across the valley and a cloud of smoke went up in front of us. Icchio came back from her afternoon job early because lightning was striking all around the place.

Before & after dinner, Jo and I started playing with the Sculpey (polymer clay) that I brought her; I made a sort of a bird. Stayed up waiting for it to bake, then realized the oven wasn't actually on, and had to stay up some more.

FIRENZE August 1 - Got up early so Icchio could drive us to Montespertoli on her way to work; we took a bus from there to Florence & spent the day there. No photos, I was fed up with carrying the camera around.

Neither of us felt like a lot of art or shopping so we went to some non-art museum places. First the Specola (Museo di Zoologia), which had a huge collection of taxidermied animals, mostly so badly stuffed that we couldn't stop laughing (keeping in mind that we weren't laughing at the dead, but at the slobs who messed up the dead) - sheepish lions, cross-eyed otters, etc. I forgot to draw any pictures of these (but if I did, you'd think I must be exaggerating). The other part of the museum is an incredible collection of wax anatomical models from the 17th & 18th centuries. Beautifully detailed cutaway figures and organ systems in multicolored wax - I have no idea how it was done. At the end were some of Zumbo's wax tableaux - "The Plague," "The Triumph of Time," etc. Later, the Museum of the History of Science, full of intricate astrolabes, pumps, clocks, telescopes, and the bony middle finger of Galileo in a reliquary. They also had some medical models and a set of flabbergasting cartoonish drawings (F. Valle, Opera d'ostetricia, 1792), unfortunately impossible to reproduce here, of a doctor yanking a baby out of a woman in various poses, with both of them dressed to the nines except for the minimal necessary area and an X-ray view of her belly, and both exclaiming in high melodrama style.

We had some very good ice cream at a place called Cavini(?), and some English beer at a pub on P. St. Maria Novella. Would've gone to the comics store but it's closed in the afternoon - also Jo says their books are all shrink-wrapped. Stopped at an international bookstore & picked up Geoff Ryman's latest.

Long bus ride back to Marcialla, then wrote postcards & stayed up reading, and wondering where I ought to live.

CERTALDO August 2 - Up early again & off to Certaldo. It's right next to Marcialla (or looks that way - a big valley in between) but the only way to get there is to go all the way to Montespertoli & get another bus. Jo knows Certaldo from her teaching job. It's prety small, but not as small as Marcialla & a lot livelier. Further up the hill is the medieval town, Certaldo Alto, with the old Governor's Palace. Both parts are saturated with Boccacciana - Boccaccio was born there & lived there for a short while - there's the Caffe Boccaccio, the Boccaccio Pizzeria, Boccaccio Travel Agency etc.

The medieval town, really just a few streets leading up to the castle, with all its winding passages & walls & stairs & alcoves looks like cat heaven, though we only saw one cat. There's a grocery store, a cafe and a craft shop (which looks like all craft shops). The Museum of Religious Art hast mostly chalices and censers, plus a few odd but not memorable paintings (with the patron looking over the shoulder of the saint) and a huge, beautiful wooden Crucifixion. The Palazio Presidio has some enjoyable stairs & rooms, a very big view of the valleys, some miserable prison cells where someone scratched a whole lot of tally marks on the wall, and a peculiar assortment of modern Japanese art on exhibit. In the back there's a landscape/sculpture installation by Nagasawa, "The Tea House Garden"; Jo has an exhibit catalogue that describes the theoretical significance of this piece in florid detail, but up close it just seems ill-conceived and impossible to be with. The palace guestbook had a lot of comments questioning the wisdom of the exhibit & wondering why some of the "chinoiserie" had been hung directly on top of the ancient frescoes.

Back home for lunch & spent the rest of the day drawing a landscape postcard and working out a route for next week. Thought of trying to extend my return ticket, called Lufthansa but the next flight would be Sept. 6 which is too long. Even so, it looks like I can stay a few days in Barcelona - will probably do that instead of going all over France.

We went out for splendid pizza in Tavarnelle. After we had some dessert and grappa, the waiter ignored us for a very long time while Jo kept trying to get the check. She made the check-writing gesture, which apparently is unknown in Italy; I told Icchio it means "Give me your phone number."

