Pillar #15: Romans are a superstitious people--at least when it comes to soccer

This will be short because I'm procrastinating and should really get back to my studio work, but Sunday night, we went to the Roma v. Lazio soccer match. For my first European soccer game, I have to say it was really great, and it was really nice to do something unrelated to architecture or urbanism for once!
I may have mentioned this before, but Lazio is the region in which Rome is located, so basically, it's a rivalry along the lines of Georgia-Georgia Tech or Georgia-Florida football. The only difference is that die-hard Roma and Lazio fans are even crazier that American football fans, which I never really thought possible.
We arrived at the Stadio Olimpico (the 70,000+ seat arena which was the site of the 1960 Olympics) around 6:10 pm for the game, which was to start at 6:30. It was eerily quiet and empty walking up to the stadium, but when we got there, it was apparent that most people were already in the stadium, cheering, chanting, and singing their Italian "fight" songs. When we got in the stadium, there was a very clear divide between the maroon of Roma and the light blue of Lazio, and at midfield was the press area on one side and a completely empty section on the other side. We were informed that that is sort of the "no-man's land" where people only buy tickets to fight with the opposing team's fans, and sure enough, we were not disappointed. A few minutes before the game started, people began rushing into that section and quickly started throwing punches, but they were pretty quickly subdued by the security. The section remained empty the rest of the game--kind of a waste of the best seats, if you ask me. (We were quite far from this section, so there was no real danger for us.)


When we got to our seats, we realized that there were already people sitting in them, but they made room for us. An English speaking Italian behind us informed us that the guy in our seat HAD to stay there because he sat there all season and Roma hadn't lost a game yet, so Claire, Huaxia and I squeezed into two seats for the first half. Lazio scored pretty quickly into the game, so our section was pretty subdued for the rest of the first half. During halftime, Huaxia got up to take some pictures and decided to just sit in the aisle for the start of the second half. Roma quickly came back, scoring two goals on penalty kicks, and our section instantly came alive. The chanting, which as far as we could tell was led by a few random gesturing people at the bottom of the stands rather than by loudspeakers or a band, became even louder, and after each goal, there was a lot of jumping and thrashing around. At one point, Huaxia came back to sit with us, and a few things happened. Previously, Claire and I were sitting with Huaxia between us, since she was the smallest. When she came back though, Huaxia sat to one side of us. Immediately, the guy behind us told her that she HAD to sit in the middle because we couldn't just change seats around like that. Huaxia returned to the middle seat, at which point the couple back on the aisle started objecting. Huaxia couldn't back with us because Roma didn't score at all while she was sitting there in the first half but they scored twice while she was sitting in the aisle, so she HAD to move back to the aisle. Huaxia agreed, reluctantly, and she returned to the aisle with a hero's welcome and offers for free beer and snacks.


The game ended without Lazio scoring again, so, of course, the Roma section went wild, and we were informed that we HAVE to come back next Sunday and sit with them again. We didn't have the heart to tell them we'd be finishing up our work in studio, and that they'd just have to go on without us. I certainly hope Roma wins again though.

Pillar #14: Wide street + tall buildings + no trees + diesel engines = Unpleasant Street

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've been expending my writing energies on several papers due at the end of the semester. As of today, I am done with two of my classes- one completely and one I have to finish a paper, and then of course we have our studio presentation a week from Monday. Almost done!

It occurred to me that with all of my travels, I've neglected to write much about some of the cool stuff I've done in Rome, the best of which was visiting St. Peter's Basilica, the seat of the Catholic Church in the Vatican City. We actually waited until mid-February to go for the first time, mostly because Claire has never been to Rome before, and I wanted to make sure she saw plenty of other stuff first. St. Peter's is so incredibly breathtaking that everything else seems pretty insignificant by comparison. It was designed in multiple phases by some of the greatest architects in history and became a model for future Renaissance and Baroque churches throughout Italy and Europe.

