At play in the fields of the dead

I was all set to bring you a post about things going on in the last week when the internet connection I’ve been using disappeared.  I’m hoping this is a rather temporary thing; for now, I’ll write it in a Word document and post it when I get a chance. 

Before I tell you about our day trip last Tuesday, I want to give you some background about me and art history.

I didn’t know that I loved art history until I was in my mid-twenties, when I took an Art Appreciation class at Seattle Central Community College.  I went on to take other kinds of classes, but I do suppose that it was exactly what community college is for; I took various classes until I found something I loved.  And I didn’t know that I loved it right away; it kind of sat in the back of my head, art history as something that I had never considered before, just hanging out there as one of the favorite classes that I’d had an opportunity to take. 

In 2005, right after my grandfather passed away, I decided to return to school.  It was becoming evident to me that I needed to undertake some sort of career path.  A few years earlier I’d thought about moving back to California, and at that time, because I’d basically taught myself how to do my job as a medical transcriptionist at the radiologist’s office for which I worked, there were holes in my knowledge that seemed to put me out of the running for even scoring an interview with any Bay Area hospital.  I’d only worked in one specialty, and I’d never had an anatomy/physiology class, so while I was good at my job and learned quickly, I knew that it would be easier to get a job sight unseen if I had an education in medical transcription. 

I started researching schools, and then I started researching financial aid.  And it became evident to me that I could do something I really, really loved and also get financial aid to do that.  So instead of going for the three-quarter course in medical transcription, I decided to check out the community college near the apartment we’d just moved into in North Seattle.  They had art history courses, three of them, the triumvirate of survey courses that included overviews of ancient/prehistoric art, medieval & Renaissance art, and modern art.   So, I began to work through them, also taking French along the way because I thought that it would be helpful to art historical research. 

And I was good at art history.  I kept thinking of questions that couldn’t be answered in our overview textbook, and I spent hours poring over different editions of the thing, trying to answer every question posed to me.  I was especially enamored with the medieval and Renaissance art, but I had a professor who was challenging in more than one way:  He pushed me to learn, which was good, but he was combative and difficult, which was not.  For instance, when we complained that the assignments for research he was giving us were based on the text three editions out of date from the one we had, we realized that he had not changed these assignments since the older edition was current.  We were told to deal with it and we all had to fight over the one tattered edition that the library held that would answer all of our questions.  He would bark at us that we had it lucky, that when he was taking art history decades and decades ago that he had to sketch the slides to know what they were, that there were no carousels of slides for check-out at his library. 

Still, I loved every minute of the actual looking, the iconography, the secrets.  And really, that’s why I got into art history, because I love secrets.  I love it when a bowl of fruit is not just a bowl of fruit.  I remember the very secret that got me hooked, which is so pedestrian to me now, as I am being trained to use iconography as a tool but not to stop there:  In Botticelli's Primavera, there are all these apple trees in the background, and the professor told me that the apples there were probably related to the crest of the patron, the Medici (who had three apples in a pyramidal shape).   It all opened up for me in that moment, that there was a secret language that we were learning to read, that I knew then that the painting had always been beautiful but now it meant in an extra way.

As I got further and further into art history, it was the secrets that kept me going.  And when I got to the UW and started studying with the art history department there, I realized that the Renaissance and the Baroque really spoke to me, because above all, the humanists were of that age, and they seemed to love words as much as I did, but more than that, they loved the ways things meant.  They loved the way that words and images interacted with one another, the secrets they told, the special society of those who could read this language. 

Soon after I made it to UW I declared a minor in Comparative Religion, yet another discipline of arcane knowledge, yes, more secrets.  I studied the New Testament, researching literary devices in each of the gospels and looking at context for Paul’s letters.  I went on to study Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam.  I started to see trends.  It is amazing the way the human mind works, the things it needs, the way that we as a world developed and the seeming coincidences of the advent of things.  The cyclical nature that philosophers apply to things.  The idea of a First Cause and how to explain it, but also how to reach it, to communicate with it.  How to honor it. 