POPULÓNIA/BARATTI August 3 - Got up with a plan to go to the beach; watched the rain come down for a couple of hours; then called the tourist bureau & found out it was still sunny on the coast. Icchio, Jo, the dog & I all got in the car. Since this is August I expected all the Italians in the world to be at the beach, but apparently there are more popular beaches - this one is in a little bay near a tiny village with some Etruscan ruins; the beach is a narrow strip of sand, but between that & the road are some great fields & groves. There's one grove of ocean pines that I could've stood in all day. We lounged at the beach till 6 & decided to skip the ruins & drive on.

The dog likes the beach & is content to swim for a few minutes & then sleep for an hour. She tried something new: rolling around in the shallow surf, looking like a seaweed monster. I tried something new: lying down on the sand where the water just reached the back of my head.

On to SAN GALGANO the tiniest possible town containing mostly the old monastery of the same name. The abbey is a great Gothic toy-box, now lacking a roof. Standing in the middle of a big green field it's very inviting. At dusk they turn on floodlights on the ground, a weird effect since it's meant to be lighted from the sky. Up a steep hill is the round chapel containing the sword in a stone which was Galgano's miracle - he stuck the sword in there when his friends were trying to lure him back to knighthood. Also somewhere in the chapel (I heard later) are the preserved hands of some thieves, whose hands fell off when they tried to steal the holy sword. Next to the abbey is a "center for birds of prey" - we just missed some kind of big falconry show.

Back home & stayed in most of the day August 4. Hot, hot, hot. Finished drawing a landscape postcard. Looked at train schedules, decided to try for Barcelona.

Eventually we drove into Firenze & met Simone at Icchio's parents' house. Watched some TV news - mostly about Marilyn Monroe (news in August - no one's paying attention). I washed my clothes & hung them in the garden. In the corner of the garden there's a 40-year-old turtle. Slow to look around & slow to eat a fig, but when I went to get my camera the turtle went back to her hiding place with impressive speed.

We drove out to Fiesole, a suburb with a view from a big hill. Climbed the hill. Back to the house, picked up Leo & went out looking for a restaurant that's part of the annual "Sagra del Tortello" basically a week where you can get lots of tortelli everywhere. Closed. So we ended up at the Festa dell'Unità in San Brigida (which Leo called San Frigida) - a remnant of Tuscany's Communist loyalty, now sponsored by the "Democrats of the Left" (whose flag still has a tree & a rose but has lost the hammer & sickle). There's a lot of fried food, bad to OK, and a Muzak-swing band caled the Jetlag Orchestra - playing "I Just Called to Say I Love You" with a smoke machine. On the way back Leo took out the frustrations of the day by driving around curves in a homicidal style.

Slept over at the house in Firenze, reading The Wizard of Oz.

PISA August 5 - Clothes still not dry, paid 3 Euro (!) to dry them on the way to the train station. Leaving Firenze for good today. In Pisa Jo & I staggered around in the heat for a while before meeting up with Valeria & her boyfriend. She just passed a big exam in veterinary school & is moving on to "large animals," although what she really wants to be is a fish inspector at market.

Piazza dei Miracoli is (I'm told) the only thing to see in Pisa unless you're a college student. The tower, the cathedral & the baptistry are all beautiful. Jo pointed out that the cathedral uses recycled ancient marble full of random Latin inscriptions at odd angles. We toured the cemetery, full of sarcophagi & tomb fragments from various eras, and the partly restored frescoes in the "Triumph of Death" series. (The frescoes were mostly ruined when we bombed Pisa and the lead roof melted onto the walls.)

I rode the train with Jo back to Firenze where I got a connection to Rome. This was a last-minute decision I had been resisting because I kept flinching from the idea of a big hot city where I don't speak the language. But remembering the ruins & learning a few more words of Italian convinced me.

ROMA What should've been a 3-hour trip turned out to be more like 4 and when I crept out of Roma Termine it all looked dark & scary. I had deliberately failed to call ahead to any hostels - something about not wanting to commit to any plans at all - and all the ones on my list were full, so I ended up in a dorm room in the Stargate Hotel (whose logo looks like the sci-fi movie of the same name) - a not at all futuristic maze of disrepair, but the beds looked clean.

(On the train, I shared a compartment with Babi, a Roman widow who had just been on an Adriatic holiday and was always depressed by summer in the city. In broken French & Italian she told me about her husband, a man of "various character" whom she'd been happy with. And now "time passes and marriage is more difficult for young people today." I drew a pencil portrait of her - she was fascinated & embarrassed - preening one minute & hiding the next minute. She insisted on taking the picture - the wrinkles of "time passing" made her sad but she really liked the eyes.)