The original basilica (Side note: Basilica comes from the word for Roman law courts that were located in the forum and could be entered from all sides. Early Christian churches adapted the same basic plan but you could only enter from one of the short sides on axis with the center.) was begun by the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century over the supposed site of the tomb of Peter, therefore literally making Peter the rock on which the church was built. After centuries of deterioration and instability in the church, Pope Julius II decided to demolish the old basilica and begin rebuilding new St. Peter's. Starting with the plan for a centralized church by Bramante, successive Popes for more than 100 years enlisted Michelangelo, Giacomo della Porta, Domenico Fontana, Carlo Maderno and Gianlorenzo Bernini to complete the church and the colonnaded piazza in front.


Knowing what talent went into building St. Peter's made the climb to the top of the dome all the better. The first glimpse we got of the vast interior was from the circular walkway ringing the dome where we were able to peer down on the the high altar and the many small people below. From there, we entered the dome and climbed between the two structural shells (not for the claustrophobic or the faint of heart) towards the top. The cupola is roughly the size of a tiny, circular church designed by Bramante to mark what was thought to be the spot of the crucifixion of St. Peter, the Tempietto, which happens to be around the corner from my apartment. (St. Peter was crucified upside down because he felt he was not worthy to be martyred in the same manner as Christ. Similarly, St. Andrew was crucified on an X-shaped cross.) From there, we were able to get an amazing 360 degree view of the city from its tallest point, and thankfully, it was an unseasonably warm, sunny, and clear day.

As I mentioned before, St. Peter's is not a cathedral, because the seat of the bishop of Rome (the Pope) is actually at St. John the Lateran on the opposite side of town. This became significant during the Middle Ages when a new pope was coronated because he would have to process through town from St. Peter's to the Lateran to complete the process. We've been talking about this papal procession route in class as a kind of armature through the city where property owners often dressed up their property not only to make the route more formalized, but to emphasize their importance in the hopes of gaining lucrative positions in the new administration. Churches along the route also dressed up their facades, added bell towers, etc. so that you get a series of visual cues that lead you along what would otherwise be just another curvy street. The procession is very visually and symbolically rich, starting at the Vatican and going past the fortress Castel Sant' Angelo, over the "Bridge of the Angels" by Bernini whose angels bear the instruments of the crucifixion, past the Bank of the Holy Spirit (the Vatican bank), up to the Capitoline Hill to the Campidoglio, down through the Roman Forum through two triumphal arches, past the Colossum, and onward south to the Lateran.

They don't do this anymore (not really sure why...), and during the 19th century, a more modern road, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, was put in that parallels and eventually connects to the old route to the Campidoglio. It is one of the few roads in central Rome that is pretty similar to a typical American city street--four lanes, wide sidewalks, 4-5 story buildings fronting it--yet for some reason, it is incredibly unpleasant to walk down. This made waiting in line for an hour and a half to get into the Palazzo Massimo on March 16th even more painful.

This palazzo is one of the more famous in Rome because it was built on the foundations of a Roman theater and therefore has a curving facade. In order to have a symmetrical facade, the oldest Massimo actually had to buy a small piece of his younger brother's property. The palazzo is open to the public for free once a year to commemorate the miraculous recovery of one of the Massimo children during the 16th century, and they were having a mass in the chapel while people were touring the house. It was a bit of a let down because you could only see certain rooms in the house, but still cool to say we've been (at least among other architecture nerds).

I hope there will be time for more updates before I head to the UK and Ireland in a couple of weeks. We've done lots of great stuff and a few more day trips, so I will do my best.

Pillar #13: Romans apparently have no concern for March Madness (Veneto/Tuscany Trip Part IV)

Finally, we come to Siena, the de facto climax of our trip due to its location on the long road back to Rome and its complexity within a seemingly simple y-shaped city. Our first order of business was to head to the Campo, the central market and governmental piazza of Siena, and one of the most remarkable public spaces in the world. The city is formed from three neighborhoods at the top of three ridges that merged at a bowl, which eventually became the Campo. It is less like a piazza and more like an outdoor theater due to its shape and orientation towards city hall, which acts as the stage. After a quick walk we got dinner at a restaurant with no menu aside from the owner who rattled off some pasta and meat in Italian, and I ended up with a great dish consisting of a local, fat spaghetti called “pici” with wild boar sauce.