Art history seemed so huge to me when I started that I never thought that I would find a toehold in it.  The ways things shook out, though, I discovered that I was extremely interested in the Reform/Counter-Reform period in Europe and what came out of that.  So, one might say, Southern Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  I was guided a lot by the very professors who are leading our group here in Rome, and I’m honored to have been chosen to come along.  In fact, the way things worked out for me was rather perfect, things happening for a reason, and all that.  Most of you are aware that I had two back surgeries in late 2007 and early 2008, which caused me to miss two quarters at UW.  I was devastated at the time because I felt that I’d worked so hard to get to that point, and now I was completely stymied by this physical limitation.  But it turns out that if I hadn’t been delayed by those two quarters, I would have graduated last spring, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to come on this trip with these professors.  I also wouldn’t have gotten to study with two other professors that have greatly shaped my love of my time period – a Northern Baroque scholar who left the university the quarter after I studied with her, and the professor with whom I took two Spanish art classes who encouraged me to push myself and introduced me to a greater understanding of my old Iberian fascination.  On top of all that, my financial aid has worked out pretty nicely.  All in all, as hard as I’ve pushed myself, as hard as I’ve worked, it seems like things have fallen into place for me in the best way possible with my whole education in the last four years.  I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with grad school, and when, but my education has been extremely rewarding and challenging and has really shaped who I am.   

Anyway, I seem to have gotten off onto a tangent.  What I wanted to tell you was that in the first art history class that I took, the one on ancient art, we spent a week talking about the Etruscans.  They were an old civilization, old I think even to the ancient Romans, and most of what we know of them is attached to their burial practices.  There’s something about these practices that is completely poignant.  I remember looking at this Etruscan sarcophagus that is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and being made kind of teary-eyed by the depiction of the couple embracing each other for eternity, right there on top of the sarcophagus.  I came to understand, even in that early class, that there was always something strange and ethereal about the Etruscans.  It turns out the Romans thought so too; they seem to have thought of them as an inferior society but at the same time held them up as spiritual adepts. 

During the information meeting for the Rome program, back at the beginning of the school year, I hadn’t decided whether I’d be able to handle Rome.  Mainly it was because of everything with my back, and how out of the world I had become, between being so vulnerable due to my physical limitations and being so immersed in academia.  Then they said that we would go to Tarquinia, where there was an Etruscan necropolis, and I remember this wave of heat washing over me, that kind of shiver you get when you know something is meant to happen.  I don’t even like ancient art all that much, and really the only time look very closely at it is within the context of the Renaissance, which sought to reawaken the greatness of antiquity.  But the Etruscans are different.  I told my mother about the meeting that night over the telephone.  She might remember: even just telling her about the possibility that we'd get to go, hearing myself say that we would get to see the Etruscan stuff, it made my voice crack with emotion.

That is emblematic of how I feel about art history.  Art history might put other people to sleep at parties (and I always fear that it might at the parties I attend, especially when I get talking about something and fear that  people’s eyes will glaze over), but for me, I can’t get enough of it.  For me, too, there’s another history immersed in all of it, and it is the history of my own mind awakening, realizing that I could be good at something, that I have fallen in love with it and have loved it enough to stay with it and to be rewarded by it. 

So we went to Cervetri and Tarquinia.  We got on a bus, early in the morning, and drove along the Lungotevere out of town.  Since all of our apartments and the Rome Center are in the historic center, it was interesting to see what the outskirts of Rome looked like.  Turns out there are strip malls in Italy, too. 

The bus took us about an hour out of the city to the necropolis at Cervetri.  Cervetri was entertaining to me because as we drove through it, I realized that it was reminding me of Santa Cruz.  It was a beachy sort of town, with painted apartment buildings with flat roofs, quiet streets with front yards.  As we were closer and closer to the necropolis, it reminded me of those field trips we used to take as children to the Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz, the early morning sun shining through the dew on all the green around us while we, the sleepy students, stepped off the bus to survey the Italian countryside around us.  Except the thing is?  There are tombs here that date back to 800 BCE. 

