Torino: Elegant Squares, a New Nation, Ancient Egyptians, and Just a Little Frustration

Out in the World Again

Ponte Vecchio, minus crowds, 7 in the morning

I’m finally traveling again, post-Covid. In Italy, I would say about 1 in 10,000 people is masked against the dread virus. Things feel free and open, and crowded. I guess there is really no off season in Florence and probably never was.

The Virgin of Mercy, circa 1400, Bargello Museum, Florence

Florence is a Renaissance City, but I’m drawn to its medieval beauties, like this life-sized painted wood sculpture. This Madonna is looking out for crowds of humanity huddled together—like us today, I’m thinking.

As always, Florence is colorful and frenetic. A little rain just makes the colors brighter. The Galleria Uffizi is as crammed as ever, but the other museums and the churches offer quiet contemplation, and sometimes even a place to sit in front of a masterpiece. I’m happy to be back.

During the time I didn’t travel much, WordPress changed in ways I don’t quite understand. Here’s hoping I get to record my memorable moments on the platform again. Testing, testing, testing!

Happy Christmas 2020

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My new favorite Nativity scene is probably in an empty gallery this year. It’s “Madonna in the Rose Arbor,” by Stefan Lochner, 1440-1442. It’s in Cologne’s Wallraf-Richardtz Museum, three glorious floors plus a fine cafe, no doubt empty in the great pandemic of 2020.

The caption explains “the Lord God is in the details” of the painting. The Virgin’s halo, for example, is a version of the lunar cycle and points to the medieval link between astronomy and theology. And the brooch she is wearing features a unicorn, a traditional symbol for Christ. Who knew?

As for me, I just love the gentle expressive faces, the delicate roses, and the child-angels gathered around, as though waiting for a play-date with the child.

Just before Christmas 2019, I was in Germany, stuffing my days and nights with lights and music and holiday cheer.

The Angel Market in Cologne was populated with angels and happy mortal folks.

A few blocks away, we attended a sublime choral concert at St. Gereon Church.

This pandemic year, there’s none of that. There were no grandchildren at my house, no in-person Christmas service, no gatherings at all.

Of course my cats thought 2020 was the best year ever because we mostly hung around the house with them.

We had more wildlife visits even than usual.

It was still Christmas in the Rocky Mountains and we counted our blessings. Someone went around to our homes a few days beforehand and videotaped us holding Christmas Eve candles. On the night, we watched our online service and then went in family groups to leave our candles in the snow outside the church. We wore masks and gave our friends air-hugs from a distance.

We’re looking forward to a brighter 2021, to traveling again after a good long time of dreaming and planning. Wishing health and happiness to all!

Happy 245th Birthday, Jane Austen!

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If Jane were alive today, she would be isolated like the rest of us, but she would still be able to take one of the long country rambles that she loved in the Hampshire countryside around her home at Chawton. I wish I could tag along.

I’m recycling a post from a few years ago. It’s about an art exhibit that Jane attended. It’s a pity that Jane herself was never painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. She was not rich enough or grand enough, even though she had recently published one of the most beloved novels ever written in English, “Pride and Prejudice.” Of course the author was listed as “A Lady,” not Jane Austen. But lots of people eagerly read her work. My post was from 2013, which seems a tumultuous age ago. Here it is:

Through the wonders of technology, we are all invited to stand alongside Jane Austen at an art exhibit she attended on May 24, 1813–two hundred years ago. The date was just a few months after the publication of Pride and Prejudice. Jane mischievously told her companions that she fully expected to see her heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, in a portrait. Elizabeth had just become Mrs. Darcy, of course. “I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow,” Jane wrote to her sister.

The exhibit was a retrospective of work by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had been painting the rich and famous for decades. In 1769 he was knighted by King George III, who appreciated the “Grand Style” in which Reynolds painted his mostly wealthy subjects. When he painted unnamed allegorical or mythological figures, the models tended to be rich and/or famous, and everyone knew who they were. As it happened, Jane did not find a likely image of Elizabeth. She joked later that surely Reynolds had painted her, but Mr. Darcy must have valued the portrait too much to put it on public display. Jane did, however, enjoy mingling with the celebrities who crowded the exhibit. We could think of this exhibit as the very first edition of the tabloids we all see in grocery checkout lanes (and read as a guilty pleasure). Everyone who was anyone wanted to fall under the gaze of Reynolds, just as our celebrities hire publicists to get themselves on the covers of magazines. Sir Joshua Reynolds was also renowned for tender portraits of children. My very first post described one of my favorite paintings by Joshua Reynolds, “Lady Caroline Scott as Winter,” painted in 1776. The post is at https://castlesandcoffeehouses.com/2012/11/20/winter-as-a-child/. ‎The portrait is in private hands, but I saw it in a special exhibit at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum two years ago.