The last day of our trip was finally a beautiful day with highs near 60 degrees, so I left behind several of my usual layers, gloves, and scarf and we headed out to explore the town. Claire and I covered almost the entire town before breaking for lunch in the Campo and climbing the 400 steps of the Campanile to see an amazing view of the town and miles of surrounding countryside. (Florence, you have some explaining to do…)

The best part about Siena was that it felt like a real town and not just a stop on the tour of Italy. Sure, there are the main shopping streets and Campo that attract tourists. I mentioned that the Campo tends to act like a theater, and with a large market on the upper slope plus performers on stilts, jugglers, etc. putting on a show it did just that. The subtle slope makes it very easy to sit, and many were taking advantage of the warm sun by doing just that. We also visited the Duomo at the highest point in the center of town and the three or four other large monastic churches on the edges of town that like Pisa connect physically and symbolically to the landscape. In addition to these larger, more populated areas, there are also smaller, quieter neighborhoods on the ridges where there are families, smaller churches, schools, and other essential community functions. Historically, these were easily identified by the 17 Contrada, or wards, within the city that participate in the annual Palio di Siena. This is the horse race that takes place around the upper part of the Campo which is still a point of great neighborhood pride. If you’ve seen the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, the opening chase scene ends in Siena during the Palio.

After spending most of the day in Siena, we finally departed for Rome, and were back home around 8:30 pm after the grocery stores were closed. As you can probably imagine, we had little food in the house, and oddly enough, when we went down the hill Sunday afternoon around 1:30 to get groceries, we discovered that all the grocery stores were closed. Determined to find a grocery store and encouraged by the sudden burst of beautiful spring weather (the only March Madness I’ve noticed has nothing to with basketball and everything to do with Romans being out and about in large numbers when the sun is out), we walked into town and finally found an open grocery store. It would seem that Roman Sundays are the opposite of the US, as things are open in the morning and closed afternoons. Also unlike the US, there are plenty of other things besides certain fast food restaurants that shall not be named that are closed all day.

I will get pictures up as soon as I am able, but for now, it's back to the grind...

Pillar #12: Americans appreciate spontaneous organ recitals just as much as the next Florentine (Veneto/Tuscany Trip Part III)

I wrote these posts as we drive in the car (we are back in Rome, by the way), so that’s why they’re a bit longer and more detailed than normal. Also, it’s why I may have jumped the gun a bit when I gave the Venetians credit for the near perfect shower. As it turns out, it seems that most of northern Italy has their act together when it comes to showering, and I can’t tell you how great it is since I have to take a bath everyday in Rome. (Yes, you get to sit down which is nice, but it is otherwise inconvenient.) It’s especially good coming from Bruges where the clearance in the shower was six feet, but these are the quirks you have to deal with when staying in an old retrofitted building in Europe. Sometimes the showers have a (mostly) water-tight door; sometimes it’s just a curtain and a floor drain. Sometimes you have a door of normal height; sometimes you have a six-foot tall door on which you hit your head not once or twice, but five times. For some reason, you always get a bidet. That I will never understand.

When I last posted, we were heading to Lucca, and it was incredibly slow going over the mountains. We didn’t quite beat the snow, and when we stopped for a quick bathroom break, there was already an inch and a half on the ground after only 30 minutes. We made it over the mountains eventually, and soon the only white mountains we saw were near Carrera, where most of the white marble in Italy is mined. (When Caesar Augustus transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble, he was primarily using Carrera marble.)

We arrived in Lucca with enough time to take our customary walk through town before dark and eat dinner. This stop was pretty uneventful aside from two things. First, my hotel room was covered from floor to ceiling in floral wallpaper, curtains, and bed linens. It felt like I was sleeping in someone’s grandmother’s house, or maybe Wonka Land. Second, I had fried chicken and vegetables (the house specialty) for dinner. The vegetables were tempura fried, but the chicken, aside from the lack of salt, was pretty dang close to home. I didn’t know the Luccese had it in them.