Dead tired at the hostel, washed up & met my roommates - 3 Spaniard guys & an American couple, Southerners studying in Bristol. The Spaniards offered us sandwiches, cookies and hash. I took a hit & tried to sleep, while the American girl talked a mile a minute, mostly about slang and drugs. (I learned that "fumado" is Spanish for stoned & that there's "no point to staying in Amsterdam more than 2 nights" if you get wasted every night.) I talked a little too & was happy to realize that I'd never talked to roommates in a hostel before. Tried to go to sleep gain around 12, was up till at least 3 because of brutal heat & random thoughts.

August 6 - Walked to a lot of things. The fora, the Colosseum, the Botanical Garden (populated only by mothers, children, & ducks), the Circus Maximus, a few bridges. Spent a lot of time in the Trastevere. Looked through a lot of comics & translated paperbacks on the used book stands. At a big shiny bookstore, bought a Mattotti book & a Toppi. A small Japanese woman was meditating in lotus position on a bench in the bookstore.

At Teatro Belli in the Trastevere, I saw the Prague Marionette Company do a puppet version of The Marriage of Figaro. Great expressive puppets, moving perfectly with the recorded singing; a multiple-level set, with smaller rod puppets operated from below on the upper levels, and big marionettes on the lower level for busier scenes; and a shadow screen for some bits of comic business. The audience was mostly adults but the kids were into it too. I wish I could have understood a single word. Did an OK drawing of Figaro & Susanna.

Walked all the way back past the station, pretty exhausted & slept fine this time. On the way back I found out I can hum fake Mozart for a long long time.

August 7 - Said goodbye to my roommates (Iñaki left a note: "Have a nice trip (not acid trip) and good luck in all your lifes.") Didn't cover a whole lot of new ground today - stopped a lot, watched tourists, drank water. Dozed in the shadow of a statue on Capitolino, then stayed there about an hour, watching tour groups - got a little lonely. Bought another damn book - translated stories of J. Lethem - at a cool little store, Libreria Renascimiento(?) which also has an odd assortment of comics: Crumb, Druillet, Shelton, Manara, "Prof. Bad Trip," Tintin, back issues of "Blue," a single 1991 issue of some anthology with a Carol Swain story, and a bunch of cutesy-porny gag strips by someone called Wolinski. Hung out with the cats at the beautiful Sacra Argentina excavations, which would look like cat heaven even if there weren't an animal shelter next to it below street level. (I asked the manager if any cats had been removed from the Colosseum, because I only saw a few & I remembered there being tons of them there. She said grimly: "No - the city does not even dream of doing anything either for or against the cats.")

Other sights: the Pantheon (with a sign outside saying you can get an indulgence on any of the following holy days - "or any other day the faithful one may choose"), P. Navera, market in P. di Fuori (there's a bookstore there called Fahrenheit 451 - looks political - never got to see it open), P. d'Espagna, temple to Hadrian, and many spiffy carabinieri guarding various government buildings that I accidentally started walking into.

Speaking of government, I didn't notice so many propaganda posters in Firenze. But here, Berlusconi's party has posters everywhere telling "responsible young people" to join the Forza Italia Youth instead of becoming "extremists"; the AN (fascists) are blaming "the left" for burning down a library, and propose to "give power back to the state and the people"; the "center left" is accusing the gov't of some malfeasance I didn't understand (about health care?) and several sides are fighting over some new sanitation plan.

Just before running for the train, I decided to eat a big meal in a restaurant (it's been pizza & bread & cheese so far) since I'm already spending money I shouldn't. It was all full of Americans (the restaurant, not the meal) & I considered pretending to be French, but didn't. It's creepy how so many of the U.S. tourists look the same to me. There's this one American girl I swear I've seen fifty times - sort of Midwestern &/or Southern, square-jawed, solid.

Left my first giveaway book, The Wizard of Oz, in Roma Termini on a public phone, along with my Italian phone card.

The night train was pretty good. I was in a 6-bed couchette with at first just 3 Koreans - Mr. Lo, a polite engineer of some kind, and Mrs. Lo, a beauty who liked to speak English & said I looked just like Brad Pitt; they were with a huge S. Korean tour group that took up most of the train; and Taewoo, a young backpacker who had just lost all his money in Rome - he & his friend were almost thrown off the train due to having to the wrong kind of ticket, but they made it to Zürich. In the middle of the night we were joined by two loud young Italian guys. Went to sleep in shadowy warm hills, woke up in cool bright mountains.

part 1 - part 2 - part 3