This child was an exact contemporary of Jane Austen. I like to imagine that Lady Caroline attended the same exhibit, and maybe rubbed shoulders with Jane. We tend to think of Jane Austen as a country mouse, a spinster who spent her days waiting on her family and shyly writing her novels in secret, in her spare time. Actually, she was fun-loving, always ready for a dance or an outing. She knew all about balls and country homes because she attended many balls, large and small. And she had relatives with grand country homes. To enter the exhibit, go to http://www.whatjanesaw.org/. The complete original catalog of the exhibit is there. If you click on a picture, an enlargement comes up, along with a description. If you have trouble getting into the site, go to the article below and click on the link. Historians at the University of Texas at Austin meticulously recreated the original exhibit, using accurate historical sources. So we can see the arrangement of the actual paintings in the 3 rooms of the exhibit. We can try to imagine Jane’s assessment of each painting–I’m hearing pithy comments, aren’t you? There’s an excellent article about the online exhibit in The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/books/what-jane-saw-is-an-online-trip-for-jane-austen-fans.html?_r=0

Even during the great pandemic of 2020, I’m sure Jane has some respectful visitors at her final resting place in Winchester Cathedral. I’d like to hear her comments on how we’re all behaving, or not behaving. And I’m hoping for better times, when people can go to work and school and restaurants and shops and parties. Jane would be the first to say we all need to get out more.

I am thinking right now that even though I can’t travel, I’ve been to a lot of places. Time to catch up on posts!

Join me next time for more explorations in the places and faces of Europe and the British Isles!

Usse: A Sleeping Beauty of a Chateau

My Artsy Pandemic Year

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I filled my deck with flowers, managed to keep them alive, and set up my easel.

Lawrence of Arabia, Incognito in Dorset

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National Trust guidebook, detail of Augustus John’s portrait of Lawrence, 1919, now in the Tate Britain museum.

Given the chance, I always make a beeline for the home-turned-museum of any writer, whether I like the writer or not. Why? Because writers hardly ever made much money (most of them still don’t, truth be told) and lived quite ordinary lives. But a few became famous enough that their admirers somehow preserved their homes. My theory is that wandering around the home of a writer is one of the few ways to see how ordinary people lived back in the day.

Clouds Hill in the rural reaches of Dorset was once the home of a very non-ordinary man, T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. I had a vague memory of him from the 1962 movie starring Peter O’Toole. I saw the movie on a high-school date in downtown Minneapolis. But what I really remember is Peter’s electric presence on the screen. And those piercing blue eyes! My date was probably a very nice boy, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about him.

How did a world-famous war hero end up as a humble Private on an Army base, with special permission to escape during his free time to this tiny cottage?Why had he enlisted under assumed names as an airplane mechanic and later in the Tank Corps? Why did he want to disappear? What was the big deal about him in the first place?

The questions intrigued me enough to download and read Michael Korda’s biography while I was still traveling. I have to admit just skimming quite a bit of the intricate military and political detail. What I wanted was to understand the man, but he was so eccentric and so private that I think nobody ever really understood him. I think he liked it that way.

The following summary of Lawrence’s life is vastly over-simplified, but it at least begins to explain how he became what, with all due respect, I’d call a very strange dude. Korda’s book, the National Trust guidebook, and displays at the cottage are my sources.

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born an outsider in Victorian Wales in 1888. His father, Sir Thomas Chapman, had left an unhappy marriage, four daughters and prosperous estates in Ireland and run off with the family governess, Sarah Junner. She was herself an illegitimate child whose father was unknown to her. They called themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence” although they were never free to marry because Lady Chapman would not agree to a divorce. They had a small but steady income from investments, and raised their five sons together.

T. E. Lawrence had a fraught relationship with his parents. They tried to keep secret the fact that they were “living in sin.” His mother in particular underwent a radical religious conversion which she tried to impose on the family. She beat her most strong-willed son and by his account, tried in every way to get him to behave like her idea of a perfect child. (Good luck with that). He was glad to escape to Oxford, where he won First Class Honors in modern history in 1910. He went off to Syria to work on excavations run by the British Museum. Then World War I broke out.

The war found Lawrence serving as a Colonel in British Military Intelligence in Cairo. At the time, the Turkish Ottoman Empire ruled most of what we now call the Mideast. In 1916, the Arab Revolt began. Lawrence encouraged the uprising and quickly became one of its leaders, becoming adept at guerrilla warfare. He had a fine time of it, racing around the desert in Arab robes, blowing up railway lines, and earning the trust and friendship of Arab leaders like Prince Faisal. Finally, in 1918, Lawrence helped the rebels capture Damascus and the power of the Ottoman Empire was broken.