After Lucca, we headed to Pisa for a brief stop. When I visited five years ago, I was actually surprised to learn that in addition to the leaning tower, there was actually a cathedral, baptistery, cemetery, and a whole town, in fact. Since we made the long walk across town from the train station last time, I was relieved when we skipped the town and drove straight for the edge where the cathedral is located. I couldn’t quite think of the words to describe it last time—the green grass, the sparkling white marble of the buildings, the blue cloudless sky, and the location on the very edge of town in an open area overlooking the mountains beyond—but one of the benefits of going to a Catholic university is that they can give you the religious significance of everything. The Pisans were literally trying to create a City of God on the earth when they isolated the sacred precinct at the edge of the city and gave it a strong connection to nature, much in the way the Athenians did with the acropolis (although not literally elevated above the city). The Florentines may have the biggest cathedral, but in my opinion, the Pisans have the grandest in Tuscany.


Speaking of Florence, that was our next stop, and it was fortunately a longer one. Our hotel was literally in the center of town, located on the old Roman Decumanus (the primary east-west street) and about a block from the Forum, now the Piazza della Repubblica, so we were basically surrounded by all of the important buildings and spaces we visited. We were mostly left to explore on our own during the two days, so Claire and I tried to make the most out of our time, visiting the Uffizi Gallery (formerly the offices of the Medici family who ruled Florence during the Renaissance, now an art gallery), Santa Croce (uncertain) and the Pazzi Chapel (Brunelleschi), San Lorenzo (Brunelleschi) and the Lauretian Library (Michelangelo), and doing our individual sketching assignments before and after lunch.

At two, we met up with the group to drive to nearby Settignano to see the gardens of the Villa Gamberaia. This was a nice change to get off into the rural landscape where there are olive groves and vineyards and incredible countryside all within sight of the city. The view from the terrace off the front of the house had an incredible view of Florence (even more so once the sun peeked out for a moment as it was setting), and the gardens were very elaborate, with a formal garden off the side of the house, a long grass “bowling green,” as the called it, running the full length of the property, several grottos, two “boschetta,” or oak groves, and an orange/lemon grove and orangerie where the trees are moved during the winter (and as we’ve seen, yes it does snow in Tuscany, even in March).

If you’re going to spend money on food in Italy, I highly suggest doing it in small towns off the beaten path (Spello, for instance) or in Tuscany, because first, it’s already much cheaper than say Rome or Venice anyway, and second, it’s just better than anywhere else I’ve been (Neapolitan pizza aside). In Florence, I had spaghetti with tomato, cream, and butter sauce (just cover all the bases), really good grilled swordfish, jumping ahead a bit, I also had a really good fat spaghetti called pici with wild boar sauce, which, following a common theme, had tiny little bones that I had to pick out of my mouth. After dinner, Claire and I were walking around and as we approached our hotel, we heard organ music that at first was a bit unnerving, but as we rounded the corner, we realized it was coming from the church across the street. Supposedly Dante’s church (before he was given the boot from Florence) was having a free, and quite incredible for the 40 minutes we sat there listening, organ recital with donations going to restore the bell tower. Only in Italy.

The next morning it was drizzling and cold—again—so we decided to forgo paying to climb the Duomo and instead hiked to San Miniato al Monte, a church by Alberti high on the hills overlooking the city. What would have been a fantastic view was limited only to the city between us and the center of town because of the clouds, so we missed seeing the hills and surrounding landscape. Afterwards, we quickly walked by the Palazzo Pitti and Santo Spirito on the same side of the river before meeting the group to depart for San Gimignano.

One of my favorite places we visited last semester, San Gimignano is a tiny hill town south of Florence that has been nearly perfectly preserved from the Middle Ages, and it is therefore a pretty big tourist attraction now. The town has one of my favorite sequences of piazzas that we’ve visited (based on my memory from last time), but unfortunately we had several factors working against us—the cold (nothing new), the rain that prevented us from seeing stuff, like the famous towers, above us (nothing new), and the market stalls and tents that were temporarily set up in all of the piazzas. It was more or less productive, but very difficult to get a sense of space when there are tents in your way.