In a way the Etruscans are the ultimate secret.  Because all we have are visual objects and not written records, it's hard to say anything with certainty about their practices; the best we can do is try to piece it together, to try to avoid assigning 21st century motivations to what we see.  Estelle (one of the professors) pointed out that with the Etruscans we see perhaps the purest form of art history (what many would call archaeology, especially archaeologists):  we have only the object as the document.  She encouraged us to remember this when moving forward with art that seems to drown in all the ink spilled over its virtues and vices, that underneath centuries of writing there is always the object.  There is always the object that speaks for itself.  This is something that I have learned from her over the past couple of years (this is my fourth course with her, and I consider her something of a mentor), but this was a poignant and memorable touchstone, a reminder of how important it is to look.  To just look, first. 

The tombs were called tumuli, these mounds that were cut partly from the “living rock” – the rock that was just there naturally – and partly built with blocks (example at right).  I couldn’t help but think of hobbit holes, of course, but sans the wooden doors.  We spent a few hours hiking all over this necropolis, peeking in all the tombs, getting excited about armchairs made out of stone in some of the later ones.  It was quite the needed break from Rome – and amazing that just an hour outside of the city there was this utterly quiet place that was lushly overgrown, mossy and dark cut through with patches of golden sunlight, with hundreds of butterflies and a clutter of cats that were half-feral, half-fed from a bag of crunchies near the museum entrance.  (By the by, did you know that a collective of cats may also be called a clowder, a glaring, a pounce, a nuisance, a kindle, a kendle, and a destruction?  I think “clutter” is more evocative than “litter,” at any rate.)

After the Etruscan art history nerd’s paradise of a mixture of Indiana Jones Exploring: Beginner's Edition and academic discussion, we got back on the bus to go to Tarquinia to eat lunch and visit the museum there.  The bus “wouldn’t go up into the old city,” the professors said, which was exciting for the prospect of just what about the old city they all wanted to protect, but also daunting because the old city was up, up, and more up, and well, my body doesn’t do “up” very well.  I managed, even if I did lag behind just a little bit, but Tarquinia was the Cervetri/Santa Cruz mix tempered with medieval Italian town, perched on a hill above a vast panorama of the sea. (At right is a picture of us below the old town, looking out on said panorama, waiting for the bus after the museum.) I want to live there someday for a little while, just escape to Tarquinia and stay for the spring.  I imagine in summer it gets pretty touristy.  I liked how quiet it was just then, in the first week of April.

We hiked up a hill to where the museum was, at quite a brisk pace. (The photo at left pictures us leisurely walking back down it after lunch.)  But it was worth it, when we got to the top, because Stuart remembered a  restaurant there from when he led the Rome trip two years ago.  He popped in to find out whether they could/would accommodate all twenty-five of us, and it turns out that he and the owner remembered each other by sight.  We sat down in this great little place:  L'AmbArAdAm was its name, and I still haven't figured out the meaning or why all the random capitalization. I looked at the décor I realized that everything that looked medieval about the building it was in probably was medieval; I keep forgetting that in this place that is possible, and that while fakery exists, as likely as not you find yourself in a tabacchi (a tobacconist, where they sell smokes and just about everything else, from stamps to bus tickets) on the ground floor of a building that is three times as old as your home country. 

The professors explained the menu a bit, and I ordered one of the best meals that I’ve had since arriving in Italy.  Though the restaurant had an entire seafood menu, which I’m told would have been excellent, I’m not much of a fan of seafood.  What I had, though, was so good that I wrote it down, so let me transcribe from my notebook:  “Gnocchetti con asparagi, guanciale e parmesan, e per contorno insalata mista, con vino bianco e espresso lungo.”   The dish was the tenderest, most beautiful little gnocchi I’ve ever had, with bright green bits of asparagus and with guanciale, which is an unsmoked bacon made of pork cheeks/jowl (I’ll spare you the Wikipedia link, because the picture that accompanies it is best not to think about.)  It was a gorgeous primo piatto, which I had with a mixed salad on the side.  My tablemate Ryan and shared a half-bottle of the house white, which was refreshing.  To finish, mainly because we had the rest of the afternoon ahead of us, we went for espresso lungo.  I suggested this in particular because of everything I’d heard about not drinking coffee with milk after about 11 in the morning.  It turns out that there is something to this; milk doesn’t help with the digestive process, so one should never really get an espresso with milk after a meal.  (This great blog has an explanatory post on the subject.)  Trouble is, I don’t usually drink coffee black, but I didn’t want to commit a faux pas.  The lungo lets a little more water run into the shot, which dilutes it a bit.  We figured we’d try it.  We did, and to me it was so rich and strong that it made me shudder like I’d thrown back a gulp of whiskey!  I never have sugar in my coffee, but in this instance the addition of sugar worked out perfectly and it was caramel-y, warm, and finished quickly. 