Lawrence had agreed to do all this because he believed passionately in Arab self-determination. But far above his pay grade, politicians had secretly planned all along to divide the Mideast into French and British sectors. He had been used.

Lawrence went back to England and wrote about his war experiences in his book “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” But his fame dogged him. And it seems he suffered from what we would now call post traumatic distress syndrome–no surprise, since during the war he had been captured, tortured and raped. He needed a safe haven and anonymity. Friends helped him become a humble enlisted man, although his real identity was never much of a secret.

Lawrence was not rich, but he had enough money to gradually turn his cottage into a fine man-cave. He had a special reading chair built. He was a small man, only 5 feet 5 inches (Peter O’Toole was well over 6 feet). During the twelve years Lawrence occupied the cottage, he had a large library which was actually his most valuable possession, sold after his death.

He slept in his quarters on the military base, but lounged and listened to music in his cottage while he read and wrote. Besides his own writing, he worked on translations which brought in a little income.

He entertained friends and eventually built a sort of pantry with a bunk bed for visitors. He built a fine bathroom and figured out how to fill his tub with hot water, although the cottage never had proper running water. The cottage never had a kitchen. Lawrence made do with food from the Army mess and nearby cafes.

Another luxury was a series of expensive motorcycles which no mere enlisted man could afford.

Sadly, Lawrence crashed his last beloved Brough Superior on May 13, 1935 and died six days later without regaining consciousness.

There’s a lot to think about in Lawrence’s story, There’s the constant tension between high-level politics and the military people who try to carry out orders which might not have been truthfully explained to them. There are the lifelong physical and psychic wounds of warfare. There are the demands and pitfalls of fame. Lawrence’s strict Victorian upbringing looks in hindsight like it seriously damaged him, but it was probably not so unusual for the time. In his brief 46 years, Lawrence lived a full life, if not a happy one.

The 1962 movie is still well worth watching. In it, Peter O’Toole’s blue eyes are as piercing as ever.

Quarantine in Paradise, 2020

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When I travel in Europe, I love to regale city dwellers that I meet with pictures of the wildlife outside my windows in my Rocky Mountain home. I always start with the yearling bear who tried to open my door and get in a few years ago.

He and his mother and brother were awake and hungry after a long winter of hibernation.

They found some ant traps outside (the green gizmo on the ground). I was worried that I’d carelessly poisoned them. A wildlife officer set my mind at ease. She said that if a bear ate about a hundred ant traps, s/he might feel a little bit peckish.

I live on a ridge in a house perched above my smallish town. Seeing wildlife is always a thrill. Neighbors call each other about sightings, but we miss a lot of them as life goes on for the animals who were here first.

I live on the edge of a protected wildlife area. Moose are some of my favorite visitors, winter and summer. They drop by often to feast on my trees and shrubs.

My strictly-indoor cats like them, too.

This lady moose hung around for several days this spring. She was especially pretty and gentle. I’m still hoping she might return with a calf.

I am not so fond of mountain lions. I can tell if they stroll alongside the house in the middle of the night because my cats go wild. In winter, they leave tracks. Their long tails drag in the snow.

They’re big, they leave big tracks, and they pretty much eat what they want. That would include my cats, or (shudder) possibly me. I don’t go strolling around alone at night. But they are not known to stalk humans in these parts, at least so far.

Mountain lions are magnificent animals, but I don’t particularly want to see the one that’s been hanging out in my neighborhood lately.

I love foxes, though.

I hope they always feel welcome in our tall grass which we never mow.

My last trip to Europe was in December, before the pandemic grounded me and everybody else. The ski mountain shut down on March 15 and the town went on lockdown. The normally-bustling spring break season was a bust. I’ve never seen the town so empty. Everything closed, and locals hunkered down. Our hospital has only 42 beds, so we could not afford an outbreak. Our assisted living/nursing home had several cases of the coronavirus and several cherished elderly residents died. But compared to other places, we’ve been lucky.

During the Great Quarantine, most of us stuck close to home and waved at each other on frequent walks in our neighborhoods. We amused ourselves as best we could. One of my neighbors encouraged Silly Walks. Where’s John Cleese?

We’ll get some snowy days. In fact, last summer I arrived back in town after a trip in a blinding blizzard that dropped two feet of snow on June 25. But right now, the snow is mostly melted. Rivers and streams are rushing.