To be continued in Part IV...

Pillar #11: Six is greater than four (Veneto Part II)

Following quite a long walk from our hotel to the bus station to meet Angelo, we bid farewell to Venice and headed to Padua, or Padova as the Italians know it. Padua is very evidently a town of Roman origin as you can see the original castrum, or colony, outlined by a moat and partial remains of the city wall. Because we were staying on the edge of the city, we drove in Sunday night for dinner and a quick walk. We also met up with John and Jen, the married couple in our class, who were sick and had to miss the first part of the trip. (The other four of us had far too much room in the back of the van anyway. We don't want to get spoiled.) Monday morning, we took another early walk through different parts of the town and saw a few churches, and one, San Antonio, was an entire complex comprised of a basilica, chapels, four cortiles, museums, and other church functions. St. Anthony of Padua is a patron saint of traveler (so I’m told), so that was probably a good stop for us to make as we departed for Vicenza.


Vicenza is the home of Andrea Palladio, who designed many buildings in Vicenza and around northern Italy. He also published a book called I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, or Four Books of Architecture, the name of which comes from a long tradition of architectural treatises regarding siting of cities and buildings, design, the Classical orders/columns, proportioning, materials, etc. dating back to Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria or Ten Books of Architecture, the first treatise of the Renaissance which followed Vitruvius’s De Architectura (Ten Books of Architecture) from antiquity, the oldest surviving treatise. Palladio’s book was circulated widely throughout Europe, and it was through his book and other similar books that the Renaissance spread to northern Europe through varying interpretations.Our first stop on Palladio road was another roadside stop at Villa Capra, also known as La Rotunda or Villa Rotunda, one of his most famous villas. Similar to Villa Malcontenta, this villa was set in a picturesque landscape on a canal at the outskirts of a small village near Vicenza. It was a beautiful, cloudless day (still cold), so it made for some great photographs. We stopped at a couple of other villas as well before going into the city, the Villa Valmarana and Villa Thiene. Villas Capra and Valmarana are both privately owned and only open for tours on certain days, but Villa Thiene is located on the edge of a small village and actually functions as its town hall today.


In Vicenza, we were looking forward to seeing some of Palladio’s many buildings, but quickly realized that most of them were closed on Monday. Disappointed, but with many possibilities to see facades and interior courts, we headed into town towards the Basilica, which in this case refers to a row of three buildings that Palladio re-faced and combined to form the town hall for the city, complete with shops on the main level under the arcade and government functions above. Rather than an arcade with single columns (as we saw in Bologna, etc.), he used an ingenious device known as a Serliana, also known as the Palladian motif because of his frequent usage. You’ve probably all seen the pattern in houses everywhere, combining an arch with a column on either side, and then a beam on each side of the arch connecting to another column. The ingenious thing about it is that the outside columns can be shifted farther out and the beam can be lengthened, while the columns supporting the arch remain the same distance apart thereby keeping the arch the same size when using multiple bays of different widths. At the Basilica, for instance, the bays on the sides are about six feet shorter than the center bays, so the two columns on either side of the arch are much closer together. It is barely noticeable unless you look closely because all of the arches are the same height and width. There’s your architectural lesson for the day.