After lunch it was on to the National Etruscan Museum, which is housed in a medieval building with much of the architecture still intact (pictured at right), and which comprises a large collection of Etruscan sarcophagi and various grave goods. We were beginning to run short on time, so we tried to hit the most important points, the stuff that the professors wanted us to see.  At one point it was almost time to go, but Stuart told us to pass quickly through one floor and check out something on the far end, coming up to meet them on the third floor, where there were some painted tombs set up in climate-controlled conditions for us to view.  A group of us tried to tear through that second floor as fast as we could, but we kept getting stuck on things – the jewelry, the armor, the pottery, the strange little ceremonial things, the set of false teeth (!!!).  I’ll probably always remember running into that jewelry room with my classmate John and it being as though we were kids in a candy store, trying to see everything but going much too quickly, stopping short when something would catch our eye, knowing we couldn’t linger.

We had one more site to visit, and that was the necropolis itself at Tarquinia.  This one was different than the one at Cervetri; these tombs were later and had paintings throughout. (At left is a tomb painting depicting a door to the underworld flanked by figures representing the Etruscan demon of death, Charun.) We spent 45 minutes descending into darkness, letting our eyes adjust, and then emerging into blaring sunlight again and again.  We all gathered at the end of that time to talk about the way that the burial practices seemed to change for the Etruscans and what that could mean for changes in their civilization in general.  Finally, exhausted, we boarded the bus to return to Rome, arriving there at about 7:30.  My poor flatmate Kit fell when descending the very steep back stairs of the Pullman (what Italians call those large tour buses), hurting her foot and back, so it was a somewhat frightening end to the day.  We bundled her off in a cab back to the apartment and another flatmate and I walked, slowly, back to the apartment.  A long day, but extremely rewarding, and an experience I’ll never forget.  Ever.  It was at once nothing and everything I’d thought it would be, back in that first art history course I took in the fall of 2005.

The next day was spent in class, and really, I can’t even remember what I did that day afterward.  I did run a few errands; it’s become a habit for me to pick up meat (prosciutto or salame) and cheese and bread from the various stores that sell each of these products, and throw them together with some tomatoes from the Campo fruttivendoli (fruit-sellers) for a kind of antipasto lunch.  By the end of Wednesday, my throat was scratchy, and I knew that one of my profs and several of the other students were feeling ill, so I quarantined myself in my room so I wouldn’t get anyone else sick.  Sure enough, Thursday and Friday, I spent in bed, reading and watching internet teevee.  On Friday afternoon I did go to the farmacia to find some medicine, being sure to look up how to say, “I think I have a cold” in Italian.  (Penso che abbia un raffredore.)  What I didn’t anticipate, in my out-of-it state, is that the farmacista would want to know more specifics, so I resulted to pantomime to explain that my ears were clogged and my sinuses were killing me.  Whatever he gave me helped.  I seem better now, though a small cough seems to linger and may require a return trip to the farmacia armed with, “And now, I need some cough drops.  Halls?” 

This has gotten long, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it.  I’ll stop here for now, since I’ve got reading to do for tomorrow.  I am happy and getting used to my surroundings, but there is always more to learn, always new places to go.  Rome is never the same twice, because something’s always under construction, old things are always being restored.  The program assistant, Lauren, told me today that she has never seen the Ara Pacis in all the times she’s come to Rome (I think 2001 was her first trip) because it’s always been in the midst of restoration, so she’s quite excited to see it.  We’ll be going there tomorrow, along with the Pantheon.

Alla prossima volta...