What I Did On My Holidays
Hey all,
Hope things are good with you! Earlier this month I was in Italy for a week - a zoom through four cities (Bologna and Parma with one friend, Trieste and Venice with another), the sort of travel where it feels like surely you were gone for so much longer than you were. It must have been at least a month, there’s so much novelty for your brain to sort through.
I love how every region of Italy has its own special type of bread. Sometimes the bread is incredible (gnocco fritto in Parma and Bologna, oh my god, revelation of the holiday). Sometimes it’s fine (Trieste went big on breadsticks). Sometimes it’s… not to my taste (Florence’s bread is made without salt; nobody’s totally sure why but according to one version of the story it’s to get back at Pisa for blocking salt shipments, “fine, we don’t need your salt anyway” - imagine, hundreds of years making bread without salt because you know what, maybe you like it BETTER that way and it’s GOOD that Pisa blocked the shipments ACTUALLY).
Bologna is GREAT. Before this visit it wasn’t particularly on my radar - I only went because there was an exhibition I wanted to see in Parma, and my friends were in Bologna for a film festival, an hour away on the train. But it’s SO nice, porticoes and bits of old paintings and sculptures just sitting around in corners, and new art as well, so many bookshops, a lot of energy and excitement. It’s hard to be sure as a tourist but it also felt like a place that was fine with visitors but not distorted by them, you know? Broadly happy to accommodate tourism but focused on its own stuff.
In Trieste the train station was temporarily filled with scaffolding, and it really rendered visible the ambition of even mid-sized nineteenth-century train stations. All these little lines stretching up to the ceiling, like a fancy ink drawing where the pencil marks haven’t been rubbed out yet and they help you to understand the detail and scale of the work.
Also in Trieste: a restaurant with NO PIZZA written big on a sign propped up by the door.
We went to the Wind Museum, a museum about wind generally but more specifically the bora, a wind that blows through Trieste in winter. The bora would sometimes freeze the waterfront, back in the day, the museum guide told us; the steep pavements of Trieste used to have ropes running up the sides to cling to; people would cut cheese graters in half and wear them as ad-hoc shoe grips. The bora blows less often and less fiercely now. The guide brought out folders full of cheerful postcard illustrations of pedestrians being buffetted up into the air, and showed us a weight that a local woman had carried in her bag when she was tiny, to stop her from being blown away on the walk to school.
He also quoted Giani Stuparich (very approximate translation):
Forse molti triestini conservano, dai loro giovani anni, una segreta simpatia per la bora. E quando ne sentono parlar con paura dai forestieri, sorridono con la rassegnata ma un tantino orgogliosa compiacenza di chi ha in casa un mastino temibile. // Maybe those of us from Trieste have, from childhood, a secret fondness for the bora. And when we hear anyone else talk about it fearfully, we smile with resignation but also just a smidge of pride, like someone whose house is home to a terrifying mastiff.Of course Australians are like this about our spiders and snakes and sharks, which we simultaneously reassure visitors about and then big up. I don’t think the English have anything like this, the secretly relished danger, but maybe I’m missing something? Wet summers? The idea that fish and chips is the national dish? The aristocracy?
Key encounters in Trieste included: one of those dogs that look like teddybears, who sat adorably in a restaurant all through lunch, and then just as its owner was getting ready to go, it lifted its leg and relieved itself all over the stone floor. (The owner sighed and put a twenty euro note on the table and asked for some paper napkins.)
God Venice is so weird. I’d never been before. Usually when you go to a city that you’ve seen in a bunch of photos, maybe 10-20% of the city looks like those photos. But in Venice everywhere looks like those photos, every corner turns onto an alleyway or a piazza or sixty people queueing for gelato or a little bridge from which you can see another little bridge, and you wait on your bridge for the person on that bridge to leave so you can take a photo of it, and they wait for you to leave so they can take a photo of your bridge.
Sorry to say these guys waited us out Very much, of course, a place where you are constantly thinking “this is incredible and weird and beautiful and I’m so glad to be here but wow, the intense tourism is really a lot” while knowing that you are one of, say, thirty thousand tourists in town, and that you are all thinking the exact same thing.
We went to a little bookbindery, and when I looked at some illustrations of cats the bookbinder came over and excitedly asked if I liked cats, and then he showed me a lot of photos of his own cat getting in the way while he tried to do bookbinding. Incredible. WAY better algorithm than Instagram.
It’s really nice to meet up with someone familiar in a new-to-you place, isn’t it; to walk into a restaurant or wait by a train station or look across a piazza and oh, it’s your friend from London or Melbourne or Adelaide or wherever, and here you are together! It’s definitely different from the sort of shared holiday where you travel together to a new place. It feels a bit imaginary, a bit like the world accommodating you in some totally unreasonable desire.
Anyway, what a lovely week, I’m back at home now and trying to “write” “another” “novel”, what an absolutely ludicrous pursuit. I have to make up some whole new people AND give them a bunch of problems AND help to solve them? Seems like a lot of fuss that could be avoided by simply not making the people up in the first place tbh.
Okay, wrapping up, some things I’ve enjoyed lately include:
Italy (see above)
The television series Hacks which is a DELIGHT (although I’m part way through series three and consumed by dread every episode in case something goes embarrassingly wrong)
Lauren Bravo’s charming and funny novel Probably Nothing (which is mostly set in Walthamstow, so there’s a fun game of “which thinly-disguised pub is THIS one” for locals)
The first hour of the videogame Flock, out this week, by Hollow Ponds and Dick Hogg: fly around bright gorgeous landscapes and classify weird wildlife, perfect (to be clear the game is probably also good AFTER the first hour, I just haven’t got there yet)
Large bees
Hanging out in Hyde Park listening distance from the Kylie concert, along with a few friends and hundreds of strangers who also correctly decided that was the best way to spend their Saturday evening
That’s all this time, see you soon,
Holly