It was interesting to see how effectively good architects can improve the quality of nearly everything else built in the town, not only because of better design but improving construction methods and materials. (This is not necessarily true today because construction materials and methods for modernist buildings are often too complicated and unaffordable for the average client, especially those outside of large cities. In Palladio’s day for instance, everyone used masonry, so everyone benefited from improved quality regardless of whether they were using heavy stone or brick or a Classical or vernacular style.) The palazzo type (Italian urban mansions) that Palladio designed throughout Vicenza is essentially the form of 19th or early 20th century urban buildings with retail on the ground floor fronting the street and residential or commercial uses above (think of the Fred Building in Downtown Athens or the C&S National Bank (Bank of America/Georgia State) Building in Downtown Atlanta). The Palladian palazzo model creates an interesting problem though once the wealthy families move out because the ground floor of his buildings and those he inspired are usually solid masonry with only a wide central door and a passage that connects to a central cortile where the carriages would park. This is pretty anti-urban to have many of these around town because it is essentially a blank wall at the sidewalk, but in Vicenza, they have solved this by putting the shop fronts on either side of the passage leading to the cortile with parking in the cortile itself. Others have created an L-shaped galleria (much smaller version of what we saw in Brussels) that goes through the block from one palazzo door to another. There are somewhat messier versions in Rome where they actually cut a low doorway into the stone base under a window sill and used the entire height of the ground floor plus piano nobile (second, and main floor where the family lived) for the shop. More good lessons learned.

From Vicenza we headed to Verona, where we saw some more great streets, urban spaces, and lots of Juliet balconies, although at times it did feel as though we were going to be blown away by a tempest. Unfortunately, we were not to be in Mantua or the other stops because we had to race over the mountains to Lucca to avoid…you guessed it…a snowstorm. The trip is beginning to feel a bit like a comedy of errors.

Next time, we fast forward to Tuscany.

Pillar #10: Venetians know how to shower. Almost. (Veneto Part I)

We began our trip to the Veneto with our usual 6 am departure. (I suppose those are getting easier.) We’re traveling with our studio professor again who likes to see as many cities as possible (see posts about Umbria and Campania in 6 days total vs Belgium in 8 days) and only knew where we’d be staying each night, so we knew we’d eventually make it to Bologna. We knew it wouldn’t be as simple as just driving straight to Bologna, of course, and we were not disappointed when we stopped in Arezzo after a couple hours on the road, a larger town with a sloping piazza that we studied, followed by two small villages Poppi and Stia before arriving in Bologna just before night fall. I am determined this trip to sketch more 3-D views of buildings rather than just focusing on plans of urban spaces, and so far I’ve been able to do that. (Although, I have to say my sketch from Poppi was a little sloppy.)

Seeing Bologna at night was a bit easier than Naples. It has wider streets, lower buildings, larger piazzas, and much better lighting. Also, it has one of the most unusual features of a city I’ve seen (which we saw in Poppi on a much smaller scale), which is miles of covered loggias lining most of the major streets. I’m not sure of the history, but somehow, everyone started building loggias at the base of their buildings. I suppose that early builders were enticed because they could build into the public right-of-way while allowing the sidewalk to pass below. I was actually kind of hoping for rain for once, because we could have stayed pretty dry walking through town (aside from crossing the streets). For dinner, we were hoping to have some of the famously good Bolognese food (like the Bolognese sauce, similar to what is most common in the US- spaghetti and hamburger meat sauce), and so we used our driver Angelo to use his Italian fluency to lead us to a good, and cheap spot. Unfortunately, we were led not to a Bolognese restaurant, but to a Neapolitan restaurant, so technically we still got a lot of tomato sauce and a pretty good meal, but no Bolognese sauce.

The rain that we missed in Bologna apparently went to Ferrara by mistake, because when we arrived there after leaving Bologna that morning, it felt like we were back in Belgium with cold wind and rainy conditions. We stayed long enough to walk around the Duke’s castle (with a moat!), check out the cathedral and the market in the square next door, and a few other plazas and squares (one that we saw mostly from a coffee shop because it was so cold).
From Ferrara, we continued our trek northward to Venice. The original plan was to take a ferry in so we could approach Venice from the water, just as wealthy Venetians would have done coming from their summer villas in the “suburbs.” We stopped to take pictures in front of the most famous of these near Venice, the Villa Malcontenta by Andrea Palladio, one of the most important architects of the Renaissance. (Unfortunately, we missed the ferry, so we ended up driving into Venice anyway. We did take the vaparetto, or the bus-boat, close to the hotel, so we saw the Grand Canal and the Ponte Rialto (bridge) on the way.)