In the past couple of weeks, the valley has turned green and all the fruit trees have burst into blossom. Shops and restaurants are beginning to open. Most of the locals cheerfully wear the still-mandatory masks in the grocery store. The health-care and grocery-store workers, and fire and police personnel, are our friends and neighbors. We are deeply grateful to them.

I’d love to get on a plane and wake up in Paris or London or Vienna or Copenhagen. Or anywhere, really. But for now, I’m acutely aware of how fortunate I am to ride out the pandemic in a peaceful mountain town, my idea of Paradise.

Social Distancing 101 in Eyam, the Plague Village

Downton Abbey Locations: Irresistible for a Fan

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I managed to get to Highclere Castle, the “real” Downton Abbey, on a day it was closed to the general public. Now, I have no claim to fame and I was not invited to take tea with the current Countess, but I was armed with a yearly pass from the Historic Houses Association of England. Reading the booklet’s fine print, I let out a very unladylike whoop–it was covered! Hopeless fan of British eye candy that I am, I was not about to miss my chance.

We arrived at the estate in sunny Hampshire on a day when a fleet of classy British sport cars were parked on the grounds. Lord Grantham and his faithful golden labrador were nowhere in sight.

Full disclosure: my husband had seen exactly half of one episode of the TV show, but we share a fascination with British country homes. It’s always fun to be on the inside looking out of those imposing windows.

Alas, no photos were allowed inside, but after a short time cooling our heels outside the famous front door, in we went. Is that door-knocker a wolf? He’s just a little intimidating, for sure. Inside, the house looks exactly as it does on TV and now in the movie. No photos are allowed, but I can’t blame the owners. Visitors moved through the lush rooms quietly, not rushed, murmuring about their favorite scenes.

The movie’s other stately home location is Harewood–pronounced “Harwood,” of course. I never get British pronunciations right until I’m either corrected or I hear them from somebody who knows better.

Harewood is in Yorkshire (where Downton Abbey is supposed to be) and it’s very grand indeed.

In the recent movie, set in 1927, it’s one of the homes of Princess Mary, daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. She is married to Viscount Henry Lascelles, later the Sixth Earl of Harewood. He had a reputation for being difficult, especially after possibly suffering from shellshock in World War I. Also, he was fifteen years older than the Princess. But I can’t find any evidence that she ever considered leaving him, as in the movie.

Princess Mary was beloved for her gentle nature and her service during the Great War, including her gift packages in 1914 to every single British and Indian soldier, nurse or anyone who had a part in the war effort. The packages included tobacco, a pipe, cigarettes and a lighter in a brass box with a picture of her face. Those who did not smoke received boxes with sweets and such instead.

Harewood as it stands today was built beginning in 1759. The money came directly from the slave trade. Henry Lascelles, an earlier ancestor of the current owners, went to Barbados at the age of twenty-one and made his family’s fortune by astute, and apparently ruthless, exploitation of interests the family already had in sugar, cotton, rum and tobacco production–and in running slave ships.

The year 2007 was the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire, which happened in 1807. The Lascelles family had already sponsored research into the original source of their wealth, something very few British families did. In the Bicentary year, they sponsored a whole range of talks, tours, lectures and theatrical performances on the subject of slavery. Many if not most of the stately homes I like so much share the same history, but very few acknowledge it.

My old guidebook from a visit in the 1990s does not mention the slave trade at all. To their credit, the current owners have produced a new guidebook that not only tells the sad story, but tells how to access the actual historical records online.

The original Henry Lascelles may not have enjoyed his ill-gotten gains all that much. In 1753, he killed himself by slashing his own throat. (I have to wonder if his death was really a suicide, but that’s the story in the house’s current guidebook, above). His son Edwin Lascelles immediately began planning a grand house on the property he inherited.

The slave-trade money certainly bought beauty and luxury.

Robert Adam was a young Scottish architect, recently returned from studies in Italy and on the way up the social ladder when Edwin Lascelles hired him. The hallmark of Adams’s style was elaborate symmetrical plaster ornamentation on every flat surface, and especially on every ceiling.

Capability Brown designed the extensive grounds and gardens.

And Thomas Chippendale furnished the entire house from top to bottom.

Chippendale’s hall chairs, designed especially for the grand entry hall, were never sat upon–they were purely decorative. No doubt anybody like me, who might have plopped down in one, was never left alone in this most intimidating room.

Today, Jacob Epstein’s monumental alabaster sculpture “Adam” dominates the grand hall. It was made in the late 1930s and arrived at Harewood only in 1961. One wonders what “Downton Abbey’s” Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, would make of this Adam.

Anglophile that I am, I’ll always fall for the beauty and romance of a way of life that only existed for a very few people in a very brief period of time. But I’m happy to see the true cost of such beauty acknowledged as it is at Harewood.