One of the challenging things about Venice is that it is impossible to get vehicles into the center city because of all the canals and stepped bridges, so we still had to walk and carry bags over stairs a bit. It also makes the service functions of the city much more challenging, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so expensive to do pretty much everything in Venice. Basically, goods have to be brought in by boat, unloaded, and carted to the various stores and restaurants. We even saw people dumping trash into a garbage barge that was stopped in one of the canals. It’s pretty interesting stuff that we really take for granted because it’s something that has been prioritized in modern planning (to the detriment of other functions. Often, service access is planned while public areas are the left over stuff).

I hate to be negative, but I really don’t get all the fuss about Venice. Yeah, they have canals. So does Bruges, which also has trees and doesn’t smell bad. Yeah, they have the guys in funny hats who will row you around the canals, but it’s like 70-80 euros (and did I mention it smells bad?). Frankly, they’ve done a pretty good job at building the city up as this really romantic tourist destination, which is unfortunately all they have as far as industry. This is basically the same impression I got during my last visit as well. Fortunately, they did have the best shower I've come across in my travels so far, and compared to the no shower I have at my apartment, I'm pretty grateful.

Venice does have some really cool public spaces and architecture, which was really the point of the visit anyway. Our first stop was Piazza di San Marco, which is one of the greatest public spaces in the world according to most people you ask. It is one of the largest we’ve been to thus far, and it has one of the most ornate and unique Medieval churches we’ve seen. Venice was basically the only power in Italy for centuries prior to the church growing in Rome and the Renaissance because it reinvigorated European trade after the fall of the Roman empire, and it was heavily influenced by the Eastern Roman empire and later the Byzantine empire, whose capital was in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey). That is why you get such interesting architectural forms, such as onion domes on top, and also why the church is Romanesque (with round arches), rather than Gothic (pointed arches) like most Medieval churches. The whole interior of the church is covered in incredible gold mosaics, which was common in Byzantine churches and is very well done for the time period.

We went to the top of the Campanile (bell tower) in the piazza and got the full panorama of the city, and afterwards we wandered around for a while looking for food. We basically did the same thing on Saturday, and in addition to finding our hotel from last time, I found the piazza where we had our spontaneous late night art show. We also went to a beautiful mass at San Marco (although again in Italian), and it was really nice because they had all the lights on so you could see the mosaics really clearly.

Sunday was spent with more walks, but this time through areas I did not make it to last time. The coolest was a piazza off the beaten path that is the center of a real Venetian neighborhood. The space itself was great—it was a large, u-shaped piazza with a smaller church in the center, but the coolest part was what was happening inside the church. Around noon, people began slowly streaming out, and we decided to go inside and take a look. About 20 minutes after the service there was a familiar scene—many members of the congregation still in the aisle talking with each other, chatting with the preacher, and tidying up the sanctuary. I can only assume that these families left to go home, eat, and spend their Sunday afternoon together. Some things, it would seem, are universal (appropriate, being that catholic in the general sense means universal). Though we have different church traditions, cities, cultures, and lifestyles, some things are the same even halfway around the globe. In traditional cities, religion tends to become a central focus of the civic life of the community, as is evident in the architectural hierarchy of neighborhoods and towns. In this particular neighborhood, the church is clearly the most important structure (since it is in the middle of the piazza with rounded elements and a tall bell tower), just as in Watkinsville, the Ashford brothers perched their church on a hill, gave it a powerful façade and a tall steeple.

Religion tends to provide a common value system within a community, but as our societies change, however, the architectural framework changes with it. In most Italian cities, church towers remain as the highest structures in town, and the same goes for many small towns in America. However, if you were to put one of these small town churches into the parking lot of a large shopping center, it would be totally lost in the expanse of openness and would really lose its significance among the other mundane elements around it. The sad part is, most suburban churches are doing this exact thing by putting their churches (now jumbo-sized) in the middle of a parking lot, and even making them look like vastly scaled up suburban houses (the large Presbyterian church which is dwarfed by the larger OCHS comes to mind). There is no longer anything special or significant about it because it simply blends in with the rest of the suburban landscape of parking lots and generic buildings. If you compare the two models, the suburban church is essentially a community, but only on Sunday and special events because it is isolated from where parishioners live and work. The church in Venice, on the other hand, is literally the center of the community all week long because the congregation mostly lives, works, and worships together. If you think about larger towns though, like Athens, Atlanta, Chicago, etc., the situation becomes even worse because church towers are literally overshadowed by tall residential and commercial towers, therefore totally upending the traditional hierarchy of cities. So the question that comes to my mind is this: If the character and structure our cities are a reflection of our societal values, what does this say about our priorities?

That’s pretty much Part I of our trip in a rather large nutshell. In Part II – Padua and Palladio, Vicenza and Verona, Mantua and mountain towns.

Pillar #9: Traditional cities actually are fairly easy to navigate

The final stop in our trip to Belgium was a 3-hour layover in Brussels on Monday afternoon en route from Bruges to the Charleroi airport south of Brussels. Four of us decided that we would venture in to the city without any prior knowledge of where we would be surfacing after leaving the train station, but we were mostly just excited that it was warmer and not raining. We consulted the less than informative subway map, and decided that we would try to find the market square, cathedral, and galleria that our professor suggested we see before leaving. After venturing forward only a few blocks, we spotted the side of what appeared to be a significant church and headed towards it. Sure enough, it was the cathedral, perched upon a hill overlooking the historic center. After quickly going inside, we came out of the front doors to see a spire and suspecting it was the market tower, we naturally headed towards it. Before too long we reached another plaza, and came face to face with the entrance to the galleria as we rounded the corner. Most of you probably read "galleria" and think shopping mall, and that would actually be pretty accurate. The only difference is, this galleria, or passage (like massage) according to my professor's urban spatial types (see post 8), is basically one normal street with a roof over it. It was really neat because another open street crossed it towards the middle, and basically passed through the colonnade and continued on. We passed through the galleria and followed the crossing street, only to be presented with a head-on view of the market tower framed by buildings leading into the plaza. Our walk continued on like this, leading us to several other churches, lunch, and eventually back to the train station (with a little help from an occasional street sign). Even if we didn't have signs helping us, chances are pretty good we still would have run into something interesting because that's how traditional cities work.

Quite the opposite was true the time I flew into Orlando for my friend Carol's wedding and was left to the mercy of the public transit system (being too cheap to pay for a cab from the airport out towards Universal Studios). I got off the bus in a pretty touristy area where I thought I could walk 20 minutes to my hotel. Four hours of wandering later including a bit of off-roading with my rolling suitcase, I was still no closer to the hotel, having been blocked by an interstate highway, an overpass with no sidewalks, dead-end streets, and an outlet mall. Finally, I came across a tourist trolley that took me back to the same spot I got off the city bus just in time to catch the last trolley of the evening across the interstate to my hotel. This was with plenty of street signs and maps available, and it still took more than four hours to get a mile and a half. And I can read maps. I figured out the DC metro when I was 10. It just goes to show you how the modern system of planning is just ok for cars (assuming there is no traffic or wrecks or construction), but pretty miserable for everyone else. (By the way, Carol and others may be reading this, so I should add that I had a great time in Orlando other than that!)

That aside, Brussels was pretty neat despite the speed with which we saw it. The sun even came out for the last hour we were there, which was probably the longest we saw it while in Belgium. It was different than Bruges because it was mostly French speaking, where Bruges was predominantly Dutch (which, consequently, is very much like English if you were to speak with your mouth full, or if you were to type quickly without the spell check. Some of my favorite signs from the Antwerp train station were Centraal Station, telefoon, and telegraaf, for example.)

I have finally caught up with my photo uploads to Picasa (now that I am on the next trip to the Veneto and Tuscany!), and I realized I was even farther behind than I though. SO...
Umbria: http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmith31/Umbria
Campania: http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmith31/Campania
Belgium: http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmith31/Belgium

I hope that will keep y'all busy until we're back from Tuscany in a week or so.